Ground Zero History and Signs of Transgenocide

From Scorpions and the Anatomy of Time: the 3-D Mind, Volume 3, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002

By Jacques M. Chevalier Two decades ago (1983: 135), Baudrillard looked in the direction of the World Trade Center for reflections and measurements of our times. His discussion started withan incisive question: "Why are there two towers at New York's World Trade Center? All of Manhattan's great buildings were always happy enough to affront each other in a competitive verticality, the result of which is an architectural panorama in the image of the capitalist system: a pyramidal jungle, all the buildings attacking each other." Baudrillard's question concerned the end of competitive capitalism. But the question that is now before us has radically changed. Given the tragedy of September 11, we must now ask what these buildings reduced to ground zero signify in regards to history, the towering structures of globalization, and the new "order of appearances"?

Part of the answer may be found in the towers themselves and memories thereof, or at least Baudrillard's rendering of them. When erected, the two towers suggested many things. Above all, they signified a global system claiming a "definitive" architecture, a twinborn complex that replaced competition by a flexible yet immutable binary system. Figures of world monopoly culminated in "perfect parallelipipeds a 1/4-mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind communication vessels" (Baudrillard 1983: 135). The new Manhattan and the world that came with it took the shape of molecular DNA, a double backbone structure based on the spiralling principles of similitude and duplication. The message was clear: the planet was to be governed by a quasi-genetic code consisting of pure and perfect mirror forms. The towers forming the heart and centre of world trade marked the end of hierarchical rivalries by virtue of being utterly tall and simply "incomparable."

The WTC towers were also built on the rule of self-referentiality, a global framing strategy no longer guided by the aspirations of heavenly transcendence or the forward march of history. Towers of self-involution and self-duplication were elevated above all other narratives, like spectres dedicated to the end of history and grand visions thereof. Architectural means to achieve this implacable regime involved a digital code superseding the uplifting propositions of earlier skyscrapers and the works of transcendence built into cathedrals of previous ages. Whereas cathedrals and skyscrapers used to make a point of aiming for the heavens above, the flat-roofed pillars never took up the challenge of shooting for the sky and the heavenly hopes that lie beyond the hitherto or the here-and-now. Nor did these faceless towers "envisage" a need to put on a façade, like most buildings do, showing concerns with "keeping up appearances" in regards to their contribution to the designs of history. Just as the two edifices felt no obligation to "edify," world trade no longer aspired to keep up a front on matters of rhetoric or ideology -- evoking the horizons of democracy, justice, liberty, progress, science, or even God and country, to justify its own rule. Global trade had no promising story to tell, no compulsion to generate grand narratives that went beyond its own walls made of self-hardening steel, using signs of the here-and-now to herald the opening of broader horizons.

Globalization never pretended to reflect its immediate habitat, let alone reflect on its larger surroundings and the world in which people actually live. Unlike mirror-buildings of the 1960s (coldly but courteously projecting mirror representations of other designs in their vicinity), one tower blindly looked into its own mirror image of glass and steel. This was a cold gaze designed to eradicate variegated perspectives on private habitat and public space, not to mention differential views of real people and those "representing" or acting in (or against) their interest. The glassy-eyed perspective imposing itself upon the world happened to be mapped along the north-south axis, yet this was a false distance that never meant to offer a promising view on the North/South divide. In the end, the twin towers struck the ultimate narcissistic pose, a self-referential gesture that seemed forever fixed in time and space, a boundless involution that fully coincided with an exterior structurally adjusting to its many demands.

But the story of the WTC now harks back to the tragic end of Narcissus at the hands of Nemesis, the goddess of justice and vengeance who caused the youthful god to be haunted by memories of his own reflection. To use words that are less mythical, the pressure of history has brought back the issue of fragility, the inherent vanity built into all orders of appearances. Islamist extremism (not to be confused with Islam!) carried out this mission with utmost cruelty, converting the end of history into a death sentence horribly tangible and yet profoundly symbolic. Imageries are meanings experienced through events that never happen on their own. While lessons of Realpolitik can (and must) be read into them, ground zero events wasted no time in becoming lavishly symbolic. Actually the events have been "imaginable" for quite a while. In the early 1990s, Baudrillard (1993) had these chilling words to say about death sentences pronounced by Islamist extremism, sentences that are reminiscent of

