Coulter, Gerry: After ‚Disciplined‘ Thought: Baudrillard and Poetic Resolution, 11.03.09

Veröffentlicht am 11. März 2009 von avinus

My impulse comes from a radical temperament which has more in common with poetry (Baudrillard, 1993:131).

I. Introduction

During the past twenty-five years concepts such as Truth, Meaning, and the Real (the capital letters represent universality), have been subjected to radical criticisms. Today many students of society are only comfortable with the terms truth, meaning, and the real (lower case) to represent an understanding that all knowledge exist along local and restricted horizons – as partial objects (see, for example, Baudrillard, 1994:108). Goethe understood, two centuries ago, that the self is the only criteria for truth we will ever know. Between Goethe and today stand a phalanx of „disciplined“ knowledge known as the social sciences. Leaders in the various fields who constitute the „police“ of each social science often deploy so called „scholarly journals“ to monitor and regulate discourse in their field. Sometimes, in recent years, a new term „multidisciplinarity“ has not necessarily represented a challenge to the police but merely operated as a kind of academic INTERPOL. We are able today to once again take seriously Goethe’s insight because open-access journals (such as AVINUS Magazine) work to frustrate the academic police while focusing on a very high quality of discourse. Among some of the more liberating aspects of the present is that it is now possible to turn to non-traditional approaches and methods of inquiry such as photography, film, visual culture, art, and poetry as inspirations for social thought. Few have accomplished this in terms of the poetic with the fierce commitment to radicallity than Jean Baudrillard.

In this essay I point to Baudrillard’s effort to seek a poetic, rather than empirical, resolution of the world. Specifically, I argue that such an approach opens new ways of non-disciplined thinking which are more indebted to art, literature, and poetry than to any traditional school or methodology. From Baudrillard I have learned that what is at stake is the future of radical thought as it exists beyond all politics. To enter into the poetic is to leave the world of politics behind. It is a world of theory where the very act of writing itself is a form of politics. It is not necessary that the reader of this paper has read Baudrillard although it may stimulate a greater interest in doing so. I offer my Baudrillard-inspired assessment of the place of the poetic in inquiry today to those who accept that we do indeed have much to learn from photographers, poets, and artists of all kinds.

II. Poetry As A Way Out of Voluntary Servitude

Theory is a core issue for thoughtful inquiry today. For Baudrillard „theory could even be poetry“ (1990:24). I have never known anyone who needed the poetic to live and write as much as he did. Baudrillard’s world was our world – one that frequently drifts into delirium. In a delirious world one strategy is to adopt a delirious point of view – one without homage to any principle of Truth or causality (2000:68). Baudrillard was very clear about not being a poet but he understood that poems, parables, stories, and fables (fiction) are as „real“ as anything else in this world. It was his deep respect and appreciation for these forms which allowed him to grant a poetic singularity to events and to subject them to powerful challenges which often ended in radical uncertainty (Ibid.).

Often a fable can be used to illustrate a point. I wonder if Baudrillard ever did so more poetically than in his use of „Death in Samarkand“ to illustrate the distractions that can be caused by even a single sign:

Consider the story of the soldier who meets Death at a crossing of the marketplace, and he believes he saw him make a menacing gesture in his direction. He rushes to the king’s palace and asks the king for his best horse in order that he might flee during the night far from Death, as far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace and reproaches him for having frightened one of his best servants. ‚I didn’t mean to frighten him. It was just that I was surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow in Samarkand‘ (1990d:72).

That one (or an entire society) can run towards one’s fate by attempting to avoid it is the kind of poetic irony that informs this kind of thinking. In Baudrillard we find references to Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees in at least nine of his books (1983; 1990c; 1993b; 1993c; 1995; 1998; 2001b; 2001c; 2005b). This fable is brought forward into our own time [Mandeville wrote it in the early 18^th century] as a poetic way of understanding that corruption is vital to a society’s success – „the splendor of a society depends on its vices“ (1993b:102). This fable goes some distance in explaining America today. Baudrillard also draws on the fable of The Sorcerers Apprentice (1997b:24); Guido Ceronetti’s Incest Fable (1993b and 2001:93); and several fables from Borges: The Mirror People (1996:148); The Lottery in Babylon (1990d:150; 1996:91; 2001:93); and The Map and the Territory (1994:1; 1996:47; 2000:63). Such fables become poetic mirrors for Baudrillard about his own time. In the case of Borges‘ The Map and the Territory he says we need to turn this fable upside down:

We live as if inside Borges’s fable of the map and the territory; in this story nothing is left but pieces of the map scattered throughout the empty space of the territory. …Today there is nothing left but a map (the virtual abstraction of the territory), and on this map some fragments of the real are still floating and drifting (2000:63).

Also, at several junctures, Baudrillard cites Arthur C. Clarke’s parable The Nine Billion Names of God (1990c; 1993c; 1996; 1996b; and 1997b) to refer to our current circumstance. In it a community of Tibetan monks have been listing the many names of God for centuries. Growing tired they call in experts from IBM and the computers finish the job in a month. What the technicians did not know was the prophecy that once the nine billion names of God had been recorded the world would end. As they come down from the mountain the stars in the sky begin to disappear one by one (see Baudrillard, 2000:42). Fables such as this poetically point to the risks presented by techno-science.

Fiction (especially novels) also plays an enormous role in Baudrillard’s poetic thinking. He writes of the fiction of Western values with a poetic twist – arguing that it is not the presence of Western values that people outside of the West detest – as much as the West’s absence of values (2002b:65). Even the superpower America is reduced to a powerful fiction (1988:95, 1993:132) and he is never more poetic than in his assessment of Disneyland as a „deterrence machine for the rejuvenation of the fiction of reality“ (1994:13) because Disneyland exists to hide that all of „real“ America is Disneyland (Ibid.:12). America is his fiction about a powerful fiction – the land of „just as it is“ (1988:28) and „the last remaining primitive society“ – „the primitive society of the future“ (1988:7). Many Americans, especially the men of the Right, hated Baudrillard’s poetic and fictive America. It is interesting how they soon gave the world George W. Bush and a kind of „Baud-reality“ settled over international events. It is important also to remember that Baudrillard was not a proponent of such events, rather, he found them intolerable (1987b:107).

Baudrillard’s poetic sensibility led him to challenge us to probe the course of events and their possible meanings in non-traditional ways. This meant that an event like that which took place in New York on September 11, 2001 can be understood as peculiarly affirming of his poetic writing of the world [he posited, as an explanation of why the towers toppled, the suggestion that the twin towers may have committed suicide in response to the attacks of the suicide planes (2003:43)]. This is difficult poetry for many to accept but we should remember that its author was convinced that he lived in a time when „everything in the moral, political and philosophical spheres is heading towards the lowest common denominator“ (1998b:103). Perhaps the resonance of consternation his thought evoked was just loud enough to penetrate the nearly deafening cacophony of banal [mediated] explanations of the event.

Baudrillard’s poetic ear could discern the sounds of the „background noise of the universe“ (1996:2) and the „silent laugher of flowers, grass, plants and forest“ (2002:1). These sounds have been heard by almost no other students of society since the inception of modernity yet novelists, artists, and poets hear them everyday. Baudrillard’s writing demands of us a poetic sensibility and as this sensibility has been systematically denied by almost every stage of our education.

For the education systems of modernity it is difficult to imagine a more striking case of system failure than Baudrillard. His writings represent a system’s failure to integrate him despite the ruthless, comprehensive and compulsory regimes of education and socialization he, like each of us, face. Baudrillard is also an example of the kind of thinker who understands the irony of community and that the biggest battle any of us face, in being ourselves, is against any collective to which we belong. As a theorist he is closer to playwrights like Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter who understand that each person is fundamentally at odds with the universe. This perspective, which is at the core of his poetic way of seeing, imbued Baudrillard with a profound suspicion of the real. In a time in which Truth „no longer affords a solution“… „perhaps“, says Baudrillard, „we can aim at a poetic resolution of the world“ (2000:68).

Poetic resolution can be a strategy of resistance to systematization while leaving open the possibility of radical thought. Radical thought is best practiced as a form of academic agnosticism – the notion that it is better to have things in which not to believe, than to believe. This includes raising questions concerning, for example, what kind of future people desire when they say they wish to end terrorism. To them Baudrillard asks „what kind of state would be capable of dissuading and annihilating all terrorism in the bud…? It would have to arm itself with such terrorism and generalize terror on every level“ (1990c:22).

This kind of assertion is very close to what we often refer to as poetic justice – the reversible. It forces us to look beyond current fears to the implications of our thoughts and actions. In a world which so often disappoints the young, a poetic approach is a far more generous gift to lay at their feet than is an empirical methodology. This is also one reason why so many traditional „social scientists“ loathe Baudrillard and seek to protect their students from him.

To adopt a poetic view of the world one must renounce empiricism. A poetic approach is much closer to metaphysics than it is to pragmatic epistemologies. In our time of the proliferation of everything, how many sense, as does Baudrillard, the poetic notion that „power emerges from absence“? (1997:9)

Baudrillard’s writing takes on the poetic quality of „slimming things down and reducing stocks“ – „to escape fullness you have to create voids between spaces so that there can be collisions and short-circuits“ (1993:38). He understood that poetry exists today everywhere but in poetry. The challenge is to find poetic power – the poetic function in its primal state“ (Ibid.) elsewhere – such as in theoretical writing or in the arts, which have, arguably, had a greater influence on theory in recent years than have the empirical sciences (see Coulter, 2008). If writing is to aim at a total resolution of the world then why should this not be a poetic resolution? (1996:100) It is for this reason that the kinds of writing which are obsessed with meaning (ideological and moral), are so unconcerned with the act of writing which, for Baudrillard, involves „the poetic, ironic, allusive force of language, …the juggling with meaning“ (Ibid.:103). Baudrillard believes that art [and for him theory is an art form] ought to be concerned with illusion – otherwise all it does is mirror the world around it and therefore serves no purpose. As an art, writing is concerned with the „poetic transfiguration of the world“ (1997:140). This could be very playful as in his poetic „fate-based unrealist analysis“ of the death of Diana:

On the one hand, if we assess all that would have had not to have happened for the event not to take place, then quite clearly it could not but occur. There would have to have been no Pont de l’Alma, and hence no Battle of the Alma. There would have had to have been no Mercedes, and hence no German car company whose founder had a daughter called Mercedes. No Dodi and no Ritz, nor all the wealth of the Arab princes and the historical rivalry with the British. The British Empire itself would have had to have been wiped from history. So everything combines, a contrario and in absentia, to demonstrate the urgent necessity of this death. The event therefore, is itself unreal, since it is made up of all that should not have taken place for it not to occur. And, as a result, thanks to all those negative probabilities, it produces and incalculable effect. (Baudrillard, 2001:136-37).

This passage demonstrates Baudrillard’s more mischievous understanding of his art – the art of writing (which is at the core of the art of theory), to „confront objects with the absurdity of their function, in a poetic unreality“ (1997b:13). Here the myth of linearity is exposed by its inversion. This includes a certain poetic confrontation with the art of writing theory itself as in this exquisite passage on human experience:

Everyday experience falls like snow. Immaterial, crystalline and microscopic, it enshrouds all the features of the landscape. It absorbs sounds, the resonance of thoughts and events; the wind sweeps across it sometimes with unexpected violence and it gives off an inner light, a malign fluorescence which bathes all forms in crepuscular indistinctness. Watching time snow down, ideas snow down, watching the silence of some aurora borealis light up, giving in to the vertigo of enshrouding and whiteness (1990:59).

Or this poetic passage written on the journey home in his America:

At 30,000 feet and 600 miles per hour, I have beneath me the ice-flows of Greenland, the Indes Galantes in my earphones, Catherine Deneuve on the screen, and an old man asleep on my lap. ‚Yes, I feel all the violence of love…‘ sings the sublime voice, from one time zone to the next. The people in the plane are asleep. Speed knows nothing of the violence of love. Between one night and the next, the one we came from and the one we shall land in, there will have been only four hours of daylight. But the sublime voice, the voice of insomnia travels even more quickly. It moves through the freezing, trans-oceanic atmosphere, runs along the long lashes of the actress, along the horizon, violet where the sun is rising, as we fly along in our warm coffin of a jet, and finally fades away somewhere off the coast of Iceland (1988:24).

A key aspect of the enigmatic quality of Baudrillard’s writing then is to be found in its poetic nature – he was a theorist who does not sacrifice the art of writing to the concepts he wrote about – if he did he would have produced merely sociology and therein reduced poetic enigmas to meaning. Poetry is a synonym for fiction and the fabulous. „Theory is“, after all, „never so fine as when it takes the form of a fiction or a fable“ (2006:11). The closing down of systemic Meaning opens new poetic ones (2005:71). The expression of the poetic depends on language and the role of language (recalling Lacan) „is to stand in for meaning“ which is eternally absent (1990b:6).

Baudrillard poetically wondered if we really want to have to choose between meaning and non-meaning today. He argued that we do not want this choice because while meaning’s absence is intolerable „it would be just as intolerable to see the world assume a definitive meaning“ (2001:128). This would be the end of thought, poetry and writing – a world where we could look up solutions in a book (a Bible, a Koran, etc.,) or a computer model. The computer model is the goal of every techno-science of our time which will ultimately challenge the human to the core:

If we discover that not everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, genetically and neurologically managed, then whatever survives could be truly called „human“: some inalienable and indestructible human quality could finally be identified. Of course, there is always the risk, in this experimental adventure, that nothing will pass the test – that the human will be permanently eradicated (2000:15-16).

If Baudrillard preferred fiction to science it may well have been because fiction holds a greater power in the mind of one who’s hopes are fatal. „Night does not fall, objects secrete it at the end of day when, in their tiredness, they exile themselves into their silence“ (1990b:149).

One of the challenges faced by those inclined toward poetic resolution is to allow the poetic aspect of things to flow through him or her, just as it is the task of the painter to find the poetic light given off by objects from within (no such light is scientifically or empirically possible but all good painters and poets know it is there). For Baudrillard, the poetic sensibility also defines itself in an awareness of contradiction and reversibility – „when things contradict their very reality – this too is poetic“ (1996:59). The poetic is central to that which remains fundamentally radical in Baudrillard. Radical thought for him is a form of constant challenge – even to one’s most cherished ideas and sources. It is why he could never subject his writing to the limits of a politics.

The poetic (poems, fables, fiction, stories, parables) is for Baudrillard part of his deep appreciation of ambivalence and ambiguity (1993c:215) and is important to how he copes with the extermination of value (Ibid.:198). We do not discover anything in poetic enjoyment and this is a vital part of what makes the poetic a radical experience (Ibid.:208). The poetic involves an „insurrection of a language against its own laws“ (Ibid.:198) and it allows us to resist the „repressive interiorized space of language“ (Ibid.:234), providing the basis for the „mutual volitization of the status of the thing and discourse“ (Ibid.:235). He finds no room for poetry in psychoanalysis, in ideology, nor in morality – these are „brute forms of writing burdened with the concept“ (Ibid.:223). Poetry then is the place of the „redistribution of symbolic exchange in the very heart of words“ (Ibid.:205) and the „site of the extermination of value and the law“ (Ibid.:195).

His poetic approach allowed Baudrillard (who studied under Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes), eventually taking his degree and teaching sociology, to avoid the voluntary servitude that so many subject themselves to in the many non-poetic approaches to inquiry (empirical, politically motivated, techno-scientific and so on). As such he is a very important case in the development of an alternative approach to inquiry – one in which creativity and writing were powerful and central. Baudrillard’s effort to resolve the world poetically is not for everyone. For those who feel its seduction it is important to press on to assess the implications of this thought aimed at a poetic resolution of the world. Others may consider leaving this paper at this point for an immediate return to politics and/or traditional academe.

III. Hope In System Failure

From the passages cited above we see that Baudrillard managed to bring the explosive power of language to poetic resolution. To the end he remained suspicious of all efforts to perfect the world as he did efforts to explain it with certainty. On poetry he said: „the words refer to each other, creating a pure event, in the meantime they have captured a fragment of the world, even if they have no identifiable referent from which a practical instruction can be drawn“ (2005b:73). This is not a kind of thinking that is in the business of making the world more certain or more knowable:

Here, however, lies the task of philosophical thought: to go to the limit of hypotheses and processes, even if they are catastrophic. The only justification for thinking and writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes. Here, beyond the discourse of truth, resides the poetic and enigmatic value of thinking. For, facing a world that is unintelligible and enigmatic, our task is clear: we must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic (2000:83).

Baudrillard was somewhat melancholic but he was no Romantic. He spent a good deal of his time writing his frustrations with his times. He was intensely frustrated by what we gave up in „cancelling our metaphysical contract and making another more perilous one with things“ (2001b:36; see also 1983b:149). His poetic strategy against consumerism, militarism, globalism, and nationalism, was to have things in which not to believe as opposed to things in which to believe. Surrounded as we are today by fundamentalists such as George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden this is not a bad strategy. For Baudrillard (and this is also part of his early departure from Marxism), the death of god is the end of transcendence.

The end of transcendence and responsibility to another world beyond our own meant that transcendence became secular and the effort to make the world transparent and operational replaced it. For Baudrillard, the death of god is the root of modernities turn to techno-perfection as against earlier forms of spiritual perfection. In modernity the understanding of good and evil become split – and our efforts go into making the world better only to see it go from bad to worse (2004:105). Irony comes to the fore in modernity and thoughtful inquiry, when it turns to empiricism, loses sight of irony investing itself in system support. The attempt to perfect this world [through techno-science] will almost certainly lead to systemic collapse – Baudrillard’s fatal hope – and his fatal optimism in reversibility.

Baudrillard was disappointed but no thinker who writes does so without hope. What we get from Baudrillard is a fatal hope – an optimism about the reversibility of systems. Following the current period of the proliferation of information, security, and technology (the era of the perfect crime), Baudrillard hopes for a collapse. Baudrillard, living in extreme times, takes the problematic to a radical conclusion as we no longer have the same kind of hope in a distant future that someone living before the contemporary could more easily hold. Such is the uncertainty of our times which are invested in Baudrillard’s fatal hope of systemic collapse. For him the alternative to collapse was much worse – that the system would succeed resulting in a genuinely brave new world glittering with advanced technologies. In such a world we would live out our lives in total security where computers would generate the models of lives which would become as predictable as the weather. This would be a world in which evil, all negative events, disease, and uncertainty are removed. But this too will be a world of [distilled and slow] death for an adaptive and thoughtful species. Against such a world Baudrillard saw the poetic possibility of collapse. Thought (and writing), in this view, seeks poetic resolution to an unsatisfactory, uncertain, and ultimately (he hoped) unknowable world. The poetic function of thought and writing then is based on the belief that empiricism and the techno-rational societies it contributes to, would fail. Of course this failure can only be viewed as poetic from a Baudrillardian point of view as his was the poetics of reversion.

IV. Radical Optimism

…why not take the view that the fundamental rule is that of evil, and that any happy event throws itself into question? Is it not true optimism to consider the world a fundamentally negative event, with many happy exceptions? By contrast, does not true pessimism consist in viewing the world as fundamentally good, leaving the slightest accident, to make us despair of that vision? Such is the rule of a radical optimism, we must take evil as the basic rule, (Baudrillard, 1997:138).

Herodotus was the first we know to have considered reversibility seriously in his memory of those who were „great long ago“ but who have now „become small“ (Herodotus, 1998: Book I, v). We have called this aspect of human passage many things. Some call it poetic justice (such as the fall of great empires into small satellites of new empires); others have referred to it as the turning of the wheel of fortune. „Human happiness never remains long in the same place“ (Ibid.) For Baudrillard it is part of the most poetic thing we know – that which comes as close to justice as anything we ever experience as humans: reversibility – the poetic reversibility of one thing into another (1993c:220).

For Baudrillard reversibility is the fundamental rule (2005:41) but this does not imply a determinism in his thought – indeed, reversibility is an absolute weapon against determinism (1990c:82). Baudrillard notes that the reversibility of things, which is an ironic form today, does not entail a romantic viewpoint. Rather, it means that, for us: „a strange game is being played“ and we do not know all the rules of this game – in our time, indifference has become a strategic terrain (1993:175).

The poetic provided Baudrillard with the germ of an idea that might be his single greatest thought: reversibility. It is central to what Baudrillard calls „objective irony“ – the „strong probability, verging on a certainty, that systems will be undone by their own systematicity“ (2000:78; see also Coulter, 2004). For Baudrillard this applies to both technical and human systems (political, social, economic). The more a system advances toward its perfection, the more it is prone to deconstruct itself (Ibid.).

One of Baudrillard’s more poetic examples of this, for technical systems, is the computer virus: „the tiniest one is enough to wreck the credibility of computer systems, which is not without its funny side“ (2002b:6). This is extended by Baudrillard into his understanding of globalization and the New World Order as reversible: „the more the hegemony of the global consensus is reinforced, the greater the risk, or chances it will collapse“ (1995:86). That for Baudrillard would be the most poetic resolution of all: „all the philosophies of modernity will appear naïve when compared with the natural reversibility of the world“ (1996:10).

V. Conclusion

Philosophy would like to transform the enigma of the world into a philosophical question, but the enigma leaves no room for any question… the enigma of the world remains total (1996b:20).

The poetic plays a significant part in Baudrillard’s strategy to bring resolution, through thought and writing, to the unsatisfactory times in which he finds himself. Along with fables, countless literary and artistic references, poetry is Baudrillard’s great inspiration in his struggle against the forces of integral reality (2004:5). In his writing Baudrillard felt a radical opposition between a poetic, singular configuration, linked to the metamorphosis of forms, as against the kind of virtual reality that is prevalent today. In a poetic approach it is the forms which become – language as the passage of forms – a kind of inhabited void (2004:84). Poetic resolution – and nothing is more poetic for Baudrillard than reversibility – was a way out of the restrictions of the social sciences and political commitments to „improving“ our world until it was a technoscientific nightmare.

As we seek new approaches to inquiry we would do well to remember that we do not necessarily have to seek Meaning or Truth – but a more poetic way of living, writing and thinking. Beyond discourses of Truth, Baudrillard found his own way to make the world, which came to him as enigmatic and unintelligible – a little more enigmatic, a little more unintelligible. What he left to us was a gift far more precious than Truth – he pointed to its absence and in doing so he took us beyond the limits of established forms of inquiry. If he reminds us of Goethe it is because his approach valued Goethe’s insight. From Baudrillard we learn the poetry of accepting a world that is given to us as enigmatic and unintelligible and to push it to poetic, not empirical, resolution. If we are to avoid both of the twin nightmares of total systemic collapse and total systemic success new forms of inquiry have a lot at stake in poetic resolution of the kind Baudrillard practiced.

