A note to my readers: In 1998, I wrote an essay that I called "Why The World Trade Center Had To Explode." It was published in a volume titled "Architecture and Civilization" as "Written In Stone: Architectural Communication and Disintegration." There is a long passage that takes off from the attack on the WTC in 1993, and asserts - within a symbolic structure - that the WTC must be destroyed. Because people have asked me and written to me about this essay since the events of 9.11, I want to take responsibility for what I wrote and try to explain what I was trying to do.
After Marion and I watched in disbelief what happened on Tuesday morning, she said "you must be thinking about your essay." I hadn't, but then I did, and I had a little witch's brew of feeling to add to the already-full cauldron. The essay was posted on my site, and several people found it that day. Here is an email from Steve Kirschner, which arrived 9.11: You're a real fucking idiot! Looks like you got what you wanted... and I quote you: The World Trade Center almost requires an explosion; the explosion is the perfect cure for the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center represents the form or fantasy of a transcendence of time; the explosion represents the perfect instantaneous revenge of time itself. Ignorant Fucking Jack Ass !
After I wrote to try to explain and apologize, Kirschner wrote back, kindly, that we are all angry and intense at the moment.
First, the responsibility: If you read this essay and perceive that I hated the WTC and what it stood for, you are right. To me, the idea of ripping out city blocks in lower Manhattan and replacing them with insanely huge towers that had absolutely no character or interest of any kind, that made the ground around them a bizarre valley of winds, is a symbol of many things I hate, including and especially vast consolidation of power, and its concomitant: vast, systematic disempowerment of millions of people. And I flirted with terrorism in that piece, at least in the sense that I did not condemn the 1993 explosion, and that several things I said, including what was quoted by Kirschner, seemed actually to support the idea of blowing the thing up. I regret how cavalierly I did that; I regret that I did it at all.
But now the explanation: Even if I had the idea that in some way the WTC had to explode, I never said that it should explode, or that I hoped it would explode. And of course I never endorsed and never would endorse killing thousands of innocent people. I really do believe, as I have been saying and writing, that it was the most monstrous imaginable crime. And I think those responsible deserve death and that our dead should be avenged.
Here is the piece, unedited, in its entirety, so you can judge for yourselves.
Why the World Trade Center Had to Explode
By Crispin Sartwell
Behind my parents' farm there's a little house that hasn't been occupied for about thirty years. My son Sam is fascinated by it. Whenever we visit we take a ride back there on the tractor. We usually return with a piece of the house: Sam collects nails, wall brackets, anything we can pry off. Each time we go, the house has disintegrated a little more, and not only because we are disassembling it. The floorboards have rotted to the point where I no longer take Sam upstairs. Snakes live in the piles of old drywall; we collect their skins. Wasps and hornets nest under the eaves so that at the right season the whole structure buzzes. A couple of years ago turkey vultures started entering through a broken second-floor window and occupied the back room. We'd walk up the stairs and see a bird almost as big as my son hobble to the window and flap out. There's an old refrigerator in the kitchen with an ancient bottle of apple juice. The large propane heater is intact. Foundations of old beds are piled up in the living room. There's a cache of paint and building supplies under the steps, as though someone intended to fix the place up and never got around to it.
In fact, the middle-aged man named Earl runs the general store in Woodville grew up in that house. His parents are buried a couple of hundred yards away in a family plot that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century. The parents' gravestones are in pretty good shape, but some of the older ones are barely legible: the stone is discolored and disintegrating. Earl comes a few times a year with a weed whacker and clears out the little graveyard, but in between it grows over with briars. The house itself is being overgrown too; trees are sprouting up around the porch and now through it.
A building begins to disintegrate the moment it is completed; in fact, it begins to disintegrate before it is completed. There are houses, like Earl's, that endure for only a few decades. There are huge public projects everyone hates so much it's a relief to dynamite them after thirty years. Then there are "enduring monuments": the Great Wall or the pyramids, characterized not by permanence but by an extremely slow rate of decay relative to human experience. These are as fascinating for the way they have weathered, for the signs of antiquity they bear, as for the magnificence or overweening pride of their creation. In fact, such structures are absorbing precisely in that relation of hubris to decay.
