When Signifiers Collide: Doubling, Semiotic Black Holes, and the Destructive Remainder of the American Un/Real

Morrione, Deems D.

Cultural Critique, 63, Spring 2006, pp. 158-173 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press DOI: 10.1353/cul.2006.0021

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cul/summary/v063/63.1morrione.html

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WHEN SIGNIFIERS COLLIDE

DOUBLING, SEMIOTIC BLACK HOLES, AND THE DESTRUCTIVE REMAINDER OF THE AMERICAN UN/REAL
Deems D. Morrione

By a paradox that is only apparent, the discourse that makes people believe is the one that takes away what it urges them to believe in, or never delivers what it promises. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

any things have become linked to the events of September 11, 2001, as a bifurcated semiotic chain of destruction, but at least one aspect of it has not yet been thoroughly investigated, that of its excess. In fact, one could argue that the excess is imbricated in the event itself and is therefore impossible to see. This is because a conventional semiotic doubling posits the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and that on the Pentagon as two separate and discursively equal events. However, the attack on the latter has become enfolded by the destruction of the former and has been thereby eclipsed. The attack on the Pentagon has become the excess of the Twin Towers; except for this excess, one might call it a pure act of obliteration whose consequences, though immanent in 9/11, have yet to be mapped semiotically. An important purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how the bombing of the Pentagon is semiotically linked to the destruction/ doubling of the Twin Towers. Also, how the Twin Towersevents become the alibi for the seemingly unending excess generated at the Pentagon. Further, it seeks to elucidate how the excess of this semiotic implosion has further compressed and recapitulated a wide array of iconographic analogues, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the Reichstag Fire of February 27, 1933, into its own signifying nexus.
Cultural Critique 63Spring 2006Copyright 2006 Regents of the University of Minnesota

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MAYBE FINAL DESTINATIONS DO HAVE SEQUELS

In his work The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, Jean Baudrillard presents a semiotics of doubling that explains both the symbolic importance of the Twin Towers and why their destruction should be read as two separate events (and it is on this basis that I will argue that the attack on the Pentagon is a third event, the excess of the other two). The devastation of the Towers is, of course, paradoxical. It is both singular and double. It is singular in the sense that the destruction of the Twin Towers has left one large semiotic black hole in the center of Manhattan (not simply a void, for that phenomenon is without discursive gravitational pull) and double in that it was accomplished by collapsing two parallel events/structures. Baudrillard explains the importance of this dual action as well as the signiWcance of the doubling of the Towers themselves:
Perfect parallelepipeds, standing over 1,300 feet tall, on a square base. Perfectly balanced, blind communicating vessels (they say terrorism is blind, but the towers were blind toomonoliths no longer opening onto the outside world, but subject to artiWcial conditioning). The fact that there were two of them signiWes the end of any original reference. If there had been only one, monopoly would not have been perfectly embodied. Only the doubling of the sign truly puts an end to what it designates.1

According to Baudrillard, the aesthetic duplication that the Twin Towers comprised was an obscenity of form, a conWrmed perfection, a solidiWcation of arrogance. In classical semiotics, singularities represent failure; only duplication conWrms the idea of the original.2 In Baudrillards framework, this is a mise en aby me for Americas overall hyperreality, found in the paradox of utopia achieved, where the notions of dream and reality collide into singular form.3 This is more serious than it may Wrst appear. As Perry Miller, the founder of American studies, averred, America was established by people who believed that they had a political covenant with God to create a shining beacon to the rest of the world, a city on the hill that embodied Gods divine will on earth.4 The Twin Towers destruction radically unstitches the entire fabric of this national metaphor.5 The effectivity of this allegorical system depends upon the outside conWrmation of Baudrillards paradox of utopia achieved;6 this is in

