Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 19:54:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Weiss: "Terror Reigns in Manhattan"


Terror Reigns in Manhattan

http://www.social-ecology.org/lgp/issues/lgp36.html

by Michael D. Weiss

Editors’ note: The following article singles out a
real crisis that is emerging in anarchism, not only in
the U.S. but in Europe as well: the steady
degeneration of a left-libertarian radical theory and
practice into a bohemian, personalistic, and in many
ways decadent lifestyle. In our view, the designation
lifestyle anarchism could often be substituted for
postmodernism throughout the article. 


On the streets of New York, spring 1992.

Not far from the complacent New Age-ism of the
touristy West Village cafés and uptown sushi bars,
terror culture is afoot. Arising from the dark
fragments of postmodernism, terror culture is the
defining philosophy or, to use the de rigueur term,
"voice" of a new movement. With growing force and
articulation, this terrible voice, the clarion of the
fin-de-millennium, echoes from Columbia's Philosophy
Hall, to the cafés of SoHo and the squats of midtown.
This new movement has been called the paradigm of the
twenty-first century, but its philosophy signals
nothing less than the death of the city.

Although the scent of postmodern decay is strongest
below Fourteenth Street, the signs of it are
everywhere. From amidst the phone sex ads and the club
listings in underground newspapers, a careful observer
glimpses the postmodern terrorists. Ghoulish books
called Hunting Humans and The Atrocity Exhibition fill
their shelves; Faces of Death and hard-core
pornography sit next to their VCRs; tattoos and
piercing adorn their bodies. Dressed in defaced jeans
or in the almost passé all-black uniform of their
movement, they frequent the nightclubs, galleries, and
bookstores of the city.

What is truly frightening about terror culture is that
it is gaining ground, making its way into the
mainstream. One of the leading American movies of
recent years, Silence of the Lambs, is decidedly
terroristic: The serial killer Hannibal Lecter (played
by Anthony Hopkins) is transformed into a Sherlock
Holmes-type hero. On TV Twin Peaks and a slew of
real-life crime and talk shows popularize "real"
violence and fringe lifestyles. After the Jeffrey
Dahmer case, a California card distributor released
serial killer trading cards. Rock album covers make
the Beatles’ original mutilated baby cover of the
White Album pale in comparison. 

College fashion is ugly. Women with dyed black hair
and nose rings wear men’s Doc Martens or cowboy boots,
defaced jeans, and T-shirts sporting bizarre,
horrific, or obscene logos. According to Lola, a
pink-haired, nose-ringed student at Parsons,
"Postmodernism is the rage in art schools. Everybody
dresses in black. It’s fashion." In fact, every person
I talked to, whether a self-proclaimed devotee of
terror culture or not, conceded that terror culture
has affected the contemporary cultural scene.

Terror historian Arthur Kroker describes the new
postmodernism as "playing at your local theater, TV
studio, office tower, doctor’s office, or sex outlet.
It is the implosion of contemporary culture into a
whole series of panic scenes at the
fin-de-millennium."

This new movement has arisen from the fragmentation of
relativism. Yet though borrowing much from the
relativists, terror culture has at its core radical
subversion, nihilism, and complete rejection of all
contemporary concepts of value. Terror culture goes
beyond the relativist observation that all concepts of
value or quality are contingent and socially
constructed, ultimately to espouse a theory of
anti-value.

To understand terror culture one must look to its
genesis in academic postmodernism. Postmodernism, as
its name suggests, is first and foremost a reaction to
modernity. "Modernity" represents a belief in progress
and in the value of art, science, and religion. The
modern era, according to historian Arnold Toynbee, is
"an unbroken vista of progress toward Earthly
Paradise" full of idealism and technological optimism.
The modernist world is orderly and logical, and humans
can ultimately conquer it through Reason.

Postmodernism, like relativism, however, rejects
modernity’s premise that human beings will achieve a
progressive realization of truth through human
endeavor. As Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at
the University of California at Berkeley, expresses
it, "Post-modernism came into existence when the
notion of progress began to subside." The postmoderns
reject teleological belief systems; they reject the
notions of progress, truth, and beauty because these
notions make sense only inside our culture’s current
dominant paradigm, or way of looking at things.