Baudrillard understood the power of language as few have. Writing for him was a precious „singularity“, „a resistance to real time“, „something that does not conform“, „an act of resistance“, the „invention of an antagonistic world“ rather than a „defence of a world that might have existed“ (1998b:32 ff.). Writing could never be sacrificed to politics and intellectuals should speak for themselves – not for others as it always leads to condescension (1993:79). He understood from the lived experience of his poetic perspective that theory (as poetry, fiction and fable) precedes the world. „Things appear to us only through the meaning we have given them“ (2004:91). For Baudrillard this meant seeking a poetic resolution of the world through challenge with an eye on system reversion. It kept his wisdom and writing joyful to the end despite everything. It also helped him to attain escape velocity from his contemporaries (especially Foucault) and propelled him beyond politics to a more joyous way of seeing. I offer it as one way of approaching Avinus Magazine as it takes its place on the world stage of ideas and discourse. It is the kind of thinking and writing (radical thought) that does not conform to the kind of inquiry which merely contributes to the building of an uninhabitable world. Baudrillard pointed to a poetic approach which may contribute to vastly different ways of seeing and knowing so long as we remember that truth and meaning exist only partially, along our local and restricted horizon. This is the kind of „undisciplined“ thought in which the likes of Goethe was able to participate. It is the basis of a respectful and challenging approach to the multi-vocality of human discourse and inquiry. For the first time in two centuries, the established academic police actually do have something to fear. One of the ways in which Avinus may thrive is in making their job all the more difficult.

Gerry Coulter’s essay „Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive Ambivalence of Gaming“ appeared in the SAGE journal Games and Culture (Volume 2, Number 4, December, 2007:358-365). His recent article: „Baudrillard and Hölderlin and Poetic Resolution“, in Nebula, Volume 5, Number 4, December 2008; An essay „A Way of Proceeding: Joseph Beuys, the Epistemological Break, and Radical Thought Today“ appears in Kritikos: A Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text, and Image (May – June, 2008): http://intertheory.org/gcoulter.htm; and his quarterly column for Euro Art (On-line) Magazine: „Kees van Dongen and the Power of Seduction“ (Spring 2008) is available at: http://www.euroartmagazine.com/new/?issue=13=1&content=156. Dr. Coulter’s teaching has been recognized on numerous occasions most recently by Bishop’s University’s highest award for teaching – the William and Nancy Turner Prize.

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Gerry Coulter (2005). „Intersections and Divergences in Contemporary Theory: Baudrillard and Agamben On Politics And the Daunting Questions of Our Time“ an Introduction to Giorgio Agamben’s „Form of Life“ in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 2 (July)
Gerry Coulter (2008). „A Way of Proceeding: Joseph Beuys, the Epistemological Break, and Radical Thought Today“, in: Kritikos: A Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text, and Image (May – June):
Herodotus (1998). <a href=“http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/0140449086?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwavinusmaga-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=0140449086″>The Histories</a><img src=“http://www.assoc-amazon.de/e/ir?t=wwwavinusmaga-21&l=as2&o=3&a=0140449086″ width=“1″ height=“1″ border=“0″ alt=““ style=“border:none !important; margin:0px !important;“ /> (Translated by Robin Waterfield), Oxford University Press.
Friederich Johann Hölderlin (1990). Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books (Translated with an introduction by David Constantine).

Coulter, Gerry: Tadeo Ando, One World Trade Centre and “The Ground Zero Project”, 25.06.2014

Veröffentlicht am 25. Juni 2014 von avinus

I. Introduction

The recently opened One World Trade Centre (One WTC or “The Freedom Tower” as some insist on calling it) in New York City is a curious edifice. The building is the center piece of an ongoing effort to respond to the events of September 11, 2001. It is a remarkably unexceptional modern tower of glass and steel (104 stories) reaching a symbolic 1776 symbolic feet (541m) at the top of its 408 foot (104m) high tower. I am among those who did not think that anything would make us miss the architecture of the twin towers as much as this building does. America felt it had to respond to 9/11 with a big building and that is what it has done. Now that we have One WTC I wonder if anyone wonders what we might have had in place of this monstrous ode to architectural mediocrity and petty local politics.

In this essay I will examine One WTC in contrast with the project proposed for the site by the Pritzker Prize Laureate Tadeo Ando. Ando wanted to use the space to help Americans reflect upon their place in the world. In an odd way, One WTC also accomplishes this goal but not in the way Ando intended.

II. ‘One World’ Trade Centre

“We came back and we rebuilt it and we should feel good about it” (One WTC architect David Childs cited in Rabb, 2013).

The original Twin Towers were not especially interesting works of architecture in comparison to what they represented – they were a symbol. In a world which was entering into increasing levels of hyper-realism, the original towers stood as a fictional center of digitalized integrated globalizing capitalism – architecture serving as the fiction of how society was being taught to imagine itself by its financial elites. As clones of each other the Twin Towers also represented a kind of lapse of architectural reason (See Baudrillard and Nouvel, 2000: 4 ff). Today the symbolism is more brutal: “One World” Trade Centre is more than an address – it is a commentary on Western globalization from one of its principal nodes. “One World” is the only way capitalism can now view the future – one world united under Westernization. Many Americans, and some others, can only understand globalization as “Americanization”, and One WTC is a monument to this ideology. As such it makes an adequate symbolic replacement for the Twin Towers expressed in New York City’s prevailing language of verticality.

On September 11, 2001 America experienced not only a symbolic defeat – there were real economic consequences. While an invasion of Afghanistan was probable no one could have foreseen the invasion of Iraq and the devastating toll this war has taken on an already bankrupt (several times over by 2001) American economy. According to my own computation from various U. S. Congressional and White House reports, it appears the cost of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are approaching one trillion dollars since 2003 or about $8.7 M (€5.8 M) per day.

Similarly One WTC has delivered a hard economic blow to New York City whose commuters have experienced skyrocketing tolls to use the commuter systems to and from the island of Manhattan for several years. Cost estimates for the tower (the world’s most expensive building) were originally set at $2 billion (€ 1.33 B) and by the time of completion will reach at least $3.8 B (€ 2.53B). Its 3 million square feet of office space (replacing the 10 million square feet of the twin towers) will need to rent at 100 per cent occupancy at a rate of $125 (€ 83) per square foot for the building to break even. Over the past three years the average rent for office space in lower Manhattan is $62.50 (€ 41.6) per square foot as One WTC opens into a glutted market. When the building finally began in 2006 rents were falling in New York and a good deal of the “trimming” done to Daniel Libeskind’s original plans by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s David Childs was a direct effort to cut costs. Still, in 2014 the anchor tenant Conde Naste is paying less than $60 (€ 45) per square foot. According to the Wall Street Journal today only 55 per cent of the building is leased and no new tenant has signed on in three years. The rent for non-anchor tenants has been dropped from $75 per square foot to $69 (€50 to €46). (http://on.wsj.com/1jVTyvd).

Further, cost overruns to its yet to be completed train station are currently in excess of $1B (€6.66 M). The Durst Corporation which manages One WTC values the $3.8 B tower at only $2B (€ 1.33 B). Through their constantly increasing commuter tolls workers in One WTC are subsidizing the rent of their employers.

One WTC is an incredible example of an edifice which makes no commercial sense and very little architectural sense. At the tenth anniversary memorial for 9/11 former New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo was overheard speaking with former New Jersey Governor George Pataki: “This is the biggest waste of money anybody’s ever seen. Who would have ever spent this money. If we knew what this was going to be like, nobody would have ever done this” (cited in Rabb, 2013).

Even among its architectural neighbors One WTC lacks architectural interest. It is a building in which many find neither grace nor charm. One of its harsher critics (the London-based graffiti artist Banksy), said that the building shows that New York “has lost its nerve” and the building represents that “New York’s glory days are over”.

III. One of the Potential Alternatives

“…nature is being destroyed by humans. There should be a harmony between the artificial world, the natural environment, and human beings” (Ando, 2009).

For a global economic and military power to be so successfully attacked as America was on September 11, 2001, by a relatively powerless group of individuals, is a humiliation. One World Trade Centre is a response to this act of humiliation. There was widespread demand for the Twin Towers to be rebuilt or be surpassed by another very large edifice – it had to be big. Very few called for anything but another architectural monster to reply to the monstrous attack. What we have in the end is another unexciting architectural monster in Manhattan to replace the Twin monstrosities which towered over their skyline like alien objects from an unmade Kubrick film.

One architect did offer the Americans an opportunity to avoid the creation of yet another architectural monstrosity for this site – Tadeo Ando (b. Japan, 1941). In Ando’s architecture Western Modernist architecture meets Eastern thought concerning balance, the human need for contemplation and edifices which deeply respect their environment. As he has said: “You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on the land, and then use that knowledge along with contemporary thinking to interpret what you see” (Ando, 2002b).

Ando, a self-taught architect, has worked within this philosophy for five decades and has won world architecture’s highest award: The Pritzker Prize (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for architecture). Anyone unfamiliar with his work can, even after a few minutes of looking at several of his works on the internet, understand Ando’s gift (see especially his: Museum of Wood, (Hyogo, Japan [1994]; Chikatsu-Asuka Historical Museum (Osaka, Japan [1994]); Nariwa Museum (Okayama [1994], Oyamazaki Villa Museum (Kyoto [1995]; Awaji-Yumebutai Complex and Gardens (Hyogo [1999]); Studio Karl Lagerfeld (Biarritz [2001]; 4 x 4 House (2003); Row House, Azuma (1976); and Koshino House (1986)] . Ando has long been acutely aware of the need of humanity for buildings which compliment nature and the human need for peaceful contemplation. Often light [Church of the Light (1989); Atelier in Oyodo (1991)] and water [Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art (2002); Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum (1992) and his Hompuku-ji Water Temple, Hyogo (1991)] are used to compliment his overall philosophy of architecture.

Like many architects around the world Ando was profoundly affected by the events of September 11, 2001 – especially the fall of the twin towers and the deaths of nearly 3000 people on that day. When a competition was announced for both a memorial and a structure to replace the Twin Towers Ando offered perhaps his most thoughtful design – his Project for Ground Zero (2003). While it was never seriously considered by the adjudication panel (who had already been affected by the fever to respond with a huge vertical edifice), Ando’s proposal is more than an old model gathering dust in an architect’s storeroom. [Images of Ando’s proposal may be found by entering: “Tadeo Ando proposal for ground zero” into most search engines].

Among Ando’s recent gifts to architecture, theory and philosophy have been his unique solution to the question of what to do with “Ground Zero” in New York. Ando offered New York and America an opportunity to use the symbolic space of Ground Zero as a public place of contemplation on America’s place in the world. Ando said about his proposal: “It is important for architecture to touch the human spirit” (Ando and Rose, 2004). Against the terrorist action and the military response to it Ando proposed that a small section of a massive [imaginary] subterranean globe occupy on the site. This project, which will never be built, would also have spoken softly against the wild and callous architecture of downtown Manhattan – precisely the kind which now stand on this spot. The surface of the imaginary sphere would be a grass covered mound (a park for quiet contemplation and reflection) not unlike ancient Japanese burial mounds.

Ando proposed a singularity – a park in the shape of the imaginary globe slightly exposed above the surface. The result would have been a grass covered mound 650 feet [165m] in diameter which reached a height of 100 feet [32m] in the center. The mound would serve as the symbolic exposed surface of the imaginary underground sphere which would, in total, represent 1/30,000^th of the surface of the earth. People walking across the mound would gain the impression of walking along the surface of a large sphere. Ando saw this project as an opportunity for people to think about how we are going to live together in the future on our shared celestial home. I think Ando knew full well that his project would never win the competition and it seems clear that he simply wanted to use it as a philosophical gift to Americans in the form of an unfinished design. He also understood that simply erecting another building on the site would do nothing to respond to the need for spaces in which to contemplate how we are going to live together as diverse peoples in the age of terrorism. Along with this project he offered the Americans advice: “I think that what we need now is the courage to construct nothing more on this site” (Ando, 2002a).

As has long been the case with Ando his solution to the problem of architecture at ground zero has been unique. He seems to have never believed in universal principles being applicable to all situations given his respect for the environment, light and those who will use his buildings. Against those who sought a military response to the events of September 11, 2001 Ando wanted to provide a park, which the exposed part of his globe was to be, to remind people that New York and America are part of the world. “I want the surface to disappear and become a space – a space that stimulates thinking. If the surface does not speak too loudly, then the people will begin to think about themselves. They bring the meaning to the space” (Ando in Auping, 2002).

In an age given over to architectural unreason (city after city dominated by office towers) Ando has so far not designed a monster. Perhaps it is because Ando is an autodidact that he was able to abandon so much of architectural history (save some key insights from the best of Modernism) and to offer up such a consistent and strong series of works. The most important thing he incorporates into his architecture has been his own intellectual sensitivities to place and space. He seldom, if ever, did this any better than in his proposal for the Ground Zero site in New York.

“As an architect this is all I can do – to create a dialogue among diverse cultures, histories, and values. We can learn so much from each other and our past” (Ando in Auping, 2002).

What Ando proposed was a philosophical and psychologically necessary park for meditation. What New York got was another glass, concrete and steel tower: an architectural act of [along with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq] in response to terrorism. One World Trade Centre stands to lose a lot of money for the foreseeable future. It seems an extraordinary expense for what is to be gained from it – this the tower shares with America’s War in Iraq.

A question remains: After the Twin Towers fell the terrorists and their supporters claimed a significant victory in the global war that is globalization and resistance to it (terrorism being the most extreme and distasteful form of resistance). It seems to me that Ando’s project clearly denied the terrorists (or anyone) a claim to victory. I wish I could say the same for One, World Trade Centre.

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Full Professor and Past Chairperson, Department of Sociology, Bishop’s University, 2600 College Street, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. J1M 0C8

E-mail: gcoulter@ubishops.ca

Biography: Gerry Coulter has published over 150 scholarly and par-scholarly articles, reviews, and book chapters [many on art and architecture] over the past twenty years. He has presented his work at over 50 conferences around the world including two key-note addresses. He is the author of two books: Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert – The Poetics of Radicality (Intertheory Press, USA, 2012) and Art After The Avant-Garde: Baudrillard’s Challenge (Intertheory, 2014). He is the founding and managing editor of The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS now in its 11th year): http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies. His major reference work (456 pages): The Baudrillard Index may be accessed from the cover page of the IJBS website. Dr. Coulter’s teaching has been recognized on numerous occasions including Bishop’s University’s highest award for teaching – the William and Nancy Turner Prize. He serves on the editorial board of several North American and European Journals.

References (and other important documents concerning Ando)

Tadeo Ando (1995). “Acceptance Speech for the Pritzker Prize”: http://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/1995/ceremony_speech1.html

Tadeo Ando (2002a). “Architect’s Statement Concerning His Proposal For Ground Zero”. www.ando.groundzero/architect/ando/statement/240702

Tadeo Ando (2002b). “Interview with Architectural Record” (May): http://archrecord.construction.com/people/interviews/archives/0205Ando.asp

Tadeo Ando with Charlie Rose (2004). Interview, Charlie Rose Show (January 22): www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1616

Tadeo Ando (2009). Interview With CNN’s “Talk Asia” (aired: October 30, 2009).

Michael Auping (2002). Seven Interviews With Tadeo Ando. Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Publication.

Jean Baudrillard and jean Nouvel ([2000] 2002). The Singular Objects of Architecture. University of Minnesota Press. Translated by Robert Bononno.

Gerry Coulter (2008). “Louis I. Kahn The timeless Art of Light and Form”. Euro Art (On-line) Magazine (Summer): http://www.euroartmagazine.com/new/?issue=14&page=1&content=168

William Curtis (2000). “A Conversation with Tadeo Ando”. El Croquis, No. 44+58.

Kenneth Frampton (1995). “Thoughts on Tadeo Ando” [An essay on Ando winning the Pritzker Prize]: http://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/essay.html

Alessandra Latour. (Editor). Louis I. Kahn, Writings, Lectures, Interviews, New York: Rizzoli, 1991.

Scott Rabb (2013). (“The Truth About The WTC”, Esquire Online Magazine: April 29): http://www.esquire.com/features/world-trade-centre-rebuilding-0912

Ruth Peltason and Grace Ong-Yan (2010). Architect: The Work of Pritzker Prize Laureates in Their Own Words. New York. Black Dog Press.

Pritzker Prize Committee (1995). Biography accompanying Pritzker Prize Acceptance Speech: www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/1995/bio.html).

Sadjed, Ariane: Die Konsumgesellschaft im Iran, 19.11.09

Veröffentlicht am 19. November 2009 von avinus

Abseits gängiger Klischees über die gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse im Iran beschreibt AVINUS-Autorin Ariane Sadjed die Rolle der islamischen Religion. Diese ist nämlich nicht zwangsläufig ein Mittel, um die Bevölkerung in Unmündigkeit zu halten. Vielmehr kann die Religion als Gegenpol zur Politik fungieren und damit Freiräume schaffen.

Religion und Moderne

Über den Iran zu sprechen bedeutet oft, erst die schreienden Bilder zu widerlegen, die mit dem Land assoziiert werden. Darstellungen in den Medien beschränken sich meistens auf zwei Extreme: es sind entweder Bilder fanatisch-religiöser Anhänger eines glühenden Anti-Amerikanismus oder topmodisch gekleidete Frauen mit auffallendem Make-up, die dem iranischen Regime vermeintlich subversiv gegenüber stehen. Wieso sind gerade diese zwei Bilder in der westlichen Medienöffentlichkeit so dominant? Kann darin eine Vorstellung von Widerstand erkannt werden, die nur eine bestimmte Art der Subversivität kenntlich macht, nämlich jene, die statt den Regeln des Gottesstaates jenen der globalen Konsumkultur – mit westlichen Waren – folgt? Die Islamische Republik hat sich seit ihrer Gründungsphase darauf berufen, sich von der westlichen Warenwirtschaft unabhängig zu machen. Doch spätestens seit der Präsidentschaft Rafsanjanis 1989-1997 wurde der freien Marktwirtschaft extensiv Raum gegeben^[1]. Die neuen gesellschaftlichen Eliten, ausführende und kontrollierende Organe eines institutionell verordneten islamischen Habitus, sind mittlerweile in die wohlhabendsten Schichten aufgestiegen. Sie führen damit einerseits das Credo der Revolution von der Abkehr von materialistischen Ausschweifungen ad absurdum, lassen aber auch erstaunte Beobachter aus dem Westen zurück, die nicht verstehen, wieso unter den schwarzen Schleiern mancher Frauen teure Designerschuhe hervorblitzen. Die Vorstellung, dass Religiosität eher in armen und ungebildeten Bevölkerungsschichten verwurzelt ist^[2] und die Teilnahme an der globalen Warenwirtschaft und ihren weltlichen Gütern ausschließt, trifft zumindest im Iran nicht zu. Religiosität hat so viele Facetten, dass man die, vor allem aus westlichen Kontexten bekannten, Kategorien umdenken oder erweitern muss. Dazu möchte ich zuerst auf Theorien der Säkularisierung eingehen und danach die Rolle der Konsumgesellschaft im Iran besprechen.

Die Hauptthese der Säkularisierungstheorie konstatiert einen Rückgang von Religiosität zugunsten von Rationalität und Vernunft, der sich durch die Trennung von Institutionen wie dem Staat und dem Markt von religiösen Institutionen vollzieht. Hefner (1998) zeigt durch seine Aufarbeitung der Geschichte der Kämpfe zwischen Kirche und Staat jedoch, dass die Befreiung vom Religiösen keine lineare Geschichte der Emanzipation ist, die zu der „sauberen“ Trennung geführt hat, von der in westlichen Gesellschaften heute ausgegangen wird. Die Vereinigten Staaten beispielsweise entschieden sich zwar gegen eine Staatskirche, dies führte aber nicht zu einer Abnahme verschiedener Religiosität, sondern zu einem starken Wettbewerb, der Rivalitäten und die Bildung von Sekten schürte. Durch solche Entwicklungen wurde die Religion pluralistischer. Religiöse Rituale verschwanden deswegen aber nicht aus der Öffentlichkeit. In islamischen Gesellschaften ist eine ähnliche Entwicklung, eine sogenannte Objektifizierung religiösen Wissens, feststellbar^[3]. Während islamisches Wissen historisch stets in der Hand einer kleinen Elite war, sind dieses Wissen sowie islamische Praktiken heute einer wachsenden Anzahl von Menschen zugänglich. Der verstärkte Zugang zu höherer Bildung, das Aufkommen eines Marktes für islamische Schriften und Prozesse der Urbanisierung haben demnach in einigen Ländern zu einer Fragmentierung religiöser Autorität geführt, soziale Kräfte pluralisiert und der Demokratisierung Aufwind gegeben. Hefner betont, dass in diesem Wettstreit um Autorität nur in jenen Gesellschaften der “Neofundamentalismus” siegte, die mit Krisen wie Bürgerkrieg, ökonomischem Zusammenbruch, ethnischen Konflikten oder extremer staatlicher Gewalt konfrontiert waren. Das führt ihn zu der Schlussfolgerung, dass der wahre „clash of civilizations“ nicht zwischen dem Westen und einem homogenen „Anderen“ stattfindet, sondern zwischen rivalisierenden Traditionsträgern innerhalb derselben Nationen und Zivilisationen.

Moaddel (2002) führt weiter aus, wie ein islamischer Diskurs in Opposition zu staatlichen Strukturen geformt wird. Anhand der Muslimbruderschaft in Ägypten beschreibt er, wie diese Bewegung in den 1930er und 40er Jahren für politische Mäßigung und Parlamentarismus eintrat. Extremistische Tendenzen begannen erst Fuß zu fassen, nachdem die Bruderschaft nach dem Umsturz der Regierung 1952 von jeglicher politischer Partizipation ausgeschlossen wurde. Die staatlich verordneten säkularen Ideologien in Ägypten, Syrien oder dem Iran politisierten den öffentlichen Diskurs und bildeten damit einen günstigen Kontext für das Erstarken eines islamischen Fundamentalismus. Der Demokratisierungsprozess hingegen, der von König Hussein in Jordanien Ende der 1980er Jahre initiiert wurde, beförderte die Säkularisierung der islamischen Bewegung Jordaniens^[4]. Moaddel sieht seine Theorie durch die Entwicklungen im post-revolutionären Iran bestätigt: wo der monolithische, von oben verordnete Diskurs nun religiös ist, haben Prozesse der Objektifizierung und Fragmentierung religiöser Autorität – weit entfernt davon, Religion zu politisieren – die Entwicklung einer islamischen Bürgerrechtsbewegung und eine Säkularisierung der Religion gefördert.