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fact what fuels it. If Americas national purpose is to serve as a model to be emulated by the rest of the world, it needs the Other to conWrm this, or at the very least not to challenge the proposition. (And as many political theorists and philosophers have noted, isnt this one of Hegels more important lessons, that the master is much more dependent on the slave than vice versa?) Not only did those responsible disconWrm this paradox, they conWrmed its failure. This fact did not escape Senator John Kerry, who, when speaking of responses to 9/11 in his acceptance speech for the Democratic Partys nomination for President, stated, We need to make America once again a beacon in the world. We need to be looked up to and not just feared.7 This is, then, what was actually destroyed on September 11, 2001: the ability of America to serve as the symbolic center of global politics for itself and the Other. Baudrillard argues that the Twin Towers can be seen to have committed suicide because they could not longer bear the weight of this responsibility. In a sense, one could also argue that the Twin Towers imploded because the Other was no longer willing to conWrm their un/paralleled perfection. In short, the Other was no longer able to tolerate the twin notions of cultural narcissism and economic arrogance and sought to end them the only way it could, by striking at metonymic sources. This is why the events are catastrophic semiotic collisions: the Other, meant to take inspiration from the iconography of postWorld War II modernity embodied by the Twin Towers, ruptured the symbols of technological perfection with its own tools. By hijacking passenger airplanes, themselves testament to the ability to traverse spatial points in a way not before seen in human history, and ramming them into the symbolic center or anchor of modernitys systemic interplay, the skyscraper, the Other played a trump card. Recalling the news footage of these events, played over and over again on the evening news as if it were on a continuous feedback loop, one cannot help being struck by the trauma of the disappearance of modernity itselfthe collision of two of its great technological achievements, seized from their masters and utilized to bring about their own destruction. The collision resulted in a compression of the planes, the Twin Towers, and the empty spaces within to a single point of wreckageit was almost as if all the air had been let out, and what was left was the popped balloon of an age gone by.

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Beyond the duality of the Towers and their symbolic utility, doubling is further important in understanding the effects of their destruction. Baudrillard explains that, had only one plane demolished a single Tower, it could have been read as an accident. The second plane conWrmed the Wrst as an attack. (He further cites the Queens air crash a month later as an unknowable event, since it remained a singular act of destruction. Was it terrorism? Was it an accident? Sadly, we will never know because semiotic conWrmation never came.) Again, the semiotic paradox: only repetition conWrms singularity. Obliteration, however, is not the end of doubling. Doubling is not merely destructive; it is also creative, as it produces a remainder. As Barthes, Derrida, and others have demonstrated, writing itself is a kind of violence, one that, using Deleuzean/Guattarian terminology, reterritorializes a space in order to disrupt its solidity/meaning.8 This is not unique to discursive phenomena, as semiotic events also possess this capacity. When the Third World Others smashed into the First World parallelepipeds, the semiotic events rendered in the visual media could have been part of a 1970s-style disaster Wlm (with 1990s terrorist plot twists) entitled When Signifiers Collide. And as fatal object theory demonstrates, such events invite the production of banal strategies which attempt to detoxify the calamity and bring its meaning to an end. (The irony of this is, as Barthes points out, that In speaking, I can never erase, annul; all I can do is say I am erasing, annulling, correcting, in short, speak some more.)9 Though Baudrillard does not fully explore the excess suggested by my hypothetical disaster Wlm When Signifiers Collide, he does allude to it in his work on the Twin Towers:
Even in their failure, the terrorists succeeded beyond their wildest hopes: in bungling their attack on the White House (while succeeding far beyond their objectives on the towers), they demonstrated unintentionally that that was not the essential target, that political power no longer means much, and real power lies elsewhere.10

Baudrillard alludes here to the attack on the Pentagon, the unintentional but apt target of the third plane crash. The Pentagon-event provided only a location for semiotic excess; the extra event added to the Wrst two. However, it was also exposed, if brieXy and accidentally, as attached to but not part of the Twin Towers attacks. This is one

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reason why the Twin Towers attacks and the Pentagon attack do not sit on a semiotic axis with parity: the Wrst two are understood to be intentional, the second, a mistake. However, these events are semiotically related, bound to the Twin Towers attacks by Al Qaeda, the presumed culprits of both. It is quite logical that the Pentagon attack has been subsumed under the destruction of the Twin Towers as the ofWcial sign of the tragedy. Not only were the Wrst two attacks discursively mapped as intentional, the result was the obliteration of the Twin Towers. The Pentagon was merely an attack. It is still there and has been repaired. The Twin Towers were destroyed and plans have been made to rebuild over the wreckage. Excess abounds in this situation, but one might say that the singularity at the center of the black hole created by the destruction of the Twin Towers can be located at the Pentagon.