the depressurization of an aircraft cabin that occurs when the plane's fuselage is breached or cracked … Everything is sucked violently out into the void as a result of the variation in pressure between inside and out. All that is needed is for a small rift or hole to be made in the ultra-thin envelope that separates two worlds. Terrorism, the taking of hostages, is par excellence an act that punches just such a hole in a universe (ours) that is both artificial and artificially protected. Islam as a whole -- Islam as it is, not the Islam of the Middle Ages: the Islam that has to be evaluated in strategic terms, not moral or religious -- is in the process of creating a vacuum around the Western system (including the countries of Eastern Europe) and from time to time puncturing this system with a single act or utterance, so that all our values are engulfed by the void. Islam exerts no revolutionary pressure upon the Western universe, nor is there any prospect of its converting or conquering the West: it is content to destabilize it by means of viral attacks of this kind, in the name of a principle of Evil against which we are defenseless and on the basis of the virtual catastrophe constituted by the difference in pressure between the two worlds, on the basis of the perpetual threat to a protected universe (ours), of a brutal depressurization of the atmosphere (the values) that we breathe. The fact is that a good deal of oxygen has already escaped from our Western world through all kinds of fissures and interstices. We should be well advised, therefore, to keep our oxygen masks on (Baudrillard 1993: 83-4).

The terror tied to memories of September 11 and their aftermath is worthy of evil pitched on a cosmic scale. We know evil to be a powerful instrument of religious extremism, a weapon of gigantic proportions designed to make war against everything that the western world is made to stand for. Given the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of all the good things advocated and yet ruined by the "free world" -- liberty, democracy, justice, progress -- radical Islamism has an easy job naming and imagining everyone's arch enemy, turning all "crusaders" into a demonic force to be exorcised from everything that is truly sacred. The job is all the more facile as the West, ubiquitous and all-powerful as it may be, is conspicuous in its absence and feebleness with regards to all things pertaining to evil. In the words of Baudrillard, we have reached a level of "complete aseptic whiteness" such that "violence is whitewashed, history is whitewashed, all as part of a vast enterprise of cosmetic surgery at whose completion nothing will be left but a society for which, and individuals for whom, all violence, all negativity, are strictly forbidden" (1993: 45).

The death sentence pronounced by the "free world" against evil is utterly unimaginative in that we no longer have words that can do justice to the atrocities of evil, those perpetrated by others and, what is worse, our own -- hate mongering amidst "our ranks" and countless villainies perpetrated in the name of the "free (trade) world." Bin Laden and his associates may be called the "evil-doers," yet the euphemism betrays an impoverished vocabulary that breaks all the rules of elementary rhetoric: artfulness, persuasion, and force. No one is impressed. In retrospect, while denounced by the politically correct, Bush's knee-jerk pronouncement of a "wanted, dead or alive" sentence against Bin Laden had at least the merit of being simultaneously truthful and mythical, reincorporating old frontier fables into the horrors of history. But this is no longer permissible; the gathering signals and white lies of "United We Stand" must prevail against the war cries of lofty legend and myth. Islamism struggling against "satanic verses" and crusades is but a mirror image of this narrative vacuum created by a world so profane that it can no longer speak evil, countering anathema with equally awesome weaponry.

But "let no one be mistaken." Evil has never been expunged from our world gone "fanatically soft -- or softly fanatical" (Baudrillard 1993: 82). Rather, it has been transfigured into our alter ego, like a mirror mirroring itself into an inverted image that makes us constantly tremble, a permanent threat of ground zero destruction that we can never see as globally "our" own. Paradoxically, evil eradicated from the walls of the great western enclosure creeps back into the system. It does so through a language that is both digital and calendrical, a mundane "9/11" formula that clearly refers to a precise event situated in measurable time. But again, let no one be fooled. This is not the language of "real history," the kind that consists of series of chronological events marked by developments and crises of variable amplitude, from better to worse or vice versa, at a closer or greater distance from the aims of democracy, reason, let alone Islamic virtue. The 9/11 number speaks rather the language of urgency, catastrophe, and extreme calculation. It is a figure that heralds the beginning of ground zero history -- a zero point of reference evoking the location of the centre of a massive explosion, but also a cipher that marks the absence of meaning, measure, or value, and the lowest point against which all other actions can be determined and measured. Ground zero history is the new order of appearances spreading through the global system like anthrax in the body social. It revolves around a point of infinite nothingness, a centre from which all other quantities will be reckoned, without ever adding "real" value or events.

When put up at the sign of 9/11, history is forced to yield to the zero-sum rule of infinity and immeasurability -- horrific sacrifices leading to eternal life for some, and cruel deeds of "infinite freedom" for others. Amplitude and hope give way to zero-value events evolving in a black hole expanding through viral contagion. Calling up history at this number invites an extreme response, a final division between all the "pluses" and the "minuses" of this world, a terrifying rift that no one is permitted to escape. Either you are "one of us," or you are "one of them." In the end, there is no choice. All must side against "crusaders," or they must side against "evil-doers." Two camps are fighting until death do them part, in the image of two monoliths of intolerance reigning over all voices of dissent.

