…Blues’s simultaneous signalling, and marked absence of, post-crisis closure, is one of the means by which it re-works not only the disaster movie paradigm, but such events as 9/11 and the ‘natural disasters’, formerly introduced. The reader may have observed that my earlier move to separate the (cinematically) representative from particular moments of ‘the real’ did not look to differentiate between the latter as lived experience, and its existence as media-generated, pluralistic cultural text (journalistic documentation; witness or survivor video footage). Whilst it is not my intention to obfuscate the innumerable narratives of psychic/corporeal suffering that emerged from these events, and others to which they might be comparable within the parameters I have discussed, it is valid to suggest that, for the overwhelming majority of the economically developed world, the ‘experience’ of 9/11 (to take one example) was constructed ‘in (just after) the moment’ through televisual images, journalistic reports, rolling news and amateur videos uploaded to youtube for playing, re-playing and commentary.
surveying the damage NBC
Whilst I am not about to suggest, after Baudrillard, that 9/11 did not happen, that this form of mediatisation can be seen not to comprise the transmitting of the event, but rather, the event itself, situates the post-millennial disaster/tragedy in the realms of a hyperreality in which it is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication […]. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, a […] perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits alls its vicissitudes.3
3 Jean Baudrillard, trans. Shelia Faria Glaser, Simulation and Simulacra (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994[1981]), 1, my emphasis.
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