In Bezug auf die Geschichte der Säkularisierung in Europa zeigt Salvatore (2005), dass eine bestimmte Form religiösen Fanatismus der Mobilisierung eines neuen, modernen Typus staatlicher Gewalt dienlich war. Anhand der Reconquista in Spanien zeigt er, dass die Schaffung eines Nationalstaates mit homogener Bevölkerung, Sprache und Religion nur durch die Verbindung von Kirche und Königshaus möglich wurde. Salvatore macht deutlich, dass diese Homogenisierung eine Vorbedingung für die nächste Stufe der Neutralisierung verschiedener religiöser Einstellungen und ihres Kampfgeistes war und die darauffolgende Säkularität als eine neue Form des Regierens innerhalb der aufkommenden, modernen politischen Strukturen einläutete. Die Vorstellung einer säkularen Öffentlichkeit als eine neutrale Position vis-a-vis der Vielzahl von Religionen, ein institutionelles und kulturelles Regelwerk, das vermeintlich fanatischen Aktivismus in seine sicheren Grenzen verweist, ist demnach nicht haltbar. Salvatore argumentiert in Anlehnung an Talal Asad (2003) dafür, Säkularität auch als einen normativen Diskurs wahrzunehmen, durch den bestimmte Formen moderner Machtpolitik Ausdruck finden. Eine plastischere Methode des Analysierens ist daher sinnvoller als die Analyse einer statischen Opposition von religiös und säkular.

Vielleicht liegt es unter anderem daran, dass die westliche Öffentlichkeit – genau wie umgekehrt die islamische – mit der Erfassung bestimmter Wechselwirkungen zwischen Staatsmacht und Religion oder Religion und Massenkonsum gewisse Schwierigkeiten haben. In Bezug auf islamische Gesellschaften ist es daher unabdingbar, die Wahrnehmung der (ohne Zweifel vorhandenen) Unterschiede in der Herausbildung dieser Begrifflichkeiten einer differenzierten Betrachtung zu unterziehen, die der historischen Entwicklung der respektiven Einstellungen und Praktiken genügend Raum gibt. Die Auswirkungen dieser Entwicklungen im post-revolutionären Iran werden im folgenden genauer beleuchtet.

Konsumgesellschaft

Die iranische Regierung beansprucht die Führungsposition im Kampf um politische und kulturelle Autonomie für sich, indem sie an historische Ereignisse im kollektiven Gedächtnis anknüpft^[5]: schon während der Kajaren-Dynastie wurden nationale Ressourcen leichtfertig der englischen Krone übergeben, was zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts zu der konstitutionellen Revolution führte. Auf die Übernahme der zentralen Einkommensquelle, der iranischen Ölgesellschaft, durch die englische Regierung folgten kurz darauf innenpolitische Zwistigkeiten, die – mit Unterstützung der amerikanischen Regierung – den Sturz des demokratisch gewählten Ministerpräsidenten Mossadegh im Jahr 1953 nach sich zogen^[6]. Die darauf folgende Wiedereinsetzung des Monarchen, Reza Schah Pahlavi, auf dessen Kooperation sich England und die USA stützen konnten, und die rasante Modernisierung nach „westlichem Stil“ hinterließ ein gravierendes ökonomisches Ungleichgewicht und führte zu einer Auflösung der traditionellen sozialen Strukturen. Mit der fortschreitenden Entfremdung der herrschenden Klassen von der großen Mehrheit der Bevölkerung verschärften sich die sozialen und politischen Konflikte, auf die der Schah immer autoritärer reagierte^[7]. Die islamische Revolution 1979 sollte der Herrschaft dieser Eliten ein Ende setzen. Mit der Errichtung der Islamischen Republik und der Institutionalisierung revolutionärer Aktivitäten wurden daher in Bezug auf äußeres Auftreten, Körpersprache und Umgangsformen neue Verhaltensmuster, basierend auf „islamischen“ und „traditionellen“ Werten erfunden, die ein kulturelles Gegenmodell zum Westen, aber gleichzeitig auch Modernität und Fortschritt repräsentieren sollten. Die Übernahme dieser neuen Codes wurde unerlässlich für soziale Interaktionen in der postrevolutionären Gesellschaft Irans.^[8]) Private Räume, Einkaufszentren, Parks, Restaurants oder Kinos sind aber noch immer Orte, in denen westliches Auftreten mitunter erwünscht ist. Die Repräsentanten dieser unterschiedlichen Einstellungen schaffen durch den Besitz und die Verwendung entsprechender Konsumgüter soziale Zugehörigkeiten und Abgrenzungen. Während die gesellschaftlichen Eliten unter dem Schah vor allem aufgrund der Wahrung westlicher statt iranischer Interessen angegriffen wurden, lassen sich vergleichbare Tendenzen nun bei der neuen islamischen Elite erkennen, die sich zwar in Ablehnung gegenüber westlichen Lebensmodellen übt, die Konsumkultur jedoch fest in ihrem Alltag integriert hat. Die politischen Autoritäten Irans scheinen eine bestimmte Form des Konsumierens zu ermutigen, nämlich jene, die eine islamische Identität und damit Konformität mit dem Staatsmodell der islamischen Republik affirmieren. Dies ist besonders im Iran ein prekäres Feld, wo durch die Revolution eine Neuordnung der Gesellschaft stattgefunden hat und die ehemals herrschende Mittel- und Oberklasse zwar entmachtet wurde, das Versprechen sozialer Gleichheit aber nicht eingelöst wurde. Die Wege, durch die die Oberschicht zu Geld gekommen ist, werden häufig mit Korruption und Vetternwirtschaft in Zusammenhang gebracht^[9]. Von den unteren Schichten abgetrennt und kaum akzeptiert, rivalisieren verschiedene Teile dieses neuen Establishments untereinander. Dieser Kampf um Anerkennung wird durch unterschiedliches Konsumverhalten deutlich. Auf der einen Seite finden sich Lebenstile US-amerikanischer Prägung, auf der anderen Seite „islamische“ Eliten, wo sich die Frauen zwar verschleiern, der Schleier allerdings aus wertvollstem Stoffe aus Dubai sein muss. Diese Gruppierungen fechten einen „war of status competition” aus, „in which goods serve chiefly in status-marking and status-claiming capacities“^[10].

Konsumverhalten kann also der Ausfechtung sozio-politischer Konflikte dienen. Die Darstellung des Konsumverhaltens als Ergebnis individueller, oft rein emotional geleiteter oder irrationaler Entscheidungen ohne strukturellen Hintergrund entpolitisiert den Konsum jedoch und verschleiert damit seine Funktion als sozialer Ordnungsmechanismus^[11]. Wie Mary Douglas (1979) betont dient die Konstruktion von Konsum als einer Freizeitaktivität, die von der Sphäre der Produktion und des Politischen getrennt ist, der Aufrechterhaltung bestimmter Machtverhältnisse: „Irrational explanations of consumer behaviour get currency only because economists believe that they should have a theory that is morally neutral and empty of judgement, whereas no serious consumption theory can avoid the responsibility of social criticism. Ultimately, consumption is about power, but power is held and exercised in many different ways“^[12].

Neben Mechanismen der sozialen Inklusion und Exklusion sieht Baudrillard (1998) durch die Wahlmöglichkeiten des Konsums jedoch auch emanzipatorisches Potential für das Subjekt. Die Konsumkultur geht mit der Entwicklung eines “wählenden Selbstes” einher^[13], in der sich die von Geburt und sozialen Zuschreibungen festgelegte Identität zu einem reflexiven, offenen Projekt wandelt, das vom individuellen Auftreten bestimmt ist. Die Wurzeln dieser Entwicklung sehen Zukin und Maguire in Prozessen der Urbanisierung und Industrialisierung, die den Zugang zu einer Bandbreite neuer Waren und Erfahrung geöffnet haben, während dadurch gleichzeitig Familienstrukturen und Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse verändert wurden. „The individual is then free to choose his or her path toward self-realization, taking on an opportunity and obligation once reserved for the elite. This freedom, however, comes at the cost of security; without ﬁxed rules, the individual is constantly at risk of getting it wrong“^[14]. Diese Fragilität ist bezeichnend für den Iran, wo das teilweise gewaltsame Eindringen der Moderne zu verschiedenen Brüchen innerhalb der Gesellschaft geführt hat. Nichtsdestotrotz gehen Marketing-Manager in transnationalen Firmen davon aus, dass alle Konsumenten der Welt nach einem „amerikanischen“ Modell einer Konsumgesellschaft als Basis ihrer Bedürfnisse und Begehren streben^[15]. Die Manager sehen in diesem Modell ein universelles Ziel von Modernisierung, Demokratie und Fortschritt, und ihre Marketingstrategien zielen darauf ab, nationale, kulturelle und ethnische Differenzen im Streben nach dieser universellen Konsumkultur zu eliminieren. Dadurch entstehen Widersprüchlichkeiten, in denen globale Einflüsse sowie partikular-lokale und die vom Regime vorgegebenen, vereinheitlichenden Praktiken nebeneinander existieren oder mit einander konkurrieren^[16]. So haben sich in Teilen der Bevölkerung lokal spezifische Formen des Konsums herausgebildet, unabhängig von Religiösität, aber in irgendeiner Form auf die herrschende Meinung regieren.

Der vorliegende Text möchte daher der Frage nachgehen, wie gläubige Iraner und offizielle Repräsentanten des Islam das Verhältnis ihrer Religion zu modernen Formen der Massenkultur definieren und ob sie sich als Vertreter einer islamischen Lebensweise sehen, die gegen dieses Eindringen „von außen“ ankämpft, oder ob sie der Ansicht sind, so gut wie alle Gesellschaften müssten sich heute mit der Entwicklung des internationalen Konsummarktes auseinandersetzen.

Befreiung oder Disziplinierung?

In seiner Vorlesung über Governmentalität legt Foucault (1991) einschneidende Veränderungen in der Geschichte gesellschaftlicher Machtbeziehungen dar, aus denen die modernen Techniken des Regierens hervorgegangen sind. Nach Foucault ist die zunehmende Zentralität des politischen Apparates im Westen des beginnenden 18. Jahrhunderts nicht auf eine zentrale Macht zurück zu führen, die ihren Einfluss auf die Gesellschaft durch die Ausdehnung der Staatsmacht erweitert hat. Vielmehr haben Staaten es bewerkstelligt, „to connect themselves to a diversity of forces and groups that in different ways had long tried to shape and administer the lives of individuals in pursuit of various goals“^[17]. Mit der Stärkung des Konzepts vom Individuum in der Gesellschaft werden diese Strategien der Disziplinierung mehr und mehr internalisiert und damit diffuser, wodurch die regulierende Macht subtiler wird. Foucault’s Schriften über Governmentalität zeigen auch, wie wichtig der Prozess der Individualisierung für den Aufstieg des Konsumenten als frei wählendes Individuum war. Die Schaffung der Subjektivität war im Kapitalismus essentiell, weil er die Produktion von Subjekten benötigte, die sich selbst als autonome, selbstbestimmte und aktive Individuen wahrnahmen. Foucault greift damit auf Althussers Argument zurück, das besagt, der Schlüsselmechanismus der Ideologie sei, Individuen zu konstituieren, die sich als autonome Subjekte wahrnehmen und ihre Unterwerfung selbst ausüben, als wäre es ihr eigener freier Wille^[18]. Diese Erkenntnis ist wichtig für eine Analyse der Konsumgesellschaft im Iran, weil sie die Gleichsetzung von Konsum und Freiheit hinterfragt, die sowohl im Blick von außen auf den Iran, als auch innerhalb des Irans selbst immer wieder zur Debatte steht. Massenkultur und Konsum haben, neben anderen Faktoren, zweifellos zu Prozessen der Demokratisierung, Rationalisierung und Individualisierung im Iran geführt^[19]. Gleichzeitig findet jedoch auch eine Idealisierung und Privatisierung des Konsums statt, durch die Aspekte wie die Maximierung von Profit um jeden Preis oder die Verschärfung sozialen Ungleichgewichts verdeckt werden.

Es mag verlockend sein, die modebewussten, auffällig geschminkten jungen Frauen zu Kämpferinnen gegen das iranische Regime zu stilisieren. Viele Iraner wünschen sich durchaus eine Demokratie. Die Interaktion zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft jedoch als ein monolithisches Verhältnis zwischen religiösen Unterdrückern und freiheitsliebenden Unterdrückten darzustellen, wird der Komplexität der Situation nicht gerecht. Das Konzept einer zugrunde liegenden (religiösen) Logik, die überwunden werden muss, damit Strukturen sich verändern, entspricht nicht der Vielseitigkeit, über die sich die Ordnung in der Gesellschaft manifestiert. Einerseits herrscht nämlich innerhalb des Iran eine vielfältige Auseinandersetzung darüber, wie die iranische oder islamische Identität repräsentiert gehört. Gleichzeitig ist zu beobachten, dass durch Massenkonsum und die globale Zirkulation von Waren religiöse Symbole und Praktiken immer mehr in die Alltagskultur eindringen^[20]. Die spezifisch iranische Situation ist, dass hier bereits seit über hundert Jahren ein Kampf gegen Fremdeinfluss und Fremdherrschaft stattfindet, der die eigenen Herrscher mal Tür und Tor geöffnet haben, dann wieder bekämpft haben. Welche Aspekte der globalen Konsumkultur zu einer Demokratisierung der iranischen Gesellschaft geführt haben, und welche Konflikte dadurch entstanden, denen sich auch andere – westliche – Gesellschaften gegenüber sehen, gilt es zu untersuchen.

Literatur

Ervand Abrahamian (1982). Iran Between Two Revolutions. Princeton Studies on the Near East.
Ali M. Ansari (2000). Iran, Islam, and Democracy: the politics of managing change. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, Middle East Programme.
Talal Asad (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Cultural memory in the present. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jean Baudrillard (1998). The Consumer Society: Myths and structures. London: Sage.
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, Peter Miller (Hg) (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Gouvermentality. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Ann Cvetkovich (1992). Mixed feelings: feminism, mass culture, and Victorian sensationalism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press
Mary Douglas & Baron Isherwood (1979). The World of Goods. Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London: Allen Lane.
Shmuel Eisenstadt (2006). Die großen Revolutionen und die Kulturen der Moderne. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Mike Featherstone (1991). Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: SAGE Publ.
Michel Foucault. Governmentality. In: Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Hg) (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, S. 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Grant McCracken (1988). Culture and consumption: New approaches to the symbolic character of consumer goods and activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Artikel

Thaddeus Coreno, Fundamentalism as Class Culture. Sociology of Religion, vol. 63, nr.3, (Autumn 2002), S. 335-260.
Robert Hefner. Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age. Annual Review of Anthropology 27, 1998, S. 83-104.
Mansoor Moaddel, The Study of Islamic Culture and Politics: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology 2002, 28: S. 359-86.
Armando Salvatore, The Euro-Islamic Roots of Secularity: A Difficult Equation. Asian Journal of Social Science, Vol. 33, nr.3, 2005: S. 412-437 (26).
Nikolas Rose, Pat O’Malley, and Mariana Valverde, GOVERNMENTALITY. Annual Review Law Soc. Sci. 2006. 2: S. 83–104.
Sharon Zukin and Jennifer Smith Maguire, Consumers and Consumption. Annual Review of Sociology, 2004, 30: S. 173-197.

Endnoten (↵ returns to text)

vgl. Ansari, 2000.↵
Coreno, 2002.↵
Hefner, S.38.↵
Moaddel, S. 374.↵
Eisenstadt, 2006.↵
Ansari, 2000.↵
Abrahmian, 1982.↵
vgl. Masserat Amir Ebrahimi, Public Spaces in Enclosure: www.pagesmagazine.net/masserat.html (22.8.2009↵
Ansari, 2000.↵
McCracken 1988, S. 6.↵
Cvetkovic, 1992.↵
Douglas, S. 89.↵
Zukin & Maguire 2004, S. 59.↵
Zukin & Maguire, S. 64.↵
Zukin & Maguire, S. 66.↵
Featherstone, 1991.↵
Rose, S. 87.↵
Rose, S. 90.↵
Adelkhah, 1992.↵
Böhme 2006.↵

Coulter, Gerry: Ecology And Two Deaths, 06.10.09

Veröffentlicht am 6. Oktober 2009 von avinus

Consider the story of the soldier who meets Death at a crossing of the marketplace, and he believes he saw him make a menacing gesture in his direction. He rushes to the king’s palace and asks the king for his best horse in order that he might flee during the night far from Death, as far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace and reproaches him for having frightened one of his best servants. „I didn’t mean to frighten him. It was just that I was surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow in Samarkand.“^[1]

Discussions of political ecology today are often shrouded in an apocalyptic tone. I think this is a good thing given our history as a species which has evolved along a technological trajectory. What makes us human, perhaps more than anything else, is our elaborate tool making ability. Technology has long been crucial to what humans are and today it is not only a force we use to adapt, but one to which we must adapt. From the first pieces of flint, to parchment scrolls, the characters of languages, libraries, atomic devices, computers, all the way down to the digitalization of genetic codes, technology has been vital to our destiny as a species. After the first piece of flint was secured to a piece of wood to make an axe (for hunting and for murder), there was no turning back. We are neither innately good nor evil and we partake generously of both. The axe and the hammer contain as much evidence of who we are as does any “Holy Book”. As we look toward the future of life on earth we can depend upon humans to do both good and evil but we cannot necessarily be depended upon to act wisely and in our long term best interest. We can however, given our history, be depended upon to attempt technological solutions to any problem. One of our destinies is to eventually merge with technology and we have been ambivalent about this for the better part of six decades. Such are some of the most basic considerations informing the background against which discussions of political ecology should take place today.

Until the middle of the twentieth century humans managed to keep the upper hand over technology (although there were troubling signs during WWI as we watched almost an entire European generation literally fed to the machineries of the first advanced technological war). Hitler was there as a mere message boy but no doubt the first experiences of industrialized death left a mark on him. By 1945, and the end of his war, we had learned how to set off a chain of nuclear events from which we could only hope to hide deep underground. We have lived now for over half a century with the knowledge that the very technology which helps make us what we are has the ability to end what we are. We could somehow manage to imagine a few ragged survivors of a nuclear catastrophe but a genetic catastrophe would, no doubt, be thoroughly devastating. The atomic bomb and artificial intelligence seem rather tame now in a time of the likelihood of genetic terrorism, and the nanotechnologies with which we will profoundly redesign every species on the planet, including our own. The most important story of the 21st century will almost certainly be our encounter, at the level of a species, with death. It will probably arrive in one of two ways.

In one of our possible futures, the one that is of great concern to contemporary political ecologists, our current path will lead us to a dreadful ecological disaster that will wipe out most life on earth. There are many scenarios which describe this possible future and it is now a widely understood possibility. Fear of such ecological collapse is probably the primary motivating force behind efforts to devise a basic ecological survival strategy for humanity given the potential harm that our economics and technologies do to our natural environment. Most ecologists considering these issues rightly understand that what is at stake is the very survival of not only human life but the technologically engaged nature of that life. No one seriously thinks that we have a future that is a non-technological one any more than we have ever had a non-technological past. What most ecologists do agree upon is that our current political, economic and technological trajectories are heading us toward an ecological crisis that will lead to a total system failure. What most ecologists do not consider, in these urgent times of ecological distress, is the disturbing irony is that such a failure may actually be our last chance from something much worse – the success of the current system.

Another future scenario, also well understood, sees us able to avoid ecological collapse by making our human and technological systems sustainable. In the most glowing of these scenarios we will wipe out most (if not all) human ‘deformities’ and the possibility of an inherited disease will become a thing of the past (were these not also the dreams of Nazi science and eugenics?). In such a future we will also enjoy the birth of children whose characteristics have been carefully selected from a menu. The socialization of such expensive progeny will be carefully planned and parenting will almost certainly become a matter of dire responsibility in a world where, it is believed, little should be left to chance. Genetic cloning would almost certainly play a smaller role here than something we already know all too well – social cloning via various agencies of socialization (parents, schooling, mainstream media). Surely, in such a world, everyone would require a wearable mini-computer complete with retinal interface to the brain (the technology is already more than a decade old). Perhaps the ‘wear-comp’ could even correct our thoughts the way word processors today correct our typing.

The person walking along a street today engaged in conversation with a minute ear piece and microphone is one technological degree from being permanently networked when all of our gadgets are available in the wear-comp. The “I-phone” and “Blackberry” are the bridging technology to the wear-comp and the early post human years of the tribulations of the experiment that will be the Networked People. From this world only mere humans will remain among the unplugged and the last humans (as we known humans today) will be found among the poorest – the ‘unconnected’. Of course there is a lot of criticism of this unfolding future but we know well that this criticism runs just behind the pace of the technologies which are making this future part of our present. Today we occupy a planet upon which a schizophrenic ecological discourse rages – a deepening of efforts to implement sustainable ecological measures running behind the simultaneous proliferation of enterprises of ecological annihilation.

But what if all the nay-sayers are wrong? What if our current system succeeds and we do build a genuinely brave new ecologically sustainable world glittering with advanced technologies? We could then live out our lives in total security. If we can avoid an ecological catastrophe we might enter into a utopian world of protection and security even greater than that of the present inhabitants of ‘gated’ communities. Computers would then generate the models of lives which will become as predictable as the weather – a world in which evil, all negative events, disease, and uncertainty are removed. This future is only as far away as the ability of the current system to adapt itself to ecological sustainability. But even here, among the most glowing scenarios, a problem becomes apparent: Can we imagine, really, a world more full of refined and measured death for a creative and thoughtful species than a predictable, networked, techno-future? Is this what proponents of sustainable market economies and advanced technology dream of? Whether or not it is, an artificial and technologically programmable future is almost a certainty if our current system succeeds.