WHERE GRAVITY HAS GONE MAD

Why a semiotic black hole? This phenomenon is most effectively mapped in the context of a geopolitics of space-time and signs, not of geography, topology, or climatology. The Twin Towersevent is not about the old boundaries of pure spatiality where classical deWnitions of nationality and sovereignty held sway but one that involves the velocity of signiWcation and the ability of the Other to defy the anchors of meaning. This method of understanding the semiotic-discursive universe takes into consideration a non-Euclidean politics that involves general relativity: there is a curvature to our view of the world, one that often forces causes to rebound on themselves and events to scatter and develop purposes that are difWcult to map using conventional political language. It just may be that we are witnessing an event that obeys the laws of physics on a semiotic-discursive scale. This new geopolitics concerns the semiotic gravitational tug of objects on the fatal scale, those that do not wait passively for interpretation by subjects. These objects have discovered a will of their own. Much has been made of the great power of fascination and attraction associated with fatal objects; they are capable of absorbing attention lavished on them by devotees because of their association with some traumatic event, resulting in what Baudrillard and others have

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recognized as an obesity of presence.11 The characteristic that makes them fatal is what affords them an intense discursive gravity: they are catastrophic semiotic ruptures that come to be sutured to particular objects and/or events. By contrast, banality is the realm of crisis and law, whereby problems are identiWed, solved, and forgotten; most of what is reported on the evening news is the province of banality.12 Banal objects reveal themselves only when their low-frequency presences are detected by the already interested, like the astronomers at SETI using giant antennas to Wnd the faint voices of ET among so much celestial chatter. Whereas fatality needs the high energy of the gamma-ray end of the spectrum in order to register singularity, banality hides in the dull and ubiquitous hum of radio. Diane Rubensteins discussion of the death of Princess Diana posits the fatal object as a radical fetish of virtual reality, a move beyond alienation to a principle of otherness raised to technical perfection that can refract every interpretation into the void.13 The fatal object is the paradigm of this framework: its excess is a virtual remainder, the fait divers that encourages a process of fetishization on its behalf. The semiotic black hole is the next step in fatality; it is the destruction of the whole sign, an obliteration of a massive totemic paradox (in this case, utopia achieved). It is not merely a fait divers that comes to be seen as traumatic, it is a perfect catastrophe, a shocking, ineluctable event that radically transforms the socius, possessing a gravitational pull that has the power to massively reshape and remotivate even the political (long assumed to be dead, it now has been jolted into virtual activity as a spectral show of poll numbers, morality plays, and special effects). Unlike the usual fatal object/event, which refracts its banalities into the void while still sutured to them, the semiotic black hole has the power to reconWgure the geopolitical universe while leaving little or no trace of its inXuence. Fatal objects rely on overt metonymic, synecdochal, and hyperreal ties to their banalities in order to literalize them; Princess Diana has a foundation, Megan Kanka has her own law. We do not refer to the Department of Homeland Security as the 9/11 Memorial Bureau for Consolidating Intelligence Gathering by U.S. Spy Agencies; it is not necessary to do so. The Twin Towers have made it possible to elide discussions about due process and spying or even about extant terrorist threats; the banalities generated after an event of this magnitude have their own self-justiWcations

