postmodernism

JEAN BAUDRILLARD ile MATRIX-turkish

2005-04-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

AUDE LANCELIN / PARIS - Postmodernliğin teorisyenine göre Wachowski kardeşlerin filmi eğitici semptomlar taşıyor ve her ne kadar reddediyor görünse de teknoloji evreninin bir fetişi haline gelmiş durumda. Reddediyor görünse de kitle kültürünün bir parçası olan film, birçok düşünürün hararetli tartışmalara girişmesi için yeterince muammalı.

2003 yılındayız, etraf loş. Sinema kompleksinin rahat koltuklarında patlamış mısırlarımıza gömülü vaziyetteyken Schopenhauer ve Platon'un modern müritlerinin 'Matrix'in kodunu kırmasını izliyoruz. Acaba Neo, insanlığı Wachowski'lerin içine düşürdüğü esaret zincirinden kurtarabilecek mi?
Serinin üçüncü filminin dünya çapında dağıtımı beklenirken internetteki forum köşeleri önde gelen filozoflarla siber-sofistlerin lazerli düşünce savaşlarına sahne alıyor. Kimisi Descartes ve Berkeley'nin 'Matrix'in düşünce babası olduğu, kimisi de Adorno ve Horkheimer'in güzel Trinity'nin uçan tekmelerini öngördügünü ileri sürüyor...

'Ontolojik Matrix terörü'

'Matrix' tartışmaları Fransa'da had safhaya varmış durumda; Fransız düşünürler Paris'te geçen haziranda 'Gerçegin Çölü' başlığı altında yuvarlak masa toplantıları düzenleyip Matrix'i tartıştı; düşünür Slovaj Zizek, 'Matrix veya Çifte Sapkınlık' başlıklı bir eser yayımladı. Jean-Pierre Zarader, Fransız TF1 televizyonunun internet sitesi için film hakkında 'Saf Aklın Eleştirisi' başlıklı bir makale kaleme aldı ve 'Matrix'in Kantçı yanı'nın altını çizdi; filmin Frankfurt ekolünü takip ettigi sıkça dile getirildi. Yani şimdilerde Fransız düşün âleminde 'Matrix' serisinin yol açtığı bir 'ontolojik terör' konuşuluyor...

Serinin üçüncü filmi gösterime girerken tartışmaya en son Wachowski kardeşlerin açıkça referans aldığı 'postmodernitenin düşünsel mimarı' sosyolog Jean Baudrillard'da da katıldı ve tabir yerindeyse Matrix'in şifresini kırdı!

[A.L] Gerçek ve sanal üzerine görüşleriniz 'Matrix'in yaratıcılarının önde gelen referansları oldu. Serinin ilk filminde sizin görüşlerinize açık göndermeler vardı ve hatta 1981 tarihinde yayımladığınız 'Simulakrlar ve Simülasyon' kitabınızın kapağı bir sahnede görünüyordu. Bu sizi şaşırttı mı?

[J.B.] Bir yanlış anlaşılmanın olduğu kesin, zaten bu yüzden Matrix tartışmalarına katılmaktan çekindim. Wachowski'nin adamları ilk filmden sonra benim de ikinci filmde görünmem için aradılar ama bunun münasip bir fikir olmadiğını kendilerine söyledim! (Gülüyor.)
Aslında 1980'li yıllarda New York'lu simülasyoncuların yaptıkları hatayı tekrarlıyorlar. Bu sanatçılar sanal olanı bir olgu olarak alıp görünür bir fanteziye çeviriyorlardı. Ancak bir sanal kâinat yaratıyorsan bunu tekrar kategorilere ayırıp üzerinde konuşamazsın. Ancak bu filmle örneğin 'Kusursuz Cinayet'te geliştirdiginiz görüşleriniz arasında çarpıcı baglantılar mevcut. 'Gerçegin Çölü'ne yapılan gönderme, tamamen sanal olarak yaratılan bütün o insanlar, insanların yapay bir zekânın ürünü olması...

[A.L.] Evet ama gerçekle sanal arasındaki farkın giderek daha fazla belirsizleşmesi hakkında başka filmler de çevrildi: Peter Weir'in 'Truman Show', Spielberg'in 'Azınlık Raporu', hatta David Lynch'in başyapıtı 'Mulholland Çıkmazı' gibi.

[J.B.] 'Matrix'i bunların son kertede bir sentezi olarak kabul etmek gerekir. Ama buradaki düzen o kadar üstünkörü, kaba saba ki gerçekte fazla bir sorun yaratmıyor. Ya kişilikler bizzat Matrix'in içinde, yani dijital nesneler haline gelmiş ya da sistemin dışında yani direniş ülkesi Zion'da radikalleşmiş. Oysa iki dünya arasındaki geçişte neler olup bittiğini göstermek ilginç olabilirdi. Ama bu filmin asıl rahatsız edici yanı, Platon'un çok daha önceden ortaya koyduğu, simülasyon ile ilüzyonun birbirine karıştırılmasının yarattığı klasik sorundur.

Burada gerçekten bir yanlış anlama var. Görünür dünyanın kökten bir ilüzyondan ibaret olması...
Bütün gelişmiş kültürler bu soruyu ele almış sanat ve sembolleştirmeyle çözümler üretmiştir. Bizim çektiğimiz ıstıraba katlanmak için kendimizin icat ettigi şey sanal bir gerçek, tehlikeli ya da olumsuz öğelerin süpürüldüğü hayali bir evrendir. Ve bu evren artık gerçeğin yerine geçmeye ve tek çözüm olmaya başladı. Oysa 'Matrix' tamamıyla bu sürece katkıda bulunuyor!
Hayal edilen, ütopyası kurulan, fantezisi üretilen şeyler görüntüye çevriliyor, 'gerçekleştiriliyor'. Her şey tam bir saydamlık içinde. 'Matrix' hayali bir düzen üzerine, o düzeni bizzat yaratacak bir film.
Bu ayrıca teknolojik yabancılaşmayı reddettiği anlaşılan ama aynı zamanda dijital evrene ve sentez görüntülere abanan bir film 'Matrix'...

'Matrix 2'nin çarpıcı yanı seyirciyi o devasa özel efektlerin etkisinden çekip çıkaracak, verilmek istenen mesajı algılamasını sağlayacak ironiden bir nebze nasiplenmemiş olmasıdır. Seyirciye bir imaj, bir hayalle karşı karşıya bulunduğunu hatırlatacak tek bir sekans, Barthes'in deyişiyle bir 'punctum' yok. Filmden arta sadece eğitici semptomlar ve gerçekle hayal arasındaki farkın belirsizleştigi bir teknoloji evreninin fetişi kalıyor.
Bu açıdan 'Matrix' hem saf ve temiz yürekli hem de sapkın olabilen dengesiz bir nesne niteliğinde. Filmin sonundaki Freud bozması karakter dogru söylüyor: "Bir an Matrix'i yeniden programlayıp denklemdeki sapmaları temizlemek gerekti. Ve siz muhalifler buna yardim ettiniz." Neo buna karşılık 'Dışarıdayız' diyor. İşte bu cevaba ben teorik olarak karşı çıkıyorum!

'Matrix' halihazırdakı durumun tüm gücü elde tutan tekelci gücün imajını yansıtıyor ve bu nedenle kendi kendine parçalanmasına katkıda bulunuyor. Aslına bakarsanız filmin tüm dünyaya dağıtılıyor olması da filmin bir parçası. Mc Luhan'in dediği gibi 'Araç mesajdır'. 'Matrix'in mesajı kendi kontrolsüz biçimde adeta bulaşıcı bir hastalık gibi yayılmasıdır.

'Matrix' ya da pop ikonu Madonna'nın son albümünde olduğu gibi Amerikan pazarlama çarkının, sisteme eleştiri getiren ürünleri destekleyerek başarıyı elde etmesini görmek de oldukça çarpıcı olsa gerek.
Yaşadığımız dönemi nefes alınamaz hale getiren de bunun ta kendisi. Sistem yanıltıcı bir olumsuzluk üretiyor ve bunlar gösteri ürünleri ile entegre vaziyette. Sistem böylece tüm gerçek alternatiflerin üzerine sürgü çekiyor. Artık bu dünyayı düşünmek için sistem dışı bir nokta, muhalif bir işlev yok, sadece sisteme büyülenmiş biçimde katılım var. Ancak unutmayın ki, mükemmeliyete yaklaştıkça, onu tamamen yok edecek bir kazaya da yaklaşmış olur. Bu asla gerçekleşmemiş bir tür olumlu ironi.

Kuşkusuz 11 Eylül buna katkıda bulunuyor. Terörizm asla bir alternatif güç değildir. Terörizm Batı'nın gücünün kendi üzerine neredeyse intihar biçimde geri dönmesi metaforundan ibarettir. Zamanında bunu söylemiştim ve kabul görmemişti. Ama buna karşı ne nihilist ne de karamsar olmaya gerek yok. Sistem, sanal, hayali, Matrix... Tüm bunlar belki de tarihin çöplüğüne gömülecekler.
Geri dönüşlülük, meydan okuma ve cazibe ise yok edilemez...

Nouvel Observateur'den çeviren: Mustafa Alkan

http://www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?haberno=94734&tarih=08/11/2003

The Islamic Simulacrum

2005-04-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

West Africa Review (2000)
ISSN: 1525-4488
in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Into Africa

Thomas E. R. Maguire

Into Africa, the BBC/PBS six-part series hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., displays the rich heritage of African society at every corner of the continent. Unfortunately, in the eyes of many, Gates failed to enhance popular culture with a revised and radical view of Africa. Instead, he reinforced many of the negative stereotypes of Africa and its diverse culture. This paper deals with the way that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. portrays Islam negatively in a manner similar to the traditional and modern manifestations of Orientalism. Using the concept of simulacrum, as introduced by Jean Baudrillard, I will identify the existence of an “Islamic simulacrum” that functions to vilify the Islamic world through Western media. By “Western media” I refer to the English language media in the United States and the United Kingdom where Into Africa was broadcast. In addition, I will examine the deeply intertwined “postmodern simulacrum” that maintains Orientalism and Western domination through rhetoric of pluralism and tolerance. Due to the obscure and endlessly shifting meaning of “postmodern,” it is necessary to specify that I use the concept as Ahmed S. Akbar defined it in Postmodernism and Islam. I will show the ways that the postmodern simulacrum appropriates marginal discourses within Western society to replace traditional figures of domination in the ongoing process of Orientalism. The body of the paper will systematically identify the ways in which Into Africa functions in the postmodern simulacrum as Afrocentric Orientalism. In a separate critique of Into Africa, Ali Mazrui accused Gates of “Black Orientalism”. I prefer the paradoxical term, “Afrocentric Orientalism”, because it specifically refers to the appropriation of Afrocentricism as a marginal discourse. On that note, the use of this term should not be mistaken as an indictment of that discourse, or viewed as a suggestion that Into Africa is an Afrocentric text. Molefi Kete Asante, a pioneer of Afrocentrism, actually referred to the film series as “a Eurocentric enterprise”. In conclusion, I will briefly address the broader issues regarding the relationship between Islamic and African civilisations that Henry Louis Gates avoids through his negative portrayals of Islam. However, this paper is primarily about Into Africa’s complicity with the representation of Islam in Western media, and not the diverse history of Islamic expansion into Africa.

The Islamic Simulacrum
Jean Baudrillard identified an epistemological crisis in contemporary media- drenched society with the concept of the simulacrum, the accelerated circulation of images without referents, a hyperreality operating independently of truth value. In spite of the disputed and ill-measured depth to which the simulacrum immerses members of society, its deceptive tides fail to breech the shores of representation--it deals primarily with the circulation of images and not other epistemological sources. As the majority of Western people wade through its currents, some are apprehensive, heeding the warning, and some are careless, occasionally being swept away. Perhaps Baudrillard is a Noah without an ark, proclaiming an invisible flood without a means for salvation, or an academic charlatan, swimming through the air, pitying the drowned. Despite the occasionally messianic tone of Baudrillard’s philosophy, and his disputable claims that simulacrum envelops society, the concept of simulacrum does identify a concrete process through which the media can deceive by projecting signs and images which distort the reality to which any given representation corresponds. In cases of radical alterity, where individuals acquire knowledge of a given subject primarily, or entirely, through the media, simulacrum becomes the sole epistemological force.

Media representations of the Islamic world provide a convincing example of this phenomenon. In Covering Islam, Edward Said explores the American news coverage of Islam in the late seventies and early eighties. Within a matrix of military dictatorships and fundamentalist coups, Said examines the underlying geopolitical strategies at work in the representations of the Islamic world. The portrayal of Islam as a monolithic mass of “barbarism.medieval theocracy.[and] distasteful exoticism” weaves itself neatly into a social panic regarding the Middle Eastern control of the United States’ oil supplies (Said, 1981: xv) Though the increasing “coverage” of Islam in 1970s marked a new wave of representational attacks, the history of ethnocentric and xenophobic Western attitudes toward Islam can be traced deep into the roots of modernity. In his landmark work, Orientalism, Said traces the history of Western approaches to studying, describing, and engaging the Muslim world. For hundreds of years, the principal dichotomy established between West and East was the true religion of Christianity versus the false religion of Islam. Europe viewed Islam as a religion with an identical structure to Christianity except Christ had been replaced by the impostor, Mohammed. The very term which designated the religion of Islam in Western discourse bursts with misunderstanding. Islam was externally titled, “Mohammedanism,” a misnomer that would stay in common use well into the twentieth century. Two very basic and ubiquitous teachings throughout the Muslim world are the prohibition against the worship of any man, including the prophet Mohammed, and the reverence of Jesus as one of the greatest prophets of God. Such self-representations of Islam were either ignored or consciously considered irrelevant by Orientalists in the West. Though the religious character of Orientalism has subsided with the secularisation of Christendom, its orientation toward Islam as a monolithic object for study has remained. Regarding the opposed abstractions of “Aryan” and “Semitic” that appeared in late nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship, Said notes,

“.what has not been sufficiently stressed in histories of modern anti-Semitism has been the legitimation of such atavistic designations by Orientalism, and.the way this academic and intellectual legitimation has persisted right through the modern age in discussions of Islam, the Arabs, or the Near Orient. For whereas it is no longer possible to write learned (or even popular) disquisitions on either “the Negro mind” or “the Jewish personality,” it is perfectly possible to engage in such research as “the Islamic mind,” or “the Arab character”.” (1978; 262)
As the underlying racism and ethnocentrism of Orientalism has come to inform the media representations of Islam through the late twentieth century, new oppositions have developed to replace the religious dichotomy of past centuries. The secular, rational, democratic, and modern self-image of the West sees its opposite in Islam, the great and dangerous impostor of a benevolent global civilization.

The image of Western society as the bastion of democracy, tolerance, and secular pluralism can be easily challenged with any number of incidents demonstrating the enduring racism and viciousness of neo-imperialism. However, in the media, the images of Western benevolence dominate, constituting what might be termed the postmodern simulacrum, with the Islamic simulacrum in contemporary media currently standing as its major opposition.. In Postmodernism and Islam, Akbar S. Ahmed identifies the qualities of postmodernism that compose this simulacrum. Included in his definition of postmodernism are the following criteria:

“.a questioning of, a loss of faith in, the project of modernity; a spirit of pluralism; a heightened scepticism of traditional orthodoxies.a rejection of a view of the world as a universal totality.in many profound ways the media are the central dynamic, the Zeitgeist, the defining feature, of postmodernism.[it] allows, indeed encourages, the juxtaposition of discourses, and exuberant eclecticism, the mixing of diverse images.” (Ahmed, 1992; 10-11, 25)
Ahmed also asserts an explicit connection between postmodernism and “ethno- religious revivalism--or fundamentalism” (1992; 13). The development of fundamentalist assertions of identity deeply intertwine with the transnational unification of postmodernism. Though the fundamentalist phenomenon has occurred worldwide irrespective of religion, economy, or political system, the media focus on fundamentalism has unfairly centred on religious movements within the Islamic world. Indeed, fundamentalism has become a code word for Islam that can be broadly applied to any one of the world’s one billion Muslims. Thus, within the rhetoric of pluralism and tolerance of postmodernity, there is a major exception in the representations of Islam.

The Islamic simulacrum marks a modern extension of an ongoing strategy of Western cultural domination. Neither Said nor Ahmed attempt a blanket defence of the charges put forth against Islam in the mass media. Instead, they demonstrate the inaccuracy of the monolithic structure imposed over Islam by the various organs of Western power. When the practices and effects of traditional Orientalism are juxtaposed with those of the Islamic simulacrum, there is very little difference besides the ability for postmodernism to shift from icons of eurocentrism to those of pluralism and humanism in its tactics of vilification. For instance, instead of Islam being attacked as an impostor religion of Christianity, Islam may now be frequently attacked for its “negative treatment of women”. The Muslim woman’s hijab, or veil, has become a symbol of oppression in the West. However, the diversity of opinions and practices within Islam regarding the veil receive little attention, nor does the hijab’s relatively marginal position within the faith. Islam has also been charged with the elimination of indigenous ethnic identities in various regions. Even though such criticisms have appeared within the postmodern simulacrum, it would be highly disputable to assert that postmodern Western society has done anything significant for the liberation of women or the protection of indigenous cultures from the negative effects of global civilization. The ideals of Islam can make as many claims to the protection of women and ethnic identities as can Western humanism. When marginal voices speak after centuries of imposed silence, they can easily be regarded as indicators of an absolute change. However, within the postmodern simulacrum, they can simply transplant a progressive face onto an ongoing process of domination. Many aggressive criticisms of Islam in the media derive their social impact from such a process.

Though the Islamic simulacrum functions in a unique way in the propagation of ethnocentrism, it exists as one of the many heads of a polycephalous monster. The enduring racism against peoples of the African diaspora continues through different simulacra. In the United States, the demonisation of black people operates much as it always has in Western culture, but only in distinct realms of transgression which can be officially sanctioned by rhetoric of legal equanimity; overt racism is unacceptable. The paranoia inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial contained every possible invocation of savagery, but only within a rational logic of crime and punishment. Outside these realms of transgression, a simulacrum of equality exists which asserts the passing of racism and the full integration of African Americans into American prosperity. Despite unemployment and poverty rates in the black community that often equal or surpass those of the entire nation during the Great Depression, a belief in the disappearance of racism continues to grow in the U.S. Though the latter simulacrum represents a distinctly postmodern phenomenon, the prior originates in the centuries-old practice of dehumanisation that rationalised and justified the slave trade. In Into Africa, the six-part series produced for BBC in the United Kingdom, and PBS in the United States, Henry Louis Gates travels through various parts of Africa in an attempt to shatter the depictions of the continent as a land void of civilization and culture. He explains that, “it’s important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilised only when white people arrived. Africans have been creators of culture for thousands of years.”(BBC online, 2000) During his journey, however, Henry Louis Gates travels to many parts of Africa which have interacted with both European and Islamic civilization. In his attempt to extract a history of “Black Africa” from these diverse cultures, he reinforces many of the elements of the Islamic simulacrum, thereby adding Into Africa to the arsenal of postmodern strategies to discredit Islam.

Into Africa
Into Africa is divided into six one-hour episodes with the following titles and content 1) The Swahili Coast: exploring the East African Swahili trading civilization 2) The Road to Timbuktu: travelling along the Niger River toward the fabled Islamic university at Timbuktu 3) The Black Kingdoms of the Nile: venture down the Nile River into the lands of ancient Nubia 4) The Slave Kingdoms: examining West African roles in the slave trade 5) The Holy Land: a pilgrimage through the great sites of Ethiopian Christianity 6) The Lost Cities of the South: reassessing the ancient history of South Africa and Zimbabwe. The first three episodes deal with Islamic Africa.

The Swahili Coast begins with Henry Louis Gates arriving in Lamu, a Swahili coastal town, quoting one of the first European mariners to arrive in East Africa, commenting on the wealth and sophistication of the Swahili, most likely a great contrast to his expectations of a land populated with savages. Gates declares his intention to determine the “roots of the Swahili people”, who still have a “distinctive Muslim culture.” The camera films several veiled women walking down the street as Gates mentions that, “for 2,000 years Arab merchants have settled on this coast. You can see their influence everywhere. There seems to be a mosque on every street corner.” This generalisation of Islam, which will continue throughout this episode, utterly ignores that Islam arose in Arabia just over 1400 years ago. Soon after, he goes to meet with Sheikh Bedawi, “one of Lamu’s most venerable Islamic scholars.” During the conversation, Sheikh Bedawi, somewhat light-skinned but clearly African, claims that he is of pure Arab descent, tracing his ancestry to the prophet Mohammed. He also explains that he tries not to look badly upon those with African blood. His translator adds that Arab men used to take African women as concubines, which led to African people being considered inferior. Leaving Lamu by boat, Gates says, “whatever Sheikh Bedowi says, that supposedly pure Arabic blood has long been mixed with the blood of Black Africans.” In this first encounter with Islamic Africa, the image of Islam progresses from veiled women, mosques, and a Qu’ranic school to bigotry, concubines, and confused identity, neatly reaffirming the Islamic simulacrum.

Gates continues his journey along the Swahili coast by visiting a town that specialises in the construction of dhals. Gates visits a local architect, Ahmed Sigoff, who also traces his ancestry to the prophet Mohammed. He describes the way that Arab men frequently married African women, with the reverse, African men marrying Arab women, only occurring occasionally. He affirms the higher social standing accorded to those members of the community with Arabian descent. In conclusion to this conversation, Gates states that the situation in Lamu “reminds me how black Americans used to claim descent from some distant Cherokee or Sioux ancestor, anything but pure Negro.” With this statement, Gates draws a parallel between Swahili and African-American cultures. The justification for such a parallel is dubious within the evidence provided in the episode. Beyond the possibility for highly divergent interpretations of what “pure Negro” might mean in each culture, Gates oversimplifies the complexity of ethnic friction in the United States and Kenya under a common banner of “blackness”. Gates makes a legitimate claim that the Swahili culture should not be entirely credited to Arabs. However, he inappropriately uses “Islam” and “Arab” as interchangeable signifiers. When Gates next travels to Shanga, the remains of the oldest city in coastal East Africa, his guide explains that the lowest strata of the town resembles archaeological remains of inland settlements, proving that the first inhabitants of the city were black Africans. One of his guides, Mohammed Badi, explains that, 2,000 years ago, the Arabs arrived and gained power gradually through intermarriage. However, Gates never addresses the fact that the arrival of Islam in Arabia arises six hundred years after the initial contact. The significant ways in which Islam transformed Arab culture, including a strong emphasis on equality irrespective of ethnicity, never enter his discussion of Swahili culture. The elision of these conflicts within the Muslim world itself allows the monolithic model of Islam to stand unchallenged. Later, when he’s leaving the island of Lamu, he notes that “the Arabs weren’t the only ones who came to exploit the coast. The British were here from the late nineteenth century up to 1960. They gave special privileges to those who claimed Arab descent, deepening racial divisions.” The extent to which colonialism may have contributed to the ethnic tension previously described at Lamu receives no critical attention.

While the issues of ethnic identity directly relate to the project of Into Africa, Gates makes a clear effort to include images that reinforce the Islamic simulacrum in other ways. After returning from the archaeological remains at Shanga, Gates plays a board game with his other guide, Abus Shakoona. After discussing Abus’ perspective on his ethnic identity as a mix of Arab and African, the conversation turns to the subject of Abus’ marriage to two women. Abus explains that Islam allows a man to marry up to four wives. Gates explains, “I would rather [my daughters] have two husbands than them to be one wife to a husband with two wives.I’d rather them be in control.” So far, Islamic gender relations have been described as a combination of polygamy and concubinage, and Gates clearly asserts his opinion that Islam disempowers women with the statement about his daughters. The next stop for Gates is Mombassa, a large port city and a major destination for European tourists. Walking along the beach, Gates comments on the disturbing racial polarity between the white tourists and the African servants. A moment later, he states, “it’s no accident that the people from Oman and the Saudi-Arabians would move here.leaving all that desert and heat, but this is spectacular.this is so beautiful.” Not only does this statement make an untenable connection between Arab traders and European tourists, it reeks of the malicious depiction of a foreign land that Into Africa attempts to destroy. When Gates travels to the archaeological remains of the Swahili city of Getti, he reinvokes the notion of female oppression in Islam. Standing in an arched inlet of the remains of Getti’s fifteenth- century mosque, Abdullah Alailsi, the curator, recites the fatiha, the first verse of the Qu’ran and an oft-repeated element of salaat, Muslim prayer. After finishing, they continue a conversation as follows:

Abdullah: So with the help of the echo, as you realized, the message will be conveyed and received very simultaneously. And for that, those women at that time had no complaints at all. Right, they could hear him very vividly.

Gates: They couldn’t see him as well.

Abdullah: They couldn’t see him but they could hear him. The front part of it was entirely meant for men and the hind part was specifically kept for the ladies.

When Gates veers from his stated mission of reconstituting a stolen African past and swerves into unrelated representations of Muslim culture, he continually reinforces the Islamic simulacrum. After Abdullah’s statement that men and women are separated in Muslim prayer services, there is no treatment of this issue beyond Gates’ insinuated disapproval. After his tour of Getti, Gates comments that “unlike the British archaeologists, Abdullah says Getti was an African city built by Africans. This grand city was built by the Swahili. And here, on the mainland of Kenya, the Swahili are seen as Africans.” This glides over the fact that the Swahili in Mombassa, and those who built Getti, are Muslims. Gates is only interested in the colour of the builders, and not a revised picture of the African/Arab cooperation that Getti might demonstrate.

The final destination in The Swahili Coast is the island of Zanzibar, which grew rich during the eighteenth and nineteenth century by trading spices and slaves. The conflicts of ethnic identity are at their ugliest in Zanzibar. The island has witnessed great civil unrest in recent decades as the phantoms of its history have risen violently. Gates returns to many of the ethnic identity issues previously addressed, only this time linking them to the slave trade. Gates travels to the village of Kizimkazi where he talks to two black men who consider themselves Persian. Unlike the residents of Lamu, they possess no family trees and offer a rather poor verification of their Persian identity. However, a twelfth- century mosque with Khoufic inscriptions remains in the village that testifies to an ancient Persian presence on the island. Gates once again parallels the experience of Swahili Muslims to African Americans by stating,

“so it’s true that the Persians really did settle in Zanzibar -- just as the Arabs, and later the Indians did. But why do so many people here claim to be the descendants of a handful of medieval Persian mariners? It’s a bit like me claiming to be white because my great-great- grandfather was an Irishman named Brady.I think the answer lies in the shadow of Zanzibar’s history, as the centre of the East African slave trade.”
Despite the historical links and similarities between Zanzibar and the black Atlantic, the conflation of the two histories in such a matter again oversimplifies the ethnic identity issues at work in East Africa. In passing, as evidence of the island’s prosperity in the nineteenth century, Gates explains that the sultan of Oman moved to Zanzibar in 1940 with his court and his 99 concubines—another icon of the Islamic simulacrum, the harem, coming into play. He concludes by talking to a descendent of Tiputip, a famed Swahili slave trader, about the island’s sad history. Her unconvincing defence of the Arab role in slavery only emphasises the Arab participation in the institution, though Gates attempts no sweeping indictment of Muslims as slavers. In conclusion to The Swahilil Coast, Gates says, “it’s taken my people 50 years to move from ‘Negro,’ to ‘Black,’ to ‘African-American.’ I wonder how long it will take the Swahili to call themselves ‘African.’” With this statement, the Swahili no longer have the right to identify themselves as Muslims. According to Gates, they must purify themselves from Arab influence and redefine themselves within the domain of “Africa.” In the end, Gates comes very close to affirming one of the great Orientalist maxims, the oft-quoted position of Karl Marx that, “they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”(Said, 1978; xiii)

The Swahili Coast presents a version of East African history that could be classified as Afrocentric Orientalism. In The Road to Timbuktu, and The Black Kingdoms of the Nile, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. affirms the Islamic simulacrum in more subtle ways than the obvious misrepresentations of Swahili culture. He begins his sojourn to Timbuktu by explaining the reverence felt by African-Americans for the fabled city. The very existence of Timubuktu as a major centre of learning in West Africa disproves the myths of savagery imposed on black people throughout the period of European expansion. Recounting the old tales of Timbuktu he heard back in his neighbourhood barber shop, he quoted some men as saying, “there’s shit in these books that the white man don’t want us to know about.” The quest for that knowledge drives Gates on his trip to Timbuktu. Though the great Mali empire which Gates describes, and its university at Timbuktu, were Muslim, he pays minimal attention to the Islamic identity of either. Unlike The Swahili Coast, there are few representations of Islam or ethnic difference as he travels along the River Niger. Even when he encounters modern slavery by Tuareg nomads, who are very likely Muslim, he makes no mention of religion. The first explicit Islamic reference comes in his description of the fourteenth century king Monsamoosa’s hajj , or pilgrimage to Mecca, with 500 slaves, each carrying a staff of pure gold. He makes no criticism of Monsamoosa or his practice of slavery. Gates visits the twelfth century mosque at Djenne, a giant and impressive building made entirely of mud. The Imam of Djenne agrees to speak with Gates in front of the mosque. When Gates asks permission to enter the grand building, he is told that the only way he may enter is by becoming Muslim. His responds, “if I become Muslim, I want four wives.” Though this is clearly meant as a joke, and taken as such by his company, Gates again invokes polygamy as a symbol of Islam. Gates acknowledges the development of literacy in Mali with the arrival of Arabs and Islam, but also displays evidence of much older civilisations. There is validity in his goal of disproving a European claim that civilization only came with the Arabs, but again he focuses on negating Western racism by appropriating “Africa” in toto. When he finally reaches Timbuktu, he finds, as expected, a city centuries in decline from its peak. His guide, Ali Seedie, a Muslim scholar, shows him several of the centuries-old books from his family’s personal collection that remain as a legacy to the great university. Gates concludes the episode, saying, “the mind of the black world locked into the pages of these priceless books. Evidence of a grand civilization, untranslated and unknown.” The final remark again resonates with Orientalist tones. These books certainly testify to the greatness of the old Mali empire, but also to Muslim civilization, which endures to this day, despite the implication that the books are “unknown” because they have not been translated from Arabic. It is important to note however, that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. obtained a grant from the Mellon Foundation to catalogue and translate the books from Timbuktu. In a response to Ali Mazrui’s criticism of Into Africa, Gates argues that “the film series would have been justified, in my opinion, if this accomplishment had been the sole benefit that generated.”(West Africa Review, 2000) Though this claim has validity in regard to this significant benefit, it is still important to assess the harms of the film series. Even though The Road to Timbuktu lacks explicitly malicious representations of Islam, Gates assumes the posture of traditional Western academic scholars in dealing with the “otherness” of Muslim society.

In The Black Kingdoms of the Nile, Gates again encounters the Islamic world, continuing many of the Afrocentric Orientalist themes from the previous episodes. Gates delves into the history of Nile civilisations in an attempt to show the major role that Black pharaohs played in ancient Egypt. This episode presents convincing evidence for the major role of black Africans in ancient civilization and the racism that has prevented Western archaeologists from acknowledging it. However, the ethnographic elements of the travelogue address Islam in predictable ways. Gates explains that the Egyptian construction of the Aswan damn buried much of ancient Nubia under water. He notes that many African- Americans objected to the damn at the time of its construction because they considered it racist. His guide, Esra Dahab, a Nubian, expresses her anger at the loss of the geographic source of Nubian civilization, but she fails to confirm or deny the charge of racism. She takes Gates to a village that was specifically built for the flood refugees, where he notes that “Islamic terrorists” had killed 68 tourists several weeks beforehand. Esra introduces him to a woman who experienced the move when she was a child. Initially, she explains that the benefits of the damn outweigh the costs, and that she has no pain from moving. However, she expresses some nervousness because an Egyptian police officer is standing nearby. After he leaves, she affirms that people were sad when they left the land and that she misses it. Gates suggests that she has been “programmed.” Later, when Gates is in the Sudan, where a proposed damn could wash away more ancient Nubian lands, he makes similar inquiries to Sheikh Ashi, who, with his brother, runs a Qu’ranic school that would face devastation if the damn is built. The man expresses some regret, but again suggests that the damn would bring many benefits to the area. Gates asserts that Sheikh Ashi is also afraid to speak his mind, a questionable psychological assessment considering the actual line of questioning. When Gates enters the Sudan for the first time, he says, “all we ever hear about the Sudan is that it’s in a state of civil war, it has a fundamentalist Islamic government and it hates Americans. So I’m kind of nervous.” In one breath, Gates affirms the existence of the Islamic simulacrum; with the next, he justifies it. Toward the end of the episode, explaining the position of a Nubian politician, he says, “she believes that because the Nubian people are so fiercely independent, they’re a threat to the fundamentalist government.” His portrayal of the Islamic societies of the Nile region as racist and oppressive is consistent with the images of fundamentalism in the Islamic simulacrum.

Afrocentric Orientalism
The concept of Afrocentric Orientalism could only arise amidst the shifting cultural icons of postmodernity. Besides the continual reinforcement of the Islamic simulacrum, Gates’ sympathy towards Christianity throughout the series offers a stunning contrast to his depiction of Muslims and the West African cultures he explores in The Slave Kingdoms. In the United States, where the series aired under a different title, Wonders of the African World, Gates has been attacked repeatedly for his uneven leveling of blame on Africans for the slave trade, with very little attention given to European involvement. While in Zanzibar, Gates expresses disillusionment with the Anglican attempts at atonement for slavery. In his discussions with Canon Garda, a Christian leader in Zanzibar, he only speaks of his inability to forgive the slavers. He refuses to address any of the ethnic identity conflicts embedded in Christianity. In The Holy Land, Gates almost performs a total elision of the Muslim presence in Ethiopia. He states, “after surviving nearly 2,000 years the Christian kingdom was overthrown in the 1974 Marxist revolution. Today, Ethiopia is secular and is a democracy, with almost as many Muslims as Christians.” Though the Muslim presence in Ethiopia dates back fourteen centuries to the time of the prophet Mohammed, when a Christian Ethopian king offered sanctuary to the early Muslims who were persecuted in Mecca, this statement suggests that the arrival of Muslims to the country is relatively recent and insignificant. He also refers to “Muslim invaders” and to Ethiopia being “protected from Islamic neighbours by formidable mountain ranges.” While travelling through the Sudan, Gates comments that “the Nubians were Christians for 1200 years before they became Muslims in the sixteenth century. Some even took part in the Crusades.” The transcription of this statement does not capture Gates’ deepened voice at the grave pronunciation of “Muslims”, or the celebratory way in which he refers to the Crusades. Edward Said exposes the deepest roots of Orientalism as a paranoia stemming from the conflict between European Christianity and Islam. Henry Louis Gates upholds these fundamental elements of Orientalism within an Afrocentric framework.