Paradigm theory, a central tenet of postmodernism,
postulates that there are countless different
paradigms and that our current culture’s arrangement
proceeds only from the one now dominant. Truth,
progress, aesthetic quality, even value are arbitrary
as to one paradigm and impossible to fulfill in all
paradigms at the same time. They are thus meaningless
concepts that should be discarded.

The postmodernist attempts to demonstrate that the
contingency and socially constructed ideals of Western
culture are both liberating and emasculating. As
Gitlin writes, "Post-modernism neither embraces nor
criticizes but beholds the world blankly, with a
knowingness that dissolves feeling and commitment into
irony." To the postmodernist, everything—every value,
every idea—is contingent. Postmodernism rejects the
earnestness of modernism as simple-mindedness and
adopts all that modernism rejects. By embracing
kitsch, "poor" quality, and obscenity, postmoderns
reject value per se, or at least value as defined by
the dominant paradigm.

This sort of kitsch pomo caught on in the art and
architectural world in the late 1970s. Employing these
ideas, a painting movement emerged in New York that
rejected all distinctions between bad art and good art
by employing tasteless images, inept drawing, poor
craftsmanship, and unschooled color. The movement’s
1978 show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art had
the Monty-Pythonesque title "Bad Painting."

As expressed by Julie Wachtel, a postmodern artist
whose works consist of tracings of cartoon figures
from cheap greeting cards directly onto canvas,
postmodernism rejects the very "idea of quality."

The message in the title of New York Times art
reporter Andy Grundberg's "Death Comes to
Post-Modernism" clearly hasn't reached downtown. The
1980s social climber may have tired of chintz
architecture and schlock ballet, but in intellectual
and popular cultures postmodernism has lost none of
its potency. Contemporary postmodernists fall roughly
into two camps: New Age multiculturalism devotees (the
children of 1960s relativism) and terror culture
devotees. This second group, the postmodern
terrorists, are indigenous to the postmodern scene,
which, according to Kroker, "evokes, and then
secretes, the fin-de-millennium mood of contemporary
culture," a world of "panic sex, panic art, panic
ideology, panic bodies, panic noise, and panic
theory."

It is a movement whose intellectual heart is radical
subversion and whose chief ideological progenitor is
Jean Baudrillard. Born in Paris in 1929, Baudrillard
has spent the last twenty years of his life
crisscrossing America, writing of its "inspired
banality." The starting point of Baudrillard’s
postmodernism is pain. Relying heavily on the language
of cybernetics and information science, he describes a
dizzying "hyperreal" world where paradigm shifts and
changing images obscure all meaning.

For Baudrillard, the communications age has replaced
the scene with the obscene. The obscene


is no longer then the traditional obscenity of what is
hidden, repressed, forbidden, or obscure; on the
contrary, it is the obscenity of the visible, of the
all-too-visible, of the more visible-than-visible. It
is the obscenity of what no longer has any secret.


Yet though everything is apparent, nothing has
meaning. The massive infusion of terrifying gibberish
can only be described as pornographic: It is a "whole
pornography of information and communication, that is
to say, of circuits and networks, a pornography of all
functions and objects in their readability, their
fluidity and availability." 

In this hyperreal environment notions of value are not
only meaningless, they act as simulations that keep us
away from reality. As Baudrillard says, "We are in an
epoch of simulation: simulated culture, simulated
intellectual life, and . . . simulated conservatism.
And the simulations have almost already lost their
ability to refer back to the ‘real thing.’"

Baudrillard’s goal, therefore, is to rediscover and
recapture reality by bringing us something that cannot
be transformed into hyperreal gibberish. Much as T. S.
Eliot sought "the still point in the turning world,"
so Baudrillard pursues "that critical point, that
blind spot in time" where "we suddenly left reality
behind." At that point lies the "possibility of a pure
event, an event that can no longer be manipulated,
interpreted, or deciphered by any historical
subjectivity."

