When Signifiers Collide

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Deems D. Morrione

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

Published by University of Minnesota PressDOI: 10.1353/cul.2006.0021

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Cultural Critique 63—Spring 2006—Copyright 2006 Regents of the University of Minnesota

WHEN SIGNIFIERS COLLIDEDOUBLING, SEMIOTIC BLACK HOLES, AND THE DESTRUCTIVE

REMAINDER OF THE AMERICAN UN/REAL

Deems D. Morrione

By a paradox that is only apparent, the discourse that makes people believe is

the one that takes away what it urges them to believe in, or never delivers what

it promises.

—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Many things have become linked to the events of September 11,2001, as a bifurcated semiotic chain of destruction, but at least oneaspect of it has not yet been thoroughly investigated, that of its excess.In fact, one could argue that the excess is imbricated in the event itselfand is therefore impossible to see. This is because a conventional semi-otic doubling posits the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World TradeCenter and that on the Pentagon as two separate and discursively equalevents. However, the attack on the latter has become enfolded by thedestruction of the former and has been thereby eclipsed. The attackon the Pentagon has become the excess of the Twin Towers; exceptfor this excess, one might call it a pure act of obliteration whose con-sequences, though immanent in 9/11, have yet to be mapped semi-otically. An important purpose of this essay is to demonstrate howthe bombing of the Pentagon is semiotically linked to the destruction/doubling of the Twin Towers. Also, how the Twin Towers–eventsbecome the alibi for the seemingly unending excess generated at thePentagon. Further, it seeks to elucidate how the excess of this semi-otic implosion has further compressed and recapitulated a wide arrayof iconographic analogues, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor onDecember 7, 1941, and the Reichstag Fire of February 27, 1933, intoits own signifying nexus.

06 Morrione.qxd 7/13/2006 10:52 AM Page 157

MAYBE FINAL DESTINATIONS DO HAVE SEQUELS

In his work The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, JeanBaudrillard presents a semiotics of doubling that explains both thesymbolic importance of the Twin Towers and why their destructionshould be read as two separate events (and it is on this basis that Iwill argue that the attack on the Pentagon is a third event, the excessof the other two). The devastation of the Towers is, of course, para-doxical. It is both singular and double. It is singular in the sense thatthe destruction of the Twin Towers has left one large semiotic blackhole in the center of Manhattan (not simply a void, for that phenom-enon is without discursive gravitational pull) and double in that itwas accomplished by collapsing two parallel events/structures. Bau-drillard explains the importance of this dual action as well as the sig-niWcance of the doubling of the Towers themselves:

Perfect parallelepipeds, standing over 1,300 feet tall, on a square base.Perfectly balanced, blind communicating vessels (they say terrorism is“blind,” but the towers were blind too—monoliths no longer openingonto the outside world, but subject to artiWcial conditioning). The factthat there were two of them signiWes the end of any original reference.If there had been only one, monopoly would not have been perfectlyembodied. Only the doubling of the sign truly puts an end to what itdesignates.1

According to Baudrillard, the aesthetic duplication that the TwinTowers comprised was an obscenity of form, a conWrmed perfection,a solidiWcation of arrogance. In classical semiotics, singularities rep-resent failure; only duplication conWrms the idea of the original.2 InBaudrillard’s framework, this is a mise en abyme for America’s over-all hyperreality, found in the paradox of utopia achieved, where thenotions of dream and reality collide into singular form.3

This is more serious than it may Wrst appear. As Perry Miller, thefounder of American studies, averred, America was established bypeople who believed that they had a political covenant with God tocreate a shining beacon to the rest of the world, a “city on the hill”that embodied God’s divine will on earth.4 The Twin Towers’ destruc-tion radically unstitches the entire fabric of this national metaphor.5

The effectivity of this allegorical system depends upon the outsideconWrmation of Baudrillard’s paradox of utopia achieved;6 this is in

DEEMS D. MORRIONE158


fact what fuels it. If America’s national purpose is to serve as a modelto be emulated by the rest of the world, it needs the Other to conWrmthis, or at the very least not to challenge the proposition. (And asmany political theorists and philosophers have noted, isn’t this oneof Hegel’s more important lessons, that the master is much more de-pendent on the slave than vice versa?) Not only did those responsibledisconWrm this paradox, they conWrmed its failure. This fact did notescape Senator John Kerry, who, when speaking of responses to 9/11in his acceptance speech for the Democratic Party’s nomination forPresident, stated, “We need to make America once again a beacon inthe world. We need to be looked up to and not just feared.”7

