Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer proceeds the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory.1
If we are to have unity in the sense that it is currently being projected on the map of American identity then it will be of this order of simulation. Origins of course will be part of the packaging, the supposed underlying territory of the American We. Some will be benign, conceptual, a reflection of our cultural values, and yet others, the majority, will be centered in violence and terrific force, pitting this mythic being, the American, against all manner of threats to his/her life and limb. Trials of immense violence such as the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 have always served as the regular basis and foundation for this national identity, the hope being that by repeatedly exhibiting these events, commemorating them in symbolic form a fundamental otherness, a separate destiny (tribal and nationalistic) will be proven, demonstrated negatively by way of external violence. The interest here is the boundary. The identity needs a physical skin, a skin that is in danger of being punctured, violated. This is the most visceral understanding the human being has of its identity, as instinct, self-preservation - as pain. It’s only natural that it would be appealed to in this context, the individual body made to look somehow equivalent to the unified whole, to the national map, to the abstraction We.
And yet, all that remains are models. Curiously our deaths, no matter how patriotic, are still reckoned statistically, still made the province of mathematics.
Within the mechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space and time), that concept [causality] is reduced to the formulas of mathematics – with which, as one must emphasize again and again, nothing is ever comprehended, but rather designated and distorted.2
Which is precisely the utility. Causality cannot have a correspondence to reality because too many coeval antecedents would be required to form a total understanding of any one phenomenon. Mathematics is much more suited to the project because it allows for a more formulaic and thus limited interpretation of events. Its operation is strict, but the results, as Nietzsche points out, are subject to distortion when they are reintroduced to the material they were meant to describe, or more correctly, to the hierarchical organization of information, the details forming the generic narrative. We can see this quite clearly in the body count associated with September eleventh. This number 3000 appears in front of the American public as a sort of index of the pain they are supposed to collectively feel. It is a number representing a wound, and suggesting, without much examination, the body which sustained it. America was attacked; therefore, you were attacked. That at least is the logic of a causality caught in the uninterrupted circuit of political and economic narrative. It is acceptable to most observers because the signs, in their present construction, are set up in advance to lend themselves to each other as referents, to mimic the authentic object or real condition they are supposed to be signifying.
Furthermore:
The spectacular public representation of violated bodies has come to function as a way of imagining and situating, albeit in violently pathologized form, the very idea of “the public” and, more exactly, the relations of bodies and persons to public spaces.3
The terrorist attack on September eleventh 2001 provided a graphic characterization of the American public. New York, the sacred no-place of “Ground Zero” became the locus of public identification. A shared space. An identifying scar. And most importantly an absence, an empty place upon which to renovate the fictions of identity and unity themselves.
The Twin Towers may have been a meaningful target in and of themselves. Mirror images of each other they represented in at least one way the excess and redundancy of mechanical reproduction, and in another, as the World Trade Center, a multinational conglomeration of production, information and media companies, a nexus and monument to Technological hegemony. Despite the inherent diversity of the tenants the Twin Towers stood for a pure force of self-replication, global in scope but hermetically sealed.
Plato thought not only that Hermes invented language but that he did so in relation to “bargaining”, which implies that a prime site of linguistic invention is the marketplace, another place where we are likely to meet strangers with strange goods, and crossroads-wise, find ourselves forced to articulate newly.4
Perhaps in the days of bartering, craftsmanship, of preindustrial commerce there was still a necessity for new articulation. In the current climate of mass production and monetary exchange there is no longer a need for linguistic invention, understanding, or curiosity because the extent to which the goods and the language of trade differ has been reduced to its quintessential binary form, the language of currency, of technology and self-perpetuation. Mass production does not seek the exchange of culture, but rather its replacement. Trade, organized under the utopian guise of the World Bank and WTO, provides for the illusion that the American global project is one of universal prosperity, that it is truly standard of living and choice that are America’s number one exports. And choice we are told is synonymous with freedom and liberty, but choice with regard to the mass-produced is only a method of conversion, a slight of hand whereby the superfluous is exchanged for the necessary.
It is manic consumption that we export under this banner of choice.
And perhaps this is our cultural legacy, identification through accessories, and conspicuous consumption. “The function of belongings within the economy of the bourgeois subject is one of supplementarity, a supplementarity that in consumer culture replaces its generating subject as the interior milieu substitutes for, and takes the place of, an interior self.”5 As members of consumer culture we are what is to be signified by consumption and accumulation. The objects that surround our corporal body, and our identification, as consumers, taken together are signs of membership and interiority, suggestive of both narrative closure and abstract transcendence of self. Being the target of signification, one lives through a nostalgia for the unique. The grammar of belongings fits into a narrative of production and consumption that promises the restoration of unique identity through accumulation. This is possible because the signifiers (the products one buys, the car, the brand of clothing, etc…) as they enter into this narrative are relieved of their original historical content. Prior to becoming the signifier in this consumer construct they had a separate meaning and history, they were produced by a worker in a factory for example, they provided someone’s livelihood, or were the source of someone’s misery, perhaps the raw materials for the object were brought forth from a piece of land that had to be forcibly taken from an indigenous population, maybe the employees were underpaid, their families going to bed hungry at night, or perhaps the labor was fulfilling and the object received secret marks of endearment, as in the case of a steel worker who welds their initials into the girder of an unfinished building, or a car manufacturer who leaves some token hidden well within the manifold of a vehicle as it passes their position on the assembly line. The details that might have actually contributed to the biography of an object, and may have given, though imperfectly, the consumer the sense of receiving something unique have all been changed, distorted as the object is used as mere form in this secondary semiological structure. Left with an impoverished history, the object, as form, as signifier can now be lent to one of a number of concepts in the consumer culture’s lexicon. One might associate, for example, a Rolex watch with Success, or an Apple Computer with Progress, or a pair of shoes with Coolness, and then in turn receive, as a reward for one’s participation in this economy of associations, transcendence of the material conditions, the sameness of these mass-productions, ascending to the station of their concepts, identifying with them on a personal level. But this identification must be done indiscreetly, these things to operate as signifiers have to be visible, they have to display, and continue to display their clean surfaces, their unblemished form.6 And they must be accumulated, or at least, replaced, upgraded, if they are to assume this character of signification and biography. We must continually have our past, our belongings within our view, organized in a linear context so that they are capable of referring to one another as historical and mythological text and thus informing, indirectly, our overall identification.7
[Within this narrative there is no longer room for the generating subject in his/her authoritative (self-actualizing) capacity, rather their function, if they are to be active at all, is as a kind of museum curator, but a curator of repetition and homogeneity, in a museum of the mass-produced self, and the empty form.]
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, p. 2
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, #554, p. 300
Mark Seltzer, Serial Killer: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture, p. 35
Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes the World, p. 299
Stewart, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, p. XI
For a discussion on semiology; signifiers, signifieds, signs, forms and concepts in mythological speech see Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, pages 111-127
Baudrillard, Ibid. p. 19
Rameses means nothing to us: only the mummy is of inestimable worth since it is what guarantees that accumulation means something. Our entire linear and accumulative culture would collapse if we could not stockpile the past in plain view…