[Reader-list] the tall twin towers

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

Yesterday I saw the film Lajja at the night show. The film opened up 
its contemporary landscape with an aerial shot of night time New 
York. The tall towers of the WTC all lit up stood signifying `a 
cosmos', eternal and proud. The film then traced the trauma of an 
`indian bahu` trapped amidst this self-absorbed brilliance....

The following posting that i picked up from the nettime list makes an 
attempt to look at the real and symbolic power of of the twin towers. 
hope it will provoke some discussions.

[remarks on Zizek - fwd from Nettime]
DESERTING THE REAL / GOING TO THE MOVIES

John O'Neill

Should we run into the movie house with S/Z every time we see 
something on TV? Don't we miss TV's attempt to make a movie that we 
are just about to see but for which its commentators lack narrative 
power?

(1) We know what hit WTC  and possibly who --but we don't know what 
WTC is nor who we are;

(2) If we pair WTC and WTO we get a better sense of them and 
ourselves, recalling their contested status in protests played out 
world-wide (Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa) beyond the newly improvised
walls of capital democracy;

(3) If we twin the WTC towers with WTO, we achieve intellectual 
perspective by connecting iconology to the material practices of 
global capitalism. The WTC was a glass house of capital brains and 
bodies, young, powerful, plugged into money, style, and the nomadic 
life of the twenty/eighty split that rules symbolic capitalism's 
division of social labour into highly and lowly valued services;

(4) The terrible destruction of WTC demands in the first instance 
that its bodies be Americanized, familized and averaged into "anyone 
of us". At the same time, there is staged the recovery of these
bodies by civic bodies (firemen / women, police men and women, 
security men and women and other citizens willing to sacrifice 
themselves on behalf of capital bodies who at other times seek to be 
unburdened by such duties, charity, and the taxes that underwrite 
these municipal services.

(5) The critical challenge is to connect the intellectual perspective 
we might gain with the moral perspective offered to us in the scenes 
of extraordinary civic responses to the disaster which fell
upon New York and Washington. TV is witness to these moral events but 
lacks any liturgical knowledge to fill in its otherwise empty icons 
whose endless repetition begins to numb our minds and hearts. Perhaps 
this is because we know our resolve to learn from them is weak and 
soon
overwhelmed with cries for revenge that do not close the wound but 
keep it open for ever;

(6) Any pop commentary, eked out by comparing movies to movies, is 
weak in its response to civic events that require us to think through 
the daily toll upon workers, families and communities. It is they who 
bear the human capital sacrifice that calls for witness at the site 
of WTC. Here the hidden injuries of modernity mark us all.

(7) It is a conceit of commentary that the world's integrity can be 
filtered through its analysts and anchor persons whereas it is the 
inalienable gift of everyone who lent a hand to anyone else in need. 
The catastrophic events that opened this week also tore out of us an 
unfinished prayer to anyone's god anywhere......It is in the silence 
of those gods that we must learn to think and to hold together.


John O'Neill
Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology
227 Founders College,
York University, Toronto, M3J 1P3, Canada
(Home) 416-653-8838
(Office) 416-736-5148
  (Fax)    416-653-7323

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