We live today in an artwork that follows the principle of reality television, which is not that it depicts reality, but that it becomes reality. As if watching in slow motion, we see this happening as it happens. The artifice entailed, the conceit, the ruse — all are on full display. Forthright disclosure, intercut with meta-commentary by the participants, adds a mocking twist to the old avant-garde technique of breaching the “fourth wall” separating audience and actors. What results is not awakening but rather sociopathic dissociation. For if reality is what comes afterwards rather than before, then whatever remains of the distinction between art and everything else melts into air. In the all-encompassing artwork, all facts are “alternative facts” subject to the free play of imaginative association, and all truth is “fake” before its deadly blow is felt. [...]
In order to function properly, this power must stand on ground that has been made sacred as a stage. In today’s United States, this is the ground of white nationalist patriarchy, or what its stage managers euphemistically call “economic nationalism.” Its jargon includes “alt-right” code words like “tradition” and “neo-traditionalism,” often accompanied by qualifiers like “Judeo-Christian” or “European.” This is the nativist jargon of a pseudo-philosophy peddled by self-promoting, anti-intellectual imposters. As such it fortifies a mythic, white “people” against their imagined enemies, both political and economic, and implies a gendered division of labor where men produce and women reproduce. As toxic common sense, this jargon helps to construct a socio-technical theater of power that authorizes and enables patriarchal, demagogic speech acts in the first place. [...]
To access this process, we must approach Ground Zero through its most sacred building. This is not the 9/11 National Memorial, which shrunk the “sacred ground” of commemoration to a bare minimum so that profit could be maximized, or the adjacent 9/11 National Museum, which relegated public memory to a series of underground exhibition spaces; rather it is the shopping mall, or “the Oculus,” that rises above the adjacent commuter subway station. Designed by Santiago Calatrava for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Westfield Corporation, the Oculus synthesizes secular-religious tensions by honoring its Gothic sources in the breach. Its massive, top-lit nave with a see-through structural ribcage barely sublimates the architecture of the Gothic cathedral — and with it crusading Christian piety — in an orgy of consumerist branding. This apotheosis of kitsch reveals the aesthetic and political program for the entire site, which is to generate a surfeit of theological “meaning” in order that business might proceed as usual, including the business of developing real estate and the business of securing the homeland. [...]
The “economic nationalism” now emanating from the White House attempts to compensate for this perceived disenchantment by calling forth capitalism’s sublimated “spirit,” or soul. That is the function of the presidential tweet or executive order as performative speech act: to reaffirm the sanctity of the homeland and, in the process, to secure the role of the master builder who restores meaning to the desolate landscapes of imperial decline. Preeminently, neoliberalism — understood as an economic, political, and cultural system — assigns this role the real estate developer. At Ground Zero, it was the lessee of the World Trade Center, Larry Silverstein, a relatively minor New York player whose unrelenting effort to turn tragedy into profit by “rebuilding” a sacred site was recast as an epic struggle with public authorities, insurance companies, and potential tenants. On the national stage, it was another minor player in New York real estate who cast himself as an artist — or better, an architect — charged with rebuilding the nation as sacred ground: “Make America Great Again.”
