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

Mon Nov 18 18:00:30 CST 2013

What Morris said!

Baudrillard's post-Simulations obsession with turning everything into
a rich and universal symbol would have made Jung wince and say 'ease
up, feller.' A building can't turn its back, for pete's sake. Even if
it did the back would then be the front.

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 10:55 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> So many things in this brief analysis of WTC towers is incorrect and
> exposing his ignorance of architecture:
>
> 1.  The towers didn't turn their backs on anything.  They had no backs. All
> their faces were identical.  And they were no more faceless than any other
> of their contemporaries.  Most modernist towers of that era and before were
> grids, by nature uniform and and faceless.
>
> 2. Neither did they face each other.  They were offset from each other on a
> diagonal.  Thus they maximized the number of faces sent outward, not at each
> other.  In other words they didn't block each other's views.
>
> 3.  He is correct to point out that they did all they could to stand out and
> dominate.  That is one of the central features of early and later (pre-Pomo)
> modernist architecture, which was notoriously anti-urban and ant-street.
> Modernism hated facades lining streets or plazas or squares, all the devices
> of pre-modern architecture to define urban SPACE.  Pre modern urban
> architecture worked in a collective manner to define public spaces.  Modern
> architecture hated urbanism, seeking to demolish vast areas of urban fabric
> in order to provide an open limitless field in which to display mega
> objects.  The WTC did its best to do just that in lower Manhattan.  This is
> just plain vanilla modern architecture at a scale that allowed it to achieve
> standard modernist goals.
>
> BTW, most architects thought they were crappy architecture.
>
> David Morris
>
>
> On Monday, November 18, 2013, Heikki Raudaskoski wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> I never appreciated Baudrillard much to begin with, and his writings on
>> 9/11 made me appreciate him less, but some parts of his analysis may hold
>> true, like the following points paraphrased by Margaret McNally:
>>
>> "The aesthetic twinness and symmetry of the Twin Towers, and their
>> dominant height above other skyscrapers in the New York City skyline,
>> signified that the WTC no longer represented competition of corporate
>> capital among these modern symbols of capitalism in New York City or,
>> indeed, the world. Rather, it represented western global capital
>> dominance (Baudrillard, Spirit 38-39). The Towers' faceless facades stood
>> isolated, turning their back on other skyscrapers, and facing one another
>> in a playful, yet somewhat arrogant gesture that both defied modernism,
>> and signified their self-contained supremacy of global power (40)."
>>
>>
>> http://tinyurl.com/p9hghuz (Please note that clicking this link will
>> prompt a download of a Word document to your computer.)
>>
>>
>> Heikki
>>
>> On Mon, 18 Nov 2013, Paul Mackin wrote:
>>
>> > Also, it's the media--TV, radio, and print--that creates that "instant
>> > history," telling us what we now think even before we think it, or
>> > might never have thought it. It sells newspapers, as the saying goes.
>> >
>> > In a similar case, there's a story-heading this morning in either the
>> > Times or the Post that reads "America still haunted by JFK
>> > assassination."  Well, speaking for myself, the things haunting me
>> > have nothing to do with that 50 year ago sad event.  I suspect it's
>> > the same for many of the rest of you as well.
>> >
>> > P
>> >
>> > On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> > > 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 -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l