Crisis of Meaning
By Peter Lamborn Wilson
The author was in NYC from Sept. 9th to Sept. 15th and this piece
was written in the week after the attack.
A few days after the event, the New York Times ran an interesting article
on the advertising "industry" and its crisis. Not only zillions
of dollars a day etc. etc., but a weird effect: suddenly it seems impossible
to have advertising at all. It seems massively "inappropriate"
to move product as per usual with shrieking & insinuating, mocking
& sneering, prurience & peeping; with hate & envy masked as
fashion, with greed thinly disguised as freedom of choice.
Death and tragedy occur every day, every minute, not only in the former
Third World, even in New York, even in America. Why hasn't advertising
ever seemed shameful to anyone ever before? The media - which cannot utter
a sound without puking up a cliché - speaks now of the waking of
a sleeping giant (meaning that we will no longer terrorism etc.) - but
what was this sleep? And what does it mean to wake into a feeling of shame?
Last week, it seems we were willing to admit that our highest social values
could be expressed in price codes (the "mark of the Beast" as
the cranks say, the "prophets of doom"). This week, we feel
shame. In a Times interview a fashion designer expressed doubt that her
work had any significance and wondered if she could go with it.
The fashion industry is also ashamed; Hollywood is ashamed; even the
news media expressed some fleeting longing for decorum & dignity &
decency.
Are we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our meanspiritedness,
our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred of the body and of all
nature, our obsession with gadgetry & "information", our
degraded pop culture, our vapid or morbid art & lit, & so on &
so on? - or should we defend all this as "freedom" and our "way
of life"?
Our leaders are telling us to return to normal routines (after a decent
period of mourning) in the assurance that they will assign significance
to the event, they will embody our hate & desire for revenge, they
will mediate for us with the forces of "evil". But what exactly
is this normal life to consist of? Why do we feel this shame?
Schoolchildren (again according to the Times) ask their teachers what
it means that the terrorists were willing to die, to kill themselves;
and their teachers evade the question, saying that "we don't understand."
And the ad execs, they don't understand either - they're bewildered. Awake
but confused by a crisis of meaning. Last week all meanings could be expressed
in terms of money. Why should 5000 murders change the meaning of meaning?
A hyper-fashionable Italian clothing company uses death to sell its products.
Photographs - even huge billboards - showing people dying of AIDS or waiting
to be executed - designed to sell woolly jumpers. In this life as normal?
Should we return to it?
For a few days no music was heard in the streets. No thumping bass speakers
rattled the air, no chants of hate for women & queers, no "Madison
Avenue Choirs" hymning the celestial delites of commodities or vacations
in the midst of other peoples' misery.
For a few hours or days there appeared no official spin on the event,
no slogan/logo in the media, no interpretation, no meaning. We watched
the cloud drift around the city, first to the East over Brooklyn then
up the west side of Manhattan, finally over the east side as well. With
the smell and the poisonous haze around the moon came a nightmare abut
the occult significance of the cloud: - angry bewildered ghosts in a vast
white cloud. And we breathed that cloud into us. We'll never get it out
of our lungs. What the cloud wanted was an explanation, a meaning.
But next day the spin was in, the media had found or been given its a
ndreds who died trying to save thenswer - "Attack On America",
our freedom, our values, our way of life, carried out by "cowards"
who were nevertheless not "physical cowards" (as some official
explained in the Times). Perhaps they were moral cowards? He didn e our
faculty and students of colo't say.
Why do they hate us? A few people have asked but received no coherent
answer. Do "they" hate "us" because we use of 75%
of the world's resources even though we only constitute 20% of its population?
because we bomb Baghdad & Belgrade without risking even one American
life? because we export a vapid sneering meanspirited culture to the world,
video games about death, movies about death, TV shows about death, commodities
that are dead, music that kills the spirit? because we've made advertising
copy our highest artform? because we define "freedom" as our
freedom to rule & be ruled by money?
The politicians have told that "they" envy us and our way of
life and therefore wish to destroy it. Envy - yes, why not? The whole
system of global capital is based on envy. It has to be. No envy, no desire.
No desire, no reason to spend. No reason to spend, implosion of global
capital, q.e.d. But then why should the ad execs & fashion designers
& sports teams & entertainers feel this strange unaccountable
shame?
And why should the terrorists have been willing to die just because they
envy our wealth & our way of life & our freedom to buy, and spend,
and waste? What does it mean?
After the Holocaust (or Hiroshima, or the Gulag) certain philosophers
said that there could be no more art or poetry. But they were wrong apparently.
We have poetry again. It may not mean the same thing it meant before.
It may not mean anything. But we have it. And who could have dreamed at
the gate of Buchenwald or Treblinka that one day we would have - Nike
ads or sitcoms about lawyers?
Is any meaning going to emerge from the 9/11 event? Without meaning tragedy
ends not in catharsis but simply depression, endless sorrow. Our leaders
"seek closure" - perhaps by killing many Afghan children - perhaps
by a new Crusade against the Saracens - and of course by a return to normal.
We'll show "them" - by refusing meaning. We will sleep because
it is our right not to awake to confusion & shame.
Our sleep will be troubled. We'll have to "sacrifice a few freedoms"
to protect Freedom. We'll have to fear & hate. But within a few weeks
or months we will have buried even the fear & hate, rather we will
have transformed all that emotion to the Image, to the Evil Eye of the
media, our externalized unconscious. We'll have sitcoms again and gangster
rap and arguments about our right to download it all for free into our
home computers. We'll get those airplanes flying, once again polluting
"our" skies with noise & carcinogens. We'll overcome our
shame. And that will constitute our revenge. That will be our meaning.
Our morality.
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