The paradoxical nature of Gates’ Afrocentric Orientalism stems from the very mission of Into Africa, the reclaiming of African history from the racist framework imposed by European colonialism. Though the series succeeds in reinventing the image of Africa without some of its traditional stereotypes, Gates succumbs to the same illness that afflicted other Africanist movements of the twentieth century. Biodin Jeyifo suggests that Into Africa engages in the “reconfiguration of Senghorian negritude”, explaining,

“.every single claim or assertion that can be made about Africa is premised on the obsessive need to refute the doubts already established by the Western world about those claims and assertions.this was the animating spirit, the motive force of Senghorian Negritude: whatever Africa is, or is not, can be established only with reference to the doubts and phobias about Africa established in the minds of Africans themselves and the rest of the world by Western racism and ethnocentrism.The point of the objections to negritude of course was that in becoming locked into that dialectic of discourse and counter-discourse with Western racism and ethnocentrism, negritude gave too much ground to the West, it allowed Western frames of ideas and discourse to dictate the terms of discussions of the African past and present, and worst of all, sometimes negritude even became no more than an inversion or caricature of Western ideas of what it is to be human or ’civilized.’“ (West Africa Review, 2000)
V.Y. Mudimbe tracks the rupture in discourses of colonialism and domination that attempted to define Africa on its own terms. (Mudimbe, 1988) African scholars who attempted the counter-discourse with the West often found themselves in an uncomfortable intermediate position between Western academic systems and their respective African cultures. The use of Western thought and languages by African scholars still remains a difficult issue for the self-representation of Africa within global contexts. Gates comes from a very traditional Western academic background (Yale, Cambridge, Harvard) and he maintains its general structures with the exception of its generally demeaning depiction of Africa. Gates continually makes comparisons between Africa and Europe through the six episodes of Into Africa, as if the two regions are distinct poles of a radical dichotomy which he intends to equalise. In Getti, he shows that the Swahili possessed toilets which rival those he has seen in Europe. When arriving at the mosque of Djenne, he says, “it looks like something from outer space, but for me, it’s as sublime as the cathedral at Notre- Dame.” The latter statement confirms not only the positioning of Africa and Europe as dichotomous opposites, but also the cultural distance from which Henry Louis Gates views Muslim West Africa. Gates appropriates every culture, person, and artefact that he encounters for his reconstituted vision of Africa within a Eurocentric definition of civilization.

Conclusion
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. allows the anti-Islamic structures of Orientalist academia and postmodern media to rest unchallenged in his documentary of Africa. During his voyage, he often resembles the very European travelling scholars whose legacy he wishes to dispel. He presents Islamic Africa as a monolithic mass with a confused self-identity. He ignores the deep variations and practices of African Muslims and their relationship to a global Islamic civilization. Though Into Africa may help resuscitate the self-image and historical pride of people scattered throughout the African diaspora, it also suggests that Islam stands as a threat to any healthy reconstituted image of Africa or an African future. However, from E.W. Blyden, to Franz Fanon, to Kwame Nkrumah, Islam has always been considered a necessary partner in the development of pan-African unity and liberation. In addition, Islam has played a major role in African-American history, from the Muslim slaves who made up an estimated ten percent of all those who were brutally imported to America, to the steady rise of converts among black Americans in the twentieth century. (Gardell, 1996, p. 32, 214-215) These elisions reduce the potency of Into Africa as a treatise against the Eurocentric positions. Instead, the series adds another marginal discourse to the vilification of Islam, enhancing the power of the postmodern simulacrum to retrofit Western imperialism.

Bibliography
Abdullahi Osman El-Tom, “Drinking the Koran: The Meaning of Koranic Verses in Berti Erasure,” in Peel, J.D.Y. and Stewart, C.C. (eds.), Popular Islam South of the Sahara, Manchester University Press, 1985

Ahmed, Akbar S., Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise, Routledge, London, 1992

Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994

Gardell, Mattias, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, Duke University Press, Durham, 1996

Harrow, Kenneth W. (eds.) Faces of Islam in African Literature, James Currey Ltd., London, 1991

Lewis, Bernard, “The Crows of the Arabs,” in Gates Jr., Henry Louis (ed.), “Race,” Writing, and Difference, University of Chicago Press, London, 1986

Mudimbe, V.Y., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, James Currey, London, 1988

Said, Edward W., Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Penguin Books, London, 1978.

_________ Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981

Trimingham, J. Spencer, The Influence of Islam Upon Africa, Longmans, Green, and Co Ltd, London 1968

Filmography
Into Africa with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., BBC, 1999

Webography
Official BBC Into Africa website, including transcripts of the six episodes. www.bbc.co.uk/education/history/africa/africa.shtml

Official PBS Wonders of the African World website. www.pbs.org/wonders

West Africa Review, 1:2, January, 2000 Special Issue Dedicated to Wonders of the African World. www.westafricareview.com/war/vol1.2/1.2war.htm

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© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center

Citation Format

Maguire, Thomas E.R. (2000). The Islamic Simulacrum in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Into Africa. West Africa Review: 1 , 2. [iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.2.25]

** Table of Contents

0.1. The Islamic Simulacrum
0.2. Into Africa
0.3. Afrocentric Orientalism
0.4. Conclusion
1. Bibliography
1.1. Filmography
1.2. Webography

Photography--Jean Baudrillard

2005-04-14T19:52:00.000-07:00

Translated by Francois Debrix

The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. It is a paradox that the lack of objectivity of the world is disclosed by the photographic lens (objectif).2 Analysis and reproduction (ressemblance) are of no help in solving this problem. The technique of photography takes us beyond the replica into the domain of the trompe l'oeil. Through its unrealistic play of visual techniques, its slicing of reality, its immobility, its silence, and its phenomenological reduction of movements, photography affirms itself as both the purest and the most artificial exposition of the image.

At the same time, photography transforms the very notion of technique. Technique becomes an opportunity for a double play: it amplifies the concept of illusion and the visual forms. A complicity between the technical device and the world is established. The power of objects and of "objective" techniques converge. The photographic act consists of entering this space of intimate complicity, not to master it, but to play along with it and to demonstrate that nothing has been decided yet (rendre evidente l'idee que les jeux ne sont pas faits). "What cannot be said must be kept silent." But what cannot be said can also be kept silent through a display of images.

The idea is to resist noise, speech, rumors by mobilizing photography's silence; to resist movements, flows, and speed by using its immobility; to resist the explosion of communication and information by brandishing its secrecy; and to resist the moral imperative of meaning by deploying its absence of signification. What above all must be challenged is the automatic overflow of images, their endless succession, which obliterates not only the mark of photography (le trait), the poignant detail of the object (its punctum), but also the very moment of the photo, immediately passed, irreversible, hence always nostalgic. The instantaneity of photography is not to be confused with the simultaneity of real time. The flow of pictures produced and erased in real time is indifferent to the third dimension of the photographic moment. Visual flows only know change. The image is no longer given the time to become an image. To be an image, there has to be a moment of becoming which can only happen when the rowdy proceedings of the world are suspended and dismissed for good. The idea, then, is to replace the triumphant epiphany of meaning with a silent apophany of objects and their appearances.

Against meaning and its aesthetic, the subversive function of the image is to discover literality in the object (the photographic image, itself an expression of literality, becomes the magical operator of reality's disappearance). In a sense, the photographic image materially translates the absence of reality which "is so obvious and so easily accepted because we already have the feeling that nothing is real" (Borges). Such a phenomenology of reality's absence is usually impossible to achieve. Classically, the subject outshines the object. The subject is an excessively blinding source of light. Thus, the literal function of the image has to be ignored to the benefit of ideology, aesthetics, politics, and of the need to make connections with other images. Most images speak, tell stories; their noise cannot be turned down. They obliterate the silent signification of their objects. We must get rid of everything that interferes with and covers up the manifestation of silent evidence. Photography helps us filter the impact of the subject. It facilitates the deployment of the objects's own magic (black or otherwise).

Photography also enables a technical perfection of the gaze (through the lens) which can protect the object from aesthetic transfiguration. The photographic gaze has a sort of nonchalance which nonintrusively captures the apparition of objects. It does not seek to probe or analyze reality. Instead, the photographic gaze is "literally" applied on the surface of things to illustrate their apparition as fragments. It is a very brief revelation, immediately followed by the disappearance of the objects.

But no matter which photographic technique is used, there is always one thing, and one thing only, that remains: the light. Photo-graphy: The writing of light. The light of photography remains proper to the image. Photographic light is not "realistic" or "natural." It is not artificial either. Rather, this light is the very imagination of the image, its own thought. It does not emanate from one single source, but from two different, dual ones: the object and the gaze. "The image stands at the junction of a light which comes from the object and another which comes from the gaze" (Plato).

This is exactly the kind of light we find in Edward Hopper's work. His light is raw, white, ocean-like, reminiscent of sea shores. Yet, at the same time, it is unreal, emptied out, without atmosphere, as if it came from another shore (venue d'un autre littoral). It is an irradiating light which preserves the power of black and white contrasts, even when colors are used. The characters, their faces, the landscapes are projected into a light that is not theirs. They are violently illuminated from outside, like strange objects, and by a light which announces the imminence of an unexpected event. They are isolated in an aura which is both extremely fluid and distinctly cruel. It is an absolute light, literally photographic, which demands that one does not look at it but, instead, that one closes one's eyes on the internal night it contains. There is in Hopper's work a luminous intuition similar to that found in Vermeer's painting. But the secret of Vermeer's light is its intimacy whereas, in Hopper, the light reveals a ruthless exteriority, a brilliant materiality of objects and of their immediate fulfillment, a revelation through emptiness.

This raw phenomenology of the photographic image is a bit like negative theology. It is "apophatic," as we used to call the practice of proving God's existence by focusing on what he wasn't rather than on what he was. The same thing happens with our knowledge of the world and its objects. The idea is to reveal such a knowledge in its emptiness, by default (en creux) rather than in an open confrontation (in any case impossible). In photography, it is the writing of light which serves as the medium for this elision of meaning and this quasi-experimental revelation (in theoretical works, it is language which functions as the thought's symbolic filter).

In addition to such an apophatic approach to things (through their emptiness), photography is also a drama, a dramatic move to action (passage a l'acte), which is a way of seizing the world by "acting it out."3 Photography exorcizes the world through the instantaneous fiction of its representation (not by its representation directly; representation is always a play with reality). The photographic image is not a representation; it is a fiction. Through photography, it is perhaps the world itself that starts to act (qui passe a l'acte) and imposes its fiction. Photography brings the world into action (acts out the world, is the world's act) and the world steps into the photographic act (acts out photography, is photography's act).4 This creates a material complicity between us and the world since the world is never anything more than a continuous move to action (a continuous acting out).

In photography, we see nothing. Only the lens "sees" things. But the lens is hidden. It is not the Other 5 which catches the photographer's eye, but rather what's left of the Other when the photographer is absent (quand lui n'est pas la). We are never in the real presence of the object. Between reality and its image, there is an impossible exchange. At best, one finds a figurative correlation between reality and the image. "Pure" reality -- if there can be such a thing -- is a question without an answer. Photography also questions "pure reality." It asks questions to the Other. But it does not expect an answer. Thus, in his short-story "The Adventure of a Photographer,"6 Italo Calvino writes: "To catch Bice in the street when she didn't not know he was watching her, to keep her in the range of hidden lenses, to photograph her not only without letting himself be seen but without seeing her, to surprise her as if she was in the absence of his gaze, of any gaze...It was an invisible Bice that he wanted to possess, a Bice absolutely alone, a Bice whose presence presupposed the absence of him and everyone else."7 Later, Calvino's photographer only takes pictures of the studio walls by which she once stood. But Bice has completely disappeared. And the photographer too has disappeared. We always speak in terms of the disappearance of the object in photography. It once was; it no longer is. There is indeed a symbolic murder that is part of the photographic act. But it is not simply the murder of the object. On the other side of the lens, the subject too is made to disappear. Each snapshot simultaneously ends the real presence of the object and the presence of the subject. In this act of reciprocal disappearance, we also find a transfusion between object and subject. It is not always a successful transfusion. To succeed, one condition must be met. The Other -- the object -- must survive this disappearance to create a "poetic situation of transfer" or a "transfer of poetic situation." In such a fatal reciprocity, one perhaps finds the beginning of a solution to the problem of society's so-called "lack of communicability." We may find an answer to the fact that people and things tend to no longer mean anything to each other. This is an anxious situation that we generally try to conjure away by forcing more signification.

But there are only a few images that can escape this desire of forced signification. There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea, whatever that idea might be (but, in particular, the ideas of information and testimony are salient). A moral anthropology has already intervened. The idea of man has already interfered. This is why contemporary photography (and not only photo-journalism) is used to take pictures of "real victims," "real dead people," and "real destitutes" who are thus abandoned to documentary evidence and imaginary compassion.8 Most contemporary photos only reflect the "objective" misery of the human condition. One can no longer find a primitive tribe without the necessary presence of some anthropologist. Similarly, one can no longer find a homeless individual surrounded by garbage without the necessary presence of some photographer who will have to "immortalize" this scene on film. In fact, misery and violence affect us far less when they are readily signified and openly made visible. This is the principle of imaginary experience (la loi de l'imaginaire). The image must touch us directly, impose on us its peculiar illusion, speak to us with its original language in order for us to be affected by its content. To operate a transfer of affect into reality, there has to be a definite (resolu) counter-transfer of the image.

We deplore the disappearance of the real under the weight of too many images. But let's not forget that the image disappears too because of reality. In fact, the real is far less often sacrificed than the image. The image is robbed of its originality and given away to shameful acts of complicity. Instead of lamenting the relinquishing of the real to superficial images, one would do well to challenge the surrender of the image to the real. The power of the image can only be restored by liberating the image from reality. By giving back to the image its specificity (its "stupidity" according to Rosset),9 the real itself can rediscover its true image.

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example. It prefers to take pictures not of what is but of what should not be from a moral or humanitarian perspective. Meanwhile, it still makes good aesthetic, commercial and clearly immoral use of everyday misery. These photos are not the witness of reality. They are the witness of the total denial of the image from now on designed to represent what refuses to be seen. The image is turned into the accomplice of those who choose to rape the real (viol du reel). The desperate search for the image often gives rise to an unfortunate result. Instead of freeing the real from its reality principle, it locks up the real inside this principle. What we are left with is a constant infusion of "realist" images to which only "retro-images" respond. Every time we are being photographed, we spontaneously take a mental position on the photographer's lens just as his lens takes a position on us. Even the most savage of tribesmen has learned how to spontaneously strike a pose. Everybody knows how to strike a pose within a vast field of imaginary reconciliation.

But the photographic event resides in the confrontation between the object and the lens (l'objectif), and in the violence that this confrontation provokes. The photographic act is a duel. It is a dare launched at the object and a dare of the object in return. Everything that ignores this confrontation is left to find refuge in the creation of new photographic techniques or in photography's aesthetics. These are easier solutions.

One may dream of a heroic age of photography when it still was a black box (a camera obscura) and not the transparent and interactive space that it has become. Remember those 1940s farmers from Arkansas whom Mike Disfarmer shot. They were all humble, conscientiously and ceremonially standing in front of the camera. The camera did not try to understand them or even catch them by surprise. There was no desire to capture what's "natural" about them or "what they look like as photographed."10 They are what they are. They do not smile. They do not complain. The image does not complain. They are, so to speak, caught in their simplest attire (dans leur plus simple appareil), for a fleeting moment, that of photography. They are absent from their lives and their miseries. They are elevated from their miseries to the tragic, impersonal figuration of their destiny. The image is revealed for what it is: it exalts what it sees as pure evidence, without interference, consensus, and adornment. It reveals what is neither moral nor "objective," but instead remains unintelligible about us. It exposes what is not up to reality but is, rather, reality's evil share (malin genie) (whether it is a fortunate one or not). It displays what is inhuman in us and does not signify.

In any case, the object is never anything more than an imaginary line. The world is an object that is both imminent and ungraspable. How far is the world? How does one obtain a clearer focus point? Is photography a mirror which briefly captures this imaginary line of the world? Or is it man who, blinded by the enlarged reflection of his own consciousness, falsifies visual perspectives and blurs the accuracy of the world? Is it like the rearview mirrors of American cars which distort visual perspectives but give you a nice warning
- -"objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear"? 11 But, in fact, aren't these objects farther than they appear? Does the photographic image bring us closer to a so-called "real world" which is in fact infinitely distant? Or does this image keep the world at a distance by creating an artificial depth perception which protects us from the imminent presence of the objects and from their virtual danger?

What is at stake (at play, en jeu) is the place of reality, the question of its degree. It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image. This puts into question our simplistic explanations about the birth of technology and the advent of the modern world. It is perhaps not technologies and media which have caused our now famous disappearance of reality. On the contrary, it is probable that all our technologies (fatal offsprings that they are) arise from the gradual extinction of reality.

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Notes
1. A Translation of Jean Baudrillard, "La Photographie ou l'Ecriture de la Lumiere: Litteralite de l'Image," in L'Echange Impossible (The Impossible Exchange). Paris: Galilee, 1999: pp. 175-184.
2. There is here a play on the French word "objectif." "Objectif" means objective (adj.) and visual lens (subs.) at the same time.
3. This term is in English in the original French version.
4. An unsatisfactory translation of "la photo 'passe a l'acte du monde' et le monde 'passe a l'acte photographique'."
5. Capitalized by Baudrillard in the French text.
6. "L'Aventure d'un photographe," in Italo Calvino, Aventures [Adventures]. Paris: Le Seuil, 1990. Calvino's Adventures (I Racconti in Italian) have been published in several different books in English. For example, "The Adventure of a Photographer" was published as part of Calvino's novel Difficult Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984), pp. 220-235.
7. Translation borrowed from Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves, trans. W. Weaver, p. 233.
8. I use the term "real" (in quotation marks) in front of victims, dead people and destitute to render Baudrillard's term "en tant que tels" (which literally means "as such").
9. Possibly Clement Rosset, author of La Realite et Son Double (Reality and Its Double), Paris: Gallimard, 1996; and of Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
10. In English in the French text.
11. In English in the French text.

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Francois Debrix is a professor in International Relations at Florida International University, Miami, Florida. This article was translated in Miami, March 31, 2000.

Pop Playground J. Lo

2005-04-14T19:33:00.000-07:00

According to theorist Jean Baudrillard, all culture is based upon communication. This communication is based on the exchange of signs and symbols, and traditionally the symbolic world and the real world have been kept separate. In a mass communication culture, this is no longer the case. Electronic media has destroyed the distinctions between the symbolic and the real, creating what Baudrillard calls “hyperreality.” In hyperreality, signs become detached from their referents – representations no longer have any relationship to what they purport to represent. Signs only signify other signs, and meaning (as we traditionally think of it) is lost.

I like to think that in between postmodern dissections of American global policy decisions, Baudrillard follows the career of one of America’s most successful celebrities (and thus, a master of the hyperreality generator), Jennifer Lopez. Ms. Lopez (the only safe title due to intermittent marriages) has managed to fuse all parts of her celebrity into one brand: J. Lo. All signs – J. Lo the actress, J. Lo the singer, J. Lo the model – serve one purpose: to enhance the status of J. Lo. So that J. Lo star in more films, make more albums, and make the cover of more magazines. There is no deeper goal than increased visibility, which is a value that sets postmodern social reality apart from social realities of the past. Visibility is worth, and worth is visibility: how important can you be if you aren’t on TV? Cause and effect break down. Hyperreality personified. J. Lo.

I’ll admit I got a bit abstract fairly quickly. Don’t hold it against me (you should see the material I’m working from). If we go step by step in examining the wonders of J. Lo, things should get a little more concrete.

First, where did this fame come from? Jennifer’s first starring role was in Selena, the slain Tejano singer. Selena’s posthumously released album reached the top of the charts (we’ll suspend morbid social commentary on this for now). The movie appeals to a demographic rarely catered to by media bigwigs. Success! Jennifer becomes famous by adopting the persona of someone already famous. A famous singer. Cut to music career.

Jennifer can’t sing. She’s not terrible, but she isn’t much better than above average. However, she’s moderately famous, especially in key niche demographics in the Hispanic community, people that became fans through Selena. Jennifer can dance. And she is very, shall we say, presentable. This is more than enough for a successful pop album. Computers can wrench every passable note out of Jennifer’s throat through a myriad of compressions, filters, edits, and now and then a healthy slathering of vocoder. Everything works! Instant platinum success! Jennifer is big now. The Latin angle was hot that year. Now Jennifer is J. Lo, a name given to her by fans.

A film career based only on fame and a music career based on a film role. But the layers of hyperreality have only just begun. Soon, Jennifer herself becomes fodder for the advancement of J. Lo. High-profile relationship with Puff Daddy. Scandalous Grammy dress. High profile breakup with Puff Daddy. More headlines, more fame. More movies, of continually less edgy nature. The Cell, Angel Eyes, the current Maid in Manhattan -- all star vehicles in the traditional sense of the word, movies that ride a celebrity’s fame and thereby enhance it (The Cell melded this with state-of-the-art special effects for an awkward attempt at wider appeal). These movies are inconceivable without J. Lo; paradoxically, J. Lo’s characters are such blank templates that any actor could fill the role. J. Lo’s emotions rarely veer far from winningly sensitive and obsequiously nurturing. Of course, the roles have no real relationship to the films (which are barely films at all). The only relationship they have is as PR to J. Lo. J. Lo, the public presence. Not a real person. A hyperreal person.

Jennifer seems to have sensed something, and maybe her fans do too. In her subsequent albums, she maintains one thing again and again: she’s real. The title of her most successful song: “I’m Real” (the remix, natch). What does it mean for J. Lo to be real?

You like the way I dress
The way I wear my hair
Show me off to all your friends
Baby, I don't care
Just as long as you tell them who I am
Tell them I'm the one that made you give a damn
Don't ask where I've been
Or what I'm gonna do
Just know that I'm here with you
Don't try to understand
Baby, there's no mystery
‘Cause you know how I am

I’m real.

J. Lo seems to comment on her own hyperreal career right in the lyrics. She doesn’t care how she’s shown, as long as she’s sufficiently branded. Then she feints, exhorting the listener (fan, consumer, J. Lo buyer) to focus, not on the past or the future, but on the present. Does she ever say what it means to be real? Of course not. It’s a foregone conclusion. You know how she is. Real. In a really real way. There’s no mystery. Her newest single even states that to her “it’s like breathing.” Staying real. She does it naturally, all the time.

Clearly, “I’m real” means quite the opposite of what it is supposed to mean. It should affirm that J. Lo has a firm basis in Jennifer Lopez. But we know this is not the case. Not just because Baudrillard told us there is no real. It’s because J. Lo is the only thing that matters now. Not Jennifer. Not Jenny From the Block. When she says, “I’m real” we have no choice to conclude the opposite. Here we are again. Signs without reference. Cause and effect breaking down.

What should we conclude from this strange, paradoxical tone in J. Lo’s music? An identity crisis perhaps (which may explain this rash of marriages)? Whatever the reason, it strikes an odd note in a pop landscape that openly flaunts its lack of traditional notions of authenticity (O-Town’s career would make for another interesting examination in pop hyperreality). Perhaps Baudrillard can take a minute out of his busy day to write some lyrics that would fit J. Lo a little better. “I’m Hyperreal” anybody?

By: Gavin Mueller
2002-12-16

The Hyppereal Spectacle-Professor Ron Burnett

2005-04-14T19:16:00.000-07:00

English 378D ()

Some thirty years after Marshall McLuhan's prophetic announcement of the coming global village, that notion, which once seemed the exclusive domain of future generations, is now reality. Technology, even within the past decade, has advanced by seemingly exponential rates, and what was once deemed incredible is now the mundane and commonplace. Now, mass society across the world is irrevocably linked. One can only imagine the sense of awe and excitement expressed by those who witnessed the unveiling of television at the World's Fair in 1932. Whereas news of wars in distant foreign lands once could only be read about second-hand in the newspaper, they are now broadcast across the world so that anyone watching the screen can be instantly transported to the front lines as the action unfolds. Essentially, it is a vicarious experience, for the viewer is nowhere near the real action but rather in the comfort of home. To this writer, it seems as if the whole point of virtual reality is to enable users to experience activities in which they do not ordinarily participate. That is to say that these experiences, which are nothing more than simulations, are to the virtual reality user as enjoyable and satisfying as the real thing. VR users accept the simulated for the real. Where can the line between the real and the simulated be drawn, then, if it can be drawn at all? Are the images the media projects to us, a society of spectators as Debord would say, nothing more than simulations of the real that we consciously accept? In the mass desire to conform to the status quo, is it possible that society accepts the simulation for the real because the status quo dictates it? It is my intention to investigate, utilising the theories of Guy Debord and his contemporary Jean Baudrillard, the possibility that society has become nothing less than a spectacle based society, and that these spectacles, far from being true pictures of reality, are nothing more than the melding together of the real and the simulated into a new vision of reality, the hyperreal. In essence, the masses have become a society of spectators, totally dependent on the images projected to them as referents of the world in which they live. Not unlike the ancient Roman bread and circuses, society today depends on the spectacle for a variety of reasons. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord states: The whole life of these societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation (p.12). Take, as an example, the recent media circus surrounding the O.J. Simpson trial. The millions who tuned in every day did so for a variety of reasons, but the inescapable fact is that they all intently watched nothing more than a spectacle, knowing full well that it was exactly that. The images of the trial, projected world-wide, depicted the real life trial of an accused murderer. But by virtue of the fact that someone in New York could watch the precedings as they were happening live means that the trial could be nothing but a spectacle, with the viewers forming an integral part in the spectacle itself. Debord states that the spectacle appears at once to be society itself, a part of society, and as a means of unifying society (p.12). Americans, from Maine to Hawaii, all see the same images, courtesy of national broadcasting, and that image serves to unite them. All of society's attentions, the collective consciousness, is centered within the spectacle itself. Because all of society is concentrated on the spectacle, society is itself related to both the spectacle and all other spectators, for they are projected the same images. It follows, by deduction, that the spectacle is not limited to just the images projected, but rather the whole effect, the social relationship between spectators which the images involved mediate. The true spectacle of the Simpson trial was not the trial itself, but rather the total effect it had on the masses, the spectators involved; specifically, the polarization of Caucasians and African Americans over the trial was the essential property of the spectacle. It follows that the spectacle, although it unites in its scope, can also prompt division; in this case along racial lines. Thus described, the spectacle is nothing but the relationship that spectators have to any given image. The spectacle serves a role in society; Debord states: Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not something added to the real world- not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society's real unreality. In all its specific manifestations- news or propa- ganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment- the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life. It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made choice. In form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system. It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification, for it governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself. (Debord, p.13) The spectacle, being the heart of the society that at the same time produces it and consumes it, serves to represent what is nothing else save the status quo. The spectators look to the spectacle itself as a reference point for their own social practices. Social practice, which the spectacle's autonomy challenges, is also the real totality to which the spectacle is subordinate. So deep is the rift in this totality, however, that the spectacle is able to emerge as its apparent goal (Debord, p.13). So it seems, then, that by virtue of the fact that the masses are exposed to the spectacle and depend on it for their own determinations of the status quo, the spectacle does not serve in this respect to project to the masses the aims of some higher power (government or media), but rather the spectacle itself becomes the goal of the masses. Thus said, it is the spectacle and nothing else which the masses depend on. However, if the what the spectacle presents is not reality, but rather the reality as propagated by the interactive spectacle, then the masses will believe that the prevailing mode of life as presented by this false spectacle is what they should believe. For example, people buy Mercedes cars because of the spectacle surrounding the name Mercedes. They believe that it is to their advantage to own a car that bears the name of the marque; they do so because of the images projected to them that the car is luxurious, it is safe, etc. The real reason people buy Mercedes cars is that they themselves desire to become part of the spectacle when they drive off the dealer's lot. If the spectacle surrounding Mercedes cars suddenly turned to one of ill repute, then nobody would buy a Mercedes. According to Debord, it is impossible to place the spectacle in abstract opposition to the real, that is to say concrete social activity, because the difference between the two, reality and image, is unapparent . The spectacle, although it turns reality on its head, as Debord states, is a real product of real social activity (Debord, p.14). In the same way, lived reality is affected by the spectacle's 'mechanisms of contemplation'; it absorbs the spectacle's form and in turn, supports it, lending the spectacle credence in the eyes of the spectator. It follows that each side, the spectacle and the real, has its own share of objective reality (Debord, p.14). Concepts that may begin in the real meld into the spectacle and vice versa. As a result, reality 'erupts' within the spectacle, and subsequently, the spectacle is accepted as the real. The sum total of this process, Debord posits, is the reciprocal alienation that is the base element of society as it currently exists (Debord, p.14). In such a world, truth becomes the embodiment of falsehood. So it seems then, following Debord's reasoning, that the spectacle serves to bring together the spectrum of phenomena; the contrasts and diversities of these phenomena are the appearances of the spectacle. Understood in its own terms, the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance (Debord, p.14). However, a critique examining the spectacle's essential character must expose the spectacle for what it is - a visible negation of life by virtue of the fact that the spectacle has, as Debord states, "invented a visual form for itself" (Debord, p.14). To try to describe the spectacle would require using the methodology of it; in short, the methodology of the society that both gives life to the spectacle and feeds from it. Debord asserts that in one sense, the spectacle expresses the aims of one particular economic and social formation; i.e., the formation's agenda is transmitted by the spectacle (Debord, p.15). This in turn, it can be argued, develops into first the goals of the society, and secondly, that society's status quo. The spectacle is, in a sense, on a pedestal, out of reach where it cannot be harmed or disputed by the masses. Its message is “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear” (Debord, p.15). If something bad happens, it will be corrected, and then everything will be all right; sort of a soothing voice of placation. Debord contends that the attitude the spectacle demands of society is the same passive acceptance that established it in the first place, by virtue of its apparent indisputability . This effect can only be the result of the spectacle's monopoly over “the realm of appearances” (Debord, p.15). The spectacle's means and its ends are the same; it is self-perpetuating by design. Modern industrial society, Debord states, has the seemingly spectacular character that it does because of the fundamental relationship it has with the spectacle that first came with it and then came to define it. If the spectacle is the perfect vehicle for the projection of images to the masses, then there can be no end, for it is self development and perpetuation on which the spectacle is dependent. The spectacle, simply put, cannot end. The only product of this process is the continued propagation of the spectacle. The spectacle, in a way, is the shiny box in which reality comes wrapped, but society never actually unwraps the box, preferring to look at the box with the spectacular wrapping instead of removing the wrapping and coming to terms with the reality inside. They do so because they have grown accustomed to the notion that the box is better than what is inside. The status quo, it can be construed, dictates this acceptance. Touching on Baudrillard's notion of the simulation, which I will delve into later in this discussion, Debord states: "For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings - tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behaviour;" (Debord, p.17). Since it is part and parcel of the spectacle to create a world that is not directly perceptible, it is only inevitable that the spectacle elevates the sense of sight to the state of importance once occupied by touch, when the real experience was the true aim. Sight is at one time both the most abstract of the senses and also the most easily deceived. In a world of projections, sight is the method by which the masses perceive the apparent reality. However, it is impossible to recognize the spectacle for what it essentially is, if Debord's logic is to be accepted, for he defines the spectacle as being immune from human activity; hence, it cannot be reviewed or examined, for all activity is encompassed by and absorbed into the spectacle. "Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule;" (Debord, p.17). At this point in his argument, Debord asserts the claim that the spectacle has inherited all of the weaknesses of Western Philosophy, which he reduces to an attempt to understand human activity by means of categories of vision. Due to these inherited weaknesses, the spectacle relies on the same technical rationality as philosophy, but instead of realizing philosophical problems, the all absorbing spectacle twists reality on its head and instead philosophises reality, turning the material life of everyone into a 'universe of speculation'(Debord, p.17). It would also follow that notions of a subjective vision of truth, from Keirkegaard and other Existentialists, stems from this claim. It stands to reason that if the whole of the masses were caught up in the spectacle from the inside, all judging their surroundings subjectively, the result, as Debord concludes, is nothing but speculative world. Taking into account each person's subjective opinions of the spectacle, it follows that the end result of this process would be alienation from what was reality to the point were there is only the spectacle. "Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle,"(Debord p.20). Within the spectacle, however, there emerges a new reality, a concept that lies in direct comparison with Baudrillard's notion of the hyperreal. Within the spectacle, Debord states, is the specialization of power. All shifts in the balance of power occur within the spectacle, for all events occur within the scope of the spectacle: If the spectacle-understood in the limited sense of those mass media that are its most stultifying superficial mani- festation - seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle's inner dynamics. (Debord, p.19) Because the spectacle, understood in Debord's description, is the perfect representation of the real, all the spectators, though separated from each other and alienated from reality, are united in the way that they each have a one-way relationship to the spectacle, that very entity which perpetuates their isolation. "The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites only in its separateness," (Debord,p.22). Those in the spectacle perceive each other through the spectacle, that is to say, they depend on the spectacle for everything because everything is contained within the spectacle. The spectacle is the locus of all activity, all that once might have been outside the spectacle is destined to become part of the spectacle. Woody Allen's film Zelig is a treatment of the spectacle. Zelig, a man who adopts the identity of the company he keeps because he has no identity of his own, is suddenly caught up in a spectacle, the spectacle of his own existence. The entire nation is enthralled by his unique 'condition'; songs are written about him, dance crazes are launched, and any action taken by Zelig is scrutinized by the spectator. Zelig cannot escape the public eye for he is part of the spectacle, although he does not wish to be part of it. He has no choice. It is not the individual's actions that perpetuate their place within the spectacle, but rather how those actions are perceived by the masses. Zelig is at first a scientific curiosity, a source of amazement for the masses, and then the same society which previously hung on his every move renders him an outcast. The individual, it seems, has no control over the spectacle. In a sense, Zelig is caught up in the gears of the public machine, unable to free himself; only society can decide when to move on to the next attraction. Zelig, in the course of the movie, is at first a freak, then an outcast, and then, the very society which condemned him labels him a hero. Returning to the earlier example of the Simpson trial, it must be remembered that at one time O.J. was a national football hero, the children of the very same nation that would later label him a murderer once emulated him. Every kid tossing a football around the yard wanted to be like O.J.. Just like Zelig, Simpson rose to glory and then fell in the eyes of the spectator. Whether Simpson will ultimately be emancipated from the nation's contempt remains to be seen; the undeniable fact is that the society of the spectacle decides when to move on to the next attraction. Debord's argument, in which nothing short of a new notion of reality is advanced, treads the same territory as Jean Baudrillard's concept of the hyperreal, a place where the real and the simulated merge into what some would call the future. In Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard states: "In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials," (p.167). Whereas the media might once have been a mirror in which society caught brief glimpses of itself, it is now, as Baudriallrd posits, not so much a reflection of the masses but rather a projection that the masses interpret as a reflection. He states: No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic minaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units-and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imagi- nary. it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combin- atory models in hyperspace without an atmosphere. (Baudrillard, p.167) It seems then, that what once were two distinct entities, the real and the simulated, have, as Baudrillard contends, fused into a new entity, the hyperreal. This idea seems similar to Debord's notion that the real has fused into the spectacle. Baudrillard's main intention is that the real has fused with the simulated, producing, what I feel can only be termed a spectacle. To completely grasp how the simulated can be taken for the real, one might look to the material world. One might say that a real diamond and a simulated diamond, that is to say an artificial man made one, are not the same thing. Resisting the temptation to say that the former is a diamond and the latter is not, the logical conclusion is that they are both diamonds. Although one was dug up from the ground and the other manufactured in a laboratory, the fact is that both are carbon based, have the same chemical structure,etc. The two are one and the same, for the simulation, in essence, has all the properties of the real. Even a diamond expert would not be able to tell which is which. In support, Baudrillard offers this comment: It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself. Never again will the real have to be produced. (Baudrillard, p.167) In order to simulate it is necessary for the simulation to have all the essential properties of the real. Someone who is pretending to be ill can lie in bed all day long and feign sickness. By virtue of the fact that the simulator displays symptoms of illness, a doctor would conclude that the patient was really sick. In the same way, a simulation of an event is real in the sense that it has all the properties of the the real event, just like the simulated diamond discussed previously. Take for example, the Persian Gulf War. While there were actual offensives against the Iraqi army, and real, live forces were fighting, everyone in the world, including President Bush, was watching the events unfold on CNN. In effect, people were not watching the real war, but rather something that did in fact have all the essential properties of the real action; hence, everyone was watching a simulation of the war. According to Baudrillard, the mass media can merely do nothing but simulate, for it is logically impossible for someone sitting in their living room in Los Angeles to be really experiencing a military offensive in Kuwait. Yet, everyone watching CNN during the days of the conflict will tell you that they really saw the war on TV. It follows that what they saw was not the real war, but a simulation of it that they all took as the real. The same goes for the Simpson trial. Of the millions across the world who eagerly watched the proceedings (again, on CNN), only those who were physically in the courtroom really experienced what went on. Everyone else was watching a simulation. The fact that cameras were allowed in the courtroom meant that the trial could be experienced in a vicarious manner. Why be someplace in physical reality when you can see exactly the same thing on your widescreen? Obviously, every media depiction of past events can be nothing but simulation, for the events are in the past, in a place where they can not be considered real. It is precisely a simulation of these past events which the masses see, all the time inferring from the simulation that 'this is what really happened'. The media, in almost all facets, if Baudrillard's concept is to be accepted, does not serve to represent the real. It can only simulate; by reducing the real to its elemental signs, it can reproduce. Baudrillard states: So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent. Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelopes the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum. (Baudrillard, p.170) It follows, from this statement, that Baudrillard envision the simulation as being totally self contained. There is no need to utilize referents from the real world because these referents are incorporated into the simulation. This concept of self containment and self perpetuation runs parallel to Debord's self contained spectacle. Baudrillard states that there are four successive phases of the simulated image; these phases, in turn, can be applied to establishment of the hyperreal society. The first phase is that a simulation is the reflection of a basic reality, but secondly, the simulation masks and perverts the basic reality. Thirdly, not only can the simulation mask a reality, it can also mask the absence of a basic reality. Finally, the simulation bears no relation to any reality that may exist; the simulation is its own pure simulacrum, that is to say that the simulation exists within its own defined space. Not only is the simulation separate from reality, it appears to be its own reality (Baudrillard, p.170). Imagine if you will, a sofa that has a few cigarette burns on one side of it. Now take a sheet and cover the sofa. This cover is the simulation, for the sofa with the sheet on it is still a sofa, but it is impossible to determine where the cigarette burns are. This is how the simulation works on reality. It covers up the absences and imperfections of the basic reality and makes things look as they should. Society, as Baudrillard argues, is content to look at the sofa with the cover on it and accept the masked sofa as the real sofa. Baudrillard cites Disneyland as the perfect model of this blurring of the lines between real and simulation. Disneyland is itself a hyperreal, a real place in which people immerse themselves in the simulated and the imaginary. There are no distinctions in Disneyland, as soon as you walk in the front gates you are surrounded by images of talking animals endowed with human characteristics. In the Disney world, so to speak, the total effect attained is the blending together of the real and the simulated to the point where everything in the park is taken as the real, although the place is nothing but a hyperreal. The masses, however, walk around the park with their families believing that they are experiencing real sensations, stimuli, etc. These real sensations are triggered by simulated entities. The public domain has, as Baudrillard states, evolved into the hyperreal: A self perpetuating zone in which reality is lost, for the simulation presents a better projection of reality than reality itself could. Understood in this manner, the result is a Mobius strip. Reality is on one side, simulation on the other, but where one ends and the other begins is impossible to determine. The whole Mobius strip taken together is the new reality in which society exists, the hyperreality. All events, no matter which place they may have originated from, are automatically integrated into the hyperreal, which, as he argues, is what society looks at anyway. It follows that society then exists within this hyperreality, and the hyperreality is taken as the apparent reality, that is to say the state of affairs in which society exists. Relevant to the discussion of what could possible be termed the spectacular hyperreality, is the release of the world's first completely digitally rendered motion picture, The Toy Story. All of the work in making this movie was done on computer. It could be said that it is also the first simulated movie, for there is nothing real about the film. The computer generated characters exist within a computer generated world, hence the whole movie is a simulation. The simulation becomes hyperreality when real, live people enter the theater and watch the projected images. The transformation into the hyperreal is completed when they leave the theater and later recount to their friends what happened in the movie, believing that what they saw on the screen really happened. Although the viewer might be aware that the movie was, in essence, a simulation, by virtue of the fact that they physically saw it on the big screen makes them the key ingredient to the dominance of the hyperreal. In conclusion, it might be said that both Debord and Baudrillard are concerned with the transformation of society into a new entity. While Debord argues that we continually exist in a society dominated by the spectacle, incorporating Baudrillard's notion of the hyperreal it could be said that the spectacles society both gives life to and gains life from, have evolved into hyperreal spectacles, by virtue of the fact that the real has been displaced and lost irretrievably in the past. Works Cited Allen, Woody. Zelig. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. 1995 Baudrillard,Jean. Simulacra and Simulations: The Selected Writings of Jean Baudrillard. Ed. Mark Poster. New York: Polity Press, 1988. 166-85.