Like the soldier riding through the night attempting to avoid his destiny, yet racing toward it in Samarkand, our way of life seems to have a rendez-vous with death which is probably unavoidable. What remains to be seen is which one. Will we as a species succumb to a probable technologically driven ecological catastrophe? Or, does an even worse fate await us – one in which the current system succeeds? These are deeply disturbing questions and the current discourse concerning political ecology will be better for not avoiding them.

I do not seek to defuse concern or to encourage pessimism but to encourage those concerned with political ecology, in a time of great enthusiasm for sustainability, to ask themselves just what kind of future we are trying to sustain? If political ecology is to be guided, as many would like it to be, by a concern to make the present system sustainable, it must also face the dire problems our continued systemic course will place on human freedoms and creativity. Are we really willing to accept systemic preservation at any cost? If the best we can do is sustain our current systemic trajectory, then perhaps we are far better off facing the kind of system failure which depends on a devastating ecological crisis.

Until someone can devise a scenario under which we can both change our systemic path toward being utterly domesticated by technology while, and, at the same time avoiding ecological disintegration – I will remain on the side hoping for the lesser evil – ecological collapse. In a practical sense I hope that by advocating an apocalyptic stance, and encouraging others to do so, I can play a small role at least in flushing out the deeper implications of where political ecologies are headed today. Until political ecology can come to terms with the two deaths which we as a species currently face, I cannot help but feel that we are all a little closer to Benjamin’s Angel than we like to imagine we are:

The Angel of History does not move dialectically into the future, but has his face turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at this feet. The Angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and join together that which has been smashed to pieces, but a storm is blowing from paradise and irresistibly propels him into the future toward which his back is turned, while the pile of ruins before him grows skyward. What we call progress is that storm.^[2]

Works cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1990.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Endnoten (↵ returns to text)

Baudrillard 1990, p. 72↵
Benjamin 1969, p. 119↵

Coulter, Gerry: In the Shadow of Post-Democratic Capitalism – A Fascination for China, 26.11.08

Veröffentlicht am 26. November 2008 von avinus

I. Introduction

The relationship between the art of China and Western Art Museums has changed noticeably over the past decade. Previously we could expect Chinese artworks to appear primarily in historical, archaeological, anthropological or textile museums but not in major art museums (many of which still do not own an important Chinese art work). Many significant Western art museums have tended to avoid Chinese art specifically and Asian art generally. This is because Chinese art has remained outside of the definition of “art” (which in Western museums has been focused on oil paint and not the use of ink on paper, or ink and colour on silk or bamboo).

In the past five years, through a series of traveling shows, and a re-envisioning of existing holdings, our exposure to Chinese art in Western museums has increased. In the next section I examine how these shows are broadening the scope of what is on view in the West. In the third section I examine the global cultural context of these shows given China’s entry into a unique historical position – the potential bearer of post-democratic capitalism to the New World Order.

Heinrich, Caroline: In Search of the Child’s Innocence, 28.01.08

Veröffentlicht am 28. Januar 2008 von avinus

(translated from the German by Alan N. Shapiro)

“Die Schaffung von Werten befindet sich im Spielplatz der Kinder”, schreibt Caroline Heinrich in diesem zum ersten Mal auf Englisch und exklusiv im AVINUS Magazin publizierten Essay. Die ausgewiesene Baudrillard-Expertin erklärt, warum die Unwissenheit der Kinder die ursprüngliche Quelle westlicher Wertvorstellungen ist.

Introit: Denial and Affirmation of Life

I begin with a quotation. „The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes,“^[1] writes Nietzsche in Zarathustra. The child is innocent because she starts all over again from scratch. She starts from the space of emptiness that the lion has carved out. The space of emptiness is the space that has been emptied of the values of Western thought—values that the lion has corrupted. Exposed during the process of the radical destruction of these values is the fact that they signify „nothing.“ They are based on a will to nothing, a denial of life. The metamorphosis of the lion into the child thus takes place at the moment of an „implosion into No.“ This is the moment when the will that only denies must, in the final reckoning, deny itself.

The crucial point to be grasped here is this: for the invention of radically new values to occur, it is first absolutely necessary to achieve the void of values.

I want to investigate the question of why the creation of values—based as it is on the fundamental rule of the saying-yes to life—is to be found more than anywhere else on the playing field of the child. I will divide my inquiry into six parts. First, I will underscore a critical opposition: what is the difference between the premises of Western value-production and the childish creation of values? Second, I will say something about the problem of singularities. Third, I will consider whether one can detect a Nietzschean trace of the „child’s innocence“ in Jean Baudrillard’s thought. Fourth, I will demonstrate that the playing field of the child is shaped by her perception of the pataphysical refinement of the world. Fifth, I will establish why the destructive desire towards the object is unknown to the child. Finally—enlightened by this last insight—I will briefly reflect once more upon the topic of singularity.

I
Western Value-Production and
Childish Value-Creation

According to Nietzsche, metaphysical Western thought is based on measuring the correlation between the value of an ethical principle and the degree of its reality.^[2] The assumption is that the highest ethical value would have the greatest reality. Within this worldview, „good“ is connected with truth, reality, reason, being, order, unity, causality, and so on. „Evil“ is associated with untruth, illusion, sensuality, nothingness, disorder, multiplicity, chaos, etc.

Western morality says: the good is the true, the true is the real, and the real is substantial. The Nietzschean child replies: your truth doesn’t interest me, I know nothing of substance, and I am stumped by what you call reality. Western morality says: the good is a principle on which you should act. The Nietzschean child replies: I know no principle, I know only exceptions, and my sporting game is different every time. Morality says: this is good, do this, this is good, do this. The child objects: well, that depends (es kommt darauf an).

II
The Singularity

„That depends“ means: a singular constellation exists at a certain moment. At that moment, the Nietzschean child makes her judgment about „good“ and „evil.“ An example: in the old order of values, pity for the suffering of others is a value in itself. In addition to limitless hypocrisy, this leads to the condemnation of those who do not suffer, those who do not wish to suffer, and those who do not place any special value on having sympathy for their inherited environment. Against this, the pity of the Nietzschean child is expressed in the following remark by Nietzsche: „I frequently feel ‚pity‘ where there is no suffering, but rather (…) a lagging behind contrasted to what might have been.“^[3] The pity of the Nietzschean child grounds the perception of the denial of becoming. It recognizes that active forces get severed from the property of affirmation by reactive forces. The pity of the Nietzschean child is not necessarily related to the real suffering or not-suffering of others. It is not a „good“ value in itself, no more than an instance of destruction would be a non-value in itself.

III
The ‚Child’s Innocence‘ chez Baudrillard

I come now to the question of the trace of the „child’s innocence“ in Baudrillard’s thought. It shows through in his concept of the „insurrection of singularities“ against the system of generalized exchange.

In 1976, Baudrillard wrote about the architecture of the World Trade Center—the twinness of the Towers, their binary character, their doubling of monopoly capitalism. He explained that we survive in a system where there is no longer difference and where all social spheres have become interchangeable. Marx had already grasped that „the movement of capital is without measure.“^[4] Baudrillard has made it clear just how without measure the movement of capital has become — so measureless that it has abolished all referentiality. Today pay and work are completely decoupled from each other. Work and leisure time are melded together in „lifestyle design.“ We will take trade unions seriously again when they start to demand the doubling of salaries and „the right to be lazy“ for anyone who wants it.

Work no longer serves production. It serves the reproduction of designed women and designed men. We are all designed not designing. And so we shall remain—until the day comes when we finally say aloud what we all have secretly been thinking for a long time: we don’t believe in productive work, nor in growth, nor in progress, nor in the state bureaucracy of Big Brother.

Politics is dead. Edmund Stoiber [Governor of Bavaria and 2002 Chancellor candidate of the German Christian Democratic Union] said it very well recently: „Our decision-making processes are no longer competitive,“^[5] he complained.

Baudrillard has shown that our society is a pornographic film studio. As in porno, it shows everything. Truer than true, realer than real, hyperreal. It produces only indifference and appearance, while at the same time hating appearance and – above all – seduction.

Baudrillard has explained why this logic of indifference—in the labor force, in the operational structures, in the networks—leads to the total surveillance of individuals and to the „impounding“ of their lives.^[6] He has made us see the sadness of this society—where we are no longer allowed to flip the „off“ switch; where we are no longer asked but tested; where we are not permitted to be silent (even when we have nothing to say); where we are not allowed to break the chain of communication; where we are required to know everything about ourselves; and where we are only permitted to fall in love with someone matching our „personal description.“

Baudrillard has uncovered the negative passion and self-hatred of this society. He has exposed the suffering of a society that ensures the adventure vacation while doing away with all real adventure. Declaring every catastrophe to be a security problem, we do not feel our suffering. Substituting for real feelings, our secret admiration for the counter-violence of terrorism enters the game.

Baudrillard has shown that forces truly oppositional to the system would have to strike not on the level of political difference (a demolished arena which still exists only in the images of the system’s advertisements for itself), but on the level of the system’s indifference. Like the „I Love You“ virus, which brought entire networks to their knees, and reduced this oh so perfect system to total ridiculousness. This little coquettish love virus showed how prone to breakdown systems that aspire to perfection become.

What resists a system of generalized exchange is not those forces which assert themselves in dialectical, differential, or oppositional relation to the global system, but rather those forces which cannot be integrated or liquidated by the system: singularities. Differences that participate in the global „advertising campaign“ for the universal values of freedom, democracy and human rights are granted inclusion by the system of power. Singular radical otherness does not seek inclusion.

Here I have a doubt about Baudrillard’s position. On one side, Baudrillard writes that singularities are neither positive nor negative. They do not represent an alternative. They belong to another order. They obey no value judgment. They submit to no reality principle. But on the other side, Baudrillard sees in our cultural forms of self-hatred and bad conscience a „negative passion.“ It is a form of reacting that he calls „degraded.“^[7] In an article about the strike of so-called „cultural creators,“ Baudrillard speaks of a „justified revenge against the spectacle by the spectacle-people themselves.“^[8] This begs the question: what would be an „unjustified revenge“? Or: in what does the justice of the justified revenge consist?

I do not take issue with Baudrillard’s statement that singularities submit to no value judgments. The problem for me is that – and as a great fan of Baudrillard’s philosophy I hesitate to say this – he stops short of connecting the insurrection of singularities to the gathering emergence of the „child’s innocence“ as prophesied by Nietzsche. Baudrillard preserves in something of a fog this real breakout possibility for radical otherness.

A very delicate question, for example, is whether, in contrast to the „negative passion“ of our cultural self-hatred, one can comprehend terrorism as a „positive passion.“ Baudrillard’s commentary on the singular Event of September 11, 2001 suggests that viewpoint. In other words, one can infer—or make the supposition—that Baudrillard links the term „degraded“ to passivity and „not degraded“ to activity. In its open violence, 9/11 would be „activity.“ In its destructive abreaction to the system, 9/11 would nonetheless be a „positive passion.“ To a system that requires one to accept everything, to which one cannot give anything back, to which one cannot talk back, 9/11 would not be a degraded reply. It would not be a „degraded form of the impossible counter-gift,“ but on the contrary would have to be understood as a „successful symbolic exception.“

Why successful? Because to confront a system that excludes death with the dead victim means in fact to humiliate that system. The system, for its part, has no effective answer to this death. Only the Twin Towers themselves knew the appropriate and commensurate symbolic response. Successful? Because the terrorist singularity revenges „all those singular cultures that have paid for the inauguration of the world’s only superpower with their own disappearance.“^[9]

I doubt, however, that the Native Americans Big Foot [tribal chief of the more than 200 Miniconjou Lakota Sioux who were massacred in 1890 by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry] and Buddy Lamont [an Oglala Lakota killed by U.S. government forces during the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee] would have agreed to this form of revenge. „Agreed or not,“ Baudrillard would perhaps now think, „what is at stake here is a fundamental rule.“ „Of course!“ I think back. But that is precisely the problem. Baudrillard writes that, at a certain point, „the fundamental rule always wins.“ A unidirectional gift can only be answered with a „violent abreaction“ (strike, terrorism, etc.).^[10] But is it not the case that Baudrillard wants, above all, to show that revenge – as a symbolic form of reversibility—confirms this fundamental rule? That he wants to make clear that neither society nor the world can bear a principle of unity?

I do not believe that the only important thing to decide is if something is a singular exception. It is not sufficient to say that singularities are decisive regardless of whether they embody our best or our worst. It is not enough to correlate the valuation of a „degraded“ or „not degraded“ form of reacting with the criterion of passive or active. I think that the valuation of singularities must take as its point of departure the meaning of the illusionary act of a Nietzschean child.

Of course, from the standpoint of the „good system,“ singularities are „evil.“ They are so radically other that they do not allow themselves be integrated into the „system of good.“ The system tries nonetheless every time to do exactly that: to integrate them, to assimilate them. „Recognition of difference“ is perhaps the most hypocritical way of achieving the elimination of the radical other. The other is „understood,“ even when she does not at all want to be understood. As far as the system is concerned, her story should be narrated as a digestible romance of identity and difference, rendered useful as an advertisement for cultural difference. Baudrillard writes about this „risibility of our altruistic ‚understanding‘.“ „For ‚We respect the fact that you are different‘ read: ‚You people who are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all you have left‘. The signs of folklore and poverty are excellent markers of difference.“^[11] And futher: „nothing could be more contemptuous—or contemptible.“ The radical other is allowed to be our difference, but not to give us anything. Above all, she must not irritate us by being a non-understandable other. Consider the category of „misappropriated development aid,“ which designates the circumstance of the specified purpose of the aid getting lost. In a Mexican slum, a development aid worker broke out in tears because donated plastic container toilets, intended for the improvement of hygiene, were used by the inhabitants for chicken breeding.

The observation that, from the standpoint of the „good system,“ singularities are „evil,“ can be reverse-formulated. The „evil“ singularities are an illusionary „good,“ an obscene „good.“ They oppose themselves to a completely degenerated system. A multiplicity of singularities defends itself against the principle of unity. One can cheer the chicken breeding of the slum residents as a re-enchanting tear in the system.

But there are also less enchanting tears. Baudrillard writes: „It is intolerable for the ‚free‘ world that in a certain territory [Afghanistan], ‚democratic‘ freedoms—music, television, or even the face of wome—can be forbidden. That a country can do the exact opposite of what normally goes by the name of civilization.“^[12] But is it only intolerable for those who still believe in the decaying delusional idea of universal values?

I find it intolerable that music is forbidden to be heard. I find it intolerable that the face must veil itself. But the taboo in a certain territory [France] on wearing a head scarf exemplifies the vanishing into neutrality of every value in the West, the dissolving of all the West’s values into nonpartisan nothingness. The argument for the French law is that the Muslim head scarf is a „political sign.“ Translation: the unpolitical and the neutral are the „good signs.“

Baudrillard would cite them both as insurrectional singularities against the global system. But for me there is a critical difference between the „détournement“ [diverting] of the plastic container toilets for chicken breeding practiced by the Mexican slum residents and the Taliban’s prohibition of music and faces. In the Mexican chicken breeding, I see a singularity that defends singularity in itself. In the other kind of „exception“ to global capitalist-consumerist culture, this is not the case. And it is the Nietzschean child who is at play here. Zarathustra’s First Discourse. Metamorphosis of the Third Kind. The Lion into the Child. First Contact with the Foundational Property of the Will to Power. It is the nurturing of this will that legitimates the judgment that is – at last and for the first time – able to discriminate between the denial of life and the affirmation of life. „Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation.“^[13]

Why does Nietzsche choose the figure of the child? The child takes up her ground against the Old Man of Hegel who has reconciled himself with the dried-up „concrete“ of life. Hegel’s Old Man – for whom all is already said and done – À l’Ouest rien de nouveau? – is content [man muss zufrieden sein] with „this here“ reality that he has dubbed to be good and reasonable. From which he has excluded everything „unreasonable“: chance, sensuality, possibilities. Hegel writes: „In ordinary life one calls even the most dwarfed and ephemeral existence by accident a reality. But even our most common feelings confirm that a contingent existence does not merit the emphatic name of the real. Contingency is an existence that has no greater value than something that is merely possible, that might as well not be as be.“^[14] The accidental— because it is merely something possible—has, for Hegel, no value. It has no „reality“ value and thus no „moral“ value. And so it goes!

For the child—in her „first motion,“ in her impossibility of being hard-wired to experiences—accident and possibility have value. Her world is the aleatory world of objects. Her reality is saturated through and through by that which—according to what Hegel thinks—does not deserve the name of the real. The world of Hegel’s Old Man is a metaphysical reality. The child’s world is post-metaphysical or pataphysical.

IV
Pataphysics: Photography and the Child

The world in photography is the world of the child. Baudrillard writes: „The joy of taking photographs is an objective delight. Whoever has not experienced the objective rapture of the image one morning in town or desert will never in any way understand the pataphysical refinement of the world.“^[15] The child understands this pataphysical refinement. Pataphysics is the condition for what Nietzsche calls the beginning of the creation of new values—the brave new world where saying yes to life will really count for the first time.

Baudrillard has reflected brilliantly on photography. How is it, he asks, that the photo—which does not exist in advance—is able to document anything? The photo is illusionary. The objects thereby illuminated at the same time announce their own disappearance. What is depicted exists no longer in this way. The photo is illusionary in its „discreet charm of a previous life.“^[16] It is artificial because it seizes in interruptions the uninterrupted course of events. It freeze-frames an unrepeatable moment. It is a clipping, the snapshot of a clipping. It is unique, singular, incomparable. About its meaning it remains silent. It has no meaning. It has no reference. It has no measure. Like the world, the photo lacks nothing. Like the world, it gets along fine without us. It is what it is. Or, in reverse, the world—back-transmitting through technology and photography—is everything that metaphysical Western thought does not want to think. The world is „evil“: illusionary, unreal, meaningless, disordered, singular…

Baudrillard’s reflections on photography are themselves „evil.“ „Against the philosophy of the subject and the contemplating gaze,“ they are an „anti-philosophy of the object.“^[17] In the photographic act, the subject disappears. She instead occupies the „unseen site of representation.“^[18] The subject must mentally empty herself like a film negative. In her body posture, the photographer must snuggle up to the „posture of objects.“ In relation to the judgment of metaphysical philosophy—for which it is the subject who thinks the world—the relative values of subject and object get reversed. Baudrillard grasps that photography only has „sense“ at all when the „fundamental rule“ is observed: „It is the object which sees us, the object which dreams us.“^[19]

„Every press on the shutter-release,“ writes Baudrillard, „which puts an end to the real presence of the object, also causes me to disappear as subject, and it’s in this reciprocal disappearance that a transfusion between the two occurs.“^[20] Every press on the shutter-release sends one tumbling through the looking-glass into the „inverse“ world of the child. The child’s world is an „evil“ world. For the child, there is, in any case, no „real presence of objects.“ She knows no reality principle—“for illusion isn’t the opposite of reality.“ She is always absent from herself as subject. In the „reciprocal disappearance“^[21] of „real“ object and „real“ subject, it is the child who stands fundamentally in this relationship of transfusion.

The child possesses no concept of time, duration, interval, or continuity. She lives first of all in „space.“ The world shows itself to the child in the same way that it presents itself in the photo: „discontinuous and punctual.“^[22] Without orientation in time, the child lives in a transfusioning space. It is a „space“ like that which opens for the photographer in the moment of pressing the shutter-release. Continuous time—along with the subject—disappears.

The child lives in a space of the in-between, a space between sender and receiver—outside of spoken language and its sense. She is agile in her way of living the transfusion-relation to the world. She is in contact with the „objects“ of the world—which she does not read as signs, but rather perceives as symptoms. Intuition is her umbilical cord to the world.

The child gets on well with those objects that are „strange to themselves,“ in the region of their blurredness and trembling. She enjoys the excitement of „watching the grass grow“ and can feel what „is in the air.“ She is in touch with the pataphysical refinement of the world.

Baudrillard tells the story of the African artist [Michael Richards] who was commissioned to make a sculpture for the front plaza of the World Trade Center. The finished sculpture portrayed the artist himself drilled through by planes. He was killed in his studio on September 11, 2001 along with his sculpture.

Baudrillard speaks of an „amazing intuitive presentiment“—and understands this to be an especially delicate area of intuition.^[23] The French thinker was taken to task in the U.S. media for having dared to open such a line of inquiry during the February 19, 2002 roundtable discussion at New York University [broadcast on France Culture on February 23, 2002].^[24]

Commentators in the American press were so irritated by Baudrillard’s remarks linking the sculpture and the Event of which it was a precognition because they adjudicate the truthfulness or falsehood of a philosopher’s statements utilizing the measuring rod of metaphysical truth. For them, precognition can only be thought as something that „has to happen.“ Any „precog“ claim is automatically suspect because it implies stopping the future dead in its tracks, putting an end to the future’s openness, and transforming life into destiny.

But precognition can be thought in another—post-metaphysical—way. In the moment in which something analogous to the pressing of the shutter-release or the „punctum of photography“^[25] brings about the graduation from the playing level of the intentional subject, the continuity of time is also halted. The reversibility of intentionality is accompanied by a reversibility of time. The player who has reached the game-level of intuition now faces the challenge of objectively backwards-running time. This mode of time, however, does not concern the future reality of the subject. On the contrary, it allows a notifying object to appear to one of its possible pasts. Intuitive inspiration or the sudden coming-to-me of a thought evidence the fact that, as Baudrillard writes, „decisions and thoughts secretly come from elsewhere.“^[26] It is not about foresight, but rather about what I propose to call back-sight.

The term „foresight“ correlates with the chronological time of the intentional subject. This temporality, however (precisely at the moment of the coming-to-me of the thought from elsewhere), is absent from itself. The term „backsight“ indicates that in a singular instant the possible past of an object is grasped in a certain constellation. Whether or not an Event then transpires remains dependent upon an equally singular uncertain constellation.

The hypothesis is the following: there is backwards-running temporality—but its existence documents, explains, proves, and determines nothing. „Backsight“—because it makes known a possible having-become of things—is therefore not a presentiment that, once it comes true, can be explained as a metaphysical truth. It is much more a pataphysical truth, a truth with which „nothing“ is to be gotten.