This is, then, what was actually destroyed on September 11, 2001:the ability of America to serve as the symbolic center of global politicsfor itself and the Other. Baudrillard argues that the Twin Towers can beseen to have committed suicide because they could not longer bearthe weight of this responsibility. In a sense, one could also argue thatthe Twin Towers imploded because the Other was no longer willingto conWrm their un/paralleled perfection. In short, the Other was nolonger able to tolerate the twin notions of cultural narcissism andeconomic arrogance and sought to end them the only way it could, bystriking at metonymic sources.

This is why the events are catastrophic semiotic collisions: theOther, meant to take inspiration from the iconography of post–WorldWar II modernity embodied by the Twin Towers, ruptured the symbolsof technological perfection with its own tools. By hijacking passengerairplanes, themselves testament to the ability to traverse spatial pointsin a way not before seen in human history, and ramming them intothe symbolic center or anchor of modernity’s systemic interplay, theskyscraper, the Other played a trump card. Recalling the news footageof these events, played over and over again on the evening news as ifit were on a continuous feedback loop, one cannot help being struckby the trauma of the disappearance of modernity itself—the collisionof two of its great technological achievements, seized from their mas-ters and utilized to bring about their own destruction. The collisionresulted in a compression of the planes, the Twin Towers, and theempty spaces within to a single point of wreckage—it was almost asif all the air had been let out, and what was left was the popped bal-loon of an age gone by.

WHEN SIGNIFIERS COLLIDE 159


Beyond the duality of the Towers and their symbolic utility, dou-bling is further important in understanding the effects of their destruc-tion. Baudrillard explains that, had only one plane demolished a singleTower, it could have been read as an accident. The second plane con-Wrmed the Wrst as an attack. (He further cites the Queens air crash amonth later as an unknowable event, since it remained a singular actof destruction. Was it terrorism? Was it an accident? Sadly, we willnever know because semiotic conWrmation never came.) Again, thesemiotic paradox: only repetition conWrms singularity.

Obliteration, however, is not the end of doubling. Doubling is notmerely destructive; it is also creative, as it produces a remainder. AsBarthes, Derrida, and others have demonstrated, writing itself is akind of violence, one that, using Deleuzean/Guattarian terminology,reterritorializes a space in order to disrupt its solidity/meaning.8 Thisis not unique to discursive phenomena, as semiotic events also pos-sess this capacity. When the Third World Others smashed into theFirst World parallelepipeds, the semiotic events rendered in the visualmedia could have been part of a 1970s-style disaster Wlm (with 1990sterrorist plot twists) entitled When Signifiers Collide. And as fatal objecttheory demonstrates, such events invite the production of banal strate-gies which attempt to detoxify the calamity and bring its meaning toan end. (The irony of this is, as Barthes points out, that “In speaking,I can never erase, annul; all I can do is say ‘I am erasing, annulling,correcting,’ in short, speak some more.”)9

Though Baudrillard does not fully explore the excess suggestedby my hypothetical disaster Wlm When Signifiers Collide, he does alludeto it in his work on the Twin Towers:

Even in their failure, the terrorists succeeded beyond their wildest hopes:in bungling their attack on the White House (while succeeding far be-yond their objectives on the towers), they demonstrated unintentionallythat that was not the essential target, that political power no longer meansmuch, and real power lies elsewhere.10

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



reason why the Twin Towers attacks and the Pentagon attack do notsit on a semiotic axis with parity: the Wrst two are understood to beintentional, the second, a mistake. However, these events are semiot-ically related, bound to the Twin Towers attacks by Al Qaeda, the pre-sumed culprits of both. It is quite logical that the Pentagon attack hasbeen subsumed under the destruction of the Twin Towers as the ofW-cial sign of the tragedy. Not only were the Wrst two attacks discursivelymapped as “intentional,” the result was the obliteration of the TwinTowers. The Pentagon was merely an attack. It is still there and hasbeen repaired. The Twin Towers were destroyed and plans have beenmade to rebuild over the wreckage. Excess abounds in this situation,but one might say that the singularity at the center of the black holecreated by the destruction of the Twin Towers can be located at thePentagon.

