Language Earthquakes
25/8/10 17:49![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eredienI was reading ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rm's journal earlier today, and started thinking about something she wrote in this post. I was going to post the following as a comment in her journal, but it wouldn't fit in a comment no matter how I edited it, and I realized it would make a good standalone post. So, I thought I would post it here and also leave a link to this in her journal comments.
I am leaving comments open, but be nice to each other. I left comments open because I am hoping that people will have interesting things to say about geology and critical literary theory in relation to metaphors and language phrases as they are used in modern politics. I have no emotional energy to moderate a debate right now, and even if I had the emotional energy, I have other things to do. If you are nasty, you are going to get banned. Thank you.
--
rm wrote:
"Ground Zero" has been, since the beginning, a useful term to frame, not just what happened at the WTC as an act or war, but to frame this idea of ourselves ("The West") being at war with Islam (which we shouldn't be, and is what the terrorists are trying, successfully apparently, to trick us into), and that's not a type of useful I can support.
That made me realize something new about how language is used to empower those already in power. The idea of "Ground Zero" implies some kind of origin point--a ground--and some kind of spreading out from that origin point--if there's a zero, that implies a one, two, and three, and on. But there's no Ground 1 or 2; there's just this empty origin. Ground Zeroes happen all over the world, every day--but how many of those get named? And of those, how many get named as the central point from which everything came, but in which there is emptiness?
Just one, and it's in one of the largest, richest, most important cities in the Global North (I'm trying to ditch the concept of "The West" in order to use the different concept of "The Global North," after having read Stuffed and Starved). An incredibly privileged act: name our wounds, and name them as first--to name them as the origin of pain.
So now there's this literally empty signifier of zero, as blasted origin. Origin implies that something is supposed to be spreading out; but no one knows what is "spreading" or where it is going. But people always pour things into empty spaces; human beings are always compelled to construct meanings out of trauma.
Something foreign, unknown, terrifying, is spreading from a single point, a wound, in the Global North, and no one knows what it is...
Mosques are foreign, unknown, terrifying, and "they" want to build one on the point, the wound.
Oh my God! The terrifying spreading thing must be Islam! It must bePlan51 Park 51!
It must be...the Ground Zero Mosque! (With that one added word, appended, the empty lingustic place gets literally filled with the idea of a literal building, and one which encompasses all of the Global North's fear of The Other at that. See it?)
If you look at the op-eds, the articles, the texts of the debate, it's clear many people assume something "spread" out from a defined, empty "ground" "zero" into other grounds nearby. Those areas were never defined, named, (as the "zero" point was, had to be), so there is no structure for people to talk about anything except the "zero" point as being sacred ground. All the "correct radius in blocks" talk is actually a barely-understood struggle to retroactively name and define a "ground 1" or "2." We are having this debate--"should we define those areas? Why wouldn't we? What spread out? How far did it go?"--without recognizing that we are claiming sacred ground, and without understanding why: all because the word zero, which we have heard so much, implies that there must be a one and a two. The lack of same makes people subconsciously uneasy: zeroes need to be followed by ones; order makes sense of things that make no sense. We are trying to build order, but we appear to be unaware, or unconcerned, that we ourselves are laying foundations in the dark.
After earthquakes, geologists talk about the epicenter--the stress point, the origin--of the quake. But they also talk about aftershock areas, and zones of destruction, and seismic shadowing, wherein the ripples from one earthquake reverberate through the earth's core and are felt in the place opposite from the epicenter, on the other side of the planet. After a quake, you hear about seismic shadowing, and you suddenly understand why you have been hearing so much about tsunamis in Japan.
But saying the words "Ground Zero" invokes the idea of epicenter without mentioning the quake. As our house falls to pieces around us, we cannot know why unless we talk about the earthquake. As we count the dead that are our seismic shadow, we cannot have any understanding of why people fight halfway around the world unless we talk about the earthquake.
And we keep invoking the epicenter as the reason for the quake.
I wish they would get a geologist to advise the White House.
A serious question: would thePlan51 Park 51 project would have generated as much opposition if it did not have a number in its name? (Yes, the proposed center is/was also called the Cordoba Mosque Project, but that name people had to research, and people are presenting the meaning(s) of it in articles, and other people are debating those meanings. No one is debating "Plan51," "Park 51" which to my ear sounds almost generic--no, rather, it sounds like it was designed to sound almost generic, like the name of an upscale bar/bistro. "Ground Zero" also sounds almost generic, too.
There's some kind of seismic shadowing in people's minds, in the language; there must be.
rm's journal earlier today, and started thinking about something she wrote in this post. I was going to post the following as a comment in her journal, but it wouldn't fit in a comment no matter how I edited it, and I realized it would make a good standalone post. So, I thought I would post it here and also leave a link to this in her journal comments.I am leaving comments open, but be nice to each other. I left comments open because I am hoping that people will have interesting things to say about geology and critical literary theory in relation to metaphors and language phrases as they are used in modern politics. I have no emotional energy to moderate a debate right now, and even if I had the emotional energy, I have other things to do. If you are nasty, you are going to get banned. Thank you.
