Questioning a Cultural Landmark: The Twin Towers as Center

1. IntroductionIn the live broadcasts and countless photographic reproductions and reprints after the events of September 11, 2001, via the 24-hour news cycle, the image of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center falling one after the other has permeated the collective psyche on a global level. It is safe to assume that this impactful image is the ultimate foreground and the quintessence of the event as a whole. By comparison, the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 became instances in the background of the 9/11 tapestry. The centered nature of the Twin Towers in the entire context of September 11, 2001, and the post-9/11 phenomenon deserve an analysis due to their era-defining dimensions at the onset of the 21st century.The aim of this paper is to question the foreground and background of the 9/11 tapestry contained in the image of the Twin Towers, by tackling the means by which this landmark has been centered in the collective psyche. Furthermore, the representation of an entire world order put forward by this iconic landmark of Americanness must be dissected in order to comprehend the ways in which this topos has been employed to justify a series of sociocultural and political discourses in the post-9/11 universe. This undertaking will be conducted by using the tools provided by Derridean deconstruction and semiological analysis.2. Questionable centralityA point that must be made at this stage regarding the symbolic nature of the Twin Towers is precisely their epitomizing a "Western value-system and a world order" (Baudrillard 2003: 37). This marks the potency and the charged nature of the Twin Towers as a sign within the structure of American and Western culture. Instantly recognizable and a recurrent element in products of popular culture meant to produce spontaneous consent and sympathy in the psyches of those contemplating them, the Twin Towers became a locus which grounded the entire structure or order in the Western world and from which agents of cultural hegemony irradiated. After their fall, the legacy of the Twin Towers has become a subject of intense debate, particularly due to the site's politicized and historic significations (Watts 2009: 413). An entire quest for appropriating the site was initiated, largely through mass media coverage, which translated into an emplacement of the public topos of the Twin Towers within a personal space, producing "prosthetic memories" (Wilson Baptist 2015: 4). The endeavor of representing the unrepresentable has thus been firmly enshrined in the post-9/11 collective mindset. However, the success of this exercise may only be achieved by establishing connections with the visual residuals of the past.In pre-9/11 photographs or impressions of lower Manhattan, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center instantaneously stand out against the backdrop of the surrounding structures. Even if the focus is not directly placed on the towers as such, their presence in the overall panorama is sufficient for them to become the center by which the image and its signification are decoded; they instantly bring up umbrella terms such as New York or America itself. The semiotic sign of the Twin Towers thus automatically spills onto other signs, therefore triggering what Derrida regarded as a trace. The Twin Towers are thus a departure point, the foreground by which the seminal nature of this trace can be followed.Just like the Eiffel Tower in Paris, analyzed meticulously by Roland Barthes in an essay dedicated to the centrality of this locus in the Parisian and the French landscape (Barthes 1983: 236-250), the Twin Towers represented the ultimate embodiment of the vertical axis in the landscape of New York. In his essay "Walking in the City", Michel de Certeau explores at large the centralized perspective one gains of the city from the top floors of the World Trade Center. The urban jungle of Manhattan unfolds horizontally before one's eyes, together with other landmarks of American exceptionalism, such as the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. …