Critical bystanders may refuse to take sides and will insist on rethinking the world we live in, as we must. Like Baudrillard, they may nonetheless propose an us-them scenario of their own, a tragic plot featuring the inevitable revenge of the Other -- all those populations brutally pushed out of the western enclosure and suffocating in the current world system atmosphere. Despair and vengeance come back to haunt us, striking Manichean terror and dismay into spoils of the new global order. Injustice breeds intolerance and war. The chronic inability to "do justice" to the Other -- "bringing justice" to others is the priority on both sides -- smacks of racism mapped onto a binary code that permits of no exception to its rule. One spectre of genocide facing another looms large on our world's immediate horizon. These grounds are exceedingly familiar, to the point that nothing new can be truly expected.

And yet there is something devastatingly new about 9/11 and countless other tragedies of the end of the century: these events do not lend themselves to simple accusations of systematic attempts at eradicating the Other. What tends to be forgotten in current stories of the us-them genre, retributively minded or not, is the extent to which the foe is now partaking of the world "we" live in. For this is not a vengeful Otherness that is simply somewhere "out there," agitating against the aircraft we travel in for petty reasons of jealousy or envy. Rather, this is an Otherness that plays a key role in the order of appearances "we" have jointly created (rumour has it that "we are the world"), a global regime made fragile by constant reminders that every one comfortably seated in the plane or living next door is a potential "Other" and yet "one of us" -- breathing freely, well educated, not all that poor, and by no means disdainful of western values, dividends of the oil industry included.

The fact that true otherness is hard to be found should not take anyone by surprise. After all, so many forms of Otherness have been spoiled in so many ways that there is very little left to eradicate. Globalization reigns to the a point that there is no cannon fodder left to feed the warmongering ways of genocide. The observation applies to the principal protagonists of this new war that is not exactly a war: that is, their rhetoric of mutual Otherness is very hard to swallow. Actually, the notion that "evil doers" and "freedom fighters" -- or is it "satanic crusaders" and "Islamist martyrs"? -- belong to different species fully separated by culture, economy, and history is an insult to everyone's intelligence. This raises a radically new question: Could it be that wars are no longer being waged against Others that have ceased to exist as such? Could it be that the conditions of possibility of genocide are no longer with us?

In hindsight, the language of genocide does not do justice to the hauntings of 9/11. Ground zero history does not sow the all-too-familiar fear of genocide. Instead it sows the fear of transgenocide, from trans- (Latin), across, genos (Greek), race, kind, and caedere (Latin), to cut down, strike mortally, or kill. At the heart of this new genre (from the same root) of war, a messy war that is not exactly a war, lies the demise of the neatness and clearness of genos, a root term around which revolve a host of meanings directly implicated in the current transmutations of violence and terror.

We know the Greek genos (alias the Latin genus) to be inclined to create orderly categories endowed with a sense of boundary. What is less obvious is the propensity for this genos to be unfaithful to its own rule. Instead of acting like a genus, this principle has behaved essentially like a virus. It spread throughout the entire body social known as modernity, penetrating through the pores and organs of an entire era. Throughout this defunct era we call modernity, the agent of genos and mutations thereof evolved and expanded in such ways as to affect the semantics and pragmatics of all spheres of life, be they concerned with "gender," "genes," "gentiles," "generals," or "generalizations" about the "genesis" of war. These added up to a host of derivations that were responsible for the modern constructions of Otherness, including the healthy versions (aspirations of the United Nations) and the pathological alike (all "final solutions" of the twentieth century).

Whether we like it or not, we are now entering an era that will question, challenge and undermine practically all divides founded on this older rule of genos. Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, the destruction of the WTC speaks not to a war between "social genotypes." What we have before us is rather a hyperviral assault between a few socially engineered hybrids aspiring to hegemony and supremacy. Mutants of history struggling for power -- rival forces working across boundaries (which is what hyperviruses do) and lording it over subaltern forms of hybridity -- are launching a war against all aspirations to the globalization of diversity.

The struggle between complexly engineered hybrids takes place in a world that is now falling into a state of "trans," a world subject to a compulsive transgressive mode that is rather imaginative and hopeful but also fraught with danger and terror. One derivation of genos that is massively affected by these transmutations of history is to be found in the area of "gender" and "genitalia," a centre of erotic "commerce" that will no longer tolerate simple formulations of the us-them (masculine-feminine) divide. Clear distinctions of gender and sex are giving way to explorations of transgender and transsexuality pursued on the planes of biology, culture, and society -- performing radical surgeries, real and symbolic, on the sexual division of labour and also the division of sexual labour. Sex itself loses all sense of boundary, to the point that it can be found everywhere and is a ubiquitous concern.

