Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too" (p. 338)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

I agree with you.

But as representative building - and here the W in WTC is of relevance - 
the Twin Towers were  functioning as the master icon of Western capitalism.

On 18.11.2013 16:49, Paul Mackin wrote:
> I always thought 11 Wall street (NYSE) was the symbolic and religious
> center of American (Western) capitalism,  with its opening and closing
> (church) bells ringing away.
>
> P
>
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 7:14 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>> Shawn, as a fake Zen therapist, might not be the novel's most trustworthy
>> voice, but here he is on to something. Discussions about the symbolic
>> dimension of the Twin Towers tend, also on this list, to reduce it to its
>> phallic element. This is there, no doubt, but if this was all there is, it
>> could have been just any skyscraper. Yet the Trade Center Towers were not
>> just any skyscraper. Artists like Philippe Petit or Wim Wenders ("Der
>> Amerikanische Freund", 1977) realized this right away. The Twin Towers were
>> the symbolic center of Western capitalism. And when they were destroyed,
>> Western people in general and US people in particular perceived this as an
>> attack on "our way of life", as chancellor Schröder put it back then.
>> Shawn's comparison of the WTC attacks to the blowing up of the Buddha
>> statues in Afghanistan makes this symbolic dimension clear.
>> The shock and the confusion afterwards (including the belittling of the
>> terrorists' courage) have to do with the recognition that on the symbolic
>> level the battle was once and for all already decided. The biggest single
>> anti-modernity statement ever! So what the fuck can you do? Nothing. You can
>> lead war in the Middle East as long as you want: This will not make it
>> undone. The only adequate symbolic answer, Sloterdijk hinted at that
>> immediately, would have been to blow up the Kaaba in Mecca. But that -
>> thanks to the crumbs of rationality being left on the table - was never an
>> option. Not even for the most insane military person.  Another religious
>> symbolic dimension of the event lies in the fact that a person socialized
>> into one of the three monotheistic religions could hardly avoid thinking of
>> the Tower of Babel, a problematic association when one considers the origin
>> of this story.
>>
>> -
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> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
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