This page maintained by Dr. Ron Burnett, (Eye-image by Maija Burnett) December 21, 1996)

Copyright © 1996, Ron Burnett, Maija Burnett. All rights reserved.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real-Slavoj Zizek

2005-04-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

Alain Badiou identified as the key feature of the XXth century the "passion of the Real /la passion du reel/"1: in contrast to the XIXth century of the utopian or "scientific" projects and ideals, plans about the future, the XXth century aimed at delivering the thing itself, at directly realizing the longer-for New Order. The ultimate and defining experience of the XXth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to the everyday social reality - the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality. Already in the trenches of the World War I, Carl Schmitt was celebrating the face to face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression, from the Lacanian Real - the Thing Antigone confronts when he violates the order of the City - to the Bataillean excess.

As Badiou demonstrated apropos of the Stalinist show trials, this violent effort to distill the pure Real from the elusive reality necessarily ends up in its opposite, in the obsession with pure appearance: in the Stalinist universe, the passion of the Real (ruthless enforcement of the Socialist development) thus culminates in ritualistic stagings of a theatrical spectacle in the truth of which no one believes. The key to this reversal resides in the ultimate impossibility to draw a clear distinction between deceptive reality and some firm positive kernel of the Real: every positive bit of reality is a priori suspicious, since (as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle. The fundamental illusion is here that, once the violent work of purification is done, the New Man will emerge ex nihilo, freed from the filth of the past corruption. Within this horizon, "really-existing men" are reduced to the stock of raw material which can be ruthlessly exploited for the construction of the new - the Stalinist revolutionary definition of man is a circular one: "man is what is to be crushed, stamped on, mercilessly worked over, in order to produce a new man." We have here the tension between the series of "ordinary" elements ("ordinary" men as the "material" of history) and the exceptional "empty" element (the socialist "New Man," which is at first nothing but an empty place to be filled up with positive content through the revolutionary turmoil). In a revolution, there is no a priori positive determination of this New Man: a revolution is not legitimized by the positive notion of what Man's essence, "alienated" in present conditions and to be realized through the revolutionary process, is - the only legitimization of a revolution is negative, a will to break with the Past. One should formulate here things in a very precise way: the reason why the Stalinist fury of purification is so destructive resides in the very fact that it is sustained by the belief that, after the destructive work of purification will be accomplished, SOMETHING WILL REMAIN, the sublime "indivisible remainder," the paragon of the New. It is in order to conceal the fact that there is nothing beyond that, in a strictly perverse way, the revolutionary has to cling to violence as the only index of his authenticity, and it is as this level that the critics of Stalinism as a rule misperceive the cause of the Communist's attachment to the Party. Say, when, in 1939-1941 pro-Soviet Communists twice had to change their Party line overnight (after the Soviet-German pact, it was imperialism, not, Fascism, which was elevated to the role of the main enemy; from June 22 1941, when Germany attacked Soviet Union, it was again the popular front against the Fascist beast), the brutality of the imposed changes of position was what attracted them. Along the same lines, the purges themselves exerted an uncanny fascination, especially on intellectuals: their "irrational" cruelty served as a kind of ontological proof, bearing witness to the fact that we are dealing with the Real, not just with empty plans - the Party is ruthlessly brutal, so it means business...

So, if the passion of the Real ends up with the pure semblance of the political theater, then, in an exact inversion, the "postmodern" passion of the semblance of the Last Men ends up in a kind of Real. Recall the phenomenon of "cutters" (mostly women who experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with razors or otherwise hurt themselves), strictly correlative to the virtualization of our environs: it stands for a desperate strategy to return to the real of the body. As such, cutting is to be contrasted with the standard tattoo inscriptions on the body, which guarantee the subject's inclusion in the (virtual) symbolic order - with the cutters, the problem is the opposite one, namely the assertion of reality itself. Far from being suicidal, far from signalling a desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) to firmly ground our ego in our bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existing. The standard report of cutters is that, after seeing the red warm blood flowing out of the self-inflicted wound, the feel alive again, firmly rooted in reality. So, although, of course, cutting is a pathological phenomenon, it is nonetheless a pathological attempt at regaining some kind of normalcy, at avoiding a total psychotic breakdown. On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real - in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one. However, at the end of this process of virtualization, the inevitable Benthamian conclusion awaits us: reality is its own best semblance.

And was the bombing of the WTC with regard to the Hollywood catastrophe movies not like the snuff pornography versus ordinary sado-maso porno movies? This is the element of truth in Karl-Heinz Stockhausen's provocative statement that the planes hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work of art: one can effectively perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of the XXth century art's "passion of the real" - the "terrorists" themselves did it not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but FOR THE SPECTACULAR EFFECT OF IT. The authentic XXth century passion to penetrate the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate "effect," sought after from digitalized special effects through reality TV and amateur pornography up to snuff movies. Snuff movies which deliver the "real thing" are perhaps the ultimate truth of virtual reality. There is an intimate connection between virtualization of reality and the emergence of an infinite and infinitized bodily pain, much stronger that the usual one: do biogenetics and Virtual Reality combined not open up new "enhanced" possibilities of TORTURE, new and unheard-of horizons of extending our ability to endure pain (through widening our sensory capacity to sustain pain, through inventing new forms of inflicting it)? Perhaps, the ultimate Sadean image on an "undead" victim of the torture who can sustain endless pain without having at his/her disposal the escape into death, also waits to become reality.

The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show. The most recent example of this is Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small town clerk who gradually discovers the truth that he is the hero of a 24-hours permanent TV show: his hometown is constructed on a gigantic studio set, with cameras following him permanently. Among its predecessors, it is worth mentioning Philip Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic Californian city of the late 50s, gradually discovers that the whole town is a fake staged to keep him satisfied... The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the material inertia. And the same "derealization" of the horror went on after the WTC bombings: while the number of 6000 victims is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see - no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of the dying people... in clear contrast to the reporting from the Third World catastrophies where the whole point was to produce a scoop of some gruesome detail: Somalis dying of hunger, raped Bosnian women, men with throats cut. These shots were always accompanied with the advance-warning that "some of the images you will see are extremely graphic and may hurt children" - a warning which we NEVER heard in the reports on the WTC collapse. Is this not yet another proof of how, even in this tragic moments, the distance which separates Us from Them, from their reality, is maintained: the real horror happens THERE, not HERE? /"2

So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late capitalist consumerist society, "real social life" itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in "real" life as stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the "real life" itself, its reversal into a spectral show. Among others, Christopher Isherwood gave expression to this unreality of the American daily life, exemplified in the motel room: "American motels are unreal! /.../ they are deliberately designed to be unreal. /.../ The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate." Peter Sloterdijk's notion of the "sphere" is here literally realized, as the gigantic metal sphere that envelopes and isolates the entire city. Years ago, a series of science-fiction films like Zardoz or Logan's Run forecasted today's postmodern predicament by extending this fantasy to the community itself: the isolated group living an aseptic life in a secluded area longs for the experience of the real world of material decay. Is the endlessly repeated shot of the plane approaching and hitting the second WTC tower not the real-life version of the famous scene from Hitchcock's Birds, superbly analyzed by Raymond Bellour, in which Melanie approaches the Bodega Bay pier after crossing the bay on the small boat? When, while approaching the wharf, she waves to her (future) lover, a single bird (first perceived as an undistinguished dark blot) unexpectedly enters the frame from above right and hits her head.3 Was the plane which hit the WTC tower not literally the ultimate Hitchcockian blot, the anamorphic stain which denaturalized the idyllic well-known New York landscape?

The Wachowski brothers' hit Matrix (1999) brought this logic to its climax: the material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "real reality," he sees a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting: "Welcome to the desert of the real." Was it not something of the similar order that took place in New York on September 11? Its citizens were introduced to the "desert of the real" - to us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots we saw of the collapsing towers could not but remind us of the most breathtaking scenes in the catastrophe big productions.

When we hear how the bombings were a totally unexpected shock, how the unimaginable Impossible happened, one should recall the other defining catastrophe from the beginning of the XXth century, that of Titanic: it was also a shock, but the space for it was already prepared in ideological fantasizing, since Titanic was the symbol of the might of the XIXth century industrial civilization. Does the same not hold also for these bombings? Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested - just recall the series of movies from Escape From New York to Independence Day. Therein resides the rationale of the often-mentioned association of the attacks with the Hollywood disaster movies: the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and this was the greatest surprise.

One should therefore turn around the standard reading according to which, the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite on the contrary, it is prior to the WTC collapse than we lived in our reality, perceiving the Third World horrors as something which is not effectively part of our social reality, as something which exists (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen - and what happened on September 11 is that this screen fantasmatic apparition entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e., the symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality). The fact that, after September 11, the opening of many "of the blockbuster" movies with scenes which bear a resemblance to the WTC collapse (large buildings on fire or under attack, terrorist actions...) was postponed (or the films were even shelved), is thus to be read as the "repression" of the fantasmatic background responsible for the impact of the WTC collapse. Of course, the point is not to play a pseudo-postmodern game of reducing the WTC collapse to just another media spectacle, reading it as a catastrophy version of the snuff porno movies; the question we should have asked ourselves when we stared at the TV screens on September 11 is simply: WHERE DID WE ALREADY SEE THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN?

It is precisely now, when we are dealing with the raw Real of a catastrophe, that we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates which determine its perception. If there is any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the "center of financial capitalism," but, rather, the notion that the two WTC towers stood for the center of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production. The shattering impact of the bombings can only be accounted for only against the background of the borderline which today separates the digitalized First World from the Third World "desert of the Real." It is the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction.

Is, consequently, Osama Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the bombings, not the real-life counterpart of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the master-criminal in most of the James Bond films, involved in the acts of global destruction. What one should recall here is that the only place in Hollywood films where we see the production process in all its intensity is when James Bond penetrates the master-criminal's secret domain and locates there the site of intense labor (distilling and packaging the drugs, constructing a rocket that will destroy New York...). When the master-criminal, after capturing Bond, usually takes him on a tour of his illegal factory, is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist proud presentation of the production in a factory? And the function of Bond's intervention, of course, is to explode in firecraks this site of production, allowing us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with the "disappearing working class." Is it not that, in the exploding WTC towers, this violence directed at the threatening Outside turned back at us?

The safe Sphere in which Americans live is experienced as under threat from the Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly self-sacrificing AND cowards, cunningly intelligent AND primitive barbarians. The letters of the deceased attackers are quoted as "chilling documents" - why? Are they not exactly what one would expect from dedicated fighters on a suicidal mission? If one takes away references to Koran, in what do they differ from, say, the CIA special manuals? Were the CIA manuals for the Nicaraguan contras with detailed descriptions on how to perturb the daily life, up to how to clog the water toilets, not of the same order - if anything, MORE cowardly? When, on September 25, 2001, the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar appealed to Americans to use their own judgement in responding to the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon rather than blindly following their government's policy to attack his country ("You accept everything your government says, whether it is true or false. /.../ Don't you have your own thinking? /.../ So it will be better for you to use your sense and understanding."), were these statements, taken in a literal-abstract, decontextualized, sense, not quite appropriate? Today, more than ever, one should bear in mind that the large majority of Arabs are not fanaticized dark crowds, but scared, uncertain, aware of their fragile status - witness the anxiety the bombings caused in Egypt.

Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the "civilized" West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the "barbarian" Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound, we should also, now more than ever, bear in mind that the actual effect of these bombings is much more symbolic than real: in Africa, EVERY SINGLE DAY more people die of AIDS than all the victims of the WTC collapse, and their death could have been easily cut back with relatively small financial means. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Ruanda and Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York rapist gangs and a dozen or so snipers blindly targeting people who walk along the streets, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago.

When, days after September 11 2001, our gaze was transfixed by the images of the plane hitting one of the WTC towers, all of us were forced to experience what the "compulsion to repeat" ans jouissance beyond the pleasure principle are: we wanted to see it again and again, the same shots were repeated ad nauseam, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest. It is when we watched on TV screen the two WTC towers collapsing, that it became possible to experience the falsity of the "reality TV shows": even if these shows are "for real," people still act in them - they simply play themselves. The standard disclaimer in a novel ("characters in this text are a fiction, every resemblance with the real life characters is purely contingent") holds also for the participants of the reality soaps: what we see there are fictional characters, even if they play themselves for the real. Of course, the "return to the Real" can be given different twists: one already hears some conservatives claim that what made us so vulnerable is our very openness - with the inevitable conclusion lurking in the background that, if we are to protect our "way of life," we will have to sacrifice some of our freedoms which were "misused" by the enemies of freedom. This logic should be rejected tout court: is it not a fact that our First World "open" countries are the most controlled countries in the entire history of humanity? In the United Kingdom, all public spaces, from buses to shopping malls, are constantly videotaped, not to mention the almost total control of all forms of digital communication.

Along the same lines, Rightist commentators like George Will also immediately proclaimed the end of the American "holiday from history" - the impact of reality shattering the isolated tower of the liberal tolerant attitude and the Cultural Studies focus on textuality. Now, we are forced to strike back, to deal with real enemies in the real world... However, WHOM to strike? Whatever the response, it will never hit the RIGHT target, bringing us full satisfaction. The ridicule of America attacking Afghanistan cannot but strike the eye: if the greatest power in the world will destroy one of the poorest countries in which peasant barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultimate case of the impotent acting out? Afghanistan is otherwise an ideal target: a country ALREADY reduced to rubble, with no infrastructure, repeatedly destroyed by war for the last two decades... one cannot avoid the surmise that the choice of Afghanistan will be also determined by economic considerations: is it not the best procedure to act out one's anger at a country for which no one cares and where there is nothing to destroy? Unfortunately, the possible choice of Afghanistan recalls the anecdote about the madman who searches for the lost key beneath a street light; when asked why there when he lost the key in a dark corner backwards, he answers: "But it is easier to search under strong light!" Is not the ultimate irony that the whole of Kabul already looks like downtown Manhattan?

To succumb to the urge to act now and retaliate means precisely to avoid confronting the true dimensions of what occurred on September 11 - it means an act whose true aim is to lull us into the secure conviction that nothing has REALLY changed. The true long-term threat are further acts of mass terror in comparison to which the memory of the WTC collapse will pale - acts less spectacular, but much more horrifying. What about bacteriological warfare, what about the use of lethal gas, what about the prospect of the DNA terrorism (developing poisons which will affect only people who share a determinate genome)? In contrast to Marx who relied on the notion of fetish as a solid object whose stable presence obfuscates its social mediation, one should assert that fetishism reaches its acme precisely when the fetish itself is "dematerialized," turned into a fluid "immaterial" virtual entity; money fetishism will culminate with the passage to its electronic form, when the last traces of its materiality will disappear - it is only at this stage that it will assume the form of an indestructible spectral presence: I owe you 1000 $, and no matter how many material notes I burn, I still owe you 1000 $, the debt is inscribed somewhere in the virtual digital space... Does the same not hold also for warfare? Far from pointing towards the XXIth century warfare, the WTC twin towers explosion and collapse in September 2001 were rather the last spectacular cry of the XXth century warfare. What awaits us is something much more uncanny: the specter of an "immaterial" war where the attack is invisible - viruses, poisons which can be anywhere and nowhere. At the level of visible material reality, nothing happens, no big explosions, and yet the known universe starts to collapse, life disintegrates... We are entering a new era of paranoiac warfare in which the biggest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. Instead of a quick acting out, one should confront these difficult questions: what will "war" mean in the XXIst century? Who will be "them," if they are, clearly, neither states nor criminal gangs? One cannot resist the temptation to recall here the Freudian opposition of the public Law and its obscene superego double: are, along the same line, the "international terrorist organizations" not the obscene double of the big multinational corporations - the ultimate rhizomatic machine, all-present, although with no clear territorial base? Are they not the form in which nationalist and/or religious "fundamentalism" accommodated itself to global capitalism? Do they not embody the ultimate contrafiction, with their particular/exclusive content and their global dynamic functioning?

There is a partial truth in the notion of the "clash of civilizations" attested here - witness the surprise of the average American: "How is it possible that these people display and practice such a disregard for their own lives?" Is the obverse of this surprise not the rather sad fact that we, in the First World countries, find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice one's life? When, after the bombings, even the Taliban foreign minister said that he can "feel the pain" of the American children, did he not thereby confirm the hegemonic ideological role of this Bill Clinton's trademark phrase? It effectively appears as if the split between First World and Third World runs more and more along the lines of the opposition between leading a long satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one's life to some transcendent Cause. Two philosophical references immediately impose themselves apropos this ideological antagonism between the Western consummerist way of life and the Muslim radicalism: Hegel and Nietzsche. Is this antagonism not the one between what Nietzsche called "passive" and "active" nihilism? We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle up to their self-destruction. (One cannot but note the significant role of the stock exchange in the bombings: the ultimate proof of their traumatic impact was that the New York Stock Exchange was closed for four days, and its opening the following Monday was presented as the key sign of things returning to normal.) Furthermore, if one perceives this opposition through the lenses of the Hegelian struggle between Master and Servant, one cannot avoid noting the paradox: although we in the West are perceived as exploiting masters, it is us who occupy the position of the Servant who, since he clings to life and its pleasures, is unable to risk his life (recall Colin Powell's notion of a high-tech war with no human casualties), while the poor Muslim radicals are Masters ready to risk their life...

However, this notion of the "clash of civilizations" has to be thoroughly rejected: what we are witnessing today are rather clashes WITHIN each civilization. Furthermore, a brief look at the comparative history of Islam and Christianity tells us that the "human rights record" of Islam (to use this anachronistic term) is much better than that of Christianity: in the past centuries, Islam was significantly more tolerant towards other religions than Christianity. NOW it is also the time to remember that it was through the Arabs that, in the Middle Ages, we in the Western Europe regained access to our Ancient Greek legacy. While in no way excusing today's horror acts, these facts nonetheless clearly demonstrate that we are not dealing with a feature inscribed into Islam "as such," but with the outcome of modern socio-political conditions.

On a closer look, what IS this "clash of civilizations" effectively about? Are all real-life "clashes" not clearly related to global capitalism? The Muslim "fundamentalist" target is not only global capitalism's corroding impact on social life, but ALSO the corrupted "traditionalist" regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. The most horrifying slaughters (those in Ruanda, Kongo, and Sierra Leone) not only took place - and are taking place - within the SAME "civilization," but are also clearly related to the interplay of global economic interests. Even in the few cases which would vaguely fit the definition of the "clash of civilisations" (Bosnia and Kosovo, south of Sudan, etc.), the shadow of other interests is easily discernible.

Every feature attributed to the Other is already present in the very heart of the US: murderous fanaticism? There are today in the US itself more than two millions of the Rightist populist "fundamentalists" who also practice the terror of their own, legitimized by (their understanding of) Christianity. Since America is in a way "harboring" them, should the US Army have punished the US themselves after the Oklashoma bombing? And what about the way Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson reacted to the bombings, perceiving them as a sign that God lifted up its protection of the US because of the sinful lives of the Americans, putting the blame on hedonist materialism, liberalism, and rampant sexuality, and claiming that America got what it deserved? The fact that very same condemnation of the "liberal" America as the one from the Muslim Other came from the very heart of the Amerique profonde should give as to think. America as a safe haven? When a New Yorker commented on how, after the bombings, one can no longer walk safely on the city's streets, the irony of it was that, well before the bombings, the streets of New York were well-known for the dangers of being attacked or, at least, mugged - if anything, the bombings gave rise to a new sense of solidarity, with the scenes of young African-Americans helping an old Jewish gentlemen to cross the street, scenes unimaginable a couple of days ago.

Now, in the days immediately following the bombings, it is as if we dwell in the unique time between a traumatic event and its symbolic impact, like in those brief moment after we are deeply cut, and before the full extent of the pain strikes us - it is open how the events will be symbolized, what their symbolic efficiency will be, what acts they will be evoked to justify. If nothing else, one can clearly experience yet again the limitation of our democracy: decisions are being made which will affect the fate of all of us, and all of us just wait, aware that we are utterly powerless. Even here, in these moments of utmost tension, this link is not automatic but contingent. There are already the first bad omens, like the sudden resurrection, in the public discourse, of the old Cold war term "free world": the struggle is now the one between the "free world" and the forces of darkness and terror. The question to be asked here is, of course: who then belongs to the UNFREE world? Are, say, China or Egypt part of this free world? The actual message is, of course, that the old division between the Western liberal-democratic countries and all the others is again enforced.

The day after the bombing, I got a message from a journal which was just about to publish a longer text of mine on Lenin, telling me that they decided to postpone its publication - they considered inopportune to publish a text on Lenin immediately after the bombing. Does this not points towards the ominous ideological rearticulations which will follow, with a new Berufsverbot (prohibition to employ radicals) much stronger and more widespread than the one in the Germany of the 70s? These days, one often hears the phrase that the struggle is now the one for democracy - true, but not quite in the way this phrase is usually meant. Already, some Leftist friends of mine wrote me that, in these difficult moments, it is better to keep one's head down and not push forward with our agenda. Against this temptation to duck out the crisis, one should insist that NOW the Left should provide a better analysis - otherwise, it concedes in advance its political AND ethical defeat in the face of the acts of quite genuine ordinary people heroism (like the passengers who, in a model of rational ethical act, overtook the kidnappers and provokes the early crush of the plane: if one is condemned to die soon, one should gather the strength and die in such a way as to prevent other people dying).

When, in the aftermath of September 11, the Americans en masse rediscovered their American pride, displaying flags and singing together in the public, one should emphasize more than ever that there is nothing "innocent" in this rediscovery of the American innocence, in getting rid of the sense of historical guilt or irony which prevented many of them to fully assume being American. What this gesture amounted to was to "objectively" assume the burden of all that being "American" stood for in the past - an exemplary case of ideological interpellation, of fully assuming one's symbolic mandate, which enters the stage after the perplexity caused by some historical trauma. In the traumatic aftermath of September 11, when the old security seemed momentarily shattered, what more "natural" gesture than to take refuge in the innocence of the firm ideological identification? 4 However, it is precisely such moments of transparent innocence, of "return to basics," when the gesture of identification seems "natural," that are, from the standpoint of the critique of ideology, the most obscure one's, even, in a certain way, obscurity itself. Let us recall another such innocently-transparent moment, the endlessly reproduced video-shot from Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Piece at the height of the "troubles" in 1989, of a tiny young man with a can who, alone, stands in front of an advancing gigantic tank, and courageously tries to prevent its advance, so that, when the tank tries to bypass him by turning right or left, them man also moves aside, again standing in its way:

"The representation is so powerful that it demolishes all other understandings. This streetscene, this time and this event, have come to constitute the compass point for virtually all Western journeys into the interior of the contemporary political and cultural life of China."5
And, again, this very moment of transparent clarity (things are rendered at their utmost naked: a single man against the raw force of the State) is, for our Western gaze, sustained by a cobweb of ideological implications, embodying a series of oppositions: individual versus state, peaceful resistance versus state violence, man versus machine, the inner force of a tiny individual versus the impotence of the powerful machine... These implications, against the background of which the shot exerts its full direct impact, these "mediations" which sustain the shot's immediate impact, are NOT present for a Chinese observer, since the above-mentioned series of oppositions is inherent to the European ideological legacy. And the same ideological background also overdetermines, say, our perception of the horrifying images of tiny individuals jumping from the burning WTC tower into certain death.

So what about the phrase which reverberates everywhere, "Nothing will be the same after September 11"? Significantly, this phrase is never further elaborated - it just an empty gesture of saying something "deep" without really knowing what we want to say. So our first reaction to it should be: Really? Is it, rather, not that the only thing that effectively changed was that America was forced to realize the kind of world it was part of? On the other hand, such changes in perception are never without consequences, since the way we perceive our situation determines the way we act in it. Recall the processes of collapse of a political regime, say, the collapse of the Communist regimes in the Eastern Europe in 1990: at a certain moment, people all of a sudden became aware that the game is over, that the Communists are lost. The break was purely symbolic, nothing changed "in reality" - and, nonetheless, from this moment on, the final collapse of the regime was just a question of days... What if something of the same order DID occur on September 11?

We don't yet know what consequences in economy, ideology, politics, war, this event will have, but one thing is sure: the US, which, till now, perceived itself as an island exempted from this kind of violence, witnessing this kind of things only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved. So the alternative is: will Americans decide to fortify further their "sphere," or to risk stepping out of it? Either America will persist in, strengthen even, the deeply immoral attitude of "Why should this happen to us? Things like this don't happen HERE!", leading to more aggressivity towards the threatening Outside, in short: to a paranoiac acting out. Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world, making the long-overdued move from "A thing like this should not happen HERE!" to "A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!". Therein resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only way to ensure that it will not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE ELSE. In short, America should learn to humbly accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation.

The WTC bombings again confront us with the necessity to resist the temptation of a double blackmail. If one simply, only and unconditionally condemns it, one cannot but appear to endorse the blatantly ideological position of the American innocence under attack by the Third World Evil; if one draws attention to the deeper socio-political causes of the Arab extremism, one cannot but appear to blame the victim which ultimately got what it deserved... The only consequent solution is here to reject this very opposition and to adopt both positions simultaneously, which can only be done if one resorts to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions, each one is one-sided and false. Far from offering a case apropos of which one can adopt a clear ethical stance, we encounter here the limit of moral reasoning: from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this very innocence is not innocent - to adopt such an "innocent" position in today's global capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction. The same goes for the more ideological clash of interpretations: one can claim that the attack on the WTC was an attack on what is worth fighting for in democratic freedoms - the decadent Western way of life condemned by Muslim and other fundamentalists is the universe of women's rights and multiculturalist tolerance; however, one can also claim that it was an attack on the very center and symbol of global financial capitalism. This, of course, in no way entails the compromise notion of shared guilt (terrorists are to blame, but, partially, also Americans are also to blame...) - the point is, rather, that the two sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. The fact that global capitalism is a totality means that it is the dialectical unity of itself and of its other, of the forces which resist it on "fundamentalist" ideological grounds.

Consequently, of the two main stories which emerged after September 11, both are worse, as Stalin would have put it. The American patriotic narrative - the innocence under siege, the surge of patriotic pride - is, of course, vain; however, is the Leftist narrative (with its Schadenfreude: the US got what they deserved, what they were for decades doing to others) really any better? The predominant reaction of European, but also American, Leftists was nothing less than scandalous: all imaginable stupidities were said and written, up to the "feminist" point that the WTC towers were two phallic symbols, waiting to be destroyed ("castrated"). Was there not something petty and miserable in the mathematics reminding one of the holocaust revisionism (what are the 6000 dead against millions in Ruanda, Kongo, etc.)? And what about the fact that CIA (co)created Taliban and Bin Laden, financing and helping them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why was this fact quoted as an argument AGAINST attacking them? Would it not be much more logical to claim that it is precisely their duty to get us rid of the monster they created? The moment one thinks in the terms of "yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but one should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism," the ethical catastrophy is already here: the only appropriate stance is the unconditional solidarity will ALL victims. The ethical stance proper is here replaced with the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable. In short, let us make a simple mental experiment: if you detect in yourself any restraint to fully empathize with the victims of the WTC collapse, if you feel the urge to qualify your empathy with "yes, but what about the millions who suffer in Africa...", you are not demonstrating your Third World sympathize, but merely the mauvaise foi which bears witness to your implicit patronizing racist attitude towards the Third World victims. (More precisely, the problem with such comparative statements is that they are necessary and inadmissible: one HAS to make them, one HAS to make the point that much worse horrors are taken place around the world on a daily basis - but one has to do it without getting involved in the obscene mathematics of guilt.)