As the Tao Te Ching says, we make a house out of wood and stone, but we make it for the sake of the empty space they enclose. We make shelter against the the world with material that is itself part of the world. In slow weathering by sun and snow, in the work of insects, by the continual pressure of gravity, in the tornado that razes a building to its foundations, the world pushes back. In fact, our structures themselves threaten us, as when a high-rise emits a shower of bricks, a man-made fatal weather.
We live pushing out against the world and feeling the world push back against us: exercising power and experiencing the nostalgia or ecstasy or despair that we find in our powerlessness: erecting a structure to make a safe space and then watching that structure slowly disintegrate, working to shore it up or abandoning it for another, getting crushed in its collapse.
One thing we seek in this process is surcease from the onslaught of time. The space created by a building is not only a useful emptiness carved out against the weather, but at least in imagination a caesura in time: a release from, a pause within its passage. Certainly one function of the pyramids or the Great Wall is as an imaginary hedge against time: these structures long outlasted their originators and one way or another they were meant to fend off death. The pyramids were sepulchers, intended to guarantee eternal endurance; the Great Wall was meant to fend off the barbarians -- a human manifestation of chaos, a human weather. The gleaming corporate towers that dominate city skylines today serve a similar function; they signal that whatever may happen to the corporation's stock or to its factories or to its employees, the corporation itself endures, transcends the temporal, gleams permanently in steel and glass.
Related to this or entailed by it, these structures signal a transcendence of the human. As expressions of the weird ontology of institutions, the pyramids and the skyscraper are consciously built on a scale that dwarfs the body. For the board of directors dies, but the corporation lives on. Pharaohs and emperors croak, but the dynasty endures. We are still trying to figure out how human bodies could have actually given rise to the pyramids, and this was meant to be a mystery: it is key to understanding what the pyramids were trying to accomplish that we cannot understand how human bodies could create them, or that it is difficult to envision the actual building process. One thing is for sure: the building process involved breaking bodies or straining bodies to their utmost capacity. The attempt to disembed oneself from finitude always only shows that one is embedded in it utterly. And that makes the ruin absorbing or lends it a penumbra of the tragic: not simply the failure of all human creations at overcoming the temporal, but the perverse heroism that conceives an annihilating transcendence.
Take the bombing of the World Trade Center. If the Great Wall represents the rationality of the Middle Kingdom, its superiority to the barbarian, its culture, literacy, permanence and glory, the World Trade Center represents our rationality. Trade itself as embodied in the Center is a rational concept encapsulating the administration of the world for human purposes. The World Trade Center is a massive expression of the conquest of time and space: jutting up into the sky and penetrating it dualithically: up into a different weather: shining, simplified, incredibly human even as it seeks transcendence of the organic. The space it defines is apparently detached from its context, more or less perfectly climate-controlled: even in a blizzard it is exactly 72 degrees within the huge artificial environment.
The World Trade Center, hence, is not only a technological overcoming of the world, or the illusion of a technological overcoming of the world, it is a symbol of that overcoming, a monument to it, an expression of power and pride on a vast scale. The forces that tried to blow it up come in our imagination out of the chaos, out of an Islamic fundamentalism stuck in an anachronistic temporality and a pure irrational terrorism. For the westerner such forces might as well be tornadoes or wild animals. The Islamic fundamentalists' attack on the World Trade Center is a sudden conflagration of temporalities: antiquity invading modernity: the safety and control of the gigantic structure suddenly compromised by the absonant force of another era.
And here I am not talking only about an eruption of the past into the present but a clash of different temporal orders. The Islamic fundamentalist is conceived as "medieval" even when using plastic explosives. So the act is conceived as an activist anachronism, as the act of people who want to "turn back the clock," who perversely resist "progress." That is an odd terrorism indeed: a terrorism of time in which what is attacked is not even primarily the target itself, but "the future." The terrorist organization is conceived as blowing up the future on behalf of the past. But more deeply, there is a clash of temporal orders, of ways of organizing time. The time represented by the World Trade Center is full of future; the people who live in this time live backwards out of a projection of what is to come. Terrorist time organizes itself around the present as embodied in an explosion. It questions or attacks or annihilates in the present the existence of the future.
