Welcome to the Desert of the Real!

The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living
in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly
starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle
staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all
people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic
show. The most recent example of this is Peter Weir's The Truman Show
(1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small town clerk who gradually
discovers the truth that he is the hero of a 24-hours permanent TV
show: his hometown is constructed on a gigantic studio set, with
cameras following him permanently. Among its predecessors, it is
worth mentioning Philip Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a
hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic Californian city
of the late 50s, gradually discovers that the whole town is a fake
staged to keep him satisfied... The underlying experience of Time Out
of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist
consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a
way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the material inertia.

So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life
deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late
capitalist consumerist society, "real social life" itself somehow
acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving
in "real" life as stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate
truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the
de-materialization of the "real life" itself, its reversal into a
spectral show. Among them, Christopher Isherwood gave expression to
this unreality of the American daily life, exemplified in the motel
room: "American motels are unreal!/.../ they are deliberately
designed to be unreal. /.../ The Europeans hate us because we've
retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into
caves to contemplate." Peter Sloterdijk's notion of the "sphere" is
here literally realized, as the gigantic metal sphere that envelopes
and isolates the entire city. Years ago, a series of science-fiction
films like Zardoz or Logan's Run forecasted today's postmodern
predicament by extending this fantasy to the community itself: the
isolated group living an aseptic life in a secluded area longs for
the experience of the real world of material decay.

The Wachowski brothers' hit Matrix (1999) brought this logic to its
climax: the material reality we all experience and see around us is a
virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to
which we are all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves)
awakens into the "real reality," he sees a desolate landscape
littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a global
war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting:
"Welcome to the desert of the real." Was it not something of the
similar order that took place in New York on September 11? Its
citizens were introduced to the "desert of the real" - to us,
corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots we saw of the
collapsing towers could not but remind us of the most breathtaking
scenes in the catastrophe big productions.

When we hear how the bombings were a totally unexpected shock, how
the unimaginable Impossible happened, one should recall the other
defining catastrophe from the beginning of the XXth century, that of
Titanic: it was also a shock, but the space for it was already
prepared in ideological fantasizing, since Titanic was the symbol of
the might of the XIXth century industrial civilization. Does the same
not hold also for these bombings? Not only were the media bombarding
us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat
was also obviously libidinally invested - just recall the series of
movies from Escape From New York to Independence Day. The unthinkable
which happened was thus the object of fantasy: in a way, America got
what it fantasized about, and this was the greatest surprise.

It is precisely now,when we are dealing with the raw Real of a
catastrophe, that we should bear in mind the ideological and
fantasmatic coordinates which determine its perception. If there is
any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC towers, it is not so much
the old-fashioned notion of the "center of financial capitalism,"
but, rather, the notion that the two WTC towers stood for the center
of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected
from the sphere of material production. The shattering impact of the
bombings can only be accounted for only against the background of the
borderline which today separates the digitalized First World from the
Third World "desert of the Real." It is the awareness that we live in
an insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some
ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction.

Is, consequently, Osama Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind
the bombings, not the real-life counterpart of Ernst Stavro Blofeld,
the master-criminal in most of the James Bond films, involved in the
acts of global destruction. What one should recall here is that the
only place in Hollywood films where we see the production process in
all its intensity is when James Bond penetrates the master-criminal's
secret domain and locates there the site of intense labor (distilling
and packaging the drugs, constructing a rocket that will destroy New
York...).
When the master-criminal, after capturing Bond, usually takes him on
a tour of his illegal factory, is this not the closest Hollywood
comes to the socialist-realist proud presentation of the production
in a factory? And the function of Bond's intervention, of course, is
to explode in firecraks this site of production, allowing us to
return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with the
"disappearing working class." Is it not that, in the exploding WTC
towers, this violence directed at the threatening Outside turned back
at us?

