AFF

1ac
Advantage one is fun: debates on this topic produce extreme
enjoyment
Robinson 15 [Nick Robinson, 3-23-2015, School of Ptx @ University of Leeds,
"Militarism and opposition in the living room: the case of military videogames," Taylor
& Francis, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21624887.2015.1130491
//GBS Majeed & Jacobs]
Post 9/11, concern has grown over the rise of both militarisation and
militarism. militarisation the social
While both militarism (here, ‘the prevalence of warlike values in society’) and (here, ‘ contradictory and tense

process in which civil society organises itself for the production of violence’ )

‘[t]oday as never
significantly predate 9/11 (Gillis 1989, 1; see also; Berghahn 1981; Enloe 1988), they have arguably taken on a more pronounced aspect since then. As Bacevich (2005, 1) argues,

before in their history Americans are enthralled with military power’. While much of the

tensions over the legitimate role for the military, the extent to which
recent scholarship is focused on the USA,

society is being militarised and the acceptability of the promotion of warlike values are
preoccupying security scholars hese developments(see, for example, Stavrianakis and Selby 2013 for a highly useful collection). Concurrent with t

has been an increasing acknowledgement of the importance of the

interrelationship between popular culture and the military and the
consequences for militarism and militarisation (see, for example, Boggs and Pollard 2006, 2007; Der Derian 2009). Davies and Philpott’s
(2012) discussion of militarisation and popular culture is particularly important, providing a comprehensive analysis which teases out the different roles popular culture performs and presenting a call for further research. Here, I distinguish

popular culture: as a vehicle for militarism (militarism through

between two potential roles of

popular culture) and as contributor to militarisation (militarisation by popular

culture). thus it does not explicitly engage with analysis of the
The focus of this article is on militarism through popular culture;

contribution of popular culture to the militarisation process. Davies and Philpott also alert us to the importance of political contestation:

the analysis of militarization is politically incomplete – and wrong – if it neglects the

‘

contradictions and dissent it produces in popular culture and the possibilities for
contestation and demilitarization it enables through popular culture’ (2012, 43). Reflecting their call, this article seeks to

popular culture can offer critiques of militarisation and/or militarism.

demonstrate that Shapiro (2009, 37), for example,

of ‘cinema’s increasingly political and anti-militarization impetus’, emphasising that

talks

Hollywood and independent film makers have produced a number of films which
explicitly critique the growth of militarised violence. Whilst seldom mainstream, the
production of videogames designed to critique war can also be seen, for example in September 12th, This War of Mine, and

Citizens and activists, too, have made critical interventions targeted

Spec Ops: The Line (Robinson 2012, 515–519).

against militaristic popular culture, military’s recruitment- evidenced by Haynes’s and Delappe’s political activism against the US

focused videogame America’s Army (Haynes 2006; on Delappe see Chan 2010. See Robinson 2012, 513–519 for the scope of these interventions) and Crowe’s (2011) analysis of player

players conform to or resist the rules of the game, so

behaviour in online games which examines how

challenging militarism. contribution of military videogames to

This article offers a specific focus on the

militarism and the ensuing opposition to militarism . Videogames are particularly appropriate for this task as contemporary war games are played by
millions of people in Europe, North America and Australasia: five of the last six games in the Call of Duty series have each sold approximately 25–30m copies, grossing revenues of over $1bn each.1 As Stahl (2006, 118) identified, these are not

September 11,
isolated cases: ‘ red in a boom in sales of war-themed video
2001 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ushe

games for the commercial market’ games offer strongly militaristic messages to . Such

their players (and hence contribute to militarism). Chan (2005), Höglund (2008), Šisler (2008), Huntemann and Payne (2009), Mantello (2012), Schulzke (2013) and Robinson (2015) all examined the messages

games differentiate between the allies of the player and the

within military games, demonstrating how these

enemy, often offering Orientalist depictions which position the latter as a

‘rogue state’ beyond the boundaries of reason and diplomacy so legitimating
the use of overwhelming force . This article explores the interrelationship between videogames, militarism and opposition through discussion of two recent first-person shooter
games, Medal of Honor and Medal of Honor Warfighter. These were chosen in part because they are typical of the genre, with th e player acting as a serving US military operative fighting in the contemporary War on Terror. Yet, they also place a
very particular emphasis on offering an ‘authentic’ experience of that war and openly celebrate their collaborations with the military, so allowing for exploration of how this manifests itself in terms of militarism. Medal of Honor (MoH) was
released in October 2010, selling approximately 5.9m copies across PS3, Xbox 360 and PC (data from http://www.vgchartz.com). The narrative of MoH centres on the initial phase of the war in Afghanistan in late 2001. Originally the developers
had proposed to use the game to tell a ‘real story’ based on the Afghan conflict. However, given sensitivities surrounding this, and following discussion with the Special Operations personnel who were acting as advisers to the developers, a
decision was taken to change the setting from one which was ‘accurate and realistic’ to one which was ‘authentic and plausible’ (Suellentrop 2010). In the single player story, the player plays four different characters – two Special Ops (‘Tier 1’)
personnel, one US Army Ranger, and one Apache helicopter gun pilot. The story focuses primarily on the Special Ops missions and centres on their insertion to perform reconnaissance of enemy positions based on information supplied by an
Afghan informant. Due to the poor direction from Washington-based officials, the operation goes wrong, resulting in two Tier 1 operatives becoming stranded. The subsequent rescue mission reveals that the Tier 1 personnel have been captured
and are being tortured, with the US Army Rangers arriving only in time to save one of them – one of the key playable characters (‘Rabbit’) dies while awaiting extraction Medal of Honor Warfighter (MoHW), was released 2 years after MoH in
October 2012. Unlike the previous game it is generally seen as a commercial and critical failure, with combined sales of only 2.8m units across Xbox 360, PS3 and PC and a metacritic aggregated rating in the mid-low 50s across all three formats.2
MoHW is set soon after events in the first game yet it takes a very different tack – rather than engaging in the contemporary Afghan war, the player undertakes a series of covert operations within countries such as Somalia, the Philippines and
Pakistan to foil a terrorist threat. In the single player campaign, the player is primarily cast as a Tier 1 operative codenamed ‘Preacher’ who works covertly alongside a variety of national Special Forces operatives to trace the source of a large
quantity of a highly explosive compound called PETN. This leads them eventually to a Saudi Arabian banker named Hassan (aka ‘the Cleric’) who is the leader of a Jihadist network based in Pakistan. While ‘Preacher’ and his colleagues ultimately
succeed in killing Hassan and his associates so averting the terrorist threat it comes at a terrible price – ‘Mother’ (also featured in MoH) is captured and tortured to death by one of Hassan’s accomplices. In the context of the increasing
acknowledgement of the importance of popular culture for world politics, this article argues that a focus on military videoga mes – exemplified by these two games – opens up key insights for our understanding of militarism and opposition to

the development of a three-part framework based on the military-

militarism. It shows this through

entertainment complex; the spatial dimension of militarism, and gendered

militarism, which together demonstrate how these games aim to offer an
‘authentic’ experience to the player and contribute to militarism .3 However, the article also highlights

that the search for authenticity was not uncontroversial, with the games
prompting heated debate from the military, politicians and players on the
appropriateness of using videogames for military entertainment. Analytical framework Militarism

Militarism is the older concept,

and militarisation – definition and overview Differentiating between militarism and militarisation is essential to this article. As Gillis (1989, 1) states, ‘

usually defined as either the dominance of the military over civilian authority, or, more
generally, as the prevalence of warlike values in society’. Stavrianakis and Selby (2013, 3) point out that militarism is
surprisingly understudied within politics and IR: ‘sustained research and reflection has largely disappeared since the 1990s’. To address this shortfall, they offer a five-fold typology of militarism which covers: ideology (the celebration and
glorification of war); behavioural (the use of force to resolve disputes); military build-ups (measuring the growth of military budgets, equipment or personnel); institutional conceptions (the links between the military and government), and

sociological understandings (the embeddedness of militarism within society). Offering a preference for a sociological approach, which they argue can in
principle capture all of these other elements, they emphasise the importance of further work to study militarism (Stavrianakis and Selby 2013, 14–15). This article, with its focus on the politics of military videogames, explicitly speaks to this

ideology (these games glorify war); behavioural

agenda. In particular, it explores at least three facets of Stavrianakis and Selby’s typology:

(force is essential within these games to ‘win’); and institutional conceptions

(shown by the formal links between the videogame producers and the
military). Militarism is thus observable through both the structural power
of the military and also in the active promotion of militaristic solutions to
political problems (see also Bacevich 2005, 227). In deconstructing militarism, Enloe’s work is particularly useful in indicating ‘those distinctively militaristic core beliefs’, among which she identifies: that
armed force is the ultimate resolver of tensions; (b) that human nature is prone to conflict; (c) that having enemies is a natural condition; (d) that hierarchical relations produce effective action; (e) that a state without a military is naive, scarcely
modern and barely legitimate; (f) that in times of crisis those who are feminine need armed protection; (g) that in times of crisis any man who refuses to engage in armed violent action is jeopardizing his own status as a manly man. (2004, 219.

beliefs are occasionally ‘put under public scrutiny and

For an expanded list building on Enloe see; Bernazzoli and Flint 2009, 400–402) Such

examined; often, though, they are left unproblematized, as if they were “natural”.
Whatever one treats as “natural” is close to the core of one’s own ideology’ ). The (Enloe 2004, 219

desire to understand how militarism becomes ‘natural’ is central to militarisation, which

is seen as the process by which militarism secures social and political penetration. Enloe makes the

‘Militarism is an ideology. Militarization, by contrast, is a sociopolitical

contrast with militarism particularly clear:

process. Militarization is the multitracked process by which the roots of militarism are
driven deep down into the soil of a society – or of a non-governmental organization, a
governmental department, an ethnic group, or an international agency’ (Enloe 2004, 219–220). Sherry (1995, xi) also
places a strong emphasis on process, with militarisation ‘the process by which war and national security became consuming anxieties and provided the memories, models and metaphors that shaped broad areas of national life’ (see also Geyer
1989, 79). This brief review of the literature serves to reaffirm the importance of a separation between militarism and militarisation. This article does not make any claims about how games contribute to the militarisation process, instead focusing

emphasise the crucial contribution which popular culture makes

exclusively on militarism. It aims to

to militarism and expose the importance of ‘open, visible and conscious’

displays of militaristic ideology which military videogames provide (Åhäll 2015, 68).