An explosion is instantaneous. Indeed, its force is engendered by its instantaneousness. An explosion is a sudden or momentary attack; it happens allatonce in a total simultaneity of events. It is a kind of temporal collapse in which a future ceases to be projected, a sudden expansion of the present into everywhere the explosion reaches. Futures are pulled into the explosion and blown apart, rendered over instantaneously into presence.
The World Trade Center almost requires an explosion; the explosion is the perfect cure for the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center represents the form or fantasy of a transcendence of time; the explosion represents the perfect instantaneous revenge of time itself. Quickly or slowly time always retrieves its own, and the World Trade Center as a suspension of the temporal was always a delusion whether in the end it explodes or not.
The World Trade Center was erected as a suspension of presence, or as an attempt to immolate the present entirely into the future continually, into a temporality of project or "trade." The explosion as an event punctures that delusion utterly, unsuspends time and releases it back into the present, or rather shows that the World Trade Center at any given moment is in fact occupying that moment, that the transcendence of presence and the teleological rationality it embodies are illusions. After the World Trade Center explodes we realize that the World Trade Center could have exploded and might explode at any moment: that the future might always collapse back into a moment of pure presence. But in fact this insight is available at every moment with regard to every structure, because at every moment every structure is disintegrating. Rational time is disordered not primarily in the bizarre or anomalous terrorist attack but in the everyday corruption of all artifacts. The weatherworn, abandoned house and the weatherworn, exhausted body of the man who grew up in it show equally that temporality cannot be suspended.
The work of time is continual as well as instantaneous, and the World Trade Center needs, in order to maintain the illusion of a transcendence of time, to accomplish the constant work of presence, the maintenance that continually returns it "in its original state" to the present. The work of the Center's maintenance staff is instrumental; it is meant to maintain the building in the sense that it allows the building to emerge more or less pristine into the endless series of futures. But this work of maintenance can be accomplished only in the present. Thus, monumental architecture, whether ancient or modern, exists in a fantastic relation to time that is constantly under attack. The gleaming skyscraper belies or disguises the constant work of maintenance -- cleaning, rebuilding, shoring up -- that both allows the building to resist temporality and demonstrates that it is always perfectly embedded in temporality, bathed in it, saturated by it in every aspect. The machines that make this environment must be continually tended; energy and money must be continually expended in their maintenance; the minute that labor is withdrawn the towers will begin to disintegrate, and the disintegration to which they are already subject will become apparent.
The work of maintenance is a call to presence. When you are washing the dishes or repairing the car or accomplishing various projects in home improvement you may be distracted, you may be focusing on the goal and may be pulled away into the future. But the labor itself by which you are accomplishing this goal is a lure into presence; it is always possible to emerge into presence within that labor. While the corporate titans on the upper floors of the Trade Center are devising marketing plans and strategies for increasing wealth, the maintenance workers are getting through one more day scrubbing the floors, washing the windows, tending the furnaces and air conditioners, washing the windows. Maybe they get off of work and go get drunk or go home and play with their kids. They are less awash in future than the executives, and they are almost not seen by them; they blend in with the building itself and the massive work of maintenance they accomplish is in part rendered invisible in order to maintain the illusion of permanence or immutability.
When this work is abandoned, as in the house on my parents' farm, things fall apart with incredible rapidity. And the disintegration is nostalgic and is aesthetic. It is a kind of real-life vanitas; it functions in the imagination as a confrontation and affirmation of human limits: of disease, death, decomposition. The house is abandoned: not a symbol of abandonment, not a story or narrative about abandonment, but an actual abandoned thing. I can only imagine the reasons for which it was abandoned: it was too small, too inaccessible in a little hollow far from any road; the people who lived there could afford more and better. But I can easily imagine the feelings of the people who grew up there when they see it: relief that they got out of it, maybe, but also the intense connection to something that is slowly but at every moment lapsing toward nonexistence.