“WHERE GRAVITY HAS GONE MAD”

Why a semiotic black hole? This phenomenon is most effectivelymapped in the context of a geopolitics of space-time and signs, not ofgeography, topology, or climatology. The Twin Towers–event is notabout the old boundaries of pure spatiality where classical deWnitionsof nationality and sovereignty held sway but one that involves thevelocity of signiWcation and the ability of the Other to defy the anchorsof meaning. This method of understanding the semiotic-discursive uni-verse takes into consideration a non-Euclidean politics that involvesgeneral relativity: there is a curvature to our view of the world, onethat often forces causes to rebound on themselves and events to scat-ter and develop purposes that are difWcult to map using conventionalpolitical language. It just may be that we are witnessing an event thatobeys the laws of physics on a semiotic-discursive scale. This newgeopolitics concerns the semiotic gravitational tug of objects on thefatal scale, those that do not wait passively for interpretation by sub-jects. These objects have discovered a will of their own.

Much has been made of the great power of fascination and attrac-tion associated with fatal objects; they are capable of absorbing atten-tion lavished on them by devotees because of their association withsome traumatic event, resulting in what Baudrillard and others have



recognized as an “obesity” of presence.11 The characteristic that makesthem “fatal” is what affords them an intense discursive gravity: theyare catastrophic semiotic ruptures that come to be sutured to particu-lar objects and/or events. By contrast, “banality” is the realm of “cri-sis” and “law,” whereby problems are identiWed, solved, and forgotten;most of what is reported on the evening news is the province of banal-ity.12 Banal objects reveal themselves only when their low-frequencypresences are detected by the already interested, like the astronomersat SETI using giant antennas to Wnd the faint voices of ET among somuch celestial chatter. Whereas fatality needs the high energy of thegamma-ray end of the spectrum in order to register singularity, banal-ity hides in the dull and ubiquitous hum of radio. Diane Rubenstein’sdiscussion of the death of Princess Diana posits the fatal object as a“radical fetish of virtual reality, a move beyond alienation to a prin-ciple of otherness raised to technical perfection” that can “refract everyinterpretation into the void.”13 The fatal object is the paradigm of thisframework: its excess is a virtual remainder, the fait divers that en-courages a process of fetishization on its behalf.

The semiotic black hole is the next step in fatality; it is the destruc-tion of the whole sign, an obliteration of a massive totemic paradox(in this case, utopia achieved). It is not merely a fait divers that comesto be seen as traumatic, it is a perfect catastrophe, a shocking, ineluct-able event that radically transforms the socius, possessing a gravita-tional pull that has the power to massively reshape and remotivateeven the political (long assumed to be dead, it now has been joltedinto virtual activity as a spectral show of poll numbers, morality plays,and special effects). Unlike the usual fatal object/event, which refractsits banalities “into the void” while still sutured to them, the semioticblack hole has the power to reconWgure the geopolitical universe whileleaving little or no trace of its inXuence. Fatal objects rely on overtmetonymic, synecdochal, and hyperreal ties to their banalities inorder to literalize them; Princess Diana has a foundation, Megan Kankahas her own law. We do not refer to the Department of HomelandSecurity as the 9/11 Memorial Bureau for Consolidating IntelligenceGathering by U.S. Spy Agencies; it is not necessary to do so. The TwinTowers have made it possible to elide discussions about due processand spying or even about extant terrorist threats; the banalities gener-ated after an event of this magnitude have their own self-justiWcations



and therefore need little connection to the originary trauma. For ex-ample, the major objection of most Democrats to the creation of theDepartment of Homeland Security was related to the lack of unioni-zation afforded to its employees and not to due process/constitutionalissues such as respecting the “zones of privacy,” proper procedurefor trying the accused, or proWling. The semiotic black hole, then, is acollision of a fatal event and a perfect object that not only results inthe multiplication of banal discourses and events under one sign suchas Princess Diana or JonBenet Ramsey but a restructuring of the geo-political universe in which the event takes place.14

If we accept Einstein’s theory of general relativity, we understandgravity to be the geometric composition of space-time. Black holes,because of their intense gravity, warp the fabric of space-time aroundthem (all matter in the universe does this, but black holes do it withsuch extreme force that whatever falls into them becomes destroyedby the singularity within and only later Wnds its way back into theuniverse in mangled form). Following this logic, the implosion of theTwin Towers may be the event horizon (or entrance) to a black holewhose inner gravitational nexus (or singularity) is centered south ofNew York in Washington, D.C. The Pentagon, on a semiotic axis withthe Twin Towers linked by Al Qaeda, is the gravitational center ofthis black hole. It therefore warps the geopolitical space-time aroundit by deWning, displacing, and destroying the matter it affects. It couldnot have been destroyed by the Al Qaeda attack because it is the forceof destruction (one can hope, as Stephen Hawking says, that black holeseventually dry up, but that is another discussion).

