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Title: Crisis of Meaning
Author: Hakim Bey
Date: 2001
Language: en
Topics: 9/11, Peter Lamborn Wilson, reality, terrorism
Source: Retrieved on April 23rd, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/crisis-meaning.html
Notes: The author was in NYC from Sept. 9th to Sept. 15th and this piece was written in the week after the attack. Published as Peter Lamborn Wilson.

Hakim Bey

Crisis of Meaning

A few days after the event, the New York Times ran an interesting

article on the advertising “industry” and its crisis. Not only zillions

of dollars a day etc. etc., but a weird effect: suddenly it seems

impossible to have advertising at all. It seems massively

“inappropriate” to move product as per usual with shrieking &

insinuating, mocking & sneering, prurience & peeping; with hate & envy

masked as fashion, with greed thinly disguised as freedom of choice.

Death and tragedy occur every day, every minute, not only in the former

Third World, even in New York, even in America. Why hasn’t advertising

ever seemed shameful to anyone ever before? The media — which cannot

utter a sound without puking up a cliché — speaks now of the waking of a

sleeping giant (meaning that we will no longer terrorism etc.) — but

what was this sleep? And what does it mean to wake into a feeling of

shame?

Last week, it seems we were willing to admit that our highest social

values could be expressed in price codes (the “mark of the Beast” as the

cranks say, the “prophets of doom”). This week, we feel shame. In a

Times interview a fashion designer expressed doubt that her work had any

significance and wondered if she could go with it.

The fashion industry is also ashamed; Hollywood is ashamed; even the

news media expressed some fleeting longing for decorum & dignity &

decency.

Are we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our

meanspiritedness, our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred of the

body and of all nature, our obsession with gadgetry & “information”, our

degraded pop culture, our vapid or morbid art & lit, & so on & so on? —

or should we defend all this as “freedom” and our “way of life”?

Our leaders are telling us to return to normal routines (after a decent

period of mourning) in the assurance that they will assign significance

to the event, they will embody our hate & desire for revenge, they will

mediate for us with the forces of “evil”. But what exactly is this

normal life to consist of? Why do we feel this shame?

Schoolchildren (again according to the Times) ask their teachers what it

means that the terrorists were willing to die, to kill themselves; and

their teachers evade the question, saying that “we don’t understand.”

And the ad execs, they don’t understand either — they’re bewildered.

Awake but confused by a crisis of meaning. Last week all meanings could

be expressed in terms of money. Why should 5000 murders change the

meaning of meaning?

A hyper-fashionable Italian clothing company uses death to sell its

products. Photographs — even huge billboards — showing people dying of

AIDS or waiting to be executed — designed to sell woolly jumpers. In

this life as normal? Should we return to it?

For a few days no music was heard in the streets. No thumping bass

speakers rattled the air, no chants of hate for women & queers, no

“Madison Avenue Choirs” hymning the celestial delites of commodities or

vacations in the midst of other peoples’ misery.

For a few hours or days there appeared no official spin on the event, no

slogan/logo in the media, no interpretation, no meaning. We watched the

cloud drift around the city, first to the East over Brooklyn then up the

west side of Manhattan, finally over the east side as well. With the

smell and the poisonous haze around the moon came a nightmare abut the

occult significance of the cloud: — angry bewildered ghosts in a vast

white cloud. And we breathed that cloud into us. We’ll never get it out

of our lungs. What the cloud wanted was an explanation, a meaning.

But next day the spin was in, the media had found or been given its a

ndreds who died trying to save thenswer — “Attack On America”, our

freedom, our values, our way of life, carried out by “cowards” who were

nevertheless not “physical cowards” (as some official explained in the

Times). Perhaps they were moral cowards? He didn e our faculty and

students of colo’t say.

Why do they hate us? A few people have asked but received no coherent

answer. Do “they” hate “us” because we use of 75% of the world’s

resources even though we only constitute 20% of its population? because

we bomb Baghdad & Belgrade without risking even one American life?

because we export a vapid sneering meanspirited culture to the world,

video games about death, movies about death, TV shows about death,

commodities that are dead, music that kills the spirit? because we’ve

made advertising copy our highest artform? because we define “freedom”

as our freedom to rule & be ruled by money?

The politicians have told that “they” envy us and our way of life and

therefore wish to destroy it. Envy — yes, why not? The whole system of

global capital is based on envy. It has to be. No envy, no desire. No

desire, no reason to spend. No reason to spend, implosion of global

capital, q.e.d. But then why should the ad execs & fashion designers &

sports teams & entertainers feel this strange unaccountable shame?

And why should the terrorists have been willing to die just because they

envy our wealth & our way of life & our freedom to buy, and spend, and

waste? What does it mean?

After the Holocaust (or Hiroshima, or the Gulag) certain philosophers

said that there could be no more art or poetry. But they were wrong

apparently. We have poetry again. It may not mean the same thing it

meant before. It may not mean anything. But we have it. And who could

have dreamed at the gate of Buchenwald or Treblinka that one day we

would have — Nike ads or sitcoms about lawyers?

Is any meaning going to emerge from the 9/11 event? Without meaning

tragedy ends not in catharsis but simply depression, endless sorrow. Our

leaders “seek closure” — perhaps by killing many Afghan children —

perhaps by a new Crusade against the Saracens — and of course by a

return to normal. We’ll show “them” — by refusing meaning. We will sleep

because it is our right not to awake to confusion & shame.

Our sleep will be troubled. We’ll have to “sacrifice a few freedoms” to

protect Freedom. We’ll have to fear & hate. But within a few weeks or

months we will have buried even the fear & hate, rather we will have

transformed all that emotion to the Image, to the Evil Eye of the media,

our externalized unconscious. We’ll have sitcoms again and gangster rap

and arguments about our right to download it all for free into our home

computers. We’ll get those airplanes flying, once again polluting “our”

skies with noise & carcinogens. We’ll overcome our shame. And that will

constitute our revenge. That will be our meaning. Our morality.