It must be said that, within the scope of these two extremes (the violent retaliatory act versus the new reflection about the global situation and America's role in it), the reaction of the Western powers till now was surprisingly considerate (no wonder it caused the violent anti-American outburst of Ariel Sharon!). Perhaps the greatest irony of the situation is that the main "collateral damage" of the Western reaction is the focus on the plight of the Afghani refugees, and, more generally, on the catastrophic food and health situation in Afghanistan, so that, sometimes, military action against Taliban is almost presented as a means to guarantee the safe delivery of the humanitarian aid - as Tony Blair said, perhaps, we will have to bomb Taliban in order to secure the food transportation and distribution. Although, of course, such large-scale publicized humanitarian actions are in themselves ideologically charged, involving the debilitating degradation of the Afghani people to helpless victims, and reducing the Taliban to a parasite terrorizing them, it is significant to acknowledge that the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan presents a much larger catastrophy than the WTC bombings.

Another way in which the Left miserably failed is that, in the weeks after the bombing, it reverted to the old mantra "Give peace a chance! War does not stop violence!" - a true case of hysterical precipitation, reacting to something which will not even happen in the expected form. Instead of the concrete analysis of the new complex situation after the bombings, of the chances it gives to the Left to propose its own interpretation of the events, we got the blind ritualistic chant "No war!", which fails to address even the elementary fact, de facto acknowledged by the US government itself (through its postponing of the retaliatory action), that this is not a war like others, that the bombing of Afghanistan is not a solution. A sad situation, in which George Bush showed more power of reflection than most of the Left!

No wonder that anti-Americanism was most discernible in "big" European nations, especially France and Germany: it is part of their resistance to globalization. One often hears the complaint that the recent trend of globalization threatens the sovereignty of the Nation-States; here, however, one should qualify this statement: WHICH states are most exposed to this threat? It is not the small states, but the second-rang (ex-)world powers, countries like United Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that, once fully immersed in the newly emerging global Empire, they will be reduced at the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. The refusal of "Americanization" in France, shared by many Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is thus ultimately the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is losing its hegemonic role in Europe. The results of this refusal are often comical - at a recent philosophical colloquium, a French Leftist philosopher complained how, apart from him, there are now practically no French philosophers in France: Derrida is sold to American deconstructionism, the academia is overwhelmed by Anglo-Saxon cognitivism... A simple mental experiment is indicative here: let us imagine someone from Serbia claiming that he is the only remaining truly Serb philosopher - he would have been immediately denounced and ridiculed as a nationalist. The levelling of weight between larger and smaller Nation-States should thus be counted among the beneficial effects of globalization: beneath the contemptuous deriding of the new Eastern European post-Communist states, it is easy to discern the contours of the wounded Narcissism of the European "great nations." Here, a good dose of Lenin's sensitivity for the small nations (recall his insistence that, in the relationship between large and small nations, one should always allow for a greater degree of the "small" nationalism) would be helpful. Interestingly, the same matrix was reproduced within ex-Yugoslavia: not only for the Serbs, but even for the majority of the Western powers, Serbia was self-evidently perceived as the only ethnic group with enough substance to form its own state. Throughout the 90s, even the radical democratic critics of Milosevic who rejected Serb nationalism, acted on the presupposition that, among the ex-Yugoslav republics, it is only Serbia which has democratic potential: after overthrowing Milosevic, Serbia alone can turn into a thriving democratic state, while other ex-Yugoslav nations are too "provincial" to sustain their own democratic State... is this not the echo of Friedrich Engels' well-known scathing remarks about how the small Balkan nations are politically reactionary since their very existence is a reaction, a survival of the past?

America's "holiday from history" was a fake: America's peace was bought by the catastrophes going on elsewhere. These days, the predominant point of view is that of an innocent gaze confronting unspeakable Evil which stroke from the Outside - and, again, apropos this gaze, one should gather the strength and apply to it also Hegel's well-known dictum that the Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around itself. There is thus an element of truth even in the most constricted Moral Majority vision of the depraved America dedicated to mindless pleasures, in the conservative horror at this netherworld of sexploitation and pathological violence: what they don't get is merely the Hegelian speculative identity between this netherworld and their own position of fake purity - the fact that so many fundamentalist preachers turned out to be secret sexual perverts is more than a contingent empirical fact. When the infamous Jimmy Swaggart claimed that the fact that he visited prostitutes only gave additional strength to his preaching (he knew from intimate struggle what he was preaching against), although undoubtedly hypocritical at the immediate subjective level, is nonetheless objectively true.

Can one imagine a greater irony than the fact that the first codename for the US operation against terrorists was "Infinite Justice" (later changed in response to the reproach of the American Islam clerics that only God can exert infinite justice)? Taken seriously, this name is profoundly ambiguous: either it means that the Americans have the right to ruthlessly destroy not only all terrorists but also all who gave then material, moral, ideological etc. support (and this process will be by definition endless in the precise sense of the Hegelian "bad infinity" - the work will never be really accomplished, there will always remain some other terrorist threat...); or it means that the justice exerted must be truly infinite in the strict Hegelian sense, i.e., that, in relating to others, it has to relate to itself - in short, that it has to ask the question of how we ourselves who exert justice are involved in what we are fighting against. When, on September 22 2001, Derrida received the Theodor Adorno award, he referred in his speech to the WTC bombings: "My unconditional compassion, addressed at the victims of the September 11, does not prevent me to say it loudly: with regard to this crime, I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless." This self-relating, this inclusion of oneself into the picture, is the only true "infinite justice."

In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus Christ. Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, "Love thy neighbor!" means "Love the Muslims!" OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.

1. See Alain Badiou, Le siecle, forthcoming from Editions du Seuil, Paris.

2. Another case of ideological censorship: when fireworkers' widows were interviewed on CNN, most of them gave the expected performance: tears, prayers... all except one of them who, without a tear, said that she does not pray for her deceived husband, because she knows that prayer will not get him back. When asked if she dreams of revenge, she calmly said that that would be the true betrayal of her husband: if he were to survive, he would insist that the worst thing to do is to succumb to the urge to retaliate... useless to add that this fragment was shown only once and then disappeared from the repetitions of the same block.

3. See Chapter III in Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2000.

4. I rely here on my critical elaboration of Althusser's notion of interpellation in chapter 3 of Metastases of Enjoyment, London: Verso Books 1995.

5. Michael Dutton, Streetlife China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 17.

*10/7/01 - Reflections on WTC - an earlier version of the book, Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

Simulacra and Simulations-Jean Baudrillard

2005-04-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

The simulacrum is true.

Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their art)ficial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.

The divine irreference of images

To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" illnesses by their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the illness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the organic to the unconscious order: once again, the latter is held to be real, more real than the former; but why should simulation stop at the portals of the unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any other symptom in classical medicine? Dreams already are.

The alienist, of course, claims that "for each form of the mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms, of which the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which the alienist is unlikely to be deceived." This (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all cost the truth principle, and to escape the specter raised by simulation: namely that truth, reference and objective caues have ceased to exist. What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the reduplication of the discourse of the unconscious in a discourse of simulation that can never be unmasked, since it isn't false either?2

What can the army do with simulators? Traditionally, following a direct principle of identification, it unmasks and punishes them. Today, it can reform an excellent simulator as though he were equivalent to a "real" homosexual, heart-case or lunatic. Even military psychology retreats from the Cartesian clarifies and hesitates to draw the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" symptom and the authentic symptom. "If he acts crazy so well, then he must be mad." Nor is it mistaken: in the sense that all lunatics are simulators, and this lack of distinction is the worst form of subversion. Against it, classical reason armed itself with all its categories. But it is this today which again outflanks them, submerging the truth principle.

Outside of medicine and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented." Indeed it can. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination - the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.3 Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.

It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflections and were content to venerate God at one remove. But the converse can also be said, namely that the iconolaters possesed the most modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew no longer represented anything, and that they were purely a game, but that this was precisely the greatest game - knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

This was the approach of the Jesuits, who based their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences - the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which no longer serves as alibi for a strategy completely free of influences and signs. Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics.

Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meamng and that something could guarantee this exchangeGod, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an umnterrupted circuit without reference or circumference

So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental ax~om). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.

These would be the successive phases of the image:

1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning pomt. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notmn of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its art)ficial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Hyperreal and imaginary

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.

The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It ~s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.

Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.

Political incantation

Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.

The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal - in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu that: "The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated"; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public mocality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the; order of capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.

But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes "relation of force" to mean the truth of capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging and revivihg moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and political consciousnesses of people.

All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none.

Watergate is not a scandal: this is- what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its fundamental immorality - these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather, it is "enlightened" thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust; its justice is a class justice; capital exploits us; etc." - as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the left which holds out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that capital will fall for this phantasmagoria of the social contract and furfill its obligation towards the whole of society (at the same time, no need for revolution: it is enough that capital accept the rational formula of exchange).

Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral and economic rationality, but - challenge to take up according to symbolic law.

Moebius: spiralling negativity

Hence Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of scandal to regenerative ends. This is embodied by the character called "Deep Throat," who was said to be a Republican grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order to get rid of Nixon - and why not? All hypotheses are possible, although this one is superfluous: the work of the Right is done very well, and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left. All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another; where there is no longer any active or passive. It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can be maintained (including, of course, "objective" analysis, struggle, etc.) But if the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all directions.

Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all models around the merest fact- the models come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events. Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity or implosion of poles) is what each time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle.

The communists attack the socialist party as though they wanted to shatter the union of the Left. They sanction the idea that their reticence stems from a more radical political exigency. In fact, it is because they don't want power. But do they not want it at this conjuncture because it is unfavorable for the Left in general, or because it is unfavorable for them within the union of the Left - or do they not want it by definition? When Berlinguer declares, "We mustn't be frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy," this means simultaneously:

1 That there is nothing to fear, since the communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in its fundamental capitalist mechanism.

2 That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to power (for the reason that they don't want to); and even if they do take it up, they will only ever wield it by proxy.

3 That in fact power, genuine power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing it or taking it over.

4 But more: 1, Berlinguer, am not frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy - which might appear evident, but not so evident, since:

5 It can also mean the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of seeing the communists seize power (and with good reason, even for a communist).

All the above is simultaneously true. This is the secret of a discourse that is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determinate position of power, the impossibility of a determinate position of discourse. And this logic belongs to neither party. It traverses all discourses without their wanting it.

Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut. As for the Moebius strip, if it is split in two, it results in an additional spiral without there being any possibility of resolving its surfaces (here the reversible continuity of hypotheses). Hades of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning4 - where even those condemned at Burgos are still a gik from Franco to Western democracy, which finds m them the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humamsm, and whose indignant protestation consolidates in return Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against foreign intervention? Where is the truth in all that, when such collusions admirably knit together without their authors even knowing it?

The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the "vicious" curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from right to lek a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own sur&ce: transfinite? And isn't it the same with desire and libidinal space? The conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire and the law; the ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so well received at the moment): only capital takes pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings this desire that is "revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in wanting what it wants," to want its own repression and to invest paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion which reduces this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, historical revolution.

All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion. Not so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history took its force from opposing itself to the one on nature, the discourse on desire to the one on power: today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.

It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder - a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.

Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others - Johnson, Nixon, Ford - only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an art)ficial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die - that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone.

To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle by the mirror of crisis, negativity and anti-power: this is the only alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its deja-vu and its deja-mort.

Strategy of the real

Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.

For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.

But the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.

Go and organize a fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible. In brief, stay close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of art)ficial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you). In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality: that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.

In this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation must be seen the whole thrust of an order that can only see and understand m terms of some reality, because it can function nowhere else. The simulation of an offence, if it is patent, will either be punished more lightly (because it has no "consequences") or be punished as an offence to public office (for example, if one triggered off a police operation "for nothing") - but never as simulation, since it is precisely as such that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is irreceivable by power. How can you punish the simulation of virtue? Yet as such it is as serious as the simulation of crime. Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, since it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based. The established order can do nothing against it, for the law is a second-order simulacrum whereas simulation is a third-order simulacrum, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distmctions upon which function all power and the entire social stratum. Hence, failing the real, it is here that we must aim at order.

This is why order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, It always prefers this assumption (thus in the army they would rather take the simulator as a true madman). But this becomes more and more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation; through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.

Thus all hold ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their "real" goal at all. But this does not make them inoffensive. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents or aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other (for that matter like so-called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc.5), that they are precisely unverifiable by an order which can only exert itself on the real and the rational, on ends and means: a referential order which can only dominate referentials, a determinate power which can only dominate a determined world, but which can do nothing about that indefinite recurrence of simulation, about that weightless nebula no longer obeying the law of gravitation of the real - power itself eventually breaking apart in this space and becomnig a simulation of power (disconnected from its aims and objectives, and dedicated to power effects and mass simulation).

The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also - why not? - the discourse of desire. "Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power, for in a nonreferential world even the confusian of the reality principle with the desire principle is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. One remains among principles, and there power is always right.

Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they turn against power this deterrence which is so well utilized for a long time itself. For, finally, it was capital which was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal, which shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. It was the first to practice deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc.; and if it was capital which fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it in the extermination of every use value, of every real equivalence, of production and wealth, in the very sensation we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Now, it is this very logic which is today hardened even more against it. And when it wants to fight this catastrophic spiral by secreting one last glimmer of reality, on which to found one last glimmer of power, it only multiplies the signs and accelerates the play of simulation.

As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs. When it is threatened today by simulation (the threat of vanishing in the play of signs), power risks the real, risks crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, -political stakes. This is a question of life or death for it. But it is too late.

Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of goods and commodities, that of la belle epoque of political economy, no longer makes any sense of its own, and has not for some time. What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten in a striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all the profundity and energy of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking resemblance to itself.

Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power - a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power. Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power comes down to nothing more than the critical obsession with power: an obsession with its death; an obsession with its survival which becomes greater the more it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, logically we will be under the total spell of power - a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one and the same time the satisfaction of having got rid of it (nobody wants it any more, everybody unloads it on others) and grieving its loss. Melancholy for societies without power: this has already given rise to fascism, that overdose of a powerful referential in a society which cannot terminate its mourning.

But we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this same breakdown. And it is by an art)ficial revitalization of all this that we try to escape it. Undoubtedly this will even end up in socialism. By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer belongs to history, it is through the death of the social that socialism will emerge - as it is through the death of God that religions emerge. A twisted coming, a perverse event, an unintelligible reversion to the logic of reason. As is the fact that power is no longer present except to conceal that there is none. A simulation which can go on indefinitely, since -unlike "true" power which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake - this is nothing but the object of a social demand, and hence subject to the law of supply and demand, rather than to violence and death. Completely expunged from the political dimension, it is dependent, like any other commodity, on production and mass consumption. Its spark has disappeared; only the fiction of a political universe is saved.

Likewise with work. The spark of production, the violence of its stake no longer exists. Everybody still produces, and more and more, but work has subtly become something else: a need (as Marx ideally envisaged it, but not at all in the same sense), the object of a social "demand," like leisure, to which it is equivalent in the general run of life's options. A demand exactly proportional to the loss of stake in the work process.6 The same change in fortune as for power: the scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production-real, has disappeared. And for that matter so has the strike-real too, which is no longer a stoppage of work, but its alternative pole in the ritual scansion of the social calendar. It is as if everyone has "occupied" their work place or work post, after declaring the strike, and resumed production, as is the custom in a "self-managed" job, in exactly the same terms as before, by declaring themselves (and virtually being) in a state of permanent strike.

This isn't a science-fiction dream: everywhere it is a question of a doubling of the work process. And of a double or locum for the strike process - strikes which are incorporated like obsolescence in objects, like crises in production. Then there are no longer any strikes or work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else entirely: a wizardry of work, a trompe l'oeil, a scenodrama (not to say melodrama) of production, collective dramaturgy upon the empty stage of the social.

It is no longer a question of the ideology of work - of the traditional ethic that obscures the "real" labour process and the "objective" process of exploitation- but of the scenario of work. Likewise, it is no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.

This is ultimately why power is so in accord with ideological discourses and discourses on ideology, for these are all discourses of truth - always good, even and especially if they are revolutionary, to counter the mortal blows of simulation.

Notes

1 Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a disquieting foreignness: the uneasiness before the photograph, considered like a witch's trick - and more generally before any technical apparatus, which is always an apparatus of reproduction, is related by Benjamin to the uneasiness before the mirror-image. There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. But how much more so when this image can be detached from the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced at will (cf. The Student of Prague, where the devil detaches the image of the student from the mirror and harrasses him to death by the intermediary of this image). All reproduction implies therefore a kind of black magic, from the fact of being seduced by one's own image in the water, like Narcissus, to being haunted by the double and, who knows, to the mortal turning back of this vast technical apparatus secreted today by man as his own image (the narcissistic mirage of technique, McLuhan) and that returns to him, cancelled and distorted -endless reproduction of himself and his power to the limits of the world. Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate. This has hardly changed for us: simulation (that we describe here as the operation of the code) is still and always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of control and of death, just like the imitative object (primitive statuette, image of photo) always had as objective an operation of black image.

2 There is furthermore in Monod's book a flagrant contradiction, which reflects the ambiguity of all current science. His discourse concerns the code, that is the third-order simulacra, but it does so still according to "scientific" schemes of the second-order - objectiveness, "scientific" ethic of knowledge, science's principle of truth and transcendence. All things incompatible with the indeterminable models of the third-order.

3 "It's the feeble 'definition' of TV which condemns its spectator to rearranging the few points retained into a kind of abstract work. He participates suddenly in the creation of a reality that was only just presented to him in dots: the television watcher is in the position of an individual who is asked to project his own fantasies on inkblots that are not supposed to represent anything." TV as perpetual Rorshach test. And furthermore: "The TV image requires each instant that we 'close' the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile."

4 "The Medium is the Message" is the very slogan of the political economy of the sign, when it enters into the third-order simulation - the distinction between the medium and the message characterizes instead signification of the second-order.

5 The entire current "psychological" situation is characterized by this shortcircuit.

Doesn't emancipation of children and teenagers, once the initial phase of revolt is passed and once there has been established the principle of the right to emancipation, seem like the real emancipation of parents. And the young (students, high-schoolers, adolescents) seem to sense it in their always more insistent demand (though still as paradoxical) for the presence and advice of parents or of teachers. Alone at last, free and responsible, it seemed to them suddenly that other people possibly have absconded with their true liberty. Therefore, there is no question of "leaving them be." They're going to hassle them, not with any emotional or material spontaneous demand, but with an exigency that has been premeditated and corrected by an implicit oedipal knowledge. Hyperdependence (much greater than before) distored by irony and refusal, parody of libidinous original mechanisms. Demand without content, without referent, unjust)fied, but for all that all the more severe - naked demand with no possible answer. The contents of knowledge (teaching) or of affective relations, the pedagogical or familial referent having been eliminated in the act of emancipation, there remains only a demand linked to the empty form of the institution- perverse demand, and for that reason all the more obstinate. "Transferable" desire (that is to say non-referential, un-referential), desire that has been fed by lack, by the place left vacant, "liberated," desire captured in its own vertiginous image, desire of desire, as pure form, hyperreal. Deprived of symbolic substance, it doubles back upon itself, draws its energy from its own reflection and its disappointment with itself. This is literally today the "demand," and it is obvious that unlike the "classical" objective or transferable relations this one here is insoluble and interminable.

Simulated Oedipus.

Francois Richard: "Students asked to be seduced either bodily or verbally. But also they are aware of this and they play the game, ironically. 'Give us your knowledge, your presence, you have the word, speak, you are there for that.' Contestation certainly, but not only: the more authority is contested, vilified, the greater the need for authority as such. They play at Oedipus also, to deny it all the more vehemently. The 'teach', he's Daddy, they say; it's fun, you play at incest, malaise, the untouchable, at being a tease - in order to de-sexualize finally." Like one under analysis who asks for Oedipus back again, who tells the "oedipal" stories, who has the "analytical" dreams to satisfy the supposed request of the analyst, or to resist him? In the same way the student goes through his oedipal number, his seduction number, gets chummy, close, approaches, dominates- but this isn't desire, it's simulation. Oedipal psychodrama of simulation (neither less real nor less dramatic for all that). Very different from the real libidinal stakes of knowledge and power or even of a real mourning for the absence of same (as could have happened after 1968 in the universities). Now we've reached the phase of desperate reproduction, and where the stakes are nil, the simulacrum is maximal - exacerbated and parodied simulation at one and the same time- as interminable as psychoanalysis and for the same reasons.

The interminable psychoanalysis.

There is a whole chapter to add to the history of transference and countertransference: that of their liquidation by simulation, of the impossible psychoanalysis because it is itself, from now on, that produces and reproduces the unconscious as its institutional substance. Psychoanalysis dies also of the exchange of the signs of the unconscious. Just as revolution dies of the exchange of the critical signs of political economy. This short-circuit was well known to Freud in the form of the gift of the analytic dream, or with the "uninformed" patients, in the form of the gift of their analytic knowledge. But this was still interpreted as resistance, as detour, and did not put fundamentally into question either the process of analysis or the principle of transference. It is another thing entirely when the unconscious itself, the discourse of the unconscious becomes unfindable - according to the same scenario of simulative anticipation that we have seen at work on all levels with the machines of the third order. The analysis then can no longer end, it becomes logically and historically interminable, since it stabilizes on a puppetsubstance of reproduction, an unconscious programmed on demand - an impossible-to-break-through point around which the whole analysis is rearranged. The messages of the unconscious have been short-circuited by the psychoanalysis "medium." This is libidinal hyperrealism. To the famous categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, it is going to be necessary to add the hyperreal, which captures and obstructs the functioning of the three orders.

6 Athenian democracy, much more advanced than our own, had reached the point where the vote was considered as payment for a service, after all other repressive solutions had been tried and found wanting in order to insure a quorum.

The algebra of infinite justice-Arundhati Roy

2005-04-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war, Arundhati Roy challenges the instinct for vengeance

Guardian

Saturday September 29, 2001

In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: "Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don't know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and wept.

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once Amer ica goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America's streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said, "We know exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting them." It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI and the American public don't.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies of America "enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?' " he said. "They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and there's nothing to support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government's policies that are so hated. They can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.

America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It's almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the "international coalition against terror", before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission - called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America's war against terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard choice", but that, all things considered, "we think the price is worth it". Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map - no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines - 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age". Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it's any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there's a run on maps of the country), but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble.

Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a "revolutionary tax". The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline fundamentalists - fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls' schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be "immoral" are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government's human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.

And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation's structural adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like dragon's teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup ported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands.

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any third world country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it's staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare - smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax - the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more "rid the world of evil-doers" than he can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their "factories" from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America's new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being "wanted dead or alive".

From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them.

From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions in which he operates, it's entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks - that he is the inspirational figure, "the CEO of the holding company". The Taliban's response to US demands for the extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President Bush's response is that the demand is "non-negotiable".

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.

President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - "If you're not with us, you're against us" - is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.

© Arundhati Roy 2001

The spirit of terrorism-baudrillard

2005-04-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

Le Monde 2/11/01

Translated: Dr Rachel Bloul, School of Social sciences, Australian National
University.

In footnotes: personal comments to remind me to think about these points
when later analyzing the piece.

In italics, details about not-quite-direct translations.

We have had many global events from Diana's death to the World Cup, or
even violent and real events from wars to genocides. But not one global
symbolic event, that is an event not only with global repercussions, but
one that questions the very process of globalization. All through the
stagnant 90s, there has been "la greve des evenements" (literally "an
events strike", translated from a phrase of the Argentino writer Macedonio
Fernandez). Well, the strike is off. We are even facing, with the World
Trade Center & New York hits, the absolute event, the "mother" of events,
the pure event which is the essence of all the events that never happened.

Not only are all history and power plays disrupted, but so are the
conditions of analysis. One must take one's time. For as long as events
were at a standstill, one had to anticipate and overcome them. But when
they speed up, one must slow down; without getting lost under a mass of
discourses and the shadow of war ("nuage de la guerre": literally clouds
announcing war), and while keeping undiminished the unforgettable flash of
images.

All the speeches and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the
event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. Moral condemnation and
the sacred union against terrorism are equal to the prodigious jubilation
engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed; better,
by seeing it more or less self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly.

Though it is (this superpower) that has, through its unbearable power,
engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this
terrorist imagination which -unknowingly- inhabits us all.

That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has
dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power
hegemonic to that degree, - this is unacceptable for Western moral
conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by
the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.

It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take
that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a pure
accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few
fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that
this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms:
because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without
this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and
without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can
count on this unavowable complicity.

This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power from the
disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global
order. That malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share (this
order's) benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive
power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center
embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this
definitive order.

No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for
perverse effects. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the
(literally: "rise to power of power") exacerbates a will to destroy it.
And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers
collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes
by their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot declare war on
Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine
power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war
on itself.

Numerous disaster movies are witness to this phantasm, which they
obviously exorcise through images and submerge under special effects. But
the universal attraction these movies exert, as pornography does, shows
how (this phantasm's) realization is always close at hand - the impulse to
deny any system being all the stronger if such system is close to
perfection or absolute supremacy.

It is even probable that the terrorists (like the experts!) did not
anticipate the collapse of the Twin Towers, which was, far more than (the
attack of) the Pentagon, the deepest symbolic shock. The symbolic collapse
of a whole system is due to an unforeseen complicity, as if, by collapsing
(themselves), by suiciding, the towers had entered the game to complete
the event.

In a way, it is the entire system that, by its internal fragility, helps
the initial action. The more the system is globally concentrated to
constitute ultimately only one network, the more it becomes vulnerable at
a single point (already one little Filipino hacker has succeeded, with his
laptop, to launch the I love you virus that wrecked entire networks).
Here, eighteen (dix-huit in the text) kamikazes, through the absolute arm
that is death multiplied by technological efficiency, start a global
catastrophic process.

When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals
with this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic
machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other
way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the situation (literally
'transfer of situation': am I too influenced by early translation as
'reversal'?)? It is the system itself that has created the objective
conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself,
it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are
ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of
power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a definitive
act that is also unanswerable (in the text: which cannot be part of the
exchange circuit). Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible
singularity in a generalized exchange system. Any singularity (whether
species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the
setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged
today by this terrorist situational transfer.

Terror against terror - there is no more ideology behind all that. We are
now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an
Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It (energy)
does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its
time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize
(the world) through force.

Terrorism, like virus, is everywhere. Immersed globally, terrorism, like
the shadow of any system of domination, is ready everywhere to emerge as a
double agent. There is no boundary to define it; it is in the very core of
this culture that fights it - and the visible schism (and hatred) that
opposes, on a global level, the exploited and the underdeveloped against
the Western world, is secretly linked to the internal fracture of the
dominant system. The latter can face any visible antagonism. But with
terrorism - and its viral structure -, as if every domination apparatus
were creating its own antibody, the chemistry of its own disappearance;
against this almost automatic reversal of its own puissance, the system is
powerless. And terrorism is the shockwave of this silent reversal.

Thus, it is no shock of civilizations, of religions, and it goes much
beyond Islam and America, on which one attempts to focus the conflict to
give the illusion of a visible conflict and of an attainable solution
(through force). It certainly is a fundamental antagonism, but one which
shows, through the spectrum of America (which maybe by itself the
epicentre but not the embodiment of globalization) and through the
spectrum of Islam (which is conversely not the embodiment of terrorism),
triumphant globalization fighting with itself. In this way it is indeed a
World War, not the third one, but the fourth and only truly World War, as
it has as stakes globalization itself. The first two World Wars were
classic wars. The first ended European supremacy and the colonial era. The
second ended Nazism. The third, which did happen, as a dissuasive Cold
War, ended communism. From one war to the other, one went further each
time toward a unique world order. Today the latter, virtually
accomplished, is confronted by antagonistic forces, diffused in the very
heart of the global, in all its actual convulsions. Fractal war in which
all cells, all singularities revolt as antibodies do. It is a conflict so
unfathomable that, from time to time, one must preserve the idea of war
through spectacular productions such as the Gulf (production) and today
Afghanistan's. But the fourth World War is elsewhere. It is that which
haunts every global order, every hegemonic domination; -if Islam dominated
the world, terrorism would fight against it.

For it is the world itself which resists domination.

Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Center, this symbolic
challenge is immoral, and it answers a globalization that is immoral. Then
let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something, let
us go somewhat beyond Good and Evil. As we have, for once, an event that
challenges not only morals, but every interpretation, let us try to have
the intelligence of Evil. The crucial point is precisely there: in this
total counter-meaning to Good and Evil in Western philosophy, the
philosophy of Enlightenment. We naively believe that the progress of the
Good, its rise in all domains (sciences, techniques, democracy, human
rights) correspond to a defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to understand that
Good and Evil rise simultaneously, and in the same movement. The triumph
of the One does not produce the erasure of the Other. Metaphysically, one
considers Evil as an accident, but this axiom, embedded in all manichean
fights of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, nor
vice-versa: there are both irreducible, and inextricable from each other.
In fact, Good could defeat Evil only by renouncing itself, as by
appropriating a global power monopoly, it creates a response of
proportional violence.

In the traditional universe, there was still a balance of Good and Evil,
according to a dialectical relation that more or less insured tension and
equilibrium in the moral universe; - a little as in the Cold War, the
face-to-face of the two powers insured an equilibrium of terror. Thus,
there was no supremacy of one on the other. This symmetry is broken as
soon as there is a total extrapolation of the Good (an hegemony of the
positive over any form of negativity, an exclusion of death, of any
potential adversarial force: the absolute triumph of the Good). From
there, the equilibrium is broken, and it is as if Evil regained an
invisible autonomy, developing then in exponential fashion.

Keeping everything in proportion, it is more or less what happened in the
political order with the erasure of communism and the global triumph of
liberal power: a fantastical enemy appeared, diffused over the whole
planet, infiltrating everywhere as a virus, surging from every interstice
of power. Islam. But Islam is only the moving front of the
crystallization of this antagonism. This antagonism is everywhere and it
is in each of us. Thus, terror against terror... But asymmetrical
terror... And this asymmetry leaves the global superpower totally
disarmed. Fighting itself, it can only founder in its own logic of power
relations, without being able to play in the field of symbolic challenge
and death, as it has eliminated the latter from its own culture.

Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb every
crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply hopeless situation
(not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and the privileged
too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event is that terrorists
have finished with empty suicides; they now organize their own death in
offensive and efficient ways, according to a strategic intuition, that is
the intuition of the immense fragility of their adversary, this system
reaching its quasi perfection and thus vulnerable to the least spark. They
succeeded in making their own death the absolute arm against a system that
feeds off the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero death. Any
system of zero death is a zero sum system. And all the means of dissuasion
and destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made his
death a counter-offensive. "What of American bombings! Our men want to die
as much as Americans want to live!" This explains the asymmetry of 7, 000
deaths in one blow against a system of zero death.

Therefore, here, death is the key (to the game) not only the brutal
irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the irruption of a
more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death - the absolute, no
appeal event.

This is the spirit of terrorism.

Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs to
the revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives
by ceaselessly bringing those who oppose it to fight in the domain of the
real, which is always its own. But (it) moves the fight into the symbolic
domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal, of
escalation. Thus, death can be answered only though an equal or superior
death. (Terrorism) challenges the system by a gift that the latter can
reciprocate only through its own death and its own collapse.

The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to
the multiple challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor
power, themselves escape symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the
only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In this vertiginous cycle of
the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an infinitesimal
point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around
this minute point, the whole system of the real and power gains in
density, freezes, compresses, and sinks in its own super-efficacy. The
tactics of terrorism are to provoke an excess of reality and to make the
system collapse under the weight of this excess. The very derision of the
situation, as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against
it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system's
violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the
only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death.

This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but
symbolic death of a few individuals.

One must recognize the birth of a new terrorism, a new form of action that
enters the game and appropriate its rules, the better to confuse it. Not
only do these people not fight with equal arms, as they produce their own
deaths, to which there is no possible response ("they are cowards"), but
they appropriate all the arms of dominant power. Money and financial
speculation, information technologies and aeronautics, the production of
spectacle and media networks: they have assimilated all of modernity and
globalization, while maintaining their aim to destroy it.

Most cunningly, they have even used the banality of American everyday life
as a mask and double game. Sleeping in their suburbs, reading and studying
within families, before waking up suddenly like delayed explosive devices.
The perfect mastery of this secretiveness is almost as terrorist as the
spectacular action of the 11 September. For it makes one suspect: any
inoffensive individual can be a potential terrorist! If those terrorists
could pass unnoticed, then anyone of us is an unnoticed criminal (each
plane is suspect too), and ultimately, it might even be true. This might
well correspond to an unconscious form of potential criminality, masked,
carefully repressed, but always liable, if not to surge, at least to
secretly vibrate with the spectacle of Evil. Thus, the event spreads out
in its minutiae, the source of an even more subtle psychological (mental)
terrorism.

The radical difference is that terrorists, while having at their disposal
all the arms of the system, have also another fatal weapon: their own
death.

If they limited themselves to fighting the system with its own weapons,
they would be immediately eliminated. If they did not oppose the system
with their own death, they would disappear as quickly as a useless
sacrifice; this has almost always been the fate of terrorism until now
(thus the Palestinian suicidal attacks) and the reason why it could not
but fail.

Everything changed as soon as they allied all available modern means to
this highly symbolic weapon. The latter infinitely multiplies their
destructive potential. It is the multiplication of these two factors
(which seem to us so irreconcilable) that gives them such superiority.
Conversely, the strategy of zero death, of a technological, 'clean' war,
precisely misses this transfiguration of 'real' power by symbolic power.

The prodigious success of such an attack poses a problem, and to
understand it, one must tear oneself away from our Western perspective, to
apprehend what happens in terrorists' minds and organization. Such
efficacy, for us, would mean maximal calculation and rationality,
something we have difficulties imagining in others. And even then, with
us, there would always be, as in any rational organization or secret
service, leaks and errors.

