Text and Performance Quarterly i j Routledge

Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 91-114 « » T»yio,&?,.„* coup

Mourning Speech: Haunting and the

Spectral Voices of Nine-Eleven
Joshua Gunn

In this essay I forward a psychoanalytic theory of haunting that privileges the object of
speech in cultural and theatrical performance. Using this theory, I analyze the mass
media exploitation of the panicked and dying voices of Nine-eleven. I conclude with two
observations. First, performance is haunted by an ontological dualism central to
subjectivity, which challenges any easy distinction between the live and the recorded.
Second, the Nine-eleven archive is frequently used in the civic performance of political
amnesia.

Keywords: Speech; Audience; Haunting; Mourning; Melancholia; Archive; Repertoire;

Dualism

Only when the horror of annihilation is raised fully into consciousness are we placed
in the proper relationship to the dead: that of unity with them, since we, like them,
are victims of the same conditions and of the same disappointed hope. (Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno 178)

A specter is haunting the United States. It made its most visible appearance on the
ninety-day anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001 as two "ghosts, two
ethereal columns of pure light... filling the dark void created when terrorists
brought down the World Trade Center towers" (Saffron par. 1). The twin beams
highlighted a profound need to visualize the invisible, to presence the absent, to
materialize a phantom lurking in a dark and smoky night sky. The phantasmagoria
was only discernable from a distance, requiring the hovering clouds of smoke and
smog to make itself known. The gigantic, glowing presence of the lights seemed to

Joshua Gunn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State
University in Baton Rouge. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered to the Department of Communication
Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and to the Communication Department at Georgia
State University in Atlanta. The author thanks Michael Bowman, Mindy Fenske, Ronald Walter Greene, Tracy
Stephenson, Nathan Stormer, and the anonymous reviewers for their advice and patience. Correspondence to:
Joshua Gunn, Department of Communication Studies, Louisiana State University, 136 Coates Hall, Baton
Rouge, LA 70803, USA. Tel: + 1 770 423 6338; Email: jgunn@lsu.edu.

ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/lSSN 1479-5760 (online) © 2004 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/1046293042000288344
92 /. Gunn
deliver sense of relief. "Not seeing the buildings there has been such a wound," said
one observer. "I know they're never coming back, but these lights help the healing"
(Saffron par. 1). Perhaps because ghosts function to remind us of something absent,
just a short month later, the lights were deliberately snuffed out.
More than simply an attempt to honor the deceased, the memorial of light was
part of a litany of ceremonies and suppUcations orchestrated to restore a sense of
stability to a polity of survivors. A contrast of presences and absences was central to
each somber rite. Before the memorial of light, numerous, smaller rites of remem-
brance echoed the sudden absence of the lights in their many calculated silences,
such as the one held on February 26, 2002, in which families and friends of the
victims of the attacks on September II, 2001, joined those of the victims of the first
attempt to bomb the World Trade Center in a lengthy moment of contemplation.
"During the moment of silence, all work halted, construction workers removed their
helmets and a bagpiper played 'Amazing Grace' " (Stewart AlO). On the sixth month
anniversary of the attacks, a service was held in Lower Manhattan to remember the
victims. Two moments of silence were held at 8:46 and 9:03 a.m. to relive the
moments when each plane struck a tower. "Please join me in a moment of silence"
intoned Mayor Bloomberg at the end of the ceremony, "the second plane has just
struck the second tower."
Although we are often led to believe that Western modes of perception are
dominated by the image, Michel Chion urges us to recognize our "vococentrism": in
every sonic environment, "the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a
hierarchy of perception." "There are voices," says Chion, "and then everything else"
(5). Moments of silence help us to hear better the way in which the human voice
structures the sonorous in terms of its very absence. For example, on May 30, 2002,
a ceremony of silence provoked much discussion by reporters, who eulogized the last
day of recovery and salvage as if it were a person: "It began almost nine months ago
with the frightening thunder of jet engines, explosions, screams and sirens," wrote
one reporting team. "It ended in silence. ... with excruciating slowness [fifteen] men
and women began to walk wordlessly up the steel ramp" (Haberman and Neuman
2). Television news programs made notice of the long silences as well. "David Bloom
joins me now from ground zero for the ceremonies," said NBC's Tom Brokaw that
morning. "David, this is going to be a ceremony mostly of silence. Why is that?" As
impromptu reporters are apt to do. Bloom did not answer the question: "Tom, it's
because it's a solemn, 20-minute ceremony [that] is meant most especially for the
more than 1700 hundred families who still have found no trace of their relatives who
died here" (Brokaw paras. 2-5). Although perhaps unintended, the reporter's
remarks interestingly align the visible with the audible, and the unseen with the
unspoken. A trace is, of course, a visible mark or audible sign of a former concrete
presence, literally a ghost of what was. In this context, silence suggests a profound
need for vocalic traces, an intense desire for sonorous ghosts.
As is the case with most critical analyses, in this essay I mourn for the dead by
conjuring their ghosts. But I also mourn for the loss of something singularly human:
voice. More specifically, I lament the disappearance of speech from many of our
 Mourning Speech 93

departmental nameplates, and I make an intentionally polemical call for its return in
the examination and criticism of contemporary cultural and theatrical performances.
Drawing on the insights of psychoanalytic theory, I suggest that the haunting of
speech can be understood in two related senses. First, the haunting of speech refers
to the ghosting or spectralization of the human voice that results from the forgetting
catalyzed by the dominance of visuality. Second, the haunting of speech refers to
haunting by the human voice, or the ways in which speech troubles us as a
disembodied object, which is the consequence of technologies of recording and
telepresence (e.g., the phonograph and telephone; see Peters 177-225; Sconce
59-91). Understood in this double sense, I suggest that the haunting of speech
demonstrates that haunting in general is a common experience in our lives that has
little to do with superstition or the paranormal. Rather, haunting is a psychical force
motivating performances that attempt to mourn, a force animating practices that
attempt to presence the dead in traces as a means of knowing and, especially in
respect to media coverage of Nine-eleven, as a means of coping. Further, because
ghosts paradoxically denote an absence made present, I also suggest that the notion
of vocal or sonorous haunting helps to challenge the imagocentric, representational
logics motivating clean distinctions between what Diana Taylor has termed the
"archive" and the "repertoire," often experienced as a dichotomy between the
written (recorded) and the embodied (live). I conclude by arguing that the haunting
of speech points to a radical alienation of the subject from the biological body, and
the murdering made possible by the simultaneous recognition and repression of this
gap-

Haunting/Subjectification
The Idiom of Haunting
According to the OED, the dominant meaning of "haunt" is to "practice [something]
habitually, familiarly, or frequently." Essentially, haunting is a repetitive practice of
an individual in relation to something familiar, a meaning that eventually became
associated with ghosts, those disembodied beings draped in sheets that some readers
are imagining. In her masterful exploration of ghosts as an idiom of subjectivity.
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon suggests
that haunting "describes how that which appears not to be there is often a seething
presence, acting on and often melding with taken-for-granted realities." She argues
that:

the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting
is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure,
and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make
social life. ... Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always
a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as
cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. (8)

As an idiom for scholarship, haunting seems to require an interpretive wedding of