Meanwhile the scientific understanding of "genes" has given way to the language of transgenetic manipulation and commerce and related applications to means of reproduction (agriculture, gestation, etc.) and destruction (bioterrorism strikes back). In agriculture, local land races, which are themselves stores of genetic variability resulting from centuries of human selection and testing, are being systematically displaced by artificially engineered hybrids and clones that constitute a radical threat to the planet's botanical gene pool.

Conventional notions of "genesis" and "genealogy" mapped on to events of social history -- clear mappings of origins and descent -- are also subject to the end of genos. They are quickly yielding ground to boundless transhistorical references that make a mockery of pure origins and final destinations. Alas, we can no longer count on a definitive theology or a science of history to save the day and shed pure light on the real origin of 9/11, let alone its final end. Great insights and final victories are no longer in sight.

Better lessons could perhaps be found in the area of comparative anthropology and political economy. Students of society may thus look at how people (French gens) differ in terms of cultural orientation or class affiliation. They will take inspiration from statements of Political History 101, which are safe enough. Those of us who took the course will recall that the English "gentry" (another telling derivation of genos) differed from the nobility and the yeomanry in the sense of engaging in thoughts and actions that served their own class interests. Observations of difference and hierarchy will thus explain why "types of people" (pigeonholed into classes, nations, tribes, ethnic groups, and so on) are in struggle and are prone to war. Using these lessons of history, ground zero events can be attributed to and blamed on groups that can be clearly identified because truly "different."

But there is a problem here, one that is currently plaguing all comfortable taxonomies of the social scientific mind. The movements of transnational capital (bin Laden's?) and cultural transmigration (landed terrorists?) and the proliferation of classificatory grids and combinations thereof -- politics coupled with gender, overlapping with race, crosscutting with nationality, overdetermined by religion, and mediated by class -- will soon make a mockery of all essays in analytical reasoning. How many will be fooled by explanations of war that purport to reduce violence to oppositions in grammar -- distinctions of logic in action? Who will dare reduce 9/11 to a simple or multiple struggle of wage-labour against capital, woman against man, the South against the North, Palestine against Israel, the Jews against the "Gentiles" (genos strikes again), Islam against Christianity, the West against the rest?

History is now giving birth to an era where no single clamour of Truth can be expected to triumph over the mobbish ways of smaller truths. Humanity's capacity to make sense of 9/11 is bound to suffer. The Babylonian world we live in consists of so many disciplines that should be heard on the issues, actors, and root causes of 9/11 that no categorical truth can be expected. Readers are reminded that transdisciplinarity is no less fashionable than current developments of transgendering, transgenetics, transnationals, transmigrations, and transculturation. Nowadays the boundary that separates one discipline (or literary "genre" and related modes of "generalization") from another is as messy and blurred as the distinction that lies between the oppressed (employees of the WTC, or martyrs of radical Islamism?) and filthy-rich capitalists (working at the WTC, or hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan?). As with transgenetics, hybridity creeps in everywhere and takes forms that are intricately engineered and unpredictable at the same time. A case in point is this war of a confusing genre that combines various military genres. It has "generals" that are not really "generals," "generalizations" that are never truly imperative, and rules of discipline that seem utterly chaotic and unpredictable. Could it be that this virtual eradication of all forms of genos is at the heart of this seamless war?

But the loss of boundary should not be confused with the immeasurability of human folly and inhumanity. However chaotic and transgenocidal it may be, our age is not without hope. Current events and others of the like that have or will come to pass must not deter "us" from the globalization of diversity and hopes to that effect. I am not alluding to the old kind of diversity premised on illusions of fixed genotypes and self-identical references. What is now under attack is a new reality and vision of plurality, one that fosters memories and hopes of a "transreferential" humanity, a twofold sense of self-identity and being-human that feeds on fluxes and motions occurring across the older bounds of genos. Perhaps these nomadic hopes could be vested in the memories and "generosity" of the god of true beginnings and endings. I am alluding to the twin-faced Janus who gave his name to the first month of the year, the doorkeeper to the passage of time, and the "gentle" (also from genos) messenger of prayers to all other gods -- hence a kindred spirit of Christ, Jehovah, Allah, and countless other divinities that tend to be forgotten. On the former site of the WTC and mirror reflections thereof, humanity may wish to erect a global shrine dedicated to this messenger of hope. The youthful Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection would then yield ground zero to Janus, the old one whose faces looked in multiple directions, from goings of the past to comings of the future. Perhaps the mourning of September 11 could give way to the prayers of December 11, the historic day of the Janus festival, thus breathing life into history and wise measures and visions thereof.

If contagious immeasurability is the order of the day, then so be it, but for gods' sake, let it be a viral attack of infinite wisdom.

References

Baudrillard, Jean, 1983. Simulations. Transl. by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e).

-- 1993. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Transl. by James Benedict. London: Verso.