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 CTHEORY          THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE          VOL 22, NO 3

 Article 76     99/11/03         Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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 Bataille's Columbine: The Sacred Space of Hate
 ==============================================

 ~Andrew Wernick~

      We will never defeat the system on the plane of the real...We
      must therefore displace everything onto the sphere of the
      symbolic where challenge, reversal, and overbidding are the law.
           - Jean Baudrillard

 Here and there - in the pie-strewn faces of Bill Gates and a host of
 other politicos and celebrities, but also, and more demonically, in
 the massacre-suicide at Columbine there are signs of a renewed
 heterological activism. Signs: because in the media wherein these
 ruptural gestures, in being completed, are immediately inscribed,
 there are nothing but signs. Heterological: because, taken to the
 limit, a limit to which these examples at least point, the activism
 in question conjures with what is absolutely unassimilable to the
 ruling order.

 Bataille's 'heterology' - from the Greek word for difference -
 concerns the different as such. It is the difference that must be
 expelled from the same in order for the same to be the same. In
 bodily terms: excretions of all kinds; in the body-politic: sacrifice
 and the sacred. For Bataille such expenditure is both a law of nature
 and the locus of our highest needs. But, if so, we must also
 acknowledge an inconvenience. Reason would homogenise everything, but
 what is reason to do when it encounters what it excludes? When it
 comes into contact with paroxysms of laughter, weeping, screaming,
 orgasm, or exultant destruction? What ~can~ it do when, having
 admitted the inadmissible, in the ecstatic pursuit of 'clear
 consciousness', these paroxysms surge through reason itself? That is
 why for Bataille there could not, strictly, be any 'science' of such
 an object. There could only be a '~practical~ heterology'.

 This did not mean, though, that reflection had to stop. To the
 contrary: if 'practical heterology', in asserting itself, were to
 become the practice ~of~ heterology, then, by the same right as any
 other, this practice, or rather, as transmuted into a politics, this
 meta-practice, would have its own theoretical moment. It is this
 precisely which Bataille himself sought to provide in the writings
 that have survived from his activist phase in the 1930s, and which
 culminated in 1936-39 in the twin project of ~Acephale~ and the
 ~College de Sociologie~.

 ***

 In tracing Bataille's trajectory, from the Surrealists onwards, what
 some have especially noted is his quest for a certain 'experience' of
 community. With ~Acephale~ that quest became explicit. The secret
 cultic group that operated behind the scenes of the public talks and
 discussions that comprised the ~College de Sociologie~ climaxed a
 decade-long preoccupation with how - against the Christian idea of
 communion, from which only the element of sacrifice was retained -
 the sovereign, and expending, singularity of the individual could yet
 be combined with primal bonds of association. In its ecstatic signs
 and forms, and above all by living in the imminence of a voluntary
 human sacrifice, the group would try to realise ~in itself~ -
 non-fusionally, and non-hierarchically - a fully headless, i.e.
 acephalic, condition.

 This was conceived no doubt as a prototype of what might be achieved,
 after the Revolution, on a grander scale. In a period of deepening
 danger and gloom, it can also be read as the first stage in a
 privatising retreat. But its fuller significance has been hard to
 interpret, and not only because its participants were sworn to a
 secrecy they kept. What this significance might be only comes into
 focus when we realise that community, or the search for a community
 that excluded one, was not the only thread that connected ~Acephale~
 and the ~College~ back to earlier versions of Bataille's project.
 There was also the continuity of a practical intent: an intent that,
 from the opening salvos against Breton in the late 20s, insistently
 linked what Bataille was already formulating, in anthropological,
 psychoanalytic, and Nietzschean terms, as heterology and excess, to a
 maximalist transformist politics.

