CURRENTS OF CONTEMPORANEITY: ARCHITECTURE IN THE AFTERMATH TERRY SMITH If one were to slow down a videotape of the first plane approaching then hitting the north tower of World Trade Center, New York, at 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, and then zoom in to the instants of impact, one would see the word “American” slide, letter by letter, into oblivion. In Kelly Geunther’s New York Times photograph of the second plane as it hurtled through the skyscrapers of the Financial District towards the south tower, the blue and gray colours made it, unmistakably, a United Airlines flight. As images that draw us to imagine the deaths of actual human beings, these pictures were, and remain, deeply affecting. They record, among much else, an act of spectacular terrorism––an action of one group of humans against another within a war that is conducted at both symbolic and literal levels––a raid that was, and remains, profoundly disturbing. The profundity it disturbed was expressed, through perversely exact metaphor, in the violent obliteration of the word “UNITED.” These are the opening words of my book, The Architecture of Aftermath. 1 They spell out the big picture message sent by that attack: that the disposition of power in the world had just changed, perhaps irredeemably and forever, from one in which Western-style modernity set the global agenda. 2 Yet this should not have been the surprise that it was. For a number of years there had been indications of profound realignments between the great formations of modernity, and of the emergence of distinctively contemporary currents––certainly of a (dis)order riven by differences, but also, perhaps, carrying signs of the emergence of new formations. The 9/11 moment was a recent flashpoint of both civilizational and region-to-region conflict, and it continues to be used as a justification for governments of all stripes to declare open-ended states of emergency, and as an umbrella for the imposition of repressive agendas in many countries, not least the United States. Intractable, irresolvable “events” of this kind have come to seem almost normal in