94 /. Gunn
the intrinsic and extrinsic, the historical and the subjective, the external and internal.
Haunting ties one to a "structure of feeling," an entire web of communal produc-
tions and emotions during a specific moment (Williams 25-41). Further, ghost
hunting, trying to document the traces of what was or that which eludes in scholarly
performance, necessarily forces one to articulate a historical and emotional context.'
For these reasons the idiom of haunting has been somewhat popular in performance
scholarship; haunting neatly encapsulates the interplay of presence and absence
central to performance. Herbert Blau has referenced the "ghostliness" of perform-
ance as the Eternal Return of some, unmentionable "interior resistance" {Eye
172-73). Similarly, Marvin Carlson describes the memorial function of theatre as
"ghosting," which concerns the accretion of audience memories of past perfor-
mances into a kind of terministic screen or perceptive filter (7, 58—63). Extending
Roland Barthes' observation that photography captures ghosts in its "rehearsal for
death," Peggy Phelan has suggested the same of cultural performances, adding that
unlike any other art form, live "performance ... understands the generative possibil-
ities of disappearance," and "enacts the productive appeal of the nonreproductive"
("Francesca Woodman" 980; Unmarked 27, 146-66; also see Kairschner 14-20). In
distinction from Carlson's positivistic materialism, however, for Phelan ghosting
could be characterized as that which replicates without reproduction (also see
Haraway 149-81). Ghosting captures the "ontology of performance," understood as
the way in which performers' bodies are used to emphasize the impossibility of
physical and psychical harmony, the lie of representation (Phelan, Unmarked 150-
51).
Haunting, then, suggests much more than a tidy critical protocol. Gordon writes
that she was led to the idiom because "the available critical vocabularies were
failing ... to communicate the depth, density, and intricacies of the dialectic of
subjection and subjectivity ..." (8). She refers, of course, to the critical project of the
Posts (e.g., poststructuralism, postmodernism, posthumanism, and so on), which
has helped to produce an understanding of subjectivity that no longer requires the
sense of unity, coherence, or autonomy implied by the concept of the individual (see
Silverman, Subject 126-93). Consequently, haunting is also an idiom that challenges
traditional notions of audience as a discretely knowable group of individuals, insofar
as any performative encounter produces, and is produced by, uncontrollable sub-
jects. "Although we may sometimes think so," suggests Craig Gingrich-Philbrook,
"the audience is neither as singular, nor as single minded, as a swarm of angry bees"
(90). Even so, Herbert Blau has suggested that "how we think about an audience is
a function of how we think about ourselves ... and how, if at all, we may accommo-
date the urge for collective experience" (Audience 28). While no one would deny the
obvious distinction between the folks "sitting out there" and the folks "moving
around up here," the audience is nevertheless a discursive production that reflects
more about the person or group who brings them into being than the thoughts or
desires of some quantifiable number of bodies "out there." The audience, in other
words, is us.
Blau's observations should be read against the claim that those interested in
 Mourning Speech 95
performance have yet to develop sophisticated vocabularies or methods for under-
standing "audience." Linda M. Park-Fuller has argued, for example, that "few recent
studies of audience exist" because of "privileging of performing over audience" and
the "lack of sophisticated language and procedures" (304). In search of a
"sophisticated" alternative, Park-Fuller suggests that "quantitative methods loom
large as an obvious methodological choice ... to measure the types and extent of
social disturbance and regeneration prompted by performance" (290-91). Ironically,
psychoanalysis, one of the most sophisticated perspectives for discussing audience
reception or "audiencing," is passed over, presumably because it renders the concept
of audience "chaotic" (289).^ Below, I argue that insofar as cultural performance in
general is experienced as a haunting, this chaotic (read "abstract") audience can be
mapped and understood with psychoanalytic theory.

Suhjectification and the Pleasure of Uncertain Derivatives

Freud worried that "psycho-analysis has little prospect of becoming liked or popu-
lar" because its jargon referenced unverifiable hypotheses and postulates that "are
bound to seem very strange to ordinary modes of thought..." ("Some Elementary
Lessons" 282). One of those strange, unverifiable postulates is that ghosts, under-
stood as phantasms or fantasies, have real effects (see Gunn, "Refitting Fantasy"
1-23; Laplanche and Pontalis 314—18; Zizek, Plague 3-44). In other words, one of
the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis is that psychical life is haunted, that the
experiential world is a parade of memories, mnemic traces, and perceptual ghosts
that may not necessarily correspond to a mind-independent reality—nor should it
have to (in fact, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, any attempt to adapt the haunted
psyche to some "natural" environment is rejected out of hand; see van Haute
xxvii-xliii). Because of this extraordinary position against adaptation, no other
theoretical perspective has mapped the complexities of ghosts and haunting more
than psychoanalysis, so much so that it would seem impossible to ignore it when
addressing haunting as a performative phenomenon (strangely, Carlson has in fact
achieved the impossible by writing an entire book about haunting and performance
that avoids any mention of psychoanalysis). In spite of its challenging prose,
psychoanalysis does offer a sophisticated alternative to understanding audience
reception without recourse to positivism or quantitative measures.'' This alternative
does concern, however, the audience in the abstract, or understanding the experience
of an audience, as well as the performer, in terms of a more technical understanding
of "the subject."
Ghosts and haunting comprise one of the most popular idioms that psychoana-
lytic scholars have used to grapple with the key difficulty of our posthumanist
awakening: (over)simply expressed, the subject is fragmented or "split," a dialectical
exchange of internal and external forces that, absent of the certitude and fixity of
Enlightenment "man" (e.g., the masculinized, rational agent), is difficult to analyze,
much less understand. Jacques Lacan's psychical description of the split subject as a
continual mediation of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious elements is the
96 /. Gunn
most well-known psychoanalytic theory of subjectification. Although Lacan is an
obscure writer and difficult to read (in good humor, Althusser speaks of Lacan as
"the 'Gongora of psychoanalysis,' 'Grand Dragon,' great officiator of an esoteric
cult...," Writings 21),'* the difficulty of his prose is intentional and designed to
produce new idioms for thinking and talking about "hitherto unexpressed workings
of the unconscious," which are impossible to capture fully (Kearney 271). The
necessity of producing new ways to speak about the unconscious is in turn premised
on the assumption that the notion of a coherent and unified subject is an illusion
that represses unconscious dynamics. The idea of the individual as we commonly
think about it is a mistake of consciousness, a mistake of embracing an imagined
unified vision of the self, or imago, over tbe reality of the symbolic structures that
constitute us—structures that precede our birth and that will continue long after our
death. The most primary and privileged of these structures for Lacan is language or
representation, otherwise known as the Symbolic order or the big "Other."
In Lacan's scheme, the imagination or the "imaginary" (as a noun) also plays a
central role in subjectivity. The imaginary is botb a mytbic stage of development and
an order of tbe psyche. As a mythic stage or allegory of subject development, tbe
imaginary refers to a moment in childhood maturation that Lacan calls tbe "mirror
stage." In this stage of maturation, tbe child, wbo experiences him- or herself as a
fragmented, incoberent collection of desires and memories, happens upon an image
of bim or berself in a "looking glass" or reflective surface. Tbis image stimulates tbe
idea of a complete entity entirely independent of otbers: tbe imago (Lacan, "Mirror"
1-7; also see Lacan, "Split" 67-78). Seeing her or bis unified copy, tbe cbild
triumpbantly proclaims, "that's me!" As tbe cbild grows older, tbe imago, in turn,
becomes invested witb all sorts of expectations from witbout (e.g., from its motber).
For Lacan, tbis primary identification witb tbe mirror image and tbe consequent
imago is a mistake, and as subjects we are constantly negotiating a series of
bomologous gaps tbat tbe imago belies (for example, between tbe conscious and
unconscious). Insofar as tbe imago is an impossible ideal from witbout, it is also
necessarily of tbe Otber. Because we constantly pursue tbe imago for a sense of unity,
for a sense of "individuality," we are necessarily being-for-Otber. One migbt also say
tbat tbe imago is a kind of gbost and one of tbe many imaginary elements tbat
comprise tbe domain of ideology. Inspired by Lacanian psycboanalysis, Louis
Altbusser argued tbat tbe primary function of ideology is to "interpellate" us as
subjects wbo believe tbat tbey/we are autonomous "individuals" ("Ideology" 127-
86). In tbis sense, becoming a subject (subjectification) involves tbe continuous and
repetitive baunting of ideology, wbicb is tbe performance of repression par excellence.
Witbout a gbost to provide tbe map of consciousness, tbe individual is merely a
mindless, biologically driven macbine. Tbis continuous, largely unconscious per-
formance of subjectification produces identity, and tbe process or doing of tbis
performance is often termed "performativity" (Butler 171-90).
Tbe ambivalence of Self/Otber central to modern subjectivity leads to a number
of questions tbat are difficult to answer: Wbat are tbe limits of buman agency? To
what degree is subjectivity determined by forces from witbout—linguistic, economic.
 Mourning Speech 97