 In the _Use Value of De Sade: an Open Letter to my Current Comrades_,
 Bataille had conceived the emancipatory process as having two phases.
 After the Revolution, in the shape of 'an anti-religious and asocial
 organisation having as its goal orgiastic participation in different
 forms of destruction', 'practical heterology' was to be
 unleashed to create a maximally free 'cultural' zone. The needs this
 would satisfy would themselves have arisen in 'the violent excitation
 that results from the expulsion of heterogeneous elements'. But
 first, to break the impasse, head off fascism, and create the
 conditions for sovereignty for all, the Dionysian forces of the
 aroused proletariat were to be channeled into a grand sacrifice (no
 metaphor) of the ruling class. In preparation for the feast, the
 immediate political task was to awaken these forces, direct them
 against the class enemy, and prevent their containment down some
 self-defeating Parliamentary road. Hence Bataille's objections to the
 merely literary defense of de Sade. Hence the direct action street
 tactics of ~Contre-attaque~. And hence, also, ~Acephale~. The group
 and its praxis was not just an experiment in community. Nor, in its
 forms and its mission, did it just anticipate the practice of
 heterology in the Revolution's triumphant phase two. It was also, in
 the here and now, a ~strategy~, its delirious movement towards
 sacrifice and apotheosis an intended symbolic move. This move in
 turn, it was hoped, would trigger others, summoning up the energies
 deemed necessary to shatter the capitalist state.

 ~Acephale~, then, was a radically mobilising micro-politics. Its
 peculiarity, as such, was two-fold. First, in the demobilising wake
 of the failed General Strike, the wave of militancy had receded, so
 that the task was not just to direct it. It had, in the first place,
 to be evoked. From this change in emphasis stemmed the project's
 'areligious' ~mysterium~. At the climax of the group's inner
 practice, the exorbitant forces of a final class sacrifice were to be
 challenged to appear. This catalysis, secondly, would be undertaken
 as an action in itself. Like Dadaist art, it would have no immediate
 use-value. In its recourse to sacrifice, the useful would be
 destroyed. Not that it would be passive. The point would be the
 gesture itself. A performed symbol, it would be ~itself~ performative
 in the larger sacrifice it engendered. Here, then, and without
 precedent, would be a lucidly conceived politics played out wholly in
 the register of what a means-ends rationality could only call
 ~magic~.

 ***

 Minus the blood, there are echoes of such a politics in the
 Situationist concepts of ~derive~ and ~contestation~. In the impish
 antics of the 60s something similar was spontaneously discovered on a
 larger scale. But few have examined, or sought to develop, Bataille's
 startling 'change of terrain' as a thought in itself. One of the few
 who has (though without this being much recognised by his many fans
 and detractors) is Jean Baudrillard, most explicitly in his writings
 of the 70s. Baudrillard reformulates the turn in a variety of ways -
 from production to seduction, from the critical to the fatal, from
 the scene to the obscene etc - linking these tropes to a revised
 understanding of capitalism as marked by the fusion of signs and
 commodities, orbital circulation, and a de-referentialising 'third
 order' of simulation. In _Symbolic Exchange and Death_, he
 characterises the required change in perspective, in its fullest
 extent, as a 'move to the symbolic'. At stake, he makes clear, is an
 entire paradigm shift, with implications for practice as well as
 theory.

 This is not to say that Baudrillard simply repeats, in an updated
 context, and in his own idiom, the theses of Bataille. If he has done
 that, he has also modified the problematic itself. Bataille had
 contrasted a 'restricted economy' of utility and economic exchange
 with a 'general economy' exuberant with bio-solar waste and excess.
 For Baudrillard, the former (transmogrified into general exchange and
 the hyper-real) is counter-posed to an order of 'symbolic exchange',
 rife with ambivalence and escalation. Thus, in a return to Mauss, the
 focus shifts from expenditure, sacrifice and excess to the ambivalent
 reciprocities of gift, challenge and counter-gift.

 In that context, Baudrillard's 'Symbolic' serves as the irreducible
 other not just of power and utility, but also of the markets for
 money and status. As for what it replaces, prised from its home-base
 in Bataille's solar-dependent 'general economy', heterological
 expenditure is relocated in the cancerous overproduction of signs,
 things and money engendered by capital itself. It is this excess,
 finally, which 'challenges the social', and thereby holds the promise
 of a devastating counter-challenge. In substituting the Symbolic for
 the heterological, it may be said, Baudrillard replaces a force with
 a dimension, which gives him an excuse for taking flight in
 metaphysics. It should be noted, at the same time, that Baudrillard
 does not just withdraw into quietism. It is rather that, after a
 brief flirtation with apathy (the refusal of meaning) and terrorism
 (offer back a violent death to those who would give us a slow one),
 the counter-gift he himself chooses to offer is simply that of his
 own - mimetically 'excessive' - practice of theory.