As with all black holes (both physical and semiotic), the event hori-zon is the site of the rupture in space-time in which it was created. Here,the rupture of the paradox utopia achieved by the semiotic collision atthe site of the Twin Towers created an angry point of cultural-politicalXux that coalesced into a singularity of intense gravity at the center. Inthis case, the singularity is the Pentagon. This is the case for two rea-sons: First, for the reasons already explained, it is the site of excess, offailure. Second, it is the avenging excess of the Twin Towers–events.The ubiquitous “War on Terror,” the Pentagon’s response to 9/11, hasled to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the curbing of civilrights in the United States through the passage of the USA PATRIOTAct. To understand this more fully, one should recall that, after all the



other explanations for the war in Iraq evaporated (WMDs, uranium,centrifuges), the one rationale on which the Bush Administrationsteadfastly refused to budge was the claim that Saddam Hussein indi-rectly participated in the events of 9/11 through his mysterious “con-nection” to Al Qaeda. The Pentagon, then, is the dense point in whichthe geopolitical space-time of the Twin Towers–events is being warped.

What, then, is the geometric composition of this force of naturecentered in Washington, D.C.? There is, of course, the obvious—thePentagon is, after all, a geometric object par excellence. In addition tobeing the largest ofWce building in the world, it has a large pentagonalvoid in the center, almost as if its builders knew that the tension ofWve concentric rings of concrete wall would exert so much pressureon the center space that only our earthly version of quantum residue,a park, could exist there. Yet it is so much more. The semiotic blackhole in the center of Manhattan has intensiWed its gravitational pull,enabling the Pentagon to assume the position as its singularity thatcannot be seen but is still able to warp our geopolitical landscape. Anironic question one might pose is: does anyone remember the majornews stories prior to 9/11? For that matter, what about big headlineevents that occurred afterward? It would be difWcult to maintain anykind of static memory in the face of such a phenomenon, as singularevents have fallen in, as it were, and have been destroyed by the sheerpower of the geopolitical gravity generated at the Pentagon and an-chored to the national universe by the Twin Towers.

Two of the events destroyed by the Twin Towers semiotic blackhole deserve particular attention, as they themselves could be con-sidered fatal. Discussing other fatal events in the context of a semioticblack hole demonstrates not only the sheer power it has to warp thegeopolitical universe as such but also the ways in which it changesand compresses the particularities in its vicinity. This is important herebecause fatal events are themselves prodigious semiotic-discursivephenomena; only something extremely powerful should be able toeither shut them down or reconstitute them as part of a larger event.15

First, Election 2000. If ever a recent political event could claimfatal status in America, this is it (along with the Kennedy assassination,Watergate, Iran/Contra, and the Ken Starr crusade). And althoughone can quibble over hanging chads, illegal ballots, and the importanceof “undervotes” and “overvotes,” it is difWcult to argue that Septem-ber 11, 2001, had no effect (if retroactive) on the event itself. As Gore



Vidal points out in a critique of The New York Times article entitled“In Election Review, Bush Wins without Supreme Court Help,” theevents of 9/11 put an end to all questions about Election 2000.16 Vidaltakes the Times to task for attempting to provide an untenable para-dox simply for the purpose of political stability; he notes that, whilethe article’s main focus is on proving that Bush won the election, it(inadvertently?) admits that he did not. In the end, the Times is forcedinto a mealy compromise: it’s difWcult to know who won, “so, let’scall the whole thing off.”

Vidal’s disgust with the Times’s article is telling because he isnot simply making the obvious point that the results of Election 2000are questionable. Every American knows that. The important pointwith regard to the Twin Towers semiotic black hole is that this ballot-counting gesture is entirely excessive and that its timely interventioncompressed a fatal event with serious political consequences into aninconsequential blip on the radar (or as is said in political scienceparlance, it was reduced to the banality of the outlier). Since formerVice President Gore had conceded the election, there was no reason toinvestigate the results further. However, a “consortium of news orga-nizations” (spearheaded by The New York Times) decided in Decemberof 2000 to investigate and recount the votes themselves.17 Two monthsafter 9/11 and near the Wrst anniversary of the contentious election,“America’s newspaper” had a kind of hyperreal moral high groundon which to end the dispute. The New York Times is near the event hori-zon of this black hole; as “only Nixon could go to China” and onlyClinton could bring about “welfare reform,” only the Times could pro-claim the election Wnally over. Yes, it was fraught with problems, but nowwe have more important things to worry about . . .