To find this spot, Baudrillard proposes a complete
assault on the present paradigm: "It is true that
logic only leads to disenchantment. We can’t avoid
going a long way with negativity, nihilism, and all.
But then don't you think a more exciting world opens
up? Not a more reassuring world, but certainly more
thrilling, a world where the name of the game remains
secret. A world ruled by reversibility and
indetermination."

Baudrillard concedes that


Post-modernist discourse is a violent, restless, and
hallucinogenic reflection, . . . a wiping clean of the
"entire horizon" as the dominant mood of
twentieth-century experience.


He even illustrates this point with a story.


Take, for example, the story of a woman to whom a man
sends an ardent love letter. She asks him what part of
her seduced him the most. What else can he answer? Her
eyes, of course. And he receives in the mail, wrapped
in brown paper, the woman’s eye. The man is shattered,
destroyed. The woman has abolished the symbolic order.
She loses an eye, he loses face. 

For Baudrillard, we are undermining all rationality
and ultimately the entire paradigm by attacking the
paradigm of thought embodied in the idea of metaphor.

Hence the intellectual underpinnings of terror culture
contain the seeds of utter nihilism and destruction.
As Jean-François Lyotard expresses the essence of
terror philosophy:


Beneath the general call for an easing and abatement
of pressure, we hear the murmurs of the desire to
recommence terror, of the phantasm of grasping
reality. The reply is: war on everything,let’s be
witnesses to the unpresentable, let’s activate those
differences, let’s save the honor of the name.


But terror culture’s war on the dominant paradigms is
not restricted to sterile intellectual environs; it is
carried on in the streets, nightclubs, bookstores,
theaters, and art galleries of the world’s
metropolises.

A recent exhibition at The New Gallery, 583 Broadway,
illustrates the dichotomy of evolving postmodern
culture. The exhibit is largely patronized by men
wearing expensive overcoats and sporting trendy
haircuts rather than by the denizens of the SoHo cafés
who spawned the movement. On one wall of the gallery,
a ten-by-twenty-foot photograph of a prison entrance
serves as a screen for a slide show that spells out
"opening new doors" in several different languages.
Another wall features a thirty-foot-long computer
image of dirty Brazilian miners. The floor boasts
assorted photos of Vietnamese boat people—all very
dirty, all very shocking. 

The last room of the exhibit contains an installation
composed of plastic wallpaper with large molded
children's toys in pastel colors, flanked by two lambs
of the same material that say "bless you" on the back.
Opposite the bright wall sits a wooden table that
supports a two-foot-high sculpture of a fat smiling
naked man surrounded by at least twenty earth-toned
ceramic pitchers. The man’s arms are open wide in a
joyous embrace, and a word-balloon rising from the top
of his head says "Baby, I love you!" The mouths of the
pitchers are reminiscent of puckered lips. This is
pure kitsch, the happy ending in a sad and dizzy
world, as meaningful as a music box in a pile of
nuclear waste. This is the essence of postmodernism:
the willful juxtaposition of terror and Toyland.

Observers of this terror show have mixed reactions,
although they agree that it is provocative. An
onlooker named Iddo, a recent graduate from Hammond’s
Visual and Environmental Studies program, says he is
familiar with this type of postmodernism. According to
Iddo, "Lots of new cinema programs buy into this
stuff." He cites as an example the movie Jacob's
Ladder. "It lacks narrative; it’s grotesque; it’s
medieval; it’s totally postmodern." Looking at some of
the more extreme works in the New Gallery, however,
Iddo expresses some skepticism about the movement’s
contribution. "Personally," he says, "I don’t buy it.
They believe in artistic and cultural relativism, that
there’s no good or bad art, no way to judge the
material. This stuff is highly intellectual, at least
in cinema. But in the end, I think it’s just boring."
Another onlooker, a middle-aged woman dressed in
black, disagrees. "You don’t understand it if you
think it’s boring," she tells him. "This is the only
stuff left that’s interesting. Andrew Wyeth—that’s
boring."

