Gazing at Ground Zero: Tourism, Voyeurism and Spectacle

Abstract

This essay uses the temporary viewing platform at the site of the former World Trade Center to explore our fascination with violence, conflict and disaster. It illustrates how discourses of voyeurism and authenticity promote a desire for sites of horror, and examines how that desire both disrupts and reinforces our prevailing interpretations of global politics. The viewing platform at Ground Zero was initially constructed to manage the thousands of people who traveled to New York in response to the shocking media images of 11 September. However, their desire to escape mediation and touch “the real” had the opposite effect—it transformed Ground Zero into a tourist attraction. Using Ground Zero as a starting point, this essay theorizes discourses of voyeurism and authenticity through the work of Baudrillard, Debord and Bauman in an effort to position the tourist as a significant political subject.

Notes

Although there are debates over the exact number of September 11 victims at the WTC, a conservative estimate of their nationality can be found online at: www.september11victims.com/september11victims/COUNTRY_CITIZENSHIP.htm

The use of religious vocabulary to describe Ground Zero was very common amongst visitors. As Paulette Canuso from Philadelphia explained, “To me, it’s more a religious experience than a touristic one. I felt like making a pilgrimage” (AFP 2001). Jeffrey G. MacDonald argued that Ground Zero demands “the reverence of a shrine at the end of a pilgrimage” (2002). Likewise, a spokesperson for New York’s Office of Emergency Management explained, “We’re not promoting it as a tourist attraction … visitors need to realise that this is a sacred location” (Yancey 2002). But as Laura Kurgan argues, it was the family members of victims who most often used religious vocabulary, “It is a burial ground. It is a cemetery, where the men and women we loved are buried. Where they rest is now hallowed ground” (2002).

Even when this amount is adjusted for purchasing power in Afghanistan, it is only equivalent to $1,000 per person killed. To provide a sense of the scale employed here, when an American Air force plane accidentally flew into a cable car in Italy, the family members were offered $275,000 per person killed (interview with Marc Herold at the University of New Hampshire, BBC News, Radio 4, Saturday 27 July 2002, 8:20am GMT). Professor Herold was the academic who caused massive controversy by suggesting that the number of non‐combatant casualties in Afghanistan was 3,767—more than that of the WTC attacks (Der Derian 2002, p. 7).

Psychoanalytic theories describe voyeurism as the sexual pleasure aroused in the act of looking upon a forbidden object of desire. As Freud’s arguments make clear, voyeurism is the condition that allows repressed sexual feelings to emerge (Freud 1976, 1975; Calvert 2000). While this paper takes some of its reference points from psychoanalytic theory (especially in terms of forbidden desire), it investigates the object of horror rather than the object of sexual fantasy.

Psychoanalytic film theory is helpful in explaining the mediated desire for horror because it argues that all cinema is voyeuristic. Christian Metz developed the idea of voyeurism in relation to how the spectator is brought into the political apparatus of cinema and forced to maintain a measured distance between himself (subject) and whatever is on the screen (object) (Metz 1986, pp. 245–278). Also important here is Laura Mulvey’s reconfiguration of voyeurism in terms of scopophilia—the pleasure of looking. She argues that all cinema encourages “scopophilic voyeurism” because we get pleasure sitting in darkened theatres peering into the lives and stories of other people. But Mulvey’s work is also important for its political edge—she argues that the scopophilic voyeurism we experience in the cinema organizes subjects according to wider power structures. Because Mulvey is particularly concerned with the power structure of patriarchy, she explains how scopophilic voyeurism positions men as the controlling subjects of the gaze, and women as the gazed‐upon objects (Mulvey 1989). Her claims are further politicized by Norman Denzin, who argues that cinema has contributed to the general rise of voyeurism in our society. The ever‐presence of voyeurism can be identified by the fact that we are all being watched (through CCTV and other forms of surveillance), and we are all watching others through widened access to technologies of representation (cinema, television, the internet). Denzin argues that because society is now governed by the practice of “watching”, the voyeur has become the primary subject position through which our social behavior is organized and regulated (1995).