Susan Willis

Learning from the Banana

IN WHAT FOLLOWS I WANT TO SUGGEST A METHOD FOR LOOKING AT THE PHENOMENA of daily life that draws on the historical methodology defined by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project. While Das Passagen-Werk was published posthumously, I think the collection reveals enough about Benjamins concept of history as it relates to the present and as it is articulated culturally to use this work as a basis for developing analyses of contemporary culture. What struck Benjamin in his consideration of the nineteenth-century Paris arcades was the dynamic juxtaposition these produced between the public and the private with the shops carved out and constructed within older living space; and the way the shops referenced past historical periods and foreign geographies in their commodities and decor. In the juxtapositions Benjamin grasped a materialist approach to history which he described as analogous to the theory of montage. He realized that the references to the past functioned as quotations; that is, the present embodies significant meaningful moments of the past and quotes these in its creation of the now. As defined by Benjamin, neither montage nor quotation suggests stasis as they now do in relation to structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Rather, they contribute to a dialectical reading of history-history defined not as a continuum projected out of the past and propelled by progress into the future, but history apprehended from our vantage point in the present as ruptured moments that take on significance because of their relationship to the present. As he put it:

What Goes Around Comes Around: A Parable of Global Warfare

in the attacks on the World Trade Center brought a new wave of terror: a sniper in the Washington suburbs. Not the mass catastrophe produced by tons of collapsing steel and burning jet fuel, the sniper’s campaign wrought massive uncertainty punctuated by randomly chosen, but precisely aimed shots. Ordinary people doing ordinary things were transformed into targets, the suburbs into a shooting range. Seven people fell during the first three days of the sniper’s attack. “Killed while sitting on a park bench,” “killed while walking across a parking lot,” “killed while doing lawn work,” “killed while putting gas in his taxi cab,” “killed while vacuuming her minivan,” “killed on the street corner,” or “shot while loading packages into her car,”1 each victim was a mark, frozen in a rifle’s telescopic sight, isolated from his or her surroundings, a target in an exercise in marksmanship. Six more would fall before the snipers, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, were finally apprehended. In terms of numbers, thirteen shooting deaths in the space of three weeks is hardly remarkable in the gun-crazy United States. Los Angeles alone can yield six hundred shooting deaths in a year, with the notorious South Central area contributing twenty per week. Even Muhammad and Malvo’s exploits might have gone unnoticed had they spread their victims out instead of concentrating them in the highly visible topography of the D.C. area. Indeed, prior shootings in Louisiana and Alabama that were subsequently attributed to the snipers might have remained in the homicide limbo of unsolved crime—just another random shooting death. Only by concentrating their attack did the snipers’ serial spree take on the proportion of terror to emerge as what Jean Baudrillard might call a “singularity [in] the heart of a system of generalized exchange.”2 October was a month of relentless uncertainty, steeped in the awful reality that anyone could get a bullet through the head while pumping gas. The sniper attacks brought a lottery of death to the suburbs. The banal landscape of car-choked roadways and parking lots, the commerce of gas stations, convenience stores, and strip malls were reconfigured in a new terrain of risk. The cloak of uneventful malaise that passes for security was torn asunder to reveal a population gripped with fear and anxiety. The media and law enforcement officials issued palliatives meant to calm, Susan Willis What Goes Around Comes Around

Anthrax "R" Us

attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the media, apparently not satisfied with the disaster at hand, began disseminating the fear that terrorists, having succeeded in shutting down air travel and the stock market, might launch a follow-up attack using chemical or biological weapons. Whether the fear was prescient or causal, TV and radio journalists were soon to see it realized in a flood of anthrax mailings, five of them real and tens of thousands of them hoaxes. Conveyed on the waves of hysteria over anthrax, the impact of the terrorists’ incursion spread to the far corners of the country—the West Coast, the South, the rural, the suburban— places that otherwise reckoned themselves low on the terrorists’ list of potential targets. The shock waves unleashed by the airplanes that slammed into our nation’s economic and military centers were displaced into vectors of biological attack, both real and imaginary. These fanned out and penetrated the most mundane recesses of hometown America. College mailrooms began quarantining cookies from home; tons of mail, including batches of SAT exams, were sealed and stockpiled for future anthrax testing; numbers of commercial flights were redirected and forced to land when white powder (invariably Sweet and Low) was discovered on tray tables. The trivial stuff of daily life—vanilla pudding mix, powdered sugar, flour, talcum powder—suddenly had the power to close schools, cancel the mail, shut factories, and otherwise halt business as usual. The country was in a panic. White powder was turning up everywhere. Citizens were afraid to receive, much less open, their mail. Government agencies, the Postal Service, and the Centers for Disease Control were slow to issue precautionary advice. And when advice came, it seemed to heighten the public’s anxiety. We were told to look for suspicious letters: no return address, curious combinations of postage stamps, downward slanting printing, inexplicable bulk, an unexpected package, and above all: white powder. We were told to seal the suspicious letter in a plastic bag, likewise our clothes, and shower immediately. With the advice came hundreds more hoaxes and hundreds more false alarms. People began demanding and stockpiling Cipro, the antibiotic of choice. Some, Susan Willis Anthrax “ ” Us R