After 9/11, Do We Prefer Images to Reality?

The only war that matters is the war against the imagination—all other wars are subsumed in it.
—Diane di Prima

In 1999, David Levi Strauss wrote an essay titled “Can You Hear Me?: Re-Imagining Audience Under the Pandaemonium,” in which he ruminates on a crisis of the imagination beset by panic. “A panic is an irrational terror involving noise and confused disturbance,” he writes. “Panic is a disease of the imagination.” According to Strauss, panic was the centerpiece of an “all-consuming Pandaemonium of sound and image”—the ubiquitous onslaught of information in which “the principle requirements of the audience ha[d] become passivity and obedience.” Although this declaration was made before the rise of social media, and only two years before the events of 9/11, Strauss’s prescient declarations seem to have predicted the course of “iconopolitics”—or the use of images in defining political and cultural activity, art, and the imagination—over the last two decades and the rise of American nationalism and global authoritarianism. What was supposed to democratize information instead created a Pandaemonium. The word “Pandaemonium”—borrowed from John Milton’s Paradise Lost meaning “the place of all howling demons”—embodies the irrational. In action it deafens and blinds, confuses and nauseates, pacifies and dispirits us, as on the morning of September 11, 2001, and in the communications environment that followed.

For over forty years, Strauss has written on the effects that photography and images have had on the twenty-first-century imagination. In particular, he has long been concerned with what happens between things—image and belief, words and images, representation and the real—and has contributed to broader cultural discourses on issues surrounding trauma, democracy, audience, human agency, resistance, and aesthetics. Three recent books published in 2020 encapsulate Strauss’s long engagement with these themes. Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT Press), a collection of responses to the 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, which he attended as a “culture spy,” realizes an alarming political crisis that we now know in its full and ongoing monstrosity. Paired with photographs by Susan Meiselas and Peter van Agtmael, Strauss’s dispatches read as an imminent accident occurring in slow motion, each iteration a dream of paralysis as a new kind of iconopolitics unfolds. These themes are critically examined in his exposition “On Images & Magic: Towards an Iconopolitics of Belief,” in The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination (Autonomedia), illuminating the importance of magic to our systems of belief and twenty-first-century image use. And his succinct book Photography and Belief (ekphrasis) builds on the legacies of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Vilém Flusser. In it, Strauss delves into the historical, social, and philosophical elements between the two titular terms, while elucidating on the relevance of magic, love, and agency under a perceived reality that incessantly vanishes.

Strauss’s disquisition on images, belief, iconopolitics, and magic has been haunted by the events of 9/11. On that morning, he was set to begin the first session of his Advanced History of Photography seminar at New York University, where he was teaching. Instead, he was awoken by his wife and, like millions of others, watched the second plane hit the South Tower. When classes began the following week, he told me recently, “the seminar became a triage operation, to deal with the students’ trauma.” He was taken by how utterly transformed they were by their experiences of that day, later writing that “the sadness in photographs, in their relation to death and remembrance, had never been so palpable to them,” while the political uses of photographic images became of vital concern.

For Strauss, 9/11 was a point of convergence—an event that was felt to be very real and unreal simultaneously. As he writes in the introduction to Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), the day “shifted the ground of our thinking about images, wiping away years of accumulated theories about their effects and meanings, and causing us once again to acknowledge and confront our irrational and enduring attraction to them.” Most of us had “witnessed” the event through images. As Strauss has suggested, we were the targets; that is, all of us watching from afar—us image-witnesses. The imaging of that moment was the point, and Strauss has sought to show this through his writing. Of the dramatic moment when the second plane struck the South Tower, he writes in his brilliant essay on 9/11, titled “The Highest Degree of Illusion” (2001), that “it was immediately frozen into a still image that could be infinitely reproduced. It was not legible as ‘reality,’ but as representation it was indelible.” Once seen, these images were grafted into the depths of our minds as a permanent fixture easily conjured and suffered all over again. That is the visual impact of 9/11, an event that can be seen to represent the true meaning of the Sublime (the provocation of terror or horror in the audience); the destruction of those two monumental pillars became symbolic of a radical dislocation of the real.

9/11 and its aftermath manifested as a physical, psychological, and temporal wound: a hole in the building, the loss of loved ones, a mark on the social body, a scar in the collective consciousness.

Belief is inherent in our desire for images, and photographs, according to Strauss, have enough unreality in them to make an event such as 9/11 real to us. As he writes in “The Highest Degree of Illusion”: “We cannot bear reality, but we bear images—like stigmata, like children, like fallen comrades. We suffer them. We idealize them. We believe them because we need what we are in them.” The complex relationship we have with them is bound up in empathy, compassion, and our relationship to “the Real”—the physical and temporal world as we know it. 9/11 was a supreme example of this: “The affective unreality of the event cried out for representation,” Strauss writes in Words Not Spent Today. It cried out because our belief in images was in a state of crisis; Postmodernism and related discourses had dismantled photographic “truth,” while the booming digital and electronic environments had made image manipulation more accessible and dissemination faster and farther reaching.