And second, the collapse of Enron et al. Bigger than S&L, TeapotDome, and Crédit Moblier, the Wnancial scandals of the past few yearsinvolving Enron and several other megaconglomerates, with regardto their inXated stock values and their leveraging of debt on subsid-iaries, also seem to be fatal casualties of the Twin Towers semioticblack hole. Not that nothing has been done; quite the contrary. CheckThe New York Times business section during any given week, and youwill likely Wnd stories about various investigations into this person’sdealings or that subsidiary’s violation of commodity trading rules.The fatal event itself, the collapse of Enron, has fractured into a mil-lion banal particularities and is no longer front-page news.



The Enron collapse is a good example of a fatal event that occurredafter 9/11 but was unable to remain so for very long. One might haveassumed that, because members of the extant Presidential Adminis-tration were implicated in the scandal, its fatality might have beensevere enough to at least merit Iran/Contra–style hearings, but theubiquitous War on Terror (the gravitational pull of the Pentagon) hasreduced the collapse of Enron to the status of a fait divers. An excellentexample of the compression of this event into banality is found in thepersonage of one Mr. Thomas White, former Secretary of the Army forthe Bush Administration. A senior executive at Enron for eleven years,it has been suggested that he may have participated in the manipula-tion of power prices in California, that he may have engaged in insidertrading to dump his Enron investments before the company tanked,and that, also during his tenure at Enron, he attempted to secure lucra-tive deals for the now-defunct Wnancial behemoth to supply energyto the Army. When this scandal broke, many journalists and punditscalled for his resignation and Senators Feinstein and Boxer of Califor-nia asked the Justice Department to investigate his ties to the failedenergy megaconglomerate. Despite the controversy, Mr. White contin-ued in his job at the Pentagon throughout much of the Wrst George W.Bush Administration.18 Being at the gravitational center of this semi-otic black hole does have its advantages.

The power of this semiotic black hole to destroy and reconstituteevents even on the fatal scale is not limited to the present or to therecent past / near future. In fact, this event literalizes a compressionof history as well; if it is capable of absorbing both accidents andintent-laden events, there is no limit to its affect on old, dead forms.Since this warpage of our geopolitical universe is able to nullify ironyas it recapitulates what passes for “the real” before our eyes, it shouldbe no surprise that seemingly opposite events can be compressedinto singularities, “prequels” to the Twin Towers events.

THE PENTAGON’S SPACE-TIME PROBLEM:ESTABLISHING PREQUELS IN THE PRESENT

One of the more interesting discursive gravitational effects of the TwinTowers semiotic black hole and its pentagonal singularity at the cen-ter is historical in nature. I refer to the compression of two seemingly



autonomous and opposite events: the bombing of Pearl Harbor andthe Reichstag Fire. In fact, one could argue that the Pentagon’s gravita-tional doubling has reconstituted these events as a singular historicalprequel to the destruction of the Twin Towers. The Pentagon singu-larity has been able, because of its alibi in Manhattan, to reform andreconstitute not only day-to-day reality but historically based chainsof truth (or in Foucauldian terms, “epistemes”) that have becomecaught in the gravitational nexus of this phenomenon—and the PearlHarbor bombing is one of these casualties (and along with it the Reich-stag Fire), as one Wnds with the great number of parallels made be-tween the events in the press. This type of retro doubling makes agreat deal of sense in the context of Baudrillard’s refusal to say “thereal” has returned, that we still live in a “virtual universe.” If anevent can absorb both intentionality and accidents, truth and Wction,what sense does it make to discuss “the return of the real”?

Baudrillard argues in his 2002 work on the Twin Towers that wehave not experienced a return of a “real” event, that in fact reality“has absorbed Wction’s energy, and has itself become Wction.”19 Hismajor point is that in order to have a “real” event, one needs a realityprinciple, not a catastrophe, to arbitrate verity.20 Baudrillard furtherrefutes claims that September 11 not only represents an ascendanceof “the real” over “the virtual” but that it also proves Fukuyama-loverswrong, that history has somehow returned. If we can conceive of theTwin Towers–events as having opened up a rip in our geopoliticalspace-time, it may be worth considering why the temporality of his-tory cannot withstand its gravitational effects.