 Be that as it may, in Baudrillard's reformulation of Bataille's
 search for a heterological politics three fundamental propositions
 are retained. First, he continues to posit a dualistic social
 ontology in permanent tension with itself. Secondly, he identifies a
 contradictory trend with regard to this tension, in which on the one
 hand a totalising regime of capitalist production and consumption has
 impoverished and suppressed a more primordial order of being, and on
 the other hand this latter proves inextinguishable. And thirdly, in
 the possibility that this repressed might stage a bloody-minded, or
 carnivalesque, return, he likewise sees a potential for disturbance
 in which dormant fault-lines are reactivated and, perhaps, a
 cataclysmic reversal can occur.

 Such propositions, in all their extravagance, lend themselves to
 experiment. One can imagine a research program devoted to that end.
 Of course, the revolutionary eschatology that underpinned Bataille's
 own 'science of the scared' - and which still haunts Baudrillard -
 has become virtually unthinkable. If the efforts of the ~College~
 were to be continued today, moreover, these efforts would have to
 take account of the changed conditions under which the
 'heterological' and the 'Symbolic' can, or do, still appear. This, in
 turn, would require attention to the way in which the
 pan-commodification of culture and communication, combined with the
 technological transformation of the latter, has altered the very
 constitution of the social - especially, perhaps, with regard to the
 primal level at which the dynamics of gift and sacrifice are
 themselves presumed to operate.

 It is, at any rate, against the background of an investigation that
 might be developed along these lines, that I venture to offer some
 reflections about the incident at Littleton Colorado that 'shocked
 the nation' (as they say) six months ago.

 ***

 To suggest, as a starting point for understanding 'Columbine' that we
 should read its meaning in the light of ~Acephale~ will no doubt seem
 scandalous. It implies a perspective in which the sanguinary gesture
 of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold might be viewed with something less
 than total panic and condemnation. At the same time, it will be said,
 the comparison is strained. The motives of the reactive
 semi-literates who murdered their classmates (and one teacher) at
 Columbine High, were light years from the highly sophisticated
 reasonings of the ~gauchiste~ intellectuals who gathered at the
 blasted oak of Bataille's secret group and who, after all, killed
 no-one. The comparison traduces the memory, does it not, of both
 Bataille and of those gunned down?

 All this may be granted. Yet the action at Columbine ~does~ come into
 the same frame if we grasp it as an instance of that more general
 'move to the symbolic' that Baudrillard has extrapolated from
 Bataille. Indeed, like the sacrifice envisaged for ~Acephale~ itself,
 what Harris and Klebold offered us on Hitler's birthday was a deadly
 counter-gift, a performative symbol as fatal strategy, a contestative
 transgression that staked itself in the game.

 To examine Columbine from this angle has one immediate advantage. It
 enables us - against all diabolising and reifying - to recover a
 sense of agency with regard to the actors at its centre. It enables
 us to do so, moreover, not to hold them accountable yet again, nor
 indeed to get lost in their subjectivity; but to permit what has been
 defined as a tragedy (irrational, and 'externally' caused) to be
 examined as a meaningful act, an act whose outcome can be assessed in
 relation to its own horizon of meaning.

 Such an assessment, however, is only possible if we disentangle
 ourselves from the ideological effects that the original action
 blindly provoked. We get nowhere by reconstructing its meaning from
 within the therapeutic, preventative, or repressive discourses which
 covered up the social wound in the aftermath. Which is further to
 suggest that we must also disentangle the successive but distinct
 moments of 'Columbine' itself.

 There was, it must be said, not just ~one~ symbolic event at
 Columbine, but ~two~ - each of which, moreover, had its own
 discursive effects, and its own mimetic reverberations as the events
 on the ground spread into media virtuality. If the first event was
 the mass killing that echoed out into threats and shootings in
 schools as far away as Alberta, the second event (in fact, a whole
 string of them) was a reparative ritual in which 'the shooters' were
 excreted, the evil they represented was given names (like 'the
 culture of violence') and made the object of a moral crusade; and in
 an outpouring of prayers, condolences, policy initiatives and
 donations, the 'community' - of the school, the locale, and 'the
 nation' - was healed and restored.