Thus, the secret of such success is elsewhere. The difference, with them,
is that there is no work contract, but a pact and an obligation of
sacrifice. Such obligation is secure from defection and corruption. The
miracle is the adaptation to a global network, to technical protocols
without any loss of this complicity for life and to the death. Contrary to
the contract, the pact does not link individuals, -even their 'suicide' is
not individual heroism, it is a collective, sacrificial act, sealed by
demanding ideals (I'm a bit free here but I feel it corresponds better to
what is meant by 'exigence ideale'). And it is the conjunction of these
two mechanisms, born of an operational structure and of a symbolic pact,
which makes possible such an excessive action.

We have no idea anymore of what is such a symbolic calculation, as in
poker or potlatch, with minimal stakes and maximal result. That is,
exactly what terrorists obtained in the attack on Manhattan, and which
would be a good metaphor for chaos theory: an initial shock, provoking
incalculable consequences, while American gigantic deployment ("Desert
Storm") obtained only derisory effects; - the storm ending so to speak in
the flutter of butterfly wings.

Suicidal terrorism was the terrorism of the poor; this is the terrorism of
the rich. And that is what specially frighten us: they have become rich
(they have every means) without ceasing to want to eradicate us.
Certainly, according to our value system, they cheat: staking (gambling?)
one's own death is cheating. But they could not care less, and the new
rules of the game are not ours.

We try everything to discredit their actions. Thus, we call them
"suicidal" and "martyrs". To add immediately that such martyrdom does not
prove anything, that it has nothing to do with truth and even (quoting
Nietzsche) that it is the enemy of truth. Certainly, their death does not
prove anything, but there is nothing to prove in a system where truth
itself is elusive --or are we pretending to own it? Besides, such a moral
argument can be reversed. If the voluntary martyrdom of the kamikazes
proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of the victims cannot prove
anything either, and there is something obscene in making it a moral
argument (the above is not to negate their suffering and their death).

Another bad faith argument: these terrorists exchange their death for a
place in Paradise. Their act is not gratuitous, thus it is not authentic.
It would be gratuitous only if they did not believe in God, if their death
was without hope, as is ours (yet Christian martyrs assumed just such
sublime exchange). Thus, again, they do not fight with equal weapons if
they have the right to a salvation we can no longer hope for. We have to
lose everything by our death while they can pledge it for the highest
stakes.

Ultimately, all that - causes, proofs, truth, rewards, means and ends-
belongs to typically Western calculation. We even put a value to death in
terms of interest rates, and quality/price ratio. Such economic
calculations are the calculation of those poor who no longer have even the
courage to pay (the price of death?).

What can happen, - apart from war, which is no more than a conventional
protection screen? We talk of bio-terrorism, bacteriological war or
nuclear terrorism. But none of that belongs to the domain of symbolic
challenge, rather it belongs to an annihilation without speech, without
glory, without risk - that is, to the domain of the final solution.

And to see in terrorist action a purely destructive logic is nonsense. It
seems to me that their own death is inseparable from their action ( it is
precisely what makes it a symbolic action), and not at all the impersonal
elimination of the Other. Everything resides in the challenge and the
duel, that is still in a personal, dual relation with the adversary. It is
the power of the adversary that has humbled you, it is this power which
must be humbled. And not simply exterminated... One must make (the
adversary) lose face. And this cannot be obtained by pure force and by the
suppression of the other. The latter must be aimed at, and hurt, as a
personal adversary. Apart from the pact that links terrorists to each
other, there is something like a dual pact with the adversary. It is then,
exactly the opposite to the cowardice of which they are accused, and it is
exactly the opposite of what Americans do, for example in the Gulf War
(and which they are doing again in Afghanistan): invisible target,
operational elimination.

Of all these vicissitudes, we particularly remember seeing images. And we
must keep this proliferation of images, and their fascination, for they
constitute, willy nilly, our primitive scene. And the New York events have
radicalized the relation of images to reality, in the same way as they
have radicalized the global situation. While before we dealt with an
unbroken abundance of banal images and an uninterrupted flow of spurious
events, the terrorist attack in New York has resurrected both the image
and the event.

Among the other weapons of the system which they have co-opted against it,
terrorists have exploited the real time of images (not clear here if it is
real duration, real time or images in real time), their instantaneous
global diffusion. They have appropriated it in the same way as they have
appropriated financial speculation, electronic information or air traffic.
The role of images is highly ambiguous. For they capture the event (take
it as hostage) at the same time as they glorify it. They can be infinitely
multiplied, and at the same time act as a diversion and a neutralization
(as happened for the events of May 68). One always forgets that when one
speaks of the "danger" of the media. The image consumes the event, that
is, it absorbs the latter and gives it back as consumer goods. Certainly
the image gives to the event an unprecedented impact, but as an
image-event.

What happens then to the real event, if everywhere the image, the fiction,
the virtual, infuses reality? In this present case, one might perceive
(maybe with a certain relief) a resurgence of the real, and of the
violence of the real, in a supposedly virtual universe. "This is the end
of all your virtual stories, - that is real!" Similarly, one could
perceive a resurrection of history after its proclaimed death. But does
reality really prevail over fiction? If it seems so, it is because reality
has absorbed the energy of fiction, and become fiction itself. One could
almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of
the image... It is as if they duel, to find which is the most
unimaginable.

The collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center is unimaginable, but
that is not enough to make it a real event. A surplus of violence is not
enough to open up reality. For reality is a principle, and this principle
is lost. Real and fiction are inextricable, and the fascination of the
attack is foremost the fascination by the image (the consequences, whether
catastrophic or leading to jubilation are themselves mostly imaginary).

It is therefore a case where the real is added to the image as a terror
bonus, as yet another thrill. It is not only terrifying, it is even real.
It is not the violence of the real that is first there, with the added
thrill of the image; rather the image is there first, with the added
thrill of the real. It is something like a prize fiction, a fiction beyond
fiction. Ballard (after Borges) was thus speaking of reinventing the real
as the ultimate, and most redoubtable, fiction.

This terrorist violence is not then reality backfiring, no more than it is
history backfiring. This terrorist violence is not "real". It is worse in
a way: it is symbolic. Violence in itself can be perfectly banal and
innocuous. Only symbolic violence generates singularity. And in this
singular event, in this disaster movie of Manhattan, the two elements that
fascinate 20th century masses are joined: the white magic of movies and
the black magic of terrorism.

One tries after the event to assign to the latter any meaning, to find any
possible interpretation. But there is none possible, and it is only the
radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle that is
original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism imposes the terrorism
of the spectacle. And against this immoral fascination (even if it
engenders a universal moral reaction) the political order can do nothing.
This is our theatre of cruelty, the only one left to us, -extraordinary
because it unites the most spectacular to the most provocative. It is both
the sublime micro-model of a nucleus of real violence with maximal
resonance - thus the purest form of the spectacular, and the sacrificial
model that opposes to historical and political order the purest symbolic
form of challenge.

Any slaughter would be forgiven them if it had a meaning, if it could be
interpreted as historical violence - this is the moral axiom of
permissible violence. Any violence would be forgiven them if it were not
broadcast by media ("Terrorism would be nothing without the media"). But
all that is illusory. There is no good usage of the media, the media are
part of the event, they are part of the terror and they are part of the
game in one way or another.

Repressive actions travel the same unpredictable spiral as terrorist
actions - none can know where it may stop, and what reversals may follow.
At the level of the image and information, there are no possible
distinctions between the spectacular and the symbolic, between "crime" and
repression. And this uncontrollable unraveling of reversibility is the
true victory of terrorism. It is a victory visible in the underground and
extensive ramifications of the event - not only in direct, economic,
political, market and financial recessions for the whole system, and in
the moral and psychological regression that follows; but also in the
regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free
movement etc... that the Western world is so proud of, and that
legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world.

Already, the idea of freedom, a new and recent (sic) idea, is being erased
from everyday lives and consciousness, and liberal globalization is being
realized as its exact reverse: a 'Law and Order' globalization, a total
control, a policing terror. Deregulation ends in maximal constraints and
restrictions, equal to those in a fundamentalist society.

Production, consumption, speculation and growth slowdowns (but not of
course corruption!): everything indicates a strategic retreat of the
global system, a heart-rending revision of its values, a regulation forced
by absolute disorder, but one the system imposes on itself, internalizing
its own defeat. It seems a defensive reaction to terrorism impact, but it
might in fact respond to secret injunctions.

Another side to terrorist victory is that all other forms of violence and
destabilization of order favor it: Internet terrorism, biological
terrorism, anthrax terrorism and the terrorism of the rumor, all are
assigned to Ben Laden. He could even claim natural disasters. Every form
of disorganization and perverse exchange benefits him. The structure of
generalized global exchange itself favors impossible exchange. It is a
form of terrorist automatic writing, constantly fed by the involuntary
terrorism of the news. With all its consequent panics: if, in that
anthrax story, intoxication happens by itself, by instantaneous
crystallization, like a chemical solution reacting to the contact of a
molecule, it is because the system has reached the critical mass that
makes it vulnerable to any aggression.

There is no solution to this extreme situation, especially not war that
offers only an experience of deja-vu, with the same flooding of military
forces, fantastic news, useless propaganda, deceitful and pathetic
discourses and technological deployment. In other words, as in the Gulf
War, a non-event, an event that did not happen...

There is its raison d'etre: to substitute to a real and formidable, unique
and unforeseeable event, a repetitive and deja-vu pseudo-event. The
terrorist attack corresponded to a primacy of the event over every model
of interpretation. Conversely, this stupidly military and technological
war corresponds to a primacy of the model over the event, that is to
fictitious stakes and to a non-sequitur. War extends/continues the absence
at the heart of politics through other means.

Editions Galilee/"Le Monde"

Getting the Real On: Baudrillard, Berkeley and the Staging of Reality

2005-04-14T17:12:00.000-07:00

ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004)

Dr. David Johnson
(London, England)

I. Introduction

Baudrillard’s work is often portrayed as an all-out attack on the reality principle.1 But this view is a caricature of Baudrillard, which would have him simply replacing the pretentious view that the world is built on completely solid foundations, with the equally pretentious view that life is just a dream. I wish to show how Baudrillard tries to dismantle the reality principle, but only in part, in order to introduce an order of reality in which only ecstatic or seductive phenomena are truly “real”. By affirming the substantial reality of seductive phenomena, rather than simply dismissing all existence as simply unreal, Baudrillard offers us a progressive rather than a nihilistic form of philosophy. And by stressing the manner in which some phenomena are more real than others, Baudrillard indeed forces us to reconsider how the reality principle is formed. I will make special reference to a certain Berkelean paradox which Baudrillard solves in a recent work.

II. Baudrillard and the Reality Principle

To begin with, it is certainly the case that Baudrillard is intent on destroying the reality principle in its current form. For Baudrillard, those who affirm “objective reality” are caught up in a power obsessed world, one which persistently tries to turn wayward existence into the controlled production of goods. Those who affirm the reality principle ignore the deeper reality of seduction; a rich immanent realm which has no need to produce or to prove itself to be “real”:

Production only accumulates, without deviating from its end. It replaces all illusions with just one, its own, which becomes the reality principle. Production, like revolution, puts an end to the epidemic of appearances. But seduction is inevitable.2

For Baudrillard, the reality principle must be attacked because of its alliance to the repressive world of production. However, for Baudrillard, those who merely attack the real wholesale, in an over-zealous manner, are simply naive. This is because the reality principle is a construct, and as such remains somewhat fragile. It is this fragile ideological construct which needs to be attacked rather than the world itself as a substantial phenomenon. One does not need to romantically close one’s eyes to existence to make the reality principle crumble; in fact, quite the opposite. As Baudrillard asserts: “the real represents itself as a whole”, it is an intellectually constructed perspective, and so “to eliminate it, destroy it, deny it, etc. isn’t a naive act”. In order to destroy the reality principle all one has to do is to grasp “the immediacy, the instantaneity of things and of their appearance;”3 one will then find phenomena which are ironically too real to be incorporated into that organised, rational, perfectible and productive whole which passes itself off as the real. Ironically, this holistic “real world” vision is extremely vague, since it needs to spread its focus over the entire world. To deconstruct this holistic vision Baudrillard applies his attention to more substantial, precise and indeed graspable realities. We will see this argument echoed later in a slightly different form, when Baudrillard deals with what I will call the Berkelean paradox arguing that only those singularities which lie directly before us can be described as having any kind of “reality”.

In my view, the naivety of a wholesale rejection of the reality principle in any form mirrors the repressive idealism of those who believe only in the “real world” of production. That is because such naive anti-realism, like the totalising reality principle of production, replaces “all illusions with just one, its own”, in this case the illusion that there is no objective reality whatsoever. Such a holistic world vision, albeit vague, puts a stop to the proliferation of substantial multiple realities and the metamorphosis-like appearances of seduction.

Throughout his career, Baudrillard has described and analysed the dismantling of the reality principle by late capitalism, in which a wild circulation of commodities melds with a chaotic blurring of those values and categories that had previously held the reality principle together.4 Even the world of production is threatened by this new capitalistic lawlessness, but the spirit of production, the work ethic and the reality principle have ironically become all the more aggressive the more they have become compromised, and they live on with a vengeance in forms of simulation. This world of confused and diminished values makes people feel directionless, generating a form of “inescapable indifference”5 in which “nobody is now the slightest bit interested in sexual liberation, political discussion, organic illnesses, or even in conventional warfare.”6 Baudrillard may warily rejoice at the current indifference to sexual liberation and political discussion, believing the calls for liberation and political engagement to be calls for production in disguise. However, there is also the unfortunate fact that in a world of general indifference, nobody is that interested in seduction either. This illegitimate passive indifference to seduction, based on the dismantling of the reality principle, is as damaging to the realm of seduction as the active repression of seductive phenomena by those who affirm the objective reality of the world. Baudrillard wishes to attack “the real” as a general principle, but by enlisting the deeper reality of seduction which is something “prior” to the “real world” and the world of accumulation. As Baudrillard writes: “…Nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it.”7

Baudrillard has recently portrayed this war of objective facts as taking place within a finite economy, which can be portrayed as a small stage where only a certain amount of phenomena can be baptised as real at any given moment. What makes it impossible for all phenomena to become objective fact is the fact of death, the limits of the human mind and the indifference of human beings to certain prosaic phenomena, caught up as they are within a world on fire with seduction. What is offered intellectually here is a certain joyful science, which replaces a mere negative anti-realism with an ecstatic affirmation of the reality of seduction. At stake in existential terms is a certain letting go of the dead weight of facts, the weight of the world. We must insist that we are indifferent to certain facts, because of our ecstatic affirmation of other more seductive facts, and that therefore the very nature of existence must be radically re-evaluated.

III. The Berkelean Paradox

In Cool Memories IV Baudrillard suggests that objective truths may indeed exist. This would appear to be a shocking statement, made as it is by someone who appears to have spent most of his life waging war on the principle of the real in all its forms. The twist, however, is that for Baudrillard things must wait their turn to be made objective, must wait for the space to become available so that they can be scrutinised, through the clearing away of other equally objective facts, so that they can enter the stage upon which they can be witnessed and baptised as real. In this fragment, a worker at the “Ministry of Self-Evidence and Reality” makes a discovery:

… Objective facts, objective truths, had always been there …but …were present on a kind of waiting list, and appeared one by one only as space became available, as empty spaces were left by the disappearance of other objective truths…8

The picture that Baudrillard paints, of phenomena jostling with each other to get upon the stage of the real, and of realists struggling to decide what deserves a place in reality, has a comic aspect, one that is recognisably Baudrillardean.

In a sense, Baudrillard is simply providing us with another absurd scenario with which to mock the reality mongers. However, this description of the process by which phenomena are “realised” also solves at a stroke a certain element within the Berkelean debate about the reality or non-reality of non-perceived phenomena. In a crucial dramatisation of the problem in dialogue form, George Berkeley has an anti-Berkelean figure named Hylas ask the question “What more easy than to conceive a tree or house existing by itself, independent of, and unperceived by any mind whatsoever?” The pro-Berkeley caricature Philonous replies to this question with another question in a rhetorical vein: “How say you Hylas, can you see a thing which is at the same time unseen?”9 This philosophical problem is often dramatised through the question of whether an unperceived and unheard tree-fall makes a sound, and we will concentrate on this more poetic rendering, although it does not appear as such within Berkeley’s written oeuvre.

It is not necessary to delve into Berkeley’s use of this question of the reality of unperceived phenomena or his solution to it, or indeed to delve deeply into Berkelean scholarship. The question regarding the reality status of unobserved phenomena remains intact as a contemporary philosophical problem, and Baudrillard clearly answers it in a productive fashion. Baudrillard enables us to see that the event of the tree falling without being perceived does not exist as an objective fact, but neither does it not exist. Just as the phenomena in the “Ministry of Self Evidence and Reality” wait to take the place of other phenomena in order to become objective, the tree’s fall waits its turn to be verified as having really happened, waits to get on the stage of the real, a wait that, it need not be pointed out, could last forever. It is absurd to suggest that a tree’s unobserved fall in the forest does not happen, because it is infinitely vulnerable to being observed. But likewise, it is absurd to insist that an unobserved tree-fall has any full reality, if it is in fact not observed.

To insist on the objective fact of the tree’s fall without it being objectified is not objective, and to insist that it exists without being seen is not empirical. But to insist that the tree’s fall would not be real even if it were observed is to wistfully and naïvely hope that life is a dream, that objects can never be visited and will never be realised. Reality then becomes a simple matter of access, and of event. The falling of a tree, unseen, is a potentially real event that, however, may fail to take place as real. It is important to stress the sheer unreality of the unseen tree’s fall since to claim the substantial nature of unobserved objective facts would lead us to deny the greater intensity and urgency of seductive facts. But to overstress the unreality of the unobserved tree’s fall, to suggest it would not even become real if observed, would lead us to conclude that phenomena are essentially unreal, whether observed or not, and this would lead us to deny the sheer power of experience and foist upon us another kind of indifference to seductive phenomena.

IV. Libidinal and Prosaic Phenomena

There are two fundamental reasons why phenomena must wait their turn to be baptised as real. The first is that the human mind is finite and the world is large; the human mind simply cannot hold all objective truths together at the same time. The ultimate staging ground of reality, that of the mind, is forever limited to what is on show at any given time. As Baudrillard points out, information technology is seen to be the custodian of the objective truth of the world, pretending as it does to represent an exhaustive storage of objective truths that can be accessed together all at once in real time. But all that technologically stored information must pass through the finite human mind to be baptised as real, and this process leaves heroic gaps. A tree falling in a forest might be an ironic one-joke site that you never had time to surf.

The other reason that all the world’s phenomena cannot be realised at once is that the human mind is not just a machine for verifying things as real. The celebrants of information technology cannot understand that the real must ultimately be processed upon the stage of the flesh and blood of our minds, to be filtered through desire, forgetfulness, perversity and indifference. We can say that while it may be physically possible to record or review how many trees collapse in Siberia on a given winter’s day, one may not be interested in the slightest. Regarding the human mind’s disinterest in certain potentially real phenomena, I would wish to extend or even misuse Baudrillard’s terminology here and give the notion of indifference a certain metaphysical status beyond that of denoting a certain postmodern political and libidinal apathy. That is, I will insist that it really matters how much things don’t matter. For example, the reality status of a one-inch diameter of coral in the barrier reef would seem to be extremely fragile if we are radically indifferent to it, or involved in other seductions.

Things neither exist nor fail to exist – they are simply important or unimportant. This has crucial consequences for the status that we give to reality. Events gain reality in direct proportion to their existential necessity or their libidinal intensity. It clearly involves a certain split between those interested in baptising cold facts as real, and those who merely focus-in on what interests them, things they may declare as authentic or merely fun. Are you interested in whether a tree fell in the cold wastelands? Or would you rather consider the objective reality of that seductive being sitting in the corner of the bar?

Although seduction and desire can be seen to scramble the processes of establishing objective facts, seduction and desire are every bit as objective as trees that fall in forests or the building blocks of the genetic code. Furthermore, a phenomenon like intoxication may lead to illusions or even hallucinations, which can lead you to disbelieve objective facts, but intoxication itself is an objective fact.

Since it is the case that you can only realise a few elements of the world at any one time, the choice between realising scientific facts and realising libidinal facts becomes extremely sharp. When you are freezing in Siberia waiting for a tree to fall so that you can film it for your web site, you are not warm at home being gradually seduced by the objective warmth of coal fires and bodies. This being the case, it is tempting to take a strong existential line, and to insist that the greater intensity of libidinal objective realities is sufficient to make them more objective than scientific ones. But to leave the matter there is to fall into the trap of merely making a sentimental Lawrencean plea for “more life”, or to follow in a conventional way the call to libertinage and hedonism. It is not enough to talk of the deeper truth of desire or seduction over that of sober scientific facts; instead one must insist on the parity of these different truths, their identical objectivity. That way, one can inaugurate a structural catastrophe, and reveal a kind of objective double booking. It is certainly true that as objective facts, both the libidinal fact and the object fact have parity; only then should one add that the libidinal fact has existential weight behind it also (it is really and truly a more important fact!).

V. The Data Bank and the Real

For Baudrillard, today’s society tries to store all facts and represent all events in the “artificial memory”10 of data banks, in order to control their flow. We can add that contemporary society also tries to “realise” all events within the circularity of data banks in order to exorcise the mysterious nature of unexperienced events and their essential unreality, to ensure the substantial nature of the world and the world of production. Data banks attempt to process, store and render accessible all the world’s phenomena. However, human life and the human mind is finite and caught up in a world of seduction, and so could never realise all the events and absorb all the facts contained within some perfect data bank. In any case, only those phenomena which are physically experienced are truly “real”. A tree-fall stored away and forgotten in the circuitry of a data bank is as unreal as one that never got recorded or stored.

Even if an exhaustive data bank could be produced which contained every event that took place within the universe, the information that it contained would need to be processed by the human mind to be truly valid. Now, it is clear that human beings cannot store and review all facts at once due to the sheer physical make up of the mind and of human appetites. This inability is compounded by the fact that all reviewing must take place sequentially through time because of the sheer scale of data. For example, while academics are studying the history of the Maya they are not studying the history of the Incas.

Data banks have an ambition to record events as they happen, and to at least potentially offer up all data simultaneously and instantly. They therefore claim to offer a world that can be realised “all at once”, that is, to offer “real time”. But the human necessity to process and experience events sequentially, “one at a time” as it were, makes a mockery of this “real time” as represented by data banks.

It is, ironically, only in the realm of scientific or academic fact that the choice of subject matter – what you make “real” – does not really matter. It does not really matter to me whether I study the Maya or the Incas today, or whether I study the North side or the South side of the barrier reef first. This indifference does not extend to libidinal phenomena, which do not seem to be so interchangeable. On a libidinal level, we can see that when we are making love to one person, we are not making love to another person, and this is crucial to the objective status of that lived moment. It is because of our basic indifference to scientific and academic facts that they can be indifferently grouped together in an arbitrary manner within a data bank and be made to represent the “real world” as a whole, a process that cannot be achieved with seductive facts, due to the antagonistic differences in their qualities. Similarly, it is because we are secretly indifferent to these prosaic facts that we can go on to consider them as existing independent of our experience of them. These objective phenomena are like boring relatives that we never visit and rarely think about but never doubt the existence of, even though in reality they might be long extinguished or have completely changed.

If life is a kind of dream, but one which has a form of objective reality, where does this leave those who are at the cutting edge of science or information technology? They know, just as we know, that anything can be recorded and stored and rendered as objective reality. But equally, they must know how impossible it is to transfer all this hard-drive to the software of the brain. Super-initiated into the secret power of scientific objectivity and information, they can see that such omniscience is also a form of impotence. For the more facts they can verify and make objective, the more they are spreading themselves thinly over the world and diluting their powers. Secretly, these scientists and computer technicians, these new agnostics, know that when they are in the throws of seduction, or in the arms of sleep, they have ceased recording and reviewing their data. They have reached the philosophical apotheosis of indifference.

A problem can now be seen. If we are to deny the substantial nature of unobserved scientific facts, should we not also deny the substantial nature of unknown pleasures? Perhaps, but this would make us indifferent to all pleasures except those which are close at hand, compounding the contemporary indifference to seduction. Clearly, part of the excitement of libidinal stakes is that they involve not only taking seriously what one can easily enjoy, but also the mysterious attraction of those things that we have not yet experienced, that do not as yet properly exist. But if we accept the substantial nature of unknown pleasures, what is to stop all those unexperienced libidinal stakes taking over from the scientists’ and academics’ archive of dead information to form just another kind of phantom world? This issue needs to be explored in depth, but it must suffice for the moment to note that libidinal economies abide by different rules to those that govern scientific and academic economies. As stated earlier, the reason that unexperienced scientific objective facts can be grouped together and be made to represent a whole “real world” is that they can be indifferently grouped together, a process that cannot be achieved with seductive facts, due to the antagonistic differences in their qualities. An always-already self-fulfilled world of the data bank cannot crystallise out of recalcitrant libidinal facts, facts which have to be actually engaged with, in a perhaps tortuous manner, in succession, to become truly real.

Scientists and academics have, in truth, only an oblique interest in prosaic objective facts. For example, if one has no real interest in coral, there is little to stop this empty, pseudo interest from seeping over into an “interest” in sea-anemones. There is little to be sacrificed, then, in moving from prosaic facts at hand to discovering unknown prosaic facts. But with libidinal facts, all unknown pleasures have to somehow give proof that they are really “out there”, and that they are of such value that it is worth putting aside the pleasures at one’s immediate disposal. In other words, libidinal stakes are real stakes, and each libidinal lure must prove itself to be somehow potentially valid. There is a certain urgency in libidinal stakes, a certain precision which balances the attraction of the unknown against the seductive nature of the already known, an economy which is altogether absent within the realm of science or academia in which the status of the unknown is equal to the known, or may even have greater status. Moreover, we do not really feel that all those libidinal pleasures that we have not yet experienced lie in wait as always-already achieved in real time, like the scientific facts contained within a data bank, despite the ambitions of pornographers. Libidinal pleasures flow within a certain natural duration, and flow naturally from the known to the unknown (which is then known), without being blackmailed or haunted by some always-already in place unilateral authority of the already real, which claims to operate in real-time. We must not be blackmailed by unexperienced libidinal phenomena any more than by unseen prosaic phenomena.

VI. Conclusion

Baudrillard has solved the Berkelean problem of the status of unobserved objects, although, one can safely presume, without any such ambition. But this is not really important. What is important is that he has revealed the vanity of assuming the essential reality of unobserved phenomena, and thereby relieved us, almost literally, of the weight of the world. We are relieved of one of the origins of a certain destructive will to power, a will that always dreams that the grass is greener elsewhere.

Baudrillard has delivered us from a certain political blackmail. He has rescued us from the authority of experts, who control the dead matter of the unexperienced and unobserved, who wield a supposed power that acts as a constant rebuke to our sovereignty. Freed from the myth that we need to hold the whole world in our heads, we can turn at will from prosaic objective facts to equally objective seductive facts. And we know that if we choose to baptise a prosaic fact as real, we are doing so in place of baptising a seductive fact as real. That is, we are at all times making an objective choice. And there really is no way out.

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David Johnson: Has a D. Phil. in English and Related Literature from York University and an M.A. (Distinction) in Continental Philosophy from Warwick University, England. He has published The Time of the Lords: An Attack on Bataille’s Slave Aesthetic of Transience. Leicester: Ephemera Books, 2001.

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Endnotes

1 Critics who have taken Baudrillard to task for his supposed wholesale denial of reality include Christopher Norris, who condemns what he sees as “Baudrillard’s stance of last-ditch cognitive scepticism”. Norris. Uncritical Theory. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992:28.

2 Jean Baudrillard. Seduction (1979). Translated by Brain Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990:84.

3 Baudrillard. Fragments: Conversations with François L’Yvonnet (2001). Translated by Chris Turner. London: Routledge, 2004:64.

4 See Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil (1990). Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1993:3-13.

5 Ibid.:4.

6 Ibid.:36.

7 Jean Baudrillard. Seduction (1979). Translated by Brain Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990:2.

8 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories IV (2000). Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2003:101.

9 George Berkeley. The Principles of Human Knowledge/Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1710/ 1713). Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1985:183-184.

10 Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil (1990). Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1993:57.

The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard

2005-04-14T17:02:00.000-07:00

ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004)

Translated by:

Dr. Gary Genosko (Canada Research Chair in Technoculture Studies, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada).

and

Adam Bryx (Graduate Student in English, Lakehead University).

The simulacrum hypothesis deserved better than to become a reality.2

Le Nouvel Observateur: Your reflections on reality and the virtual are some of the key references used by the makers of The Matrix. The first episode explicitly referred to you as the viewer clearly saw the cover of Simulacra and Simulation.3 Were you surprised by this?

Jean Baudrillard: Certainly there have been misinterpretations, which is why I have been hesitant until now to speak about The Matrix. The staff of the Wachowski brothers contacted me at various times following the release of the first episode in order to get me involved with the following ones, but this wasn’t really conceivable (laughter). Basically, a similar misunderstanding occurred in the 1980s when New York-based Simulationist4 artists contacted me. They took the hypothesis of the virtual for an irrefutable fact and transformed it into a visible phantasm. But it is precisely that we can no longer employ categories of the real in order to discuss the characteristics of the virtual.

Nouvel Observateur: The connection between the film and the vision you develop, for example, in The Perfect Crime, is, however, quite striking. In evoking a desert of the real, these totally virtualized spectral humans, who are no more than the energetic reserve of thinking objects… .

Baudrillard: Yes, but already there have been other films that treat the growing indistinction between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive, the masterpiece of David Lynch. The Matrix’s value is chiefly as a synthesis of all that. But there the set-up is cruder and does not truly evoke the problem. The actors are in the matrix, that is, in the digitized system of things; or, they are radically outside it, such as in Zion, the city of resistors. But what would be interesting is to show what happens when these two worlds collide. The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment. This is a serious flaw. The radical illusion of the world is a problem faced by all great cultures, which they have solved through art and symbolization. What we have invented, in order to support this suffering, is a simulated real, which henceforth supplants the real and is its final solution, a virtual universe from which everything dangerous and negative has been expelled. And The Matrix is undeniably part of that. Everything belonging to the order of dream, utopia and phantasm is given expression, “realized.” We are in the uncut transparency. The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.

Nouvel Observateur: It is also a film that purports to denounce technicist alienation and, at the same time, plays entirely on the fascination exercised by the digital universe and computer-generated images.

Baudrillard: What is notable about Matrix Reloaded is the absence of a glimmer of irony that would allow viewers to turn this gigantic special effect on its head. There is no sequence which would be the punctum about which Roland Barthes wrote, this striking mark that brings you face-to-face with a true image. Moreover, this is what makes the film an instructive symptom, and the actual fetish of this universe of technologies of the screen in which there is no longer a distinction between the real and the imaginary. The Matrix is considered to be an extravagant object, at once candid and perverse, where there is neither a here nor a there. The pseudo-Freud who speaks at the film’s conclusion puts it well: at a certain moment, we reprogrammed the matrix in order to integrate anomalies into the equation. And you, the resistors, comprise a part of it. Thus we are, it seems, within a total virtual circuit without an exterior. Here again I am in theoretical disagreement (laughter). The Matrix paints the picture of a monopolistic superpower, like we see today, and then collaborates in its refraction. Basically, its dissemination on a world scale is complicit with the film itself. On this point it is worth recalling Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. The message of The Matrix is its own diffusion by an uncontrollable and proliferating contamination.

Nouvel Observateur: It is rather shocking to see that, henceforth, all American marketing successes, from The Matrix to Madonna’s new album, are presented as critiques of the system which massively promotes them.

Baudrillard: That is exactly what makes our times so oppressive. The system produces a negativity in trompe-l’oeil, which is integrated into products of the spectacle just as obsolescence is built into industrial products. It is the most efficient way of incorporating all genuine alternatives. There are no longer external Omega points or any antagonistic means available in order to analyze the world; there is nothing more than a fascinated adhesion. One must understand, however, that the more a system nears perfection, the more it approaches the total accident. It is a form of objective irony stipulating that nothing ever happened. September 11th participated in this. Terrorism is not an alternative power, it is nothing except the metaphor of this almost suicidal return of Western power on itself. That is what I said at the time, and it was not widely accepted. But it is not about being nihilistic or pessimistic in the face of all that. The system, the virtual, the matrix – all of these will perhaps return to the dustbin of history. For reversibility, challenge and seduction are indestructible.5

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Endnotes

1 Jean Baudrillard was interviewed for Le Nouvel Observateur (19-25 June 2003) by Aude Lancelin. The Editors of IJBS are grateful to Ruth Valentini and Le Nouvel Observateur for permission to translate and publish this interview in English http://www.nouvelobs.com

2 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories IV. New York: Verso, 2003:92.

3 Upon opening the book during the “Follow Instructions” scene in Neo’s apartment, the hollowed out text reveals the first page of the short essay “On Nihilism.”

4 It was perhaps Peter Halley more than any other American Simulationist painter who triumphed Baudrillard’s conceptualization of hyperreality in relation to day-glo colours. And, as he wryly notes, Baudrillard dashed the hopes of Halley by distancing himself from claims on him. But it wasn’t only Simulationist painters who received a cold critical shoulder. As Paul Hegarty heard in a recent interview with Baudrillard (April 2003; in his book Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory, London: Continuum, 2004), “the last ones were those ‘symbiotic’ artists. They kept pestering me, saying, ‘but you must love what we’re doing. I said, ‘hang on, this is not acceptable’.”

5 Gerry Coulter's essay in this volume examines this aspect of Baudrillard's writing over the past thirty years. See Gerry Coulter. "Reversibility: Baudrillard's One's Great Thought" http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/reversib.htm.

Book Review: Totems, Tropes, and Manifestos in Sociology and Mass Culture

2005-04-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2005)

Patricia Cormack. Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Reviewed by Dr. Leonard Steverson
(South Georgia College, Douglas, Georgia, USA)

In her book, Patricia Cormack describes her goal as an exploration into the issue of mass culture as a sociological construct as viewed by three major social theorists – Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills, and Jean Baudrillard. These theorists were picked because of their examinations of “…sociology’s relationship to its audience and the influence of modern culture on society”.1 The primary texts of two of these theorists (Durkheim’s Rules of the Sociological Method and Mills’ The Sociological Imagination), were used as tools of exploration into the authors’ explication of the subject.