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and therefore need little connection to the originary trauma. For example, the major objection of most Democrats to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was related to the lack of unionization afforded to its employees and not to due process /constitutional issues such as respecting the zones of privacy, proper procedure for trying the accused, or proWling. The semiotic black hole, then, is a collision of a fatal event and a perfect object that not only results in the multiplication of banal discourses and events under one sign such as Princess Diana or JonBenet Ramsey but a restructuring of the geopolitical universe in which the event takes place.14 If we accept Einsteins theory of general relativity, we understand gravity to be the geometric composition of space-time. Black holes, because of their intense gravity, warp the fabric of space-time around them (all matter in the universe does this, but black holes do it with such extreme force that whatever falls into them becomes destroyed by the singularity within and only later Wnds its way back into the universe in mangled form). Following this logic, the implosion of the Twin Towers may be the event horizon (or entrance) to a black hole whose inner gravitational nexus (or singularity) is centered south of New York in Washington, D.C. The Pentagon, on a semiotic axis with the Twin Towers linked by Al Qaeda, is the gravitational center of this black hole. It therefore warps the geopolitical space-time around it by deWning, displacing, and destroying the matter it affects. It could not have been destroyed by the Al Qaeda attack because it is the force of destruction (one can hope, as Stephen Hawking says, that black holes eventually dry up, but that is another discussion). As with all black holes (both physical and semiotic), the event horizon is the site of the rupture in space-time in which it was created. Here, the rupture of the paradox utopia achieved by the semiotic collision at the site of the Twin Towers created an angry point of cultural-political Xux that coalesced into a singularity of intense gravity at the center. In this case, the singularity is the Pentagon. This is the case for two reasons: First, for the reasons already explained, it is the site of excess, of failure. Second, it is the avenging excess of the Twin Towersevents. The ubiquitous War on Terror, the Pentagons response to 9/11, has led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the curbing of civil rights in the United States through the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. To understand this more fully, one should recall that, after all the

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other explanations for the war in Iraq evaporated (WMDs, uranium, centrifuges), the one rationale on which the Bush Administration steadfastly refused to budge was the claim that Saddam Hussein indirectly participated in the events of 9/11 through his mysterious connection to Al Qaeda. The Pentagon, then, is the dense point in which the geopolitical space-time of the Twin Towersevents is being warped. What, then, is the geometric composition of this force of nature centered in Washington, D.C.? There is, of course, the obviousthe Pentagon is, after all, a geometric object par excellence. In addition to being the largest ofWce building in the world, it has a large pentagonal void in the center, almost as if its builders knew that the tension of Wve concentric rings of concrete wall would exert so much pressure on the center space that only our earthly version of quantum residue, a park, could exist there. Yet it is so much more. The semiotic black hole in the center of Manhattan has intensiWed its gravitational pull, enabling the Pentagon to assume the position as its singularity that cannot be seen but is still able to warp our geopolitical landscape. An ironic question one might pose is: does anyone remember the major news stories prior to 9/11? For that matter, what about big headline events that occurred afterward? It would be difWcult to maintain any kind of static memory in the face of such a phenomenon, as singular events have fallen in, as it were, and have been destroyed by the sheer power of the geopolitical gravity generated at the Pentagon and anchored to the national universe by the Twin Towers. Two of the events destroyed by the Twin Towers semiotic black hole deserve particular attention, as they themselves could be considered fatal. Discussing other fatal events in the context of a semiotic black hole demonstrates not only the sheer power it has to warp the geopolitical universe as such but also the ways in which it changes and compresses the particularities in its vicinity. This is important here because fatal events are themselves prodigious semiotic-discursive phenomena; only something extremely powerful should be able to either shut them down or reconstitute them as part of a larger event.15 First, Election 2000. If ever a recent political event could claim fatal status in America, this is it (along with the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran/Contra, and the Ken Starr crusade). And although one can quibble over hanging chads, illegal ballots, and the importance of undervotes and overvotes, it is difWcult to argue that September 11, 2001, had no effect (if retroactive) on the event itself. As Gore

