Benedict Seymour on Wed, 13 Feb 2002 17:17:01 +0100 (CET)


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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Memo Mori


Mark,
Your piece reminded me of another writer's comments on the interoffice
memo. Adorno in his memento mori for the subject, Minima Moralia:
'that, instead of letters, they send each other inter-office
communications without address or signature, are random symptoms of a
sickness of contact.'

The real poignancy of the WTC (ie the one going on before its
destruction made it a news item) lies not in the fragile scraps of paper
and their evidence of obliterated lives but rather in the papers' bald
testimony to lives already not lived. Confetti for the 'decay of
experience'.

I enjoyed your piece and the apposite connections it made but I have to
say I always thought the plastic bag scene in American Beauty is the
film's nadir, its symptomatically failed attempt at a utopian image.
This failure is perhaps linked to the slightly false note that 9-11
elegies in general seem to strike, honouring the dead but failing to
denounce the living death and its structural exploitation. The image of
the empty bag is intended by the writer to stand in opposition to the
'official' beauty of American consumer capitalism, a poor thing filled
with transient life, worthless yet more valuable than official,
objectified beauty. However, its just as good an image for the mad dance
of capital as it is for what escapes it, yet another animated thing in a
society reduced to objects. In this respect the aura of the antic bag is
merely a continuation of the object-worship the film addresses, a
sidechapel. The bag epiphany is bogus because the bag's emptiness ends
up as affirmative as the destruction of the WTC, another, if convoluted,
proof of the ultimate rightness and superiority of the American way of
life. The plastic bag may suggest the horror vacui of consumerism but it
also consoles with a spectral presence, its beauty becomes an elite
commodity (art) of value to the discerning, stylishly alienated consumer
who yearns for spirituality in a world of things. As the image of a
consoling 'magic-in the-ordinary', a numinous intervention untrammelled
by a sense of the ordinary's mystified horrors, it's really just a
gentrified piece of new age kitsch, albeit an arte povera one.

In this image the strategies of evanescence and ephemerality earlier
pursued by Duchamp and Warhol, not to mention their conceptualist
progeny, are finally reified, subsumed under Hollywood's relentless
drive to create affirmative representations of consumer society. The
fleeting beauty of the bag indicates that this margin of freedom is now
also property, just like other forms of intangible creativity colonised
in the last decade. Jameson says somewhere that 'in postmodernism all
beauty is meretricious' and AB's plastic bag seems to be the very
epitome of this sublimity-gone-twee. Nothing is now really something;
too too solid, like a museum of WTC relics (as you imply, only in the
minds eye or in the actual encounter can the fragments have their pathos
and keep their dignity).

Yours with (email) address and the closest I can get to a signature,
Ben Seymour

----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Dery <markdery@mindspring.com>
To: <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 8:26 PM
Subject: <nettime> Memo Mori