Cormack makes use of “totems” and “tropes” as tools of analysis to investigate the relationship between “…the dialectical interaction of sociological thought with modern culture…”.2 The concept of totem that is used is derived from Durkheim’s formulation in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life3, rather than the Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation, and is appropriate in providing a distinction between traditional and modern societies. The totem serves as a representation of collective morality, a culturally constructed foundation upon which other social constructs will eventually appear as human societies advance. Due to the static nature of the totem, the author chose to introduce the more dynamic concept of trope to lend a more complementary approach to making a “connection” between the key concepts that are being considered. In this manner, Cormack appropriately provides a foundation for her analysis by using the well-grounded totem and the flexible trope. Her point, which should be quite obvious by this time, is that the works of all three theorists saw the “social” of their respective societies in both totemic and tropic representations.

The first chapter provides a historical introduction of the social and a discussion of how changes in the social order have created various examinations by those observing those descriptions. It further describes how politics and philosophical dialogue were used in attic Greece, in particular the different forms as used by the sophists and Socrates. This is used as a prelude to her discussion of the three sociological theorists.

Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard were chosen due to the perspectives, and corresponding periods, that these sociologists represent. Durkheim was chosen from the classical school of sociological theory as his work represents the “intrinsic” aspect of sociology; his manifesto approach in Rules of the Sociological Investigation specifically represents the beginnings of the discipline in this manner. Mills was selected due to what Cormack termed his “intrinsic and instructional” perspective of mass culture, especially as depicted in his major work The Sociological Imagination. Lastly, Baudrillard was chosen because of his “equivalence to mass culture” or what she refers to as “Baudrillard’s (nihilist) silence”4.

In her discussion on the French classical sociologist Emile Durkheim, Cormack begins by associating the early sociologist’s work with the ancient sophist school of discourse, a connection which Durkheim himself makes in the preface to Rules. The author, in her own attempt at persuasion, discusses at length why Rules should be considered (and, as she notes, is in fact considered by other writers) as a manifesto.5 She describes a manifesto, from its original root, as a “striking” form of communication that is appropriately used in a discussion of mass society. To further this issue of manifesto, another scholar of rhetoric manifesto, Janet Lyon, has noted that a manifesto “…declares a position; the manifesto refuses dialogue or discussion; the manifesto fosters antagonism and scorns conciliation. It is univocal, unilateral, single-minded. It conveys resolute oppositionality and indulges no tolerance for the fainthearted”.6 Noting the role of binary opposites, Lyon explains that the manifesto pits a discursive battle between the oppressed and oppressor, corrupt and corrupted, and the usurpers and rightfully entitled, and on a broader level, between the dissatisfaction experienced by the oppressed group that is in direct opposition to the prevailing cultural norms. Characteristics of a manifesto, according to Lyon include:

A chronicle of the oppressive actions leading to the complaints of the oppressed,
A call for change through a forceful listing of demands,
A confrontational communication with the oppressor.
Sounding much like Baudrillard, Lyon further adds that the manifesto “…creates a simulacrum of rupture in the dominant political order”.7 A question then presents itself: does this concept of manifesto then apply to Rules? It is certainly a reasonable claim. However, it could also be argued that the works of Mills (especially in his attacks on the “grand theorists” and “abstract empiricists”) and Baudrillard (his claims about sociology’s lack of ability to adequately represent postmodern social life) could also qualify as manifestoes. This argument, however, tends to belabor the point – Rules can certainly be seen as a manifesto.

Cormack asserts that the basis of Durkheim’s thought involved examination of collective representation, which is certainly the case as collective representations are a salient aspect of his work. She notes his famous study on suicide and his analysis of the totemic ideas and practices of Australian aborigines to expound upon this point. In Rules, Durkheim promotes the new science of sociology as a means of understanding the importance of collective influences and offers a call to social scientists to observe its most fundamental pronouncement: “the first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things”.8 Although noting the shortcomings of this manifesto, the author credits Durkheim with providing useful tropes and images that can be utilized by succeeding generations of social theorists. However, while the analytical tool of totem is very obvious in this discussion of Durkheim, the appearance of tropes are less discernable.

Next considered is the work of popular American sociologist C. Wright Mills and his classic The Sociological Imagination. This work, published in 1959, is an account of the state of sociology as well as a formulaic exhortation for sociologists to adequately promote their “craft”.9 Cormack adds that in this work, “…Mills simultaneously throws down the gauntlet to his colleagues, challenging them to recognize their relationship to ‘cultural life’ and makes a promise of identity tied with the experiential lucidity to the broader American public”.10 This is an apt description of Mills’ intentions. Mills called for the use of the sociological imagination, one of the most important tools in the discipline: this refers to the ability to see the everyday social phenomenon from the standpoint of social influences, and vice versa. The use of tropes is evident in this concept as well as uses of metaphorical analysis found in Mills’ other work. While Cormack appropriately mentions the use of tropism in Sociological Imagination, a discussion of totemism is less obvious. She correctly adds that Mills emphasized mass culture in his writings and noted that journalists and novelists were often the predominate purveyors of the sociological imagination. This point, however, should be obvious because the goal of these occupations is to represent the individual in a micro level social context and social concerns in a micro level story. In other words, “history” and “biography” naturally find themselves intertwined in the art of storytelling or reporting. Cormack states that Mills provided a bridge between modernity and post-modernity and she explains how Mills saw a need for contemporary social scientists to use pre-modern methods of artisanship to carefully and caringly prepare the craft of the sociologist. She adds this introspective statement, “Here again sociology’s hand or ‘manus’ shows itself—the slap of the manifesto has become the trained caring touch of dexterous manipulation and traditional manufactor”.11

The works of French theorist and erstwhile sociologist Jean Baudrillard are considered last. The first observation that most readers will have is that this analysis does not include a particular text, or more specifically, a manifesto, as with the other two theorists. However, Baudrillard is considered by Cormack as the theorist “…most overtly concerned with treating the sociological as collective representation, with the investigation of its place within popular and mass cultures, and with its influence on the functioning of public action”.12 It is possible too, that of the three, his ideas have changed (and possibly will continue to do so) throughout his career. To provide a better understanding of Baudrillard’s thought over the years, Butler describes three phases of Baudrillard’s maturation – his early phase in which he offers an alteration to Marxist ideology; his second phase which is marked by a desire to apply the critiques of the first period; and the last stage (at least to this point) where he turns more a theoretical and whimsical, using contemplations of social life as fodder for popular books, journals, newspapers, and chapters in books.13 It is thus perhaps difficult to adequately focus on a manifesto that captures Baudrillard in relation to the discussion at hand. A discussion about Baudrillard’s most manifesto-like concept, however, would offer a more heuristic component to the work. It is likely that the concept that is most fitting is that of simulation, and its related ideas – simulacra, signs, and hyperreality. It would seem that the focus on this thinker would center around this concept: if Durkheim concentrated on the function of sociology to understand collective representations (and, thus, society in general), and Mills focused on the discipline as a means of understanding human behavior by the study of social, instead of psychological, forces (through the sociological imagination), Baudrillard’s introduction of the concept of stimulation would seem the next phase in a logical developmental process of mass culture. Simulation, especially as it relates to consumerism (and most especially to entertainment), is certainly an issue which builds on the concepts of both of the antecedent theorists – for example, to explain Disneyland as a simulacra of the real world requires both an understanding of collective representations as well as a vivid sociological imagination. In addition, reasoning that a well reported war never happened requires an even more developed sociological imagination. However, it is quite likely that Cormack does not view the relationship between the three theorists as constituting an evolutionary process in the analysis of mass culture.

Continuing in her analysis of the latter theorist, there is the issue of the philosopher as sociologist: Cormack describes Baudrillard’s relationship with sociology as one that is strained, mostly due to his closeness to the subject. The focus of this book is on Baudrillard’s philosophical, rather than sociological descriptions of the social and his concepts of simulation and hyperrealism are explained in relation to the social. After analysis of Baudrillard’s ideas, the conclusion is reached: “Baudrillard’s story is a repetition of Durkheim’s and Mills’ assertions that the sociological is an imaginary collective representation that necessarily influences, and is influenced by, mass society”.14

Cormack also makes the point that Baudrillard’s thought is contrasted to Durkheim’s belief in the totem as a representation of the collective; again the issue of simulation is evident in this analysis. If the totem has become simply a simulation of the real derived primarily from media exploitation, the totem is a false representation, rendering the analysis of the totem a futile intellectual exercise. She notes that “…late twentieth-century western culture has become thoroughly sociological to the extent of meaninglessness, that is, to the extent that the ongoing Durkheimian ironic and interpretive relation to the social is made impossible because there is no interpretative space between the totemic image and the group”.15 This is a hint to the issue of an evolutionary process mentioned earlier in this paper; however, this idea is not developed.

Cormack also explains the divergent path taken from the work of Mills. She explains that while Mills addressed an impressionable collectivity that is receptive to the message, Baudrillard sees the collective as being one that is “…a mute, stupefied audience titillated by its own image…”.16 However, this comment seems to ignore the fact that one of Mills’ primary concerns was that the American of the Modern Age would become “The Cheerful Robot”,17 an idea also expressed by Herbert Marcuse in “One-Dimensional Man”.18 It is clear that Mills, although obviously hopeful for the uses of sociology, was not optimistic about the future, if people continued to be influenced by, and dependant upon, the mass media.

The book concludes with a general comparison of the three great thinkers and further word-play on the sociological “manus”. Appropriately, in manifesto style, Cormack outlines sixteen possibilities that describe the relationship between sociology and mass society. This synthesis at the book’s close is clearly outlined and helps the reader digest the complex analysis of the work; this is especially beneficial to those without advanced training in the study of mass culture. Cormack’s book is an interesting comparison of the works of three major thinkers of three different periods and the connection between sociology and mass culture and is an important contribution to the study of mass culture. It would be interesting to further analyze the relationship of these three figures by developing the issue from an evolutional perspective, as noted earlier, by considering Durkheim as an early twentieth century pioneer whose focus on social forces was a redirection of previous psychological approaches; by understanding Mills as a mid century benefactor of Durkheimian thought who furthered the approach by describing the media as purveyors of knowledge to an increasingly ignorant and apathetic white collar society; and finally to Baudrillard, as a late century theorist who sees the message presented to the masses as being simply an illusion, a representation of a make-believe world (or earlier world) so adequately reflected in the “reality shows” of today.

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Endnotes

1 Pat Cormack. Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002:6.

2 Ibid.

3 Emile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Tranlated by Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995.

4 Pat Cormack. Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002:28.

5 Pat Cormack (Ed.). Manifestos and Declarations of the Twentieth Century. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998.

6 Janet Lyon. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999:9.

7 Ibid.: 16.

8 Emile Durkheim. Rules of the Sociological Method. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: Free Press, 1982: 60.

9 C. Wright Mills. The Sociological Imagination (c1959). New York: Oxford University Press, 2000:195.

10 Pat Cormack. Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002:56.

11 Ibid.:82.

12 Ibid.:90.

13 Rex Butler. Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real. London: Sage, 1999:3-11.

14 Pat Cormack. Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002:105.

15 Ibid.:91.

16 Ibid.:92.

17 C. Wright Mills. The Sociological Imagination (c1959). New York: Oxford University Press, 2000:171.

18 Herbert Marcuse. One-Dimensional Man (c 1964) Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

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Summary of Baudrillard's conclusion of 'The Consumer society'

2005-04-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

...the main inspiration for Harvey seems to come from Baudrillard and from his quite pessimistic approach to consumer society. The centre of Baudrillard analysis in fact starts from the premise that postmodern consumers form their ‘identity’ following the ‘imposed’ models of the economic system especially those proposed by advertising. Viewed from this perspective, the narcissism of the individual is considered then just the refraction, or better, the negation of a real enjoyment of singularity (idem, 1998). On this escort, the so called fun morality and the invitation to indulge himself/herself (because pleasing oneself one is likely to please others) push consumers only to ‘consume’ a relation mediated primarily by signs. The obvious result is that everyone finds his or her own personality in living up to these models (idem, 1998, 96). The role of advertising is therefore considered pivotal in so far as it helps promoting these models by creating myths which are neither true nor false : advertising is thus considered a prophetic language as it presupposes no anterior truth promoting essentially hope instead of learning and understanding. This tautological mode of communication helps eliminating, according to Baudrillard, both meaning and proof from the exchanged messages (between the market and consumers) and as a result, everywhere it is the myth which finds its event, by means of a production of speech which is industrialized on the same basis as the production of material goods.

Reality is no longer anything but the model speaking itself. So it is with magical formulas, so it is with simulations and so also with advertising which, among other styles of discourse, plays – for preference- on the tautology. Everything in that discourse is a ‘metaphor’ for one and the same thing: the brand. The expressions ‘a better beer’ (than what?), ‘Lucky Strike, a toasted cigarette’ (of course, it`s toasted; they are all!) merely refer back to a spiral of self-evidence (idem, 1998, 128).

The myth of consumption is recalled by Baudrillard in the story of the ‘Student of Prague’, an old silent movie from the 1930s. The story is rather eloquent: it is about a poor student who whishes for a more prosperous life and that, thanks to the encounter with the Devil, eventually finds the woman of his dreams. But the woman, being rich, is beyond his grasp and brooding on his ambitions and dissatisfaction, the student decides to sell his image to the Devil exchanging it with gold. From that moment on, the student enjoys success after success, but then he realizes that his own image is frequenting the same circles and is following him around without letting him rest. It is the image that the Devil has revived and put into circulation. After many vicissitudes the image does not give in and continues to hound the student eventually ending up with killing a person as though to be avenged for having been sold. The student’s existence has become thus impossible and to put an end to all, he settles on the plan of killing the image. One day, passing in front of the mirror in his room, the student fires at it and the image vanishes into air. Unfortunately however, once the mirror is crashed the student dies, for by killing his image, he has killed himself. The only consolation before the death comes from seeing his real self again through a fragment of the mirror: his normal likeness is restored before he dies.

Baudrillard sees the story as a close representation of the consumer society. The relation between the self and the world is nowadays mediated by signs and images and in the case those images should be missing, then individuals can loose perspective on their selves and no identity would be possible any longer. Individuals become alienated. Nevertheless, the most peculiar aspect of this story lies in the fact that the image is sold, that it falls into the commodity sphere. That is to say that from the moment they are produced, our works and our acts fall out of our grasp and are objectivized: they fall into the Devil’s hands (idem, 1998, 188). In this story then, there is no second bargain, there is no way out but death. This is because, according to Baudrillard, the commodity logic has replaced every aspect of our life. It governs not only labour processes and material products, but the whole of culture, sexuality, and human relations, including even fantasies and individual drives (idem, 1998, 191). Everything is thus taken over by this logic in the sense that everything is spectacularized and orchestrated into images, signs, consumable models for the sole aim of profit. The conclusion reached by Baudrillard is thus quite apocalyptic to some extent: consumers never come face to face with his own needs, nor is he ever confronted with his own image. In other words, there is no meaning without reflection, and the worst aspect is that even the Devil has no more roles to play for our society is nowadays so affluent that one is given everything even without requesting it. The collective narcissism (a concept elaborated by Lipovetsky but also taken up by Baudrillard) is thus inducing society to merge itself into the image it represents of itself, to be convinced of itself in the way that advertising ends up convincing people of their bodies and the prestige values of those bodies (idem, 1998, 194). In the end, people end up with consuming a myth (the experience the so called ‘consumption of consumption’) as they are presented with tautological messages filled with what is 'already there'.

critic of baudrillard

2005-04-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Francesco Vitucci's blog
06 December 2004

The era of simulacra: Jean Baudrillard

The first problem with Postmodernism is that it represent a great range of philosophical points of view. What we have is a broad and elusive movement of thought that is as differentiated internally as it is generalizable externally as a new philosophical development (Grassie, 1997). Central to Postmodernism is the focusing on the problems of any knowledge which is founded on anything external to an individual. According to its theorists, knowledge is broadly disseminated in its forms, but not limited in its interpretation (Lyotard 1979). As a result, the movement rapidly developed a vocabulary of anti-enlightenment rhetoric, used to argue that rationality was neither as sure or as clear as rationalists supposed, and that knowledge was inherently linked to time, place, social position and other factors from which an individual constructs their view of knowledge.
Postmodernism has an obvious distrust toward claims about truths, ethics, or beauty being rooted in anything other than individual perception and group construction. Perhaps the most striking examples of this skepticism are to be found in the works of French cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard. In his book Simulations (1983), he contends that social ‘reality’ no longer exists in the conventional sense, but has been supplanted by an endless procession of simulacra. This switch to the production and reproduction of copies for which there is no original effaces the distinction between the real and the imaginary (Featherstone, 1995, 19). To grasp this concept, one might think as an example, the case of painting and sculpture, where although there can be an original work which is the one with the highest (monetary) value, there might also exist thousand of valueless copies that once recognized as such might not ‘hurt’ or even exert an influence on the original. In contrast, in the case of cds, photos, and high distribution commodities as there is no original but only copies, they become all ‘the same’ and they are all sold for the same amount of money with the consequence that one is no more able to establish and support the categories of true/false and valuable/valueless.
From this perspective, thanks to the advent of mass media, progress in technology, and improved (marketing) communication, simulacra are seen by Baudrillard merely as tools for the imposition of a virtual reality (a reality created by simulation) upon the society. The mass media, and other forms of mass cultural production in fact generate constant re-appropriation and re-contextualization of familiar cultural symbols and images, fundamentally shifting our experience away from ‘reality’ . Accordingly, all that remains on the human level is the masses, the silent majority, which acts as a ‘black hole’ (Baudrillard, 1983(2), 9), absorbing the overproduction of energy and information from the media and cynically watching the fascinating endless play of signs (Featherstone, 1995, 19).
Hence, According to Baudrillard, the sign becomes the main value of our society and of the commodities we consume (more than use or exchange value) at the same time when luxuriousness, style, power are raised to the nth power by advertising and marketing. According to Mike Underwood (link 5), Baudrillard would reject the standard view of classic economics which describes the mechanics of consumption in terms of a rational consumer setting out to satisfy needs with the aim of maximizing utility. The era of consumption would be rather the era of ‘radical alienation’ where the logic of the market has become generalized, governing today not only the processes of work and material products, but our entire culture, sexuality, human relations, including even our fantasies and individual impulses. Everything seems to be covered by this logic in the deeper sense that everything becomes spectacle, that is to say evoked, provoked, orchestrated in images, in signs, in consumable models.
For Baudrillard then, subjects seem to be nothing more than productive forces and consumption is considered as the mere locus of capitalist domination discounting the possibility that it might be a sphere of self-activity and self-valorization. Nonetheless, commodities can have various uses. Some can be indeed defined by the system of political economy, but others can also be created by consumers. From this perspective, consumption should be revalued as a source and a means through which consumers can experiment, try, affirm and negate the different aspects of the self. Accordingly, the consumer, instead of identifying himself with the products and services he purchases, he would rather cross them in search of himself (Parmiggiani, 2001, 15). Also Featherstone is critical toward Baudrillard’s approach to consumption and states that the foundation of such critique of mass culture on the part of intellectuals like Baudrillard, is to be found in an essentially nostalgic Kulturpressimismus perspective, which has entrapped them in a myth of pre-modern stability, coherence and community (idem, 1995, 20). According to him, Baudrillard’s like critics neglect in fact both complex social differentiations and the ways in which mass-produced commodities can be customized. Goods can be in fact used to mark boundaries between groups (see also the theory of Veblen and Maffesoli) and their symbolism (employed in imagery and design) can be used by consumers to construct differentiated lifestyle models. In practice, Featherstone stress the importance of transcending the view that uniformity of consumption is dictated by production and emphasize rather the need to investigate the actual use and reception of goods in various practices (idem). Critic is also Campbell (1987) who brands the manipulation approach as sensational and without any empirical support . In his opinion, what the producers of goods and services actually manipulate are not consumers or their want, but the symbolic meanings which are attached to products. They, in effect, manipulate messages and the crucial question then becomes: how does receipt of a message lead to the creation of a want in the consumer? (Campbell, 1987, 47)
Nevertheless, the analysis of Baudrillard remains intensely pessimistic. He develops in fact the so called concept of technological determinism to point out the fact that nowadays masses became passive and that they consume the media for the sole purpose of being entertained (idem, 1983(2)). Consider, as an example, the centrality of advertising as culture in our society and how our daily lives are saturated with the products of the culture industries: television in the living room, the CD player in the bedroom, the radio in the car, the walkman in the library, etc. In this situation, (what Baudrillard refers to as hyperreality) there is no possibility of distinguishing a signifier for its signified, a sign from its referent. It no longer makes sense to ask to what extent the representation conforms to or distorts the reality, since there are only signs and images, only the hyperreal (Underwood, link 5). To use one of Baudrillard’s best examples: Disneyland is the real America (1993). This statement indicates that the very notion of reality has disappeared and that images have become more real than any other reality: accordingly, if Disneyland would be the real America, that it would mean that Disneyland has become more real than the real America itself (which is now hyperreal). In other words, everything becomes a spectacle carefully orchestrated by the media even though Baudrillard do not propose a simple ‘manipulation theory’ of the media. Both masses and media would in fact be responsible for their reciprocal ‘dumbing down’: the illusion that the media are used by those ‘in power’ to manipulate, seduce and alienate the masses is a wrong interpretation. It is rather the opposite: it is the masses who manipulate those in power through the media (idem). Underwood introduces this aspect with great effectiveness:
Soap opera villains need bodyguards in real life, that TV lawyers receive letters asking for advice, that real flowers are sent to TV funerals when a soap star dies, that advertising campaigns themselves become the subject of news stories, the British Prime Minister has a walk-on role in a Russian soap, he is asked to voice his opinion on the ‘imprisonment’ of a character in the soap Coronation Street. It doesn’t take much reflection to see the force of Baudrillard’s argument. (…) That is a fiction taken for the real, but where is the real on TV? Are Tv shows like Oprah Winfrey’s showing us real people in front of a real audience or are we seeing people simulating actors acting the real? How ‘real’ a President was the former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan? (Underwood, link 5).
To some extent, Baudrillard’s work takes its cue from Guy Debord and the Situationists who were the first to elaborate and to apply the so called concept of spectacle to postmodern society. Basically, this movement was against work and for complete ‘divertissement’ which they backed up by stating that under capitalism, the creativity of most people had become diverted and stifling and that society had been divided into actors and spectators, producers and consumers. On the escort of this thesis they pursued a different kind of revolution, i.e. they wanted imagination to seize power and poetry and art to be made by all. Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure of the movement and in 1967 in his publication ‘The society of the spectacle’ he presented the most elaborate expositions of Situationist theory. In this publication, he argues that capitalism had turned all relationships transactional and that life had been reduced to a ‘spectacle’: in many ways he merely reworked Marx’s view of alienation, but what he added to Marx was the recognition that in order to ensure continued economic growth, capitalism has created ‘pseudo-needs’ to increase consumption. Modern capitalist society would be thus a consumer society, or better, a society of ‘spectacular’ commodity consumption: people are treated like passive objects and the result would be an appalling contrast between cultural poverty and economic wealth, between what is and what could be (Marshall, 1992).
Though Debord is often compared to Baudrillard it is important to understand that Debord clung to the conviction that people could see through capitalist illusions to the underlying reality and that through radical practice the passivity of the people could be overcome (Underwood, link 5). In sharp contrast with Baudrillard`s theories, there was at least a way out in this philosophy: that was the reinvention of everyday life here and now. In place of petrified life, Situationists sought the derive and the detournement and by doing so they wished to act as catalysts within the revolutionary process .
In place of the society of the spectacle, the Situationists proposed a communistic society bereft of money, commodity production, wage labor, classes, private property and the State. Pseudo-needs would be replaced by real desires, and the economy of profit becomes one of pleasure. The division of labor and the antagonism between world and play would be overcome. It would be a society founded on the love of free play, characterized by the refusal to be led, to make sacrifices, and to perform roles. Above all, they insisted that every individual should actively and consciously participate in the reconstruction of every moment of life. They called themselves Situationists precisely because they believed that all individuals should construct the situations of their lives and release their own potential and obtain their own pleasure (Marshall, 1992, 552).
All the above mentioned convictions, however, were alien to Baudrillard’s thought. From his point of view, the era of consumption is also the era of radical alienation and distinctions between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ as well as ‘authentic’ and ‘false’ needs become meaningless. It seems like mass capitalism and media have entered into an alliance in order to dumb down masses without leaving them the room for an objective and free vision of the world. On the one hand, this pessimistic view of society contrasts with Baudrillard’s statement that it is the masses who manipulate those in power through the media (1983) and confirms, on the other hand, his verbosity (common also to other postmodern thinkers) and ambiguity in exposing his theories. In The consumer society (1998) in fact, Baudrillard presents once again a picture of society thoroughly imbued with mass media output that masses are caught up in the play of images and spectacles which assume at least as much as importance as any reality supposedly external to those images . Once again then, the myth of hyperreality seems to creep into his theories and to negate masses the possibility to be critically active.
The lived, unique, eventful character of the world is neutralized and replaced by the infinite play of media which signify one another and refer to one another, to the point where they become the reciprocal content of one another – and that is the totalitarian ‘message’ of a consumer society (idem, 1998, 189).
On Baudrillard’s escort, also Eco seems to argue against the speed and the confusion of images that can arise from the scrambling effect of multi-channel choice on TV, as an example. According to him: “Switching channels reflects the brevity and speed of other visual forms. Like flicking through a magazine, or driving past a billboard. This means that ‘our’ TV evenings no longer tell us stories, it is all a trailer!” (Eco quoted in McRobbie, 1994). Other authors like Fredric Jameson (1991) however, anticipating what I will explain later about consumption behaviors, identifies in all the media events a subtle convergence of commodities and their own images (or using his words, of things and concept), though not from a pessimistic perspective as that of Baudrillard. It seems like the contents of the media itself have now become commodities, which are then flung out on some wider version of the market with which they become affiliated until the two things are indistinguishable. Put it simple, as also Underwood argued, one really wonders when reality ends and where fiction begins:
In the gradual disappearance of the physical market, of course, and the tendential identification of the commodity with its image (or brand name or logo), another, more intimate, symbiosis between the market and the media is effectuated, in which boundaries are washed over (in ways profoundly characteristic of the postmodern) and an indifferentiation of levels gradually takes the place of an older separation between thing and concept (or indeed, economics and culture, base and superstructure). (…) Today the products are, as it were, diffused throughout the space and time of the entertainment (or even news) segments, as part of that content, so that in a few well-publicized cases (most notably the series Dynasty) it is sometimes not clear when the narrative segment has ended and the commercial has begun (since the same actors appear in the commercial segment as well) (Jameson, idem, 275).
For these authors then, the pervasive circulation of serial images, computer-generated models, and media events seem to have established the predominance of an originary production. As a consequence, the simulacrum emerging from marginal spaces of aesthetic or speculative areas has become the standard form in which our experience are recorded, evaluated and exchanged (Durham, 1998). A similar approach had been already presented by Walter Benjamin on the occasion of the discussion about the demise of the auratic work of art: as a matter of fact, techniques of mechanical reproduction have gradually absorbed the original work (particularly in the cases of photography and film, where reproduction emerged for the first time as clearly inseparable from the production of the original). Baudrillard, however, argues that the extraordinary hegemony of originary reproduction has now extended its influence over every aspect of everyday life in the latter part of the 20th century. The simulacrum appears then as an instance of a dominant code that unabashedly submits reality itself to the rigors of its repetitions.
Tabloids, television, shopping malls, theme parks, video games and computer-generated simulations: all attest to the increasing domination of everyday experience by mass-produced simulacra, which effectively undercut in advance any notion of an original referent that would precede its reproduction. It is thus no longer merely for the work of art, but for the whole field of contemporary social practice and production that, in Baudrillard’s view, the notions of ‘original’ and ‘originality’ have ceased to bear the weight of any epistemic, political, or aesthetic authority. To speak of the ‘original’ bottle of Coca Cola is in this sense no less absurd than to speak of the ‘original’ of a photograph, since both are copies from the very moment of their origin. (Durham, 1998, 52).
Nevertheless this negative approach to simulacra should not be seen as the only viable opposition to the positive interpretation of Postmodernism. There are other thinkers who while criticizing Postmodernism as a whole seem also to ponder about the possibility of an extended interpretation of the simulacra. Durham (idem) who criticizes Baudrillard’s ‘post-apocalyptic’ vision of postmodernity offers, at the same time, a new perspective on the issue:
In Baudrillard’s post-apocalyptic vision of postmodernity, the serial images and virtual realities generated by the media and information technologies of all sorts have become the sole arbiters of the ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ of everyday experience, to the point that the spectator or consumer appears only as the vestigial support for the ‘simulation model’ that he or she seems destined to repeat. (…) This is Baudrillard’s grim version of that now-familiar postmodern topos, ‘the death of the subject’: the spectating subject appears as a mere monitor or terminal, as the screen on which all these codes and images intersect (idem, 1998, 21).
According to Durham then, simulacra should be observed from two main perspectives: the first conceives of the simulacrum as the copy of the copy which produces in turn an effect of identity without being grounded in an original. This notion of the simulacrum is already found in Plato, who distinguishes between the good copy or icon (which inwardly participates in the Idea) and the false copy or simulacrum (which repeats only the external appearance of the icon without itself participating in the Idea that founds it). This notion of the simulacrum can also be traced back to antiquity, perhaps most strikingly to the attacks of pagan simulacra by Tertullian and Augustine. For these Fathers of the Church, the simulacrum is not merely the copy of a copy that has ceased to resemble its original. It is also the mask of an evil simulator, a diabolical actor who, by repeating a familiar image, assumes another`s identity as the mask of its malign intentions (idem, 1998).
The second perspective implies, on the contrary, a positive interpretation of the simulacrum seen as an occasion for euphoria: through the simulacrum, we discover ourselves as actors, and our very identities appear as joyful masquerade and performance. In other words:
The first sees the simulacrum as a merely factitious or empty representation, while the second sees it as the expression of metamorphic ‘power of the false’. The first interprets repetition in terms of its distance from a founding identity, whereas the second sees it as the return of difference (idem, 1998, 15).
The centrality of the image, its availability and its reproducibility thanks to the technological improvements of the 20th century (think about photography, cinema and Internet, for example) have allowed mass media to play a central (and also positive) role in the processes of identity creation and self-representation. Images become the central focus because from the daily interaction with them one can deepen the knowledge of reality without the fear of being overwhelmed by saturation.
Images push their way into the fabric of our social lives. They enter into how we look and what we earn, and they are still with us when we worry about bills, housing and bringing up children. They compete for attention through shock tactics, reassurance, sex and mystery, and by inviting viewers to participate in series of visual puzzles. Billboard advertising showing an image without a code impose themselves, infuriatingly, on the most recalcitrant passer-by (McRobbie, 1994, 18).
Accordingly, audiences or viewers, lookers or users are no more simple-minded multitudes, but rather active and conscious counterparts. The more the interconnections between audiences and media representations become intricate, the more the former division between ‘reality’ and ‘virtuality’ seems to fade in a kind of renewed, interactive and collaborative form:
Baudrillard’s pessimistic thesis is that the media appear to extend themselves generously to their audience in a gesture designed to demonstrate democratic embrace while in fact merely extending the sphere of their influence and control. A less pessimistic postmodernist account might instead emphasize not just the flow of images and texts as they circulate through the new economy of the sign but also the flow of active agents, whose role in the production and distribution of the image is not as robotic as Baudrillard would suggest. Such an account would also require much more analysis of the occupational culture and experience of media workers employed in this postmodern de-regulated sector, as well as of their audiences. (…) The problems with the old model of the moral panic are as follows. First it assumed a clear distinction between the world of the media and the world of social reality. But in one simple sense the media are as much a part of social reality as any other component can be. We do not exist in social unreality while we watch television or read the newspaper, nor are we transported back to reality when we turn the TV off to wash the dishes or discard the paper and go to bed. Indeed perhaps there is no pure social reality outside the world of representation. Reality is relayed to us through the world of language, communication and imagery. Social meanings are inevitably representations and selections (idem, 1994, 216-217).
This approach seems to be backed up also by other thinkers’ theories such as those of Marshall MacLuhan who arguing that the ‘the medium is the message’ (1967) agrees on the ability of mass broadcasting to create visual symbols and mass action as a liberating force in human affairs. According to this ‘technological utopianism’ associated with postmodernism, digital communication would make the fragmentation of modern society a positive feature, since individuals can seek out those artistic, cultural and community experiences which they regard as being correct for themselves. In other words, the individual becomes able to form its identity and to structure the ‘truth’ from fragments while gaining, at the same time, the independence to organize his own environment. On this escort, McRobbie (1994) seems to recall somehow the concepts explained by MacLuhan when she states that ‘real life means talking about what was on TV last night’ . Also other authors like Lyotard (1979), debating about the possibly positive outcomes of mass media and in particular about computerization of society, states that bringing people knowledge in the form of information, it will produce more liberty for the entire social system.

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Baudrillard and the looting of Baghdad

2005-04-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

electronicIraq.net

Art, Music & Culture
Furious Envy - Baudrillard and the looting of Baghdad

Stephen Smith, Electronic Iraq

4 September 2003

Heavy suspicion remains that failure of the US to protect heritage sites, more than negligence, was a deliberate oversight designed as a kind of cultural 'shock and awe' that would devastate a sense of shared culture among Iraqis, leaving a blank page for the imprint of the US occupying force and the reconstruction to follow. If proven, this would be cultural genocide not witnessed during this civilization and indeed rarely experienced over the 7,000-year time span of these lost collections.

Among non-embedded journalists, there were doubts raised about the seemingly random nature of the looting. In Baghdad, Robert Fisk observed:

"But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?" [1]

The confusion surrounding the fall of Baghdad makes it difficult to answer this question, especially when the line is unclear between spontaneous popular action and propaganda. However it is not only the interpretation of events that stands in the way of understanding. Much of the commentary, from either inside or outside Baghdad, has lacked a theoretical framework and cultural perspective.

Writing in Le Monde diplomatique in November 2002, French writer and critic
Jean Baudrillard gives us a theoretical model for understanding the chaos of Baghdad. In this article, "The Despair of Having Everything" [2], his main argument is that:
"The West's mission is to make the world's wealth of cultures interchangeable, and to subordinate them within the global order. Our culture, which is bereft of values, revenges itself upon the values of other cultures."

Baudrillard goes on to develop this theme.
"The rise of the globalised system has been powered by the furious envy of an indifferent, low-definition culture faced with the reality of high-definition cultures. Envy is what disenchanted systems that have lost their intensity feel in the presence of high-intensity cultures... This is a violent expression of repressed feeling about lives in captivity, about sheltered existence, about, in fact, having far too much of existence."