Militarism, popular culture and videogames: an analytical framework it is

important to recognize that the specific content of a militaristic ideology,
and the processes of militarization that produce militaristic societies, are
multi-faceted. Hence, there are many ways that militarism can be, or fail to be, embedded within society. (Bernazzoli and Flint 2010, 158) As Bernazolli and Flint make clear, the potential sources of militarism and
militarisation are numerous. Here, I build a framework – encapsulating the military-industrial and military-entertainment complexes, spatial aspects of militarism and gendered militarism – which is utilised throughout the remainder of the
article to demonstrate the importance of popular culture, and in particular videogames, to militarism (see Table 1 for an overview). The military-entertainment complex provides the first element of the analytical framework developed here. The
MEC is derived from the military-industrial complex which came to prominence in 1961 when President Eisenhower warned in his ‘Farewell Address to the Nation’ of the dangers to American liberty from ‘the acquisition of unwarranted

conceptualisation of a ‘power elite’,

influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex’. Such concerns are reflected in Mills’ (1958, 32–33) earlier

which saw American power concentrated within a triangle between political, military and
industrial institutions so making America ‘a permanent war economy’ : ‘Virtually all Table 1. Militarism and videogames –

Power located in a symbiotic relationship

an analytical framework. Indicators of militarism Key aspect Videogame-based example Military-entertainment complex.

between political, military and industrial/popular cultural industries for mutual gain.
Use of military as consultants and licensing of weapons in the development of military
games; story-lines written in close collaboration with military military Spatial analysis Physical proximity of

industry/services sector results in shared interests with local populace; popular culture
developed in close collaboration with the military Promotional films which demonstrate that weapons manufactures and game developers are closely working

Gendered militarism Violence seen as

together; story-line and gameplay presents the player ‘in-game’ as a member of the US military actively participating in the War on Terror.

the ‘normal’ way to resolve conflict; violence seen as masculine; power structured to
promote male authority whereas women seen as needing protection; discourses of strong
nuclear families seen as crucial to domestic stability in the War on Terror . Militarised

masculinities present both within the promotional material for the games and the in-
game narrative and gameplay. Critical Studies on Security 259 political and economic actions are now judged in terms of military definitions of reality’ (see also Turse 2008; Der Derian 2009).

popular culture scholars have identified the importance of what

Building on this work, a number of

is generally termed the ‘military-entertainment complex’, identifying a

symbiotic relationship between the military, academic institutions and
industry, with research funded and driven by military priorities and
extensive labour mobility between them for (Lenoir 2000, 292–298; Lenoir and Lowood 2000). Der Derian (2009, xxxvi),

example, maps out the close affinities between the military and popular
cultural industries, arguing that in the contemporary era ‘the production,
representation and execution of war’ have merged seamlessly, with war
becoming increasingly technology driven and mediated to its citizens
through TV news coverage as a form of virtual spectacle (see also McInnes 2002; Debrix 2008). While the implications of

the military-entertainment complex are made clear in analysis of

Hollywood’s production of films that are strongly supportive of the military,
containing hyper-masculine heroes and celebrating techno-fetishism (Boggs and Pollard

this symbiotic relationship has also been

2006, 2007. See Robb 2004; Turse 2008, 103–112 for a list of the films supported by the Pentagon), since the early 1980s

visible in increasing collaborations between the military and the games industry. While the military

the military commissioning

initially developed much of the technology that drove the industry (Herz 1997, 201–205), by the mid-1990s the position had reversed, with

adaptations to commercial videogames such as tank and helicopter simulators (e.g. Battlezone and Apache,

and military combat games

respectively) for military use (e.g. Doom) (Herz 1997, 209–211; Lenoir and Lowood 2000, 26–28; Robinson 2012, 507–510). Work from

within political geography also offers important insights into the spatial dimension, emphasising

Scholarship on
distinctions between militarisation and militarism – this forms the second key element of the analytical framework offered here (on militarisation, see for example, Bernazzoli and Flint 2010).

popular culture emphasises the way in which spatiality is integral to the production of
militaristic content situated in close proximity to
(militarism). For example, research on the Institute for Creative Technologies,

Hollywood film makers, demonstrates the symbiotic link between the

military, entertainment and university sectors, reflecting what Shapiro has
termed ‘the tertiary spatialization of terrorism’ (Shapiro 2009, 30). Similarly, Herz (1997) emphasised that the flourishing of links between
the military and videogame makers was contingent on their physical location. For example, Interactive Magic, developers of th e 1994 helicopter simulator game Apache, were located ‘right down the road from Fort Bragg’ (Herz 1997, 209).
Production of the game drew extensively on links to McDonnell Douglas (makers of the Apache Longbow helicopter) who allowed the developers access to the helicopter’s technical specifications in order to enhance its realism. Of arguably greater
importance, however, were the links which the developers had to helicopter pilots based at Fort Bragg. As Interactive Magic’s then spokeswoman put it: ‘They had about twenty-five of their Apache pilots stationed across the road from our offices
here . . . they came over and flew the aircraft and said how cool it was. They loved the game. In fact, they’re trying to get the army to use Apache to train some of their pilots, as an initial weeding-out tool, because it’s a lot cheaper to have these

feminist scholarship contains a strong commitment to

guys play the computer game than fly the helicopters’ (cited in Herz 1997, 210). Finally,

interrogating the development of militarism, forming the third element of the framework
developed here in order to explain the role of videogames in militarism. This scholarship
is particularly clear in terms of identifying indicators of militarism, with as personified by Enloe’s work (see above)

its focus on identifying ‘those distinctively militaristic core beliefs’ such as ‘that armed
force is the ultimate resolver of tensions’ and ‘that in times of crisis those who are
feminine need armed protection’ post 9/11 official war stories (2004, 219). Hunt and Rygiel similarly examine as ‘told by

on
Coalition leaders, governing and business elites, and the mass media’ to show how they have been gendered ‘in order to legitimise and gain consent for the war on terror’ (2007, 4). In particular, they emphasise discourses centred

waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan ‘to protect women’s rights and liberate
Muslim and Arab women’ by ‘hyper-masculine rescuers’ discourses (9) alongside

centred on the protection of the West against those who seek to destroy
Western values Both mask malevolent motives for militarised violence.
(13). Goldstein

the portrayals of men and women, particularly with reference to group

(2001) similarly differentiates between

interactions and military heroism – the latter seen as a strongly masculine trait. Feminist
scholarship also provides useful models for engagement with popular culture. Shepherd, for example, offers

a framework which encompasses spoken language script (i.e. textual engagement with the , song lyrics, captions and

physical performance
graphics etc.), body language (i.e. the visual of each character and the framing of the on screen images and characters) and non-linguistic signifiers (i.e.

trope s, the built environment, lighting, music etc.) (2013, 7–11). Her book thus clearly delineates what she is looking at, and how she is seeing and hearing, when she watches a collection of TV series to demonstrate that ‘gender and
violence are mutually constitutive of identities, relationships, (world) politics, and each other’ (Shepherd 2013, x. See also Rowley 2010, 314– 318). Such thinking is reflective of work on militarism and popular culture: Åhäll (2012, 287), for
example, looks at film and media depictions of female heroines to explore how ‘female agency in political violence is enabled through gender’ showing that these stories ‘involve a tension between life-giving [e.g. giving birth] and life-taking

identities, and that agency is only enabled if this tension is removed [e.g. through a miscarriage] or overcome [e.g. through a return to motherhood]’. Military videogames and
militarism Through discussion of the two Medal of Honor videogames, the remainder of this article explores the contribution of videogame s to militarism and shows the importance of their militaristic messages based on

that military videogames contribute in important ways to

insights offered by the above framework. It demonstrates

militarism yet also shows that there remains a powerful space for
(militarised messages from popular culture),

critical reaction to, and rejection of, militaristic popular culture. The military-
entertainment complex The military-entertainment complex is manifest in the links
between the videogame developers, serving military personnel and the military
equipment and weapons manufacturers.

In fact, in order to maximize fun we should always pick topics

about the war, arms and the miltiary because then we get to talk
about war arms and the military and that’s the key intenral link
to fun
Stam 92 (Robert Stam is a Professor in the Cinema Studies Department at New York
University, “Mobilizing Fictions: The Gulf War, the Media, and the Recruitment of the
Spectator", 1992, Pgs 110-113)
THE AMBIGUITIES OF POSTMODERN WAR With the Gulf War, the representation of war
seemed to shift from classical realist representation to the brave new public-
relations world of hyperreality evoked by Baudrillard. Not only was the war
experienced by the spectator as a postmodern video game, but the war itself
proliferated in simulacral strategies - fake runways, fake bomb damage, fake missile
silos, even fake heat to attract heat-seeking missiles. Postmodern war, as Virilio points
out, is a highly mediated experience even for its participants; it demands a “dedoublement” of
observation - an immediate perception and a mediated perception through video and radar - a doubling itself
doubled by the dual najectory of military objects (planes, missiles) which have one real uajectory in the
actual space of battle, and another virtual trajectory in the electromagnetic environment.12 The simulations
used by the media during the war, moreover, as James Der Derian points out, existed on a
continuum with other, parallel military simulations, such as the strategic and
counterterrorist games played at the National Defense University and the tactically onented
computerized “Janus” game perfected at the Army War College, all of which themselves existed
alongside the commercially available simulation games like the popular realpolitik computer
game Balance of Power, the film/video Wargames, and the video games modeled on Top Gun. The IranIraq war
was first played out as a video game, Der Derian reminds us, in the form of the macro-
strategic game which the consulting company BDM International sold to Iraq,l3 just as the invasion of Kuwait,
according to General Schwarzkopf, was rehearsed in the form of computer simulations provided
by an American c0mpany.1~ That there was now a generation brought up on such video-
strategic games further “normalized” the brutality; since no sentient beings inhabit the
interior space of video monitors, the suffering “over there” on the ground was deemed equally inconsequential. War
games, models, and simulations have in common the feature of playing at
war via representation. In the Gulf War, the major electronic media plugged into these apparatuses. The
snippets of infrared video footage released by the Pentagon, taken from cameras
mounted on the noses of bombers, were strikingly similar to pre-war animation
materials offering views from cockpits showing direct hits fired on imaginary targets.
These same materials were euphorically described by newscasters as “riveting,” proof of the “astounding accuracy” of the
equipment. It was as if the Pentagon and its corporate suppliers made an offer that the
media could not refuse -
and which they were not ideologically inclined to refuse - theoffer of consummate war-game
visuals. With few opportunities for firsthand reports due to censorship and the “pool system,” the media began
to rely on Government-issued videotapes. Just as the Reagan White House provided photo-ops and the
“line of the day” and thus cued daily news reports, so the Pentagon and the White House dictated the
imagery of war through what amounted to video press releases.15 The Pentagon, and its corporate
suppliers, became the producers and the sponsors of the sounds and images, while the “news” became a
form of military advertising. Technological fetishism reigned. Pieces of military
equipment were called “stars” by technophiliac newscasters - their successes touted to a world all the more eager to buy
them - and later went on to “star” in military parades. If
the Gulf War revealed the descriptive aptness
of the Baudrillardian account of postmodernism, it also signaled that paradigm’s
political vacuousness. The postmodern account of the implosive collapse of boundaries in
a mass-mediated global society is exhilaratingly apt in its rendering of the hyper-
real “feel” of consumerist life in the simulacral world, but inadequate in its
account of global power relations. For Baudrillard, all cultures are now equally
caught up in the meaningless whirl of mass-mediated simulacra. But what the Gulf War reveals is
a fundamental asymmetry in how the depthless surfaces of postmodernity are lived, an asymmetry not only
between the experience of television and the experience of war, but also between the
experience of the two sides engaged in the war. While one side lived the war as a
simulacral video-war or’ miniseries, with only minimal suffering, the other lived it as a real
war replete with death, dismemberment, and disease. Technology facilitated seeing and hearing
on the one side, and obliterated it on the other. While Americans, as Jonathon Schell put it, waged war in
three dimensions, the foe was trapped in two dimensions: “. . . we kill and they die, as if a race of gods were making war
against a race of human beings.”’6 If postmodernity has spread the telematic feel of First World media around the world,
in sum, it has hardly deconstructed the relations of power that marginalize, devalue, and time and time again massacre
Third World peoples and cultures. The Gulf War also exposed some of the blind spots of the optimistic reception theories
of writers like John Fiske. In an effort to combat the cultural melancholia of the Frankfurt School view of mass culture,
Fiske sees viewers as mischievously working out “subversive” and “aberrant” readings of TV programming based on their
own counterhegemonic popular knowledge. Fiske is right to reject the “hypodermic needle” view of bourgeois ideology, a
view that reduces telespectators to “cultural dupes.” And he is undoubtedly right to suggest that housewives do develop
Critical readings of soap operas, and that African-Americans “see through” the racism of the dominant media, but if they
do so it is only because everyday life and historical memory have generated an alternative framework through which to
understand texts and events. In
the case of the Gulf War, most American viewers lacked any
alternative grid, for example one rooted in comprehension of the Middle East and of the
legacy of colonialism. Rather, they were culturally primed by colonialist and
Orientalist discourse to give credence to whatever simplistic and caricatural
view the administration chose to present, to believe the worst about our
“enemies” and the best about ourselves.

