An Excerpt from Springtime for Snowflakes: On Postmodernist Jean Baudrillard's Response to 9/11

A Postmodern Suicide

Not long after 9/11, academics began to weigh in on its cultural and political meanings (or lack thereof). Ward Churchill’s scandalous reference to the victims of 9/11 as “little Eichmanns” provided fodder for political talk-show outrage. On the other hand, Jean Baudrillard contributed the quintessential postmodern response, which went largely unremarked upon outside of academia. In Simulations (1983), Baudrillard had described the postmodern world as a series of simulacra, a spectacle of simulations without originals. Suburban neighborhoods, amusement parks, jungle dioramas in shopping malls, and even the political left and right – these were all simulations without originals, imitations without prototypes. Baudrillard enraged both left and right when he remarked that the first Gulf War “wasn’t real.” He meant that the real had been displaced by images and history by the serial reproduction of imagery.

The Twin Towers were also simulacra, doubled apparitions of the digital core of monopoly capitalism. The twins stood for monopoly in the sense that their “identicality” (Urban Dictionary) meant that competition had been eliminated. “Perfect parallelepipeds,” Baudrillard wrote, the Twin Towers represented duplication but also duplicity – their sameness revealing the false singularity of reproductions, the absence of originals.

Baudrillard didn’t describe the attacks on the World Trade Center as a mere simulation, however. Although he stated that 9/11’s symbolic resonance outweighed its “real” impact, Baudrillard saw 9/11 as a resuscitation of the real, if only in terrorism. Like 9/11 "conspiracy theorists," he rejected the “official narrative.” But unlike 9/11 “truthers,” Baudrillard did not propose an alternate grand narrative. Rather, he viewed the remains of the Twin Towers as he did the world – as the fragmented semblance of a reality that could never be reconstructed in a way that made sense. The postmodern is a constructed and tragically-ironically-named “Freedom Tower” that has displaced the real. As a scavenger expelled from reality, the postmodern theorist feasted on the discovery of reality’s dead corpse with a jouissance that only a terrorist could relish in such a meal.

Rather than “an inside job,” Baudrillard suggested that 9/11 represented a suicide, self-destruction committed by everyone within the global system. The self-immolation hadn’t been planned so much as wished for – by everyone, including its victims. According to Baudrillard, everyone who witnessed “the event” openly or secretly rejoiced at the exposure of weakness at the epicenter of power. “The moral condemnation and the holy alliance against terrorism are on the same scale as the prodigious jubilation at seeing this global superpower destroyed – better, at seeing it, in a sense, destroying itself, committing suicide.” Even those who enjoyed its advantages held a death wish for the global system’s uncontested power. Even its victims had been “complicit” in the system’s symbolic demise. The West acted the part of “accomplice in its own destruction.”

While including recommendations for containing the viral infiltration of terrorism, Baudrillard’s sympathetic understanding of the insidious Other registered a certain malevolence. In his theoretical enthusiasm, Baudrillard not only evinced a death wish for the Western world but also betrayed moral nihilism and a cultivated indifference to the reality of mass murder. His 9/11 meditations thus stand as an indictment of the postmodern theoretical project itself: a postmodern theoretical suicide.