9/11 and its aftermath manifested as a physical, psychological, and temporal wound: a hole in the building, the loss of loved ones, a mark on the social body, a scar in the collective consciousness and unconsciousness alike, the now absent towers in the city skyline, and the final impressions, two wounds in the earth where the towers once stood. It was a visual event that was felt through images. Like Saint Thomas the Apostle, we “had to be shown the wounds, as a therapeutic act, to know the trauma,” Strauss writes in Photography and Belief. However, under the Pandaemonium, the ubiquity of images has not given way to a more democratic image-savvy population but rather has burgeoned to create the opposite. As Strauss writes in the preface of Co-Illusion, “The damage done to the symbolic order—to words and images and their purchase on the Real—will take a long time to repair, and the effects of this assault on the public imaginary will be far-reaching and long-lasting.” Strauss believes more images are needed, not less, and that these are images charged with meaning, such as those made by artists and photographers, and images he terms “non-allopathic.” He differentiates between allopathic and non-allopathic images in his 1994 essay “Take As Needed” from Between Dog & Wolf, explaining that the former are anodyne—meant to treat symptoms and lull us into some state of complacency—while the latter have agency and value in a way that treats the cause of affliction and can be revelatory. As an example of the non-allopathic, Strauss mentions a drawing his four-year-old daughter gave him when he returned home after surgery and a stint in the hospital: “She instructed me to drape it over my injury whenever I could, especially at night,” he writes, and “scolded me whenever I forgot to use the image properly.” As such, this drawing became “a practical talismanic device to aid in healing.”

Images are bound up in magic. We exchange them and use them to influence, convince, provoke, soothe, and so on. They are also used on us, and against us. “Fundamental to magic is the law of sympathy, whereby things act on one another at a distance through invisible links,” Strauss writes in his essay in The Critique of the Image is the Defense of the Imagination. “The manipulation of such linkages is known as binding.” For Strauss, magic is the invisible link between image and belief and is crucial in our defense of the imaginary. In his essay, “In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: On Joseph Beuys and 9/11,” Strauss returns to Beuys’s artwork Cosmos und Damian (Cosmos and Damian) from 1974. This work, made during the artist’s first visit to the United States, and specifically New York, is based on a 3D postcard photograph depicting the Twin Towers from an aerial vantage point. The towers have been softened and tinted yellow, “making them look like two sticks of butter or fat” as Strauss puts it. On them, Beuys inscribed the names “Cosmos” and “Damian” in blood-red ink.

For Beuys, Strauss writes, the towers had already symbolized death: “rigid, cold, dedicated to the accumulation of money and world domination under Capital.” The inscriptions reference the twin Arab saints and physicians Cosmas and Damian, who were known for their free services, “cooperation and cross-cultural surgery” but were inevitably martyred by beheading. The two were a favorite subject for painters and, most famously, for being the first to successfully complete a surgical transplant, when they removed an Italian man’s diseased leg and replaced it with a previously-deceased black man’s leg, the graft of a Muslim’s appendage onto a Christian’s body. Cosmas and Damian, in Strauss’s words, “are later manifestations of the ancient Indo-European myth of divine twins, and especially the tradition of twins as magical healers.” As Strauss makes clear, it is impossible now to see this work as anything but “a therapeutic operation” in a post-9/11 world. Through symbolic action—or image magic—Beuys attempts to heal the visible and invisible wounds of the structures by renaming them as these “great healers.”

Today, this work has multiplied in its effect, and Strauss pointedly revives it among us. The many emotions post 9/11 were seized and capitalized on by those in power, who ultimately drove the US into pointless conflicts marked by war crimes and torture, and enacted draconian legislation that weakened our democratic institutions and enabled widespread spying. Many images were weaponized to this end, while others were censored and hidden. Today we witness the consequences, with the Taliban reclaiming Afghanistan and the failures of the United States on full display, again through images. Beuys’s work, through Strauss’s eyes, becomes a funerary image—not just of 9/11 but of the polarizing aftereffects (the afterimages) that have led us to this moment—that is also non-allopathic: it cries out for cross-cultural compassion and deep healing.

It’s not that we “mistake photographs for reality,” according to Strauss, but that “we prefer them to reality.” They do things for us as much as they do work on us. In Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture, 2003), he describes that in the nightmarish scene “before the dust from the towers had settled, talismans of loss—photographs of the missing—began to appear, carried through the streets by stunned survivors who rushed to try to forestall their loss of the originals. . . . Within days the talismans were transformed into funerary images, but still the living clung to them like life preservers that buoyed them over despair.” The “image-bearers” among the toxic dust and death, with their talismans in hand, became incredibly potent sympathetic images themselves. They provoked in us all a deeply felt humanity, eradicating divisions in the name of our human bond; they showed us how, Strauss writes in Between Dog & Wolf, “non-allopathic approaches recognize that images and symbols are real, and that the crystallization of a desire or concept in the form of an image can become a potent agent, directly effecting the course of events.”

The physical and visual wounds that were created on 9/11 have been repeatedly attended to through image and text by many cultural surgeons, Strauss among them. For him, writing about these difficult subjects is itself a magical act, one which, like his daughter’s drawing or Beuys’s remedy, is meant to have agency that spurs one into action. Therefore, his writings must be applied like a woven suture into the social body of humanity. And we must read them in as an ecology of the divine twins: image and belief. That is, if we are to defend the imagination, which has been under attack since that catastrophic, fiery morning twenty years ago.