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Vidal points out in a critique of The New York Times article entitled In Election Review, Bush Wins without Supreme Court Help, the events of 9/11 put an end to all questions about Election 2000.16 Vidal takes the Times to task for attempting to provide an untenable paradox simply for the purpose of political stability; he notes that, while the articles main focus is on proving that Bush won the election, it (inadvertently?) admits that he did not. In the end, the Times is forced into a mealy compromise: its difWcult to know who won, so, lets call the whole thing off. Vidals disgust with the Timess article is telling because he is not simply making the obvious point that the results of Election 2000 are questionable. Every American knows that. The important point with regard to the Twin Towers semiotic black hole is that this ballotcounting gesture is entirely excessive and that its timely intervention compressed a fatal event with serious political consequences into an inconsequential blip on the radar (or as is said in political science parlance, it was reduced to the banality of the outlier). Since former Vice President Gore had conceded the election, there was no reason to investigate the results further. However, a consortium of news organizations (spearheaded by The New York Times) decided in December of 2000 to investigate and recount the votes themselves.17 Two months after 9/11 and near the Wrst anniversary of the contentious election, Americas newspaper had a kind of hyperreal moral high ground on which to end the dispute. The New York Times is near the event horizon of this black hole; as only Nixon could go to China and only Clinton could bring about welfare reform, only the Times could proclaim the election Wnally over. Yes, it was fraught with problems, but now we have more important things to worry about . . . And second, the collapse of Enron et al. Bigger than S&L, Teapot Dome, and Crdit Moblier, the Wnancial scandals of the past few years involving Enron and several other megaconglomerates, with regard to their inXated stock values and their leveraging of debt on subsidiaries, also seem to be fatal casualties of the Twin Towers semiotic black hole. Not that nothing has been done; quite the contrary. Check The New York Times business section during any given week, and you will likely Wnd stories about various investigations into this persons dealings or that subsidiarys violation of commodity trading rules. The fatal event itself, the collapse of Enron, has fractured into a million banal particularities and is no longer front-page news.

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The Enron collapse is a good example of a fatal event that occurred after 9/11 but was unable to remain so for very long. One might have assumed that, because members of the extant Presidential Administration were implicated in the scandal, its fatality might have been severe enough to at least merit Iran/Contrastyle hearings, but the ubiquitous War on Terror (the gravitational pull of the Pentagon) has reduced the collapse of Enron to the status of a fait divers. An excellent example of the compression of this event into banality is found in the personage of one Mr. Thomas White, former Secretary of the Army for the Bush Administration. A senior executive at Enron for eleven years, it has been suggested that he may have participated in the manipulation of power prices in California, that he may have engaged in insider trading to dump his Enron investments before the company tanked, and that, also during his tenure at Enron, he attempted to secure lucrative deals for the now-defunct Wnancial behemoth to supply energy to the Army. When this scandal broke, many journalists and pundits called for his resignation and Senators Feinstein and Boxer of California asked the Justice Department to investigate his ties to the failed energy megaconglomerate. Despite the controversy, Mr. White continued in his job at the Pentagon throughout much of the Wrst George W. Bush Administration.18 Being at the gravitational center of this semiotic black hole does have its advantages. The power of this semiotic black hole to destroy and reconstitute events even on the fatal scale is not limited to the present or to the recent past / near future. In fact, this event literalizes a compression of history as well; if it is capable of absorbing both accidents and intent-laden events, there is no limit to its affect on old, dead forms. Since this warpage of our geopolitical universe is able to nullify irony as it recapitulates what passes for the real before our eyes, it should be no surprise that seemingly opposite events can be compressed into singularities, prequels to the Twin Towers events.

THE PENTAGONS SPACE-TIME PROBLEM: ESTABLISHING PREQUELS IN THE PRESENT

One of the more interesting discursive gravitational effects of the Twin Towers semiotic black hole and its pentagonal singularity at the center is historical in nature. I refer to the compression of two seemingly

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autonomous and opposite events: the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Reichstag Fire. In fact, one could argue that the Pentagons gravitational doubling has reconstituted these events as a singular historical prequel to the destruction of the Twin Towers. The Pentagon singularity has been able, because of its alibi in Manhattan, to reform and reconstitute not only day-to-day reality but historically based chains of truth (or in Foucauldian terms, epistemes) that have become caught in the gravitational nexus of this phenomenonand the Pearl Harbor bombing is one of these casualties (and along with it the Reichstag Fire), as one Wnds with the great number of parallels made between the events in the press. This type of retro doubling makes a great deal of sense in the context of Baudrillards refusal to say the real has returned, that we still live in a virtual universe. If an event can absorb both intentionality and accidents, truth and Wction, what sense does it make to discuss the return of the real? Baudrillard argues in his 2002 work on the Twin Towers that we have not experienced a return of a real event, that in fact reality has absorbed Wctions energy, and has itself become Wction.19 His major point is that in order to have a real event, one needs a reality principle, not a catastrophe, to arbitrate verity.20 Baudrillard further refutes claims that September 11 not only represents an ascendance of the real over the virtual but that it also proves Fukuyama-lovers wrong, that history has somehow returned. If we can conceive of the Twin Towersevents as having opened up a rip in our geopolitical space-time, it may be worth considering why the temporality of history cannot withstand its gravitational effects. There are two historical examples that can serve to illustrate how this absorption of fact and Wction has been accomplished and why it is emblematic not of a return of the real but of history eating itself through the Ouroboros of the present. How is it that the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers has absorbed history itself? For one thing, it allowed for the mobilization of the iconography and energy of Pearl Harbor and the Reichstag Wre under one sign. This is not as odd a notion as it may Wrst appear; the reconciliation of opposites is one way doubling reduces seemingly irreconcilable events into singular form. The phenomenon of 9/11 is also an example of doubling that eliminates the necessity of history as such: it absorbs both traditional historiography and the inconvenient existence of ahistorical narrativesi.e., it