There are two historical examples that can serve to illustrate howthis absorption of fact and Wction has been accomplished and why itis emblematic not of a return of “the real” but of history eating itselfthrough the Ouroboros of the present. How is it that the 9/11 destruc-tion of the Twin Towers has absorbed history itself? For one thing, itallowed for the mobilization of the iconography and energy of PearlHarbor and the Reichstag Wre under one sign. This is not as odd anotion as it may Wrst appear; the reconciliation of opposites is one waydoubling reduces seemingly irreconcilable events into singular form.The phenomenon of 9/11 is also an example of doubling that eliminatesthe necessity of history as such: it absorbs both traditional historiog-raphy and the inconvenient existence of ahistorical narratives—i.e., it



has compressed both history and ahistory under one sign. (If youdoubt this, I urge you to turn to Fox News at almost any given time.)Baudrillard might describe this as an example of ahistorical nar-ratives absorbing the energy of historiography. In this case, it hasan added layer: the temporal remapping of spatiality such that theuniquely American breed of equality nulliWes details and sets unlikewith like.21

It is therefore important to avoid facile historical comparisons thatattempt to tie only the events of Pearl Harbor to 9/11 in a semiotic-discursive parallel. This is a mistake for two reasons: Wrst, it ignoresthe level of spatial-temporal interplay that must be acknowledged,and second, it cannot account for the importance of the Reichstag Fireas Pearl Harbor’s historical and semiotic analogue. Only a discussionof both of these events (themselves having been compressed into asingular prequel to 9/11) can illuminate the warpage of history occur-ring at the event horizon of the Twin Towers semiotic black hole.

The spatial-temporal axis of this parallel demonstrates why thewatershed/fraternal twin events of Pearl Harbor and the ReichstagFire serve well as the prequel to 9/11 and how this warpage of ourgeopolitical space-time has compressed these two separate historicalpoints into a singularity. It probably does not go unnoticed by mostthat the Twin Towers attacks are signiWed by the singular sign “9/11”but that the Pearl Harbor attack subsumes its date. This is also true ofthe Reichstag Wre—few people actually know the date, but the placeand event are self-evident.

There are any number of ways to unpack the spatial-temporalangle with regard to the events of September 11, 2001. However, I willdirect the reader’s attention to an extremely leading questionnaireentitled “Remembering Pearl Harbor & September 11, 2001 Survey”posted by the on-line Opinion Center.22 Beneath the title appears alaughable violation of social scientiWc survey collection methods: “Oneis a location, the other a date. Understand the importance of this!” Ifone is unable to comprehend “the importance,” rest assured that ques-tion three will end the uncertainty:

3. About Pearl Harbor & 9/11/01:One is a location, the other a date. Do you think there is signiWcance inthis obvious fact?___ No.



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

No doubt, this on-line poll would lead us to believe that the primedifference is in the mechanics of the “civilized wars” of yore, wherespatial referents had signiWcance with regard to military targets andthat obeyed the classic rules of engagement. It does point to somethingelse, however. As de Certeau suggests, there is a relationship betweenspatiality and proper names in that the connection allows for a utopicspace, an ability to dream a future.23 In the context of Pearl Harbor,one might see the importance of spatiality as a managerial crisis thatinspired anxiety over the loss of control it represented (representationitself being a semiotic arrangement whereby the real and its stand-inare perceived to have “equivalence”).24 After all, nearly the entirePaciWc Xeet was concentrated at the naval base on Oahu. One couldimagine that the American nation feared a future of Japanese domi-nation of the PaciWc, a troubling prospect for U.S. trade and for thesecurity of its borders. Likewise, the Reichstag Fire, still in the arenaof representation, dealt in prevarication (in order to have a lie, onemust also have a concept of truth).25 It is accepted by most historiansnow that the Nazis set the Wre themselves in order to generate sup-port for Hitler’s consolidation of governmental power. The burningof the German Parliament, then, became an enabling device for theNazi dream, a Third Reich. Both Pearl Harbor and the Reichstag Fireelicited strong military responses; both dealt with the loss of control(or the perception of loss); both posited spatially marked enemies—for the Americans, the exteriorized Axis powers of Japan and Ger-many; for the Germans, the interiorized Communists, homosexuals,and non-Aryans.26