 In effect, I am proposing that instead of continually interpreting
 the first event from within the stock codings induced or imposed by
 the second, we should re-examine the relation between them by
 considering the meaning of the second event in terms of the first. In
 so far as the second event - likewise a kind of sacrifice - reversed
 and erased the thrust of what had provoked it, this would be to
 reposition the original act - in its own terms above all - as a
 practical failure.

 ***

 Let us turn then to the action itself: what are we to make of its
 motive? what subjectivity did it incarnate? in any case: what kind of
 action was it, or was it aiming to be? As information has dribbled
 out of the police investigation, some facts have emerged which
 undercut several mis-impressions that were instantly, and
 tenaciously, formed. Some are trivial - it was likely not Cassie
 Bernal but Valeen Schnurr who was asked if she believed in God.
 Others are more important. They disconfirm reductions.

 In the first place: the shootings cannot be understood as just a
 crazy individual act. It is true that Eric Harris had been on
 medication after an anger management program for vandalism, and that
 he had stopped taking his Levux five days before the event. It is
 also true that Harris, up against the relentless he-man expectations
 of his decorated, missile-testing father, had just been notified of
 rejection by the Marines. The grounds - instability as evidenced by
 his medication - closed the loop and precipitated a crisis. All this
 fits the profile of a mass killer, tipped over into an explosion.
 But, as Harris's diary clearly shows, the April 20th action had been
 planned long in advance. Besides, Klebold had no such pattern and
 came from an ostensibly happy and integrated family. Nor was he just
 an easily led sidekick. He was the lead techie. He was also an
 ideological influence. Half-Jewish, he was an obsessive anti-semite;
 it was likely Klebold who sparked the idea that the massacre should
 occur on Hitler's birthday. In any case, they participated equally in
 the shootings themselves. This was emphatically a team effort.

 It would be a mistake, on the other hand, to construe the shootings
 as simply a form of victim's revenge. This, again, is not to deny
 that Harris and Klebold had real tormentors and persecutors. They
 were fag-bated and pushed around in the halls and food lines for
 being physically weak and socially marginal. They were punished for
 hanging out with the other pariahs - not that they fitted in even
 there. But if personal revenge was a factor, the action itself both
 under and overshot any such motive. There was no planned hit list
 (the worst bully had left the school three months before). Nor, when
 they went on the rampage, is there any evidence that they
 particularly singled out 'jocks'. Those they actually shot were
 random targets of opportunity. It was the gleeful capriciousness
 which survivors recalled.

 Nor for the same reason - again, a plausible construction - can their
 action be made intelligible simply as a right wing rendition of white
 male rage. If it was the latter it was not necessarily the former.
 They did not focus on women, gays, or feminists. Nor, more
 especially, did they target visible minorities, or Jews. There
 remains, to be sure, the fact of the chosen date. This indicates, if
 nothing else, the fascination (in the absence of an active left) that
 far right slogans and symbols have come to exercise for more than one
 anarchic current of youth discontent. A birthday present for Hitler
 certainly ~suggests~ a connection with Burford, Oklohoma City, black
 church burnings, and assassinations by 'The Order'. But as the cop
 who looked at Harris's garrulous notebooks commented: "they weren't
 into all that white supremacy stuff". There was no ZOG, no racial
 project. It was equal opportunity hatred. This is evident in Harris's
 'what I love; what I hate' essay posted on his Web page a year
 before. They hated everything and everyone they encountered. If they
 hated Christians they also hated non-Christians. If they hated
 pacifists they also hated 'jerks on the road' and the boastfulness of
 their military-obsessed peers. They exulted in that hatred as itself
 a mode of identity. To wave the figure of Hitler in the face of the
 world was just another way to hate it. After all, according to
 Harris' web site, he hated racists too.

 ***

 The full meaning of their action only becomes clear, however, when we
 reconstruct what happened on the day.

