Peter Lamborn Wilson: 9/11 and the Crisis of Meaning

[anna balint]

9/11 and the Crisis of Meaning
Peter Lamborn Wilson (Sept. 18, 2001)
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http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/09/169203&mode=nested&thre
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A few days after the "event," the NY Times ran an interesting article on the
advertizing "industry" and its crisis. Not only zillions of dollars a day
etc. etc., but a weird effect: suddenly it seems impossible to have
advertizing at all. It seems massively "inappropriate" to move product as
per usual with shrieking & insinuating, mocking & sneering, prurience &
peeping; with hate & envy masked as fashion, with greed thinly disguised as
freedom of choice.

Death and tragedy occur every day, every minute, not only in the former
Third World, even in New York, even in America. Why hasn't advertizing ever
seemed shameful to anyone ever before? The media -- which cannot utter a
sound without puking up a cliché -- speaks now of the waking of a sleeping
giant (meaning that we will no longer tolerate terrorism etc.) -- but what
was this sleep? And what does it mean to wake into a feeling of shame?

Last week, it seems, we were willing to admit that our highest social values
could be expressed in price codes ( the "mark of the Beast" as the cranks
say, the "prophets of doom"). This week, we feel shame. In a Times interview
a fashion designer expressed doubt that her work had any significance and
wondered if she could go on with it. The fashion industry is also ashamed;
Hollywood is ashamed; even the news media expressed some fleeting longing
for decorum & dignity & decency.

Are we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our
mean-spiritedness, our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred of the
body and of all nature, our obsession with gadgetry & "information", our
degraded pop culture, our vapid or morbid art & lit, & so on & so on? -- or
should we defend all this as "freedom" and "our way of life"?

Our leaders are telling us to return to normal routines (after a decent
period of mourning) in the assurance that they will assign significance to
the event, they will embody our hate & desire for revenge, they will mediate
for us with the forces of "evil". But what exactly is this normal life to
consist of? Why do we feel this shame?

Schoolchildren (again according to the Times) ask their teachers what it
means that the terrorists were willing to die, to kill themselves; and their
teachers evade the question, saying that "we don't understand." And the ad
execs, they don't understand either -- they're bewildered. Awake but
confused by a crisis of meaning. Last week all meanings could be expressed
in terms of money. Why should 5000 murders change the meaning of meaning?

A hyperfashionable Italian clothing company uses death to sell its products.
Photographs -- even huge billboards --showing people dying of AIDS or
waiting to be executed -- designed to sell woolly jumpers. Is this life as
normal? Should we return to it?

For a few days no music was heard in the streets. No thumping bass speakers
rattled the air, no chants of hate for women & queers, no "Madison Avenue
Choirs" hymning the celestial delites of commodities or vacations in the
midst of other peoples' misery.

For a few hours or days there appeared no official spin on the event, no
slogan/logo in the media, no interpretation, no meaning. We watched the
cloud drift around the city, first to the East over Brooklyn, then up the
west side of Manhattan, finally over the east side as well. With the smell
and the poisonous haze around the moon came a nightmare about the occult
significance of the cloud: -- angry bewildered ghosts in a vast white cloud.
And we breathed that cloud into us. We'll never get it out of our lungs.
What the cloud wanted was an explanation, a meaning.

But next day the spin was in, the media had found or been given its
answer -- "Attack on America", on our freedom our values, our way of life,
carried out by "cowards" who were nevertheless not "physical cowards" (as
some official explained to the Times). Perhaps they were moral cowards? He
didn't say.

Why do they hate us? A few people have asked but received no coherent
answer. Do "they" hate "us" because we use up 75% of the world's resources
even though we only constitute 20% of its population? because we bomb
Baghdad & Belgrade without risking even one American life? because we refuse
to discuss pollution or racism? because we demand the destruction of the
Alaskan wilderness to fuel our SUVs for thirty more days? because we export
a vapid sneering meanspirited culture to the world, video games about death,
movies about death, TV shows about death, commodities that are dead, music
that kills the spirit? because we've made advertizing our highest artform?
because we define "freedom" as our freedom to rule & be ruled by money?

The politicians have told us that "they" envy us and our way of life and
therefore wish to destroy it. Envy -- yes, why not? The whole system of
global capital is based on envy. It has to be. No envy, no desire. No
desire, no reason to spend. No reason to spend, implosion of global capital,
q.e.d. But then why should the ad execs & fashion designers & sports teams &
entertainers feel this strange unaccountable shame?

Any why should the terrorists have been willing to die just because they
envy our wealth & our way of life & our freedom to buy, and spend, and
waste? What does it mean?

After the Holocaust (or Hiroshima, or the Gulag) certain philosophers said
that there could be no more art or poetry. But they were wrong apparently.
We have poetry again. It may not mean the same thing it meant before. It may
not mean anything. But we have it. And who could have dreamed at the gate of
Buchenwald or Treblinka that one day we would have -- Nike ads or sitcoms
about lawyers?

Is any meaning going to emerge from the 9/11 event? Without meaning tragedy
ends not in catharsis but simply depression, endless sorrow. Our leaders
"seek closure" -- perhaps by killing many Afghan children -- perhaps by a
new Crusade against the Saracens -- and of course by a return to normal.
We'll show "them" -- by refusing meaning. We will sleep because it is our
right not to awake to confusion & shame.

Our sleep will be troubled. We'll have to "sacrifice a few freedoms" to
protect Freedom. We'll have to fear & hate. But within a few weeks or months
we will have buried even the fear & hate, or rather we will have transformed
all that emotion to the Image, to the Evil Eye of the media, our
externalized unconscious. We'll have sitcoms again and gangsta rap and
arguments about our right to download it all for free into our home
computers. We'll get those airplanes flying, once again polluting "our"
skies with noise & carcinogens. We'll overcome our shame. And that will
constitute our revenge. That will be our meaning. Our morality.