ideological, and/or biological? The idiom of haunting provides us with a compelling

way to negotiate (as opposed to a way to solve or answer) these kinds of questions.
Further, the haunting idiom also helpfully brings into focus the ways in which
audiences are interpellated as the subjects of a cultural or theatrical performance.
The invisible presence of ghosts, the there/not there, seen/not seen, heard/not heard
ambivalence of tbat which haunts is homologous to the contradictions of the
modern subject. In this context, performance can be understood as a field of
haunting not only in the sense of subjectification in general (tbat is, performativity,
the continuous identity performances of actor and audience alike), but also in the
sense of how a given public is made subject to a given performance.' In other words,
the ways in which an audience is brought into being by a given performance reflects
the more fundamental haunting of subjectification, a central premise of the psycho-
analytic approach to "audience."

Mourning, Melancholia, Archive, Repertoire

If haunting is habitual, then it is a kind of compulsion to repeat, an instinctual,
pleasurable behavior most noticeable in children and neurotics. Freud outlined
repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920):

Novelty is always the condition of enjoyment. But children will never tire of asking an
adult to repeat a game that he has shown them or played with them, till he is too
exhausted to go on. And if a child has been told a nice story, he will insist on hearing
it over and over again rather than a new one. ... repetition, the re-experiencing of
something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure. (42)

Repetition is the basis oi form itself, and the recognition of the repetition of form
is the source of pleasure for the audience of any performance (Burke 30-31). Novelty
is also a source of pleasure, and in the context of the repetition of form, it appears
in terms of a unique iteration of the identical (e.g., a particular performance of a
play, a live performance of a hit song, and so on). Yet, as the principal forms of
haunting, ghosts make the process a compulsory and therefore neurotic one because
their origins or motives are unknown or forgotten (as in the supernatural sense) or
repressed. Repetition compulsion is necessarily a cycle, and repetitive behaviors
continue because the origins of the compulsion are concealed, as is the case, for
example, with a person who is haunted by the same dream night after night. Only
by remembering the source or origin of a compulsion, argued Freud, will a
compulsion (or haunting) cease. Hence, ghosts can also be understood as represen-
tatives of the causes of repetition, as marks of the unmarked, as conscious,
symptomatic illusions of unconscious wishes and forgotten deeds, and haunting, as
a simultaneous experience of the pleasure and pain that ghosts inspire. In short,
haunting is a semiotics of repression.*
Understood as a compulsion to repeat, the continuous need to memorialize and
revisit the catastrophe of Nine-eleven is symptomatic of an obsessive haunting, a
cultural performance of witnessing, a longing to return to, and escape from, the
98 /. Gunn
violent scene. What keeps audiences watching, reading, and listening to the stories
of the victims of the attacks years after they occurred is the complex, contradictory
pleasures of terror made possible by split or ambivalent subjectivity. Many of us have
felt a compulsive need to consume continuously one Nine-eleven media product
after another. Although it almost goes without saying that it is in the interest of
media capitalism to perpetuate a sense of crisis and anomie in order to stimulate
consumption (Chvasta and LeVan; Gunn and Beard), ironically the representational
logic funding the mass media simultaneously urges the spectator to "move on," to
distance herself from the traumatic loss, and thus to mourn.
From a psychoanalytic vantage, this curiously pleasurable experience of repetition
compulsion, of moving back and forth between trauma and reflection, grief and
consumption, is often described as a kind of unsuccessful mourning or
"melancholia." According to Freud, "normal" mourning concerns the psychical
process by which an individual is able to "detach" herself from a loved object that
has been lost, which is only accomplished by working through and archiving the
matrix of mnemonic traces and memories (fantasies) associated with the lost object.
Melancholia, however, involves an identification and internalization of the lost
object as a phantasmal body, a spectral consumption of the imaginary object and the
consequent inability to expel or detach it from the ego (Freud, "Mourning" 243-58;
also see Fischer 115-31).
Diana Taylor's personal narrative in her remarkable book. The Archive and the
Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, helpfully illustrates the work
of mourning in a chapter titled, "Lost in the Field of Vision: Witnessing September
11." There she recounts a photographic compulsion and obsessive recycling of
mediated bits that is typical of melancholia:
Like many others, I went inside to turn on the television, trying to find sense in what
I was seeing. I could not assimilate it, either live or on TV. As in a sports stadium, I
watched both at the same time. ... I'd turn to the television and see the running, the
screaming, the collage of frantic yet nonetheless contained images of disaster on the
screen. ... Then I'd run back to the window. I took a photograph, not knowing why
exactly, and started taping the CNN broadcast: TV, window, photo, TV, window,
photo, back and forth ... (238-39)

Like Taylor, the television would also perform similarly, "obsessively" repeating
images, "itself trapped in the traumatic loop" (241). The mirroring performance of
Taylor and her television was a kind of perseveration, a kind of bodily stuttering, an
inability to accept what had already been understood unconsciously as the arrival of
death. And yet:
Each click of my camera was my own pause/hold, as I entered into the suspended
rhythm of the present. The archival impulse prompted me to save the images to
understand them at some future time. One day I would write about it, I told myself,
even as I considered taking out my journal and writing about it now. I put the now
away for later. I envisioned the moment from the postnow, what I would do with it
from a safe distance, sorting through the neat, glossy 4 X 6 images of disaster. (241)

