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>From the Chicago Tribune
CULTURE FRONT
After the attack, postmodernism loses its glib grip Julia Keller
September 27, 2001
The room had picked up on the restlessness of its inhabitants. There was a nervous energy in the air. An edge.
It was three days after Sept. 11 and this was a makeshift media briefing room at a ski resort near Shanksville, Pa., site of the crash of the fourth hijacked plane. Reporters were awaiting a possible appearance by the victims' families, who had arrived here earlier in the day and who might, we were told, decide to make the unimaginably difficult trip down the road to see the crash site. So we waited.
"You feel like a vulture, right?" a TV reporter from Pittsburgh said to me. "Hanging out to get some quotes from grieving relatives?"
She had me cold. I shrugged.
"Well," she went on, "ordinarily you'd be right. But not this time. This is about all of us. This is different."
This is different: The phrase lodged in my mind, where it has sent forth signal pulses at regular intervals ever since. Different how? Different why?
Superficial answers don't suffice. A massive death toll always gets attention, of course, and this was an assault on innocent civilians, not military personnel.
But there's much more to it than that. Everyone I know, and doubtless everyone you know, too, still struggles to find some overarching meaning in the events of Sept. 11. The fact that we agree, on an emotional as well as intellectual level, that there is a meaning -- or even that there might be a meaning -- indicates we've crossed into a new world.
The attitudinal aftermath of Sept. 11 -- the events seem destined to be referred to in the future solely by their date -- indicates a fundamental cultural shift such as we may see only once, perhaps twice, every century or so.
Not just because the target was America. It doesn't feel like it happened only to us, anyway. It feels like the dark side of globalism: Instead of the giddy bloom of an ever-expanding marketplace, we have the indiscriminate spread of a surpassing sorrow. The world, or most of it, grieves as one.
No, the densely specific character of Sept. 11 defies geography. What lies in the mess in lower Manhattan and in that black gash in the Pentagon and in a field in southwestern Pennsylvania may be, among so many other things, this: the end of postmodernism and its chokehold on the late 20th-Century cultural imagination.
Put succinctly, postmodernism contended that all meanings are contingent, all truth subjective -- indeed, that all truth is "truth." What began as a critical conceit rapidly swallowed everything from novels to sitcoms to advertising.
All at once, however, in the wake of Sept. 11, reality became real again, meaning fathomable, truth extant. Comedian David Letterman's first show after the tragedy, for instance, was marked by a pained sheepishness: He, too, seemed to realize that the world had utterly changed overnight and that his usual brand of isn't-this-all-so-silly smirkiness -- a kind of low-rent postmodernism -- no longer seems viable, or even possible.
To see a postmodern sensibility at war with a transformed world, read Susan Sontag's ridiculous rant in this week's New Yorker. The attack, she explains to those of us short-sighted enough to find it inexcusable, was "undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions." Oh. I see. According to Sontag, we just haven't put the murder of some 6,000 people in the proper perspective.
"What death really says is: Think," Leon Wieseltier writes in "Kaddish," his magnificent book about mourning his father. A new world, a world suffused with meaning, requires a great deal more of us. We can't live our lives or furnish our culture the same old ways because, after all, this is different.
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