Technology

“When you say ‘September 11’ you are already citing, are you not?” asked Jacques Derrida, rhetorically (qtd. in Borradori, 8). What are you citing? Derrida does not explain and this itself is part of the answer. The “name” for the event, “9/11,” as he suggests, is a curious name, both meaningless in itself, cryptic, provisional and tentative, and – for this very reason – “naming” all the more. For “[t]he brevity of the appellation” for “this supposed ‘event’” derives not only from “an economic or rhetorical necessity,” but points to the fact “that we do not know what we are talking about” (ibid., 86).

Yet, perhaps the working of the now most accepted term for the event (“9/11”) is not a question of economic necessity, but of economic sufficiency. It is not a matter of what is needed but of what is enough: 9/11 – instant recognition – we may not know what we are talking about, but everyone knows what we are talking about (i.e. what we are referring to). We could express this in the electronic media language: it could be metaphorically said that the designation “9/11” may be the first and fastest mental hyperlink to an event that automatically, instantly and repeatedly opens the same picture in the network of an unprecedentedly large number of individual brains and, consequently, in the world wide web of collective consciousness.