Military fun solves heg by making warfighitng more enjoyable to

watch
Nordin and Oberg 15. Dan Oberg, professor of military science, Swedish Defense
College, Stockholm, and Astrid Nordin, professor of politics, philosophy, and religion at
Lancaster University Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2015, Vol. 43(2) pg. 406
We have argued to this point that critical war studies, in Clausewitz’s footsteps, is
emerging as a field of study that is strongly attached to a particular ontology of ‘war’.
We have also argued, however, that contemporary warfare (particularly in NATO
countries) can alternatively be understood, not through the type of ‘war’ their ontology
implies (war-as-fighting), but rather through various operational procedures. Our point
has been to suggest that there is little or no symbolism left in a warfare which
processes targets as spreadsheets, target packages and tasking-orders, through a
predetermined rhythm of meetings which leads it, not to a battlefield, but to an
administrative model. This model finds its ontology in Baudrillard rather than in
Clausewitz. Through military operations we move from war as antagonistic
exchange between subjects, to war as technical realisation. The race between
targeting process and battle-rhythm resolves subjectivity, the Other and symbolic
exchange through the repetition of operational procedures. This is not an example of
war-as-fighting, but the enactment of a pre-planned script. This characteristic
is by no means exclusive to the targeting process; rather it is indicative of how military
planning is conducted in most NATO countries. It is therefore crucial to think of
disappearance – enabled and exacerbated by the way warfare is infinitely
repeated – as an integral part of thinking about an ontology of war.
However, if target-processing and associated ways of operationalising warfare is making
war in the Clausewitzean sense disappear, then why is warfare made to appear as
fighting? We are constantly immersed in ‘war’ through television, art, computer
games, military recruiting campaigns, and arms industry projects. They call forth ‘war’ as
antagonistic and generative exchange. Consider the (simulated) fighting between
warriors in the stream of screenings that includes Spartacus, 300, Troy, Braveheart,
Apocalypto, or The Last Samurai. Computer games centred on war and politics –
Civilization, Hearts of Iron, Total War – unfold through the idea that war is a struggle
between antagonistic forms of political life. Andreas Behnke argues (correctly in our
view) that the Western notion of war has lost its ontological grounding. He
reads this as part of a paradox since despite its loss, warfare needs to be
aestheticised and legitimised ‘beyond the purely instrumental’.68 The
explanation for why this is the case often lies precisely in the way
representation helps to reinforce and militarise society, as it justifies a
liberal world order.69 Arguably, this explanation eschews the prior question of why
the study of war needs to imagine an antagonistic and generative war in the first place.
What does the idea that war is antagonistic and generative obscure? Or put more
crudely, who gains from reifying war as ‘war’, or war-as-fighting?
As an attempt to answer this we complement the prior explanation by suggesting that
recent theories of ‘war’ have underplayed the way in which operational warfare is also,
in and of itself, an act of disappearance. In doing so, they overemphasise genesis
at the expense of disappearance, and obscure the loss of exchange and
subjectivity from the ‘war’ they claim to depict, at the same time as they feed from
its reification as such. This ‘war’ allows NATO’s member countries to send out war
correspondents in body armour and helmets; to give first person shooters like Battlefield
enough status as reality; to give movies like Hurt-locker, television dramas like
Generation Kill, and documentaries like Armadillo their necessary ontological back-
drop. Moreover, it is there to allow for spending vertiginous amounts of money on
recruitment, arms production, government transitions, advertising, aid, education and –
war’ is
last but not least – military operations and target-processing. Crucially, ‘
there to allow the researcher to study war in
peace. All of us who feed from this are part of an extreme reification of war –
which hides not only that ‘war’ may have ceased to be a meaningful term
which structures reality, but also that these renditions of war is the closest we have
to ‘war’ as it is described by Clausewitz. The ontology of war debates in which we
engage are therefore part of this reification of war.
In this way, the distinction between an act of warfare and the attempt to understand
wars’ underlying principles is lost through the notion of war-as-fighting. Every
attempt to wage war or think war in its own right (or to oppose or neglect war for that
matter) refers back to this loss of meaning and distinction. Understood in this
way, the focus of research on the ontology of war or on better understanding ‘war’ as an
object (to make it appear as meaningful), also bestows a reality to the attempts to deal
with war. The question of whether the notion of war as antagonistic and generative
exchange is real is therefore not the issue, as any ontology of war risks this type of
reification. Rather, we should ask why it might seem so costly to leave this
particular ontology behind. Could it be because the various ways of grappling with
war’s ontology are active parts of how this reality remains intact?
Should we (and could we) forget the reality of ‘war’? Moreover, is a world without
referents like ‘war’ a world with less violence? No, says Baudrillard, it is not: ‘[t]he
immanence of the death of all the great referents ... is expressed by exacerbating the
forms of violence and representation that characterized them’.70 This helps us
understand why, paradoxically, in an era in which war-as-fighting has
disappeared, we all speak about it, analyse it, play it on our computers and
experience it through books and films – and why a calling for war studies is
a logical step in the disappearance of war- as-fighting. This argument could be
directed against other disciplines too – ‘war’ is not a privileged object in any
respect. Nonetheless, to call for a renewed discipline of ‘war studies’ –
encouraging as it may be, especially to all of us who receive research funding based on
the existence of such a discipline – is therefore not without problems. It is not so
much a call for an understanding of war as it is a call to supplant the absence of war in
International Relations with a particular categorical blindness, since strictly
speaking war is never there. Rather, it provides a ‘simulation of perspective’
as Baudrillard would call it.71 The problem is that the organised violence to which we
constantly refer has no other reality than that of the model.72 That is, it has no
other reality than the reality provided by representations of war (which is not
to say that they are one and the same). Through this simulation, war returns as
an imperative to thought. It is an explanation or an understanding through a
particular category (‘war’) and not of a state of things (actions, reactions, challenges,
automatism, repetition, processing). ‘War’ works as an imperative:
‘You’ve got a military and you must learn how to use it well’
‘
You’ve got a weapon-system and you must learn how to operate it’

‘You’ve got a target and you must learn how to task it’

‘You’ve got an ontology of war and you must learn how to think through it.’73
Conclusion
War is understood in recent debates on critical war studies as characterised by
antagonistic and generative exchange. This amounts to a view in which ‘war’ helps
provide a context in which acts of violence become meaningful. They receive a
pattern, reciprocity and a ‘natural’ demarcation that can be named and
criticised. This article has argued that contemporary understandings of war and
warfare are well advised to find new ontologies complementing the notion that war is
fighting. We have presented one such attempt, resonating with Baudrillard’s notion of
war-processing, based on an analysis of the planning and conduct of military
operations (in NATO countries). This attempt outlines how warfare strives towards
its own ‘perfect’ and self-referential model. We illustrate this through an analysis
of military targeting so as to point to how warfare becomes a reiterative and
automated process which constructs a seamless economy of violence. We
read targeting as a perpetual motion to keep up with the battle-rhythm of
military operations and argue that it rids what is termed ‘war’ of its
underlying principles: adversaries, antagonism and exchange.
An understanding of war which neglects this aspect risks missing that war
(as processing) strictly speaking lacks an antagonistic engagement with ‘an
enemy’ and in so doing calls into question many of the underlying principles
that the notion of war- as-fighting rests upon. Doing so leaves the theorist of war
and IR with a blind spot: the conception of ‘war’ that has become operational while
being obscured by the reification of ‘war’ as fighting. Barkawi and Brighton
associate the absence of a discipline of war studies with an ‘othering of violence from
inquiry’.74 We again state explicitly, there- fore, that we are not advocating the
continuation of such othering. To say that war as processing lacks
antagonism is not to say that it lacks violence. Warfare is a highly violent
practice but it seems to occur amidst a breakdown of symbolic relations
between a subject and an Other. This would point to acts of insurgency or terror
being ways of acting out, rather than a response as such.75 The ‘perfect war’ we have
described is highly violent indeed – but that does not make it ‘fighting’.
This is not to say that war should be reduced to an automated process between man and
machine. Rather we want to point out that war-as-fighting neglects the way in which
subjectivity, symbolism and exchange are often lacking in military targeting –
something which needs to be considered if we are to better understand the
relationship between the ontic realty of warfare and the ontology of war. In
light of our argument, the ontology of war can be read not only as a way of thinking
‘war’ but also as an imperative to thought. We are aware that this imperative does
not work through simple causality. The targeting doctrines we have looked at are
not representative of all warfare. A task for future research would be to contrast it
to, for example, the way ‘insurgents’ or ‘civilians’ sub- jected to military violence
represent warfare. Another would be to examine disappear- ance in the wider contexts of
counter-insurgency and network-centric warfare.
Nevertheless, there is a risk that (critical) war studies in invoking the ontology
of war- as-fighting is led back to an antagonistic and generative exchange
between subjects – whether this is actually taking place or not. Attempts to
think of politics, ethics, security or gender risk being forced through the mould of
this particular ontology of war. Following Baudrillard, an attempt to rethink
and complement the ontology of war should challenge it in a way that forces
its ‘truth to withdraw – just as if one were pulling the chair out from under
someone about to sit down’.76 We therefore need to think war in a way that
pulls the chair out from underneath the gamer, policy maker, military
officer or theorist about to sit down to ‘do war’. What does this act of ‘pulling
the chair’ from underneath thought leave us with? Our hope is that it opens up
for the possibility of rethinking ontologies of war in a fashion that helps us
better understand and challenge their relationship to various ontic realities.
Taking this question seriously gives us a new vantage point on (critical) war
studies for future debates.

