Forgive us our debts
“Now watch this drive.” - George W. Bush, 2002
I was in eighth grade on the actual 9/11. I was in school that morning. We started watching it on TV as soon as it happened, and we watched TV all day long. (My parents are not the kind to pick me up from school early, 9/11 or no 9/11.) We kept watching TV at home. We ate dinner – watery spaghetti with the last mealy few of the August tomatoes – in front of the TV, the only time I can remember doing that before or since. Sometime that evening, I started clocking the same clips from Manhattan re-running back to back on a ten-minute loop. I knew they were important images, but truthfully, they were no more alarming than any blockbuster preview. They were moving, but silent, without any diegetic noise; just the cable hosts’ repetitive vamping.
Sometimes, when I feel like putting myself on a really bad trip, I watch videos on a YouTube channel called “EnhancedWTCVideos.” The 9/11 captured in these videos is different than the “real” 9/11 as I remember it actually happening (on TV). “Content” is an anachronistic term – the fruits of the dot-com harvest cycle would have to ripen and rot for content to cohere as the form that we recognize today – but with 25 years of hindsight and brain-corrupting internet addiction, I can definitely recognize the real 9/11 as high-production-value content. The videos on EnhancedWTCVideos, on the other hand, have a Warhol-like fixity and steadiness, an attention span that feels endless today. Twelve minutes of smoke pouring from the flaming gash in the North Tower, randomly zooming in and out on a shaky handheld camcorder. Twenty-five minutes, forty minutes, of the struck towers, and the confusion on the street. The original, diegetic audio is the most striking difference between these videos and the real 9/11 that I remember and will Never Forget. Listening to the stifled pandemonium of people’s real-time reactions makes it impossible to “watch” 9/11 the way I’m accustomed to watching it, cinematically. It puts the televisual experience just a hair closer to the on-the-ground experience. Much that is left to the imagination in the official cut is no longer left to the imagination, some degree of televisual distance is collapsed, the emotional tone is several shades darker. EnhancedWTCVideos adds some of the reality back in to what most of us experienced, “for real,” as a televisual spectacle already edited and processed to fit between commercial breaks, delivering, using Baudrillard’s terms from The Spirit of Terrorism, the frisson of reality superadded to the image. But this dose of reality is not clarifying. Nothing is learned or revealed. 9/11 is so fascinating, and so perfectly postmodern, because it stubbornly confounds and elides representation. Even unedited video recordings of the event as it transpired somehow obscure it.
Talking about 9/11 as an architectural event, Baudrillard compares the towers themselves to a bar graph, a “statistical chart,” and in all this goofy Frenchness there is a pronounced “digitality” to 9/11. We might consider two ones (11), reduced to two zeroes, literally, smoldering holes in the ground. Further, more abstract analogies to digital culture, digital governance, digital networks of communication, surveillance, finance, and trade, all present themselves – the things that, taken together, Baudrillard calls “globalization.” This is more general than a theory of economic development, and more vibey, more like: everyone and everything caught in a big, universalizing, homogenizing net. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is set right after the dot-com collapse (where 9/11/2001 is also “set,” in real time and history). The dot-com boom, a stock market bubble and phenomenon of the digital networks that facilitate stock trading, infused a ton of money into Silicon Valley; in the bust part of the cycle, that money got processed into “smart” weapons and technologies for the “agile” Global War on Terror to follow, low interest rates and liquid credit, and defense contracts for social networking and surveillance technologies. On this last point, they are one and the same: interactive mind control and data gathering platforms that we insist on calling “social media.”
Bleeding Edge features a Second Life-style computer game called DeepArcher whose source code is dependent on one of the random number generators in the Global Consciousness Project network. The Global Consciousness Project is a real-life “parapsychology” experiment that, from 1998, has maintained this network of random number generators in “an attempt to detect possible interactions of ‘global consciousness’ with physical systems.” The idea is that collective emotional responses to major world events might register as “anomalous” – nonrandom – strings of outputs from these generators. Think: COOPER/COOPER/COOPER. When 9/11 happens in the novel, as eerily foreshadowed there as in real life, it causes just this kind of spooky ripple in the digital interface between the physical and emotional realms and the generators “go nonrandom,” fragging the DeepArcher source code and opening it to all users. Throughout the first three-quarters of the novel, the game’s creators had been wrestling with whether to make it open source or sell it, perhaps to the creepy Musk-like tech billionaire Gabriel Ice. The choice is ultimately made for them by 9/11 and the deep and numinous perturbation in the network it occasioned. Dead people begin showing up in the game: people who died in the Twin Towers as well as at least one of 9/11’s less straightforward victims, the spook and murderer Nick Windust. Windust is a fictional CIA analogue to John O’Neill, the FBI counterterrorism expert and 9/11 Cassandra turned World Trade Center security chief who was tragically and ironically killed in the Towers. (O’Neill is portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the 2018 miniseries The Looming Tower.) Windust’s subplot, which also involves a brief and intense sexual entanglement with the book’s heroine, Maxine, draws a parallel between DeepArcher and Xibalba, the underworld of Mayan mythology.
