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The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that
of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city,a consumerist
paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in
is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real
world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras
in a gigantic show. The most recent example of this is Peter Weir's
The Truman Show (1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small town clerk
who gradually discovers the truth that he is the hero of a 24-hours
permanent TV show: his hometown is constructed on a gigantic studio
set, with cameras following him permanently. Among its predecessors,
it is worth mentioning Philip Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959), in
which a hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic Californian
city of the late 50s, gradually discovers that the whole town is a
fake staged to keep him satisfied... The underlyingexperience of Time
Out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist
Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL,
substanceless, deprived of the material inertia.
So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived
of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late capitalist
consumerist society, "real social life" itself somehow acquires
the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in "real"
life as stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate truth of the
capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization
of the "real life" itself, its reversal into a spectral
show. Among others, Christopher Isherwood gave expression to this
unreality of the American daily life, exemplified in the motel room:
"American motels are unreal! /.../ they are deliberately designed
to be unreal. /.../ The Europeans hate us because we've retired to
live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate."
Peter Sloterdijk's notion of the "sphere" is here literally
realized, as the gigantic metal sphere that envelopes and isolates
the entire city. Years ago, a series of science-fiction films like
Zardoz or Logan's Run forecasted today's postmodern predicament by
extending this fantasy to the community itself: the isolated group
living an aseptic life in a secluded area longs for the experience
of the real world of material decay.
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The Wachowski brothers' hit Matrix (1999) brought
this logic to its climax: the material reality we all experience and
see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic
mega-computer to which we are all attached; when the hero (played
by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "real reality," he sees
a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what remained of
Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters
the ironic greeting: "Welcome to the desert of the real."
Was it not something of the similar order that took place in New York
on September 11? Its citizens were introduced to the "desert
of the real" - to us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and
the shots we saw of the collapsing towers could not but remind us
of the most breathtaking scenes in the catastrophe big productions.
When we hear how the bombings were a totally unexpected shock, how
the unimaginable Impossible happened, one should recall the other
defining catastrophe from the beginning of the XXth century, that
of Titanic: it was also a shock, but the space for it was already
prepared in ideological fantasizing, since Titanic was the symbol
of the might of the XIXth century industrial civilization. Does the
same not hold also for these bombings? Not only were the media bombarding
us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat
was also obviously libidinally invested - just recall the series of
movies from Escape From New York to Independence Day. The unthinkable
which happened was thus the object of fantasy: in a way, America got
what it fantasized about, and this was the greatest surprise.
It is precisely now, when we are dealing with the raw Real of a catastrophe,
that we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates
which determine its perception. If there is any symbolism in the collapse
of the WTC towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the
"center of financial capitalism," but, rather, the notion
that the two WTC towers stood for the center of the VIRTUAL capitalism,
of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material
production. The shattering impact of the bombings can only be accounted
for only against the background of the borderline which today separates
the digitalized First World from the Third World "desert of the
Real." It is the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial
universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening
us all the time with total destruction.
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Is, consequently, Osama Bin Laden, the suspected
mastermind behind the bombings, not the real-life counterpart of Ernst
Stavro Blofeld, the master-criminal in most of the James Bond films,
involved in the acts of global destruction. What one should recall
here is that the only place in Hollywood films where we see the production
process in all its intensity is when James Bond penetrates the master-criminal's
secret domain and locates there the site of intense labor (distilling
and packaging the drugs, constructing a rocket that will destroy New
York...). When the master-criminal, after capturing Bond, usually
takes him on a tour of his illegal factory, is this not the closest
Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist proud presentation of the
production in a factory? And the function of Bond's intervention,
of course, is to explode in firecraks this site of production, allowing
us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with
the "disappearing working class." Is it not that, in the
exploding WTC towers, this violence directed at the threatening.