The attacks on the Twin Towers, as the on-line pollsters want us to“understand,” are marked temporally by the signiWer September 11,2001 (or its various other numerical renderings). In fact, one might notethat the “uncivilized” character of these attacks is a marked disrespectfor spatiality: the scattershot approach is an attack on proper names assuch; it disallows their uniqueness, deprives them of individual iden-tity. Worse, the enemy deWes classic military logic by embracing theHeisenberg uncertainty principle: not only does it demonstrate that it



can choose velocity over position but also that it may favor unknowa-bility to precision. The disrespect for spatiality is further demonstratedby the fact that the attacks were undertaken by a nonlocalizable enemy.Al Qaeda deWes the classic spatially anchored enemy position by tak-ing the uncertainty principle in another direction: it reserves to itselfthe right to select whether it will occupy spaces of interiority or exte-riority and has proven quite effectively that it can and will make suchchoices without prior notice.

Attacks signiWed by a singular temporal point like 9/11 are morethan horriWc, they are rude in the extreme—they deny dreams. In deCerteau’s logic, the anchor that spatiality provides is what enables abridge to be built between destinations. This is because movementbetween two spatially anchored points is always a utopic gesture—one is never sure that one will reach the intended destination; it is arisky proposition to leave one place to go to another. Temporality doesnot work in the same way. To map temporally is to choose velocityover position; to take motion as a starting point, not an effect, is totable the possibility of the future. As Baudrillard argues of speed inhis work America:

Speed creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it cancels outthe ground and territorial reference-points, since it runs ahead of timeto annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause andobliterates that cause by outstripping it.27

It is the opposite case with spatiality: movement is possible betweenspatially deWned points because it is concerned with referents andterritoriality; motion is possible because there is at least a perceptionof nonmotion. Temporality is constant motion; to mark a point in timeis to freeze only that moment, to celebrate impression and deny ex-pression. An important point about the Pearl Harbor–Reichstag Fireanalogue is that both represent forms of expression. They are spa-tially marked events and consequently provide access to a mourning,which acknowledges the passing of a dream, a realization that a crisiscan be overcome. Temporally marked events, however, are concernedwith impression, as a they totemize trauma and shock, what I termelsewhere hyperpathetic mourning, a form of abreaction characterizedby a hyperreal form of pathos, which attaches banal gesture after banalgesture to a wound so that it never closes.28



The temporal marking of the Twin Towers–events is an acknowl-edgment of the rupture of the Baudrillardian paradox mentioned ear-lier, utopia achieved.29 Not only has the semiotic black hole createdby the destruction of the Twin Towers unstitched the paradox of amajor national metaphor, it has deprived the populace of the abilityto dream a future where this is the case. It has forced Americans notmerely into a national denial of the indelicate suggestion that Amer-ica has no future but into a frozen state where only trauma matters.Worse: it says that Americans are as subject to the uncertainty prin-ciple as everyone else—a type of democracy Americans Wnd mostunsettling.

Notes

Many thanks are due to Julie Webber, Diane Rubenstein, and the anonymous read-ers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

1. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers,trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2002), 43.

2. A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictio-nary, trans. Larry Crist et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 95.

3. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988),28–29.

4. See Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belk-nap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956).

5. This is easy to understand when one considers that, because of WorldWar II, the United States was able to radically reshape the world as a global sys-tem in its own image. America, both as notion and nation, was able to make itselfthe model of human rights, democracy, and the free market for the rest of theworld. The Twin Towers, according to Baudrillard, are the embodiment of thisachievement.

6. This is, in fact, a paradox within a paradox. If America is a “city on ahill,” it shouldn’t need conWrmation of this reality from the Other. In fact, responsefrom the Other should be irrelevant because the purpose of a lighthouse is self-referential—the point is to guide ships to the proper course, not be guided bythem. Yet, in order for a lighthouse to serve its purpose, there must be lost shipsat sea.

7. John Kerry, “We Are Here to Make America Stronger” (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/30/dems.kerry.transcript.2/index.html).Kerry’s conWrmation of the rupture of this paradox is found not only in his use ofthe beacon metaphor but in the fact that he is speaking in the past tense; he refersto a noble history wherein the United States was a “city on the hill,” a positionthat has been lost and must be recovered.