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has compressed both history and ahistory under one sign. (If you doubt this, I urge you to turn to Fox News at almost any given time.) Baudrillard might describe this as an example of ahistorical narratives absorbing the energy of historiography. In this case, it has an added layer: the temporal remapping of spatiality such that the uniquely American breed of equality nulliWes details and sets unlike with like.21 It is therefore important to avoid facile historical comparisons that attempt to tie only the events of Pearl Harbor to 9/11 in a semioticdiscursive parallel. This is a mistake for two reasons: Wrst, it ignores the level of spatial-temporal interplay that must be acknowledged, and second, it cannot account for the importance of the Reichstag Fire as Pearl Harbors historical and semiotic analogue. Only a discussion of both of these events (themselves having been compressed into a singular prequel to 9/11) can illuminate the warpage of history occurring at the event horizon of the Twin Towers semiotic black hole. The spatial-temporal axis of this parallel demonstrates why the watershed/fraternal twin events of Pearl Harbor and the Reichstag Fire serve well as the prequel to 9/11 and how this warpage of our geopolitical space-time has compressed these two separate historical points into a singularity. It probably does not go unnoticed by most that the Twin Towers attacks are signiWed by the singular sign 9/11 but that the Pearl Harbor attack subsumes its date. This is also true of the Reichstag Wrefew people actually know the date, but the place and event are self-evident. There are any number of ways to unpack the spatial-temporal angle with regard to the events of September 11, 2001. However, I will direct the readers attention to an extremely leading questionnaire entitled Remembering Pearl Harbor & September 11, 2001 Survey posted by the on-line Opinion Center.22 Beneath the title appears a laughable violation of social scientiWc survey collection methods: One is a location, the other a date. Understand the importance of this! If one is unable to comprehend the importance, rest assured that question three will end the uncertainty:
3. About Pearl Harbor & 9/11/01: One is a location, the other a date. Do you think there is signiWcance in this obvious fact? ___ No.

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___ Yes, of course: One was a carefully planned precision military strike. 9/11 was a collection of erratic attacks likely consisting of more than four attempts with probably the majority ending in failure. ___ I never thought about it.

No doubt, this on-line poll would lead us to believe that the prime difference is in the mechanics of the civilized wars of yore, where spatial referents had signiWcance with regard to military targets and that obeyed the classic rules of engagement. It does point to something else, however. As de Certeau suggests, there is a relationship between spatiality and proper names in that the connection allows for a utopic space, an ability to dream a future.23 In the context of Pearl Harbor, one might see the importance of spatiality as a managerial crisis that inspired anxiety over the loss of control it represented (representation itself being a semiotic arrangement whereby the real and its stand-in are perceived to have equivalence).24 After all, nearly the entire PaciWc Xeet was concentrated at the naval base on Oahu. One could imagine that the American nation feared a future of Japanese domination of the PaciWc, a troubling prospect for U.S. trade and for the security of its borders. Likewise, the Reichstag Fire, still in the arena of representation, dealt in prevarication (in order to have a lie, one must also have a concept of truth).25 It is accepted by most historians now that the Nazis set the Wre themselves in order to generate support for Hitlers consolidation of governmental power. The burning of the German Parliament, then, became an enabling device for the Nazi dream, a Third Reich. Both Pearl Harbor and the Reichstag Fire elicited strong military responses; both dealt with the loss of control (or the perception of loss); both posited spatially marked enemies for the Americans, the exteriorized Axis powers of Japan and Germany; for the Germans, the interiorized Communists, homosexuals, and non-Aryans.26 The attacks on the Twin Towers, as the on-line pollsters want us to understand, are marked temporally by the signiWer September 11, 2001 (or its various other numerical renderings). In fact, one might note that the uncivilized character of these attacks is a marked disrespect for spatiality: the scattershot approach is an attack on proper names as such; it disallows their uniqueness, deprives them of individual identity. Worse, the enemy deWes classic military logic by embracing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: not only does it demonstrate that it