Fun outweighs—promotes citizen engagement

Stahl 9 (Roger Stahl is an associate professor of communication studies at the
University of Georgia in Athens, "Militainment, Inc: War, Media, and Popular Culture",
2009, Pgs 109-112)
Playing War In the new interactive war, genres once thought to be discrete have forged new
and strange alliances. Wartime news looks like a video game; video games
restage wartime news. Official military training simulators cross over into
commercial entertainment markets; commercial video games are made useful for
military training exercises. Advertisements sell video games with patriotic rhetorics; video games are
mobilized to advertise patriotism. The business of play works closely with the military to
replicate the tools of state violence; the business of state violence in turn
capitalizes on playtime for institutional ends. More than any other cultural manifestation,
video games represent the emerging politics of the virtual citizen-soldier, produced by the
changing configurations of electronic media, social institutions, and world events. This new figure
represents a reprogramming of the citizen subject in accordance with the
logics of Netwar where citizen identity itself becomes a battleground. As the new
security state “thickens,” it tends to reproduce the social field in its image, resulting in a culture
that progressively integrates the citizen into the momentum of the war
machine. The new generation of war-themed games is central to this culture, inviting one to inhabit a political world
conditioned through the aesthetic of “gametime.” Gametime moves quickly, subordinating critical and ethical questions to
movement and action. Historically, the spectacle of war emerged to shift emphasis from the
rational question of “why we fight” to the dazzling display of “that we fight.” Gametime
integrates the citizen, however virtually, into the mechanical pleasures of “how we fight.”
Media effects scholar Arthur Asa Berger writes: Games aren’t models of reality and don’t claim to be;
what they do is represent an emotional reality that generates the desired
fantasies in the minds of players. Thus, criticizing games for not being real or realistic misses the
point.74 This is a wise suggestion on one level. The litmus test for what ought to be subjected to “the reality principle”
should depend on what the art form “claims to be.” When a war-themed commercial game begins to
make claims about authenticity, or better yet, when a state institution like the Pentagon
begins to make claims about authenticity (and what is America’s Army without this
claim?), then the culture has entered another reality altogether. War-themed
video games, armed with this newfound legitimacy, gain a profound rhetorical
force. What was once a fantastical and entertaining sidebar becomes the very presentation of war.
Presenting war in the guise of a game alone is not alone sufficient to play at war. The
presentation must also be absent the horrors a high-tech military machine can effect. The virtual citizen-soldier, whether
playing Kuma\War or following an embedded reporter on MSNBC, fights a war largely without human consequence. This
player has intimate knowledge of the whir that the $3000 night vision goggles make when flipping the switch, as this was
meticulously reproduced for America’s Army, but he or she does not see through those goggles “little girls with smashed
up faces,” as one commentator from the Ottawa Citizen observes.75 In terms of video games, Alexander R. Galloway notes
the difference between the two, naming one “realisticness” (the ability to reproduce attributes of the physical world) and
the other “realism” (the correspondence to realities of social life).76 In a sense, the
power of America’s Army
lies in its use of the former to make a claim on the latter. The problem, of course, is that
integration into a sanitized fantasy of war is a seduction whose pleasures
are felt at the expense of the capacity for critical engagement in matters of
military power. One might say that the freedom to play war in the midst of war is not free. The crossover
between military and civic uses of war-themed video games has closed into a feedback
loop consisting of the technological ability to produce an increasingly “realistic” war and
the will to selectively reproduce political events in playable real time. This loop
appears to be tightening and accelerating. In his investigation of high-tech military training, Virtuous
War, James Der Derian argues that the apparent virtue of war is facilitated by, and is in
large part inseparable from, its virtuality.77 He admonishes us: “[L]ike reality’s most intimate counterpart,
the dream, virtuous war requires a critical awakening if we are not to sleepwalk through the
manifold travesties of war, whether between states or tribes, classes or castes, genders or
generations.” 78 Whether or not we will enjoy this critical awakening, the premise remains: video games are
increasingly both the medium and the metaphor by which we understand war. Unless we
confront their significance in crafting citizen identity, video games will march on, leading training exercises on military
bases and taking up quarters in our hearts and minds.

In particular this year’s topic is the most fun, because the

reduction of arms sales allows us to be pacifist soldiers whose
weapons are clean and whose wars are always just
Staff and Keeble 6 (Lutton Staff is an author in the areas of communication within
modern society, including publishing Reseaux: The French Journal of Communication,
Richard Lance Keeble is the Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, "Secret
State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf, and the Modern Image of Warfare", 2006,
Pgs 8-11)
New militarism and mediacentrism: warfare as fiction Military
strategy becomes essentially a
media event: an entertainment, a spectacle. Warfare, moreover, is transmuted into a
symbolic assertion of US and to a lesser degree UK global media (and military) power.
Media manip-ulation becomes a central military strategy. This `mediacentrism" is a pivotal element
of new militarist societies. Significantly, James Combs identifies the emergence of a distinctly new kind of warfare with the
UK's Falklands cam-paign of 1982 and the US invasion of Grenada of the following year. He argues (1993: 277): 'It
is a
new kind of war, war as performance. It is a war in which the attention of its auteurs
is not only the conduct of the war but also the communication of the war. With their
political and military power to command, coerce and co-opt the mass media the national
security elite can make the military event go according to script, omit bad scenes and dis-
couraging words and bring about a military performance that is both spec-
tacular and satisfying.' The shift to volunteer forces and the nuclear 'deterrent' signalled in both the US and
UK a growing separation of the state and military establishment from the public. The populist press, closely allied to the
state, served to create the illusion of participatory citizenship. Moreover, the media play other crucial roles in new
militarist societies by engaging the public in a form of glamor-ised, substitute warfare. Instead of mass active participation
in militarist wars, people
are mobilised through their consumption of heavily censored media
(much of the censorship being self-imposed by journalists) whose
job is to manufacture the
spectacle of warfare. People respond to the propagan-da offensive with a mixture of enthusiasm, contempt,
apathy and scepticism. Yet most crucially, media consumption and public opinion polling provide the illusion of
participation just as satellite technology provides the illusion of 'real live' coverage of the conflict. MacKenzie (1984) has
described the 'spectacular theatre' of 19th century British militarism when press representations of heroic imperialist
adven-tures in distant colonies had a considerable entertainment element. Featherstone, too, (1993; 1993a) has identified
the way in which the Victorian 'small' wars of imperial expansion in Africa and India were glori-fied for a doting public by
correspondents such as William Russell, G A Henty, Archibald Forbes and H M Stanley. But Victorian newspapers and
magazines did not have the social penetration of the mass media of today. And Victorian militarism was reinforced
through a wine range or institutions aria social activities: tne aivation Army, linurcn Army and uniformed youth
organisations, rifle clubs, ceremonial and drill units in factories. 'In
all these ways, a very large
proportion of the population came to have some connection with military
and paramilitary organisations.' (MacKenzie op cit: 5-6) By the 1970s this institutional and social
militarism had given way to a new mediacentric, consumerist, entertainment militarism in which the mass media,
ideologically aligned to a strong and increasingly secretive state, had assumed a dominant ideological role. Within this
media-saturated environment, Luckham (1984: 5) has identified the potency of the 'fetishism of
the weapon' within what he describes as 'the armament culture' (though he avoids
adopting the notion of militarism). During the new militarist wars media consumers were
encouraged to identify with weapons of mass destruction, which, in turn, were
constantly described as having human attributes. Moreover, Luckham argues that the modern,
high-technology weapons of extraordinarily destructive firepower have transmuted
warfare into a form of fiction. He says: 'The limitless pos-sibilities opened up by nuclear physics, space
technology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence have been the staple themes of science fiction. Materialised
in the form of nuclear missiles, laser beams, chemical weapons, germ warfare and
computers they transmute war into a new and elaborate genre of fiction.' (ibid: 11) During the
Second World War, weapons technology and its use, culminating in the nuclear bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bore little relation to any strategic rationale. Military
strategy had become profoundly irrational and had entered the realm of
fiction. As Reynolds (1989: 151) argues, there is no evidence to suggest that control over
weapons produced a consistent and rational relationship between the
means of violence and the ends sought by its use. Since 1945 this
'fictionalisation' of military strategy has intensi-fied with the development
of weapons systems of ever-increasing firepower. Fred Halliday (1983: 545) has argued against this
position suggesting that the Cold War was essentially a rational process. `...it was not irrational in that it reflected
responses by conscious political agents in the United States to what they saw as a challenge to capitalist power.' But
during the 1991 massacres, there was, in fact, little relationship between the massive fire-
power used by the US-led coalition forces and the threat posed. Militarism and, in
particular, new militarism have sought at the level of media-directed rhetoric to
legitimise and rationalise the profound irrationality and illegitimacy of the
nuclear-based, high technology military system. Since new militarist warfare is essentially a
media spectacle, the military's main concerns are to control and manipulate the image. Unlike
the militarist wars which lasted years, new militarist wars are over quickly. As Benjamin Bradlee, former executive editor
of the Washington Post, commented blunt-ly of the events of January-February 1991: 'The trouble with this war was it was
so fucking fast.' (Macarthur 1993: 147) But the Gulf 'war', which last-ed 42 days, in new militarist terms was a long 'war'.
The military become, then, the primary definers of the fast-moving event while journalists, kept far from any action, are in
no position to challenge their inventions. Moreover, the strategic imperatives of new
militarism mean that wars become inherently difficult to report and
'fictionalisation' is further encouraged. They are fought by planes (to which journalists normally
have no access) and in space and often at night. New weapons incinerate their victims making
calculations of casualties even more difficult. The emphasis on computer games in
military planning means that the distinction between `real' and Nintendo-
style wars becomes blurred. In these new wars, civilians don't die (except in 'accidents'),
weapons are clean and precise, and the soldiers are all at heart pacifists.
This is unreal warfare. As Phillip Knightley (1991: 5) commented: 'The Gulf war is an important one in the
history of censorship. It marks a deliberate attempt by the authorities to alter public perception of the nature of war itself,
particularly the fact that civilians die in war.' Yet the Gulf conflict, in fact, was not so much a unique event but the
culmination of a process that began with the Falklands 'war' of 1982 and moved through the US attacks on Grenada
(1983), Libya (1986) and Panama (1989). According to the post-modernist French theorist Jean
Baudrillard (1976; 1988), the contemporary post-modern culture is one of hyper-
reality, of re-production and simulation rather than production. Indeed, the
mediacentric culture of new militarism is founded on imitation — with the
nostalgic rein-vention/reproduction of the rhetoric of classical militarism (`I-litler'
Hussein, `allies', 'heroism', 'liberation', 'Maginot Line'), of Hollywood or of sport
dominating media and military discourse. Mann talks of 'spectator sport militarism'. He writes (1988:
185): `...wars like the Falklands or the Grenadan invasion are not qualitatively different
from the Olympic games. Because life and death are involved the emotions stirred up are deeper and stronger.
But they are not emotions backed up by committing personal resources. They do not involve real or potential
sacrifice, except by professional troops. The nuclear and mass conventional confrontation involves at most
10 per cent of GNP — a tithe paid to our modern "church", the nation. The symbolic strength of the
nation can sustain popular support for adventures and arms spending.' New
militarist wars end up as hyped-up media events with no more lasting effects than a popular TV series or sporting contest.
Since the wars are man-ufactured they fail to articulate real threats, problems or conflicts that deeply affect the public and
so are quickly forgotten — as in the cases of the US inter-ventions in the Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Panama and even the
Gulf.
The threat posed by the 'enemy' is grossly exaggerated. The 'enemy' is globalised
and in the process fictionalised. This process was rooted in the Cold War when the
Soviet threat, it has been argued, was largely imaginary — serving to legitimise
the West's (and in particular the US's) military-industrial complex, global
ambitions and military adventures. (Kaldor 1991: 35; see also Halliday op cit: 549) Throughout the
Cold War, Western intelligence services constantly exaggerated the strength of Warsaw Pact forces. (Adams 1994: 255)
When the Soviet Union failed to intervene in Poland in 1981 fol-lowing the emergence of the Solidarity movement, its
military impotence could no longer be concealed. New enemies were needed if the consensus was to remain firm in the
post-Cold War, new militarist era. This invention of enemies became increasingly desperate with the collapse of the Soviet
Union. The manufacture of Saddam Hussein as the global threat culminated this process of enemy invention in the 1980s.