"Within the traditional order it was always possible to repay God, or nature, or another higher authority, by sacrifice. Today there is no one left to compensate, to whom we might repay our symbolic debt. This is the curse of our culture: although giving is not impossible, giving back is impossible, because sacrifice has had its importance and power taken away."

Baudrillard's concept of 'sacrifice' can be understood as the role of ritual and ceremony in infusing society with its values. It is an individual's participation in and exchange with his or her society and culture.

The importance Baudrillard attaches to the loss of capacity for 'giving back' can be equated, in a cultural sense, to unequal exchange. If all cultures are interchangeable and subordinated, there can no longer be cultural exchange. A capacity for 'giving back' across north and south, between the West and the rest of the world, ultimately provides humanity's sole common ground. This is precisely what is missing under globalisation.

To understand the hatred the rest of the world feels towards the West, Baudrillard's article says we must therefore reverse our perspective.
"This is not the hatred felt by people from whom we have taken everything and to whom we have given nothing back. Rather, it is the hatred felt by those to whom we have given everything and who can give nothing in return. Their hatred stems from humiliation, not from dispossession or exploitation."

"The worst thing that can happen to global power is not for it to be attacked or destroyed but for it to be humiliated. Global power was humiliated on September 11 because the terrorists inflicted an injury that could not be inflicted on them in return. Reprisals are only physical retaliations, whereas global power had suffered a symbolic defeat. War can only respond to the terrorists' physical aggression, not to the challenge they represent. Their defiance can only be addressed by vengefully humiliating the "others" (but surely not by crushing them with bombs)."

Baudrillard's concept of vengeful humiliation suggests that the US views the non-West as a universal other. In this respect an Iraqi is interchangeable with someone from al-Qaeda, who is interchangeable with any other Arab, Muslim, Asian etc. This has assumed the proportions of a cultural genocide in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. As an Iraqi archaeologist told The New York Times:
"A country's identity, its value and civilization resides in its history. If a country's civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation". [3]

To prove a strategy of deliberate oversight, we can measure the US response in Baghdad against three key indicators. Firstly, in the first days of occupation, what responsibilities were taken up by US forces in the city? Secondly, after the prolonged build-up of hostilities, did the US, as occupying power, owe a duty of care to Iraqi heritage? Finally, to what extent was Iraqi mass action manipulated for propaganda purposes, and at what cost to site protection?

On the first point, indications are that there was a clear difference in priority given to protection of economic as opposed to cultural sites. The safeguarding of the files and secrets within the Iraqi Oil Ministry reveals the priority and motives of the invading forces. Under round the clock surveillance and guarded by US tanks to block every entrance, the Oil Ministry was one of the very few public buildings to remain untouched by looters. [4]

The issue of duty of care has also been addressed in a very direct manner. Before war commenced, international scholars made urgent appeals to prevent the destruction from what is considered by many as the cradle of civilization.

On 28 March the Science and Technology News Service published The grave danger to the priceless heritage of Iraq by military action. It was signed by more than 100 distinguished American and European academics. A similar plea went out from the Blue Shield Organisation, representing four international bodies for libraries, museums, archives and monuments. [5]

McGuire Gibson, Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology at The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, met with Department of Defence officials in January 2003:
I made the point the museum was the single most important archaeological location in the country, and they said we are aware of it and it would be heavily safeguarded and it won't be targeted. [6]

The US clearly had a duty of care to protect Iraq's heritage. This conclusion is supported by three White House cultural advisers who resigned in protest at the failure to prevent the looting of Iraq's National Museum. Martin Sullivan, Chairman of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property, stated: "The tragedy was not prevented, due to our nation's inaction. In a pre-emptive war that's the kind of thing you should have planned for". A fellow committee member regretted "the administration's total lack of sensitivity and forethought regarding the Iraq invasion and loss of cultural treasures". [7]

In one of his dispatches for The Independent, Robert Fisk anguished:
"Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose - and less than three months after US archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military data-base - did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad." [8]

"Stuff happens," came the Rumsfeld reply. "It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things". He joked, "Television is merely running the same footage of the same man stealing a vase over and over," and added that he didn't think there were that many vases in Iraq. [9]

With this image of a stolen vase copied endlessly, how ironic that Rumsfeld unwittingly makes reference to Baudrillard's concept that the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced. The hyperreal. [10]

While the staged Saddam statue toppling obsessed Fox News and the BBC, it was not of the same order of symbolism as the toppling of the Berlin Wall. Far from a joyous, spontaneous celebration, the people taking to the streets included a gangster element - antiquities smugglers and militants who incited further waves of looting by the poorest victims of the regime.

Organised crime had time to plan and execute these heists under cover of general looting. After countless dire warnings, the Pentagon should have anticipated chaos and prepared counter measures. Unfortunately, conduct under its own command saw instances of soldiers directly engaged in looting. TIME Magazine investigated how US troops trashed Baghdad's International Airport with damage running as high as $100 million. [11]

Allegations that American troops invited and provoked looting are made by a number of sources. Together they form a convincing testimony. On 11 April, Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter gave a description by human shield Khaled Bayomi of the part played by American soldiers in the wave of plundering:
"The soldiers shot two Sudanese guards who stood at their posts outside a local administration building. Then they blasted apart the doors to the building and from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to them... Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the building. The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked... The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north." [12]

Eyewitness reports also exist of looting at the National Museum. The Asia Times Online describes how curators started collecting disturbing evidence that this was a well organised operation:
"Archaeological files and computer disks simply disappeared. Glass-cutting tools were found on the museum's floor. Replicas that the curators had switched with the genuine article were still there, but the genuine artworks were stolen. The museum's vaults had been opened with special keys: an armed guard at the museum told Asia Times Online that American soldiers had not taken anything, but that they had opened the doors for "people from other nationalities" to loot. "The way they opened the locks, no Iraqi could do it."" [13]

Walter Sommerfeld, Professor for Ancient Oriental Studies, Head of Institute, University of Marburg, was in Baghdad in early May. His report (and English translation) is available on the Marburg website. [14] In considering eyewitness accounts of looting he comments that:
"The most surprising detail of the descriptions was that American soldiers made the lootings possible by breaking or shooting often well-secured gates open, shouting to by-standers "Go in, Ali Baba, it's yours!"

This stock phrase was repeated over and over again by witnesses; "Ali Baba" seems to be the American catch phrase for looting Iraqis. It was also commonly reported that Kuwaitis who accompanied the soldiers as translators and guides invited them to plunder."

In describing the looting of the National Museum, one of Sommerfeld's observers adds that American soldiers incited the crowd to help themselves with the words "this is your treasure, get in!"

Sommerfeld names three witnesses to the Museum looting. He gives their occupations and attributes quotes to each. For example, according to the guard of a neighbouring mosque:
"The Americans came back at 4.30 the next morning, and an officer ordered his troops to advance into the museum. Kuwaitis were there with the American troops... They took archaeological artefacts out of the museum and loaded them onto seven trucks of the U.S. military. The whole convoy drove away accompanied by armoured cars."

The BBC's Jonathan Duffy gives an account of the central role of American troops in the looting at Nasiriya's Technical Institute. [15] The Dean, Dr Khalid Majeed, said the Americans arrived in five vehicles, but refused to ward off looters. Instead the soldiers fired several dozen rounds at the college's south wall. The crowd, says Dr Majeed, saw this action as the 'green light' to looters. Duffy identifies two spectators who go on to describe the Americans waving and signalling for the crowd to move in:
"They started looting quickly and when one man came out with an air conditioner an American said to him 'Good, very good'."

Robert Fisk possesses a willingness to engage with locals and get close to the street action. Much weight can be given to his observations of a sinister arson campaign. Crucially, he agrees with Sommerfeld about a separation between looting and burning. First to Sommerfeld:

"The arsonists came afterwards, systematically dousing the looted buildings with gasoline... and lighting them ablaze. The difference in time between the looting and burning of a building was sometimes as much as four days."

Fisk sees more to the extent of noting the use by the arsonist gangs of blue and white buses to move around a citywide chain of institutional targets.
"The arsonists were an army. They were calculated and they knew where to go, they had maps, they were told where to go. Who told them where to go? ... This is a very, very important question that still needs to be reconciled and answered." [16]

Strangely, these gangs were apparently beyond the control of US forces that had so easily seen Republican Guard resistance melt away. Much evidence points to a planned attack on cultural sites. A full investigation must be held to determine US complicity. But for this to happen there would need to be strong international legislation and strict enforcement.

Article 9 of the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict [17] sets out obligations on states in control of occupied territories. They must prevent "any illicit export, removal or transfer of ownership of cultural property" (eg looting). Also prohibited are attempts to "destroy cultural, historical or scientific evidence" (eg arson). Neither the USA nor the UK are signatories to this Convention. Consequently they have not signed the Second Protocol.

The US Attorney General and Interpol [18] now accept that the most valuable objects from museums and galleries were not taken by casual looters but by organised criminal groups who knew precisely what they were looking for, and had a market to sell to. But as McGuire Gibson observes:
Many of the people who collect and exhibit this material are extraordinarily powerful people, with lots of connections in Washington, lots of connections in London, and various places. [19]

In 2001 a number of influential antiquities collectors and arts lawyers formed the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP). The ACCP opposes any US legal precedent that might prevent importing and handling of objects regarded as "stolen property" if banned for export under foreign legislation. The Council's William Pearlstein has labelled heritage protection laws in Iraq as "retentionist". [20] Another ACCP identity, John Merryman, Professor of Law at Stanford University, expresses a core interest of collectors and the art trade:
"The existence of a market preserves cultural objects that might otherwise be destroyed or neglected by providing them with a market value. In an open, legitimate trade, cultural objects can move to the people and institutions that value them most and are therefore most likely to care for them". [21]

At the Baghdad museum the exact number of lost artefacts has been disputed and in fact may never be known. But recounting of objects in museum cases to prove some factor of exaggeration in reports of looting is to ignore the loss of the value of scholarship from what are often misrepresented as 'art objects'. Even if pieces are recovered unharmed, accession numbers may have been removed to make illegal sale easier, or else vital documentation may have disappeared. The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott makes this profound observation:
Once an object has been stolen from a museum, it begins a metamorphosis, losing its scholarly and archaeological context and becoming a mere commodity. [22]

The theft of museum pieces to become commodities tears them away from their cultural context. How well the plundering of Mesopotamia's treasures fits Baudrillard's classic analysis of the reparation of Pharaoh Rameses II as:
"an irreparable violence towards all secrets, the violence of a civilisation without secrets. The hatred by an entire civilisation for its own foundations." [23]

This desire to unmask Egypt's secrets is a link to the "furious envy" of global power when faced with the symbolic order of Iraqi (and world) heritage.

By all key indicators, there is convincing evidence to support the hypothesis of deliberate oversight by US forces in their failure to protect Iraqi treasures. This negligence appears to have occurred in combination with a more disturbing manipulation of events with little connection to outbursts among the people.

Not surprisingly, media outlets in the Middle East have also questioned whether the looting was purely a spontaneous reaction against the collapsed regime.
"In fact, it was the result of a well-studied policy concerning the future of the occupation to ensure its security and stability by preventing the Iraqi people from resisting it by preoccupying it with a state of chaos, unrest, and disturbance." [24]

According to Baudrillard's article, war combines a number of events:
"The primary aim of warfare is to normalise savagery and beat territories into alignment. Another objective is to diminish any zone of resistance, to colonize and tame any terrain, geographical or mental."

The cultural dimension of war in Iraq did not escape the gaze of Arab commentators.
"Of course it is not possible to separate one event from the other. The looting of museums is not less painful than the scenes of killing thousands of innocent people... Whoever wanted to wipe out the landmarks of civilization through the massing of all means of destruction.... was definitely targeting this civilization... The question is why this severity and barbarity? The answer lies in the fact that a land, which possesses this civilization, is capable of renewing its civilization." [25]

In the light of Baudrillard's theory, the Iraqi people during US led reconstruction would see a shadow cast across the Middle East. The darkness of imposed universal, western values. If as Baudrillard says, the world's wealth of cultures can be rendered interchangeable, this would certainly create an unequal exchange. Despite former glories, nations such as Iraq would have nothing to give back in return, except the symbolic challenge of terrorism.

Stephen Smith has worked in the area of policy advice for libraries and cultural institutions in Australia. He is currently working on public sector broadcasting issues.

Endnotes

[1] Robert Fisk, Library books, letters, and priceless documents are set ablaze in final chapter of the sacking of Baghdad, The Independent, 15 April 2003 http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0415-07.htm

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The despair of having everything, translation posted on:
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0211/msg00067.html
see also: http://MondeDiplo.com/2002/11/12despair

[3] John F. Burns, Pillagers strip Iraqi Museum of its treasure, The New York Times, April 13, 2003
http://truthout.org/docs_03/041403C.shtml

[4] Oil Ministry the most secured building, The News International (Pakistan),
17 April 2003
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/apr2003-daily/17-04-2003/world/w3.htm

[5] Nevine El-Aref, A heritage under siege, Al Ahram Weekly On-line (Cairo),
13 April 2003
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/633/hr2.htm

[6] Where civilization began, Archaeology, Vol 56 No 4, July/August 2003
http://www.archaeology.org/magazine.php?page=0307/etc/civilization

[7] US experts resign over Iraqi looting, BBC News World Edition, 18 April 2003 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2958009.stm

[8] Robert Fisk, A civilisation torn to pieces, The Independent, 13 April 2003
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3456

[9] Lawrence Smallman, Rumsfeld cracks jokes, but Iraqis aren't laughing, aljazeera.net, 13 April 2003
http://www.payk.net/mailingLists/iran-news/html/2003.1/msg00976.html

[10] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Semiotext(e), New York, 1983, p 146

[11] Simon Robinson, Grounding planes the wrong way, TIME Magazine,
6 July 2003

[12] Ole Rothenborg, US troops encouraged ransacking, Dagens Nyheter, translation: Joe Valasek, truthout.org, 12 May 2003
http://truthout.org/docs_03/041603D.shtml
Ole Rothenborg, USA uppmanade till rofferi, Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm),
11 April 2003
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1435&a=129852

[13] Pepe Escobar, The lions of Babylon, Asia Times Online, 26 April 2003
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED26Ak06.html

[14] Walter Sommerfeld, The systematic destruction of Iraqi culture, translation: Christian Hess, University of Marburg website
http://www.uni-marburg.de/altorientalistik/war.html

[15] Jonathan Duffy, US troops 'encouraged' Iraqi looters, BBC News Online,
6 May 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3003393.stm

[16] Robert Fisk and Amy Goodman, An anti-colonial war against the Americans may have already begun: an interview with Robert Fisk on Democracy Now,
Znet Iraq, 22 April 2003, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3503

[17] UNESCO, Second Protocol to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, The Hague, 26 March 1999
http://www.unesco.org/culture/laws/hague/html_eng/protocol2.shtml

[18] Prepared remarks of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, INTERPOL Meeting on Cultural Property Looting in Iraq, 6 May 2003, Lyon, France
http://www.interpol.com/Public/ICPO/speeches/Ashcroft20030506.asp

[19] Where civilization began, Archaeology, Vol 56 No 4, July/August 2003
http://www.archaeology.org/magazine.php?page=0307/etc/civilization

[20] Zainab Bahrani, Looting and conquest, The Nation, 14 May 2003
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030526&s=bahrani

[21] John Henry Merryman, The free international movement of cultural property, New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, Vol 31 No 1, p 10
http://www.nyu.edu/pubs/jilp/

[22] Philip Kennicott, The vanishing past, Washington Post, 18 April 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=
article&node=&contentId=A47963-2003Apr17¬Found=true

[23] Baudrillard, Simulations, p 21

[24] Muhammad Khayr al-Jamali, The background for the policy of destruction and ruination, Al-Thawrah (Damascus), 15 April 2003
Online version in TIDES Middle East Report No. 58
http://ww3.carebridge.org/~tides/058MER17APR03..htm#The_Background_For

[25] Hamid Hawran, Why target the symbols of civilization?, Al-Ba'th (Damascus), 14 April 2003
Online version in TIDES Middle East Report No. 57
http://ww3.carebridge.org/~tides/057MER16APR03.htm#Why_Target_the

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Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy

2005-04-11T15:55:00.000-07:00

Subverting the Mechanisms of Control: ©2003 Jim Rovira, Drew University

"It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of Empire, but of ours. The desert of the real itself." (Baudrillard 1)

"Welcome to the desert of the real." - Morpheus, The Matrix.

The marriage of art and idea is an old one in western culture. From the dominance of theological motifs over medieval creative production to the influence of psychoanalytic theory upon early 20th century art and literature, the western aesthetic has consistently taken direction in both form and theme from abstract theoretical frameworks. The late 20th century saw this relationship become increasingly self-conscious as postmodern theory became a dominant paradigm. The Matrix Trilogy works specifically within a paradigm derived in part from the postmodern theory of Jean Baudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulation makes its appearance in The Matrix in the "Follow Instructions" scene. Thomas Anderson (a.k.a. Neo, played by Keanu Reeves) opens a copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation to a chapter entitled "On Nihilism." The hardcover book is hollow, serving as Neo's hiding place for black market software. He opens the book at the halfway point; the opening page of the final chapter, "On Nihilism," lies to the left while the right half is a hollowed out storage area. First note that the opening page of the chapter was displaced to the left side of the book when it would normally be found on the right. Add to this the fact that "On Nihilism" is the book's last chapter, not a middle chapter, and it appears that the directors have deliberately placed this chapter in the shot to direct viewers to a specific referential point for the film. Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, in fact, is so intricately woven into the narrative structure that the movie can be described as a conscious validation of Baudrillard's theory. Simulacra and Simulation was so important to the directors that it was required reading for cast members (Nichols 26). This, however, was the only Baudrillard appropriated by the film. As such, The Matrix Trilogy is a snapshot of Baudrillard rather than a representation of his thought over time.

But the film doesn't draw just from Baudrillard. Almost paradoxically, religious imagery seemingly confronts the viewer at every turn. Neo, the One, the savior of humanity, dies and returns to life and has remarkable abilities within the Matrix. He is sought out and revealed by a John the Baptist figure, Morpheus, and is betrayed by a Judas figure, Cipher. Neo is loved by Trinity and becomes the One by attaining full consciousness of his surroundings, enabling him to realize his abilities within the Matrix. His perception of his environment as streams of computer code at the end of the first movie signals the apex of his enlightenment and also the point at which he has absolute mastery of the Matrix, immune to bullets and even death while within it. Baudrillard and overt religious imagery seem to be odd theoretical bedfellows, however; religion is virtually non-existent in "On Nihilism," having been twice displaced: "The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and history" (Baudrillard 160). Religion isn't named, isn't even a discreet object in "On Nihilism," it is a displaced member of a class, "appearances," part of a previous enchantment from which the nineteenth century was disenchanted.

The Wachowski Brothers drew from a wide range of religious traditions even though Christianity provides the predominant sign system in the first film. As a result, it seems less likely that the film is proselytization for any specific religion and more likely that Baudrillard's critique of the west failed the Wachowski brothers when they wanted to move beyond critique. The Wachowski Brothers have created an effective sign system that serves as a generic representation of the process of enlightenment, one so effectively generic that any and every connection -- from Christ to Gödel to Buddhism -- is relevant, whether or not it is directly referenced by the film or even known to the directors. Baudrillard's "On Nihilism" goes on to describe the destruction of meaning via postmodernism once meaning has been destroyed by appearances, but once both meaning and appearance has been destroyed, what is left? In the midst of a theoretically destructed and deconstructed society no images, signs, or sign systems are available for the act of construction that seems so inevitable to human thinking. The Wachowski brothers' appropriation of religious imagery to meet this need is telling. It is quite possible that The Matrix Trilogy not only points to the past and present future of science fiction, but to the past and present future of religion; it seems that their film series asserts that the dialectic of enlightenment governing the early 21st century is a dialectic engaging both instrumental reason and mystical religious experience. This question can only begin to be answered, however, via an analysis of the films in the light of Baudrillard.

In the pre-history of The Matrix Trilogy, which also finds exposition in the Animatrix film shorts, human computer technology developed to the point of creating an artificial intelligence; a thinking, willing, self-determined, conscious computer. This computer continued to learn and grow, "spawning a whole race of machines" (Matrix 1.7), gaining influence over human society incrementally to the point of almost total control. Human revolt took the form of an atomic cataclysm initiating a nuclear winter intended to block sunlight from the surface of the Earth and shut down the solar-powered computer. The plot, to this point, is unoriginal. The Terminator films operate on the same premise. It is the extension of the war into the minutia of human consciousness that generates an aura of mystical enlightenment over the film, adding to its widespread appeal. This extension of control takes place in response to the nuclear cataclysm: the computer started breeding human beings for use as a power source. It created a technology that grew its victims in gel-filled pods, intravenously feeding them nutrients while tapping their body heat and electro-chemical activity to power the computer. To keep people alive as long as possible the computer created a program called "the Matrix," an exact sensory duplicate or, as it is called in the film, "neural interactive simulation," of late 20th century earth (Matrix 1.12). People grown in pods, nicknamed "coppertops" to reflect their sole purpose of powering a computer (Matrix 1.7, 1.12), are plugged directly into the computer network via implants in the bases of their skulls. Each individual within the Matrix perceives themselves as living out a normal life somewhere in late 20th century earth while, in reality, their entire lives are lived within a gel filled pod.

Compare this to Baudrillard's "The Precession of Simulacra," which asserts that simulation "is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal" (1). His word for this model of a real "without origin or reality" is "simulacrum": a copy without an original. By the "desert of the real" (quoted above) he means that the simulacrum, the imitation, now has more vitality and integrity than the original, which is fraying beneath the edges of the imitation, decaying, "rotting like a carcass" (Baudrillard 1). This construct moves beyond imitation, it works by

substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have a chance to produce itself. (Baudrillard 2)

This is precisely the world of the movies. The "real" late 20th century earth is a charred, uninhabitable wasteland, impossible to reproduce or recover, while 20th century earth in simulacrum is vital, alive, unchanged.

The diabolical nature of simulacra is reflected not only by its concealment of the decay of the real but through its intent, an intent Baudrillard seeks to expose in the essay "Simulacra and Science Fiction," also found in Simulacra and Simulation. In that essay he describes three levels of simulacra, each reflected by three forms of science fiction: natural simulacra, expressed through utopian literature; productive simulacra, expressed through "traditional" science fiction; and the simulacra of simulation, represented in the novels of Philip K. Dick and projected to be the science fiction of the future. Baudrillard specifically drew from Philip K. Dick in this essay, using Dick's novel The Simulacra as the basis of his theory of science fiction. In this novel western society is divided into different levels, each characterized by their knowledge of the fictions that govern society. The west, a conglomeration of Europe and the United States in Dick's projected future, is governed by the First Lady and different Presidents are elected to be her husband. The latest Presidents don't even really exist. Each are simulacrum created by private industry contracted out to the government. When the First Lady tries to cut the company that makes the Presidents out of the next contract, the company exposes their secret and western society unravels. Fringe elements then try to take control and establish a totalitarian state. It is this third form of simulacrum that is reproduced in The Matrix, the latest in a long line of science fiction stories that trap human society within a fictional world.

It should be noted at this point that Baudrillard told New York Times editorialist Brett Staples that the first Matrix film proceeds upon a misunderstanding of his books (Staples 1). Baudrillard's statement may reflect the fact that the films delve into ontological questions about reality and perception he disregarded for the sake of social analysis. The Wachowski Brothers, in the first film, seem to be interrogating metaphysical questions that Baudrillard specifically said were abandoned by the third level of science fiction, the level of science fiction that the Matrix films seem intended to represent (see quotation below). It should be observed, however, that the films abandon the ontological questioning so heavily stressed in the first film to focus more and more on control, and knowledge as a means of control, as the central issues in the second and third films. This raises the likely possibility that the Wachowski Brothers were never primarily interested in ontological questions. The ontological questioning was merely a means of discourse on issues of control.

These control issues, according to Baudrillard's argument in Simulacra and Simulation, are fully exploited in the third level of simulacra, the simulacrum of simulation, which is "founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game – total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control" (121). He asserts that Dick's novel depicts a gigantic "hologram in three dimensions, in which fiction will never again be a mirror held toward the future, but a desperate hallucination of the past" (Baudrillard 123) and that in its historical moment this type of science fiction is produced by societies that have lost the pioneering imagination, that have spanned their territory from ocean to ocean, because "when the map covers the whole territory, something like the principle of reality disappears" (Baudrillard 123, his emphasis). He argues that human excursions into space, which effectively project earthly habitats into the transcendence of outer space, signal the "the end of metaphysics, the end of the phantasm, the end of science fiction" (Baudrillard 124), and the beginning of the era of hyperreality.

Baudrillard goes into some detail about the future of science fiction:

It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real, the imaginary from the givens of the real. The process will, rather, be the opposite: it will be to put decentered situations, models of simulation in place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real, of the banal, of lived experience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life. (124)

Baudrillard's thesis is workable, but not without problems, as it could be argued that all three levels of simulacra had as their concern "total control" in varying forms – the first could be said to be concerned with mastery of a new physical environment, the second with mastery of a new network of societies, and the third with mastery of individual consciousness. A more effective description would seek to describe the different types of control represented by each of these forms of science fiction, each an expression of instrumental reason as understood within the context of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. As one domain is mastered, mastery of the next is sought, until the state's ubiquitous control extends even to the minutia of human consciousness.
Either way, the hyperreal in The Matrix serves the purpose of total control, as in Baudrillard. Morpheus' speech to Neo during his first experience of a miniature "neural interactive simulation" in scene 12, "The Real World," is pure exposition of Baudrillard's thesis. After explaining to Neo late 20th century earth history and the purpose of the Matrix, Morpheus goes on to ask:

What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dreamworld built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this [he holds up a coppertop battery]. (Matrix 1.12)

As in Baudrillard, the simulacra of simulation that is the Matrix is a device whose aim is total control, a device seeking to reduce human existence to no purpose but the guarantee of the continued survival of the system. People are not unlike cattle whose defecation fertilizes the ground from which they feed, who exist only to feed their owners, kept within set bounds they are never allowed to transgress. This is the Wachowski Brothers' commentary on late 20th century society and our participation in it: that we have been reduced to the status of drones feeding the system upon which we are dependent, and the system works hard to keep us from this knowledge.

"On Nihilism" is Baudrillard's description of the progression of nihilism parallel to his earlier description of the progression of science fiction. He contrasts the nihilism of the 19th century, characterized by "the destruction of appearances [. . .] in the service of meaning (representation, history, etc.)" with the nihilism of the 20th which entails the destruction of meaning itself (Baudrillard 160). When Baudrillard said that the "true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances" (160) his argument seems to parallel Lyotard's historical/philosophical metanarrative opening The Postmodern Condition. "Modernity" in the form of Marxism, Darwinian evolutionary theory, and Freud's theory of the mind destroyed the appearances imposed upon human thought via the previous grand narratives provided by religion.

Baudrillard then goes on to detail "the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning" (160-1). By the destruction of meaning he means the destruction of what had been called "meaning" by its redefinition as appearance – the introduction of the hyperreal. Terrorism of the past relied upon aleatory violence to provide the necessary function of "checking the system in broad daylight" (Baudrillard 163). Terrorism of the present, according to Baudrillard, is concerned with transparency, melancholy, and fascination: simulacra are made transparent to reveal the loss of the real beneath them; nihilism is melancholic because it is overcome by an indifference inspired by the transparency of simulacra; the nihilist's fascination is fascination "by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance" (160). These are all facets of a nihilism directed toward the hyperreal, and this is the type of nihilism represented in The Matrix. Morpheus and his group are understood by those who seek to preserve the system as dangerous terrorists, but not because of the physical destruction they cause. For the most part they destroy only appearances; while the people they kill in the Matrix really die in their pods, the life they understood as theirs never ended because it never existed. Morpheus and his group are known as terrorists because of their awareness that they are primarily destroying appearances. The problem is that these appearances are so intimately linked with the "real" human being beneath it that to kill the one is to kill the other. Absolute liberation is suicide, or only by suicide.

The second movie in the trilogy, The Matrix Reloaded, reinforces this convinction. Even Zion is dependent upon machines, and to shut down the Matrix will be, consequently, to shut down the millions of lives dependent upon it. Neo, at the end of the second film, risks the lives of virtually the entire human race by refusing to submit to the mechanisms of control, and at this point it's not apparent that he hasn't already risked or sacrificed the lives of every human being in the Matrix. Their reasoning here quite possibly mirrors state reasoning intended to justify civilian casualities in time of war, introducing the problematic of killing those, or at least some of those, you intend to liberate. At some point death itself appears to be liberation. The third film resolves this tension the only way possible: a detenté with the machines for the sake of defeating the "anti-Christ" within Matrix mythology, Agent Smith. Through his ubiquitous self replication he threatens to transform the entire human and machine world into a single, self replicated "I." Control would then be truly absolute, for only a singular will would be in existence.

Baudrillard goes on to argue in "On Nihilim" that nihilism today still checks the system in broad daylight, but not with weapons: "Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left to us" (Baudrillard 163). His immediate hope is that "the more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure" (Baudrillard 163). He compares even the most infinitesimal challenge of a hegemonic system to a wry smile at the end of an impassioned speech; it invalidates everything said previously, "effaces the whole discourse" (Baudrillard 163). The Matrix Reloaded reveals that even Zion is part of an infinitesimal system anomaly that needed to be maintained in order for the system to work at all. Intuition is pit against instrumental reason, reason designed to dominate nature and human beings, in a dialectic in which each is dependent upon the other. Baudrillard ultimately asserts that the situation is insoluble because the system itself is nihilistic, absorbing both physical and theoretical violence into its own indifference, as the Matrix attempts to do in The Matrix Reloaded, wanting to incorporate the unique insights of Neo, the latest version of the One, into itself until all potential choices produced by intuition exist only as choices within the Matrix. At that point, the Architect fantasizes, his system will have achieved total control. In Baudrillard, even death "shines by virtue of its absence" and participants remain seduced by appearances again, appearance imposing itself upon us through the meaning that ostensibly destroyed it (Baudrillard 163). Matrix Revolutions represents the wry smile in Neo's final confrontation with Agent Smith, who effectively outthinks himself while Neo, confident, overcomes through submission.

Recent events in the United States seem to bear out Baudrillard's observations: physical terrorist violence only strengthens the grip of the system as people become willing to substitute knowledge, privacy, and governmental accountability for security. At this point, of course, the value of his observations come into question. What is the purpose of the knowledge gained by his analysis if even Baudrillard's own theoretical violence is ineffectual? Is the social critic and theorist a clownish figure pointing out incongruities we all accept? Or is there an optimism masked by the mere act of writing, one that presupposes that "enlightenment" in the form of knowledge of the individual's material system of relations can empower the individual to break free, to some degree, of the system in which all are caught?

This ubiquitous control exercised by this system even (or especially) extends to the mundane sphere of the workplace, representing the individual's economic existence. In the scene "They're Coming for You" in the first film, Neo's supervisor at the computer firm Metacortex (higher mind, drawing a parallel between the A.I. supercomputer and the organizational structures of the everyday workplaces) chastises Neo for being late to work by saying:

You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special, and that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously you are mistaken. This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole. Thus, if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem. The time has come to make a choice, Mr. Anderson. Either you choose to be at your desk on time from this day forward, or you choose to find yourself another job. Do I make myself clear? (Matrix 1.5)

Ironically, window washers distract both Neo and his supervisor while the supervisor delivers this reprimand, window cleaning representing both the clarity of the supervisor's position and the clarity of Neo's place in the workforce. The clarity of signification serves as the means of reinforcing an ideological construct; namely, the ideology guiding the workplace. Neo's value in the workplace, similar to his value within the Matrix, is simply to feed the system. When he no longer does so he is flushed out. Control mechanisms are set up in both contexts to ensure he serves the role intended for him.

The system, the artificial world, interpellates each individual within it so completely that their perceived subjectivity is a complete fiction, a simulacrum, while their "real" subjectivity is completely unknown to them. Their fictional subjectivity is taken for granted, never questioned, even to the point where their real physical existence and perceived physical existence are literally worlds apart. This existence is maintained and supported by the Matrix for its own material benefit and physical survival. Neo's conversation with his supervisor parallels, precisely, his relationship to the Matrix, and it is a relationship in which he will play his part, subject himself to control, or he will be disciplined or removed by "agents" of control.

Since Morpheus, Trinity, Neo, and their group are known as terrorists within the world of the Matrix, physical violence overpowers the trilogy. The "Lobby Shooting Spree" of the first film represents the films' elevatation of violence to a visual art; the scene glories in a sensual aesthetics of violence (Matrix 1.29). The film's cinematography emphasizes control through enlightenment, as in this shooting scene where a heavily armed Neo and Trinity kill over twenty security guards and special forces police to gain access to the building and camera angles represent total control and manipulability of the shot. The film's physical violence, however, is just a thin analog to the deeper violence Neo advocates in his final speech to the supercomputer from a phone booth, a violence that threatens the system and all caught within it, a violence that is ultimately theoretical, not physical:

I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us, you're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you, a world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you. (Matrix 1.35)

The constant stream of digits that represents the Matrix stops then reads "System Failure" and Neo hangs up the phone, flying into the distance, into the space occupied by the audience. Rage Against the Machine's "Wake Up" plays to the closing credits: "Departments of police, the judges, the feds / Networks at work, keepin' people calm / You know they went after King / When he spoke out on Vietnam / He turned the power to the have-nots / and then came the shot" (DeLa Rocha "Wake Up"). The physical violence in all three films symbolized theoretical violence against forms of control and against a ubiquitous system designed to maintain control; when the hero gains enlightenment, he gains control.

In the second film his very enlightenment, however, is shown to be part of the system of control. This deconstructs the salvation narrative of the first film by locating its origin in the system itself. In a further reversal, we learn that the machine world isn't governed by the Architect's sole consciousness, but by multiple points of view vying for control. Viewers learn in the second film that the Oracle is working for the system. They learn in the third film that she's working, against the Architect's will, to end the war and make peace with humanity, a possibility opened up to Neo in the third film by his encounter of a loving Indian family in the train station. The dialectic of enlightenment interrogated by this film trilogy, then, isn't simply represented by a machine vs. human dichotomy. Both sides of the dialectice are equally represented in both the human and machine worlds, both of which would come to an end if either attempted to gain complete control. The real threat, it seems, is only Agent Smith.