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can choose velocity over position but also that it may favor unknowability to precision. The disrespect for spatiality is further demonstrated by the fact that the attacks were undertaken by a nonlocalizable enemy. Al Qaeda deWes the classic spatially anchored enemy position by taking the uncertainty principle in another direction: it reserves to itself the right to select whether it will occupy spaces of interiority or exteriority and has proven quite effectively that it can and will make such choices without prior notice. Attacks signiWed by a singular temporal point like 9/11 are more than horriWc, they are rude in the extremethey deny dreams. In de Certeaus logic, the anchor that spatiality provides is what enables a bridge to be built between destinations. This is because movement between two spatially anchored points is always a utopic gesture one is never sure that one will reach the intended destination; it is a risky proposition to leave one place to go to another. Temporality does not work in the same way. To map temporally is to choose velocity over position; to take motion as a starting point, not an effect, is to table the possibility of the future. As Baudrillard argues of speed in his work America:
Speed creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial reference-points, since it runs ahead of time to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and obliterates that cause by outstripping it.27

It is the opposite case with spatiality: movement is possible between spatially deWned points because it is concerned with referents and territoriality; motion is possible because there is at least a perception of nonmotion. Temporality is constant motion; to mark a point in time is to freeze only that moment, to celebrate impression and deny expression. An important point about the Pearl HarborReichstag Fire analogue is that both represent forms of expression. They are spatially marked events and consequently provide access to a mourning, which acknowledges the passing of a dream, a realization that a crisis can be overcome. Temporally marked events, however, are concerned with impression, as a they totemize trauma and shock, what I term elsewhere hyperpathetic mourning, a form of abreaction characterized by a hyperreal form of pathos, which attaches banal gesture after banal gesture to a wound so that it never closes.28

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The temporal marking of the Twin Towersevents is an acknowledgment of the rupture of the Baudrillardian paradox mentioned earlier, utopia achieved.29 Not only has the semiotic black hole created by the destruction of the Twin Towers unstitched the paradox of a major national metaphor, it has deprived the populace of the ability to dream a future where this is the case. It has forced Americans not merely into a national denial of the indelicate suggestion that America has no future but into a frozen state where only trauma matters. Worse: it says that Americans are as subject to the uncertainty principle as everyone elsea type of democracy Americans Wnd most unsettling.

Notes
Many thanks are due to Julie Webber, Diane Rubenstein, and the anonymous readers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2002), 43. 2. A. J. Greimas and J. Courts, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 95. 3. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), 2829. 4. See Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956). 5. This is easy to understand when one considers that, because of World War II, the United States was able to radically reshape the world as a global system in its own image. America, both as notion and nation, was able to make itself the model of human rights, democracy, and the free market for the rest of the world. The Twin Towers, according to Baudrillard, are the embodiment of this achievement. 6. This is, in fact, a paradox within a paradox. If America is a city on a hill, it shouldnt need conWrmation of this reality from the Other. In fact, response from the Other should be irrelevant because the purpose of a lighthouse is selfreferentialthe point is to guide ships to the proper course, not be guided by them. Yet, in order for a lighthouse to serve its purpose, there must be lost ships at sea. 7. John Kerry, We Are Here to Make America Stronger (http://www. cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/30/dems.kerry.transcript.2/index.html). Kerrys conWrmation of the rupture of this paradox is found not only in his use of the beacon metaphor but in the fact that he is speaking in the past tense; he refers to a noble history wherein the United States was a city on the hill, a position that has been lost and must be recovered.