Not only are military topics fun, they also make us feel powerful,
which is an extra advantage for the aff
Shapiro 14. Alan Shapiro, senior lecturer at Offenbach Art and Design University in
Germany, “Jean Baudrillard and Albert Camus on the Simulacrum of Taking a Stance on War,”
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)
The Military-Industrial Complex and the Vietnam War
The stance of opposition to a war undertaken by America’s ’military-industrial
complex’ (MIC), as President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed it in his Farewell Address to
the nation on January 17, 1961 after spending 8 years as President, seems to be based
on the assumption of the discursive viability of projecting oneself into the
imaginative space of being a sort of ‘shadow government of truth-speakers’,
empowered by democracy into the democratic position of being able to make
‘better’ decisions for the body politic of democracy than those who hold institutional
power in political economy and government. Most political discourse in the U.S.,
including the anti-war stance, seems to take for granted the idea that we should
clarify ‘our politics’ by imaginatively putting ourselves ‘in the shoes’ of
national strategists choosing among the policy options available.
Apocalypse Now
Jean Baudrillard expands our sense of what is history because he does not operate with a
strict separation between what are ‘the facts’ and what are the engaging stories that we as
a culture have written and enacted about important ‘historical’ events. Much of what
we know about the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Vietnam War comes
from Hollywood films about the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Vietnam
War that we have seen. In his essay on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 blockbuster Vietnam
War movie Apocalypse Now, Baudrillard writes that Coppola’s masterpiece is the
continuation of the Vietnam War by other means. “Nothing else in the world smells like
that,” says Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore – played by Robert Duvall – in the 2 hour and 33
minute film. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning… It smells like
victory.”
The high-budget extravaganza was produced exactly the same way that America fought
in Vietnam, says Jean Baudrillard of the film made by director Francis Ford Coppola
(Baudrillard 1981: 89-91). “War becomes film,” Baudrillard writes of Coppola’s
spectacularly successful cinematic creation. “Film becomes war, the two united by
their shared overflowing of technology” (Ibid.: 89). There is implosion or
mutual contamination between ‘film becoming Virtual Reality’ and War.
Think also of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998): total immersion in the
Virtual Reality of combat – an aesthetics of VR different from ‘critical
distance’ – as a new kind of ‘testimonial position’ with respect to war and
atrocities. In Vietnam-slash-Apocalypse Now, War is a Drug Trip and a God Trip,
a psychedelic and pornographic carnival (Baudrillard 2010), a savage
cannibalism practiced by the Christians, a film before the shooting and a shoot
before the filming, a vast machine of excessive special effects, a ‘show of power’, a
territorial lab for testing new weapons on human guinea pigs, and the
sacrificial jouissanceof throwing away billions of dollars – all these aspects alluded to or
mentioned by Baudrillard. Coppola’s film, according to Baudrillard, is the carrying on of
an undeclared, unfinished and unending War. An interminable Heart of Darkness.
Baudrillard: Neither For Nor Against
Jean Baudrillard is not ‘against war’, not even against specific wars like the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He says this explicitly in “Le masque de la guerre,”
published in the Parisian daily newspaper Libération, just prior to President George W.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ni pour ni contre. Neither for nor against. “This
war is a non-event,” writes Baudrillard, “and it is absurd to take a stance on a non-
event (Baudrillard 2003).” The non-events of the Iraq War and the War on Terror
opposed themselves to the event of September 11th, 2001.
Hostages of the Screen
Baudrillard’s two most explicit texts about war are The Gulf War Did Not Take
Place (1991), written just before, during, and just after the Persian Gulf War of 1991 that
was initiated by President George H.W. Bush, and The Spirit of Terrorism (2002),
written just after 9/11. At the very beginning of the essay “The Gulf War Will Not Take
Place,” the first of the three essays that comprise The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,
Baudrillard explains that non-war – which is what the military-industrial complex or
the (non-)war machine has become very adept at carrying out in the age of virtuality –
“is characterised by that degenerate form of war which includes hostage
manipulation and negotiation (Baudrillard 1995: 24). The Eisenhower-coined term
of the military-industrial complex is used by Baudrillard in his essay "No Reprieve For
Sarajevo," published in Libération, January 8, 1994. He sees the MIC as still operative
yet in need of conceptual upgrading. “Hostages and blackmail,” Baudrillard
continues in “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place,” “are the purest products of
deterrence. The hostage has taken the place of the warrior. He has become
the principal actor, the simulacral protagonist, or rather, in his pure
inaction, the protagoniser (le protagonisant) of non-war” (Baurillard 1995: 24).
And we, the television viewers of the non-war, are all in the situation of hostages, “all of
us as information hostages on the world media stage” (Ibid.). Hostages of the
screen, of the intoxication of the media, dragged and drugged into a logic of
deterrence, "we are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a
hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual” (Ibid.: 27).
Four Aspects of a Baudrillardian Theory of War
The post-structure [the successor to a sociological structure with less stability and with
less of a center] of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has properties of
binary/digital, simulation/modeling, viral metastasis, and complex intricate paradoxical
topology. Let us consider all four of these properties as aspects of a Baudrillardian theory
of war (or a theory of war in honour of Jean Baudrillard).
War as Imposed Binary Choice
First of all, the post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has
the property of binary/digital. It presents itself to us through the dualistic
structure of a forced binary choice, where the system obliges each of us to take
a position ‘for’ or ‘against’ war, or ‘for’ or ‘against’ particular wars, as waged,
for example, by the Pentagon, the EU ‘humanitarian’ forces, or the surveillance state’s
War on Terror. It is this very binary logic of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that is the news media
discourse, the rhetoric of politicians, and the hybrid virtual-and-real-killing
of the screen and the bomb.
Today, of course, the Internet has superceded television as the prevailing universal media (although there is much
convergence and combination of the two). And the Internet is much more interactive and participatory. There is much
more response. There is much less of a ‘spectacle’ than there was when Guy Debord and the Situationists conceptualized
their media theory in the 1960s. Yet everywhere that the ‘news media’ and the (non)-war machine still prevail, everywhere
that they are still massively influential, everywhere that they still exercise their power, we are not quite liberated from the
‘speech without response’ described by the early Baudrillard. When Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator of Libya, was
brutally killed by rebel forces on October 20, 2011, during the Libyan Civil War, the event, having been filmed by a cell
phone, was presented to worldwide viewers by almost all of the ‘news media’ as some kind of triumph for ‘justice’, even
though it was clearly a loss for democratic principles and the possible coming to light of priceless information about the
decades of atrocities committed by Gaddafi’s regime during a public trial which would never take place.

The later Baudrillard develops the powerful idea that the only authentic communicative
exchange that is possible today in the context of over-saturation with, of and by
simulacral media pseudo-exchanges is an ‘impossible exchange’. In the chapter
“Living Coin: Singularity of the Phantasm” in the book ImpossibleExchange (1999),
Baudrillard elaborates his idea of a generalized economy (not the same as Bataille’s
principle of solar expenditure or the basing of a general economy on a solar economy):
“the reinvesting of the sphere of all exchange by that which cannot possibly
be exchanged” (Baudrillard 2001: 122-131, see also Baudrillard 1976). There is
something of no-value at the heart of the economic order. Baudrillard provides
the example of the film Indecent Proposal (1993), in which the billionaire character John
Gage, played by Robert Redford, in the setting of a Las Vegas casino, purchases the
sexual-amorous favours of the married woman character Diana Murphy, played by Demi
Moore, for the sum of one million dollars. As Baudrillard interprets the film, Redford
seeks to possess the “unexchangeable part of this woman,” that portion of herself that is
outside of the exchange nexus for the simple reason that she herself does not own and
therefore cannot sell what she is. Baudrillard calls this “obliterating wealth in
and through the sign of wealth (Baudrillard 2001: 123-124). In the moment of their
first meeting, Gage asks Murphy to bet a million dollars at the roulette table for him. She
and his chips are wagered, thereby establishing the shared valuelessness – in the
sense of being outside the system of value – of both the clichéd legendary sum of one
million dollars and the enjoyment of and by this singular woman.
The Model Precedes the Real
In writing about the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Baudrillard notes the victory of the model
which precedes ‘the real’, the triumph of ‘war processing’ (on analogy with ‘data
processing’ and ‘word processing’), the predomination of virtual technologies.
The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the
property of simulation/modelling. There is the simulacrum of the disappeared
“historical” referent of war, and the triumph of informational and gaming technologies.
Baudrillard writes in “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?”: “The victory of the
model is more important than victory on the ground. Military success consecrates the
triumph of arms, but the programming success consecrates the defeat of time. War-
processing, the transparency of the model in the unfolding of the war, the
strategy of relentless execution of a program” (Baudrillard 1995: 55-56). In that
non-war that ‘did not take place’, there was the emergence of an abstract,
electronic, speculative, informatic space. “Just as wealth is no longer measured by
the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not
measured by being waged but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and
informational space, the same space in which capital moves” (Ibid.: 56).
In addition to careful management of images and information content, the true
devastation of war is kept at bay from our perceptions by simulation technologies
ranging from the televisual screen to the military ‘smart weapons’ deployed from
altitudes of tens of thousands of feet. During months of preparation for the ‘war’, viewers
experience endless military experts paraded across their screen, endlessly analyzing
scenarios before they happen. The pilot in his simulator cockpit, or the gunner in his
high-tech tank, is surrounded by a virtual environment and motion-dependent images
which are the same whether he is in a war game training exercise or a ‘real engagement’.
A Non-Euclidean Spacetime
The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the
property of complex intricate paradoxical topology. There is the “non-Euclidean”
spacetime of multiple refracting waves in an enigmatic hyperspace beyond any classical
geometry. In “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?,” Baudrillard (1995: 49-50)
writes:
At a certain speed, the speed of information, things lose their sense…
War implodes in real time, history implodes in real time, all communication and all
signification implode in real time…
The space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity, and
that the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean.
To understand the complex non-Euclidean informational space of non-war, we need a
new mathematics, a new unconventional metric space. In mathematics, a metric space is
a set where a specific concept of distance between elements of the set is defined and
implemented. Three-dimensional Euclidean space – a way of thinking about space that
belongs to the Western metaphysical ‘construction of reality’ as it was originated by the
Ancient Greek thinkers – corresponds to our ‘intuitive understanding’ of space.
1991 Persian Gulf War
Shortly before 7 PM on the evening of January 16, 1991 (January 17, early AM, in the
Gulf), Network nightly news viewers were informed that heavy bombing of strategic
targets inside Iraq had been initiated. At 9 PM, President George H.W. Bush
enthusiastically told the viewing audience that “the liberation of Kuwait has begun.”
Pentagon spokespersons explained that massive pinpoint strikes by high-tech planes
against carefully selected military sites and command headquarters had caught the Iraqis
entirely off guard. Reports of great success came in. The nation rejoiced. It was our grand
celebration. We feted our triumph in the Cold War. The glamorous high-tech weapons,
developed and paid for over years, could finally be used in the real thing, and the Soviets
were nowhere in sight. We were back. After the wrenching stalemate of
Vietnam, we could finally start again. The enemy was an inert physical
installation, a blip on a radar screen to be methodically darkened.
The Fourth Order of Simulacra
The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the
property of viral metastasis. There is the news media becoming part of the terror. There
are the surveillance policies of the state becoming part of the terror. In the essay “After
the Orgy” in the book The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard writes of the “epidemic of
simulation,” a networked mode of fractal or viral dispersal. Updating his famous theses
of “the three orders of simulacra” (in Symbolic Exchange and Death) and “the precession
of simulacra” (in Simulacra and Simulation), he seeks to introduce “a new particle into
the microphysics of simulacra (Baudrillard 1993: 5):
The first of these stages had a natural referent, and value developed on the basis of a
natural use of the world. The second was founded on a general equivalence, and value
developed by reference to a logic of the commodity. The third is governed by a code, and
value develops here by reference to a set of models. At the fourth, the fractal (or viral,
or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value
radiates in all directions…(Ibid.: 5, 7).
This is the fractal or viral stage of fourth-order simulacra. In Baudrillard’s post-
simulation epistème or "epidemic of simulation," value - if that term is still appropriate -
radiates in all directions in a cancerous metastasis. There is "no relationship between
cause and effect, merely viral relationships between one effect and another” (Ibid.: 108).
All spheres of society pass into their free-floating, excessive, and ecstatic
form.
September 11, 2001
In “The Spirit of Terrorism,” the first essay of the book The Spirit of Terrorism(2002),
Baudrillard writes of the event of September 11, 2001:
The more concentrated the system becomes globally, ultimately forming one
single network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already a
single little Filipino hacker had managed, from the the dark recesses of his
portable computer, to launch the ‘I love you’ virus, which circled the globe
devastating entire networks)…
Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which
accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate
itself anywhere, like a double agent. We can no longer draw a demarcation line around it.
It is at the very heart of this culture which combats it… Terrorism is the shock wave
of this silent reversion (2002: 8-9, 10, 11).
After each terrorist attack, there is a feeling in the air of panic and confusion in the news
media as the police and Federal Investigators identify and catch the perpetrators, and
the information society scrambles to find out ‘who did it’.