The war on the dominant paradigm has certainly begun
on the streets of New York. On Broadway, near Broome
Street, vendors sell disembodied mannequin parts for
five dollars apiece (three for $12). On St. Mark’s at
Second Avenue, sidewalk artists hawk neo-obscene or
grotesque pictures: an American flag, above which sits
a half-clothed stripper in a Grim Reaper’s cowl,
mountains of skulls against a postnuclear backdrop,
headless businessmen, rotting corpses in bondage. At
Art 54, at 54 Grand Street, black and white
lithographs of mangled children (triple sized) and
fallen angels sell for $3,500. The curator tells me
the pieces sell very well. "I get a lot of interest in
them. I like them. The subject matter may be a little
much, but I think that’s the point. People want to be
a little bit shocked."

St. Mark’s Books, at Ninth Street and Third Avenue,
advances the war on culture. The store is full of
urban primitives (the vanguard of the terror culture
movement), all in black, perusing magazine racks of
obscure photocopied magazines on anarchism, obscenity,
terror, and of course every conceivable brand of rock
and roll. On the front rack are some of the best
sellers: The Atrocity Exhibition, The Torture Garden,
Hannibal Lecter, My Father, Assassination Rhapsody,
and Freaks. Others include the complete De Sade
collection, Venus in Furs by Sacher-Masoch, Macho
Sluts, and perching nervously, Iron John. Readers sit
surrounding a rack full of Exploring Teenage Culture,
published out of Brooklyn. This magazine, edited by
"Frank," espouses mass murder (not serial killing,
which Frank calls "weak") and has sections on murder
techniques and murder records (seventeen at McDonald's
in Fresno). A longer-haired customer wearing a tweed
trench coat tells me he enjoys Frank’s writing. "I got
into this stuff through photography. The interesting
thing is that it keeps going and going. It’s a
lifestyle; it’s something you have to do. I'm trying
to do crime stuff now. Free-lance. Like Weegee, only
more real."

Another front in terror culture's "war on everything"
involves (increasingly popular) body mutilations—
disfiguring, scarring, and piercing. In its upstairs
quarters at 144 Fifth Avenue, the Gauntlet is the
premier piercing center in New York. In its first
three months, it has already performed more than eight
hundred piercings (roughly fourteen a day). Its
offices are inoffensive and even stylish. Minimalist
couches and counters sit atop polished hardwood
floors. The first tip that this is not just another
trendy midtown hair boutique comes from the contents
of the counter. It is filled with metal rings
obviously not designed for ears. Also lying under the
glass are needles, surgical forceps, jawbones,
neo-Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting genital
mutilations, and what looks like chain mail.

On the other side of the room is a table containing
copies of P.F.I.Q. (Piercing Fans International
Quarterly), a sort of combination hard-core
porn/how-to guide for amateur piercers. Also on the
table is Androgyny and a copy of a tattoo magazine,
Body Art. The piercing rooms at the Gauntlet are
extremely clean, better looking than the average
doctor’s office. It has been inspected twice by the
Health Department, passing easily both times. The
piercing is done without anesthesia. Some piercings
hurt no more than installing an earring. Others, Dan
says, are "out of body experiences."

Dan Kopka, the skin-headed, multipierced, highly
tattooed manager and master pierce at the Gauntlet
("the only fully qualified pierce in town"), gives an
assessment of the piercing movement. "Most of the
piercings we do are the three N’s: noses, nipples, and
navels. But we’ll do almost anything—genitals,
eyebrows, whatever." Dan says that his clientele is
not all alternative. "We get all different types of
people from all walks of life, from Wall Street to the
East Village." While I am there, a client comes in
looking for a back to her nose ring. "I'm not
personally really into the weird stuff," she tells me,
pointing at the genital piercing hieroglyphs,
"although one of the guys I’m going out with has one
like that. I think it's a powerful statement."
Piercing is the metaphor of the postmodern terrorist.

Terror culture even has its own publication.
Semiotext(e) is the definitive guide to terror
culture. Semiotext(e) is published by Autonomedia, a
cooperative run by Columbia University's Jim Fleming
and Sylvere Lotringer. It is headquartered in the
French Department at Columbia University (512
Philosophy Hall), although it has recently expanded to
additional offices in Brooklyn. In 1978 Lotringer,
coeditor and French professor, decided to change the
focus of the magazine, to make it more "relevant."
Thus Semiotext(e) in its current incarnation is,
according to Adam Parfrey, editor of Apocalypse
Culture, "kinda anarchistic, heretic, post-punk,
post-situationist, cutting-edge subversive-type
stuff."