The safe Sphere in which Americans live is experienced as under
threat from the Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly
self-sacrificing AND cowards, cunningly intelligent AND primitive
barbarians. Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we
should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this
pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own
essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and
peace of the "civilized" West was bought by the export of ruthless
violence and destruction into the "barbarian" Outside: the long story
from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo. Cruel and
indifferent as it may sound, we should also, now more than ever, bear
in mind that the actual effect of these bombings is much more
symbolic than real. The US just got the taste of what goes on around
the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Rwanda and
Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York
snipers and gang rapes,one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a
decade ago.

It is when we watched on TV screen the two WTC towers collapsing,
that it became possible to experience the falsity of the "reality TV
shows": even if this shows are "for real," people still act in them -
they simply play themselves. The standard disclaimer in a novel
("characters in this text are a fiction, every resemblance with the
real life characters is purely contingent") holds also for the
participants of the reality soaps: what we see there are fictional
characters, even if they play themselves for the real. Of course, the
"return to the Real" can be given different twists: Rightist
commentators like George Will also immediately proclaimed the end of
the American "holiday from history" - the impact of reality
shattering the isolated tower of the liberal tolerant attitude and
the Cultural Studies focus on textuality. Now, we are forced to
strike back, to deal with real enemies in the real world... However,
WHOM to strike? Whatever the response, it will never hit the RIGHT
target, bringing us full satisfaction. The ridicule of America
attacking Afghanistan cannot but strike the eye: if the greatest
power in the world will destroy one of the poorest countries in which
peasant barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultimate
case of the impotent acting out?

There is a partial truth in the notion of the "clash of
civilizations" attested here -witness the surprise of the average
American: "How is it possible that these people have such a
disregard for their own lives?" Is not the obverse of this surprise
the rather sad fact that we, in the First World countries, find it
more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause
for which one would be ready to sacrifice one's life? When, after the
bombings, even the Taliban foreign minister said that he can "feel
the pain" of the American children, did he not thereby confirm the
hegemonic ideological role of this Bill Clinton's trademark phrase?
Furthermore, the notion of America as a safehaven, of course, also is
a fantasy: when a New Yorker commented on how, after the bombings,
one can no longer walk safely on the city's streets, the irony of it
was that, well before the bombings, the streets of New York were
well-known for the dangers of being attacked or, at least, mugged -
if anything, the bombings gave rise to a new sense of solidarity,
with the scenes of young African-Americans helping an old Jewish
gentlemen to cross the street, scenes unimaginable a couple of days
ago.

Now, in the days immediately following the bombings, it is as if we
dwell in the unique time between a traumatic event and its symbolic
impact, like in those brief moment after we are deeply cut, and
before the full extent of the pain strikes us - it is open how the
events will be symbolized, what their symbolic efficiency will be,
what acts they will be evoked to justify. Even here, in these moments
of utmost tension, this link is not automatic but contingent. There
are already the first bad omens; the day after the bombing, I got a
message from a journal which was just about to publish a longer text
of mine on Lenin, telling me that they decided to postpone its
publication - they considered in opportune to publish a text on Lenin
immediately after the bombing. Does this not point towards the
ominous ideological rearticulations which will follow?

We don't yet know what consequences in economy, ideology, politics,
war, this event will have, but one thing is sure: the US, which, till
now, perceived itself as an island exempted from this kind of
violence, witnessing this kind of things only from the safe distance
of the TV screen, is now directly involved. So the alternative is:
will Americans decide to fortify further their "sphere," or to risk
stepping out of it? Either America will persist in, strengthen even,
the attitude of "Why should this happen to us? Things like this don't
happen HERE!", leading to more aggressivity towards the threatening
Outside, in short: to a paranoiac acting out. Or America will finally
risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating it from the
Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world, making the
long-overdued move from "A thing like this should not happen HERE!
"to "A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!". America's"
holiday from history" was a fake: America's peace was bought by the
catastrophes going on elsewhere. Therein resides the true lesson of
the bombings: the only way to ensure that it will not happen HERE
again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE ELSE.