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September 18, 2001
Requiem:
Dies Non, Not Dies Irae
By Gavin Keeney
The extraordinary events of September
11, 2001 will long resonate in the psyche of the world for reasons
that transcend politics, religion, and real estate. The current
calls to rebuild -- bigger, taller, more defiantly -- are premature
and absurd.
The nature of the World Trade
Center as a symbol laden with the unstable stuff of signifiers
(signs), pointing to a signified (content) that is ultimately
ill-defined and illusory in itself, calls attention to the reasons
for its targeting and for its remarkable former presence and,
now, absence.
New York architects are already
clamoring to claim the site for the resurrection of a new symbol,
either of defiance or reflection, but a symbol nonetheless.
There is but one significant
gesture that might satisfy the need for reclaiming and recolonizing
this hole in the tight knit fabric of Manhattan -- a city within
the city climbing over itself with significance and cluttered
with clashing symbols.
This 'void' should remain a
'void' -- as New York architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo
Scofidio have pronounced -- an elegant encomium to the disaster
and the only universally adequate and valid expression of a non-ideological
claim.
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj
Zizek has identified, at the center of all ideologies, the persistence
of an absence, a rift in consciousness, that is continually overwritten
and obscured. This ghost or 'absent center' is the unstable foundation
of subjectivity itself and the underutilized locus of ethics
(Emmanuel Levinas).
The void in New York must not
be filled with yet another symbol or sign of feigned stability
and composure but instead remain a cipher for the human condition
-- a state of being that, uncertain of itself, must fashion an
unremitting concern for every other thing and being not itself.
This site at but one center
of the world must remain free of all statements of arrogance
and ostentation -- free of bombast and insipidness. The metaphysical
'music' that fills this 'void' needs not a Mozartean 'Dies Irae'
but an inspired 'Dies Non', a 'score' without defiant spectacle
or apocalyptic machinations; a sonorous 'etude' to comprehension
and lucidity and, in fact, a blessed absence of any and all rhetoric.
CP
Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York
City and author of On the Nature of Things: Contemporary American
Landscape Architecture.
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