Class Notes 3-1: September 11 & Frankl
We ended last week discussing your student comments about the Hedges chapter "The Destruction of Culture." Among other ideas, you referenced September 11 on several occasions. In the interests of locating our "knowledge" about that day, we began that class by repeating what we knew and did not know about September 11. We anticipated that since most of our texts claim memory and knowledge about traumatic events becomes distorted, forgotten, or neglected over time, our knowledge and memory about September 11 would probably be fragmented.
Indeed, our class knowledge about the day was fairly confused. We didn't know where the hijackers came from, what reponse the United States military took in response, or what the history of the attacks were. A few of us knew that Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks, but we didn't know much about him, his life, or the events that shaped his thinking. When it came to the war in Iraq, none of us could identify the connection between the war and September 11, although a few of us believed that some of the hijackers were Iraqi, and that Saddam Hussein was possibly behind the attacks. Although this information was false, it was repeated in the media during the run-up to the invasion.
I then took the opportunity to explain a little about the life of Osama bin Laden, especially his traumatic experiences in Lebanon in the early 1980s, his participation in the Afghan-Soviet war in the late 1980s, and his declarations of war against the US in the 1990s. We contextualized September 11 by placing it firmly in the shadow of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Our knowledge about the event was also tempered by some personal experiences, such as seeing one of the hijackers in person, in Brooklyn, before the attacks.
Since traumatic events often produce fuzzy thinking, we turned to Victor Frankl's memoir Man's Search for Meaning in order to clarify and illuminate some of his experiences inside a concentration camp. The passage we spent the most time with centered on his description of "objectification," which he defined as the ability to turn an experience into a kind of distant observation. The observation of objectification occured simultanesouly with the traumatic experience, and was Frankl's method of escaping the worst moments of the camp.
In one particular scene, Frankl described trying to imagine giving a lecture about the camp while, at the same time, attempting to endure hunger and homesickness. He imaged himself in a lecture hall giving a talk. We discussed the ways this became a moment of pure fantasy. It allowed Frankl to leave his body behind. For us, this is really the issue at the heart of becoming an object: the total rejection of embodied identity, and the complete withdrawal into another reality. That other reality became, for Frankl, a way to escape the rigors of the camp. It also suggested, to us, the extreme limits of human identity---an identity without a body, or only partially connected to a body.
Indeed, our class knowledge about the day was fairly confused. We didn't know where the hijackers came from, what reponse the United States military took in response, or what the history of the attacks were. A few of us knew that Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks, but we didn't know much about him, his life, or the events that shaped his thinking. When it came to the war in Iraq, none of us could identify the connection between the war and September 11, although a few of us believed that some of the hijackers were Iraqi, and that Saddam Hussein was possibly behind the attacks. Although this information was false, it was repeated in the media during the run-up to the invasion.
I then took the opportunity to explain a little about the life of Osama bin Laden, especially his traumatic experiences in Lebanon in the early 1980s, his participation in the Afghan-Soviet war in the late 1980s, and his declarations of war against the US in the 1990s. We contextualized September 11 by placing it firmly in the shadow of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Our knowledge about the event was also tempered by some personal experiences, such as seeing one of the hijackers in person, in Brooklyn, before the attacks.
Since traumatic events often produce fuzzy thinking, we turned to Victor Frankl's memoir Man's Search for Meaning in order to clarify and illuminate some of his experiences inside a concentration camp. The passage we spent the most time with centered on his description of "objectification," which he defined as the ability to turn an experience into a kind of distant observation. The observation of objectification occured simultanesouly with the traumatic experience, and was Frankl's method of escaping the worst moments of the camp.
In one particular scene, Frankl described trying to imagine giving a lecture about the camp while, at the same time, attempting to endure hunger and homesickness. He imaged himself in a lecture hall giving a talk. We discussed the ways this became a moment of pure fantasy. It allowed Frankl to leave his body behind. For us, this is really the issue at the heart of becoming an object: the total rejection of embodied identity, and the complete withdrawal into another reality. That other reality became, for Frankl, a way to escape the rigors of the camp. It also suggested, to us, the extreme limits of human identity---an identity without a body, or only partially connected to a body.
posted by Jrc at 3:06 PM
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