After the towers fell, the haunting would continue in autoethnography, "in the
 Mourning Speech 99

performance of the existence of what no longer was physically there" (Taylor 247),
principally in photography and scholarship. This move toward reflection marks the
shift from melancholia to grief and, finally, the acceptance of loss. Taylor's move-
ment from pathological mourning, from an inability to detach from the lost object,
to what Freud would characterize as proper mourning, is dependent on moving
away from an experience of lived trauma toward recording and documentation.
In Taylor's terms, the process of mourning would seem to move from lived,
embodied, expressive performance, or "the repertoire," toward the comforting logic
of progressive temporality, "the archive." Her initial, neurotic movement from the
television, to the window, to the viewfinder—"TV, window, photo, TV, window,
photo, back and forth"—worked against the archival impulse because of a desirous
inability to escape the (impossible) experience of the immanent present or never-
ending now; the performance of the ephemeral movement of body in space enacted
a repertoire of embodied knowledge—watch, take, look—in a kind of nervous
feedback loop. Archival memory, however, only exists in terms of "documents,
maps, literary texts ... bones, videos, films," and it is the sort of thing that "sustains
power" as it "works across distance, over time and space" (19). The archival impulse
to take pictures that Taylor describes in her Nine-eleven experience is therapeutic
because it functions to separate "the source of 'knowledge' from the knower" (19).
If all performance is a rehearsal for death, then both the archive and the repertoire
are needed to avoid performative melancholia, to avoid getting stuck with the ghost
of the object that has left or been lost.' Yet to successfully grieve, time must intervene
and mourning must eventually succumb to the archival. Losing one's identity in the
perpetual live, in this sense, is a melancholic madness, a spectral stuttering most
discernable in moments of monumental catastrophe like Nine-eleven.
Insofar as Taylor notes that trauma makes witnesses of us all, then the mournful
experience of haunting seeks to move us from the embodied stuttering of the
repertoire arising in traumatic experiences to the comforting past-ness and silence of
archival spectatorship (252). Even the more mundane context of performance art
creates a homologous, mournful haunting, for it creates an experience in which the
subject attempts to reduce and file away the trauma of performance into the security
of meaning, place, and past. Melancholic haunting, consequently, is of a different
category. While it is a kind of mourning, melancholic haunting resists the work of
mourning. Melancholic haunting is seemingly live, in the moment, and unmediated.
Melancholic haunting seems to capture the pure effect of the collapse of archive and
repertoire, a continuous, embodied enactment, citation, and iteration of archival
traces of the lost.

The Uncanny Un(re)marked

Un-Real Visibility
So far I have suggested that the audience, broadly conceived, can be understood
fruitfully with reference to the psychoanalytic understanding of subjectification and
100 /. Gunn
the idiom of haunting. Using Diane Taylor's description of the dialectical work of
the archive and repertoire, I have also suggested that the haunting performance can
be understood in terms of an experiential continuum between the mournful work of
archiving and the melancholic neuroses of the repertoire; melancholic haunting
characterizes a liminal state in which the continuum folds upon itself in trauma, a
collapse of the archival and the repertoire. Put alternately, the archival represents the
successful work of mourning, whereas the repertoire represents the manifold ways in
which the object of mourning cannot be grieved—melancholia. If anything, Taylor's
account of Nine-eleven is a testament to the hegemony of the archive. But what is
this impossible object of the repertoire? What is this thing that cannot be detached
or grieved? What is this loved object that the archive attempts and fails to frame or
capture in order to move on?
Psychoanalytic theory, particularly of the Lacanian variety, terms this impossible
to describe object of love and loss the "objet a," which, in general, is any object that
sets the subject's desire into motion (ultimately, this is the desire for the Other's
desire; see Fink 50-71; Lacan, "Tuche" 276; Zizek, Metastases 177-181). Yet the key
characteristic of this stimulus that is most relevant to haunting is its impossibility;
the objet a connotes the order of the Real. The Real is the traumatic ineffable, that
which escapes the symbolic and cannot be represented, and ultimately that which is
impossible (see Biesecker 222-40; Evans 159-61; Lacan, "Tuche"; Lacan,
"Deconstruction" 165-8). In this sense, the mournful production of archival mem-
ory attempts to represent that which cannot be represented, which seems more
properly the province of the repertoire. The liveness betokened by intimations of the
Real, that which is constantly experienced and repressed in the performance of daily
life, and, most notably, that which is directly experienced in trauma, cannot be
archived.
Insofar as performance could be characterized as dancing around the Real, one
can understand why so many performance artists and practitioners are reticent to
video tape their theatrical performances. As Taylor notes:

The live performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive. A
video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the
performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is
part of the repertoire). Embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive's
ability to capture it. (20)

When a live performance is recorded, the presumed source of liminality and the
unsettling, political flows of the libidinal and melancholic that Taylor terms
"embodied memory," this is to say, the haunting of performance, gets screened in
many senses. As Taylor's Nine-eleven snap-shots attest, this is because the archival
impulse is always subject to the hegemony of visibility, the spectral, fixing work of
subjectification, and this is precisely the reason why theorists like Judith Butler and
Peggy Phelan critique identity politics as a kind of Oedipal blinding to the protean
possibilities that emerge in the Real (also see Reinelt 97—107). As Phelan notes, all
 Mourning Speech 101

discourses are subject to the hegemonic freeze of representation. All discourses, from
Nine-eleven, to science, to law, to:

theatrical realism, autobiography, and psychoanalysis are alike in believing their own
terms to be the most... fundamental route to establishing or unsettling the stability of
the real. ... I know this sounds oh-so-familiar to the ears of weary poststructuralist.
But what is less familiar is the way in which the visible itself is woven into each of these
discourses as an unmarked conspirator in the maintenance of each discursive real.
(Unmarked 3)

Visibility as such is a trap, argues Phelan, because, like all representation, "it
summons surveillance and the law," erasing in the process "the power of the
unmarked, unspoken, and unseen" [Unmarked 6-7). In reference to media coverage
of the events on September 11, 2001, then, one may be led to ask: what has the
tyranny of visibility and the fetishization of Nine-eleven erased? What do our
archival memories of that fateful day obscure? Have we mourned, or are we still
afflicted with a melancholic haunting by something we cannot let go, file away, or
otherwise visually represent? The answer, of course, has something to do with
speech.

Nine-Eleven and the "Real" Body of Voice

Regardless of the archival entry one consults, the cultural performance of Nine-
eleven was unquestionably sonorous, riddled with the sounds of explosions, sirens,
speeches, and silence. Perhaps more than the creation of memorials (initially as
shrines, and later, as permanent structures), a strong impulse in traumatic moments
is to scream and, afterwards, to speak. Indeed, every mourning moment invites the
revival speech genres, particularly the eulogy. Consequently, the importance of
speaking and speech at memorials and other places of mourning has been widely
discussed among rhetoricians (e.g., Jamieson and Campbell). What has largely
escaped discussion among rhetoricians are the ubiquitous "moments of silence" that
punctuate eulogies. As a vestige of prayer in our increasingly inclusive social spaces,
moments of silence are effective in eulogistic moments because of their en-
thymematic invitations to the atheist and religious alike.
As tokens of solemnity, I think that the emotional (and some might say spiritual)
effectiveness of moments of silence also has something do with the sometimes
inescapable experience of hearing voices in one's head during them. In contrived
silence, whether one's consciousness is visited by one's own voice in prayer, or
whether one continues to hear echoes of the speaker, one often experiences voices,
or at the very least thoughts, that refuse to leave. Steven Conner terms these
imagined, immaterial voices or thoughts "vocalic bodies":