Like Maxine’s attraction to Windust, which she does not understand or make any attempt to rationalize, 9/11 is the consequence of some invisible logic or force detectable only through its effects, all tantalizingly related to one another but impossible to resolve into a coherent “real” explanation. 9/11 makes us all into Pynchon characters (weren’t we already?), standing on the periphery of some noisy system, hallucinating a pattern into it. One of these patterns, obviously, is the conspiracy “truther” stuff. As ever with conspiracy theories, the stupid shit (“jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”) is not only lumped in with the really unsettling and inadmissible, the stupid shit serves as alibi for dismissing the real questions. Like: where the fuck was HW, Bush Senior, Director of Central Intelligence 1976-77, that morning? What was Cheney doing for those 15 minutes in the tunnel outside the Presidential Emergency Operations Center? The web of little orders and administrative changes in the months and weeks before the attack that all added up to inaction – where and with whom does the buck stop? And this is just the first few centimeters of the relatively straightforward deep state stuff, at least theoretically accessible on the plane (no pun intended?) of reality, via facts and information. But what about the spectral networked aspect of it, the parts of 9/11 that are information? The irregular stock market activity in the days leading up to (and during) the attacks? The 9/11 Commission Report acknowledged and dismissed these out of hand, due to their working assumption that Al Qaeda was responsible, and Al Qaeda doesn’t play the stock market, and please look no further into what Al Qaeda is. Are we satisfied with this?
It’s not my aim to even attempt to answer these questions here. I offer this just to say that this is the unlicensed way of making a coherent story out of the events of 9/11, quickly relegated to the dank basement of paranoia and fantasy. There’s also a licensed way of making 9/11 make sense. Both the licensed and unlicensed versions strategies involve deep dream logic, and the licensed version is the one that is actually less tethered to factual reality. Confronted with a terrifying and humiliating attack that frustrated representability, offering neither sensational victims (the overwhelming majority were male office workers) nor clear heroes (the firefighters that were so aggressively lionized in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 really couldn’t do anything during the attacks), the overwhelming response was – well, America doing what America does best. Fire up the dream machine, pluck an existing trope from our shallow cultural catalogue, and slot the events of 9/11 right into it. It was already a movie anyway. The prevailing trope organizing the official story, as Susan Faludi documents in her book Terror Dreams, was the “frontier captivity” narrative – white settlers in the American colonies, always young women, kidnapped and held far from white God and white family by encroaching bands of hostile Native Americans. This story structure predates American cinema by quite a few hundred years, but American cinema cannot stop testifying to its power, straightforwardly as with The Searchers, or in a rather more convoluted way as with every movie John Milius ever made. Faludi points out that it’s the similarity of feeling, not the similarity of events or the details or facts of the events, that connects these frontier narratives to 9/11 – feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. Now, to call the United States in 2001 powerless is simply silly. But we didn’t experience 9/11 as a geopolitical event, a Realpolitik chess move, or blowback for decades of US foreign policy. We experienced it as television. And watching it on television, over and over again, made us feel powerless, creating a rich and high-octane reserve of collective feeling that was successfully played upon and exploited in the subsequent years.
Perhaps because he’s French, Baudrillard is comfortable with a more psychoanalytic reading of 9/11. What did this powerlessness feel like, how hard was it for us to hold, what did – as my psychoanalyst might say – being forced to feel this feeling bring up for us? Faludi does a good job of documenting the sheer volume of psychic work, even bullying, expended to construct a narcotizing and acceptable myth of 9/11 as anything other than a huge national humiliation. Ultimately, though, the wish at the center of the terror dream is too freaky even for her – she routes it back through straight sociology, documenting the gender-war fallout from 9/11 and how and why 9/11 came to be construed culturally as an attack on the domestic sphere. All true enough. But what if we stay with it in the psychogeographic register that Pynchon explores in Bleeding Edge? (And really all of his fiction – I must comment here that an early proposed cover for Gravity’s Rainbow featured a straightforward interpretation of card XVI of the Major Arcana, The Tower, depicting, well, a tower: a tower that is being struck by lightning and collapsing as human figures tumble from it.) Baudrillard insists that a crooked dream-reading gets closer to the truth of the event than the straight readings that emphasize the geopolitical stakes and conscious motives and patterns of globalization as a rational economic system. For Baudrillard, globalization is a psychic and emotional system, too, with unconscious ramifications.
