[Nettime-bold] ::batteries, buddies & other binaries::

[David Teh <dteh@arthist.usyd.edu.au>]

::batteries, buddies and other binaries::

i shall respond to Julian Dibbell's thought-provoking post by adding
Jean Baudrillard's thoughts on the WTC to the mix. you'll have to excuse
the paraphrasings and the cruel ironies <and extensive quotation from
L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort, 1976.>

::the battery of capitalism::

when i first visited NYC, the WTC had me transfixed. from my brother's
balcony looking south from the east village, they were perpetual markers
of the summer atmosphere - the day, the heat, the pollution, were a
medium that transmitted and refracted these towers - they were different
every hour. but by night, of course, their real symbolic function shone
through: they were like mass-reproduced combs of blinking information,
like vertical LCD screens or server stacks, a matrix of ones and zeroes
par excellence. a di-polar battery, a closed circuit, each answering
only to the other; it was often remarked that the twin towers seemed
somehow to stand distinct from the rest of the skyline, that they stood
separate from the clamour of other skyscrapers. the implications
(theoretical and symbolic) of this austerity are telling.

at the human level, this tragedy involved civilians. but civilians were
not the targets. the targets were symbolic and global. and the binary
logic of the WTC was itself central.

in Baudrillard's numerology:  2 is the coded form of 1.  whether in
oligopolitics (2 parties), in consumer 'choice', or the logic of the
sign, 2 is 1 in disguise:

"oligopoly, or real duopoly, results from the tactical division of the
monopoly.  In every domain duopoly is the completed stage of monopoly."

in order to survive in late capitalism, the monopoly thus has to "find a
binary regulation", an oscillation, which is more stable. but:

"this changes nothing as regards monopoly, on the contrary, power is
only absolute if it is able to diffract into various equivalents, if it
knows how to divide in order to become stronger...  Two superpowers are
necessary in order to keep the universe under control: a single empire
would crumble by itself."

hence the American novelist hauled in to CNN on day 2 - 'bring back the
stability of the Cold War...'  but hence also, the "show of solidarity",
the “show of unity”.

::the buddy system::  or  ::diversity in unity::

along with this horrific pile of rubble, all America's binaries are
collapsed into one, betraying the unity so long concealed by their
superficial duality. thus Dubya’s blank cheque is rubber stamped; thus
Clinton sits beside Pappa Bush (Snr) in the National Cathedral,
<voice-over>

“what u r seeing is the military, political, and to some extent the
bureaucratic superstructure of the country” [ABC America, from memory]

a deeply ironic faux-pas.  the ceremony opened with Dubya’s trademark
Texan subtlety, with uniformed personnel representing the 5 arms of the
military, bearing standards denoting ‘great battles’.  onward Christian
soldiers indeed.  i almost believed the commentator’s report that Dubya
and his wife had “a lot to do with putting together the service.”
heavens, spare us all their Christian ‘peace’.

the towers, then, symbolised a certain binary, but a unified one
(“biunivocal”). “Unity continues its spiritual labour … [an] ostensibly
nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only admits of a
totally hierarchical solution.” (Deleuze&Guattari)

as the battery gives rise to a single flow, so do the batteries of
capital serve one end. the ambivalence of the one and the zero. ambi-
means BOTH at once.  the wTc is thus emblematic of a globalising
"homeostatic form of contemporary systems". what Baudrillard is talking
about here is the passing of a symbolic era, from competition to
correlation, from monistic capital to binary capital.

thus <Dibbell> "Nor is it coincidence that the World Trade Center was
the last of New York City's record-breaking skyscrapers." [Mahartir
really missed the boat]  Baudrillard, 6 years after the towers went up:

"Why has the WTC in New York got *two* towers? All Manhattan's great
buildings are always content to confront each other in a competitive
verticality, from which there results an architectural panorama that is
the image of the capitalist system: a pyramidal jungle, every building
on the offensive against every other... This image has changed
completely in a few years. The effigy of the capitalist system has
passed from the pyramid to the punch card.  The buildings are no longer
obelisks, but trustingly stand next to one another like the columns of a
statistical graph. This new architecture no longer embodies a
competitive system, but a countable one..."

an imperative correlation thus attends the protrusion of the twin
towers. just as we sensed, they no longer speak to their neighbours,
only to one another, that is, to themselves. in this closed battery loop
they are more stable, more impervious - and they are one...