The vocalic body is the idea—which can take the form of dream, fantasy, ideal,
theological doctrine, or hallucination—of a surrogate or secondary body, a projection
of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous
operations of the voice. ... human beings find the experience of a sourceless sound
102 /. Gunn
uncomfortable, and the experience of a sourceless voice intolerable. ... a disembodied
voice must be habited in a plausible body {Dumstruck 35; also see Conner, "Violence"
75-93).
In other words, when we hear or experience voices without discernable origin, real
or imagined, we either try to locate their source or mentally fashion bodies for them.
For example, it is not uncommon to imagine a head and face for a radio announcer;
hence our frequent astonishment when we discover the announcer looks nothing
like we imagined. From a psychoanalytic vantage, this need to assign plausible bodies
to disembodied voices is part of the repression of subjectification: these authentic
ghosts remind us that we are radically alienated from the biological body, that we
are, as subjects, barred from any reconciliation or harmony with "nature." Vocalic
bodies, in other words, are imaginary structures akin to the imago, which protect us
from remembering or realizing something we would rather not remember or realize.
The real event of "hearing voices" in one's head helps to locate the imagocentricism
animating the dichotomy between the archive and the repertoire. To be sure,
spectacle remains an important part of ritual, and the need to create visible bandages
like the memorial of light beams, particularly in the Age of the Image, is to be
expected. Consequently, discussion about the cultural performance of Nine-eleven
has tended to focus almost exclusively on imagery (e.g., the ethics of showing footage
of people jumping from the doomed buildings). The archival impulse central to
mourning is thus unquestionably imagocentric and representational, which is why
Nine-eleven lends itself so easily to fetishization, from the accoutrements and
knick-knacks of patriotism (commemorative ceramic firemen, US fiag Christmas
lights) to the airing and re-airing of collapsing buildings on television news pro-
grams, to the creation of monuments. Mournful haunting is achieved and resolved
by means of spectatorship, and consequently, recovers from the trauma of melan-
cholia by eclipsing sound with image, by succumbing to scription.^ The mourning
performance, in other words, is seen, not heard.
Melancholic haunting, on the other hand, is more readily experienced as a
sonorous phenomenon whereby the archive and the repertoire recycle acoustically,
particularly in a manner that makes no distinction between the live and the
reproduced. Speaking of the recorded voice in cinema, Kaja Silverman explains that
the voice participates in:
that powerful Western episteme, extending from Plato to Helene Cixous, which
identifies the voice with the proximity of here and now—of a metaphysical tradition
which defines speech as the very essence of presence. ... When the voice is identified
in this way with presence, it is given the imaginary power to place not only sounds by
meaning in the here and now. In other words, it is understood as closing the gap
between signifier and signified. {Acoustic Mirror 43)
This power underscores the irony of speech that both Lacan and Derrida intone:
"speech produces absence, not presence" (Silverman, Acoustic Mirror 43). Yet the
"not here" of speech, rendered most obvious in the psychical replay of the vocalic
body, paradoxically exceeds signification; it betokens a Real as the biological body,
that element of speech Barthes identified as "the grain of the voice" (179-89; also see
 Mourning Speech 103
Silverman, Acoustic Mirror 44). The "vococentrism" that Chion argues structures the
acoustic field is thus explained by the way in which the biological body haunts
speech as a "vocalic body," by the way in which the human voice seems more present
to us than other sounds, ambient or instrumental. Consequently, the illusion of the
collapse of the signifier and the signified achieved by the voice (the illusion, of
course, is due to the fact that there is no signified) is homologous to the collapse of
the archive and the repertoire. This is why the no-where of the disembodied voice
heard in a darkened room is so haunting: we hear the Real body but cannot fix it.
To understand better the psychical basis of speech in cultural performance, I turn
to a practice common in the media coverage of Nine-eleven: the exploitation of
spectral voices. Since September Uth, we have been encouraged to listen to terrified
and grieving voices repeatedly in multiple, anniversary scenarios. In his 2002 State
of the Union Address, for example. President Bush attempted to swell feelings of
sadness and loss by presencing the Voice of Innocence in his own, manipulative
brand of "oral interpretation." "For many Americans," the President said:

these four months have brought sorrow and pain that will never completely go away.
Every day a retired firefighter returns to ground zero to feel closer to his two sons who
died there. At a memorial in New York, a little boy left his football with a note for his
lost father: "Dear Daddy, please take this to Heaven. I don't want to play football until
I can play with you again someday." (2002 State of the Union par. 4; also see Gunn,
"The Rhetoric of Exorcism" 1-23).

The invocation of a past voice is described as a present one in Bush's remarks,

assuming that presencing is, in fact, what voices seem to do. The president's remarks
betoken a mournful haunting because we assume the vocalic body of innocence finds
its double in the Real; somewhere in the world the body of a boy who has lost his
father lives on. If, however, the president had read the remarks of someone who had
died, or if the president had played the panicked scream of a Nine-eleven victim
captured on a recording—as others have done repeatedly—there would be the
archival mark of the unmarked biological body, the impossible to mourn, the
melancholic haunting of disembodied speech.
A weird paradox occurs when one hears a voice of the presumed dead; that which
announces "I am here" is paradoxically not (of course, the experience of the presence
of voice is literally the announcement of absence—but we habitually repress that
fact). Although hearing the recorded voice of someone who has died can be a
comforting experience, as if the deceased were somehow still with us and archived
for repeat visitations, it can also be a chilling experience, particularly if the voice is
recognizably suffering, as when hearing the black-box recording of a plane that has
crashed. In fact, the creepy effects caused by the paradox of spectral voices have been
used time and time again by media outlets as an anxiety-stimulus for the ambivalent
process of melancholic consumption. For example, among the outpouring of
commemorative videos and DVDs, such as 9/11: The Filmmakers' Commemorative
Edition, America 911: We Will Never Forget, CNN Tribute: America Remembers, In
Memoriam: September 11, 2001, and Remember: September 11, 2001, many of which
104 /. Gunn
employ rousing music for emotional effect, WTC: The First 24 Hours makes the most
unsettling use of voices because of the absence of narration or an instrumental
soundtrack. In the opening two minutes, one is presented a letterboxed shot of a
burning World Trade Center tower. The tower abruptly lowers and disappears into
the bottom of the screen, and slowly the screen fills with billowing, white smoke.
Most of the ambient noise is caused by small explosions, sirens, and the crumbling
tower; however, one can distinctly hear shrill shrieks as the tower collapses. In his
recent filmic polemic, Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore similarly exploits the spectral
voice to harrowing effect. After a garrulous recounting of the 2000 presidential
elections, the spectator is confronted abruptly with a black screen and a lengthy
playback of the sounds of explosions and screams from "ground zero." One is not
able to see the bodies from which these terrified voices emanate; mentally fashioning
bodies for them, one must consider the possibility that they are presently dead ones.
What inspired me to write this essay was my own unsettling experience of
Nine-eleven. Like Taylor, I found myself subject to the repetitive compulsions of
melancholia as I watched television on the morning of September 11, 2001: watch,
phone friend, eat, watch, phone friend, eat. Yet I also found it difficult to mourn in
the months after, when the events became "Nine-eleven," the contemporary cultural
performance of traumatic repetition compulsion par excellence. Thankfully, media
coverage of the events of Nine-eleven becomes less compulsive as the years pass. Yet,
it is important to revisit the way in which we mourned, if only because it reveals the
centrality and subsequent repression of the human voice. Many of us remember the
pictures, but have forgotten the speech.
Consider the disturbing presentation of spectral voices on Thursday, October 4,
2001. Less than three weeks after real-time trauma. New York state authorities
released a number of the recorded conversations of emergency personnel to the news
media, presumably to demonstrate the courage and valor of America's many heroes.
Every network station aired portions of these recordings in their morning and
evening news programs. What follows is a transcription of the recorded voices that
NBC chose to air on the Today Show.
MALE VOICE ONE: [in the background one hears the horrified screams of men and
women]. Help [unintelligible] is down! Get away from it! Get away from it! [silence]

VOICE TWO: [unintelligible] is down!

