Enrico Buonanno
Terrorist forces have taken the floor energetically, and were handed a loudspeaker resonating in every corner of the globe. An incredibly clever, double-barrelled attack on a building that seemed a tailor-made receptable.
The first crash prepared the setting, rose the curtain, and pointed spotlights in the form of dozens of cameras, so that the second crash could take place "live", "in action", before the journalistic eyes of the rest of the world.
If it is true that terrorism is characterized by the need for theatricality, dramatization, publicity, here we are dealing with avant-garde, first-class 21st Century terrorism, with a sophisticated ability to use the widest reach of the media.
The elegant curve of the low-flying airplane, the oblique outline of its wings against the rigorously orthogonal grid of the World Trade Center (henceforth abbreviated WTC), the carmine eroticism of the penetrative impact, and the domino-like tumble of the facade components, as the whole structure melted upon itself in a cloud of dust. Hence the assertion of a primacy in the history of terrorism, an impeccable blow, the sublime of the aesthetics of terror.
I will first draw some considerations on the catastrophic specificity of this event, and then, by contrast, describe the generic attitude with which it was received, and projected into a collective syndrome - that is, confluence.
I
In existence, there is an economy that is specific to money, an economy specific to personal relations, and so on. There are different kinds of economy, which finally all refer to a more general energetic economy. The importance of the symbolic impact of the destruction of the WTC was partly due to the economic concentration of the damage. Within a few seconds, one witnessed the disappearance of thousands of square feet of office spaces, the cutting off of infrastructural connections that transported thousands of travellers every hour, and the annihilation of a significant fraction of the financial intelligentsia of one of the world's stock-exchange capitals.
In this sense, employees working in the WTC were an integral part of the economic target of the terrorist action. In my analysis, the loss is that of a great building has been the most significant consequence. Not just people, but also places, squares, and art works are endowed with intelligence.
Perched on an imposing infrastructural interchange, in turn wrapped by a large shopping area, in their uncompromising verticality of the twin towers enclosed a square of travertine marble, which felt domestic and incredible at once. The WTC represents one of the few projects of the modern era combining transport, public life, and work, in a complex and yet urbanistically reactive spatiality. In this sense, it is a very different paradigm from the typical New York skyscraper, in spite of the formal similarity. Such characteristics are evident to observers who have a synthetic grasp of the urban dynamics, and who perceive flows (of energy, of people and materials), even before seeing the constructive geometry.
On the financial point of view, is this really and economic loss for the USA? In the long run, probably not. At the time of writing, the army is preparing for a great war, and wars always mean a great economic boost for the USA - as is confirmed by the periods of economic depression that regularly characterize the post-conflict phase, when subsidies and investments in the warfare industry come to a halt.
Furthermore, the response of the financial market was fast, highly effective if compared to the political reaction.
The prompt reorganization of the great banking and financial firms, and the relative stability of the US dollar on the market, demonstrated the robustness of the American financial apparatus - which, being based primarily on information systems, does not need to rely on the specificity of any particular site.
Finally, it is necessary to put in perspective what has been publicized as the most severe loss, that is, the loss of human lives. One should notice that our era has witnesses, and continues to witness instances of violence and death that are much greater than the one in question here, both in terms of bloodiness and of importance. Years of civil wars in the developing countries (which are practically always fomented by the economic interests of the industrialized countries, with American imperialism often playing a dominant role) make this strike appear, by comparison, as a drop in an ocean. It then becomes clear that we need to seek elsewhere the causes of the global mourning that has obscured the world for over a week.
II
What I intend to analyze is how the vertical collapse of the towers propagated horizontally, not as physical death any more, but rather as spiritual mortification for millions of people. For simplicity, I will discuss issues concerning journalists, politicians, and citizens separately, even through a compenetration of those categories occurred.