Abu Ghraib Torture and Prisoner Abuse

This is how the English-language Wikipedia article on “Abu Ghraib Torture and Prisoner
Abuse” begins:
During the War in Iraq, human rights violations, committed from late 2003 to early
2004, in the form of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture, reports
of rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison (currently
known as the Baghdad Central Prison) came to public attention beginning in early 2004
with Department of Defense announcements. These acts were committed by military
police personnel of the United States Army together with those of additional US
governmental agencies.1
On May 19, 2004, Jean Baudrillard published the essay “Pornographie de la guerre” in
the Parisian daily newspaper Libération. (published as “War Porn” in English) The
philosopher, sociologist, and media theorist writes:
World Trade Center: shock treatment of power, humiliation inflicted on power, but from
outside. With the images of the Baghdad prisons, it is worse, it is the humiliation,
symbolic and completely fatal, which the world power inflicts on itself – the Americans
in this particular case – the shock treatment of shame and bad conscience. This is what
binds together the two events (Baudrillard 2004).
To keep the hyper-reality of cyberwar going, the ghost-people must continue to exercise
a certain ‘minimal’ function in the real. To lend the game its requisite weight or
support, they must furnish a necessary dose of reality-effect through the
chalking up of their disappearance. A certain number of victims of torture,
rape, and murder are required to provide data (‘fresh meat’) to keep the
electronic killing game going, especially if they can be photographed, and
then the images sent out on the universal image-viewing network. Baudrillard
continues in “War Porn”:
This is where the truth of these images lies; this is what they are full of: the
excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic.
Truth but not veracity: it does not help to know whether the images are true
or false… There is no longer the need for ‘embedded’ journalists because soldiers
themselves are immersed in the image – thanks to digital technology, the images are
definitively integrated into the war. They don¹t represent it anymore; they
involve neither distance, nor perception, nor judgment…(Ibid.).
Media images in general – in advertising, for example – signify the excess of wealth that
we as citizens of the West have the prerogative of partaking in. The abject and disgusting
images of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse atrocity are the dark underside
of media culture.
Beyond the epistemology of true and false, the digital technology image has inscribed
within itself the tautological reasoning of the self-fulfilling prophecy, inheriting from
advertising and the classical era of consumer culture the mastery of the art of rendering
things true by saying that they are. For Baudrillard, all images in contemporary
culture tend towards the pornographic. The visual culture of stylized images
is obscene and pornographic at every level – from hard-core porno to ‘music
television’, from swimsuit magazines to commonplace TV commercials.

Advantage 3: The 1AC is radical thought about arms sales an

operation of theory-fiction that cultivates illusory and surreal
readings of the resolution in an effusive play with language. The
role of thought is to move faster than reality itself.
Strehle 14. Samuel Strehle, fellow in the DFG research training group “The Real and
Modern Culture” at the University of Konstanz, Germany, MAs in sociology and
philosophy from Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, Germany, researcher in the
department of anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany, currently pursuing a
PhD in sociology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, “A Poetic Anthropology of War:
Jean Baudrillard and the 1991 Gulf War,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)

The production of war signs is linked to the issue of war not only in matters of
content, but also in matters of form. Content-wise, war is just one of many fields in
which reality signs are produced; regarding its form, however, it is the pure logic of
war itself that works in this industry. The production of reality for Baudrillard
is a kind of warfare itself: Not only is it a monologue of power, a “speech without
response”, as he states in Requiem for the Media (1971: 172); even more, the
“terrorism of the code” (ibid.: 179) is a war-like attack on our senses.
We, the viewers, are targets of a bombardment of signs and images.
“Semiocracy”, Baudrillard (1976: 78) calls this terror in his writing on the New York
Graffiti scene: we live under a dictatorship of signs (against which the Graffiti
raise their anti-semiotic counterforce). The war sign industry is just one of many
subdivisions of a society-wide ‘reality sign industry’ that floods our lives with all
kinds of spectacular products and information. “We are all hostages of media
intoxication, induced to believe in the war just as we were once led to believe in
the revolution in Romania, and confined to the simulacrum of war as though
confined to quarters. We are already all strategic hostages in situ; our site is the
screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day” (Baudrillard 1991b: 25).
Finally now, this is where Baudrillard’s genuine theoretical intervention takes place.
Like the Graffiti writers, Baudrillard attempts to fight back against the
terrorism of the code and its work of purification—somehow continuing
Graffiti writing by other means. Baudrillard is leading his own war, his own
counter-guerilla warfare against the reality principle. What are his spray cans?
Which are the walls on which he puts his ‘mark on society’? It is the holy walls of
theoretical discourse that Baudrillard defaces with a low tech weapon called
“theoretical terrorism”, as he called it once (Baudrillard 1983a: 91, my translation)—
a thinking made to oppose, to challenge the hegemony of reality.
The idea of ‘theoretical terrorism’ is strongly linked to his concept of “reversibility”13 —a
key term in Baudrillard’s thinking. The term may be characterized by two main aspects:
At first, it refers to the reciprocity of gift exchange in which there is no closure of
exchange but an endless changing and challenging of sides. In this regard, it is a name
for the symbolic fluidity of power.14 At second, it refers to a principle of changing
a situation by radically reversing its viewing angle—“poetic transference of the
situation”, as Baudrillard calls it in Impossible Exchange (1999: 85).
Being a rather “phantastic principle” (Zapf 2010: 145, my translation), the concept of
reversibility is linked with the most powerful and yet most clandestine subtext in
Baudrillard’s oeuvre: ’Pataphysics. The idea behind this absurd science of “imaginary
solutions” is as simple as it is mysterious: It is an attempt to create a different
reality through imagination.15 Pataphysicians fight reality through the use
of imaginary forces, through creating illusion and deceit.
It is easily overlooked how central this pataphysical approach has been for Baudrillard;
even his most serious book, Symbolic Exchange and Death, is surprisingly full of
pataphysical statements, especially in the dense, programmatic introductory pages: “The
only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics, ‘a
science of imaginary solutions’; that is, a science-fiction of the system’s
reversal against itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible
simulation in a hyperlogic of death and destruction” (Baudrillard 1976: 4 f.).
How can “science-fiction” shatter the system of reality? Baudrillard explains his strategy
later in The Perfect Crime (1995), especially in the section on “Radical Thought”, and in
Impossible Exchange (1999). Ideas, he claims, can create their own reality, since
thinking is a performative act that builds its own ‘parallel world’: “Thought
[…] does not seek to penetrate some mystery of the world, nor to discover its
hidden aspect—it is that hidden aspect. It does not discover that the world
has a double life—it is that double life, that parallel life” (Baudrillard 1999: 149).
In the performative “act of thinking” (ibid.: 115), reality is not so much depicted but
challenged. The purpose of theory for Baudrillard is the exact opposite of what we
normally would expect: It should not recognize and analyze reality, instead it
must deny and contradict its hegemony. It has to create illusion and
establish a power of seduction that makes one lose the path of reality. The
“value of thought”, claims Baudrillard (1995: 94), “lies not so much in its inevitable
convergences with truth as in the immeasurable divergences which separate it
from truth.”
Only in awareness of those abstract ’Pataphysics can we distill any sense out of some of the oddest remarks in
Baudrillard’s oeuvre, for example his “delirious self-criticism” from Cool Memories where he accuses himself of “having
surreptitiously mixed my phantasies in with reality” and of “having systematically opposed the most obvious and well-
founded notions” (Baudrillard 1987: 38). He even complains about readers taking his theories for actual facts and reading
them in a “realist version”: “Simulacra are today accepted everywhere in their realist version: simulacra exist, simulation
exists. It is the intellectual and fashionable version of this vulgarization which is the worst: all is sign, signs have abolished
reality, etc.” (Ibid.: 227).

Baudrillard suggests that even his most prominent terms can be

Instead of this “realist version”,
regarded as pataphysical attempts to seduce his readers through fictitious ideas, for
example when he admits to having “put forward the idea of simulacrum, without really
believing in it, even hoping that the real will refute it” (Baudrillard 1995: 101).
Apparently he understands his thinking to be something like a playful simulacrum
itself, for also theory can precede—and thereby seduce—reality: “The theoretical
ideal would be to set in place propositions in such a way that they could be
disconfirmed by reality, in such a way that reality could only oppose them
violently, and thereby unmask itself. For reality is an illusion, and all thought
must seek first of all to unmask it. To do that, it must itself advance behind a
mask and constitute itself as a decoy, without regard for its own truth. [...] Reality
must be caught in the trap, we must move quicker than reality” (ibid.: 99).
In this sense, Baudrillard’s writing is “theory-fiction” (Baudrillard 1991c: 202)
rather than theory, as he borrows a term from Jean-François Lyotard (1979: 92 f., cp.
Blask, 2002: 133). Like all ’Pataphysics, this notion of “theory-fiction” may be traced
back to the surrealists and their “poetic anthropology”, as Dietmar Kamper (1981,
my translation) has called it. Such an anthropology is “poetic” because it refers to the
art of writing, but also because it touches the original notion of “poiesis”,
meaning to create something. ‘Poetic anthropology’ does not seek to describe
a reality that lies out there, instead it aims to autopoietically produce the
subject it writes about through its own act of description.
Theory for Baudrillard is a “paradoxical political intervention” (Zapf 2010: 241, my
translation). Thinking itself has to become the ambiguous kind of “singularity”
(Baudrillard 1995: 96) and “event” (ibid.: 104) that is eliminated from almost any
other sphere of the system: “Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion.
Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render
unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable.
Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion
about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion—in other words, a radical
disillusioning of the real.” (Ibid.: 104).
Maybe this is the most unique aspect of Baudrillard’s thinking altogether. He is a thinker
who tries to think the world different from what it actually is. He sees himself
as something like a smuggler or drug dealer, pushing forbidden items on a “black
market in thought” (Baudrillard 1999: 104), promoting “a clandestine trade in
ideas, of all inadmissible ideas, of unassailable ideas, as the liquor trade had to
be promoted in the 1930s” (Baudrillard 1995: 104 f.).
If Baudrillard is the drug dealer of sociology, what does this imply for his analysis of
war and his reference to the principles of symbolic exchange and the duel form? If we
want to believe Baudrillard that he is not interested in rehabilitating older wars,
we should read his reference systematically rather than historically 16—there might
have never been any historical war as glamorous and honorable as portrayed by
Clausewitz anyway. Hence, the introduction of symbolic exchange and the duel principle
into the analysis of war might be more like a strategy to introduce a different view
of things into the common perception of war. It delivers the necessary contrast
against which the aestheticized, whitewashed reality of the war can be
scrutinized and deconstructed as not the only possible reality of war. Only
in the light of its radical other can the reality of war be
denaturalized and revealed as a self-display of power and
hegemony.
In this regard, Baudrillard has always remained a critical thinker who seeks to
intervene into reality instead of just observing it. To the same degree he is
neither a cynic nor a fatalist, that is—a resigned thinker. On the contrary, in an interview
on the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center he even aligns himself with the ideas of
the Enlightenment: “Fatalism offers an unpalatable interpretation of the world, for it
leads to resignation. I don’t resign myself, I want clarity, a lucid consciousness. When we
know the rules of the game, then we can change them. In this respect, I am a man of
the Enlightenment” (Baudrillard 2002b). There is one major difference, though,
between Baudrillard and the classical Enlightenment: He wishes for “clarity” and
lucidity, he wants to “know the rules of the game”, but he does not seek the truth; he
wants to “change” the rules of the game by diverting the game from its truth.
It does not seem to matter so much to Baudrillard if his instance of contrast—symbolic
exchange and the duel principle—is more fictitious or real, illusionary or true; most
possibly it has something of both sides, being undecidable like a simulacrum in
the strongest sense. When Baudrillard writes about the Gulf War, he creates an odd
mixture of lucid observations on the one hand and theoretical seductions on the
other. If there could ever be something like ‘war studies’ in the spirit of Baudrillard,
they would have to dare not to eliminate this undecidability, otherwise they
would lose the spirit.
What matters the most for Baudrillard is the effort to break open the
uniform process of reality production and shatter its seeming self-evidence
into pieces. Theory according to Baudrillard is an attempt to reverse our view of
the world—shifting our perspective by introducing something new and
unsettling into the order of things. What seemed natural before, now starts to
look artificial; what presented itself as a glorious triumph suddenly appears
stale; what was evident becomes shady. Baudrillard’s theories are like evil
ghosts: They haunt reality by staging its excluded other—no matter if this
other really exists or if it has to be feigned.