--
rm wrote:"Ground Zero" has been, since the beginning, a useful term to frame, not just what happened at the WTC as an act or war, but to frame this idea of ourselves ("The West") being at war with Islam (which we shouldn't be, and is what the terrorists are trying, successfully apparently, to trick us into), and that's not a type of useful I can support.
That made me realize something new about how language is used to empower those already in power. The idea of "Ground Zero" implies some kind of origin point--a ground--and some kind of spreading out from that origin point--if there's a zero, that implies a one, two, and three, and on. But there's no Ground 1 or 2; there's just this empty origin. Ground Zeroes happen all over the world, every day--but how many of those get named? And of those, how many get named as the central point from which everything came, but in which there is emptiness?
Just one, and it's in one of the largest, richest, most important cities in the Global North (I'm trying to ditch the concept of "The West" in order to use the different concept of "The Global North," after having read Stuffed and Starved). An incredibly privileged act: name our wounds, and name them as first--to name them as the origin of pain.
So now there's this literally empty signifier of zero, as blasted origin. Origin implies that something is supposed to be spreading out; but no one knows what is "spreading" or where it is going. But people always pour things into empty spaces; human beings are always compelled to construct meanings out of trauma.
Something foreign, unknown, terrifying, is spreading from a single point, a wound, in the Global North, and no one knows what it is...
Mosques are foreign, unknown, terrifying, and "they" want to build one on the point, the wound.
Oh my God! The terrifying spreading thing must be Islam! It must be
It must be...the Ground Zero Mosque! (With that one added word, appended, the empty lingustic place gets literally filled with the idea of a literal building, and one which encompasses all of the Global North's fear of The Other at that. See it?)
If you look at the op-eds, the articles, the texts of the debate, it's clear many people assume something "spread" out from a defined, empty "ground" "zero" into other grounds nearby. Those areas were never defined, named, (as the "zero" point was, had to be), so there is no structure for people to talk about anything except the "zero" point as being sacred ground. All the "correct radius in blocks" talk is actually a barely-understood struggle to retroactively name and define a "ground 1" or "2." We are having this debate--"should we define those areas? Why wouldn't we? What spread out? How far did it go?"--without recognizing that we are claiming sacred ground, and without understanding why: all because the word zero, which we have heard so much, implies that there must be a one and a two. The lack of same makes people subconsciously uneasy: zeroes need to be followed by ones; order makes sense of things that make no sense. We are trying to build order, but we appear to be unaware, or unconcerned, that we ourselves are laying foundations in the dark.
After earthquakes, geologists talk about the epicenter--the stress point, the origin--of the quake. But they also talk about aftershock areas, and zones of destruction, and seismic shadowing, wherein the ripples from one earthquake reverberate through the earth's core and are felt in the place opposite from the epicenter, on the other side of the planet. After a quake, you hear about seismic shadowing, and you suddenly understand why you have been hearing so much about tsunamis in Japan.
But saying the words "Ground Zero" invokes the idea of epicenter without mentioning the quake. As our house falls to pieces around us, we cannot know why unless we talk about the earthquake. As we count the dead that are our seismic shadow, we cannot have any understanding of why people fight halfway around the world unless we talk about the earthquake.
And we keep invoking the epicenter as the reason for the quake.
I wish they would get a geologist to advise the White House.
A serious question: would the
There's some kind of seismic shadowing in people's minds, in the language; there must be.
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(no subject)
27/8/10 16:20 (UTC)But I think the reason that the term "ground zero" got applied during 9/11 is because there *were* secondary effects occurring in multiple places throughout the city, as a result of the impact of the blast at the actual crash location. If nothing else, huge sections of the city were having issues with debris inhalation and with the secondary effects created by sheer panic. Doesn't it make sense, at least at the time, to distinguish between the actual impact site and the areas experiencing secondary effects?
(no subject)
27/8/10 16:31 (UTC)- the lack of formal recognition/naming of those parts of the city that experienced disaster radiating outward from that center point
- the continuing invocation of the central point as the only formally recognized/named place
Has acted to elide the damage that the rest of the city--not to mention the damage to DC and other cities--suffered, and has acted to put the focus on the center point of the damage as the only truly important place to debate about, when that simply isn't true.
What I am saying is--I think that as time has gone on, that the true size and extent of the damage in those other places is being forgotten/erased by language, and at the same time and by the same mechanism, the importance of that central point is being...overinflated.
The building they are proposing to raze, the old Burlington Coat Factory building, actually had the landing gear of one of the airplanes used in the attack fall on it, but people (by and large) aren't talking about that. They're talking about how close it should be to the site where the damage was done--and forgetting that damage was done everywhere. I think that trying to site this center on a plot of land where no damage was done is impossible--damage was done everywhere, to the hearts and minds of everyone in America, and to the idea of humanity in general, as always happens when crime and tragedy strike on such a scale; people marched with candles all over the world.
I think if people kept in mind the idea that damage was done everywhere, emotional and even physical damage (in DC and elsewhere), then a radius in blocks from the center of the damage becomes almost irrelevant, and the question instead becomes--are we going to allow healing to start, anywhere?