MALE VOICE ONE: [unintelligible] is down! Get away from it! [silence] Everybody
move away from—[voice is muffled by something] [unintelligible] move away from
the tower!

MALE VOICE TWO: [muffled] that's a ... that's a 10-13.

FIRE DISPATCHER JOHN LIGHTSEY: That's a 10-4. We gotta 10-13, we gotta

second tower down.

MALE VOICE ONE: [muffled] [a woman screams in the background noise] Move
away from the towers right now everybody, move away from the towers!
LIGHTSEY: We gotta female officer down in the second tower, possibly the third or
 Mourning Speech 105
the fourth floor. We're not sure though, they're conducting a search in regards to this
female officer down.

It is difficult to describe with adjectives the timbre of these voices. The first male
voice is screaming loudly, so much so that at times his radio cannot effectively
transmit it. Whenever the first male voice speaks, one can hear terrified voices and
numerous high-pitched screams of abject terror in the background. The conver-
sation is full of pops and hisses, and the sound is flat and bass-less.
After the first segment, NBC aired another:
CAPTAIN ALFREDO FUENTES: [unintelligible; voice is slurred and in obvious pain]
yeah ... [unintelligible] ... beneath the collapsed unit. Ah, this is Captain Fuentes, a
couple other members [unintelligible].

LIGHTSEY: Are you trapped Cap? [long silence with no answer]. Captain Fuentes, are
you trapped?

FUENTES: 10-4 [radio squelches loudly].

LIGHTSLEY: Alright, we're sending you some help.

Finally, NBC aired a third segment:

MALE VOICE THREE: ... got an ambulance full of cops. And ah, pedestrians, that we
need help.
MALE VOICE FOUR: [beep] We got possible members of the service down. Trinity
and Cedar, Trinity and Cedar.

FEMALE VOICE ONE: [beep] Be advised we have units trapped in a train station.
Park Place on the two and three line. Park Place two and three [beep] and we have
officers trapped.

When heard, it is not difficult to describe the effect of these voices as haunting,
precisely because of the kinds of vocalic bodies that we mentally conjure for some
of them—bodies that are injured, bleeding, and on the verge of death.
There is no mistaking the patriotic packaging that each of the major network and
cable news channels used to frame these voices, cycling them from the unsettling
liveness of the repertoire to the comfortably captured archive. NBC's Today Show
devoted a lengthy segment to airing the recordings, with the corroborating narration
of an emergency operator in the studio. The panicked voices were aired to the
backdrop of a gray, gold and red montage of video images. The most stable video
image was of a US flag slowly undulating as a backdrop for other video elements. In
front of the flag a series of horrific images dissolved into one another: images of
ashen people fleeing in horror dissolved into images of the second tower exploding,
which predictably dissolved into images of smoldering rubble. Text clarifying the
hurried and panicked voices appeared in the middle of the screen. In between
interrupting narration by the operator and reporter in the Today Show studio, NBC
aired more segments with the patriotic video elaboration over and over again.
Clearly, the images fading into and out of the television screen were meant to vivify
and concretize the veracity of terror and intensify an uncanny effect. But the primary
106 /. Gunn
sources of terror here are the disembodied voices, some of which we fear have long
since been divorced from their actual bodies. The voices seem to herald a continuous
doom in their excesses; something troubling looms in their grain.
If we describe these horrified vocalic bodies as ghosts, the question remains: what
is the hidden or forgotten element that causes a sense of fear and dread? One
obvious answer is that these voices remind us of things we would like to repress,
such as the fact that we will also eventually die. Another is that the voices
communicate a sense of acoustic space in the echoes of their meeting with walls of
rubble, a sense which shatters our profound and unrealistic fantasies about buildings
"as a form of protection" and as "an insulation from danger" (Wigley 71). Another
answer is that vocalic bodies of this sort are tokens of something that is unconscious
and beyond our immediate grasp or control. In respect to the latter, one may begin
to locate the cause of the uncanny effects by thinking about our own discomfort
when hearing our own recorded voices. In their 1966 study of this common
discomfort titled "The Voice as Percept" (Conner, Dumstruck 7-8, Philip S. Holzman
and Clyde Rousey theorized that to some degree we dislike hearing our own
recorded voice because it "has a very different sound quality from the voice we hear
conducted through the bones of our skull" (in Conner, Dumbstruck 7-8). Yet, as
Steven Conner recounts in his cultural history of the disembodied voice (that is,
ventriloquism):
this difference in sound quality alone does not seem enough to account for what
Holzman and Rousey call the "complex confrontation experience" brought about by
the "loss of anchorage ... [and] loss of the cathected familiar." [They suggested,
rather,] that this experience may result not so much from the unfamiliarity of the
voice, as from its familiarity. {Dumbstruck 8)

The psychologists continue by speculating that many people are displeased by their
own voices because, at some preconscious or unconscious level, we are forced to
recognize that there are meanings communicated by our voices that disclose parts of
the self that we wish to keep secret. In other words, our own voices threaten the
return of the repressed.'
Freud would suggest that the uncanny effect of terrified voices is premised on a
similar kind of recognition and displeasure. Indeed, Freud defines the uncanny in
general as a compulsive obsession with the traumatic, when obsession is defined as
the simultaneity of a wish and counter-wish (again, that ambivalence of pleasure and
pain typical of the experiences of the modern subject).'" According to Freud, the
uncanny is an aesthetic phenomenon involving an event and a feeling. The event is
the failure of repression, and the feeling is a variation of negativity (e.g., fright,
horror, dread, and terror are variously used to denote the feeling). The failure of
repression and the "uncanny effect" results when either a "primitive belief," which
we have previously repressed, finds confirmation in experience, or when something
familiar to us (including a feeling) that we have previously repressed recurs (Freud,
"Uncanny" 130-46). For Freud, these failures fundamentally cue the castration
anxiety experienced in childhood (and the parallels here to felled buildings and the
wound left behind should be obvious). Whether or not one is swayed by Freud's
 Mourning Speech 107

Oedipal analogy of sexual development is unimportant, however, because Freud's

compelling discussion of the number of elements that cue the failure-event does not
depend on an Oedipal logic. He is preoccupied with two failure-events in particular.
First, an experience of doubling, such as a doppelganger or an unexpected mirror
image, can invite terror (which Freud speculates is the double of feelings of unity
before the ego separated itself from the world). Second, the "eternal recurrence" of
the same—repetition of the same character traits in different people, or a recurrence
of similar events (deja-vu)—can invite an uncanny effect (which Freud asserts
reminds us of the instinctual compulsion to repeat).
In light of Freud's theory of the uncanny, the spectral Nine-eleven voices have an
uncanny effect in terms of their producing a double and their surfacing repressed,
primitive beliefs. The doubles produced by the disembodied voices of terror are
manifold: There is the recognition of a voice that is alive and the simultaneous
knowledge its source is possibly dead; there is the recognition of our selves in the
voice, the semiconscious doubling of identification itself. Furthermore, our re-
pressed, primitive beliefs are characteristically religious, such as the idea that the
spirits of dead bodies survive somehow in their recorded voices. Like a widower who
will not erase the message on his answering machine because it replays the voice of
his deceased spouse, these terrified voices both herald our deaths and subtly promise
eternal life.