Contention 2 is framing: fun outweighs information, which

terminates only in its opposite and generates implosive violence
across the globe
Artrip and Debrix 14. Ryan E. Artrip, Doctoral Student, ASPECT, Virginia
Polytechnic Institute, and Francois Debrix, professor of political science at Virginia
Polytechnical Institute, “The Digital Fog of War: Baudrillard and the Violence of
Representation,” Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)

The story that needs to be told is thus not about the undoubtedly deplorable “truth” or
fact of explosive and warlike violence, but about a violence of another sort. In the radical
digital transparency of the global scene, we (members of the demos) often have full or
direct exposure to explosivity, as we saw above with the image of terror. But what still
needs to be thought and problematized is implosivityor what may be called implosive
violence. Implosive violence is a violence for which we do not, and perhaps will never,
have much of a language (Rancière, 2007: 123). Although, not having a language for it or,
rather, as we saw above, seeking to find a language to talk about it and, perhaps, to make
sense of it is still sought after. This is, perhaps, what digital pictures of war/terror
violence seek to capture or want to force through. Implosive violence, often digitally
rendered these days, is in close contact with media technologies and
representational devices and techniques because it seeks representation and
meaning. This is why implosive violence insists on calling in wars (against terror, for
example) and on mobilizing war machines (against terrorist others, against vague enemy
figures), but wars and war machines that no longer have—to the extent that they
ever had—a clearly identifiable object and subject, or a clear
mission/purpose. As such, this implosive violence and its wars (the new
Western/global way of war, perhaps) must remain uncertain, unclear, foggy,
inwardly driven, representational, and indeed virulent. They must remain
uncertain and confused even as they are digitally operative and desperately
capture events/images to give the impression that meanings/significations can
and will be found. Yet, as we saw above, it is not meanings exactly that must be
found, but information and the endless guarantee of its immediate
circulation. As information occupies the empty place of meaning, certainty, or truth,
images must be instantaneously turned into appearances that search for
meanings that will never be discovered because, instead, a proliferation of
information-worthy facts and beliefs will take over (perhaps this is what US
fake pundit and comedian Stephen Colbert famously referred to as
“truthiness”). Or, as Baudrillard puts it, “free from its former enemies,
humanity now has to create enemies from within, which in fact produces a
wide variety of inhuman metastases” (Baudrillard, 2003). Thus, this implosive
violence is destined to be a global violence since it "is the product of a system
that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including of course
death as the ultimate form of singularity. […] It is a violence that, in a sense, puts
an end to violence itself and strives to establish a world where anything
related to the natural must disappear […] Better than a global violence, we should
call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by
contagion, produces by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems
and our capacities to resist" (2003; our italics).
 2ac university add on
The move towards radical theory within the cemetery university
engenders a fantasy of radicalism paving over the pain and
death that make this space possible. The only ethical act is a
pure semiotic insurrection, theory fiction, making claims
neither towards coherency nor objectivity. Scrambling the
syntactic code of the university.
www.AnarchistNews.org 10. “The University, Social Death, and the Inside
Joke,” http://anarchistnews.org/content/university-social-death-and-inside-joke
Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, yet this does not
detract from the great deal of military and corporate research, economic planning and,
perhaps most importantly, social conditioning occurring within their walls.
Furthermore, they serve as intense machines for the concentration of privilege;
each university is increasingly staffed by overworked professors and adjuncts, poorly
treated maintenance and service staff. This remains only the top of the pyramid, since a
hyper educated, stable society along Western lines can only exist by the intense
exploitation of labor and resources in the third world. Students are taught to be
oblivious to this fact; liberal seminars only serve to obfuscate the fact that they are
themselves complicit in the death and destruction waged on a daily basis. They sing the
college fight song and wear hooded sweatshirts (in the case of hip liberal arts colleges,
flannel serves the same purpose). As the Berkeley rebels observe, “Social death is our
banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning.”[43]
Our conception of the social is as the death of everything sociality entails; it is the failure
of communication, the refusal of empathy, the abandonment of autonomy. Baudrillard
writes that “The cemetery no longer exists because modern cities have entirely taken
over their function: they are ghost towns, cities of death. If the great operational
metropolis is the final form of an entire culture, then, quite simply, ours is a culture of
death.”[44] By attempting to excel in a university setting, we are resigning ourselves to
enrolling in what Mark Yudoff so proudly calls a cemetery, a necropolis to rival no
other. Yet herein lies the punch line. We are studying in the cemeteries of a nation
which has a cultural fetish for things that refuse to stay dead; an absolute fixation
with zombies. So perhaps the goal should not be to go “Beyond Zombie Politics” at
all. Writes Baudrillard: “The event itself is counter-offensive and comes from a
strange source: in every system at its apex, at its point of perfection, it reintroduces
negativity and death.”[45] The University, by totalizing itself and perfecting its
critiques, has spontaneously generated its own antithesis. Some element of sociality
refuses to stay within the discourse of the social, the dead; it becomes undead,
radically potent. According to Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body, “zombies mark
the dead end or zero degree of capitalism’s logic of endless consumption and ever
expanding accumulation, precisely because they embody this logic so literally and to
such excess.”[46] In that sense, they are almost identical to the mass, the silent
majorities that Baudrillard describe as the ideal form of resistance to the social: “they
know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into
hyperlogic, by forcing it into excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal
amortization.”[47] Zombies do not constitute a threat at first, they shamble about their
environments in an almost comic manner and are easily dispatched by a shotgun blast to
the face. Similarly, students emerge from the university in which they have been buried,
engaging in random acts of symbolic hyperconsumption and overproduction; perhaps an
overly enthusiastic usage of a classroom or cafeteria here and there, or a particularly
moving piece of theatrical composition that is easily suppressed. “Disaster is consumed
as cheesy spectacle, complete with incompetent reporting, useless information bulletins,
and inane attempts at commentary:”[48] Shaviro is talking about Night of the Living
Dead, but he might as well be referring to the press coverage of the first California
occupations. Other students respond with horror to the encroachment of dissidents: “the
living characters are concerned less about the prospect of being killed than they are
about being swept away by mimesis – of returning to existence, after death, transformed
into zombies themselves.”[49] Liberal student activists fear the incursions the most, as
they are in many ways the most invested in the fate of the contemporary university; in
many ways their role is similar to that of the survivalists in Night of the Living Dead, or
the military officers in Day. Beyond Zombie Politics claims that defenders of the UC
system are promoting a “Zombie Politics”; yet this is difficult to fathom. For they are
insistent on saving the University, on staying ‘alive’, even when their version of
life has been stripped of all that makes life worth living, when it is as good as
social death. Shaviro notes that in many scenes in zombie films, our conceptions of
protagonist and antagonist are reversed; in many scenes, human survivors act so
repugnantly that we celebrate their infection or demise.[50] In reality, “Zombie Politics
are something to be championed, because they are the politics of a multitude, an
inclusive mass of political subjects, seeking to consume brains. Yet brains must be seen
as a metaphor for what Marx calls “the General Intellect”; in his Fragment on Machines,
he describes it as “the power of knowledge, objectified.”[51] Students and faculty have
been alienated from their labor, and, angry and zombie-like, they seek to destroy the
means of their alienation. Yet, for Shaviro, “the hardest thing to acknowledge is that the
living dead are not radically Other so much as they serve to awaken a passion for
otherness and for vertiginous disidentification that is already latent within our
own selves.”[52] In other words, we have a widespread problem with aspiring to be this
other, this powerless mass. We seek a clear protagonist, we cannot avoid
associating with those we perceive as ‘still alive’. Yet for Baudrillard, this constitutes a
fundamental flaw: "at the very core of the 'rationality' of our culture, however, is an
exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen,
children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model:
the exclusion of the dead and of death."[53] In Forget Foucault, we learn the sad
reality about biopower: that power itself is fundamentally based on the separation and
alienation of death from the reality of our existence. If we are to continue to use this
conception, we risk failing to see that our very lives have been turned into a
mechanism for perpetuation of social death: the banal simulation of
existence. Whereas socialized death is a starting point for Foucault, in Baudrillard and
in recent actions from California, we see a return to a reevaluation of society and of
death; a possible return to zombie politics. Baudrillard distinguishes himself as a
connoisseur of graffiti; in Forget Foucault, he quotes a piece that said “When Jesus
arose from the dead, he became a zombie.”[54] Perhaps the reevaluation of zombie
politics will serve as the messianic shift that blasts open the gates of hell, the
cemetery-university. According to the Berkeley kids, “when we move without return
to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in
war.”[55] Baudrillard’s words about semiotic insurrectionaries might suffice: "They
blasted their way out however, so as to burst into reality like a scream, an
interjection, an anti-discourse, as the waste of all syntatic, poetic and political
development, as the smallest radical element that cannot be caught by any
organized discourse. Invincible due to their own poverty, they resist every
interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything."[56]
 2ac war = processing
Endless analysis about “war as arms” only obscures the primacy
of the simulated model. The 1AC is a performance of a radically
other ontology of war games, an illusory ontology of
disappearance we force the truth of war to withdraw by pulling
the chair out from under the gamer, the officer, the theorist and
the policy maker. We are the radical thought that moves faster
than reality, directing the implosive violence of military
presence back on itself. We are not cartagrophers; we are all
Spartacus.
Nordin and Oberg 15. Dan Oberg, professor of military science, Swedish Defense
College, Stockholm, and Astrid Nordin, professor of politics, philosophy, and religion at
Lancaster University Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2015, Vol. 43(2) pg. 406

