Well it's Valentines day, and my baby left me. She just went to do errands, but all the same, it got me thinking about disappearances.Thinking about Baudrillard's piece in conjunction with Oedipus, there seems to be a structural kinship between these narratives of disappearance. As Derrida sketches out for us, Oedipus doesn't allow Antigone to know his final resting place. It is a secret, one which prevents her mourning from taking its natural course. She mourns for her inability to mourn, an indefinite mourning, almost a ghostly mourning; to borrow J.C. Mellencamp's formulation, a mourning which goes on long after the thrill of dying is gone. Without any localized point of grief to organize his rites of departure, Oedipus continues to haunt Antigone, haunt Thebes, haunt the text. He is, I want to say, everywhere because he is nowhere.
Oedipus is not unlike the Twin Towers in this respect. After the events of 9/11, what Baudrillard would call one of many deaths of the Real, several things happened:
1) The fall of the towers led to the radical multiplication of their image-- in newscasts, in homemade memorials, in magazines. In conversation, too, I suppose. I remember I was in my sophomore year high school math class when the first plane hit, and to be honest, I didn't really know what the World Trade Center was. I had probably seen the Twin Towers, but I hadn't really thought about them until they were on fire. And like some sort of amoeba, the image of the towers was reproduced at an alarming rate upon their destruction, their division. Most illustratively, kids in my high school (kids in lots of high schools) began to fold $20 bills in such a way that, somehow, an image of the burning towers would appear (see attached picture). The image of the Towers, then, did not only spread across space, but across time as well. As we discussed in class, prefigurations of 9/11 are everywhere, in movies like Fight Club, which Baudrillard uses as evidence of the inevitability of this event to end all events. As seen in the image of the $20 bill, the system's downfall was inscribed within itself. I see this a bit differently, though. Has the system died? Not at all. The World Trade Center was destroyed, it has disappeared, but the hegemony of capital was not affected. Capital didn't die, it was resurrected without having to die, now charged with the energy of the real, sanctified as a sort of deathless martyr. So I disagree with Baudrillard here (but I also feel like I am being more Baudrillardian than he is, so maybe I am just reading him wrong): The system did not portend its own death so much as its resurrection. Less like a snake shedding its skin than a skin shedding its snake, the system built its own destruction within itself, and carried on after its death as if it were part of the plan--the most important part of the plan. In this sense, the symbolic behavior of capital has mirrored exactly the religious designs of the terrorists: The system anticipated its own demise, but also penned the terms of its resurrection. In other words, the symbolic freight of death itself was utilized by both parties in question. With the disappearance of two buildings in New York, capital's symbolic capital has been extended, renewed, reborn, baptized, galvanized, and sanctified. Where before 9/11 it was just business, now it's sacred, now it's religion. As Baudrillard wrote, "I set out to produce a Requiem, but it was also, in a way, a Te Deum" (p. 52, n4).
2) Following the radical proliferation the Twin Towers was their erasure. Films released shortly after 9/11 cut scenes that featured shots of the Towers. Spider-man was the most famous example. More poignantly, the Towers were erased from movies and television shows films before 9/11. (You can read a little bit more about that here: http://www.entertainmentnutz.com/tv/tvbites/destroying_a_memory/ , and for a more neutral take, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_audiovisual_entertainment_affected_by_the_September_11_attacks). This is, in a way, a second disappearance, an erasure of the past. Maybe ironically (and maybe depending on whether you are a Marxist philosopher or a Fortune 500 CEO) the idea was that images of the Twin Towers would be upsetting, and thus these films and shows would lose dollars. A third disappearance, we could say, is the continued absence of a memorial or monument or even new set of towers at 'Ground Zero". The combined effect of these three difference sorts of disappearances is a sort of rapture: the transcendence of capital. Like Oedipus, the symbolic power of capital is, by virtue of its disappearances, its deathless death, everywhere felt. Like Antigone, we cannot so much mourn and move on as mourn our inability to mourn, which has taken the form of the interminable 'War on Terror."
Zach Smith
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ReplyDeleteDoubles: Some Additional Thoughts
ReplyDeleteI don't want to overstay my welcome, but I have a few more thoughts on this matter that I thought we might discuss.
While above I noticed some schematic similarities between the trajectory of Oedipus and the Twin Towers, I feel like the two have a more substantial connection, one which has been kickin' around my head since we talked about it the other week. I figure I might as well spit it out while I have the chance, but it will be a bit fast and loose.
I think that, to borrow John Manoussakis's term, both Oedipus and Capitalism suffer from a "disease of sameness." The doubleness of the Twin Towers (which could have been called something else, something which did not emphasize their doubleness--for that matter, they could have just been one building) is an expression of Capitalism's dependence on sameness, on homogenization, which is at once its inaugural logic and its chief anxiety.
First, as we discussed in class, this doubleness of the towers suggests the systematicity of capitalism-- there are two identical towers, and thus there is a certain iterability, a language and a logic that arises from them. Capitalism is premised on exchange, which requires us to trade in a certain sameness.