 The initial mystery for the police was why (given all the armament
 and opportunity) so ~few~ were actually shot. The swiftly discovered
 answer was that the shootings were peripheral to the main purpose.
 Harris and Klebold entered the school only ~after~ two massive
 propane bombs, timed to detonate in the cafeteria at break time, had
 failed to go off. After killing a few people, and terrorising many
 more, they went back to the cafeteria and again tried to set off the
 bombs. When that failed, after more shootings, they called it quits
 and shot themselves. The whole plan, in short, went badly awry. The
 idea was to kill everyone at the school. The intended significance of
 their act was in what it ~failed~ to accomplish.

 But what was the meaning of that? The intent, to repeat, was to kill
 everyone. Or, to put it differently: it was to immolate the
 ~community~ of Columbine High - themselves included - ~as a whole~.
 Here, though, we must be clear. Nothing indicates that the action was
 aimed against the school in its ~official~ capacity. It did not
 foreground the principal, the teachers, the classrooms. The centre of
 devastation was to be the cafeteria. Ground-zero, that is, was the
 informal and commensal gathering place of the ~peer-group~, the
 public zone of those whose corporatised and subcultural rituals made
 up (via a clique-transcending 'school spirit') the designated
 community of the school. This was not, then, _Blackboard Jungle_, nor
 was it a rerun of _If_. Students were in no wise being represented as
 the institutionally or culturally oppressed. To the contrary: the
 youth-based 'we' of the school was itself at the forefront of what
 was being negated. In nihilating its members, the 'school body' as
 such would be torn to shreds.

 Three comments can be made:

 The first is to note the absoluteness of the antagonism, an
 antagonism that extended from the peer group of the school to the
 first-person plural as such. If the intended action at Columbine
 shares, with that of ~Acephale~, a destructive animus towards a
 communion mode of being-together, it does so ~not~ with the thought
 that a different (and better) mode of community might thereby result,
 but with the thought that being together at all deserves to die. By
 blowing everyone up, the possibility of sublation is negated along
 with what its own negation would negate. It would be banal to call
 this self-defeating. The aporias of the action illuminate a real
 impasse. The attempted destruction of a ~pseudo~-community (itself
 the imposition of a communing unity on a jungle of anomic and
 power-and-money-mediated competitiveness), coincided with the
 impossibility, from the midst of that experience, of even ~imagining~
 any other kind.

 What manifests itself in the space of that blockage, secondly, is a
 particular kind of nihilism. It is a nihilism, evidently, that is
 mired in reactiveness and can only abstractly negate. The lack of
 anything to affirm is rendered positive only by becoming an active
 will to annihilate. At the same time, the lack of an affirmed self
 with which to affirm is met by identifying (to the point of
 personification) with the negating impulse itself. It is the hateful
 negation of a hateful world; destructive rage self-affirmed. Such a
 spirit - manifest in real and fictional moral monsters, as well as in
 the audio-visual surround of attack games and industrial music to
 which Harris and Klebold were supposedly addicted - may be taken as a
 signature of the times. But if we are to interpret it
 symptomatically, let alone meet its challenge, the emptiness to which
 it is counterposed should also be placed in the picture. That the
 Columbine action was posthumously defeated lies not only in the way
 in which the outrage provoked (as was inevitable) a counter-revenge
 of the sacred it violated, but in the way in which one will to
 nothingness failed in its effort to trump another.

 The third point follows immediately from this. For all its
 self-negating reactiveness, what the Columbine action embodies has to
 be taken seriously, not only as a cultural sign but as a singularity
 bearing the trace of an actual experience of the world. This is
 especially hard to take in. How ~could~ the ordinary and immediate
 world of human beings present itself to materially pampered youth in
 an affluent suburb of the richest and most powerful region on earth
 as hideous beyond redemption? That such a view could be other than
 projective, that it might not be reducible to the unconscious effects
 of a family drama, and that even here there might be an
 authentic basis for 'hating everything', is intolerable. That is why,
 we might say, Harris and Klebold did what they did. How could that
 experience, and what it implied, be ~really~ communicated, except in
 a way that made it as indigestible as it was impossible to ignore?