1. As for the former, their forces were deployed massively, making the prevalence of this kind of informational medium in our society particularly obvious. Stills and shots of the event worth millions of dollars spread through the world at incredible speed, revealing the degree of saturation of the global journalistic network. The barriers of space and cultural differences having been abolished, a citizen of Seoul was able to see the same reportages as a resident of the Bronx, within the same delays.
The synergy between terrorism and media has been already mentioned, and in this sense the events of September 11th certainly marked a triumph for both modalities of circulation. On the other hand, while terrorism implements a strategy of striking and then withdrawing, journalists necessarily recycle a piece of news to a degree of hyper-saturation, until it is replaced by a novel piece of superior commercial value.
The capacity of the journalists to fill hours (or, depending on the medium, pages) on end, without any real information has been incredible. In the extreme case of CNN, for instance, the leading channel managed to alternate videos, reportages, and interviews for 24 hours a day, for a period of many consecutive days. Clearly, none of these interviews were really informative in their content, due to the utter opacity that hindered both a discourse on the aetiology of the strike - and hence its political implications - and a quantification of the inflicted losses. Whenever it would not prove possible to find relevant images or pieces of information, these were just constructed. One such case is the broadcasting of a film showing crowds of Palestinians street-celebrating the bombings (the film was in reality shot in 1991, during the Gulf war, so that its replay was rhetorical and anachronistic).
None of this is intended as criticism for the journalists, who do but respond to a demand of the public. Such demand, on this occasion, largely surpassed the supply; the servers of the dominating informational websites (CNN, The Guardian, etc.) all experienced great difficulties in coping with the overwhelming quantity of requests. Thus, a cycle of positive feedback between the mutually promoting rhetoric of journalism and collective hysteria.
An extreme and relatively new phenomenon has been that of a "journalization", in the sense that whoever had access to an informational channel (a neon signs in a public space, the mailing list of an institution, or a web site that is not strictly personal) believed to have the right (or the duty, they would probably say) to emit on this channel their more or less personal opinions (memes).
2. As for politics, I shall distinguis the attitude of the consignees of the executive power, and that of its implementers, that is, the police forces.
(a) Appearing in the public speeches under the pressure of the population, politicians disguised their shock and embarrassment under the mask of a sort of patriotic rhetoric with funerary overtones. Dominated by the pretence that the terrorist attack was unjustified, sudden, and unexpected, this rhetoric, for the occasion colored as a rhetoric of justice (that is, "making justice" in the form of legalized violence), served its purpose of galvanizing the larger strata of the public, ready to heap their anxieties and existential failures in the matters of the state (the term "larfe" here indicates the lower section through the social pyramid).
(b) This also implied the public's endorsement of the assumption of power on the part of what we can see as the socially somatized expressions of the monitor of deflection - that is, the military cadres and police forces. Set between the expectation of the many, and the surrender of power of the political cadres, these forces could take a position of dominance.
In the case of New York, for instance, an area of several square kilometres in the proximity of the WTC was immediately frozen. The extent of this area, clearly larger than what was required by the logistics of the situation, responded more to the assertion of a monopoly for journalists and police forces, rather than to a real need of facilitating the works and the protection of the public. Walking in the area, I could notice how police bodies, rescue teams, volunteers, and technicians were acting in a sort of reciprocal synchronicity of machinical type.
Like an organism, a machine is characterised by the synchronization of a multiplicity of parts toward a unitary aim. Unlike the organism, however, the machinical part is unaware of the movement of the whole; it works as though it was extraneous to the whole.
One will realize that these events represents a great loss for New York, if one puts them in the historical-psychological perspective of the city: under the approximately decennial charge of Mayor Giuliani, New York has continuously and increasingly suffered the censorship and the super-ego of the police forces - and the citizens have allowed this, in exchange for the Mayor's promise to "clean up" the city from the widespread small-scale criminality that characterized the city in the 80s.
