Baudrillamus

To: Retort
TJC and IB were wondering the other day why nothing had been heard from the
Baudrillard, seeing that every other pundit has weighed in, and given this
passage in Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Phil
Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983):

"Why are there two towers at New York's World Trade Center? All of Manhattan
's great buildings were always happy enough to confront each other in a
competitive verticality, the result of which is an architectural panorama in
the image of the capitalist system: as pyramidal jungle, all of the
buildings attacking each other. The system profiled itself in a celebrated
image that you had of New York when you arrived there by boat. This image
has completely changed in the last few years. The effigy of the capitalist
system has passed from the pyramid to the perforated card. Buildings are no
longer suspicious one of the other, like columns in a statistical graph.
This new architecture incarnates a system that is no longer competitive, but
compatible, and where competition has disappeared for the benefit of the
correlations. (New York is the world's only city therefore that retraces all
along it's history, and with a prodigious fidelity and in all its scope, the
actual form of the capitalistic system-it changes instantly in function of
the latter. No European city does so.) This architectural graphism is that
of the monopoly; the two W.T.C. towers, perfect parallelepideds a
quarter-mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind
communicating vessels. The fact that there are two of them signifies the end
of all competition, the end of all original reference. Paradoxically, if
there were only one, the monopoly would not be incarnated because we have
seen how it stabilizes on a dual form. For the sign to be pure, it has to
duplicate itself: it is the duplication of the sign that destroys its
meaning. This is what Andy Warhol demonstrates also: the multiple replicas
of Marilyn's face are there to show at the same time the death of the
original and the end of representation. The two towers of the W.T.C.are the
visible sign of the closure of the system in a vertigo of duplication while
the other skyscrapers are each of the them the original moment of a system
constantly transcending itself in a perpetual crisis and self-challenge.


 There is a particular fascination in this reduplication. As high as they
are, higher than all the others, the two towers signify nevertheless the end
of verticality. they ignore the other buildings, they are not of the same
race, they no longer challenge them, nor compare themselves to them,they
look one into the other as into a mirror and culminate in this prestige of
similitude. What they project is the idea of the model that they are one for
the other, and their twin altitude presents no longer any value of
transcendence.They signify only that the strategy of models and commutations
wins out in the very heart of the system itself-and New York is really the
heart of it-over the traditional strategy of competition. The buildings of
Rockefeller Center still direct their gaze one at the other into their glass
or steel facades, in the city's infinite spectacularity. The Towers, on the
other hand, are blind, and no longer have a facade. All referential of
habitat, of the facade as face, of interior and exterior, that you still
find in the Chase Manhattan or in the boldest mirror-buildings of the'60s,
is erased. At the same time as the rhetoric of verticality, the rhetoric of
the mirror has disappeared. There remains only a series closed on the number
two, just as if architecture, in the image of the system, proceeded only
from an unchangeable genetic code, a definitive model."

Strolling with Baudrillard in New York's Central Park one day soon after
this book was published, I asked him if he believed any force present
anywhere in the world had the ability to disturb this binary regulation, the
tactical doubling of monopoly in duopoly, this coupling of simultaneous and
spectacular opposition that looked like "the end of history." His reply?
"Islam.""