> A belated Elegy in a Corporate Graveyard, along with some musings on
> invisible literature...
>
>  Memo Mori
>
>  Long before the premature End of the World As We Know It and the
> resultant Death (not again!) of Irony, the SF novelist and master
ironist
> J.G. Ballard predicted (with tongue only partly in cheek) that "one
day in
> the near future.anthologies of 20th century inter-office memos" would
one
> day be "as treasured as the correspondence of Virginia Woolf and T.S.
> Eliot."1
>
> Ballard is a constant reader of what he calls "invisible
literature"---the
> paper trail of the Information Age, which comprises "market research
> reports, pharmaceutical company house magazines, the promotional copy
for
> a new high-energy breakfast food, journals such as Psychological
Abstracts
> and the Italian automobile magazine Style Auto, the internal memoranda
of
> TV company planning departments, sex manuals, [and] medical textbooks
such
> as the extraordinary Crash Injuries."2
>
> Of course, Ballard's inventory is hardly exhaustive. To his mental
> library, we might add press releases, chain letters, religious tracts,
> self-help books, psychological tests (such as the Minnesota
Multiphasic
> Personality Index), government publications (for example, the Warren,
> Meese, and Starr reports), lunatic-fringe manifestoes (Industrial
Society
> and Its Future by the Unabomber, S.C.U.M. by Valerie Solanas), trial
> transcripts, cockpit voice recordings, technical manuals, mail-order
> catalogues, mission statements, and annual reports. In the decades
since
> Ballard coined the term, around 1970, the flood of invisible lit has
> swollen to biblical proportions, gushing through the burst bulkheads
of
> our lives in the form of faxes, spam, blog, and personal e-mail, not
to
> mention the old-fashioned dead-tree stuff.
>
>  For Ballard, the literary productions of executives, scientific
> researchers, and the stage managers of consumer psychology
(advertisers,
> marketers, public-relations firms), properly read, are an
inexhaustible
> fund of insights and inspiration, perfectly attuned to the neuroses
and
> psychoses of everyday life in the 21st century---unlike the mainstream
> novel, still suffering from a humanist hangover that blinds it to our
> increasingly posthuman reality of designer babies and intelligent
> interfaces, computers that run on bacteria and heart valves made of
> engineered tissue. Like DeLillo and Pynchon, Ballard reads the
literary
> output of corporate America as a collective dream journal, extracting
from
> its eerie banalities and arcane data the true mythology of the 21st
> century. Crash Injuries, the Warren Report, and the Hollywood Yellow
Pages
> are his Kraft-Ebbing, his Interpretation of Dreams, his Man and His
> Symbols---and his Great American Novels, too. As for traditional
fiction,
> well, "the great majority of English and American novelists.have
nothing
> of interest to say whatever, and an hour spent in not reading them is
an
> hour gained forever."3 Hence, his arch prediction that, when the
> electronic cottage and the free-agent economy make the corporate
office
> obsolete, the prosaic communications of today's companies will become
> precious things, transformed by their obsolescence from memos into
> mementos.
>
> "[W]hen the last corporate headquarters has been torn down," is how he
> puts it, but that's just a blind; his future tense, borrowed from the
prop
> room of pulp SF, is purely ironic. In truth, Ballard is using the
> elevation of inter-office memos to literary status to make the
argument,
> equal parts Warhol and Duchamp, that the individual voice is giving
way to
> the collective hum of the corporate hive (see Warhol's use of hired
hands
> to do the gruntwork of actually making his art, or his famous
confession
> that he wanted to be a robot; see also Duchamp's use of mechanical
drawing
> and professional signpainters to expunge all traces of "the artist's
hand"
> from his work). Ever the wag, Ballard is also saying that scientific
> journals, industry studies, government white papers---hell, even
> advertising copy---offer a more relevant vocabulary for delving the
depths
> of our info-b litzed, hyper-mediated psyches than the serious novels
> beloved of the New York Review of Books crowd, an assertion calculated
to
> give Dame Sontag a fit of the vapors.
>
>  But Ballard's "one day in the near future" has arrived ahead of
schedule,
> on the wings of a horror unimaginable to him or anyone, burying his
> prediction under an irony heavy as death. The corporate HQ isn't an
> archaeological site just yet, but the world's best-known office
complex,
> the World Trade Center, has been reduced to a smoldering hellpit, and
the
> inter-office memos of its former occupants, many of them now dead,
have
> been filed under a mountain of debris or scattered to the winds.
>
> A snowfall of them joined the choking white grit already blanketing
> Liberty Plaza, near the debris field that was the WTC. In a photo in
the
> September 23 issue of The New York Times Magazine, waves of paper lap
at
> twisted metal, drunkenly leaning trees, and J. Seward Johnson Jr.'s
> superrealist sculpture of a corporate footsoldier, Double Check
(1982).4
> The pall of lunar dust---soot, pulverized concrete, and god knows
> what---lends the scene a ghastly beauty. It resonates at the same
> aesthetic frequency as those hauntingly poetic human shadows frozen on
> Hiroshima walls by the atomic flashbulb. And like those indelible
shadows,
> some of these papers may be all that remains of some blue-, pink-, or
> white-collar Twin Tower worker who will never be found.
>
>  That thought is never far from the minds of Times writers Jane
Fritsch
> and David Rohde, whose story "Trade Center's Past In a Sad Paper
Trail" is
> an exercise in forensic trashpicking, sleuthing out the fates of the
WTC
