Doug or someone posted Baudrillard's Spirit of T essay or a link to it when it came out (2001-2?). I thought it was exactly right on ... I posted a few things in a related theme but didn't get much of a stir. I was a little worried that some on list might get pissed off or offended because they were closer to the events, knew someone who was personally hurt or killed ... The feelings were pretty raw.
Below are some of the passages that relate to what I remember of the essay and the general public reaction:
``All the speeches and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. Moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are equal to the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed; better, by seeing it more or less self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly.
Though it is (this superpower) that has, through its unbearable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination which -unknowingly- inhabits us all...
That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, - this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it. ''
The general US reaction to the complicity and blowback was almost universal denial, condemnation and then anger about treasonous bastards, evil doers, with noise about the heartlessness, sick and twisted...
The rightwing media was especially livid, and I think it wasn't play acting outrage. Lucky there was no institutional targets for the left, or they would mostly have been at least vandalized. Mosques were. And then there was the Freedom Fries nonsense from Congress, and hate the French ... all wrapped up together with pomo theory critique of empire ...
Anyway the reason I posted the Anthropology was because Lyotard's discussion of the sublime gave me this flash of inspiration about how to link this PM view of the mythos of 9/11 with a concrete word and its feeling state. PM tends to read like analytic philosophy, a bloodless, fleshless sort of read. I was looking for something to give my own PM version more `life' more `sense' and try to lock it into an historical sort of realm.
Part to the trouble with pomo talk besides its stylistic problems, is that many readers don't understand what the works are talking about. So the way to get some understanding across is to drop the stylizations, and get back to linking up ideas with things people know about, which in this case is about how they felt.
Once Bush and much of the US talked itself into a war frenzy, my reactions fell into deep and bitter rage. I was going into what I have come think of as the existential mode. We were going to war and going to kill people and destroy places over a complete and total lie that I was going into yet another sublimity state, a very dark one. Most of my ability to get a more objective view of the Right and then most of the US dissolved into a profound loathing and nausea. They became the Other to me.
It was like I used to feel as a teenager when I would think about school, friends, the general community, some kind of loathing and passionate hatred. Back then I used to day dream a science fiction fantasy of after a nuclear war when all that I loathed was destroyed .... I would be free.
I recognized and was becoming a self and socially constructed terrorist. I went on an intellectualized search for something to destroy and locked on the neocons and Strauss. I brooded on them as Enemy. All of this takes on a kind mythological sense in the idea of stabbing a voodoo doll to kill its real life body. (I forget the anthropological name for this kind of activity.) Kill Strauss, kill the neocons. Strauss has been dead for thirty years, most people know nothing about him. The neocons are for the most part ignorant of him. All my activities and plots were symbolic. I was and am living in a symbolic universe of forms and activities.
To the ordinary Joe, I must appear entirely out of my mind, yet it all seems to be the height of rational activity and thought to me.
Anyway, reading through B as I am writing this, is like reading something I should have written or might have in small pieces, and I remember thinking yes, exactly ... in total agreement, and learning to see much more vague thoughts on my part, congeal into actual text on the page. There are term differences. What B calls `globalization' I called the total mythological envelop. It's like we are in art studio together looking at the same model and drawing her differently. He is obviously doing a much better crafted drawing, than I am of mine.
``...The third, which did happen, as a dissuasive Cold War, ended communism. From one war to the other, one went further each time toward a unique world order. Today the latter, virtually accomplished, is confronted by antagonistic forces, diffused in the very heart of the global, in all its actual convulsions. Fractal war in which all cells, all singularities revolt as antibodies do...''
This is what I am reading at the moment just now. And I think, singularities and fractals ... even down to the atomic components of this order, like me locked in mutual antagonistic struggle within my own mind. The concrete consequence of being in this mentality, is you go outdoors to the city to buy cigarettes and the place seems surreal a kind of dream world. The usual city drone starts to sound like Phillip Glass's music, that I listened to the other night.
The one concrete horror in my life is now gone, the job and job site. I have to write a post about it and the thorough going prison movie script that Chris talks about --- the job was like a combination of an asylum for the violent and criminally insane, and the grade B disaster flick.
Getting back Baudrillard.
``Keeping everything in proportion, it is more or less what happened in the political order with the erasure of communism and the global triumph of liberal power: a fantastical enemy appeared, diffused over the whole planet, infiltrating everywhere as a virus, surging from every interstice of power. Islam. ''
My own problem is I keep believing there is an `outside' a way out. That I can escape and convince others to help each other escape. But I don't know how.
``But Islam is only the moving front of the crystallization of this antagonism. This antagonism is everywhere and it is in each of us. Thus, terror against terror...''
I think what I am trying to do, is experience terror, so I can understand it, so I can defeat it --- like I used to in climbing. It's not working very well... I recently spent a few days on the web, listening to The Call to Prayer in as many different versions as I could, and looked at photos and art from the Islamic world to embed myself in it. That drowning into the Other and coming back, was very much like the sublimity I was trying to describe.
Of course the real deal would be too expensive and too close, too much like asking for death by Otherness. I was talking to a buddy (who was in Iran during the summer of the uranium centrifuge IAEA developments) and I told him what I thought would be a true adventure. Buy an old Izusu truck like the Arab truckers use and drive the roads from Beirut to Kabul together. Of course we wouldn't get passed the first road block. He has white hair and blue eyes, and I look so much like a redneck I could pass in Georgia. I did pass in Lubeck, TX.
I got a note yesterday from a guy who is going to Paris and wanted to visit the Arab and Muslim neighborhoods. I thought, wow. That's right. That's a great thing to do. Maybe that's a way to get to the Other and enjoy and figure out what's going on. Then I thought hell, just drive to Oakland and then down to San Leandro where this is a large Afghan neighborhood, places to eat, shop... meet people over coffee... Always looking for the cheap way...
``What happens then to the real event, if everywhere the image, the fiction, the virtual, infuses reality? In this present case, one might perceive (maybe with a certain relief) a resurgence of the real, and of the violence of the real, in a supposedly virtual universe. "This is the end of all your virtual stories, - that is real!" Similarly, one could perceive a resurrection of history after its proclaimed death. But does reality really prevail over fiction? If it seems so, it is because reality has absorbed the energy of fiction, and become fiction itself. One could almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of the image... It is as if they duel, to find which is the most unimaginable...''
This dialectic between image and real, symbolic form and concrete form... what others call representation and the object, this is what Phillip Glass tried to evoke in his opera, Barbarians at the Gate. The point, we are all trapped in this boundary layer. At a guess, I would guess it wasn't very popular.
Anyway, Baudrillard knows how to perform in this boundary world, understands it better, and can see the ramifications better. He's a working professional ... I feel like I just joined a class in grad school late, and am working hard to catch up.
The reception on LBO I think was mixed. I thought the essay was brilliant, right on and so forth. Absolutely not a waste time. It illuminated a lot for me.
Gotta go do my taxes ... been putting off ... hate the idea where the money goes into the account of some banker... while I take the fall into poverty, once again...
CG