I meet Jim Fleming in the old factory building in
Brooklyn that houses Semiotext(e) and, incidentally,
serves as Fleming's home. Fleming came aboard in 1979,
shortly after the decision to refocus the magazine.
His mission: to "do something on what we talk about,
change the way people think about things, absolutely
everything." Theme issues during the next ten years
included Polysexuality, featuring a half-dressed
leather-biker cover, behind which lay a collection of
essays on, among other things, animal sex, child sex,
morbid sex, violent sex, and critical sex. The Schizo
issue celebrated schizophrenia and included lyrics
from the punk rock song "Teenage Lobotomy," the Boston
Declaration of Psychiatric Oppression, and academic
articles that included "Fuck the Talkies," "Politics,"
and "Savage." Its writers include a who’s who of the
avant-garde: John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Kathy Acker, Phillip Glass, and William
Burroughs. Recent issues of Semiotext(e) have sold
more than thirty thousand copies. 

Fleming does not look at all terrifying. We chat
congenially in his kitchen while he cooks a large
spaghetti dinner. His young son lies sprawled in the
living room watching Peter Pan on the Fox network. All
in all, a wholesome scene. Jim is a ABD from Iowa in
linguistics, where he studied deconstruction under
Derrida disciple Gayatri Spivak. He now teaches in the
communications department at Hunter College. He looks
the part of the comfortable intellectual, with his
full beard and curly, unkempt hair. Sue Ann Harkey,
the graphic artist, is the most alternative-looking
person present. Her pierced nose and four or five
earrings give a hint of the movement’s fascination
with piercing.

As we talk, Jim pulls out a joint and lights it. He
passes it around, reflecting thoughtfullythat
Semiotext(e) "had been moderately successful," despite
money problems and surveillance by the FBI. "One of
our goals," he says, looking at the Schizo issue, "is
not to battle in the libraries. We try to be less
intellectual. We want to expose people to alternative
ways of living." Discussing the issue on Italy, he
says, "what we wanted was an alliance of Marxists,
drug users, and the mentally ill. I respect that."
According to Fleming, "Money and media—that’s what New
York is all about. People hoard knowledge. That’s how
they get ahead. We [New Yorkers] are information
junkies, the most in this country, maybe the world."
Semiotext(e) seems doggedly bent on feeding this
information obsession, on distributing "dangerous,"
hard-to-get information to as wide an audience as
possible, hoping to make waves in the mainstream of
popular culture.

As far as avant-garde art goes, preeminent in the
creation of terror culture is performance artist Karen
Finley. Finley’s performance art has been
distinguished by Artforum magazine as "obscenity in
its purest form." In her act Finley smears food into
her genitals and has even defecated onstage. She
graphically describes violent and bizarre sex acts
with priests, children, relatives, and the
handicapped. Following Finley’s lead, former porno
performer Annie Sprinkle now does her thing in
artistic settings. Her 1988 performance at the Kitchen
Center for Performing Arts’ "Carnival of Sleaze"
festival included elements from a previous performance
at a Screw magazine party. The Kitchen has also
featured the concededly "extremely violent
pornographic art films" of Richard Kern, best known
for his Death Trip films. These performances
graphically illustrate the terror culture agenda. The
artists violently attack the idea of value,
championing anti-value. They do not claim that what
they do is not pornographic or obscene. Nor do they
claim it is beautiful. It is terror, trying to tear
down the dominant paradigm at all costs, attacking all
fronts at once.

And the terror project is working. One can see its
effectiveness clearly while sitting in the Life Café
at Tenth Street and Avenue B at two o'clock on a
Friday night. The Life is a favorite NYU hangout.
(NYU, especially its Cinema Studies program, attracts
many aspiring terrorists.) Still, the black leather,
bald heads, and nose rings of the crowd cannot
dissipate the feeling of suburban youth transplanted
to the city, of amateurs "playing" terrorist. The
decor is quintessential pomo: Life magazine covers, a
Victorian-style embossed ceiling, cowboy hats,
exterior pipes, and black and white photos. The music
is loud, fast, and grinding. One pink-haired woman
calls it "mainstream alternative," training wheels for
terror. Another says she thinks it is a derivative
form of adolescent rebellion, though she too is
dressed in the all-black costume so common to the
movement.