> workers whose lives entwine with the "mangled, singed and occasionally
> pristine" papers blown out of the building and lofted, in some cases,
on
> the southeasterly wind that carried them as far as Brooklyn.5 The
> reporters find the year-old resume of someone who wanted a job at a
firm
> with offices in the Trade Center (she didn't get the job, a twist of
fate
> that now seems portentous); the credit union statement of a man who
worked
> on the north tower's 88th floor (he made it down); the cell-phone bill
of
> a woman whose number, when called, triggers a recording that says her
> voicemailbox is full, an everyday message that suddenly sounds
chilling.
>
>  Intimations of mortality came to rest at the novelist Jonathan
Lethem's
> feet, as well. On Henry Street, in Brooklyn, he watched "crisped
> papers.twinkling to the ground," among them a computer printout with
the
> coded I.D. "7WTC 034" and the name "Kirshenbaum, Joan." The document
> admonishes, "For any report change complete this section and return to
ops
> support, data centre." Lethem adds, "Joan Kirshenbaum, if you're
reading
> this, I've got your scrap of paper."6 Lethem is whistling past the
> graveyard, but the wry note he's reaching for turns sour when we
remember
> that Joan Kirshenbaum may not be reading this, Joan Kirshenbaum may
not be
> reading anything, Joan Kirshenbaum may never read anything again. To
> someone, somewhere, Lethem's found object may be all that's left of
> somebody they love: the inter-office memo as ashes in an urn.
>
>  Indeed, some New Yorkers seemed not to know what to do with the
> melancholy fallout of crumpled, charred or burning documents. Throw
them
> out? Save them as pieces of history or morbid souvenirs? Enshrine them
in
> some sort of secular reliquary? To the writer Kurt Andersen, who lives
in
> Brooklyn, the papers that drift down, into his backyard, seem like
> "instant archaeological objects retroactively charged with meaning,
too
> sad and strange to keep but too sad and strange to throw away."7
>
>  Why not preserve them in a memorial anthology, to be read well into
the
> 21st century, "as treasured as the correspondence of Virginia Woolf
and
> T.S. Eliot"? Then again, if they ever build a museum to the tragedy of
the
> Twin Towers, perhaps the papers that fell from the sky could be sent
aloft
> again, freed to flap and flutter like disembodied things in a giant,
> multistory version of one of those Plexiglas columns that you see in
> science museums, where a jet of air keeps a ball afloat. In the mind's
> eye, at least, there's a mute poetry to the image of all those papers
> arcing up, up, into the clouds, across the East River, over Governors
> Island, and down, into Brooklyn. Somehow, it seems like an elegy, more
> eloquent than words. It reminds me of the sweet, sublimely sad little
> pirouette of the plastic bag in the movie-within-a-movie in American
> Beauty. Only a minute in length, that slow-motion dance of a scrap of
> trash, brought to life by a gust of wind, said things about the
emptiness
> that gnaws around the edges of our lives, lives that are over in an
> eyeblink, and the fleeting glimpses we catch, in the least likely
places,
> of the sublime.
>
>  Alan Ball, who wrote the screenplay to American Beauty, based that
scene
> on a memory. One Sunday in spring, in the early '90s, he was walking,
> alone, through Manhattan's deserted financial district. "It was a
> beautiful day," he told an interviewer, "very still, kind of overcast,
and
> the light had that perfect, kind of flat quality."8 Suddenly, he
noticed
> "this plastic bag in the wind, this white plastic bag. And it circled
me,
> it literally circled me, like, 10 or 15 times. And after about the
third
> or fourth time I felt very, um, I started to feel weird.I really did
feel
> like I was in the presence of something."9 That he was standing in
front
> of the World Trade Center at the time is one of the uncanny
coincidences
> that mean everything---and nothing. Like life itself.
>
> -Mark Dery is a cultural critic. His most recent book is the essay
> collection, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
Brink
> <www.levity.com/markdery/>.
>
> (This essay originally appeared, in shorter form, as my "Invisible
Lit"
> column in the Winter 2001 issue of Bookforum.)
>
>
> ENDNOTES
>
> 1 J.G. Ballard, A User's Guide to the Millennium (New York: Picador
USA,
> 1996), p. 76.
> 2 J.G. Ballard, quoted in J.G. Ballard: Re/Search 8/9, ed. Vale,
Andrea Juno
> (San Francisco: Re/Search Publishing, 1984), p. 156.
> 3 J.G. Ballard, quoted in J.G. Ballard: Re/Search 8/9, ed. Vale,
Andrea Juno
> (San Francisco: Re/Search Publishing, 1984), p. 156.
> 4 Jeff Mermelstein, "Windows on the World," The New York Times
Magazine,
> September 23, 2001, pps. 64-65.
> 5 Jane Fritsch and David Rohde, "Trade Center's Past In a Sad Paper
Trail,"
> The New York Times, September 14, 2001, p. A1.
> 6 Jonathan Lethem, "9 Failures of the Imagination," The New York Times
> Magazine, September 23, 2001, p. 62. Happily, Joan Kirshenbaum is
alive and
> well, as Lethem informed me by e-mail. "Because of the clue you
> inadvertently reproduced in your piece -- "7WTC" -- I wrote my piece
knowing
> that Joan Kirshenbaum would have had to be sensationally unlucky to
die that
> day," he wrote. "WTC# Seven didn't collapse until five o'clock p.m. In
fact,
> she's been in touch, and her scrap of paper is back in her posession.
I
> think she's making a collage with it."
> 7 Kurt Andersen, "Fallout," The New York Times Magazine, September 23,
2001,
> p. 78.
> 8 Quentin Curtis, "The Man Behind American Beauty," The Age, February
3,
> 2000.
> 9 Russ Spencer, Salon, "In a Culture of Detritus, American Beauty
> Screenwriter Alan Ball Discovers Heartbreaking Beauty in Garbage,"
March 25,
> 2000.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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