Figure of the future creation of new values, the (Nietzschean) child dispenses with the concept of continuous time. She lives in a space of the notifying object, and in intimate contact with objects. She is permanently active in a world of backsight. It is an intuitive and delicate Existenz. Living entirely in space, the child is confronted with backwards-running time. She comes face-to-face with the potentiality of a second future, or a multiple promise of things. Back to the Future. Minority Report.

Through the photo, the world shows itself as back-transmitting, as nothing. Nothing—from the standpoint of the metaphysical reality principle, that is. It is a fascinating nothing: the „disorder of a null world,“^[27] the „emptiness of a null value“ possessing a „magical self-evidence,“^[28] as Baudrillard writes. The magical enchantment of seduction.

V
The Child Knows No Destructive
Desire Towards the Object

For the child there are no null worlds—because she knows nothing of metaphysics. Fascination through nothingness becomes fascination pure and simple. It is a small yet decisive difference. The world in the photo is an empty enchantress. For the child, the world is an overflowing enchantress. Whereas the world in the photo is a puzzling nothing, the child actually touches and feels this nothing. Whereas the world in the photo is silent, the world for the child is eloquently silent. Whereas the world in the photo is absent from itself, the child lives in the real effects of this absence (or the appearance of the „new real“). Whereas the defiance of the world in the photo resides in the world’s seductive energy, the defiance of the pact of lucidity between world and child resides in the world’s promise.

Baudrillard says that the „only profound desire“ is the desire for the (sexual) object, for that which does not need me, which can quite happily exist without me. The desire „for this alien perfection“ is at the same time the desire „to smash this alien perfection or to undress it.“^[29] The child, however, lives in freedom with respect to this desire — because she is herself alien, a strange attractor. She knows no desire for radical otherness because it lives within her. For the child in the space of the notifying object, what lives in things is above all a promise. She knows no fundamental desire to destroy creatures and things which for her are swarming with possibilities. Stated in a different terminology, the child is a hostage-taker who does not kill her hostages before they have revealed the location of the buried treasure.

Whereas the world in the photo is absent, for the child the world is absently present. The „yes“ of the child—the „yes to the sport of creation“—is a response to the challenge issued by the world. It is the possibility of making something absent present. The child in all of her actions is this small picnoleptic for whom the world and the gaze do not take place. If the photograph, through the pressing on the shutter-release, takes leave of the world and detaches itself from itself, then it succeeds, as Baudrillard writes, „to capture something of this dissimilarity and this singularity“ so that „something changes insofar as the ‚real‘ world and, indeed, the reality principle itself, are concerned.“^[30] And it is exactly this that the child at play „thinks.“ In her sport, the child gives something singular back. Each act of the child is a tear (ein Riss) in the reality principle.

Picture the following: a running child knocks over the hat that a beggar has laid out on the street asking for money. The day before, this same child had pressed a franc into the hand of a schoolmate’s rich father.

Considered from the viewpoint of the reality principle, the child is living „in the false.“ Only in reverse order would her actions have had any sense, would they have been reasonable. From the viewpoint of the reality principle, she is living an illusion. The child’s games have no place in the Western classification of ethical realities. For Western metaphysics, „illusionary acts“ are useless. They are „nothing.“ But from the viewpoint of the child, things are different. There is a tear in the reality principle. Maybe the child pressed a franc into the hand of the rich father because she liked his hands. Maybe, for the child, the rich father was in need of receiving a gift from someone. Maybe the child sensed that the beggar had cut himself off from doing something that he could better do. Maybe the child was reacting to some symptom of the father’s perchance impending bankruptcy. The possibilities are endless.

It is not important to determine which of these possibilities is true. It is not about seeing in the child’s games a principle that one can apply (like making the rich richer and the poor poorer!). What matters is to grasp that the child—who is without principles—“believes“ in her game. She believes in her illusionary act—an act answerable to nothing. Her sport takes off from a perception of the world that is answerable to nothing. The child always exists in a singular instant and in relation to a punctual (Roland Barthes) order of things. It is to this arrangement that she playfully—and just as instantaneously—responds. Like the world „in its ability to defy all resemblance,“^[31] she acknowledges the notifying object. The child, in her illusionary act, brings to realization a possibility of absence (like the African artist working on his sculpture). Immersed in her world of „back-sighting,“ the „belief“ of the child at play consists of altering an absent constellation.

On the basis of and through the illusion, the child creatively and inventively decrees her own order of things. The Nietzschean fundamental rule of the saying-yes to life as creative will is no longer about „the secret exigency to be seen, desired and thought by the object and the world,“^[32] but rather to metamorphose, defer and reverse object and world. The child’s mode of existence—seismograph of the pataphysical refinement of the world—does not allow her momentary, singular act(s) to be recuperated by the general order. Creative power based on an „illusionary act“ (paradoxically) wants no recognition as power.

VI
Conclusion: Singularity Redux

Let me return to what I said at the beginning. Morality says: this is good, do this, this is good, do this. The Nietzschean child objects: that all depends. The creation of new values of the saying-yes to life does not always mean preservation and never destruction.^[33] The component of destructive energy in the illusionary act of the Nietzschean child directs itself against those powers which persist in so punctiliously abiding by the reality principle. The negative passion will raise itself against the ruling power that one-sidedly only gives, and that knows how to receive only through its expert co-opting of the singularity of creative power.

And what about Mexican chicken breeding in plastic container toilets? The slum residents revenge the contemptuous gift insofar as they divert the gift away from its purpose. They metamorphose and reinvent it. They „make their own deal“ and reverse the gastronomical sequence: first the chickens, then the shit. Like the Nietzschean child, the Mexican slum residents are a singularity defending itself.

Those who forbid music and faces are not a self-defending singularity. They interdict the languages that are the most cryptic for them. They associate the visible with forbidden truth. They ban the „faces of seduction“ into invisibility. The Taliban are like the priest classes about whose „extreme fear of sensuality“ Nietzsche wrote, crediting them with the „[conditional] insight that it is in that domain of experience where the dominant order in its totality is threatened in the worst way.“^[34] Those who prohibit music and faces inhibit the appearance of the child—whose connection with the world is based on sensual contact.

If one endeavors, with Baudrillard, to confront a thought that tries to reverse the total social order with the singular Event of September 11, 2001, one must recognize that the attackers not only destroyed the symbol of the indifference and unidirectional giving of „the world’s only superpower,“ but that they also destroyed two „unique,“ „singular,“ very beautiful skyscrapers. One must at the same time see—in this „insurrection of singularity,“ in the most apparent form of revenge, in the symbolic gift of death—the attempt to make an example of the „power over death.“ An act of statuary intimidation of those who cannot exchange their death (and who are therefore despised), of those whose death was not allowed, and of those about whose singularity was never asked.

The Nietzschean child knows no principle. Yet her fundamental rule shows through. I think that a „post-Baudrillardian“ valuation of the forms of symbolic reversibility—as in revenge or the „return match“—must be sustained by this possibility of showing through.

————————————–

Translator’s Note
On pp.70-75 of the Verso Press edition of The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays (translated from the French by Chris Turner), Jean Baudrillard engages with the theses on the Event of September 11, 2001 of the young and extremely promising German philosopher Caroline Heinrich. Heinrich has thus far published two books in German, one of them being the major work Grundriß zu einer Philosophie der Opfer der Geschichte—“Philosophy of History from the Standpoint of the Victims“ (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2004). The German online-magazine AVINUS Magazin now begins the publication in English of Dr. Heinrich’s works. We start with the paper that Heinrich gave at the July 2004 conference on „Baudrillard and the Arts“ held at Peter Weibel’s „Center for Art and Media Technology“ in Karlsruhe, Germany.

This essay was published in German as „Auf der Suche nach der ‚Unschuld des Kindes’“, in: Philosophie und Kunst Jean Baudrillard: Eine Hommage zu seinem 75. Geburtstag (edited by Gente, Peter, Könches, Barbara and Weibel, Peter), Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2005.

Zum Autor

Caroline Heinrich, geboren 1972, hat Philosophie studiert und lebt in Mainz. Sie hat sich in ihren Studien intensiv mit den Theorien Baudrillards auseinandergesetzt. Ihre Monographie Grundriss zu einer Philosophie der Opfer der Geschichte (Wien 2004) gilt als Standardwerk der Philosophie der Opfer.

Endnoten (↵ returns to text)

Nietzsche, Friedrich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (translated with an Introduction by R.J. Hollingdale, originally published in German in 1883-5), London: Penguin Books, 1969; p.55.↵
Nietzsche, Friedrich: “Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887-9”, in: Sämtliche Werke: kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (KSA) (edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari), 13:281.↵
Nietzsche, Friedrich: “Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884-5”, in: KSA, 11:17. translation Alan N. Shapiro.↵
Marx, Karl: Das Kapital 1. Berlin: Dietz, 1966; p.159. translation ANS.↵
ARD: “Tagesschau” [German Channel One Evening News]; July 8, 2004.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: L’Échange symbolique et la mort (”Symbolic Exchange and Death”). Paris: Gallimard, 1976.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “Der Terror und die Gegengabe” (”Terror and the Counter-Gift”), in: Le Monde diplomatique, supplement to TAZ (German leftist daily newspaper); November 15, 2002; p.56.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “Kultur ist überflüssig” (”Culture is Superfluous”), in: Frankfurter Rundschau (German liberal daily newspaper); July 26, 2003.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “Der Terror und die Gegengabe.”↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “Der Terror und die Gegengabe.”↵
Baudrillard, Jean: The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (translated by James Benedict, originally published in French in 1990), London: Verso, 1993; p.132.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “Der Terror und die Gegengabe.”↵
Nietzsche, Friedrich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; p.55.↵
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften 1. Werke. Volume 8 (edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986; p.48. translation ANS.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite of Reality”, in: Fotografien, Photographies, Photographs, 1985-1998 (edited by Peter Weibel, translation from the French uncredited), Graz: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 1999; p.129.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite of Reality”; p.134.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite of Reality”; p.132.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite of Reality”; p.133.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite of Reality”; p.142.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “It is the Object Which Thinks Us…”, in: Fotografien, Photographies, Photographs, 1985-1998 (edited by Peter Weibel, translation from the French uncredited), Graz: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 1999; pp.147-8.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “It is the Object Which Thinks Us…”; p.147.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite of Reality”; p.133 (translation from the French modified by ANS).↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “Requiem für die Twin Towers”, in: Gente, Peter, Paris, Heidi and Weinmann, Martin (eds.): Short Cuts: Jean Baudrillard. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003; p.108.↵
Chris Turner’s Verso Press English translation of “Requiem for the Twin Towers” (in: The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays) does not include Baudrillard’s recounting and analysis of the African artist sculpture story. The published English text was translated from a typescript version that Jean Baudrillard faxed directly from Paris to his superb English translator. The version of “Requiem pour les Twin Towers” that includes the African artist sculpture story was a rewritten text that appeared later in French in the book Power Inferno (Paris: Galilée: 2002). Thanks to Chris Turner for explaining this to me. The German Suhrkamp-published text to which Caroline Heinrich refers was translated from the French Power Inferno version. The passage was also discussed at the February 19, 2003 debate at the “Maison des cultures du monde” in Paris entitled “Pourquoi la guerre?” at which Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and the journalist Alain Gresh were the principal participants. Baudrillard comments further on Michael Richards’ sculpture on p.117 of The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (translated by Chris Turner, originally published in French in 2004), New York: Berg, 2005, where the towering thinker also discusses a second artwork that bit the dust under the collapsed towers: the bronze technocrat by J. Seward Johnson.↵
Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (translated by Richard Howard, originally published in French in 1980), New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “It is the Object Which Thinks Us…”; (I am at present unable to find the page number of this quotation — ANS).↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite of Reality”; p.135 (translation from the French modified by ANS).↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite of Reality”; p.136.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite of Reality”; p.132 (translation from the French modified by ANS).↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “It is the Object Which Thinks Us…”; p.133.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “It is the Object Which Thinks Us…”; p.138.↵
Baudrillard, Jean: “It is the Object Which Thinks Us…”; p.145.↵
Therefore a principle of absolute nonviolence would be rejected.↵
Nietzsche, Friedrich: “Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887-9”, in: KSA, 13:384. translation ANS.↵

Shapiro, Alan N.: TV’s ‚Lost‘. The Crash Out of Globalization and Into the World, 02.03.07

Veröffentlicht am 2. März 2007 von avinus

We Are ‚Lost Together‘

The television show Lost premiered on September 22, 2004. En route from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles, California, USA, Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crashes on an unknown Island in the South Pacific. The 48 survivors find themselves in hostile surroundings. Combining elements of drama, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, adventure, thriller and Reality-TV, Lost is arguably the most original and influential TV program since Star Trek in the 1960s. It is at the forefront of the ongoing total revolution of suspenseful content and technological creativity in television. It has received all the major industry awards in the USA, such as the Emmy and the Golden Globe. It is seen in more than 70 countries. An Informa media survey of 20 countries concluded in July 2006 that Lost is the second most viewed TV show in the world (behind CSI: Miami). In my media studies writing on Lost, I continue my project of inventing the literary genre of theory-fiction that I began in my book Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance (called by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. in the academic journal Science Fiction Studies one of the most original works in the field of „science fiction theory“ since 1993). Now going further than the retelling of stories, I write first-person phenomenological narratives of what each of the 14 major characters of Lost is feeling, perceiving, thinking, and experiencing from moment to moment. It starts in the opening scene of the Pilot Episode with the predicament of Dr. Jack Shephard, who awakens in the woods after the plane crash with a painful flesh wound in his side that I see as metaphorical for the unexamined psycho-biographical wound of men in today’s global culture. I develop a new men’s movement theory that departs significantly from all currently circulating gender theories. More generally, my view of Lost is that it is telling us more about where we are after September 11, 2001 than any other discourse that has tried to define our situation following that Event. The crash of Lost is the crash of the terrorists‘ planes into the Twin Towers. Like the survivors on the Island, we confront an entirely new reality for which there is no preexisting explanation and no road map. We are truly Lost Together.

Pilot Episode, Part 1

9/22/2004
JACK SHEPHARD: In the Name of the Father
(played by Matthew Fox)

I, Alan Neil Shapiro, am a passionate television viewer. Television is an old media. But I now watch TV engrossed in practices that I have developed during my years of participation in new media: the hyper-textual World Wide Web, online multi-player interactive video games, and sex chat rooms. All the main characters of Lost – male and female – are my sexual identity avatars. They are virtual reality body-suits that I freely robe and disrobe. I inhabit their bodies and clothing as I choose. I exist inside their semiotic silhouettes. I am a rider of their purple vehicles. As the Pilot Episode of Lost begins, I wake up from oblivion as Alpha Male Jack Shephard, supine and homeless alone in the woods after a devastating aviation accident. It is my very first arrival in this particular virtual party-experience scene-space, a personal appearance financed by part of my Cable-TV subscription monthly fee, and enabled by the technological meat-machine interface of my image-saturated commodity mind. I exit the transient wormhole-like void of precision-instrumented passage between worlds quantum-leapt into an initiatory moment of surprising arousal. From now on, whatever Jack sees, feels, touches and hears, I see, feel, touch and hear. I am Jack. Jacked in.

First there is nothing. Out. My right eye is wide open, startled. It relaxes. I see tall treetops above. I’m looking straight up. Thin, bamboo-like trunks. Bright tropical green leaves. A pristine light. Pain. Somewhere in left torso. I see my left hand. It’s scrunched up. But I can move it. I can manipulate my wrist. I’m lying on my back, on the ground. I can feel my body. It’s generally all right. But I’m breathing heavily, exhausted. I’m moaning with fear and discomfort. Yes I am wounded. A sharp pain in my left side, at the height of the rib cage, rushing up through my arm. My cheeks are stinging. I hear a rustling noise — something moving towards me. Naked terror. There could be wild animals here. I’ll be eaten alive. Turn neck in dread. It’s only a dog. What a relief! He’s brown and friendly-looking with flappy ears, his long tongue hanging out. No danger there. He whimpers and runs away.
The hurt is intense, the reality of my wound unmistakable. Got to get on my feet and go look for help. C’mon, go, force yourself. In spite of the agony. But standing up is nearly impossible. Unbearable anguish. I grab hold of a bamboo stalk. I lean hard against it. It supports my weight. I push myself up. I’m grimacing in pain. Got to have a look at the gash. Difficult angle to see. It doesn’t look good. Is this whole circumstance I’m in real? What’s the last thing I remember? Reach with right hand into right business jacket pocket. Yes, it’s still there. The one-drink size airlines liquor bottle I tucked in there seemingly minutes ago. Good. I’ll use it to sterilize the wound. The laceration will have to be stitched up. Then I’ll be OK. My head is so light. Such faintness. Got to get to a clearing, out of these woods for at least an instant. See where I am. Get help from someone to sew the lesion. Gotta move. Carry me, legs! Go, go. Run this way. So many bamboo shoots. Zigzag my way through them. Go, go, go. A lone sneaker hanging by a lace over a branch.

Riders on the Storm (je pense à Jim Morrison)

The story begins with a man and his wound. Riders on the Storm. Riders on the Storm. Into this house I’m born. Into this world I’m thrown. Like a dog without a bone. An actor out alone. Riders on the Storm. I am given The Name of the Father. I am told by him how to act, how to make it through life. But are these guidelines sufficient for survival? For happiness? What if the father has not investigated his own wound? What if I am stabbed in the flesh both for him and for me? The wound might be the consequence of a fundamental lack of love, neglect by a self-absorbed parent, the deep shame of being an outsider, or the trauma of something worse like physical violence or sexual abuse. How does a man (or a woman) cope over the course of a lifetime with this original wound to the „soul“ or to the emotional body? „What wound do we have that hurts so much we have to dip it in water?“ asks the American poet Robert Bly in Iron John: A Book About Men.^[1] I am strong enough – for a certain period of time – to carry myself along through sheer will. I join the ranks of the walking wounded. I make use of an addictive substance like alcohol or drugs to temporarily numb the wound. But to make even the first step towards locating the commencement of the path of real healing, I must engage in sustained self-examination and gradually awaken my fount of courage, intelligence and dogged perseverance. Then I would be at the start of a long spiritual journey. It will be a difficult yet highly rewarding adventure. I, however, cannot embark on, make, or successfully complete this voyage alone.

JACK
Out of the Woods. Onto the Beach. Look to the right. A broad white sandy beach. An ocean of dark blue crystal water, waves not too rough. A brilliant azure sky with a few cumulus clouds. I stand here for a brief moment and take in this loveliness. So this is where I am. No longer on the plane from Sydney to Los Angeles, but on some coastline, maybe on some Island. There’s lots of green foliage at the edge of the woods. Look to the left. Oh my God! The plane has crashed! Burning fuselage. Screams coming from over there, a woman’s screams. People strewn about the beach in varying states of distress. Smoke and flames. I’m suddenly smack in the middle of an Emergency Medical Situation! Pieces of the demolished plane – of every irregular shape and imaginable size – are scattered everywhere. One of the below-wing podded engines is making a nasty whining sound and generating a sucking wind that pulls inescapably into its lethal vortex. No matter what, don’t go there! Stay down. Bend low while running. My adrenaline is starting to kick in. More fragments of the plane over here. Ripped up, burned out corrugated metal. A strip of the rear section with a long row of passenger seat windows. Harrowing screams from all directions. People calling out for their missing loved ones. Some survivors can walk. They are stumbling, helping one another. Others appear to be badly injured. I feel a pang in my own left side. Look around, look around. Situation assessment. Where can I help first? Crackling mechanical din from above. Look up. An immense chunk of one of the wings is threatening to break off and tumble to the beach! But of more immediate concern, a man is lying in the sand trapped under a huge piece of the wreckage, pleading in despair. „Somebody help me! Help! Help!“ I’ll go to him. He’s buried under one of the wheel units of the chassis.I can’t move it myself. I need others. „Give me a hand! You, come over here, give me a hand! C’mon! On the count of three! One, two, three!“ I raise the man’s limp arms high over his head and pull him out by these appendages. His right leg is bleeding badly. I need a tourniquet. I’ll use my necktie. I tighten it around his thigh. There, something accomplished.
Scream of a woman. „Somebody help me!“ I see a young woman in the distance. She appears to be pregnant. She’s on all fours on the beach. „Get him out of here! Get him away from the engine!“ I shout to the two men who just helped me free the hurt man from beneath the heavy load of the landing gear. Yes, I feel my juices flowing. That’s me giving instructions, being a leader. Now run to help that pregnant woman. Go, go, go! Man, I’m swift, even in these business shoes. The girl is an attractive blonde with an Australian accent, wearing a black minidress with thin shoulder straps, and a grayish-white linen shirt on top of that. She tells me that she’s having contractions. I ask her how many months pregnant she is, and how far apart the contractions are coming. Glancing to the left, I see a trim young man in an unbuttoned aquamarine shirt, his shirttail hanging out. He’s trying in vain to revive an unconscious woman lying flat on her back. The black-skinned middle-aged lady has on a rose-cream colored sweatshirt and black pants. A man foolishly walks too close to the active jet engine. He is abruptly sucked up and instantly killed! A fiery explosion. Take cover now! Protect the girl. Another male passerby is fatally felled by flying debris. „You’re gonna be OK. Do you understand me?“ I tell the pregnant woman. „But you’re gonna have to stay absolutely still.“ The thin man still hasn’t been able to reanimate the black woman. I notice a chubby fellow with long plaited hair, garbed in very casual attire. He looks emotionally really down and out. „Hey you, come here!“ I holler to him. „I need to get this woman away from these fumes. Take her over there. Stay with her. If her contractions occur any closer than three minutes apart, call out to me!“

I go over to the unconscious woman. The slim guy doesn’t have a clue. Her head is too far back and he’s blowing air into her stomach. He tells me that he’s a licensed lifeguard. „Well,“ I say to him pseudo-jokingly, „you need to seriously think about giving that license back.“ Now he’s suggesting that we puncture a breathing hole in her neck with a pen. He’s imploringly earnest about this. What’s up with this guy? „Good idea,“ I tell him. At least my wit’s still functioning. „You go get me a pen.“ I perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the supine woman. C’mon, c’mon! Don’t die on me! With a surprising gasp I no longer fully expect, she is breathing again and restored to awareness! Now I can turn my attention to that massive portion of the wing about to break off. When it falls to the ground, it’s going to kill somebody! It’s swaying menacingly in the wind. It’s about to give! The pregnant woman and the overweight man are directly below it! I hasten to stand up. I turn awkwardly dodging my pain and start running again. Run, run, run! „Move, move, move!“ I call to them forcefully and repeatedly while laboring to reach them on foot. „Get her outta there!“ I finally catch the portly guy’s attention. He looks up bewildered. „Get her up! Get her outta there!“ I yell louder than I ever have before. The wing collapses and explodes. A chain of explosions. The second podded engine blows up. The near-obese man, the pregnant woman and I are thrown to the ground. „You OK? You? Stay with her!“ I shout to them. Man, am I wound up tight, way too vehement. The slovenly dressed fat fellow – who actually seems rather amiable – senses that this last directive of mine was out of line and promptly answers back: „Dude, I’m not going anywhere!“ Hugo „Hurley“ Reyes is wearing an open light blue flannel shirt with a dark, thin-lined rectangular grid pattern, and a pale blue T-shirt underneath.