French theorists are ever obsessed with gifts and sacrifice, non-market forms of giving and receiving, with symbolic or otherwise non-monetary stakes. In these terms, Baudrillard conceptualizes 9/11 as a “challenge” to the globalized system via a “symbolic gift of death.” By this he means that the terrorists on 9/11 used all the resources of globalized modernity to “give it back to us” on different terms than our hegemony permits or can tolerate. For almost all of us who were alive that day, we received it via TV and televisual images. This is for him the “spirit of terrorism”: the marriage of all the technical capabilities of the globalized system, which we insist and believe is the only one there is – the air planes, air traffic control, the towers themselves, digital communications networks, cell phones (just think of the melodrama of the voicemails from Flight 93) – with a symbolic gesture that operates in a completely different dimension of meaning. That dimension is the symbolic one. The humiliating thing about 9/11 was to be addressed in a way that we can’t answer and have no answer for, to be challenged on terms that we can’t even perceive and aren’t allowed to perceive, to be given a symbolic “gift” that we can’t reciprocate. Here’s Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism summarizing the symbolic stakes:
“It is not that giving is impossible in this culture, but that the counter-gift is impossible, since all the paths of sacrifice have been neutralized and defused (there remains only a parody of sacrifice that can be seen in all the current forms of victimhood). We are, as a result, in the relentless situation of receiving, always receiving. Not now from God or nature, but through a technical system of generalized exchange and general gratification. Everything is potentially given to us, and we are entitled to everything, like it or not.”
Each node in a network is vulnerable, but new circuits can establish themselves around points of failure. The attacks of 9/11 did not destroy the system of globalization, American capitalism, or American hegemony. The real defeat of 9/11 was symbolic, and the real power in 9/11 was the exploitable emotional response it created in the collective. We’re not just humiliated by the attacks, but by the lifestyle and the life system that made such an attack possible – Baudrillard juxtaposes the horror of dying in the Twin Towers with the horror of living and working in “sarcophagi of concrete and steel,” the festering toxicity of Ground Zero itself a terrible testimonial to the horrible, unrepresentable truth of American power, what towers like those have to be made of to even exist. Of course, the American response, though it caused unaccounted and unaccountable destruction and suffering, did not answer the attacks on their own terms, and only inflamed rather than salved the fundamental humiliation. Receiving, receiving a symbolic “gift” that we can’t return on the same symbolic terms (receiving such a gift via media images) incurs, as Baudrillard says in a curious turn of phrase, “a debt that cannot be repaid.”
Baudrillard means this in terms of the system that gives us so many things, “like it or not.” These unpayable debts include real debts, of course. What American is unfamiliar with predatory debt of all kinds? Credit card debt, student loan debt, mortgage debt. It was consumer spending, after all, that juiced the flaccid economy after 9/11, and the low interest rates that persisted through the dot-com bust and the 9/11 slump that led directly to the subprime mortgage crisis, a metastasis of so many malignant unpayable debts. Baudrillard is also referring to symbolic kinds of unpayable debt – the symbolic debt he’s describing with 9/11 is constitutively unpayable. America could do a lot of things, but it couldn’t return the symbolic blow that 9/11 represented on its own terms. In his book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, Richard Beck quotes two ethnographers reflecting on “a debt that can’t be repaid,” a phrase repeated by both Bush Jr. and Obama, at two separate addresses at the Arlington National Cemetery on two separate military holidays, in 2008 and 2013. We say that a debt that can’t be repaid is in default; to say that we owe the victims and first responders of 9/11 and veterans of the subsequent GWOT a debt that can’t be repaid is to say that our government took out this loan knowing it would default. A huge, unpayable debt of human life, American, Iraqi, Afghan, and more, financed with the credit drawn from people’s depth of feeling and outrage over the images of 9/11. We receive the gifts as images, as content, and the images bind us in a psychic economy that is uncomfortably imbricated with the real economy.
The tools and techniques of the GWOT coming home to roost might signal some loss of the status we, the vaunted American public, once enjoyed as consumers, the only type of political subject we’ve ever really been. This might mark some transition from important consumer to surplus population. But I would caution us not to be fooled by the grotesque theater of austerity and sheer totalizing force. We’re still integral to the real economy, just not as consumers of cheap goods anymore. We’re integral to the real economy as consumers of cheap images. This is how our psychic energy is hooked in to the globalized system of exchange. Images have never been cheaper and easier to get, and at the same time, they’ve never been costlier in terms of the psychic vig they exact. Attention is a brilliant object for exploitation, because it’s not like credit; you can’t default on attention the way you can default on credit card debt. But it’s not free. Our mental energy is the credit of a system that is increasingly sophisticated – because it learns from us – at eliciting, predicting, and modulating extreme emotional reactions and then monetizing them, alchemizing them into real money. The feelings that the techniques and technologies for image-manipulation and image-delivery elicit in you are not accidental, and they are useful. An increasingly important question for the next several years will be: who are they useful to? Who benefits from inflicting “screen time” on us, what is the emotional interest that is charged, and why does the functioning of the global economy increasingly depend on hijacking and colonizing our dopaminergic circuits, our conscious and unconscious minds?