::the end of the vertical::

"This architectural graphism belongs to the monopoly. The two towers are
... perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels. The fact that
there are two identical towers signifies the end of all competition...
Paradoxically, if there were only one, the WTC would not embody the
monopoly... The two towers of the WTC are the visible sign of the
closure of a system in the vertigo of doubling, while the other
skyscrapers are each the original moment of a system continually
surpassing itself in crisis and challenge."

[the 'vessels' are Breton's idea (marrying two revolutions), the
communication of  two (biunivocal) correspondents which, despite a
certain difference, speak the same language.]

"However high they are and however much higher than all the others, the
two towers nevertheless signify an arrested verticality. They ignore the
other buildings, they are not of the same race, they no longer challenge
them nor compare themselves to them ... they reflect one another, ...
their semi-detached altitude no longer has a transcendant value, but
only signifies that the commutative strategy of the model will now
historically prevail over the heart of the system itself, [and] over the
traditional strategy of competition.
...
[T]he rhetoric of verticality is disappearing... There now remains only
a series based on the binary code, as if architecture, in the image of
the system, proceeded only by means of an unchanging genetic code, a
definitive model."

this monopoly at the heart of duopoly was all too conspicuous to those
outside the US.  Blind Freddy could see that capitalism still amounted
to the piling up of coins. and when you have the tallest pile, someone
will come and mess it up. (Everything and yet) Nothing has changed.
apparently the Nature of the concrete world has its own spontaneous
combustion. and this Nature abhors the heap.

the networks played a frame from the river in which the towers had been
marked out in white trapezoidal lines, showing the place they once
occupied, filled in with blue sky. media fumbles to domesticate the
loss, charting thin air, and comes up with the markings of homicide,
measurement, searching, grasping to bring this loss to account, to graph
it. perfect emptiness at the heart of a perfect crime.  but this is way
beyond homicide and cannot yet be accounted. it may be the erasure of
the comfy duopolity, a return to the competitive. or perhaps the
ignition-phase of the next order - after duopoly comes pluro-plutocracy.
wherein monopoly will only be consolidated further. the politics of
pluralism was a sign that there was something more stable than the
binary. power, work, money and bodies will now distribute themselves
completely, avoiding the heap, but this will not amount to any sort of
equality / equity / equivalence.

au contraire, this tactical dispersion (now forced) was already hinted
at by the World Financial Centre, whose variegated reflective clones
were tucked behind the WTC.
the same building, replicated several times (genetically), but each
wearing a different hat.

“Arrive at the magic formula we all seek – PLURALISM = MONISM …” (DnG
again)

contrived difference in the order of repetition, and a movement from
Trade to Finance? no matter. power moves on these networks. the global
capillaries, lines of force,
religious-military-mercantile-financial-media, a complete circuit.

i leave you with a recent siren song that contained clues. in the
post-traumatic West, ‘vision’ and ‘leadership’ have gone underground;
thinkers are entirely relegated to the margins of political life (minor
music).  i'd like to echo Steven Meinking's intelligent post - it is now
the task of the intellectual to pipe up and TAKE A LEAD in sorting
through this rubble of ideas. get out of the margins, people.

peace
dt

<<who's in the bunker who's in the bunker?
women and children first>>
i have seen too much i haven't seen enough
<<ice age comin' ice age comin'
let me hear both sides>>
<<we're not scaremongering this is really happening>>
<<mobiles workin' mobiles chirping
take the money and run>>

> Thom Yorke's Idioteque [KidA]



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