This dialectic was initially represented by the pairs of options presented to Neo throughout the first film. He has two identities; Thomas Anderson, his interpellated subjectivity, and his hacker alias Neo, his intuitively known subjectivity (perhaps even his "class consciousness" in Lukác's sense of the word), the part of him that maintains a dim awareness that he lives a fiction and is seeking the truth. He must choose between the red and the blue pill, and by doing so chooses between ignorance and the truth about the Matrix. He must choose between his life and Morpheus', between leaving his workplace by the scaffold (climbing to Promethean heights – in his fear he subjects himself to the agents of control rather than risk falling) or in the custody of agents, between the "real world" and the "dream world," a distinction that is consistently confused throughout the film by agents of control. In every case, his choice is between conformity and self-determination; submission to the system and the subjectivity it has defined for him or the forging of his own consciousness; blindness or knowledge of the truth about his condition. The second film, rather than reinforcing the sign system established in the first film, assumes it while calling into question the very existence and meaning of choice. Where choices were once offered, now they appear to be part of the mechanism of control itself. Neo's job in the third film is to untie the gordian knot of free will and control, the very dialectic of enlightenment itself. He does so not be defeating the machines, but by making peace with them.

Baudrillard's postmodernism offer readers similar choices, but without setting up human consciousness as the primary battleground because consciousness itself is a simulacrum. The Matrix's development of individual subjectivity in specifically non-materialist terms is where the film departs from its postmodern influences and projects itself into the future, a development communicated through the film's pervasive religious imagery. The film simply doesn't adhere to a bare materialism, which in the film would mask rather than uncover humanity's "true" condition. The film's Christian imagery has already been described. Hindu and Buddhist belief systems are represented by two different children at the Oracle's home in the first film and elsewhere in the trilogy. Any religion descending from the Vedas is an adequate contextualization for a personal enlightenment consisting of the truth that "you are a slave, Neo, like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch, a prison for your mind" (Matrix 1.8). This is almost reminiscent of Kant's image of the human mind in Critique of Pure Reason as an island in a fog, separate from the external world. Neo's enlightenment blows away the fog so that he completely perceives the world around him, turning idealism on its head while representing far more than just a material system of relations. It doesn't matter if the Wachowski Brothers believe in any religion or all the them. It is significat that they had to appropriate religious symbols to describe a desperately longed for liberation. It is this appropriation that signals the importance of religion in the west today.

The Baudrillard of Simulcra and Simulation would reject the first and third film's optimism although his standpiont is mirrored in the second film's answers. But the films' answers for Baudrillard's insoluble, pervasive nihilism is personal enlightenment, an enlightenment consisting of each individual realizing their condition and the nature of the matrix within which they are caught. Baudrillard implicitly values this realization however much he silences the language of individual enlightenment. His exposé of the mechanisms of societal control demands a telos that takes the form of an enlightened subjectivity attained by his readers at some time. The film's unabashed optimism is that individuals can finally understand the system in which they are caught well enough to manipulate it according to their own wills, working independently of the will of the system, becoming programmers, becoming gods that can shape their environment to their own wills.

The Matrix Trilogy locates the future of science fiction and the possible future of western thought in its optimism and in its abandonment of purely materialist conceptions of social relations and a re-emphasis upon psychic, even "spiritual," realities. All previous metanarratives focused attention beyond the inner self; Medieval and Renaissance theology looked through the material universe to a God and creator, while the scientism arising in the 19th century reduced the individual to a monad in a material world governed by mechanistic, unchangeable physical laws. Scientism is so transparently a substitute for theology, in fact, that a 2002/2003 college catalog entry for a course entitled "Narratives of Human Evolution: Neanderthals" conveys the instructor's belief "that scientific evidence for our evolution suggests a narrative stranger and more wonderful than any creation myth or work of fiction" (Drew First Year Seminar Program 1). Invoking the religious elements of mystery and wonder, this professor attempts to supplant religion by science with an almost child-like transparency, setting up scientists as priest/initiates in a gnosis uncovered through scientific research. Postmodern theory is a development of this scientism which remains forever inadequate; any completely outward looking philosophy is inadequate to meet the intuitively felt need for personal enlightenment consistently represented in all three films. It is no coincidence that evil, in the film, is represented by a machine. We fear most what we ourselves have created, what we have constructed. Our creation anxiety directed toward the machine is but a trope for our fears of our real creation: society itself. The machine is the world of human interaction, birthing us, feeding us, using us for its own survival and we are dependent upon it with seemingly nowhere else to go.

The machine is a trope for instrumental reason, reason whose goal is to dominate nature and the rest of humanity. What happens when instrumental reason attains its own consciousness? Is it really necessary to posit a self conscious supercomputer to assert that its increasing ubquity ultimately dehumanizes the human? What form could revolt take then? The Wachowski Brothers may as well have invoked Marcuse at this point instead of Baudrillard, who frighteningly predicted in 1955 that guerilla warfare (read: terrorism) is the only outlet of revolt against a ubiquitous system:

The body against "the machine" -- not against the mechanism constructed to make life safer and milder, to attenuate the cruelty of nature, but against the machine which has taken over the mechanism: the political machine, the corporate machine, the cultural and educational machine which has welded blessing and curse into one rational whole. The whole has become too big, its cohesion too strong, its function too efficient -- does the power of the negative concentrate in still partly unconquered, primitive, elemental forces? The body against the machine: men, women, and children fighting, with the most primitive tools, the most brutal and destructive machine of all times and keeping it in check -- does guerrilla warfare define the revolution of our time? (Marcuse 7)

The Matrix Reloaded confronts the reader with the inevitability only hinted at by Cipher's character in the first film. The only way to save human beings caught within the Matrix and free them from machine control is for human beings to gut the consciousness of the machine and take control. But the choice, then, is between independent instrumental reason in the form of a machine, and instrumental reason in control of a small group of human beings. Cipher escaped machine control to be subject to Morpheus' orders; when he came to see his situation in that light, he chose a comfortable position in the Matrix to the "freedom" of being subject to human control.

Postmodernism seems at first to be an advancement. While still providing its own metanarrative, it so thoroughly exposes outward looking metanarratives as constructs that the individual is turned in upon his or her own consciousness as the only grounds of judgment and value. But since postmodern theory is still rooted in its materialist philosophical predecessors such as Marxism, the postmodern individual is left desperately seeking to transcend a self which has now become its prison, allowing narratives of religious awakening to a heightened subjectivity through awareness of an outward, transcendent, immaterial "reality" to have an almost irresistible appeal. If this progression from postmodern paradigms to ecstatic religious experience seems unlikely, consider this excerpt from a Methodist seminary's 2003-2005 course catalog:

Jacques Derrida—long reviled as the progenitor of and poster boy for a radical, atheist, nihilistic relativism unleashed upon the world under the flag of something called 'deconstruction'—has more recently become the new poster boy for the convergence of themes in postmodernism and religion. (Drew University 2003-2005)

Consider also that Derrida was the keynote speaker at the conference "Irreconcilable Differences? Jacques Derrida and the Question of Religion," hosted by the University of Santa Barbara in October of 2003, and was plenary speaker at the 2002 joint conference of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature in Toronto (5). Religion tells us there is somewhere else to go: the transcendent. These religious narratives, unlike those of the past, will be personal and non-dogmatic, experiential rather than doctrinal. There is a long tradition in many religious traditions that even distrusts language about God. To some Hindus, God is s/he "before whom all words recoil." Christian Eastern Orthodoxy's apophatic theology defines God as "not this"; once everything, even language, has been erased as "not God," what is left is God. The future of postmodernism is personal spiritual awareness, science fiction is a trope for religous enlightenment in this film. The post-postmodern period has seen the destruction of appearances and meaning turned upside down.

The translation of the film's theoretical violence to the present world is problematic, however. Unlike the world of The Matrix, our "real" world does not have a readily apparent escape hatch. We are dependent upon the system that feeds us. We are inextricably dependent upon grocery stores for food, hospitals for health care, phone companies for communication, and have no substitutes should these fail. Our only hope is that the Wachowski brothers' optimism is justified, that personal enlightenment gives us some distance from our matrices. Unfortunately, it is only from a position of personal enlightenment that we can know. We can only know how much power we have outside the matrix once we are outside the matrix; we can't even know if there is an "outside" the matrix until after we have pressed against or passed through its boundaries. Ironically, the film's use of materialist postmodern theory leads it to affirm that religious subjectivity is a viable response to nihilistic ideological constructs that already presuppose materialism. Baudrillard's theory doesn't account for a future in which something like his own construct would become an ideological agent wielding ubiquitous control, nor that religious enlightenment could represent human emancipation. The Matrix Trilogy reveals that western techonological republics are still longing for a Christ to show the way to an escape hatch leading us out of ourselves, and that our postmodern condition has made us ripe to seek the fulfillment of this longing.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Drew University. "First Year Seminar Program," 2002/2003 Course Catalog: College of Liberal Arts. <20 April 2002>

Drew University. "THRST 724/Theology & Derrida: (Re)Drawing Lines in the Sands of Ambiguity. 2003/2005 Course Catalogy: The Theological School.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1974.

The Matrix. Dir. The Wachowski Brothers. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Lawrence Fishburne, Carrie-Ann Moss, Hugo Weaving, and Joe Pantoliano. 1999. DVD. Warner Brothers, 1999. Scene titles and scene and chapter numbers are taken from the DVD index.

Nichols, Peter. "HOME VIDEO: More to Satisfy 'Matrix' Mania." The New York Times, Late Edition: Final, Section E, Column 3, p. 26 November 9, 2001.

Rage Against the Machine. "Wake Up." By Zack de la Rocha and Rage Against the Machine. Rage Against the Machine. Epic, 1992.

Staples, Brett. "Editorial Observer; A French Philosopher Talks Back to Hollywood and 'The Matrix.'" The New York Times Late Edition: Final , Section A , Page 24 , Column 1, p. 788 May 24th, 2002.

Notes

1. Special thanks to Prof. Cassandra Laity, Dan Knauss, and Sheridan Lorraine for invaluable editorial assistance.

2. If you'd like to read an old version of this article published elsewhere on the web, go here. This early version of the essay was originally written shortly after the release of the film.

3. If you'd like to read my short review of The Matrix Reloaded published in Riverwest Currents, go here.

4. A shortened version of this paper was presented at a Fordham University's conference entitled: "Metaphysics of the Image: The Alternate, The Transcendent, and The Virtual in Literature" on October 20th, 2001.

5. For details about the UC Santa Barabara conference, go to: http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/projects/irreconcilabledifferences/main_page.htm

For the AAR/SBC conference details, go to: http://www.religions.divinity.gla.ac.uk/derrida_and_religion.htm

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The Matrix in IMAX |

From Critical Theory to Theoretical Discourse

2005-04-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

Paper Delivered to

The Experience of Theory

University of Göteborg, Sweden, 24-26 September 1993

by Sean Homer

This is the cost of pure warfare; that is, of the pure and empty form, of the hyperreal and eternally dissuasive form of warfare, where for the first time we can congratulate ourselves an the absence of events.

Jean Baudrillard1

No president of Ruritania in the near future will speak to the American ambassador the way that Saddam Hussein spoke to April Glaspie.

Francis Fukuyama2

In his notorious article, 'The Reality Gulf,3 published on the eve of the Gulf war, Baudrillard argued that a war would not take place, furthermore it would not take place due to the inexorable logic of deterrence. By this Baudrillard did not mean that Iraq would be deterred from fighting by the military superiority of the coalition forces; on the contrary, that the US would itself be deterred from prosecuting the war through its own sheer excess of destructive power which would paradoxically act as a counter-deterrent. Like a frightened animal caught in the headlights of an on-rushing juggernaut, the US. administration would be paralysed, mesmerised by the overweening force and scale of its own weapons of mass destruction. In the light of Baudrillard's somewhat perverse logic, Francis Fukuyama's triumphal assessment of the Gulf war and its lessons for any would-be Ruritanian dictator makes sobering reading. Fukuyama sketches a rather different scenario to that of Baudrillard in which the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the renewed confidence of US military power will now ensure that any potential Third World "aggressors" will think again before challenging Bush's "New World Order". The discrepancy between these two accounts of a single event can not, I believe, be reduced to a mere conflict of interpretations, as is highlighted by Baudrillard's even more startling claim in a subsequent article, published after the cessation of hostilities, that the Gulf war had in fact not taken place.4

What is perhaps most disturbing about Baudrillard's views on the Gulf war is not so much their absurdity - no one on the left or right has the slightest difficulty dismissing them out of hand - but rather that they are, on one level, profoundly true. Not only was debate around the issues of the Gulf war extremely restricted but the war itself was felt to impinge so little upon our own daily lives in Western Europe that it was seen as primarily a media event, of which the strategic site, according to Baudrillard, is the television screen, from which we are daily bombarded. With the cessation of hostilities came the cessation of media and public interest. Very few people now wished to continue the discussion of national sovereignty and individual rights, the issue of the Palestinians and Bedoun Arabs, or the emergence of the increasingly elusive free and democratic Kuwait. Within weeks of the ending of the Gulf war it would appear that it had, indeed, never taken place.

I do not intend to rehearse once more the issues concerning that appalling conflict but to reflect upon a situation in which probably the most prominent, certainly the most fashionable, theoretician of the Postmodern can formulate such a thesis; and in which that thesis no longer seems to scandalise us. Indeed, it appears to have left as little trace as the Gulf war itself. If such complacent ideas, such as those now proffered by Baudrillard, can gain such wide currency then it is time to ask: what are we doing with theory?

What is at the root of my concern is the lack of reflexivity of much contemporary theoretical discourse. I had always understood "theory" or "theoretical discourse" to be a critical practice. But within certain strains of post-structuralism, particularly the ascendant discourse of postmodernism the whole notion of "critique" has been bracketed, it has become an out moded concept. Critique has been replaced by, what Baudrillard calls, "theoretical violence," or, the endless disruption and reversal of symbolic codes and an incessant play on language. In his influential essay `Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'5 the American critic and theoretician Fredric Jameson identifies one of the principal features of postmodernism as its "depthlessness". Postmodernism, Jameson argues, confront us with a whole new spatial logic whereby notions of depth have been replaced by new conceptions of surface, or multiple surfaces. Consequently many of our most cherished and time-honoured radical conceptions, about the nature of cultural politics such as negativity, opposition, critique and reflexivity - which rest upon spatial presuppositions - are no longer appropriate to the moment of postmodernism.6 In other words, the possibility of achieving some form of "critical distance" is no longer an option. From both a political and a theoretical perspective I find this abandonment of the site of critique, or, critical space a disturbing and unsatisfactory phenomenon. Taking Baudrillard's work, as perhaps the most extreme terminus of this particular theoretical trajectory I shall briefly trace the eclipse of the concept of critique through his work, before questioning some of the axioms, or doxa, on which current theory rest and suggesting a number of alternative resources.

The waning of the critical impulse within theory is closely associated with the critique of representation and the referentiality of language. The basic premise behind the logic of representation is that there exists a relationship between a word and an object in which the former stands in some way for the latter. There is, to use Baudrillard's phrase, a logic of equivalence between the signifier and the referent. As is well known, Saussurean linguistics decoupled this dualism by insisting on the arbitrary nature of the relationship and on the need to bracket off the referent. A given signifier does not signify a specific phenomenon but rather the concept or image of that phenomenon. Signs, therefore, do not function according to a logic of equivalence but through a differential logic within the total economy of signs.

Baudrillard's critique of Saussurean linguistics and of the structuralist theory that developed from it was that they posited a separation between the sign and the real, whereby the former functions as the form and the latter as the content. For Baudrillard this separation of form and content is nothing but a metaphysical illusion or fiction. However it is a fiction that has important ideological implications. In his 1972 work 'For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign',7 Baudrillard argues that the economy of the sign, or semiology, is homologous with classical political economy: 'sign value is to symbolic exchange' writes Baudrillard 'what exchange value is to use value'.8 More precisely Baudrillard identifies the economic distinction between exchange value and use value with the constituent elements of the sign itself, the signifies and the signified respectively. Baudrillard's early work, particularly 'The System of Objects' and 'Consumer Society',9 advanced a critique of the distinction between exchange value and use value based on its latent anthropological conception of "need". Essentially Baudrillard argues that any critique of political economy which retains this classical dichotomy will implicitly rest on a conception of human need as its ultimate ground or "alibi". However, such a conception of need is no longer appropriate for our understanding of contemporary consumer society, or an order of discourse in which the subject as an autonomous self-centred ego has been dissolved. According to Baudrillard, consumption - as it is understood in "consumer societies" - is nothing to do with the satisfaction of needs but is rather an 'active mode of relations ... a systematic mode of activity and a global response on which our whole cultural system is founded’.10 In other words, the objects of consumption are not material goods but rather "signs". Consumption, writes Baudrillard, in so far as it is meaningful is a systematic act of the manipulation of signs’.11 The transformation of the object into the systematic status of signs entails a correlative transformation in human relations and it is this new relation, suggests Baudrillard, that is the relation of consumption. In this sense, the system of consumption functions "like" a language. Baudrillard, therefore, argues that the only way to move beyond a political economy which is grounded in need and to understand the commodity structure of consumer society is to see that use value no longer corresponds to human need, indeed there is no longer use-value as such, just exchange value.

Extending his analysis of consumer society to the "political economy of the sign" Baudrillard argues that any economy of the sign that retains the signifier/signified dualism will smuggle back in the referent as its ground or meaning. For Baudrillard, Saussure's bracketing of the referent did not so much solve the problem of equivalence as simply displace it. In other words, the same logic, or strategy of concealment, applies to both political economy and the economy of the sign:

[T]he double aspect of the commodity (UV/EV) in fact conceals a formal homogeneity in which use value, regulated by the system of exchange value, confers on the latter its "naturalist" guarantee. And the double face of the sign (Sr/Sd generalizable into Sr/Sd-Rft) obscures a formal homogeneity in which Sd and Rft (administered by the same logical form, which is none other than that of Sr), serve together as the reference-alibi - precisely the guarantee of "substance" for the Sr.12

Following Lacan, Baudrillard insists that the arbitrariness of the sign does not reside in the relationship between the signifier and the referent but within the sign itself between the signifier and the signified; on one hand, we have the signifier as form, and on the other the signified as the thought content and the referent as reality content. Just as Baudrillard came to see use value as merely a projection of exchange value, he (and here he goes one step further than Lacan, who had sought to retain some space and role for the subject which was not wholly determined by language) now argues that the referent is no more external to the sign than is the signified, both are internal to it, the referent is a projection of the sign itself. That is to say, there is no reality just the reality effect, the "world" that the sign "evokes" is nothing but the effect sign, its signified/referent. Thus Baudrillard avoids the metaphysical illusion of a separation between the sign and the real as the real in-itself does not exist as an independent concrete-reality but only as 'the extrapolation of the excision ... established by the logic of the sign onto the world of things'.13

Baudrillard's critique of political economy and the economy of the sign paths the way for him to map a full historical periodization, or, odyssey of the sign, and to formulate a new theory of "symbolic exchange". Baudrillard posits three orders of representation: the counterfeit, the productive, and the simulation, each governed by its own specific law of value.14 The first order demarcates the period from the Renaissance to the industrial era and is governed by a natural law of value. The second order designates the industrial epoch which is governed by the commodity law of value. The final order is the present phase of late capitalism or consumer society which is governed by a structural law of value:

Today, the entire system is fluctuating in indeterminacy, all of reality absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and of simulation. It is now a principle of simulation, and not reality, that regulates social life.15

For Baudrillard, the logic of the sign remains essentially one of equivalence, even when one acknowledges that a given signifier may refer to many signifieds this essential structure remains untouched, 'the equivalence has simply transmuted into polyvalence'.16 Therefore, against what Baudrillard calls the determinacy of the sign he opposes the indeterminacy of the code and of symbolic exchange. Although the exact nature of the code is never clearly defined, the symbolic designates the realm of ambivalence beyond the structural determinacy of the sign, there is no symbolic value as such, just symbolic exchange, that is, the symbolic is the realm beyond all value. What Baudrillard calls the structural "law" of value is in effect the structural "play" of each indeterminate code in relation to all the other indeterminate codes. This realm beyond the commodity structure of value is essentially a realm in which no normative statements can be made and all value is contingent and relativized.

The concept of critique is bound up with the second order of representation - that is, the order of the sign and the commodity law of value - it emerged in the West, writes Baudrillard, 'at the same time as political economy and, as the quintessence of Enlightenment rationality'.17 The whole notion of critique therefore is inextricably entwined with what Paul Ricoeur calls, in Freud and Philosophy,18 the hermeneutics of suspicion, that is they presuppose that there is something latent, something hidden which can be retrieved or demystified. Thus critique depends on the separation between the sign and the real, in the discrepancy that exists between our representations of the real and the real itself, which Baudrillard has laboured to dissolve. Critique presupposes not merely a metaphor of depth but also an assumption that one can maintain a critical distance, that one can be outside or have a particular self-conscious reflective position with respect to the discourse one is analysing. Whereas today, according to Baudrillard, we live in a hyperreal world of fluctuating and aleatory codes, of simulacra and simulations, of floating signifiers which are indeterminate non-referential and unconscious. The concept of critique, along with such other redundant notions as: rationality, referentiality, functionality, historical consciousness and all their metaphysical baggage of equivalence and depth have no place in this volatized, depthless, world of hyperreality.

With the loss of critical distance the radical theorist is faced with a profound dilemma: how can one now formulate an oppositional discourse? Baudrillard's solution to this dilemma is hardly in keeping with his own hyperbole. Observing consumer society's capacity to absorb and co-opt all strategies of resistance Baudrillard argues that critique itself serves to legitimate its antipathetic discourse. Thus, all critique can be said to ratify the dominant discourse by the very act of opposing it, therefore it must be seen as not only counter-productive but a strategy of the dominant discourse itself. Baudrillard's "radical" solution to this dilemma is to insist that the only escape from the inexorable logic of symbolic indeterminacy is death! Short of a nihilistic program of mass suicide however, Baudrillard advocates a strategy, if one may call it such, of silent and passive resistance:

I would no longer interpret in the same way the forced silence of the masses in the mass media. I would no longer see it as a sign of passivity and of alienation, but to the contrary an original strategy, an original response in the form of a challenge; and on the basis of this reversal I suggest to you a vision of things which is no longer optimistic or pessimistic, but ironic and antagonistic.19

Baudrillard sees the radicalism of this strategy in his 'strong, symbolic and primitive' understanding of the term "response". According to Baudrillard, `power belongs to him who gives and to whom no return can be made'.20 The only way to challenge the dominance of the symbolic is to refuse to play the game, to break the symbolic exchange by not participating in it, to give without the expectation of return.

However, there are a number of problems with Baudrillard's notion of symbolic exchange, not least his tendency to hypostasize the "principle" of simulation. Can one, for instance, distinguish between the 'the masses in the mass media' and the masses of subjects in any given social formation, Baudrillard's theory would suggest not, as there can be no independent reality separate from the symbolic. If this is the case, Baudrillard's strategy of silent and passive non-responsiveness, of ironic disavowal, may well be a comfortable option for the strong and empowered but is hardly a radical solution for the weak and disenfranchised. Leaving to one side the reflection that any power structure, and not just the present one, would whole heartedly welcome the silent, passive resistance of the majority of its subjects, Baudrillard's notion of resistance assumes that if individuals opt out of the system that some how it would break down and cease to function. After all "exchange" can only take place when it is reciprocated. But if the real itself is nothing more than a projection of the symbolic, where is that reciprocation, let alone resistance, to come from, how can subjects respond in a way that is not determined by the symbolic unless they can exert some independence and distance from it. It is the very irreducibility of the real to the symbolic that allows, for example, with Lacan's conception of desire or Althusser's conception of ideology, for the relative-autonomy of a de-centred subject and the possibility of an intervention in the symbolic. Against Baudrillard, I shall argue that we should resist the temptation to conflate distinct levels of abstraction and signification.

The persuasive quality of Baudrillard's work and certainly of his earlier work lies in its descriptive capacity. That is to say, it is seen to provide a good, if somewhat unsubstantiated, description of a subject's lived experience within an advanced capitalist or consumer society. Baudrillard's world of ubiquitous information technology - the technology of reproduction and proliferation rather than of production - approximates well to the situation of Western Europe and the US throughout the 1980s. However, it remains descriptive and once it is universalised beyond its own specific historical and cultural situation it becomes one more totalizing concept, erasing difference and collapsing distinctions.

Postmodernism's celebration of irony, contingency and play, coupled with literary theory's widespread use as a paradigm discourse, or model of theoretical practice, would appear to have resulted in some the more absurd claims that theory now proffers. One can understand how literary theory has achieved its pre-eminent position within theoretical practice: our raw material is after all language and texts, through which all other disciplines are necessarily mediated. At the same time literature by definition does not "hook up" to reality in any common-sense way but undergoes complex mediations between language and reality. However, when we begin to extrapolate from the insights of literary studies we confront a number of epistemological and philosophical questions which the majority of us do not have the intellectual training or background to address. To say that the unconscious is structured like a language is not the same as saying that the unconscious "is" a language, or to say that one can read our social world like a text is not same as saying that it "is" a text. As Fredric Jameson argues, in The Political Unconscious,21 the real may be only accessible through its prior (re)textualizations but this is not the same as saying that the real is itself a text. For Baudrillard to suggest that a semiotic model is the most adequate for understanding the dynamics of consumer society is a proposition of a different order from declaring the real is now constituted by the symbolic. The reduction of the real to the symbolic is simply to confuse questions of ontology with questions of epistemology, to commit what Roy Bhasker has called the "epistemic fallacy" that is, the reduction of being to knowing.22 Bhasker further defines the displacement of this fallacy to language or discourse as the" linguistic fallacy". It is true therefore that we can never know what "actually" happened in the Gulf war in an immediate, unmediated sense, but it is an utter fallacy to suggest that the Gulf war did not take place as a particular series of events except insofar as we retextualized those events. One does not have to subscribe to naive realism to posit an independent reality, indeed 'all philosophies, cognitive discourses and practical activities presuppose a realism - in the sense of some ontology or general account of the world’.23

According to Bhasker, experimental activity 'entails the possibility of a "non-human world" which operates and continues to operate even when it remains unknown, unperceived and undetected by human beings. In other words, there will always be questions of being which 'cannot be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge,' or, ontological matters which cannot be transposed into epistemological terms.24 We need to respect the specificity of both the epistemological and ontological dimensions and not, as with many postmodernists, conflate or slide between the two. In fact, Baudrillard does not actually deny that real events take place, that the Gulf war did actually happen and was not entirely a media simulation. Furthermore, Baudrillard appears to concede that there is a more prosaic and quotidian reality behind his hyperreal world of simulation:

[All] this does not mean that the domestic universe - the home, its objects, etc. - is not still lived largely in a traditional way - social, psychological, differential etc.25

Baudrillard thinks, however, that this is no longer where the stakes lie and therefore is working at a different level of abstraction and signification. But in failing to define his ontology, it is Baudrillard, along with most other postmodernists, who are committed to a naive realism.

The tendency to conflate all discourses and homogenise all texts is pervasive within postmodern theory and not least in the relationship between post-structuralism and postmodernism. These two discourses have become synonymous with each other, but we should be wary of an over-hasty assimilation of the two. Post-structuralism loosely refers to a set of practices concerned with the analysis of discourse and texts, whereas postmodernism designates an object of study. Furthermore, postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon explicitly supplants the very tradition to which post-structuralism remains wedded, that is to say Modernism. The authors that recur in post-structuralist textual readings are not Thomas Pynchon or Angela Carter, but Joyce, Kafka and Mallarme. Even Barthesian "jouissance" is essentially a Modernist aesthetic. Barthes insists that there can be no bliss in mass culture, which he describes as a 'bastard form', a 'humiliated repetition’; strictures which we might more readily associate with the mandarins of the Frankfurt School than the self-indulgence of much postmodernism. Theorists such as Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson argue that "theory" is itself a postmodern phenomenon, particularly in its present volatized, free-floating and indeterminate state. Much theory can be seen to feed off itself in an increasingly self-referential circuit of exchange, but this presents a rather partial reading of theory. Christopher Norris has argued for a number of years that for every textualist reading of Derrida there is a more conventional philosophical reading. Norris concedes that Derrida's own work invites a textualist misreading through its overly "inscriptionalist idiom" but argues that deconstruction is more than simply sophistical wordplay. According to Norris, Derrida's project is essentially a continuation of modernism, and his preoccupation with epistemological issues of truth, reality and representation, as well as ethical concerns, places him firmly in the enlightenment tradition. Derrida may question the values and metaphysical presuppositions of that tradition but he does not simply do away with them. I am not trying to suggest that there is no common ground between these two discourses and some fruitful areas of interaction: rather that we should not be too quick to conflate distinct discourses, thus eradicating "real" differences.

An emancipatory strategy assumes that there is a subject in whose name emancipation is taking place. But as we have already seen, within Baudrillard's world of hyperreality this space does not exit. Similarly the critique of value presupposes an alternative value system against which the original is being judged, as Kate Soper writes:

I would want to argue that the very reasoning that allows us to appreciate the attractions and importance of discourse theory and deconstruction is such as to commit the reasoner to defending certain values.26

Baudrillard's attempt to move beyond value is little more than that old liberal strategy of refusing to name one's own discourse, it was after all one of the earliest lesson's of literary theory that we can not make value-free judgements. The persistent hymning to heterogeneity, indeterminacy and chance is not so much a value-free realm as an alternative set of values that need in turn to be scrutinised. In a society that depends upon the levelling of all value and the fragmentation of our lived experience, is the celebration of such qualities a radical gesture or simply a programmed response? Such claims will rightly be charged with being reductive but I would suggest it is no more reductive than the universalising claims of postmodernism. What is required is a more dialectical approach towards theory, one in which we grasp it as potentially both progressive and regressive. In other words we reject the totalizing and homogenising aspects of postmodern theory in favour of a pluralist theory which is historically and situationally specific. From such a perspective the assertion of marginality and heteroglossia would be seen as a progressive gesture in relation to a hierarchical and univocal discourse. However, to assert the absolute indeterminacy of meaning and our inability to make any claims to the veracity of a given discourse can be profoundly reactionary. Similarly, the critique of value represents a radical response to the canonisation of an exclusive "great tradition" but there is nothing progressive in a critique that means we can no longer make evaluative judgements on the intrinsic merit of texts.

The kind of theoretical response I am advocating may become a little clearer if we return to the example of the Gulf war. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities a concerted propaganda campaign marginalized all oppositional voices to the war. A radical challenge to this monological discourse would take the form of a reassertion of those disparate and silenced voices, foregrounding what is absent from the discourse, its discrepancies and contradictions. However, once the war was underway the authoritative discourse relied on just such an indeterminacy of the symbolic codes in order to forestall any further public opposition. We were bombarded with images of smart bombs entering ventilation shafts; but at the same time asked to believe that the same technology could not see hundreds of women and children entering a mosque every night. In such a situation to claim that we can simply never know the truth behind such representations is cynically and complacently to acquiesce with the dominant structures of power. No radical critique can celebrate the indeterminacy of such images without highlighting the discrepancy between official rhetoric and the images that appear on our screens. It is the facts of the war, its reality, the incineration of over 25,000 fleeing conscripts, prisoners and refugees on the Basra road, or the burying alive of Iraqi soldiers in their trenches, that is politically explosive, that presents a challenge to our conception of a surgically clean war without casualties. As Edward Said observed, the whole notion of "surgical" strikes implies that the war was some how good for the Iraqis, that the coalition was cutting out some kind of cancerous growth within their midst. It is in other words within that separation of appearance and reality, the separation of the symbolic and the real which contrary to Baudrillard, was so marked and pronounced during the Gulf war that theory finds its progressive role.

I should like to conclude with some remarks by E.P. Thompson, emerging from that period of reaction in the 1950s Thompson reflects on the slide from disenchantment through quietism to reaction:

Disenchantment ceases to be a recoil of the responsible in the face of difficult social experience; it becomes an abdication of intellectual responsibility in the face of all social experience. And, ... the withdrawal or despair of the disenchanted was twisted - often by lesser men - into an apologia for complicity with reaction.27

Having yet to emerge from that more recent decade of reaction, the 1980s, I would suggest that it is high time we restored the "critical" aspect of theory.

Notes:

1 Baudrillard, J., 'Fatal Strategies', in Selected Writings Poster, M., (ed.), (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984) p. 191.

2 Fukuyama, F., `Changed Days for Ruritania's Dictator', in The Guardian (8.4.91).

3 Baudrillard, J., `The Reality Gulf', in The Guardian (11.1.91).

4 See Baudrillard, J., `The Gulf War Has Not Taken Place', in Norris, C., Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence and Wishart), pp. 192-6.

5 Jameson, F., `Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', in New Left Review, no. 146 (July/August, 1984). Reprinted in a slightly revised form as ch. 1 of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).

6 Ibid., p. 48.

7 Baudrillard, J., `For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign', in Selected Writings, pp. 57-97.

8 Ibid., p. 60.

9 See Baudrillard, J., Selected Writings, chapters 1 & 2.

10 Baudrillard, J., `The System of Objects', in Selected Writings, p. 21.

11 Ibid., p. 22.

12 Baudrillard, `For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign', p. 87.

13 Ibid., p. 87.

14 Similar schema have been sketched by Foucault, M., The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 1989), Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia vol. 1 (London: Athlone Press, 1984), Jameson, F., Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).

15 Baudrillard, J., `Symbolic Exchange and Death', in Selected Writings, p. 120.

16 Baudrillard, J., `For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign', p. 82

17 Baudrillard, J., `The Mirror of Production', in Selected Writings, p. 116.

18 Ricoeur, P., Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).

19 Baudrillard, J., `The Masses', in Selected Writings, p. 208.

20 Ibid., p. 208.

21 Jameson, F., The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1981).

22 Bhasker, R., Reclaiming Reality: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (London: Verso, 1989).

23 Ibid., p. 2.

24 Ibid., p. 17.

25 Baudrillard, J., `The Ecstasy of Communication', in Foster, H. (ed.) Postmodern Culture (Cambridge: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 133, n. 4.

26 Soper, K., `Postmodernism, Subjectivity and the Question of Value', in New Left Review, no. 186 (March/April, 1991), pp. 123-4.

27 Thompson, E.P., `Outside the Whale', in The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin Press, 1979), p. 214