This foundational logic of sameness is also, philosophically, capitalism's pitfall: commodification, the reduction of people and objects to an exchange value, eradicates the singularity of those people and objects. They become interchangeable, and thus, according to the system, are valued as homogeneous. In this way, the death of the Real significantly predates the collapse of the Twin Towers (but I think that for Baudrillard the Real can always die again). So, then, the doubleness of the Towers are a reminder of both the commodification of late capitalism, a disease of sameness which is both its law and its most insidious effect.
But, operating in the realm of symbolics as we are, I believe that the disease of sameness extends a bit further. As I previously mentioned, the interminable War on Terror is something like Antigone's infinite mourning for her inability to mourn. One of the reasons that this war is interminable is because it is simultaneously fighting for and against sameness. Outside of foreign policy, the war has been defined by a single internal conflict more than any other, about which we are urged to neither ask nor tell: Specifically, the openness of homosexuality in the military. Further, during the duration of this War, the domestic political moment has in large part been polarized by the conflict over gay marriage. Abstractly--or we could say, symbolically-- the general anxiety is over the double phallus, and their proximity, a double phallus which is represented by the Twin Towers whose fall, whose collapse into each other, both precipitated the war and galvanized the upsurge in mainstream conservative sentiment in America. The way I am looking at it, those who oppose gay marriage/open homosexuality in the military must have an underlying sense that this doubleness, this disease of sameness, leads to ruin. To risk a broad generalization, for certain folk, this sameness is the Death of the Real.* I think, though, that the anxiety of the double phallus did not truly begin with the Towers' fall, but with their erection; swapping one brand of sameness for another, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the prohibition on gay marriage are the expression of a repressed anxiety about capitalism and its tendency for commodification....(con't below)
(Doubles, con't)
ReplyDelete...Our desires and anxieties are split, doubled, and rerouted: Backwardly, we fight for the sameness of capitalism and against the sameness of homosexuality (which are heterogenous homogenies, but we are trafficking in symbols). Our crypto-anxiety, however, is about capitalism, the cause we now defend. And this is precisely the reason that it is repressed-- how could one fight both for and against capitalism's homogenization? This is why Baudrillard says that we harbor a terrorist within: We secretly wished for the disruption of capitalism's hegemony. Obviously, no one wished for the horrors of 9/11, and no one was glad when they happened. But there is a difference between innocent people dying and the disruption of hegemony, and it is latter for which we secretly pined, a desire about which we could neither ask nor tell.
In the same way that images of 9/11 were somehow disseminated into the past (see the above $20), so too were images of the repressed connection between homosexual anxieties and commodification anxieties--over perceived diseases of sameness. This trailer for Spider-man was one of the first pulled after 9/11: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xNgtWG09TQ .
After a bank heist, a bunch of robbers pile into their helicopter in an attempt to make a clean getaway. Unfortunately, their chopper is ensnared by a sticky white substance, presumably excreted from Spider-man, and, as cash falls to the ground, pulled back into a web of sticky white stuff that is connecting the double phallus of the Twin Towers. I don't think I have my mind in the gutter here (there is a sort of puberty motif to Spider-man which did a lot of this work for me). This trailer, which, again, was famously taken out of rotation following 9/11, betrays the nexus of anxieties over sameness that would erupt shortly after its filming. In confusing one for the other, whether deliberately, accidentally, or some convenient combination, we have been fighting an internal political war against one sameness while defending the other to the death. Maybe it is only my personal opinion, but it seems to me that we have the two backwards.
A more viable analysis might show I am the one who has things backwards--perhaps it is more reasonable to think that the repressed element is not an anxiety over sameness, but a desire for it. This desire to extend the domain of the self, of absolute sameness, to encompass all things is obscured prohibition and taboo. It is a desire which resides in the unconscious, or perhaps comprises it. In this way, and not unlike Oedipus, our desire for absolute sameness is what keeps us strangers to ourselves. And where did this desire come from? Well, likely programmed into us by the capitalist system in which we "live, breath, and have our being." The impulse to reduce things to sameness starts there, as does the anxiety about it. The War on Terror, besides (via the "DA,DT" policy) being a characterization of that sameness anxiety, redirects energies away from a critique of capitalism's homogenizing effects, undermining the impulse to revolt, and ensuring the system's perpetuation.
*Which has also been called the death of the family, and the beginning of some sort of apocalyptic period, where either reproduction of the species halts, or and humanity is doomed, or where cloning and artificial insemination displace traditional modes of reproduction, and traditional values in the process (reflecting in some ways the primacy of the image over the real). But, speaking as a child of divorce, I think the notion of marriage as an inviolable cultural and religious institution quit holding water some time ago. My feeling is, gay and straight marriage are either equally authentic or equally inauthentic.
Zack,
ReplyDeletethese reflections are really thought-provoking and a great extension of the baudrillard analysis to other contemporary events/signs/images....I like the way you bring Manouassakis' reading of Oedipus together with your reading of the double in spiderman, Twin Towers and the DA,DT policy! Hermeneutic unmasking of doubled meanings at its best...Keep it going.