Hauntopics: The Cogito/Retum of the Repressed

Whatever the ghostly thing, there is an abrasion in performance (the "rub"), some
interior resistance to the aboriginal romance of a pure libidinal flow. That is the real
substance of the representational split which doubles over and over. ... It is exactly
what goes out of sight that we most desperately want to see. (Herbert Blau, Eye 173)

Or perhaps it is that which we cannot hear in silence that begs for the return of the
repressed, this Real that evades representation? What is this uncanny familiarity, this
"rub" that Blau suggests haunts all performance, this ungraspable thing that would
render all ghosts the interchangeable form of some substantive yet ever-elusive
content? In this essay I attempted to provide a partial answer by urging us to close
our eyes and attend to the ghost of speech. I have suggested that the abrasion of the
Real is best captured by the grain of the voice, which can be experienced both as a
comfort and a threat. Better than the examination of images, I argued that attending
to the object of speech helpfully isolates the performative dynamics of haunting as
a continual process of subjectification and repression. I argued that mournful
performances are hauntings of this elusive, impossible Real, which is most directly
experienced in melancholic repetition, alternately described as the (temporary)
collapse of the archive and repertoire. To illustrate these claims, I examined the
spectral voices in media coverage of Nine-eleven as an ambivalent mourning
performance: on the one hand, spectral voices were exploited to encourage the
melancholy of economic consumption; on the other hand, these disembodied voices
led (and are leading) many to a sense of psychical recovery. In bringing this essay
108 /. Gunn
to a close, there remains the task of trying to voice that which makes this conceptual
apparatus go, to speak the Real that ghosts betoken but fail to represent, even in
speech. Insofar as the Real is beyond symbolicity, the best one can do is to describe
the repressed and returned objects of haunting that seem to index an impossible
excess. I do so by describing the Real objects of haunting in respect to, first, the
conceptual implications of my analysis for performance theory; and second, the
political implications of my analysis for civic performance.
In terms of performance theory, the phantasm of the vocalic body as a real ghost
with material effects points us to the "real substance" of the representational
doubling: the biological body. Of course, the Real of the biological body is obvious.
Yet it is a complex obviousness for psychoanalysis, and also for the history of
philosophy for that matter (Freud, "Some Elementary" 281-6). Phelan notes that
psychoanalysis is fueled by the "anxiety raised by the gap between the discursive
construct 'the body' and the affective experience of embodiment" (Unmarked 171).
She also reminds us that mourning is a process of internalizing the discursive "lost
other," principally as memory, as a means of coping with trauma. Consequently:

[o]ur "own" body ... is the one we have and the history of the one's we've lost. Our
body is both internal and external; invisible and visible; sick and well; living and dead.
Noncontinuous, full of jerks and rears, the body moves, like an awkward dancer trying
to partner someone she can never see or lay hold of. {Unmarked 172)

For this reason, performance is a mournful haunting in the sense that the
"performer's body" is used to "pose a question about the inability to secure the
relation between subjectivity and the body per se ..." (Unmarked 150-51). Even so,
what Phelan fails to acknowledge is that the subject's tacit identification with the
"affective experience of embodiment" comprises a life long melancholia: from a
Lacanian vantage, subjectivity is radically alien to the biological body (see Lacan,
"Subversion"; van Haute). As its own mournful practice, performance studies is
haunted by dualism. Hence a central irony of subjectification is that it comprises a
life-long mourning for an unmediated and impossible harmonization. As the work
of mourning, then, performance is haunted by the cogito as much as it is the Real
of the biological body, by the philosopher mulling over a ball of wax and worried
that he might, in fact, be dreaming (Descartes 75-80; also see Kubiak 34-46; Zizek,
Cogito). In this respect, the repertoire is a repertory, always already an archive.
Acknowledging what Gilbert Ryle termed the "ghost in the machine" is directly
related, of course, to the so-called liveness debate between Phelan and Philip
Auslander (Ryle 15-16). While in the "liveness" of performance it may seem as if the
sense of embodied here-and-now-ness is closer to the Real, the sonorous cut of the
disembodied voice recording can seem just as close (at least in practice). Indeed, in
light of the history of mass media technologies, Auslander reminds us that, "like
liveness itself, the desire for live experiences is a product of mediatization" (55).
Although it would seem that this original mediatization has something to do with
screens or the transmission of voices on air, a much earlier and individual doubling
of the (acoustic) mirror is really to blame: a mother holds up the child to the looking
 Mourning Speech 109

glass, and the child says, loudly, jubilantly, and erroneously, "that's me!" (Lacan,
"Mirror" 1-7). In echoes of that fateful moment of our first death (entry into the
Symbolic), in living from here to that final, second death, we repress the voice that
ceaselessly intones that we can never coincide with ourselves—that we are, in fact,
subjects barred from "nature." In other words, one might say, "Descartes lives!"
Insofar as we are trapped in a centuries-old problematic, this obsession with body
trouble, liveness, and performance will continue to haunt. Exorcism is futile.
What, then, are the political implications of haunting for civic performance? What
object or deed does the ghosting of speech and the haunting by voice implicate? If
the exploitation of the spectral voices of Nine-eleven provides any clue, the pleasures
and displeasures of reliving and forgetting vocalic trauma must be surfacing and
repressing something more than bodily alienation or the fear of death. The answer
to these and similar questions is locatable in the perverse familiarity of Nine-eleven.
Like media coverage of the Challenger and Columbia explosions, the Oklahoma City
bombing, and the Columbine High School shootings, the mourning of Nine-eleven
is an obvious rehearsal of melancholic practices, a hauntopia for the audience to
reaffirm what Robert Bellah has described as civil religiosity, a kind of religious
patriotism whereby one places "faith" in a transcendent ideal of progress and unity.
This religion is most commonly experienced, of course, as a kind of patriotism
whereby piety is equated with the purchase of automobiles (General Motors adver-
tisements continuously urged us to "keep America rolling"), and publics are led to
reinvest in the values of the mythic "American Heartland" (Johnson 57-75; also see
Blau, Audience 124)." Taken together, the simultaneity of these religious and
economic logics means that these images and sounds of catastrophe are involved in
the creation of what Renee Bergland calls an "American Mind" or an idealized
"American Subject," which continually recreates itself by simultaneously reliving and
repressing trauma in collective performativity.'^ The haunting of Nine-eleven is an
invitation to experience, again and again, what it is "to be an American."
Insofar as the "American" Subject refers to the collective performativity of reliving
and repressing trauma in the production of mass identity, it is not surprising that
Nine-eleven is evoked repeatedly by politicians and commentators in the service of
a civil pedagogy that insists "we Americans" have changed radically—usually for the
better—from what we were before September 11, 2001. For example. Presidential
hopeful John Kerry recently remarked that "the world tonight is very different from
the world of four years ago," and urged his audience to relive the trauma:
Remember the hours after September 11th, when we came together as one to answer
the attack against our homeland. We drew strength when our firefighters ran up stairs
and risked their lives, so that others might live. When rescuers rushed into smoke and
fire at the Pentagon. When the men and women of Flight 93 sacrificed themselves to
save our nation's Capitol. When flags were hanging from front porches all across
America, and strangers became friends. It was the worst day we have ever seen, but it
brought out the best in all of us. (paras. 32-3)