And I remember
How it all came true
It was oh so tender
And I was Lost with you
By the sweet Sorrento moon
You wait a long time
To find your dream and hold on to it
All I needed was to fly
It’s a long way
From innocence to understanding

—from Sorrento Moon, by Tina Arena
The Unexamined Life

By means of my ceaseless productivity, via my agile speed and consummate ability to get things done, through my high level of competency and professional skills, I avoid almost all available entrances into the ritual spaces and calm meditations that might enable real existential encounter with the wound of my emotional body. Countless contemporary TV shows and Hollywood films portray America’s exemplary heroes: emergency physicians, homicide detectives, attorneys for the defense, secret service agents, counter-terrorism specialists, life-risking firemen or beat cops. These daring occupations encompass weighty responsibilities and are undoubtedly among the noblest of vocations in today’s society. But the omnipresent virtual realities of the media propagate an iconography of the trained practitioner who „does good“ or „helps others“ that half performs the commendable service of showcasing worthy role models and half does the disservice of manufacturing a manipulative mythology of the obligation to make excessive macho self-sacrifices for the public interest.

The small and big screens hook us seductively into the pervasive workaholism corresponding on the level of the individual to what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger – in his 1936 essay „The Age ofthe World Picture“ – correctly diagnosed as being the plague of modern times: the characteristic bustle or constant „industrious activity of mere busyness“ of our oppressive institutional existence.^[2] Permanently enchained by the everyday life ideology that constrains me to make my contribution to business, family, nation, or the accumulation and spending of money, I operate nonstop in a pumped-up feverish caffeine-assisted trance of work and consumerism in order not to face myself. I never have to ask the terrifying question of what I would do with my life if I were truly free. Especially as a man, I steer clear of contact with my own feelings and emotions, evade looking sincerely into my own psycho-biographical pain, and fail to develop real self-love. This is the perpetual high-wire act of the Unexamined Life. But physician, heal thyself!

JACK
Finally a quieter moment arrives. Compose myself. Walk around on the beach. All of the emergency cases have been handled for now. I can turn my attention to my own wound. It’s beneath the left arm, more towards the back than exclusively on the side as I previously thought. The broodingly resolute young man whose name I still don’t know returns with a fistful of pens that he’s scavenged. It’s been quite a while since I resuscitated the black woman. „I don’t know which one will work best,“ he tells me. „They’re all good,“ I reply. „Thanks.“

The Wound and the Pen

What does it mean to take up one’s pen – or one’s word processor – and write about Lost? Are the producers of Lost consciously aware of the fact that their television show activates profound new questions for the fields of knowledge of philosophy, psychoanalysis, epistemology, computer technology, the natural sciences, aesthetics, deep ecology, and even politics and economics? Or is it the world itself – as the emergence of an intelligent, radically singular, unfathomably complex living system that has arrived at a certain point of maturity in its unfolding history – that is executing a kind of automatic writing? Is our beloved wounded planet Gaia finally starting to defend herself by transmitting new knowledge to us so that we can help her? This vital S.O.S. transmission is being emergency-broadcasted via the „low culture“ mass media par excellence of TV that is now undergoing a stunning total revolution of „content.“ The „stream of messages“ is the conveyance for the progressive unraveling of the most advanced insights in science, art and the humanities, flirtatiously forwarded to us from the radical alterity of an „absent“ elsewhere. Lost is one exemplary instance of this „message is medium“ turn, but there are others.

For many traditional humanist intellectuals and art experts, television is just the idiot box. It is the very last place that these guardians of „high culture“ would think to look for the liminal appearance of ideas, sublime forms, cognitive and conceptual breakthroughs, the „new real,“ or the making of history. For the previous generation of „old media“ theorists – with its classic position that „the medium is the message“ – the content of TV programs was secondary to the extensive restructuring and „patterning of human relationships“ (Marshall McLuhan) or to the undirectionally encoded „speech without response“ (Jean Baudrillard) operationally instituted by a primarily process-oriented communications technology.^[3] One can transcend this downplaying of the message through cultivation of the very sensitivity to the medium as „culturally framing technological-literary form“ that one learns from these two thinkers. Science fiction, fantasy, and crime investigation TV shows are the literature of today. They can tell us more about what is going on in the world than any other genre of artistic expression. The real-time phenomenological details of these hyper-modern virtual narrative paintings are to be treated as the object-oriented fractal micro-constituents or graphic brush strokes of an intensively signifying language. Reversing McLuhan’s designation of it as „cool,“ television must henceforth be seen as a hot medium.^[4] One passes from the negative analysis of the electronic media as externalized mediations of the human body, senses, and psyche^[5] or „semiological reduction“ of symbolic relations^[6] to the affirmative mindfulness of a much more personally involved moment-to-moment immersion in the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the posthuman avatar bodies whose VR experiences are the outriding vehicle for ascending to an orbital writing space of infinite hyper-textual links.^[7] To the admirable dramaturgical enactment carried out by the scriptwriters, actors, directors, and TV technicians of Lost is added the act of writing by the media philosopher.
JACK
Slowly I walk away. I must search the pieces of luggage for needle and thread. I open the wraparound zipper of a black bag with red trimming. Inside a toiletry pouch with a shiny gold-tinted swirling pattern, I find a sewing kit. At the outskirts of the woods, standing next to a strong horizontal tree branch equal to my stature, I remove my sports jacket. What excruciating pain! I take off my white formal shirt. It’s stained terribly with blood. I gently lift up my white crewneck undershirt over my head and toss it aside. These formfitting jeans that I have on now are much more comfortable than those dress pants that I was wearing on the plane. As I glide the T-shirt over my raised arms, it occurs to me just how advantageous it is for the Challenge of Survival that we face here on the Island to be so generally fit and in such good shape. Thank Goodness for all those workouts I did, like when I ran up flights of stairs between sections of spectator seats at the college football stadium. Barechested, I go down to my knees. In a single sweeping movement, I elevate my left arm over my head. Now try to get a good look at the wound. Maybe feel it with my fingertips. First tactile contact. Ouch, what a sting!

KATHERINE „KATE“ AUSTEN: The Fugitive

(played by Evangeline Lilly)

I, the deceitful shapeshifting erotomanic cyborg alien of hideously abstract tentacular Cycloptic Gumby-esque appearance, a.k.a. commonplace television viewer-consumer of sexy media images, depart Jack’s body. For a few nanoseconds I am nowhere, back in the wormhole corridor spacetime void. Look over there: an attractive female corporeal figure. Enter it. Assume its form. Merge my being with its subatomic and micro-molecular structure.
My gosh, am I Lost and confused. Put up a brave front, girl. Hang in there. I’m wringing my wrists in anxiety. How long have I been wandering around on this beach? Will I ever be able to forget what I lived and saw during the crash? I was awake during the whole thing! Memories so extreme and gruesome — how does one process such horrific images? There’s blood splattered on my fingers. Wait, someone’s calling me. „Excuse me! Did you ever use a needle?“ It’s the voice of a man. He’s kneeling over there, next to the trees, asking for help. Cute guy! Get a load of that hunk! Handsome hairy chest! Check out that washboard stomach! The tattoos on his left upper arm. But no, what’s he asking me? I can’t help anybody with anything. Not just now. „Did you ever patch a pair of jeans?“ That seems to be the sentence that I hear. What’s he saying? Think, girl, think. What exactly does he want from me? „I … um … made the drapes in my apartment.“ There, managed to get some words out. For heaven’s sake, he really does want my help. With what? OK, pull yourself together, Kate. Got to make him think that I’m an ordinary city girl. Someone with a job and a life, a rent to pay and a couple of cats. Uh oh, look at that. He’s wounded on the side, bleeding. It’s pretty dreadful. I can’t see this. That’s what you want me to sew up? I close my eyes. I count to three. Calm yourself, hot stuff, but keep appearing to be a little naive. What’s that? He says that he’s a doctor. Will I help you, sugar-pants? „Of course I will!“ I announce in a coy yet kindly tone. He gives me a small bottle of liquor to rub on my hands. „Save me some for the wound,“ he courageously quips. „Any color preference?“ I teasingly riposte, pointing out the wide assortment of different colored threads in the sewing kit. „Standard black,“ he confidently retorts.
The First Sundown
It is almost sunset. The end of the first day. The survivors have built campfires. A confident, dark-complexioned man with long black curly hair and a bearded chin, appearing to be of Middle Eastern descent, self-assuredly addresses a disoriented-looking white Anglo-Saxon working-class male whose head is buried in his own lap: „Hey you, what’s your name? We need help with the fire. No one will see it if it isn’t big.“ The good-looking Iraqi veteran of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard is named Sayid. The strung-out former guitarist of the punk rock’n roll band named Drive Shaft is called Charlie Pace.
KATE
„I might throw up on you,“ I say to Doctor Dreamboat as I’m sewing him up. He replies that I’m doing fine. This guy is so tough, so cool. He’s awesome! What a pretty face, neat haircut. Sure would like to snuggle up with him. „You don’t seem afraid at all!“ I blurt out. „I don’t understand that.“

JACK
„Well, fear is sort of an odd thing. When I was in residency, my first solo procedure was a spinal surgery on a sixteen-year-old kid, a girl. And at the end, after thirteen hours, I was closing her up and I accidentally ripped her dural sac. It’s right at the base of the spine where all the nerves come together. So it ripped open. Membranes, thin as tissue, nerves just spilled out of her like angel-hair pasta. Spinal fluid flowing out of her. And the terror was just so crazy, so real. And I knew I had to deal with it. So I just made a choice. I’d let the fear in. Let it take over. Let it do its thing. But only for five seconds. That’s all I was gonna give it. So I started to count. One … two … three … four … five. And it was gone. I went back to work, sewed her up, and she was fine.“
The ‚Girl‘ Within the Man

The brain and the spinal cord are enclosed by the meninges, a covering that consists of three distinct membrane layers the softness of which increases as one moves progressively inwards. The dura mater – from the Latin for „hard mother“ – is the tough and fibrous outermost stratum of the central nervous system’s protective shell. The arachnoid is the watery middle tier. It has as fascinating homonyms both the dainty fibers of certain botanical life-forms and the adjective denoting that which pertains to the Arachnida anthropod class of spiders or their intricate webs. The pia mater – pious or tender mother – is the innermost layer of very sensitive vascular tissue. The anecdotal allegory of Dr. Jack Shephard the neurosurgeon inadvertently tearing the dura mater of his young female patient – in the direct context of his telling the story of how he overcame his primal fear – is resonant with meaning for the question of the psycho-biographical wound of a man. Jack’s unconscious patient symbolizes the delicate feminine element or „girl“ buried deep within himself that is the untapped imprisoned secret reservoir of his primal fluid energy and vitality.

As a conservative response to the insecurity resulting from the parents not having provided a fundamental sense of being valued and loved, or as a reaction to the shame of the outsider’s experience of radical difference, I build the fortress of aggressive and unduly rational male character structure around my lonely heart and downtrodden spirit.
But inside some very special intimate part of the psyche, my inexperienced love of self and others is preserved in nearly untouched integrity. In our society, the truly forbidden love is self-love. As a temporary bridge to the encapsulated area of vulnerability, I have since adolescence practiced some moderately graceful „erotic“ routine of self-soothing identification with the pain and humiliation of the early elementary exposure that I have failed to grieve. This location of ambivalent ascription to myself of the semiotic and manneristic attributes of a more desirable version of the abject state of being to which I was diminished – culled from the marketplace of media images – is, properly speaking, the site of the wound. The wound is personal and political. It is a psychological form of social control. The self-medicating survival technique is at first a life preserver, later an albatross. As an improvised solution to the trials of the undernourished heart or the tribulations of the homuncular condition, the injury with which I have lived almost all of my life saps my overall strength as a man. It clandestinely undercuts my fearlessness in undertaking enterprises at the height of my true potential.

To gain access in a material-symbolic way to the „pia mater,“ to the most tender interior portion of the mind – or to obtain a clear introspective picture of this exquisitely virginal neural mesh – would be a major advance towards liberation of the whole person. I would bring my „feminine“ qualities – nurturing, sweetness, softness, helping others – into open social contact with my friends and fellow „survivors.“ It might reinstate the faculty of self-love which is also closely connected to a wider sense of feeling loved and protected by the surrounding habitat and the benevolence of faith or fate. As the scholar of comparative meditation traditions Naomi Ozaniec explains: „Before radiating love to others we need first to create these feelings towards ourselves. Enter your own state of meditation and become aware of your heart. Allow yourself to feel deserving of love. Allow yourself to surrender to this feeling. Imagine that you cradle a new-born child in your arms. The child is you. Let loving feelings flow through you, let the child be held in a deep and safe embrace.“^[8] With self-love and with openness to my repressed feminine side, I experience a sort of rebirth as a pubescent youth, innocent of gender stereotypes, expectations, and rules. Recall that Dr. Jack Shephard’s wound is on the left side, at the height of the rib cage. But like Jack at the moment of the accidental ripping open of his female patient’s dural sac, I want to regain some control over my newly discovered volatile emotions. To triumph over the fear and terror that are unleashed when I find myself in completely unknown territory where noman has gone before, I need to bring back in my rationality. Since I believe in the reality of my body more than in the dreams of media images, I want to be a boy, not a girl. Man plus girl equals boy. MARS plus X. I have come through to the other side of the wormhole. My goal is that of integration. The logic of Western metaphysical thinking is Either/Or, A or B. The logic that we can learn from Buddhism is And/And, A and B. I am both masculine and feminine. I will stand on two legs, whereas most other men are standing on one. I have found the path to healing. First the wound had to be isolated and allowed to breathe in light air in order to establish the conditions for healing. The best result that one can hope for, however, is to be both healed and wounded. Why can the wound not disappear? Because, in the end, it is a shared wound. It is a social psychological wound, the same wound that many other men have. The images of my (former) wound are everywhere in the semiotic media-consumer culture, keeping the damage indefinitely nearby as weakness. But this weakness can also be a revolutionary asset. In awareness, I am healed for myself, but still wounded for my friends. FRIENDSHIP plus X.

KATE
„If that had been me, I woulda run for the door.“
JACK
„No, I don’t think that’s true. You’re not running now.“

The Oppressed Child

The Fugitive. On the Run.

In our society, not only is the child weaker and smaller than the adult, but he or she is forced into a relationship of subservience to the mother and the father who are granted nearly unlimited power and territorial jurisdiction over him or her. Aside from occasional attention paid to this political condition of fundamental slavery by the anti-authoritarian movement in education, no institutionalized human relationship of domination and submission, of abuse and helplessness, has been the object of less enlightened reflection than this one. Oppressed by the parents and subjected to their arbitrary will, the child dreams of one thing: flight. More than anything else, the small person wishes to run away. It is nighttime and my conscious mind is asleep. If I move my arms and legs fast enough in a propeller-like motion, I am soon airborne. If I become tired and cease my efforts, I fall quickly back to Earth. I dream of climbing out the window. My Spiderman capability of spinning silk web strands enables me to make my way down the facade of our high-rise apartment building, proceeding from ledge to ledge. Sometimes I shoot a single sturdy thread to a fence on the roof of the low-rise building across the street, get a strong grip on the silk string with my black leather gloves, and slide my way diagonally down to safety. If I have to leap from a fire escape stairway several meters above the pavement, the bounce in my comic book legs gets me instantly back on my feet. Hit the ground running. Run and run and don’t look back. Get as far away as you can as fast as you possibly can and never go back. But freedom’s just another word for nothin‘ left to lose. In the long run, the pattern of The Great Escape turns self-defeating. The Fugitive keeps fleeing from others and from herself. Without sustained self-examination, there can be no truly successful flight leading to true freedom.

F-A-T-E

The starlit night sky. Campfires on the beach. Sayid and Charlie Pace sit together. Charlie is wearing a blue-green sweatshirt with a cute little hood over his T-shirt of alternating dark and light brown thick horizontal stripes. He has wrapped small bandages around the bases of four fingers of his left hand. Using a magic marker, he carefully draws letters on the gauze strips spelling out the word: F-A-T-E. „You’d think they woulda come by now,“ Sayid muses to Charlie. „What? who?“ replies the Catholic rocker. „Anyone,“ answers the Sunni Muslim telecommunications engineer.

Crash and Catastrophe

After the plane crash that sets up the science fictional scenario of Lost, Dr. Jack Shephard is instantaneously transported into a situation of proximity and solidarity with a motley collection of his struggling fellow human beings. It is a golden opportunity for deep bonds to form. Yet Jack’s initial predicament of not being able to attend to his own wound while working frantically to save the lives of others is a brilliant metaphorical commentary on the present-day hyper-modern translation of Heidegger’s „constant activity.“ In globalized media and corporate culture, Crash and Catastrophe are the only ways for interruptions of the continuous drone of organized and institutionalized mere busyness to take place.

But in the State of Emergency, Declared just after the Catastrophe,
We exist in a State of Fear, Just like Headlights in Front of a Deer.

Fake State Terror Alert,
Fake State Terror Alert.

Fear and Panic, That’s our Game,
AmeriKKKa, That’s our Name.

Fake State Terror Alert,
Fake State Terror Alert.

Donald Rumsfeld, He’s our Man,
If He Can’t Do It, Nobody Can.

What’s the Penalty in Texas for a President’s High Crime?
Hint: It Ain’t Got Nothin‘ to Do with Time.

Shopping Mall, Shopping Mall,
State of Pain-Killin‘ Mind Control.

Being and Time, Being and Time,
What Would Heidegger Buy with a Dime?

Turn on the Tube, See What They Say,
How Many Iraqis Did You Kill Today?

Shopping Mall, Shopping Mall,
State of Pain-Killin‘ Mind Control.

(from here to end, sung like Janis Joplin)
Oh Lord won’t you sell me some High-Tech Bennies?
We thank you, our Saviors, the Drug Companies.

And thanks to your Partners in Advertising, too,
Without your Free Information, Lord knows what I’d do.

And thanks for rammin‘ all your shit straight down my throat.
And now it’s time to say goodbye on that lovely note.

White-Jewboy Rap Song: „Heidegger’s Dime“

—Alan Neil Shapiro, 2007

Starting All Over

Twenty years ahead of their time, the Canadian cultural theorist duo Arthur and Marilouise Kroker – in the Panic Encyclopedia – identified panic as the „key psychological mood“ of hyper-modernism. „In pharmaceuticals,“ the Krokers remarked ironically in 1989 – already in full Philip K. Dick SF-becoming-reality mode – „a leading drug company, eager to get the jump on supplying sedatives for the panic population at the end of the millennium, has just announced plans for a ‚worldwide panic project.'“^[9] At a certain irreversible point, however, Crash reaches such a degree of critical intensity – the Crash Out of Globalization and Into the World – that the conditions for the construction of an alternative concrete utopia audaciously put together by a group of survivors emerge. Against the global culture of alienated work, banal consumerism, instant sexual gratification, psychological self-denial, living on speed, ubiquitous media hyper-realities, and „every man for himself“ (Sauve qui peut la vie), the survivors will engage in a social experiment where all the suppressed questions about the true meaning and purpose of human existence will be asked afresh, and the provisional answers enacted in radical artistic projects. Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages: a game. A contest. Twenty-five questions. You know the stakes. All that matters is that you give it the old college try.

Who am I?
Who are you?
Why are we here?
Do we have shared dreams?
What is it to be creative?

What is friendship?
What is love?
What is passion?
What is dance?
What is song?

Why do I have fears and anxieties?
Why is there violence and war?
How do we pursue knowledge and true epistemological flexibility?
How do we transcend the division of knowledge in the West between nature and culture?
How do we transcend the social division of labor and instead become interested in everything, but without burning ourselves up?

What is our deep ecological responsibility to our beloved wounded planet Gaia?
What is a wholesome habitat for human beings?
For animals?
For vegetables?

What is Artificial Life (A-Life)?
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
What are the coming fundamental paradigm shifts in science and technology due in the first half of the twenty-first century?
How do we reconcile Western and Buddhist ontologies of spacetime?
How do we reconcile rationalist scientific atheism and spiritual faith in a recursive, unfathomably complex living system that is the world itself in its unfolding history?

And last but not least: What is the best of all possible political and economic organizations of society?

Inspired by Star Trek and Lost – and powered by the technological invention of A.I. ArtificialIntelligence – a Radical Media, Technology, and Alternative Renewable Energy Company will be formed to bring the most creative people in the arts, humanities and critical social sciences together with a selected group of talented programmers and technologists.
Inventing the opposite of workaholism, the Company will encourage the enjoyment of life and the all-around human development of salaried employees who will work only six months a year. Pioneers of „social choreography“ like Steve Valk and Michael Klien will play a major role in originating the Company’s internal culture and in composing and arranging the patterns of dancer-like preparedness, diversified rotation of activities, and radically disruptive events for individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole.^[10]

SHANNON RUTHERFORD: High-Priced All-American Girl
(played by Maggie Grace)

Sexy blond gorgeous female over there. And a compatriot to boot. Assume her princess form.

