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Jean Baudrillard Prophesies the Twin
Towers | |
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posted by Autonomedia on Tuesday
November 06, @11:21AM from the
hallucinatory-resemblance-of-theory dept.
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jim writes: "Writing some
twenty years ago on the theme of “simulation of opposition” in
too-late capitalism, and the “law of equivalence” in the
“advanced democratic” political systems, radical French
theorist Jean Baudrillard picked Manhattan’s World Trade
Towers to illustrate his point.
An excerpt from Jean Baudrillard, Simulations,
translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Phil Beitchman (New
York: Semiotext[e], 1983):
“Why are there two towers at New York’s World Trade Center?
All of Manhattan’s great buildings were always happy enough to
confront each other in a competitive verticality, the result
of which is an architectural panorama in the image of the
capitalist system: as pyramidal jungle, all of the buildings
attacking each other. The system profiled itself in a
celebrated image that you had of New York when you arrived
there by boat. This image has completely changed in the last
few years. The effigy of the capitalist system has passed from
the pyramid to the perforated card. Buildings are no longer
suspicious one of the other, like columns in a statistical
graph. This new architecture incarnates a system that is no
longer competitive, but compatible, and where competition has
disappeared for the benefit of the correlations. (New York is
the world’s only city therefore that retraces all along it’s
history, and with a prodigious fidelity and in all its scope,
the actual form of the capitalistic system—it changes
instantly in function of the latter. No European city does
so.) This architectural graphism is that of the monopoly; the
two W.T.C. towers, perfect parallelepideds a quarter-mile high
on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind communicating
vessels. The fact that there are two of them signifies the end
of all competition, the end of all original reference.
Paradoxically, if there were only one, the monopoly would not
be incarnated because we have seen how it stabilizes on a dual
form. For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate itself: it
is the duplication of the sign that destroys its meaning. This
is what Andy Warhol demonstrates also: the multiple replicas
of Marilyn’s face are there to show at the same time the death
of the original and the end of representation. The two towers
of the W.T.C.are the visible sign of the closure of the system
in a vertigo of duplication while the other skyscrapers are
each of the them the original moment of a system constantly
transcending itself in a perpetual crisis and self-challenge.
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There is a particular fascination in this
reduplication. As high as they are, higher than all the
others, the two towers signify nevertheless the end of
verticality. they ignore the other buildings, they are not of
the same race, they no longer challenge them, nor compare
themselves to them,they look one into the other as into a
mirror and culminate in this prestige of similitude. What they
project is the idea of the model that they are one for the
other, and their twin altitude presents no longer any value of
transcendence.They signify only that the strategy of models
and commutations wins out in the very heart of the system
itself—and New York is really the heart of it—over the
traditional strategy of competition. The buildings of
Rockefeller Center still direct their gaze one at the other
into their glass or steel facades, in the city’s infinite
spectacularity. The Towers, on the other hand, are blind, and
no longer have a facade. All referential of habitat, of the
facade as face, of interior and exterior, that you still find
in the Chase Manhattan or in the boldest mirror-buildings of
the’60s, is erased. At the same time as the rhetoric of
verticality, the rhetoric of the mirror has disappeared. There
remains only a series closed on the number two, just as if
architecture, in the image of the system, proceeded only from
an unchangeable genetic code, a definitive model."
Strolling with Baudrillard in New York's Central Park one
day soon after this book was published, I asked him if he
believed any force present anywhere in the world had the
ability to disturb this binary regulation, the tactical
doubling of monopoly in duopoly, this coupling of simultaneous
and spectacular opposition that looked like "the end of
history." His reply? "Islam."" | |
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