Outside turned back at us? The safe Sphere in which Americans live
is experienced as under threat from the Outside of terrorist attackers
who are ruthlessly self-sacrificing AND cowards, cunningly intelligent
AND primitive barbarians. Whenever we encounter such a purely evil
Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson:
in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of
our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity
and peace of the "civilized" West was bought by the export
of ruthless violence and destruction into the "barbarian"
Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter
in Congo. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound, we should also, now
more than ever, bear in mind that the actual effect of these bombings
is much more symbolic than real. The US just got the taste of what
goes on around the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny,
from Rwanda and Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation
in New York snipers and gang rapes, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo
was a decade ago.
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It is when we watched on TV screen the two WTC
towers collapsing, that it became possible to experience the falsity
of the "reality TV shows": even if this shows are "for
real," people still act in them - they simply play themselves.
The standard disclaimer in a novel ("characters in this text
are a fiction, every resemblance with the real life characters is
purely contingent") holds also for the participants of the reality
soaps: what we see there are fictional characters, even if they play
themselves for the real. Of course,the "return to the Real"
can be given different twists: Rightist commentators like George Will
also immediately proclaimed the end of the American "holiday
from history" - the impact of reality shattering the isolated
tower of the liberal tolerant attitude and the Cultural Studies focus
on textuality. Now, we are forced to strike back, to deal with real
enemies in the real world... However, WHOM to strike? Whatever the
response, it will never hit the RIGHT target, bringing us full satisfaction.
The ridicule of America attacking Afghanistan cannot but strike the
eye: if the greatest power in the world will destroy one of the poorest
countries in which peasant barely survive on barren hills, will this
not be the ultimate case of the impotent acting out?
There is a partial truth in the notion of the "clash of civilizations"
attested here - witness the surprise of the average American: "How
is itpossible that these people have such a disregard for their own
lives?" Is not the obverse of this surprise the rather sad fact
that we, in the First World countries, find it more and more difficult
even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be
ready to sacrifice one's life? When, after the bombings, even the
Taliban foreign minister said that he can "feel the pain"
of the American children, did he not thereby confirm the hegemonic
ideological role of this Bill Clinton's trademark phrase? Furthermore,
the notion of America as a safe haven, of course, also is a fantasy:
when a New Yorker commented on how, after the bombings, one can no
longer walk safely on the city's streets, the irony of it was that,
well before the bombings, the streets of New York were well-known
for the dangers of being attacked or, at least, mugged - if anything,
the bombings gave rise to a new sense of solidarity, with the scenes
of young African-Americans helping an old Jewish gentlemen to cross
the street, scenes unimaginable a couple of days ago.
Now, in the days immediately following the bombings, it is as if we
dwell in the unique time between a traumatic event and its symbolic
impact, like in those brief moment after we are deeply cut, and before
the full extent of the pain strikes us - it is open how the events
will be symbolized, what their symbolic efficiency will be, what acts
they will be evoked to justify.
Even here, in these moments of utmost tension, this link is not automatic
but contingent. There are already the first bad omens; the day after
the bombing, I got a message from a journal which was just about to
publish a longer text of mine on Lenin, telling me that they decided
to postpone its publication - they considered inopportune to publish
a text on Lenin immediately after the bombing. Does this not point
towards the ominous ideological rearticulations which will follow?
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We don't yet know what consequences in economy,
ideology, politics, war, this event will have, but one thing is sure:
the US, which, till now, perceived itself as an island exempted from
this kind of violence, witnessing this kind of things only from the
safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved. So the alternative
is: will Americans decide to fortify further their "sphere,"
or to risk stepping out of it? Either America will persistin, strengthen
even, the attitude of "Why should this happen to us? Things like
this don't happen HERE!", leading to more aggressivity towards
the threatening Outside, in short: to a paranoiac acting out. Or America
will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating
it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world,
making the long-overdued move from "A thing like this should
not happen HERE!" to "A thing like this should not happen
ANYWHERE!". America's "holiday from history" was a
fake: America's peace was bought by the catastrophes going on elsewhere.
Therein resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only way to ensure
that it will not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE
ELSE.
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updated
December 2003