8. See Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berke-ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); and Gilles Deleuze andFélix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Mas-sumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

9. Barthes, 76.10. Baudrillard, Spirit, 50.11. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J.

Niesluchowski, ed. Jim Fleming (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Semiotext(e), 1990). See also, JeanBaudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1996); andDiane Rubenstein, “‘That’s the Way the Mercedes Benz’: Di, Wound Culture, andFatal Fetishism,” Theory and Event 1, no. 4 (1997): 1–8.

12. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 26. See Baudrillard’s distinction betweenanomie (banality) and anomaly (fatality) for further clariWcation.

13. Rubenstein, 1.14. In this context, I refer to such banal events/discourses as police investi-

gations, the institution of foundations, the establishment of laws, the creation ofWeb sites, and so on—all of those things, with some signifying attachment to asign, that spiral outward into the discursive universe because of some fatal event.

15. I should also note that some quite odd banal events have also occurredas a result—three in particular. First, the fact that the Twin Towers semiotic blackhole has enabled the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which,among other things, has been able to act as a go-between for the various intelli-gence gathering agencies of the U.S. government, thereby defusing some of thehistoric rivalries between them and giving them avenues for greater cooperation(of course, when it isn’t being asked to monitor the whereabouts of members of theTexas state legislature). Second, the gravitational pull has attracted Hollywood,not simply by encouraging them to generate patriotic-themed Wlms but to shelvethose that may be read as critical of U.S. foreign policy. For example, Miramaxcochairman Harvey Weinstein admitted in The New York Times to having delayedthe release of The Quiet American because he said it was “unpatriotic” (see JonWiener, “Quiet in Hollywood,” The Nation 275, no. 21 [December 16, 2002]: 6). Andthird, one cannot ignore the most ridiculous of banalities, that of the House of Rep-resentatives’ Administration Committee, which ordered the cafeterias in its build-ing to change its menus to “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” to reXect currentdispleasure toward France for refusing to support “preemptive” action in Iraq.

16. Gore Vidal, “Times Cries Eke! Buries Al Gore,” The Nation 273, no. 20(December 17, 2001), 13–15.

17. These organizations consisted of the following: The New York Times, TheWashington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Tribune Company, The Palm BeachPost, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Associated Press. See Ford Fessenden, “Howthe Consortium of News Organizations Conducted the Ballot Review,” The NewYork Times, November 12, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12METH.html.

18. Interestingly, White’s eventual resignation from his position as Secretary



of the Army came not because of his Enron dealings but, according to conserva-tive editorialist Robert Novak, for being on the wrong side of “Rumsfeld’s strug-gle with the Army high command” (“Don Rumsfeld’s Army,” townhall.com, May1, 2003). This sentiment was echoed/lamented by Joan Claybrook, president ofPublic Citizen, who argued that White should have been Wred for his activities atEnron and that his resignation came “far too late and for the wrong reasons” (“Bet-ter Late Than Never: Administration Should Have Fired Army Secretary ThomasWhite Long Ago,” citizen.org, April 28, 2003).

19. Baudrillard, Spirit, 28.20. Ibid.21. As a model for this, I have in mind the notion of “reverse discrimination.”

It used to be that racism was conceived as something historical, tied (at least inthe United States) to the various forms of oppression experienced by nonmajorityethnic/racial groups (particularly African Americans and Native Americans).However, after the various Civil Rights Acts were passed, it became au courant toequate any type of discrimination with a racial/ethnic overtone as racism. Now,even a George W. Bush could claim “racial discrimination” if, while walking byan African American on the street, that person called him “cracker,” “whitey,” or“proof of the failure of the Caucasian race.”

22. www.opinioncenter.com.23. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 102–4.24. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6.25. Ibid.26. Although, of course, the Nazis blamed the nearly blind Dutch commu-

nist Marinus van der Lubbe for the Wre itself, the rhetorical point here concernsthe utility of creating interior enemies for political gain.

27. Baudrillard, America, 6.28. Deems D. Morrione, Sublime Monsters and Virtual Children, PhD thesis,

Purdue University, 2002, 136–37.29. The new building designed for the site does not reenergize the paradox

of utopia achieved, it is merely excess created by the Twin Towers–events. If thisparadox had not ruptured, who would be talking about a new building on thissite? And what new national metaphor is instituted through having the tallest ofWcebuilding in the world? If it does represent some new cultural-political paradox, itis different from what was ruptured on September 11, 2001.



When Signifiers Collide

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