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8. See Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); and Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 9. Barthes, 76. 10. Baudrillard, Spirit, 50. 11. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, ed. Jim Fleming (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Semiotext(e), 1990). See also, Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1996); and Diane Rubenstein, Thats the Way the Mercedes Benz: Di, Wound Culture, and Fatal Fetishism, Theory and Event 1, no. 4 (1997): 18. 12. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 26. See Baudrillards distinction between anomie (banality) and anomaly (fatality) for further clariWcation. 13. Rubenstein, 1. 14. In this context, I refer to such banal events/discourses as police investigations, the institution of foundations, the establishment of laws, the creation of Web sites, and so onall of those things, with some signifying attachment to a sign, that spiral outward into the discursive universe because of some fatal event. 15. I should also note that some quite odd banal events have also occurred as a resultthree in particular. First, the fact that the Twin Towers semiotic black hole has enabled the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which, among other things, has been able to act as a go-between for the various intelligence gathering agencies of the U.S. government, thereby defusing some of the historic rivalries between them and giving them avenues for greater cooperation (of course, when it isnt being asked to monitor the whereabouts of members of the Texas state legislature). Second, the gravitational pull has attracted Hollywood, not simply by encouraging them to generate patriotic-themed Wlms but to shelve those that may be read as critical of U.S. foreign policy. For example, Miramax cochairman Harvey Weinstein admitted in The New York Times to having delayed the release of The Quiet American because he said it was unpatriotic (see Jon Wiener, Quiet in Hollywood, The Nation 275, no. 21 [December 16, 2002]: 6). And third, one cannot ignore the most ridiculous of banalities, that of the House of Representatives Administration Committee, which ordered the cafeterias in its building to change its menus to freedom fries and freedom toast to reXect current displeasure toward France for refusing to support preemptive action in Iraq. 16. Gore Vidal, Times Cries Eke! Buries Al Gore, The Nation 273, no. 20 (December 17, 2001), 1315. 17. These organizations consisted of the following: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Tribune Company, The Palm Beach Post, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Associated Press. See Ford Fessenden, How the Consortium of News Organizations Conducted the Ballot Review, The New York Times, November 12, 2001, http:/ /www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/ 12METH.html. 18. Interestingly, Whites eventual resignation from his position as Secretary

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of the Army came not because of his Enron dealings but, according to conservative editorialist Robert Novak, for being on the wrong side of Rumsfelds struggle with the Army high command (Don Rumsfelds Army, townhall.com, May 1, 2003). This sentiment was echoed/lamented by Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, who argued that White should have been Wred for his activities at Enron and that his resignation came far too late and for the wrong reasons (Better Late Than Never: Administration Should Have Fired Army Secretary Thomas White Long Ago, citizen.org, April 28, 2003). 19. Baudrillard, Spirit, 28. 20. Ibid. 21. As a model for this, I have in mind the notion of reverse discrimination. It used to be that racism was conceived as something historical, tied (at least in the United States) to the various forms of oppression experienced by nonmajority ethnic/racial groups (particularly African Americans and Native Americans). However, after the various Civil Rights Acts were passed, it became au courant to equate any type of discrimination with a racial/ethnic overtone as racism. Now, even a George W. Bush could claim racial discrimination if, while walking by an African American on the street, that person called him cracker, whitey, or proof of the failure of the Caucasian race. 22. www.opinioncenter.com. 23. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 1024. 24. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6. 25. Ibid. 26. Although, of course, the Nazis blamed the nearly blind Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe for the Wre itself, the rhetorical point here concerns the utility of creating interior enemies for political gain. 27. Baudrillard, America, 6. 28. Deems D. Morrione, Sublime Monsters and Virtual Children, PhD thesis, Purdue University, 2002, 13637. 29. The new building designed for the site does not reenergize the paradox of utopia achieved, it is merely excess created by the Twin Towersevents. If this paradox had not ruptured, who would be talking about a new building on this site? And what new national metaphor is instituted through having the tallest ofWce building in the world? If it does represent some new cultural-political paradox, it is different from what was ruptured on September 11, 2001.