Habituation

Chapter 4 demonstrates the commonplace nature of witnessing in the symbolic language and embodied habitudes of witnessing at contemporary memorials. The premise that liberal-democratic citizens should bear witness to national crimes and traumas by visiting celebrated memorials has become a commonplace form of civic obligation. The chapter examines the specific forms of witnessing that the National September 11 Memorial encourages visitors to enact. Prolonged and contentious controversies over its design—in effect, its symbolic rhetoric—provide insight into normative assumptions about how such a memorial should best memorialize collective tragedy based on past memorial precedents. The chapter argues that the memorial facilitates habitual forms of witnessing, which involve discursive practices of public remembrance that invoke familiar experiences of physical space, spatial aesthetics, and virtual reality. The National September 11 Memorial thus accommodates popular and immanently personalized habitudes of remembrance that typify late modern public culture.