At Cheap Jack’s I meet Christy, a member of A-Central,
an anarchist collective that distributes
nonauthoritarian literature, including the
Semiotext(e) and Autonomedia series. Christy tells me
that I won’t learn much about the terrorist enterprise
in the open air of the Village. She suggests the rock
group Missing Foundations as "real underground.
They’re into direct action. They’re motivated by
postmodern theory and aren’t into drugs." Christy
recently lived in the squats with the direct action
crowd. "The postmodern art scene is totally different
from the people who live in squats and are watched by
the FBI." 

The squatters represent the latest wave of homeless
youth who see themselves as a rebellion against false
culture, a celebration of life on the edge. Recession
drives young punks from cheap apartments paid for by
parents to squats. They demand respect. They call
themselves urban primitives, a new name for the
homeless. 

Arthur Kroker captures the feel of terror philosophy,
of the war on the dominant paradigm being waged in the
streets, theaters, cafés, bookstores, and galleries.
According to Kroker, the contemporary cultural scene
represents


the ecstatic implosion of postmodern culture into
excess, waste, and disaccumulation. . . . The
Postmodern Scene is, therefore, a catastrophe theory
for a hyper-modern culture and society which is
imploding into . . . its dark and negative sign . . .
, burnout, discharge, and waste as are compelled to
reveal their lingering traces on the after-images of
(our) bodies, politics, sexuality, and economy.


Given its increasing popularity, even trendiness,
what’s wrong with terror culture? Perhaps the essence
of what’s wrong is its denial that something could be
wrong with anything. In waging war on all value and
values—truth, beauty, progress—the postmodern
terrorists champion a theory of anti-value, in the
process making all dialogue not only incoherent but
meaningless. Moreover, the central belief of the
terrorists, that by attacking what we think of as good
with what we think of as bad we will find something
real, must be the ultimate nonsequitur. Even assuming
that paradigm theory is true, it does not in any way
follow that by attacking the present way of seeing
things, something "better" or more "real" will follow.
Terror culture attempts to heal its patient (society)
by destroying it. It knows what it dislikes but,
unable to do any better, is content to destroy what
is, subsisting on its dreamlike hopes for a utopian
future that will arise in its place.

Terror culture is taking hold. It desensitizes us. It
creates moral, spiritual, and at its logical
conclusion, physical death. It does not take
psychological expertise to realize that immersing
oneself in pictures of mutilated children, in
hard-core pornography, and in self-mutilation is not
conducive to a healthy mental state. The "ironic
detachment" created by terror culture is thus more
akin to Hannah Arendt’s "banality of evil" than to
Baudrillard’s "desire for the real."

In the end the battle over terror culture will be
waged, not in the ivory tower of Baudrillard and
Lyotard, but on the streets with Lola and Christy and
Iddo. The real always does enter into the equation,
and what seems to be an ultimately unhealthy way of
living will, if it is truly so, be unlivable. Theory
can push reality back only for so long. The healthy
conditions for human existence have a nasty way of
biting any utopians on the behind. If that is so,
maybe terror culture is doomed from the start, as
other utopian movements before it. On the other hand,
there has never really been a (dys)utopian movement of
this type before. Maybe for them the rules have
changed. Maybe they don’t care. As for the rest of us,
caught up in the beginning of this maelstrom, maybe we
should.°Ë

Michael D. Weiss is a freelance libertarian writer.

This article was originally published in Social
Anarchism, no. 21 (1995-1996). For more information:
Atlantic Center for Research and Education, 2743
Maryland Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21218 U.S.A.

On a similar theme, please see the recent pamphlet
Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism by Murray
Bookchin (A.K. Press, P.O. Box 40682, San Francisco CA
94140-0682).



===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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