I’m doing my toenails. It’s a good thing I had this polish with me. I’m not going to allow the temporary negative circumstances of this plane crash to interfere in any way with my personal care and simply gorgeous appearance. As everywhere else where I have ever been in my entire life, I am definitely and without any doubt the hottest-looking girl here. What a fantastic pair of legs I have! I am such a glamour girl in this white miniskirt, pink cotton tank top, and fashionable open pink leather cardigan jacket. Oh, here comes that dork stepbrother of mine. He is such a jerk! I’ll keep using him for as long as necessary for whatever he’s worth. When there’s nothing more I can get out of him, I’ll dump him and find some other warm body. Here’s Mr. Dork sitting down next to me. He’s offering me a piece of chocolate! „As if I’m gonna start eating chocolate,“ I enlighten the dork. Chocolate, very smart! What’s that gonna do for my figure? „Shannon, we may be here for a while,“ the twerp replies. „The plane had a black box, idiot,“ I lay out for him the facts of life. „They know exactly where we are and they’re coming. I’ll eat on the rescue boat.“ He shrinks to the size of his little weenie.

Talking Korean

An Asian man with finely chiseled features is talking harshly in Korean to his smooth-faced wife. Television viewers who are non-Korean speakers understand his monologue via subtitles. „You must not leave my sight,“ he commands. „You must follow me wherever I go. Do you understand? Don’t worry about the others. We need to stay together.“ The wife nods sadly.

KATE AND JACK
Jack is medically attending to a severely injured male crash victim who is lying unconscious on his back on the beach. In the dark, the Doctor focuses the beam of a flashlight onto the sufferer’s torn abdominal flesh. „Do you think he’s gonna live?“ asks Kate through her left hand which is covering her mouth. „Do you know him?“ a surprised Jack queries in return. „He was sitting next to me,“ rejoins Kate in a matter-of-fact tone. A short time later, the two new friends are seated together with Kate clenching the same hand into a fist positioned in front of her mouth. In the fingertips of his right hand, Jack tenderly holds a green model-sized airplane about 25 centimeters in length that has been skillfully crafted from a leaf. „We must have been at about forty thousand feet when it happened,“ he speculates. „We hit an air pocket. Dropped. Maybe two hundred feet. Turbulence.“ „I knew that the tail was gone,“ says Kate Austen. „But I couldn’t bring myself to look back. And then the front of the plane broke off.“ „Well, it’s not here on the beach,“ interjects Jack Shephard while continuing to affectionately hand-glide the „paper-leaf“ airplane through the air. „Neither is the tail. We need to figure out which way we came in. ‚Cause there’s a chance we could find the cockpit. If it’s intact, we might be able to find the transceiver. We could send out a signal and help the rescue party find us.“ Kate tells Jack that she earlier saw smoke coming from the interior of the jungle that one can glimpse through the not-too-distant valley. They resolve to make an expedition the next day to look for the severed front part of the plane where they might be able to retrieve the transceiver – a radio communications device that both transmits and receives – from the cockpit.

Yea, Though I Walk Through
the Valley of the Shadow of Death
All of the survivors on the beach hear a prolonged loud haunting bestial cry emanating from the jungle. It is the petrifying sound of what everyone in their worst fears visualizes as an abominable Monster. The Lost voyagers of the semi-global flight from antipodal Australia to Greater Tinseltown, USA gaze in the direction of the fog-shrouded V-shaped horizon that seems to trace the betwixt and between contingent existence down in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Never Forget – Planes Want to Be in the Air

We see the standard view out the passenger seat window that one has when sitting in a plane on a long flight. Steadied high above dense clouds, the familiar image induces a sense of floatation into reverie or disappearance away from the terrestrial frame of reference. Suspended in mildly uncomfortable comfort, in some cases heartened by the trusty companionship of one of the formidable wings, I find myself in a parallel dimension of endless time. I harmonize with the permanently irritating yet reassuring noise of the flying machine.
The smiling pretty female flight attendant with dark red hair and wearing a smart blue uniform asks Dr. Jack Shephard – sitting in left-row seat 32 of Economy Class – how his drink is. „It’s good,“ answers Jack. „That wasn’t a very strong reaction,“ says the stewardess. „Well, it’s not a very strong drink,“ replies Jack. „Just don’t tell anyone,“ she says coquettishly while offering him an extra bottle of liquor that he will put inside his jacket pocket „for later“ after she walks away. „This, of course, breaks some critical FAA regulation,“ the Doctor teases. Moments later, the turbulence intensifies. The flight attendant picks up the public address system phone and announces: „Ladies and gentlemen, the pilot has switched on the ‚fasten seatbelt‘ sign. Please return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts.“ Jack perceives that the individual sitting across the aisle from him is becoming increasingly nervous. He initiates a conversation with the African-American woman named Rose Henderson. Rose’s husband has gone to the rest room just prior to the onset of the turbulence. To calm her rising fear as the plane shakes aggressively, Rose says:„My husband keeps reminding me that planes want to be in the air.“ Behind Jack and Rose, a man abruptly goes flying through the air. Others are hurtled pitilessly about the cabin like leaves in a gusting wind. The oxygen masks come down from overhead panels. The plane’s rapid loss of altitude begins.

The Achievement of Flight

For the contemporary psychosocial cultural imagination, flight is a sense-framing tangible metaphor enlivened by the landmark stories of aeronautical and astronautical history that stands for the courageous journey to face the truth of who one really is, or the challenge of strengthening the contingent condition of being suspended „between life anddeath“ into a sustained „airborne“ existential passage. In her dreams and behavioral patterns, the child who was oppressed under the circumstances of psychological and mental abuse within her family flees. But as maturation and spiritual growth progress, escape evolves into the majestically beautiful achievement of „getting one’s plane off the ground“ and into viable flight. The original situation of the underdog or rebel – whose numbers are swelling fast in an increasingly dysfunctional society – is like that of the android replicants in the classic science fiction film Blade Runner (1982) who have only a four-year life span. „How to stay alive?“ – beyond the time-limit of one’s internal death sentence „self-destruct“ program, or even short-term „knowledge-avoiding“ survival strategy – is the haunting question posed by the last surviving escaped Nexus-6 replicant Roy Batty. My precognition is that – having entered the twenty-first century – creative outsiders like writers, artists, bohemians, punks, and many others will no longer find themselves being in such dire straits as before. Our plight is no longer so hopeless. The incomparable loveliness of successful flight is within our reach, and there is a kind of real celestial pull towards this elegant victory. Some of the great aviation pioneers of the twentieth century like Charles Lindbergh and John Glenn will be our guides to elaborating a genealogy of the inauguration of worldviews emblematized by famous flights and crashes leading up to the potentially re-enchanting „Crash Out of Globalization and Into the World“ of the present.

The great philosopher Jacques Derrida, in a book like Writing and Difference^[11], brought academic attention to writers „on the margins“ like Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille who wrote forcefully about their experience of radical difference. Leftist cultural theory in general has been fascinated by figures of the literary-artistic avant-garde who went „all the way“ to the edges of human self-experimentation: William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Kathy Acker, Samuel Beckett and so on. Although it is from Derrida and someone like Semiotext(e)book publisher Sylvère Lotringer that I learnt to place such a high value on écriture and textualité, my project is to consider selected „texts“ in the American mainstream as instances of writing that aspires to the (Heideggerian) authenticity of existence in the sense that other humanities scholars influenced by „Old Europe“ French-German thinking have reserved only for an elected group of haute culture club members. In the present study, the memoirs of Charles A. „Lucky Lindy“ Lindbergh and the flight report and air-ground communiqués of Marine Lt. Colonel John H. Glenn, Jr. (and the episodes of the television program Lost itself) are among the textual artefacts under examination. I demonstrate that „great achievements“ which have been canonized in the American cultural psyche in the simulated mode of spectacular heroism were – as biographical stories truly lived by their protagonists – extreme adventures best understood through a post-academic form of „deconstruction.“ The stratagem in my video game is to further radicalize the leading edge of literary theory yet go mainstream at the same time.

Using celebrated and notorious flights as embodied metaphors, I chart five successive worldviews of the West: universe, cosmos, globe, plate, and world. Charles Lindbergh’s transoceanic solo flight from Long Island, New York to Paris in 1927 symbolically linked the legacies of two eighteenth-century modernist-democratic political revolutions. „The universe“ is also a primary field of investigation of science, as exemplified by astrophysics. In 1961, Air Force Major Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics circled the planet one single time in a short-lived triumph for the worldview of cosmos. In the Marxist-Leninist or Christian-millenarian narrative, the planetwide extension of a system of order and harmony is the prelude to the coming of Paradise. John Glenn’s authentically heroic orbital flight in 1962 captures the moment of the crossing over of universal liberal capitalism into monopolistic-oligarchical top-down capitalist globalization. The hijacked flight of terrorists crashing two jetliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 is the accident of globalization. Following that catastrophe, the cowboy Faux President / Commander in Chief of Real and Baudrillardian-Orwellian Hyperreal Wars orders a retreat to the pre-Magellanic belief that the world is flat. George Walker „Dubya“ Bush contrives a reactionary-obscurantist platform resting on the tripod base of the leftover worldviews of universe, cosmos and globe. This optical illusion corresponds to the vista of the Earth as a flat plate that Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. „Buzz“ Aldrin, Jr. saw from the moon, or the platter of Plastic Thanksgiving Turkey that Bush held up in front of global TV cameras – while flashing his „winning“ smile – during a surprise visit to oppressed and exploited United States soldiers in the Iraq Illegal War Zone in November 2003.

The final chapter in this secret history of world-systems is the crash of the semi-global flight from Australia to the USA as depicted in Lost. The opportunity that presents itself is then to try to understand as many aspects as possible – in the seminal moments of their first appearance – of the emerging worldview of world. The survivors of Lost have crashed into something genuinely new — the world itself in its radical otherness and ambivalence, apprehended without the lens of what Heidegger calls Western metaphysical thinking in „the age of the world picture.“ Metaphysics is distanced from existence and cogitates the employment of knowledge in the service of „man’s unfettered freedom“ requiring the certainty of „an unshakable ground of truth“^[12] to establish its validity. In the age of the world picture (twentieth-century „modern times“), the world is for us „only a picture.“ Modern man institutes his relationship to the environment and to other beings through a subtle yet devastating form of domination known as representation. As „the subject,“ he sets up beings as knowable transparent objects in front of himself or as that-which-lies-before him. The subservient represented – pictorial, calculable, quantitative or informational – status of the world as a mere instrument at our disposal is continuously enforced via man’s acts of „placing before himself,“ „bringing before himself,“ and „having before himself“ (vor sich stellen, vor sich bringen, vor sich haben) of beings as objects. „Beings as a whole come to be considered in such a way that a being becomes first and only a being after it is set in place by representing-manufacturing humanity.“^[13] In the worldview of world, by contrast, there is rediscovery of passionate engagement with existence in astonishment and intuition; reinvention of knowledge as endless flowing multi-layered hyper-textual „writing“; freeing of the individual not as a sovereign Island but rather in webbed association with and even in „sweet surrender“ to other human beings; blossoming of feelings of love for animals, vegetables, and A-Life beings; and architecting the rootedness of Dasein as being-in-the-world starting from our social condition of total alienation through an aesthetics of disturbances and radical illusions.

JOHN LOCKE: The Crash of the Social Contract
(played by Terry O’Quinn)

I am male. I am a man. I am a free man. I am not an Arnold Schwarzenegger-designated girlie-man. I am a macho, a Terminator. That male avatar over there — he’ll do! Looks like he’s spent countless hours in the gym! And he has the same name as the famous late seventeenth and early eighteenth century English political philosopher of the modern liberal social contract! The very same social contract of Western Civilization that is so deeply in crisis today! The celebrated author of the Two Treatises of Government (1698) – an „Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government“^[14] – a consideration of what makes governments legitimate, and of the rights of resistance, rebellion and revolution possessed by ordinary citizens. Locke believed that the holding of beliefs – especially religious beliefs, which might include atheistic beliefs – by humans is what qualifies them to redress their grievances and assert their equality in the face of an unjust political authority. And look at that John Locke over there — he’s living through an intense authentic religious-existentialist experience! I want to be him! Hear me, oh mighty imagination-technology wish-media-of-the-future wizard! Make me a John Locke! Poof! You’re a John Locke!

Sweet mother of Jesus, what in God’s name has happened to me? It’s a cockeyed miracle! I can use my legs! I can use my legs! I feel my toes wiggling inside my shoes! Mobility and full-bodiedness have been restored to me! I’m sitting here on the beach next to the scorched podded engine, surrounded by the remains of the plane. I’m wearing my beige trousers and white shirt with blue checkered stripes. I’m engrossed in the deepest meditation that I have ever known. Here comes a torrential downpour. The other survivors are taking shelter under improvised tents and elevated aircraft parts. I couldn’t care less! Let the rain pour down! I spread my arms out wide, palms facing up. I love the rain! To me to fathom the mysteries of the universe! My turn at bat to contemplate what it’s all about. I know that a Providential Miracle has taken place. And I have been the beneficiary of it! But can one go back to less advanced forms of argument than atheism? These are the most profound of all possible thoughts. I must figure out what this all means. One thing is already certain: I would much rather be here on this Island – facing total uncertainty and the building of a new life from scratch – than back in my previous life in the „civilized world“ that had reached a dead end. In America, I was Regional Collection Supervisor for a Box Company. That $50,000 annual salary kept me going, but man, everything about that existence was gone wrong.

Robinson Crusoe (by Daniel Defoe)

A man alone and his will to survive. „THE LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRIZING ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, Of YORK, MARINER: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth of the Great River of OROONOQUE; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. WITH An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by PYRATES. Written by Himself.“^[15]
The basic situation of Robinson Crusoe’s early life was that of a young man who did not want to get a job. Robinson was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family. His father was a successful businessman, a trader in „merchandise.“ Robinson had two older brothers, one of whom was killed in war, the second of which his destiny unknown. Robinson avoided training for any particular occupation. He had a solid general education, and there was a vague idea that he might go into the Law. But Robinson dreamed only of adventure, of „going to sea.“ This wayward impulse brought him into conflict with both of his parents, not to mention several of the best friends of his youth. Why he would wish to leave the safety of his family’s home, its environs, and his native land was beyond his father’s comprehension. All Robinson had to do to attain „a life of ease and pleasure“^[16] was to follow the course that had been laid out for him by his magnanimously given upper-middle class socio-economic circumstance, supplementing this patrimony with a modicum of „application and industry.“^[17] Thanks to the efforts of those who preceded him, his life had already been shielded from the miseries to which most human beings are subjected. Only men „of desperate fortunes“^[18] and rich men seeking fame or extravagant wealth go abroad for lengthy periods of time. For a middle class person to voluntarily do so was the height of folly, his father admonished. One invites the worst of all possible misfortunes.

At the age of nineteen, having already missed his opportunities to learn a respectable trade or profession, Robinson Crusoe sets out for the first time to sea. It is a short normal trip from Kingston upon Hull to London, but even on this routine route there is trouble. The ship gets caught in a terrible storm. The weather started getting rough. The tiny ship was tossed. „Lord be merciful to us, we shall all be Lost.“^[19] As he shudders with fear, Robinson pledges that, should it please God to spare him just this one time, he will return to the House of his Father and never stray again. But as soon as the weather clears he forgets his resolution. On the eighth day of the voyage, an even more ferocious storm blows, frightening the most experienced seamen among the crew. „The sea went mountains high, and broke upon us every three or four minutes.“^[20] The ship takes on more water than it can bear. Robinson and the others on board are saved by another ship just before their own vessel sinks. After being deposited safely on shore, they walk to the port of Yarmouth. Here Robinson receives a second ominous verbal warning, articulated by the Master of the sunken ship. „Young man, you ought never to go to sea any more, you ought to take this for a plain and visible token that you are not to be a seafaring man. (…) As you made this voyage for a trial, you see what a taste Heaven has given you of what you are to expect if you persist. (…) Pray, what are you? and on what account did you go to sea?“^[21] After Robinson recounts the story of his rebellious conflict with his parents, the Master reacts with total exasperation, wondering aloud what he had done that such an „unhappy wretch“ would come aboard his ship. Not for all the money in the world would he travel again with such a harbinger of doom. „Young man, depend upon it,“ the Master concludes, „if you do not go back, where ever you go, you will meet with nothing but disasters and disappointments, till your father’s words are fulfilled upon you.“^[22]Yet an apprehension of the shame of facing family, friends and acquaintances in defeat deters Robinson Crusoe from returning to his hometown in white England. He instead takes passage on a ship to Africa, provoking the resumption of his misadventures. Sailing eastward of the Canary Islands, his ship of traffic is intercepted by a coast-guarding vessel from the Moroccan seaport of Sallee. He and his shipmates are taken prisoner by the „Moors.“ The Captain of the defending rover fancies the „young and nimble“ Robinson as his „proper prize.“^[23] He takes him as a sort of lily feminized ornament tending to his house and garden. Sometimes the Captain has the captured blue-eyed boy lie in his private cabin while the ship is in harbor.
After two years of domestication, Robinson Crusoe undertakes a daring escape by stealing the light sailboat known as the pinnace that is used in attendance on a larger ship. He proceeds along the coast of what is now Mauretania in the company of the Arab lad named Xury. The two male companions live through all manner of death-defying escapades together. They battle wild animals, struggle to obtain food and fresh water, learn to communicate and negotiate with people of native tribes, and deal with their own fear of being eaten by cannibals. Living in the vicinity of mortal dangers without being consumed by worry about them is an important stage in the Tantric challenge of initiation of the spiritual traveler into manhood ofadifferent kind.^[24] The strength of the New Man who earns the respect of the one true Goddess Gaia as an equal partner to change the world derives not from production, power, Stoicism, muscle, weapons and the dream of immortality, but rather from honest I-and-Thou encounters with the Others of femininity and death. Sustained encounters – it must be added – where the outcome is never known in advance. The final outcome of whether Gaia herself – the marvelous living alien being also known as planet Earth – will survive is also not known. It may be too late. As spiritual force, Gaia is the wounded Offspring of a complex copulation between the Judeo-Christian monotheistic God and the worldview of the most ethically Enlightened scientific atheism, the latter exemplified by Gregory Bateson’s deep ecology, Walter M. Elsasser’s holistic biology, or Donna J. Haraway’s cyborg theory.^[25] Near the Cape Verde Islands, the exhausted Robinson Crusoe and his pal Xury are rescued by a passing Portuguese ship that is on its way to the Brazilian colonies.
Robinson knows none of the Continental languages – Portuguese, Spanish or French – but there is one Scottish sailor on board who happens to speak the escaped slave’s native tongue. Restored to the company of European Men after months on the lamb in the „state of nature,“ the Englishman’s first act as a once again Free Citizen of the West is to sell his young friend Xury into ten years of indentured servitude.

Arriving in Brazil with the tidy sum of 220 Pieces of Eight in his pocket, Robinson is accepted into the settlers‘ society and becomes a sugar and tobacco plantation owner. Receiving a shot-in-the-arm of capital from England, he buys one African slave and two white servants. As time goes by, he becomes something of a neighborhood celebrity among his fellow male colonizers by retelling the story of his prior exploits along the northwest African coastline. His braggadocio tales of how he bartered with natives whet the luxury goods farmers‘ appetite for ownership of human flesh from Across the Ocean, an indulgence that was until now the exclusive privilege of those who could afford to pay the high prices demanded by the Assiento Monopoly. The South Atlantic West Shore local business doers enlist the services of an expert in how South Atlantic East Shore local business is done. Robinson Crusoe joins the expedition to go get some dark meat to make brown sugar. In exchange for his expertise, he will receive a full share of booty without having to make any up-front capital investment.
After twelve days at sea, the slave-seeking ship gets caught in a terrible hurricane, where it remains trapped for twelve days of relentless terror for the fearless crew. After plotting a course northwest by west in the direction of Trinidad, the helpless victims of Nature’s Wrath are seized upon by a second raging storm that blows them deep into unchartered waters. At the break of Dawn at the end of the Darkest Night, one man miraculously sights Land. But at this very same moment, the ship runs aground. The eleven who are still alive squeeze into a small lifeboat, abandoning themselves to the mercy of the violent waves and uncertain approach to a close by rocky strand. There is no suitable landing spot in view. „As we made nearer and nearer the shore, the land look’d more frightful than the sea.“^[26] A final massive wave capsizes the boat, sending all the aspiring slavers to their probable deaths.

Authority is Dead

Kate carefully and deferentially removes a pair of brown shoes from the feet of a dead person. She needs better shoes for the trek through the jungle. Charlie Pace is eager to help and he asks to go with Kate and Jack on their mission to search for the cockpit and transceiver. Walking in the pouring rain, the trio comes upon the front part of the plane sticking up out of the ground at a 45 degree inclination. They go inside the wrecked mass of hardware. Expending a great deal of effort, they climb uphill through the forward fuselage interior towards the enclosed space of the machine’s flying controls. Jack bangs the handle of the cockpit door vigorously with his flashlight. One of the dead pilots – his corpse having apparently been leaning with the full weight of gravity against the door – comes tumbling through. Entering the inner sanctum containing the seats of traditional authority, the three Lost survivors discover that one of the pilots, though injured with at least a concussion, is still alive! They give him some water to encourage him to speak. „How many survived?“ he asks. „Forty-eight,“ answers Jack. „How long has it been?“ „Sixteen hours.“ „Has anybody…?“ „Not yet.“ „Six hours in,“ the slightly overweight and out-of-shape pilot explains between moans of uneasiness, „our radio went out. No one could see us. We turned back to land at Fiji. By the time we hit turbulence, we were a thousand miles off course. They’re looking for us in the wrong place.“

The group finds the transceiver, but it is not working. The sound of the monster is suddenly heard loud and clear. Jack tries to see it through the film-covered window. The Captain sticks his head outside to get a direct look. The beast takes him in one fell swoop. Off-camera, he is lifted high into the air and thrashed about. Blood is splashed on the windshield. Presumably the pilot has been eaten. This ground-shaking Event causes the entire construction of the „guiding“ part of the plane (which was pointing upwards at the angle of an erect phallus!) to topple over, restored to level ground. „What the hell just happened?“ exclaims the bewildered Charlie Pace, who in the meantime had made a sneak trip to the bathroom to give himself a drug fix. Overcome by fear, the three leading characters hightail it outta there pronto. They drag each other through the swamp until Charlie’s leg gets caught in the big muddy.
KATE
I run and run until at last stopping to catch my breath. I’m all alone in the woods! I’m standing here shivering with cold and fear. I’m sobbing and panting. The monster is out here somewhere! Oh God, oh God, it’s going to get me! I don’t want to die! I hear the wailing from above and thunder in the distance. Jack! Where’s Jack? How did we get separated? I need that man. That protector. Protecting spirit, enter me! Have you given me strength? Now what’s this? Someone’s beside me! It’s that other boy. He looks terrified. What’s he got to say for himself? „That thing,“ he slowly utters in naked dread and trembling of the Other. „We were dead. And then Jack came back and he pulled me up.“ My Jack! A real man. He needs my help. GO BACK AND GET HIM, Kate. But wait it seems that this little girlie-boy doesn’t want to go back! Timidity oozes as words from his mouth. Some lame excuse about the monster’s bulking dimensions. „There’s a certain gargantuan quality about this thing,“ the insignificant nothing bleats. Yeah right, soldier boy. Bet it had sharp ferocious Jaws, too. OK, I’m on my horse, Charlie, moving courageously back through the quagmire that guys like you always seem to bumblingly blind-stagger us into. Full stop. What’s that? A small lustrous precious object lying on a mud bank next to a puddle. Some kind of metal medal? It’s the pilot’s wings. The physical symbol of a Captain’s bravery, skills, and leadership qualities. I reach down and pick it up. Now a slight shift of my ocular perception to the right. I see the reflection of the pilot’s dead body in the small pool of still water. His corpse is hanging from the overhead trees. Who can believe this. Jack appears out of a clearing in the woods. Squinting our eyes in an act of controlled will and maximum intensity to hold back a flood of tears, we look up together at THE DEATH OF POWER. My man! He’s alive! I move to embrace him. Or to be embraced by him. I tilt my pretty head slightly to the left, a subtle gesture. I purse my lips ever so finely. He rebuffs me with a shoulder fake. The pilot’s a bloody mess. His face is disfigured. „How does something like that happen?“ wonders Charlie Pace out loud. At least we have the broken transceiver as a trophy from our hunting trip.