 ***

 It may be doubted, of course, whether their gesture would have
 symbolically failed any less even had it succeeded in its technical
 aim. To have avoided the reaction which swallowed up the meaning of
 their action, Harris and Klebold would no doubt have had to sacrifice
 only themselves. But then it would have been a different action. And
 the negative will expressed in it would have had to be both much
 more, and much less, than it was.

 In the event, and precisely because there ~were~ other victims, their
 ~self~-sacrifice could be readily displaced. On the one hand it could
 be absorbed as justice - a retribution, to be sure, that did not go
 far enough, and which required more scapegoats to be found. At the
 same time, the sacrifice of all those innocent others - including, as
 the focus for a wider identification, the traumatised students and
 families left behind - could itself take centre stage. There indeed,
 in the rituals of grief and condolence it could provide an occasion
 to heal the wounds and turn the page.

 The degree of emotional identification and support this elicited was
 extraordinary, as was the extent of all manner of giving. It was as
 if not just the traumatised but the gods themselves had to be
 propitiated for the evil that had been done. Indeed: for did not the
 disaster of Columbine mean that the gods had been angry, and that the
 community itself was in debt?

 The offerings ran in two directions:

 The first, made urgent by panic, mobilised energies (since Harris and
 Klybold were no longer judicially available) against whatever could
 be blamed for what they had done. Along this line ran campaigns for
 responsible parenting, reduced media violence, and gun control, plus
 a myriad initiatives to promote safer schools. These ranged from
 stricter security, see-through lockers, and massacre preparedness
 drills, to attempted interventions - through diversity programs,
 anti-violence mentors and the like - into the climate of violence
 generated within the institution itself. The second, as it were
 'positive' direction for giving, swelled from a plethora of flowers,
 tributes, sympathy messages, and support for 'the cause' into a full
 chorus of self-restoring love-for-others taken to be at the heart of
 community itself. Columbine, in this context, became the figure for a
 collectivity that extended far beyond. The Mayor of Littleton, noting
 that the school was not in the city boundaries, declared that this
 did not matter in terms of help since 'we are all Columbine'. At the
 centre of this effort, nonetheless, was the restoration of the school
 community itself. Its culmination was the highly publicised ceremony
 of Sept 23, 1999. On that day, after the grief counsellors had done
 their job, and the buildings had been renovated in a cleansing that
 left no trace, the students and teachers held an inspirational rally
 under their principal, paraded back to their buildings, cut the
 ribbons at the entrance, went through a further school-enclosing
 human chain, and, after a solemn first assembly, re-commenced being
 Columbine High.

 What Harris and Klebold hated, one has to say, was rendered no less
 hateful for all this expenditure of good will, which had the further
 effect of completely mystifying the nature of the reparative
 operation, as well, by consequence, as the motives of anyone who
 might find the totality, even as repaired, infinitely awful. To the
 contrary, what all the scapegoating, risk-reducing, community-healing
 measures did was to reinforce the outer order of the school (and
 other schools) while artificially pumping up the non-community it
 enclosed in a false collectivity. All could proceed, moreover,
 without those involved even having to suspect that there might be
 something empty or inauthentic or servile in the collectivity being
 ritually restored; still less, that it might be against this ground
 that the figure that had disfigured it might reveal its true face.

 ***

 In one small but important respect, however, the praxis of
 restoration was not without its own moment of learning. That moment
 touches, indeed, on a dimension of the Columbine events - their
 mediation by media - which opens out onto a much larger issue. This
 concerns the relation (both as such, and under contemporary
 circumstances) of the Symbolic to the live.

 A week before the Columbine re-opening, the ~ordre du jour~ had been
 announced at a press conference. In recounting its steps, the
 Principal was asked why a human chain? It was he explained, only
 half-jokingly, to keep you guys out. The day had been devised, he
 went on, as a 'take back our school'. And the school was to be taken
 back, not just from the killers and their stain, but from the 'media'
 as well. The school's image itself was to be reclaimed. When
 reporters discovered that this would go to the extent of physically
 barring them from the in-school assembly that climaxed the day, a
 storm erupted. It was settled by a compromise: just two fixed cameras
 in the hall, plus a restricted space in the school grounds from which
 to conduct interviews, if they must.

