Jean Baudrillard Prophesies the Twin Towers
anna balint
epistolaris at freemail.hu
Tue Nov 6 20:00:15 CET 2001
Jean Baudrillard Prophesies the Twin Towers
posted by jim on Tuesday November 06, @11:21AM
from the hallucinatory-resemblance-of-theory dept.
http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/06/1624202
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.
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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