(18 November 2005 — Alan N. Shapiro)
Murray Shapiro was the son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine who owned a grocery store in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Eleanor Roosevelt was a regular customer in my grandfather’s store, as was later the wife of Brooklyn Dodgers baseball legend Pee Wee Reese. Murray enlisted at age seventeen in the U.S. Army. He served as Private First Class and an anti-tank specialist with the First Infantry Division. He fought the „Battle of the Bulge“ in Belgium. Murray was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. After six months in combat, a shell exploded a few feet from his head. He was thrown violently to the ground from his gunner’s position and cracked his skull. After several days of unconsciousness, Murray woke up in the hospital, partly deaf with ringing in his ears for life. „We didn’t sleep day or night,“ he told me. „We slept whenever we could, in fits and starts. We took turns. We were hungry, cold and tired all of the time.“
The American men and women who risked their lives in World War II fulfilled their fundamental moral duty; they fought an enemy whose „evil“ was an unambiguous given. Courage and personal sacrifice were the routine conduct of this „band of brothers.“

The survivors came home to a postwar America of unprecedented prosperity and economic opportunity. In the 1950s and 1960s the collective project of making the American dream a reality unfolded in classic form. Thanks to the 1944 „GI Bill of Rights,“ affordable higher education and loans for new home construction were readily accessible to returning veterans. Murray Shapiro earned a degree in civil engineering from The City College of New York. Like his mentor James Ruderman, Murray also had a keen academic interest in structural engineering. He pursued his graduate studies at Columbia University.
Murray Shapiro was a great engineer. Others – like Jack Rudin^[27] and Howie Zweig^[28] – can speak about his skills and accomplishments with knowledge infinitely greater than mine. I will only say on this subject that I love and have always loved the Pan Am Building.^[29] In the absence of the World Trade Center, the Pan Am Building takes on even greater significance.
In the 1950s, on the outskirts of New York City, agricultural tracts were converted to housing developments. In my earliest memory, my mother, Florence Morrison Shapiro, is buying fresh corn at the farm that was a few minutes‘ walk from our newly erected split-level house. We moved to our suburban community in 1958 when I was two years old and my brother Fred was four. Summer was my favorite time of year. Fred and I inherited our love of baseball from our Dad, and Fred passed on this passion to his two sons, Andy and James. Murray remembered many details of the first game he ever attended at Ebbets Field — in 1937 at age twelve. The great Carl Hubbell pitching for the Giants. Van Lingle Mungo on the mound for the Dodgers, the high-kicking righthanded desperado fireballer. Two and two, what’ll he do? Buy a Goldberg’s Peanut Chew.
For thirty-five years, my father commuted five or six days a week – by bus and subway, later by car – between Long Island and midtown Manhattan. He knew all the secret shortcuts to avoid traffic. While I was in high school, I worked two summers at the Office of James Ruderman^[30] and sat in the passenger seat of the car twice a day for an hour while he drove. Take the Grand Central Parkway past the World’s Fair Grounds and LaGuardia Airport to just before the Triborough Bridge. Turn left under the elm and cut through backstreets and „Sneaker City“ – where teenagers had thrown dozens of pairs of sneakers tied together with laces over telephone wires – down to the 59th Street Bridge. Along the way, you could save three minutes by hotrodding it through the exit and re-entry ramps of a service station while the car on your left stood still.
My father sometimes worked sixty-four hours a week and I saw him on Friday evenings and on Sundays. He sat with me on a pew-like lacquered wooden bench in the temple at Shabbat services. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote about the deeply meaningful communication between I and Thou – sometimes in silence, without words – and this deep contact is what I experienced in synagogue and all my life with my father.He taught me to ride a bicycle. I remember vividly the moment he let go. We played catch together. We flew kites. He taught me about stamp collecting. We climbed bedrock in Central Park. My Dad did all kinds of stuff with Fred and me on Sundays, while my Mom exhibited her paintings in the Washington Square outdoor art show. He took us to the Museum of Natural History and to the movies. We saw Robinson Crusoeon Mars, the first science fiction film I loved. We saw PT-109. I would say the Kennedys were our symbolic hope. I met Senator Robert Kennedy on Sonny Fox’s Wonderama show when I was eight. We had a serious discussion about civil rights and the nature of leadership. During my last conversation with my father, when he was still fully alert, I told him that Bobby Kennedy was my childhood hero. „As well he should have been,“ Murray replied with calm emotion and great grammatical precision. Bobby should have been President.

My most cherished memories of my father are the times I spent with him at countless Mets games at Shea Stadium, at the Jets, Giants, Yankees, Knicks, and Rangers games we went to in the 1960s, and on the golf course at the Glen Head Country Club. Golf started for us when I was a kid with Pitch N‘ Putt at Jones Beach, then 9 holes at Christopher Morley State Park, and 18 holes at Eisenhower Park. Recently we played many rounds at Van Cortlandt Park. Sitting with my father in the loge reserved seats at Shea or in our golf cart at Glen Head, I experienced exactly Martin Buber’s privileged dialogue of Iand Thou. Indirectly, Murray recounted to me during those many sessions the story of his life.
What was the fundamental lesson that my father transmitted to me? What was the wisdom of the Jewish philosopher Murray Shapiro? I claim for my father the noble title of philosopher, because at the core of his being was his sense of deep moral responsibility. Within my father’s soul, there was a powerful sense of the sacred. Some men start and justify wars by saying that God has spoken to them. But as Judaism teaches, one does not write the name of God, meaning that one does not speak of the sacred directly. One speaks of what is sacred or holy indirectly through one’s deeds. Murray kept that which was sacred to him a secret. He never said it in any catch phrase or sound bite. But if one listened carefully – and I will always try to listen more carefully in my memories of him – there was much that was sacred to Murray. The Brooklyn Dodgers were symbolic of something profoundly sacred. Providing for your family and helping others who are in need were sacred responsibilities for Murray. My father financially supported many family members – including myself – when they were in a crisis or without income.
Murray had a keen sense of play and a great wit.Work for him was play. „Enjoy life and give yourself things to look forward to,“ he often told me. Murray’s vintage New York humor was a big part of his humanity. Groucho Marx was his favorite: „My name is Captain Spalding, the African explorer, did someone call me schnorrer? Hooray, hooray, hooray.“
Florence, my wife Helga Augustin and I share a beautiful memory of Murray’s 80th birthday. It was a warm and dry summer’s day, July 5th, 2005. The four of us drove downtown and took a walk on the West Side promenade. We drove in light traffic over to the Lower East Side. Visiting from Germany, I went into the St. Mark’s Bookshop and was delighted to discover that they had sold ten copies of my media studies book on Star Trek and wanted to order five more. We ate dinner in Katz’s Delicatessen. Katz’s had not changed a bit since we went there many times as a family during my childhood. They gave us a special table in the back. The owner was sitting at the table next to us. Our waiter told fascinating anecdotes of the restaurant’s history. The portions were huge and delicious. Murray told a story of his Bar Mitzvah in 1938. His father picked up the food for the Bar Mitzvah party at Katz’s Delicatessen. Murray Shapiro was a great New Yorker.
What the heck, when all is said and done Murray and I had a lot of fun together. And here’s the surprise: there’s more fun ahead. Whenever I’m having fun – or playing at work – I know that my Dad will be standing next to me, rooting me on. Murray would like us to enjoy and celebrate life.
The Spirit of St. Louis (by Charles A. Lindbergh)As I – Alan Neil Shapiro – grew into adolescence, advertising and shopping were more and more taking command of ordinary American life. One of the first malls on Long Island was a short drive from my family’s house. It was built at Roosevelt Field, the famous airstrip where Charles A. Lindbergh took off in theSpirit of St. Louis in 1927 on his pioneering transatlantic solo flight to Paris. After I got my driver’s license and car at age eighteen, I motored endlessly around the huge parking lots that encircle the multi-story department stores and long successions of smaller boutique shops of the Roosevelt Field Shopping Mall. After finding a parking space, I walked the promenades and inspected odd gadgets of every kind. I shopped at Macy’s for trousers and my Jockey underwear. I was like Raymond Babbitt, the „autistic savant“ character played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 movie Rainman, who can only wear underpants purchased at Kmart. On the way home, I stopped to put a tiger in the tank of my gas-guzzler and to try to impossibly match the left and right halves of a „game coupon“ to win a whole big fat bunch of Dead Presidents. You know: Bananas. Cold Cash. Megabucks. El Dinero. The Wherewithal. The Necessary. Moolah. Gelt. The Green Stuff. Lettuce. My Philadelphia Bankroll. Smakeroos. Gingerbread. Gravy. Paydirt. The Handsome Ransom. A Nice Piece of Change.

I – Charles Augustus Lindbergh – am in quest of the $25,000 Raymond Orteig prize being offered to the first woman or man to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. I’m on the airstrip at dawn on the North Shore of Nassau County, Long Island in my tiny cockpit. My whirlwind engine monoplane was built by a team of ingenious aeronautical engineers at startup Ryan Airlines Incorporated of San Diego, California. My enterprise has been financed by a group of intrepid risk-taking investors centered around the Robertson Aircraft Corporation of Lambert Field in St. Louis, Missouri. I haven’t slept a wink all night before undertaking a daring venture that will require digging deep within myself to muster every ounce of concentration that I possess within my mind and every scrap of courage that I own within my gut to avoid the sudden death which would follow in a matter of seconds after any momentary lapse in judgment or attention. Meteorological reports yesterday afternoon were so negative that I assumed that no takeoff this morning – or any morning in the near future – would be possible in the midst of the heavy fogs which had entrenched themselves throughout the Northeastern Corridor. I made plans to go out on the town with my friends Lane, Blythe, Stumpf, and Mahoney. We were going to catch a Broadway production called Rio Rita. Driving along 42nd Street, we stopped to phone the Weather Bureau and were surprised to hear of a sudden lifting of the storm over Newfoundland. We immediately called off going to the theater and settled instead for a quick dinner at Queensboro Plaza. While my friends readied themselves to work on final preparations all through the night in the hangar where the Spirit of St. Louis is sheltered, I returned to my hotel to try to get some shut-eye. I laid down at a quarter to midnight knowing that I only had two-and-a-half hours before I had to get up again. The comrade who was stationed outside my hotel room door to guard against intrusions by the media blundered by entering the room himself to tell me how much he is going to miss me. He interrupted my attempt to fall asleep. Now I’ve got to start a flight of approximately thirty-six hours having already missed a night’s sleep.
Daybreak. Sunrise in Garden City. „The engine’s vibrating roar throbs back through the fuselage and drums heavily on taut fabric skin. I close the throttle and look out at tense faces beside my plane. Life and death lies mirrored in them — rigid, silent, waiting for my word. I glance down at the wheels. (…) I’m conscious of the great weight pressing tires into ground, of the fragility of wings, of the fullness of oversize tanks of fuel. Plane ready; engine ready; earth-inductor compass set on course. The long, narrow runway stretches out ahead. Over the telephone wires at its end lies the Atlantic Ocean; and beyond that, mythical as the rainbow’s pot of gold, Europe and Paris. (…) Wind, weather, power, load — how many times have I balanced these elements in my mind, barnstorming from some farmer’s cow pasture in the Middle West! But here, it’s different. There are no well-established standards from which to judge. Of course our test flights in San Diego indicate that it will take off — theoretically at least. Those carefully laid performance curves of ours have no place for mist, or a tail wind, or a soft runway. I can turn to no formula, the limits of logic are passed. Now, the intangible elements of flight – experience, instinct, intuition – must make the final judgment, place their weight upon the scales. In the last analysis, when the margin is close, when all the known factors have been considered, after equations have produced their final lifeless numbers, one measures a field with an eye, and checks the answer beyond the conscious mind. (…) Sitting in the cockpit, the conviction surges through me that the wheels will leave the ground, that the wings will rise above the wires, that it is time to start the flight.“^[31]
What I truly believe in is the Spirit of Conquest, as I phrase it in my own summary self-interpretation presented in the Preface to my memoirs which were fourteen years in the writing.^[32] Or do ‚I‘ really mean – a possible secondary deconstructive reading – the Spirit of the Quest? When I was an air-mail pilot flying the St. Louis-to-Chicago route with stops in between, it was my sworn duty to deliver paper business transaction messages – come hell or high water – to connecting flights in the Windy City that carried the letters on to their designated addressees in New York. Many of my colleagues sacrificed their own lives to help the United States Government accomplish its noble mission of establishing an efficient postal system, crashing onto some ordinary wheat field or into some unseen vertical obstacle when blinded by fog or storm. Mail truck drivers voluntarily assisted us during unpaid off-duty hours in refueling and restarting our converted Army-military war machines at the intermediate stops in Illinois on the way to the realization of our dreams of serving our country and a just cause.

Flying alone at night by the light of the silvery moon, I stake my claim as a human being to equality with that elegantly refined immortal natural satellite, my entitlement to fairly fight tooth and nail for my share of happiness in this lifetime, and my chance to leave a mark after my death commemorating my short stay in this world. To sing a song of myself, to rise to become a beacon of pale light for other lonely travelers struggling to find their way and themselves in the prevailing nocturnal darkness. Someday my body will be no more, but the spirit of my works will eternally return as per a logic of non-linear temporality like the inexact coincidence between the calendrical cycle of the moon’s phases and the duration of the solar year. It is the perspective of the moon that interests me. „It makes the earth seem more like a planet; and me a part of the heavens above it, as though I too had a right to an orbit in the sky.“^[33] I am a flying ace, an aviation pioneer, a Captain of Ingenuity, and I live by a credo. I practice my devil-dog daredevil occupation so that one day humankind will dominate the sky. But as a theorist of power, ‚I‘ (Alan Shapiro-Charles Lindbergh) know that „domination“ must be understood and performed without any corresponding submission by the other — without victims. And as an antiwar theorist of technology and media, ‚I‘ diverge from the negative assessment made by Paul Virilio in War and Cinema that vision from an airplane must be the basis of a „logistics of military perception“ for the purpose of surveillance and control over territories on the Earth below.^[34] As an important aspect of an alternative post-military and post-cinematic ethic-aesthetic, ‚I‘ fly in order to have a view over, under, around and through the world more generally and supportively, like Heidegger’s shepherd of being in hyper-modern hyper-textual mode, or the cross-pollination carried out by bees. ‚I‘ can soar without sacrificing others or the planet. I – Charles A. Lindbergh – dream of being able to fly anywhere or achieving independence from the Earth. Such an altered gravity situation might be like the experience of walking on the moon — the reaching of a truly antipodal or reverse-mirror perspective on the West.

_______________________________

Alan N. Shapiro on Deutschlandradio Kultur: „Ich halte Star Trek für einen großen Text der westlichen Kultur“. Interview vom 10.12.2009
Alan N. Shapiro interviewed by Laura Mitchell on redroom: „The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, it will be led by Radical Software“. Interview vom 26.12.2009

Endnoten (↵ returns to text)

Bly, Robert, Iron John: Iron John: A Book about Men (originally published in 1990), New York: Vintage Books, 1992; p.31.↵
Heidegger, Martin, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track (edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, originally published in German in 1950), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002; p.74.↵
McLuhan, Marshall, “The Medium Is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (originally published in 1964), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994; pp.7-21. Baudrillard, Jean, “Requiem pour les media,” in Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe, Paris: Gallimard, 1972; pp.200-28.↵
McLuhan, Marshall, “Television: The Timid Giant,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man; pp.308-37.↵
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Kroker, Arthur, “Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan,” in Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise, eds., Digital Delirium (Culturetexts), New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997; pp.89-113.↵
Baudrillard, Jean, “Fétichisme et idéologie: la réduction sémiologique,” in Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe, Paris: Gallimard, 1972; pp.95-113.↵
See Weinstone, Ann, Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism (Electronic Mediations), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.↵
Ozaniec, Naomi, Meditation (originally published in 1997), Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books, 2001; p.70.↵
Kroker, Arthur, Kroker, Marilouise and Cook, David, Panic Encyclopedia, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989; p.13.↵
See Daghdha Dance Company, Choreography as an Aesthetics of Social Change.↵
Derrida, Jacques (1976), Writing and Difference (translated by Alan Bass, originally published in French in 1967), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.↵
Heidegger, Martin, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track; p.81.↵
Heidegger, Martin, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track; pp.67-8. I have modified the Julian Young English translation. The original German reads: “Das Seiende im Ganzen wird jetzt so genommen, daß es erst und nur seiend ist, sofern es durch den vorstellend-herstellenden Menschen gestellt ist.” “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” in Holzwege, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950; p.89.↵
Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com Publishing, 2005; p.1.↵
Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe (edited with an Introduction and Notes by John Richetti, originally published in 1719), London: Penguin Books, 2001; p.1.↵
Robinson Crusoe; p.6.↵
Robinson Crusoe; p.6.↵
Robinson Crusoe; p.6.↵
Robinson Crusoe; p.11.↵
Robinson Crusoe; p.11.↵
Robinson Crusoe; p.14.↵
Robinson Crusoe; p.14.↵
Robinson Crusoe; p.17.↵
Odier, Daniel, Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love (translated from the French by Jody Gladding), Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1997.↵
Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (with a new Foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson, originally published in 1972), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Elsasser, Walter M., Reflections on a Theory of Organisms: Holism in Biology (Introduction by Harry Rubin, originally published in 1987), Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Haraway, Donna J., Modest_Witness @Second_Millennium: FemaleMan©_ Meets_Onco Mouse™, New York: Routledge, 1997.↵
Robinson Crusoe (Penguin Popular Classics); p.37.↵
Jack Rudin is chairman of Rudin Management Co., one of New York City’s leading real estate developers. My father Murray Shapiro was a close friend of Mr. Rudin, and worked as his structural engineer on many major high-rise office building projects.↵
Howie Zweig is a retired principal of my father’s consulting engineering firm, the Office of James Ruderman. Murray was Howie’s mentor and close friend.↵
In the early 1960s, my father engineered the structural integrity and worked out the painstaking safety logistics of the monumental Pan Am Building (now the Met Life Building, recently sold again), constructed over the north shed of Grand Central Terminal and atop an eight-story base of granite. Completed in 1963, the skyscraper owned initially by America’s foremost international airlines is the largest commercial office building in the world — nearly four hundred thousand square meters of rentable space. Eclipsed in size later only by the World Trade Center, the vertical structure clad on the outside with concrete panels “towers over the middle of Manhattan.” See Clausen, Meredith L., The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004. Professor Clausen conducted an extensive interview for her book with my father Murray Shapiro.↵
The Office of James Ruderman, Consulting Engineers was founded in 1927, following a working stay of several years by Mr. Ruderman in post-Revolutionary Moscow.↵
Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis, New York: Scribner, 1953; pp.181-4, passim.↵
The Spirit of St. Louis; pp.ix-xii.↵
The Spirit of St. Louis; p.11.↵
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (originally published in French in 1984, translated by Patrick Camiller), New York: Verso, 1989.↵

I. Introduction

II. Poetry As A Way Out of Voluntary Servitude

III. Hope In System Failure

IV. Radical Optimism

V. Conclusion

I. Introduction

II. ‘One World’ Trade Centre

III. One of the Potential Alternatives

Dr. Gerry Coulter

References (and other important documents concerning Ando)

Religion und Moderne

Konsumgesellschaft

Befreiung oder Disziplinierung?

I. Introduction

Introit: Denial and Affirmation of Life

I Western Value-Production and Childish Value-Creation

II The Singularity

III The ‚Child’s Innocence‘ chez Baudrillard

IV Pataphysics: Photography and the Child

V The Child Knows No Destructive Desire Towards the Object

VI Conclusion: Singularity Redux

We Are ‚Lost Together‘

Pilot Episode, Part 1

Riders on the Storm (je pense à Jim Morrison)

The Wound and the Pen

KATHERINE „KATE“ AUSTEN: The Fugitive

The Oppressed Child

The Fugitive. On the Run.

F-A-T-E

Crash and Catastrophe

Starting All Over

SHANNON RUTHERFORD: High-Priced All-American Girl (played by Maggie Grace)

Talking Korean

Never Forget – Planes Want to Be in the Air

The Achievement of Flight

JOHN LOCKE: The Crash of the Social Contract (played by Terry O’Quinn)

Robinson Crusoe (by Daniel Defoe)

Authority is Dead

I
Western Value-Production and
Childish Value-Creation

II
The Singularity

III
The ‚Child’s Innocence‘ chez Baudrillard

IV
Pataphysics: Photography and the Child

V
The Child Knows No Destructive
Desire Towards the Object

VI
Conclusion: Singularity Redux

SHANNON RUTHERFORD: High-Priced All-American Girl
(played by Maggie Grace)

JOHN LOCKE: The Crash of the Social Contract
(played by Terry O’Quinn)