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

[Monte Davis]

I agree with both of you. As a matter of prosaic fact, most of the
corporate tenants of the WTC were insurance companies (the largest by
square footage a Blue Cross HMO) and a slew of import/export firms and
financial intermediaries few of us had ever heard of. They were landmarks
and sightseeing attractions, but certainly hadn't replaced the literal or
synecdochal Wall Street, or the Chase Manhattan or Citibank towers, or the
Federal Reserve bank, as first-to-mind symbols of finance or US economic
hegemony.

UNTIL the week after September 11, 2001. It was the spectacle of their
destruction, *in combination* with the attack on the Pentagon and the
aborted attack on the White House (both unquestionably first-to-mind
symbols in their own domains), that retroactively made them "the symbolic
center of Western capitalism."

IOW: if our enemies had chosen them (twice!) as symbolic targets, by god
they'd better have been important symbols. FWIW, I think the hasty neatness
of that "instant history" in the wake of the attack is a significant source
of TRP's animus that's been discussed in another thread.


On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:37 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> 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.
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>>
>>
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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