<nettime> Reading the Skyline

["Julian Dibbell" <jmdibbell@home.com>]

My old friend David Bennahum (whom I was very glad to hear from this last
week) wrote:

> That skyline, with its antipodes of
> The Trade Center and the Empire State lost its balance today.
> And so, it seems, have we.

I don't quite agree, and we'll get to that -- but man do I empathize.

Until I left New York for the Midwest two years ago, I had lived there for
most of my adult life, and when I saw the towers go down on live television
this Tuesday, my first, wrenching thought was for the skyline. I have always
been thrilled in its presence, the way one is in the presence of any
celebrity, I guess. But at a certain point late in my life as a New Yorker,
my feelings for the skyline deepened. I want to say I fell in love with it.

It happened in the summer of 1998, which for largely unromantic reasons I
spent walking up and down the skyline's heart. I had a part-time job in an
office building in Midtown, in the Fifties, and two or three times a week I
would set out for it on foot from my apartment on East 10th Street. Where my
walk began, the buildings were low, mostly no higher than six stories. Where
it ended, I moved among skyscrapers, enveloped in verticality and filtered
sunlight, like a diver at the bottom of a kelp forest.

And between start and finish, I watched the buildings rise around me. At
23rd Street I passed the Flatiron, 300 feet high and the tallest building in
the world when it went up in 1902. Two blocks later I passed the 700-foot
Met-Life tower, which stole the Flatiron's title in 1909. The Empire State,
at 34th Street, was tallest from 1931 to 1973, nosing out the 1048-foot
Chrysler building, tallest in 1930, which I passed at 43rd.

Like so many of the buildings that surround them, these are all arresting
structures, each in its way, and at first it was their individualities that
captured my attention. But by the end of the summer I was paying as much
attention to their collective story, a narrative that as I walked unfolded
legible as any epic novel. The dainty, wedding-cake ornament of the
turn-of-the-century protoskyscrapers just north of 14th gave way to the more
gothic imagination of the upper Twenties. The irrational exuberance of the
Jazz Age spouted up in the Art Deco towers of lower Midtown, which ceded
their place in turn to the glossy, severe, incredibly dense crenellations of
the postwar middle of Manhattan.

The skyline was a brief history of 20th century American capitalism, writ
very large. And because I saw it roll uptown again and again, week after
week, I began to think of it as a wave -- a great, tentacular,
frozen-seething Hokusai wave of commerce rising from the depths of 17th
century New Amsterdam to crash on the shore of Central Park and spill itself
spent and wrecked into the poverty of Harlem. It was this wave that I came
to love.

And therefore, I must now confess, I did not love the World Trade Center
towers.

It isn't that I hated them, which in fact a fair number of New Yorkers
really did. It's just that they didn't fit. They weren't where they should
have been, which as far as I was concerned was at the Midtown crest of the
wave, taking it to its final, highest height. They didn't help tell the
story that I had come to understand was the meaning of the skyline. They
didn't make any sense, and so I didn't bother making sense of them. I
basically chose not to see them at all.

And now, of course, they lie buried in meaning. So much of it, and in so
dangerously potent a state, that it almost makes me sick to try my hand at
at understanding, at last, so late, what the towers meant before they fell.
But because I'm wired the way so many of us on this list seem to be, the
best way I can think of to feel any kind of connection to this disaster --
an event now blanketed by several thousand commentator-hours of blather --
would appear to be to offer up my own little spasm of critique.

And so I come to say that I don't quite agree with my old friend David
Bennahum. I don't think the towers balanced the skyline, and I don't think
we ourselves lost any kind of balance when we lost them. I think their
meaning was precisely that they threw the skyline *out* of balance. And if
anything I think that maybe chief among the things we lost when they fell
was our ability to keep believing we had any balance left to lose.

Consider that procession of tallest-buildings-in-the-city -- almost all of
them flung up off the top of some business cycle or another, each more or
less a snapshot of the evolving face of capital. The World Trade Center was
no different. Completed in 1973, it was both a cultural expression and an
economic by-product of the Go-Go '60s. But the drastic abstraction of its
design and above all its stark remove from the organic slope of the skyline
suggested that this particular turn of the economic screw was more than a
little bit sharper than those that had come before.

The building was in fact the sign of a tectonic shift, a farewell to what
you might call organic capitalism and a stab at erecting what Slavoj Zizek,
in his own recent spasm of WTC critique, called a symbolic "center of
VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere
of material production." It certainly seems appropriate that the Trade
Center was completed less than two years after Richard Nixon detached the
world's monetary system from its last, largely symbolic connection to the
real -- the U.S. gold standard. (How appropriate then, too, that 12 tons of
good-delivery gold bars, worth $106 million, now lie hopelessly buried in a
COMEX vault beneath the rubble of Ground Zero.)

Nor is it coincidence that the World Trade Center was the last of New York
City's record-breaking skyscrapers. The nearest equivalent to a successor
would, I suppose, be the new Times Square, which on a symbolic level
attempts to do with its excessive display of information what skyscrapers
did with their excessive displays of raw material. Meanwhile, the tallest
building in the world now stands in Malaysia, whose giant twin towers were
evacuated in the wake of 9/11 but will almost certainly be spared -- and not
just because Malaysia is a Muslim country, but because it has already seen
more than its share of the violence that the worldwide storm system of pomo
money-flows can do.

By which I mean, yes, that this virtual capitalism can be nasty stuff. And
yes, that the globally distributed violence of terrorism is in some sense a
mirror image of globalization's own less spectacular terrors.

But don't misunderstand me. I'm not by any stretch suggesting that the
felling of the towers has restored the balance they stole from my beloved
skyline -- or that I would now celebrate that balance even if it were
returned. On the contrary, I think a generalized hankering for balance is
among our chief ailments at the moment, whether it's manifested in the
score-settling zeal of the terrorists or in the retaliatory bloodlust of the
political establishment or even in the anxious insistence that moral
equivalence can and must be found between the crimes of the highjackers and
the crimes of U.S. foreign policy. None of this is very good, I'd say, for
bodies or souls.

And so I'm glad to see that as the smoke clears and those TV images keep
coming, Manhattan looks more distorted than ever, and the absence of the
towers looms even larger and louder than their presence did. Long may it
loom. I've learned too late to love the imbalance those towers brought to
the skyline. Here's hoping their loss teaches us all to find some grace in
the imbalance of the age.

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