Yet Bergland would argue that bringing "out the best in all of us" requires us to
repress or willingly forget our worst. In her book The National Uncanny, Bergland
no /. Gunn

argues that Indian ghosts, such as those in the James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of
the Mohicans, represent the simultaneous wish to destroy the racial other and unite
with them in miscegenetic bliss. Ultimately, the repression fueling an uncanny
experience with Indian ghosts is the historical event of Indian removal, the literal
spectralization of American natives (also see Derrida 77-94). In this respect the
repressed objects of performance and politics are yoked: the unbridgeable, imposs-
ible gap between the biological body and conscious experience, between being and
thought, is the fundamental, ontological alienation that makes it possible to blow the
Other to smithereens (cf. Fenske).'^ The many ghosts of Nine-eleven must be an
encounter and an amnesia to the largest specter haunting the United States—a ghost
that drives any wartime economy as much as it does a wartime politics. To name
what is mistaken as the ineffable in so many memorialized moments of silence, this
specter is unquestionably a result of US sponsored violence, the muffled scream of
a body that wants not only to survive, but, impossibly, to (be a-)live.

Notes
[1] The most famous critical use of the idiom of haunting is Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx,
in which the author describes history as "repeating itself with respect to our neurotic
fascination with elements of the past. Marx's many "ghosts" are read by Derrida to activate
a spirit of hope that does not succumb to gross positivistic materialism on the one hand and
a dogmatic utopics on the other. For an excellent blend of Derridian hauntology and
performance theory, see Kuftinec.
[2] Of course, film scholarship, particularly that of spectator theory, as well as the theories of
audience in rhetorical studies, suggests otherwise.
[3] In fact, I find the suggestion that performance scholars adopt positivistic (and, in the end,
behavioristic) measures not only misguided, but also dangerously instrumental. As I explain
below, because I understand artful or deliberate performance as an attempt to dance around
and exploit what Peggy Phelan terms the "unmarked," measuring "effectivity" destroys
possibility/hope by fixing the protean into a discernable shape: the number.
[4] "Gongora" is a reference to Luis de Gongora, a sixteenth-century Spanish poet known for
his intentionally complex and difficult writing style, which apparently invited the contempt
of many of his contemporaries. Imitators of this style helped to create the label "gongorismo"
or "Gongorism" as a style of convoluted writing.
[5] My understanding of "audience" here is somewhat similar to Michael Warner's description
of a "public" (see Warner 65-124).
[6] In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it is important to note that Freud connects repetition with
the death drive, the push or force of the psyche toward dismantling and destruction. Both
the life drive (eros) and the death drive {thanatos) never exist in a pure state, however, and
are always in some sense commingled.
[7] Alternately, one could describe mourning as "witnessing." The ambivalence of the archival
impulse and the repertoire of compulsive obsession have some important parallels to what
Kelly Oliver describes as the "necessity and impossibility of witnessing" (85-106).
[8] Although Taylor stresses that they do not comprise a binary, she recognizes that the
relationship between the archive and the repertoire easily collapses into one, "with the
written and archival constituting the hegemonic power and the repertoire providing the
hegemonic challenge" (22). Images lend themselves more easily to the archival because, of
course, "seeing is believing," and visibility helps to stabilize and fix the uncertain and the
unmarked. In order to resist the hegemony of the archival/visible, Taylor urges a centering
 Mourning Speech 111
in the repertoire and "revalorizing expressive, embodied culture" (16). Even though she
aligns speech with the power of the repertoire, Taylor recommends the study of the highly
imagistic "scenario" as something that better mediates the archive and repertoire in scholarly
performance (27-33). But why not the object of speech itself? Why not the human voice? If
vocalic bodies, literally the ghosts of speech, are real and can be "played back" for emotive
effect (as I am doing right now, hearing my mother say "I love you"), then the tidy
distinctions between the archival and the repertory, the recorded and the lived, indeed, the
contexts of performance and reflection, are difficult to maintain (at least in theory).
[9] This is why those "experts" who warned concerned parents about "backward masking" on
heavy metal records in the 1980s were so believable: human utterance as such communicates.
William S. Burroughs made a literary career out of this message. His remixes on the page
were the products of the famous "cut-up" method of textual invention dreamed up by Brion
Gyson, which Burroughs believed helped to convey unconscious messages. At a lecture given
by Burroughs to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in
1976, Burroughs explained how Gyson's method of cutting up newspaper articles and
rearranging the words into new sentences gradually evolved into his spoken-word and sound
"tape-loop" experiments with Ian Sommerville in the 1960s. Unlike textual cut-ups, the
audio cut-ups seemed to tap into the unconscious repertoire with a strong sense of
immediacy. When working with tape—at that time, magnetic, reel-to-reel tape—Burroughs
would play the tape backwards or forwards and then randomly splice in another bit of tape.
This method, he argued, relied on an unconscious knowledge of where to splice, which
explained their resulting "coherence" as an artful expression. "Cut ups put you in touch with
what you know and what you do not know you know," he argued (Burroughs, "Origin"
Track 3).
[10] This is a crude sketch of obsession, admittedly. See the theoretical discussion of the case of
the so-called "Rat Man" (Freud, Three 58-81).
[11] The term "hauntopia" is Hamera's (66).
[12] Or put alternately, these images and sounds of catastrophe in perpetual recurrence mark the
outline of what Fredric Jameson has termed the political unconscious, a collective mind or
subject to which we are all subjected, a collective consciousness that fuses language, social
institutions, bodily pleasures, and market economies into a series of psychological norms
(Jameson; also see Schwab).
[13] Recognizing the alienation of subjectification obviously points to important ethical issues.
Mindy Fenske's recent essay, "The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance,"
identifies a problematic "material/virtual" dialectic haunting performance theory and cultural
and theatrical practice (which I suggest is a consequence of subjectification). She argues that
the replication of such a binary tends to close down on one side or the other, thereby
finalizing performance in a kind of unanswerable and unresponsible autonomy that, in turn,
closes down dialogic encounter and negates life, or what Bakhtin terms "Being." From a
Lacanian vantage, this dialectic is none other than that of the "master and slave," or a
relational dynamic in which there is a struggle for recognition (see Evans 105-6). Reckoning
with the fact that desire is, in some sense, the longing for recognition, Fenske's warning
should be taken very seriously. For example, the central practice of "giving voice" and
recognition to "the audience" in interactive performance practices such as Playback Theatre
might be understood as producing the opposite of PTs dialogical, community-building aims,
insofar as it is possible for actors to exploit the suffering of an audience member in order
to produce a finalized aesthetic object (a performed life story). Such performances are
therapeutic and mournful precisely because they are unanswerable, precisely because trau-
matic experience gets archived in them. Unquestionably, many audience members enjoy such
recognition and feel better after such a performance. Yet, we need to question the improvised
reproducer of a borrowed life: is s/he assuming the function of Master, demanding a surplus
from the audience to be fetishized for his or her own recognition?
112 /. Gunn
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