3. While these consequences are necessarily limited to the national territory, the network-effect constituted by the public reaction, and the memetic proliferation made possible by the media, extended beyond the boundaries between states, even beyond what is referred to as the "western world". Generalizing a range of expressions, which can readily be identified as typical of the monitor of deflection (and are in all cases rooted in dynamics of fear and desertion from individual responsibility), I remarked three dominant forms, which I will discuss in order of increasing interiorization.
(a) Probably the lowest reaction, on national ground, has been that of direct agression toward immigrants of the Arab countries - or, often, towards the more numerous immigrants of Indian origin, in virtue of their relative somatic similarity with the populations of the Middle East. This generalizing, racist aggressiveness was presented in all sectors of society, from the private citizen to the powerful, in different degrees of sublimation.
(b) A more widespread reaction, which can specifically be labelled as "social hysteria", has been one of disorder, personal ineptitude, under the almost paranoiac pretension of being in a situation of absolute danger - be it personal, familiar, or collective. In other words, this exceptional occurrence has served as excuse to turn away from the practical reality of the individual, and relate to the other on a mode of anxiety or (self-)pity. The overflow of telephone lines and wire connections to New York only testifies of the magnitude of this modality.
Many people, some of which I had not heard in years, contacted me from abroad; in the majority of cases, I was to find that their apprehension was nothing but a deviant modality, an outlet allowing them to respond, in whichever way, to a state of affairs publicized as urgency. Their violent reaction to my relative silence then confirmed that the underlying intention of their agenda was a false, pathological one, an outdated, repetitive relational mode, dressed up in the latest news.
(c) Finally is the mechanism that I ascertained most regretfully, which struck particularly the more civilized and more sensitive individuals, the so-called "good guys". This is a mechanism of self-mortification, an idle guilt complex, which achieved but prostration of those people in their daily lives.
Naturally, this form of introverted aggressiveness also resulted in personal incapacity. I heard many people complain of their tiredness of gathering information from television and papers - some of them being academicians of high standing, whose normal daily praxis involved confrontation with highly specialized intellectual problems, far beyond the idle inconsistencies of the media. Evidently, their tiredness was symptomatic of a self-inflicted error, active mortification, and assimilation of dystonic material.
A practical metaphor of relevance has been that of blood donation: although in the rescue operations only half a dozen or so were pulled out alive from the pile of ruins in the place of the WTC, thousands of New Yorkers, and more generally of American, visited blood banks and hospitals to donate blood.
"Metaphor" in the sense that, besides providing a pardigmatic example of memetic contradictoriness, it perfectly illustrates the attitude of giving up one's own vital energy, without any effective advantage for the actuality of the situation.
Evidently, physiological somatizations of the dynamics described above were not difficult to encounter, in the form of a lack of coordination in the movements, an amount of perspiration unjustified by the mild early-autum weather, and a great deal of premature deliveries by pregnant women.
III
September's events gave me a chance to discover with surprise how I differ from the many. Particularly in the moments of pleasure - inthe enjoyment of an especially well-chosen combination of tastes, in the admiration of the perfection of the streaks of clouds coloring dusk; in brief, in those moments when the soul renews itself with such simplicity - I realized that the many, in my place, would have failed to realize this pleasure, this aesthetic compenetration with the world; instead, they would have castrated it in self-censorship, self-punishment, according to a perverse logic that grants no pleasure to those in the proximity of disgrace.
By contrast, a more mature morality shows that the converse is true. Is it not a contradiction to grieve the other's death, and then mortify one's own life? Is it not essential, in the face of death, to act the renewsal of the spirit and the force of intelligence, also through the catharsis of pleasure?
A difficult situation demands the integrity of strength; here, it is the figure of the leader, his practical efficacy, that become central; there is no use for the dead weight of those who get entangled in the thanatic process. Hence, the real leader cannot be affected by the modalities of the others, he need to remain intact in his capacity (through pleasure, among other things), and this then enables his providential role, his inseminating capacity. Among the capable ones, I noticed more availability, a readiness to smile, the implicit affirmation of something like: "Well, something bad has happened; we'll just have to make a further effort of positivity".
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