 On the side of those who devised the ceremony, two media-related
 insights were displayed. The first was that, through the way in which
 'the tragedy of Columbine' had become a celebrity event, to be
 commercially exploited as an audience attractor for ad-based media, a
 kind of theft had taken place. In its appropriation and circulation
 as a media icon, the school had been, in every sense, alienated from
 its 'name'. A liberation of that name - and of the power to shape it
 - was accordingly in order. A second insight lay in the insistence
 that the holiest ceremony of the day be, if possible, off camera, and
 at any rate preserved from the disrupting indignity of the media
 circus at work. To be fully authentic and effective, this was to say,
 the symbolic could only transpire in the moral proximity of the
 face-to-face, and in the full enjoyment there of its autonomous
 self-possession. If the messy compromise arrived at showed how
 difficult such self-possession could be, the initial insistence
 provides evidence that the symbolic retains, even on the side of
 adaptive order, a contestative energy of its own.

 In a curious way the same thought - that the live is the essential
 zone of the Symbolic, and that the media's simulative and promotional
 panopticon must be excluded for the Symbolic to even appear - was
 enacted by Harris and Klebold themselves. To be sure, they were
 massively mediatised. Strikingly unlike the Columbine survivors, they
 freely abandoned all claim to shape their self-representation (the
 price, after all, of celebrityhood). But this was only ~after~ they
 were dead. The event itself was sprung as a surprise. Its only
 witnesses were those directly involved. Its horror was that of a
 movie which had suddenly become real. Here, though, was a further
 paradox. Harris and Klebold seemed themselves to be imitating the
 media. The plot was a replay of _Heathers_, the dress-up recalled
 _The Matrix_, the shootings repeated the mannerisms of ~Quake~ and
 ~Doom~. A year before, in a media arts exercise, they had even made a
 video of themselves playing out the scene of what they eventually
 did. It was a hall of mirrors, and their action only repeated what it
 reflected back. There was, though, a crucial difference. This
 repetition translated the celluloid and the digital back into the
 embodied real. This simulacrum became flesh. In effect: the military
 spirit in the technology had conjoined with the I hate everything
 nihilism of industrial music and youth rage to create a Golem. In
 that very translation, and not only because of the physical violence
 it immediately unleashed, a bolt of energy was released.

 In the passage from the simulacrum to the live one may find a more
 general formula for the irruption of the symbolic in our day. The
 pies that now hit faces did so first in the slapstick of Vaudeville
 and in the films of Keaton and Chaplin. The Diana complex - the
 realisation of death by media - might be elucidated in similar terms.
 Rather than pursue this thought further, however, I will conclude
 with a speculative question.

 In the double symbolic event of Columbine, a sacrifice elicited a
 sacrifice: which is to say, that two variants of the sacred
 confronted one another. This commonality was obscured, however, by
 the way in which, on both sides, the drama was lived out, and
 overcoded, as an irreducible contest between good and evil. In part
 this reflected a real contradiction, in part a displacement into
 competing nihilisms, in part a Manichean dualism that is a core
 element of American Protestantism and suffuses the culture as a
 whole. What symbolic gesture could have been devised then, we might
 ask, which would have transcended this dichotomy?

 At Columbine, it may be said, the conditions for such an impossible
 conjuncture did not remotely exist. But then, under what conditions
 would they? At such a point, one might surmise, not the simulacrum
 but the Word might become flesh, though with the angels joining the
 devils, and the devils joining the angels, it would surely transpire
 as something closer to ~Acephale~, and closer still, perhaps, to what
 last stirred, for some, in the thickets of '68.

 References
 ----------

 Bataille, Georges. _Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939_
 (ed. & trans. Allan Stoekl). Manchester: Manchester University Press,
 1985.
 Baudrillard, Jean. _Symbolic Echange and Death_. London; Thousand
 Oaks: Sage Publications, 1993.

 _____________________________________________________________________
 Andrew Wernick directs the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture
 and Politics, and associated graduate programs, at Trent University,
 Canada. The author of _Promotional Culture_, and many writings on
 social and cultural theory, his most recent book is _Auguste Comte
 and the Religion of Humanity_ to be published by Cambridge University
 Press in Spring 2000.
 _____________________________________________________________________

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