By Tim Stevens.

Troels Myrup at Iconoclasm takes a look at 9/11 artefacts from the Intrepid Museum in NYC ("Adventures in Heroism"!).

There is now a growing amount of archaeological literature on 9/11, focusing on the interstices between memory, materiality and the ‘archaeological imagination’ (see e.g. work by Michael Shanks, Lynn Meskell, and Jennifer Wallace). This display in the Intrepid Museum demonstrates at least two aspects of this debate: the musealization of social memory, and the monumentalization of the debris of the past (note the glass casing).

'Musealization' apparently is a word, horrendous neologism though it is, meaning the "construction of monuments, museums, databases, and archives" [source]. Myrup quotes from Lynn Meskell:

We are witnessing the desire for grounded materiality at a staggering rapidity, to apprehend the objects and physical signs of a newfound heritage in real and tangible ways. This familiar desire for material commemoration and the physical marking of the event, is juxtaposed against the realization that the attacks (and the subsequent war on Afghanistan) have been experienced through virtual means. The events of September 11 have inaugurated a resurgence of the real, and of the violence of the real, supplanted within a supposedly virtual universe. The moments of impact when the hijacked planes hit the towers were televised repeatedly, a fantasmatic screen apparition turned reality.

Meskell is of course referring to Jean Baudrillard's famous essay, The Spirit of Terrorism, in which he describes 9/11 as a symptom of "triumphant globalization at war with itself". He goes on to say:

Another side to terrorist victory is that all other forms of violence and destabilization of order favor it: Internet terrorism, biological terrorism, anthrax terrorism and the terrorism of the rumor, all are assigned to Bin Laden. He could even claim natural disasters. Every form of disorganization and perverse exchange benefits him. The structure of generalized global exchange itself favors impossible exchange. It is a form of terrorist automatic writing, constantly fed by the involuntary terrorism of the news. With all its consequent panics: if, in that anthrax story, intoxication happens by itself, by instantaneous crystallization, like a chemical solution reacting to the contact of a molecule, it is because the system has reached the critical mass that makes it vulnerable to any aggression.

Perhaps the geological exoskeletons of Manuel de Landa with which our (post-) industrial cities shield themselves are what makes them so brittle. One prang with a plane-as-bomb and the whole edifice comes tumbling down, literally and metaphorically. The scepter, learning, physic, must all follow this, and come to dust.