The Way the World End...  From the Notes on World War IV

 

                                                                        Mikhail Epstein

 

2001 was far from a gala entryway into the 3rd millennium, but rather a black stairway. And this stairway leads to the top of a skyscraper which could collapse at any moment – “down and upwards-leading staircase.” Lost is the feeling of corkscrew and champagne easiness with which the postmodern end of the 2nd millennium was nailed down. There is a feeling that the higher the skyscraper of civilization, the more unstable it becomes under its own weight…

Just think that not long ago I would have written “the pyramid of civilization,” but now “the skyscraper.” There is a historical precipice in this incursion into language, this change of metaphors. What kind of “fourth World War” is this? In the time of the cold war we could not make up our minds to inscribe it as the “third” in the succession of world wars – apparently that war was “not right,” not typical, too peaceful. But the current war is not quite “right” either, its visible Central Asian portion is so far distant and localized. Obviously we have to get used to the fact that world wars do not resemble each other, they can unfold across unseen boundaries, in computer networks, on the quantum level – and nonetheless be global in scale and historical consequences. So the present untypical example of war with its invisible networks and “sleeper cells” allows us, in hindsight, to bring the past Soviet-American war into the ranks of the world wars.

The first two were classic, fiery, thundering. The third was cold – almost without the application of weapons. This one, the fourth, can be called dark. The majority of its fronts remain unseen. The location of destruction or an attack can by anyplace within the most highly defended country. Such is the metrics of terrorist space: it is turned inside out, it has no saving interiority. Every place is vulnerable. Plane and microbe. Microbe and radioactive particle. The boundary of life lies around every corner. A five minute’s walk from my university in Atlanta is the American Center for Disease Control, where anthrax spores are sent from every country. If you were to ask me if I were on the front lines, I would not know what to answer. Perhaps I am.

The following remarks were written in the immediate aftermath of events and pertain to the genre of the “very subjective,” and in places the “openly biased.” I hope that the indulgent reader will find in them an expression, if not of truth, then of anguish.

 

 

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

 T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”  (1925)

 

There is an irony of fate in the fact that the target of global terrorism was two buildings whose mirrored surfaces, since the beginning of the 1970s, served as a symbol and example of architectural postmodernism. Two towers – like two mirror images without an original.

The prominent architect and theoretician of postmodernism Charles Jencks once wrote that the modern age ended on July 15th, 1972 at 3:32 in the afternoon. That is when the Pruitt-Igoe residential area, designed in modern style, in Saint Louis, once called a “perfect machine for life” and awarded the National Institute of Architecture prize, was blown up with dynamite. Built in 1951, the 14-floor block-like buildings, full of sun, space and greenery, sterile and rational like a hospital, turned out to be an unsuitable dwelling place for people of low incomes. The area became a breading ground for crime and 20 years later it was decided to take it down in order to clear the area for new construction[1].

With such chronological exactness we can establish that at 10:28 on September 11, 2001, with the collapse of the two towers of the World Trade Center, which embodied the power and splendor of world capital, the age of postmodernism ended. But ended, as opposed to the modernist residential complex, not with an act of construction, but with an act of terrorism, which together with the two twin towers took the lives of thousands of people. Reality, authenticity, uniqueness – categories it was customary to despise in the poetics of postmodernism, which is based on the reiteration and play of quotes, on the mutual reflection of likenesses – cruelly took revenge on themselves.

The war in the Persian Gulf gave birth to the myth of the simulacrum – war as dramatization, a planned exercise for the TV crews. J. Baudrillard wrote an entire book on this topic, which grew out of a series of essays for the newspaper “Libération,” – “The Gulf War Did Not Happen.” According to Baudrillard, there was only a great spectacle [supershou], a grandiose event from the world of PR and mass media, which was paid for out of the war budget in order to support patriotism. The soldiers hardly differed from the actors in a crowd scene. Security was secured. The management of military actions from a command point was in essence no different from a computer game – give a command, punch a few buttons. The 1999 war in Yugoslavia – if we can give such a name to the daily air sorties by NATO bombers – it appeared, supported the point of view that recent history is just a game (on the side of the West). Reality is derealized, dissolves into fantasy.

On September 11, 2001 in New York the exact opposite occurred – the most improbable fantasy became reality.

Five years ago the science fiction film “Independence Day” (1996) – about an alien attack on America – was widely seen and it shocked the country. A space platform hangs over New York, day turns into night, buildings begin to be destroyed, people run out from under falling debris, the skyline of the capital of the world is changed beyond recognition. Today’s phantasms – planes flying through skyscrapers over New York, people buried under the ruins of the free world’s financial palaces – are as if the film had been made a reality.

Terror is not an ordinary war, which lies within the frame of a gaming scenario; terror grows out of the garbage of everyday life, it occurs here and now, and no one knows when and from where it will touch you. Terror is when reality becomes utterly significant, suspicious and inevitable. In one day the vector of historical time was changed. Everything took a step back to flesh and blood, fear and trembling, to that very same reality which it had become so fashionable to disgrace, as one would a dead lion.

Almost instantaneously, in a few hours, the “beautiful age” of reflections and simulations, the coeval of the twin towers which lasted 30 years, came to an end. And it was accomplished not with a pathetic “whimper” as with T.S. Eliot’s hollow people, but precisely with a real bang, that destroyed real people of flesh and blood. In one shot life was turned towards a new cruelty, which suddenly overturned the gentleness, the vagueness, the “rhizomicity” of the end of the 20th century. The image of the “rhizome,” a gently spreading mushroom spawn, which has no roots or stem. No top or bottom, where everything is mutually dependent, intertwined into a soft mass – this postmodern concept of Deleuze-Guattari from the book “A Thousand Plateaus” became a banner for recent tolerance, boundless pluralism.

However, it is not by chance that Deleuze and Guattari, with all their propensity for the rhizome, compare it to a swarm of rats, wasps and other creatures that gnaw or sting[2]. Everything came together, blended, became con\fused – and suddenly from this intermingling grew a new, unprecedented cruelty. Good, not opposed to evil, turned out to be bound together with it. Now we know that globalization is also the expansion of fear, maximum vulnerability, when by means of world transport networks and communications, danger draws near to the threshold of every house. All were allowed into civilization without investigation, without examining their bags, without checking their documents – and it was seized by barbarians. Who are leading civilization to a fateful collision with itself, crashing planes into towers and knocking down towers with airplanes. Their own ruin is turning out to be but a trigger for the suicide of civilization, which has lost the boundary between freedom and acceptance, diversity and egalitarianism.

                       

                                                                        September 12, 2001

 

                                                            Transl.  by Thomas Dolack



[1] Charles Jencks. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. London: Academy Editions, 1991, p. 23.

[2] “Even some animals are [rhizomatic] in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too… when rats swarm over each other.” Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. By Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. 6-7. Just like terror, a rhizome constantly runs and crawls all over the place, it is illusive. “[In rhizomes] all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment” (p. 17) “Does not the East, Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the Western model of the tree?” (p. 18).