We have argued to this point that critical war studies, in Clausewitz’s footsteps, is
emerging as a field of study that is strongly attached to a particular ontology of ‘war’.
We have also argued, however, that contemporary warfare (particularly in NATO
countries) can alternatively be understood, not through the type of ‘war’ their ontology
implies (war-as-fighting), but rather through various operational procedures. Our point
has been to suggest that there is little or no symbolism left in a warfare which
processes targets as spreadsheets, target packages and tasking-orders, through a
predetermined rhythm of meetings which leads it, not to a battlefield, but to an
administrative model. This model finds its ontology in Baudrillard rather than in
Clausewitz. Through military operations we move from war as antagonistic
exchange between subjects, to war as technical realisation. The race between
targeting process and battle-rhythm resolves subjectivity, the Other and symbolic
exchange through the repetition of operational procedures. This is not an example of
war-as-fighting, but the enactment of a pre-planned script. This characteristic
is by no means exclusive to the targeting process; rather it is indicative of how military
planning is conducted in most NATO countries. It is therefore crucial to think of
disappearance – enabled and exacerbated by the way warfare is infinitely
repeated – as an integral part of thinking about an ontology of war.
However, if target-processing and associated ways of operationalising warfare is making
war in the Clausewitzean sense disappear, then why is warfare made to appear as
fighting? We are constantly immersed in ‘war’ through television, art, computer
games, military recruiting campaigns, and arms industry projects. They call forth ‘war’ as
antagonistic and generative exchange. Consider the (simulated) fighting between
warriors in the stream of screenings that includes Spartacus, 300, Troy, Braveheart,
Apocalypto, or The Last Samurai. Computer games centred on war and politics –
Civilization, Hearts of Iron, Total War – unfold through the idea that war is a struggle
between antagonistic forms of political life. Andreas Behnke argues (correctly in our
view) that the Western notion of war has lost its ontological grounding. He
reads this as part of a paradox since despite its loss, warfare needs to be
aestheticised and legitimised ‘beyond the purely instrumental’.68 The
explanation for why this is the case often lies precisely in the way
representation helps to reinforce and militarise society, as it justifies a
liberal world order.69 Arguably, this explanation eschews the prior question of why
the study of war needs to imagine an antagonistic and generative war in the first place.
What does the idea that war is antagonistic and generative obscure? Or put more
crudely, who gains from reifying war as ‘war’, or war-as-fighting?
As an attempt to answer this we complement the prior explanation by suggesting that
recent theories of ‘war’ have underplayed the way in which operational warfare is also,
in and of itself, an act of disappearance. In doing so, they overemphasise genesis
at the expense of disappearance, and obscure the loss of exchange and
subjectivity from the ‘war’ they claim to depict, at the same time as they feed from
its reification as such. This ‘war’ allows NATO’s member countries to send out war
correspondents in body armour and helmets; to give first person shooters like Battlefield
enough status as reality; to give movies like Hurt-locker, television dramas like
Generation Kill, and documentaries like Armadillo their necessary ontological back-
drop. Moreover, it is there to allow for spending vertiginous amounts of money on
recruitment, arms production, government transitions, advertising, aid, education and –
war’ is
last but not least – military operations and target-processing. Crucially, ‘
there to allow the researcher to study war in
peace. All of us who feed from this are part of an extreme reification of war –
which hides not only that ‘war’ may have ceased to be a meaningful term
which structures reality, but also that these renditions of war is the closest we have
to ‘war’ as it is described by Clausewitz. The ontology of war debates in which we
engage are therefore part of this reification of war.
In this way, the distinction between an act of warfare and the attempt to understand
wars’ underlying principles is lost through the notion of war-as-fighting. Every
attempt to wage war or think war in its own right (or to oppose or neglect war for that
matter) refers back to this loss of meaning and distinction. Understood in this
way, the focus of research on the ontology of war or on better understanding ‘war’ as an
object (to make it appear as meaningful), also bestows a reality to the attempts to deal
with war. The question of whether the notion of war as antagonistic and generative
exchange is real is therefore not the issue, as any ontology of war risks this type of
reification. Rather, we should ask why it might seem so costly to leave this
particular ontology behind. Could it be because the various ways of grappling with
war’s ontology are active parts of how this reality remains intact?
Should we (and could we) forget the reality of ‘war’? Moreover, is a world without
referents like ‘war’ a world with less violence? No, says Baudrillard, it is not: ‘[t]he
immanence of the death of all the great referents ... is expressed by exacerbating the
forms of violence and representation that characterized them’.70 This helps us
understand why, paradoxically, in an era in which war-as-fighting has
disappeared, we all speak about it, analyse it, play it on our computers and
experience it through books and films – and why a calling for war studies is
a logical step in the disappearance of war- as-fighting. This argument could be
directed against other disciplines too – ‘war’ is not a privileged object in any
respect. Nonetheless, to call for a renewed discipline of ‘war studies’ –
encouraging as it may be, especially to all of us who receive research funding based on
the existence of such a discipline – is therefore not without problems. It is not so
much a call for an understanding of war as it is a call to supplant the absence of war in
International Relations with a particular categorical blindness, since strictly
speaking war is never there. Rather, it provides a ‘simulation of perspective’
as Baudrillard would call it.71 The problem is that the organised violence to which we
constantly refer has no other reality than that of the model.72 That is, it has no
other reality than the reality provided by representations of war (which is not
to say that they are one and the same). Through this simulation, war returns as
an imperative to thought. It is an explanation or an understanding through a
particular category (‘war’) and not of a state of things (actions, reactions, challenges,
automatism, repetition, processing). ‘War’ works as an imperative:
‘You’ve got a military and you must learn how to use it well’
‘
You’ve got a weapon-system and you must learn how to operate it’

‘You’ve got a target and you must learn how to task it’

‘You’ve got an ontology of war and you must learn how to think through it.’73
Conclusion
War is understood in recent debates on critical war studies as characterised by
antagonistic and generative exchange. This amounts to a view in which ‘war’ helps
provide a context in which acts of violence become meaningful. They receive a
pattern, reciprocity and a ‘natural’ demarcation that can be named and
criticised. This article has argued that contemporary understandings of war and
warfare are well advised to find new ontologies complementing the notion that war is
fighting. We have presented one such attempt, resonating with Baudrillard’s notion of
war-processing, based on an analysis of the planning and conduct of military
operations (in NATO countries). This attempt outlines how warfare strives towards
its own ‘perfect’ and self-referential model. We illustrate this through an analysis
of military targeting so as to point to how warfare becomes a reiterative and
automated process which constructs a seamless economy of violence. We
read targeting as a perpetual motion to keep up with the battle-rhythm of
military operations and argue that it rids what is termed ‘war’ of its
underlying principles: adversaries, antagonism and exchange.
An understanding of war which neglects this aspect risks missing that war
(as processing) strictly speaking lacks an antagonistic engagement with ‘an
enemy’ and in so doing calls into question many of the underlying principles
that the notion of war- as-fighting rests upon. Doing so leaves the theorist of war
and IR with a blind spot: the conception of ‘war’ that has become operational while
being obscured by the reification of ‘war’ as fighting. Barkawi and Brighton
associate the absence of a discipline of war studies with an ‘othering of violence from
inquiry’.74 We again state explicitly, there- fore, that we are not advocating the
continuation of such othering. To say that war as processing lacks
antagonism is not to say that it lacks violence. Warfare is a highly violent
practice but it seems to occur amidst a breakdown of symbolic relations
between a subject and an Other. This would point to acts of insurgency or terror
being ways of acting out, rather than a response as such.75 The ‘perfect war’ we have
described is highly violent indeed – but that does not make it ‘fighting’.
This is not to say that war should be reduced to an automated process between man and
machine. Rather we want to point out that war-as-fighting neglects the way in which
subjectivity, symbolism and exchange are often lacking in military targeting –
something which needs to be considered if we are to better understand the
relationship between the ontic realty of warfare and the ontology of war. In
light of our argument, the ontology of war can be read not only as a way of thinking
‘war’ but also as an imperative to thought. We are aware that this imperative does
not work through simple causality. The targeting doctrines we have looked at are
not representative of all warfare. A task for future research would be to contrast it
to, for example, the way ‘insurgents’ or ‘civilians’ sub- jected to military violence
represent warfare. Another would be to examine disappear- ance in the wider contexts of
counter-insurgency and network-centric warfare.
Nevertheless, there is a risk that (critical) war studies in invoking the ontology
of war- as-fighting is led back to an antagonistic and generative exchange
between subjects – whether this is actually taking place or not. Attempts to
think of politics, ethics, security or gender risk being forced through the mould of
this particular ontology of war. Following Baudrillard, an attempt to rethink
and complement the ontology of war should challenge it in a way that forces
its ‘truth to withdraw – just as if one were pulling the chair out from under
someone about to sit down’.76 We therefore need to think war in a way that
pulls the chair out from underneath the gamer, policy maker, military
officer or theorist about to sit down to ‘do war’. What does this act of ‘pulling
the chair’ from underneath thought leave us with? Our hope is that it opens up
for the possibility of rethinking ontologies of war in a fashion that helps us
better understand and challenge their relationship to various ontic realities.
Taking this question seriously gives us a new vantage point on (critical) war
studies for future debates.

The reality of warfare thrives on the reification of war as

generative, as appearance, as reality and in so doing this
principled reality accomplishes the techno-liquidation of the
human, of meaning, of thought. All are subordinated to models
and endless preparation wherein war disappears in favor of the
simulacral violence of a clean kill that takes place on the
unlimited battlefield
Nordin and Oberg 15. Dan Oberg, professor of military science, Swedish Defense
College, Stockholm, and Astrid Nordin, professor of politics, philosophy, and religion at
Lancaster University Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2015, Vol. 43(2) pg. 399

In Baudrillard’s notorious critique of the Gulf war he identifies traditional conceptions of

war as involving the ontology we have seen in critical war studies and contemporary
military doctrine: ‘war is born of an antagonistic, destructive but dual relation between
two adversaries’.40 However, he argues, if this is war, then there is no war taking
place in the Gulf. One important but hereto neglected reason for this argument is
Baudrillard’s claim that war has disappeared into the processing of warfare.
Baudrillard never fully developed this discussion, but he wrote extensively on the subject
from a general perspective in his final works. Therein Baudrillard points to the way
subjectivity disappears in operational processing as part of the attempt to
fulfil and perfect potential.41 Baudrillard sees subjectivity becoming a
subordinated part of technological media, ‘a perfectly operational molecule that is
left to its own devices and doomed to ... reproduce, self-identically, to
infinity’.42 In his view, we are faced with a situation in which subjectivity, social
relations and will are essentially liquidated by operational practices. They are not
supplanted by a higher will or a higher purpose. Rather, they vanish into
processing entirely devoid of symbolic meaning.
This indicates that it is not physical disappearance Baudrillard discusses, but
disappearance which strictly relates to the symbolic. Baudrillard on numerous
occasions illustrated this idea through Alfred Jarry’s novel The Supermale, which
tells a story of how automated processing dissolves limits between man and
technology. The apex of the story is a 10,000-mile bicycle race – the perpetual
motion race – which takes place between a five-man bicycle and an express train. In
the race the cyclists function as a collaborative machine to challenge the train over long
distance. The cyclists reach a speed that enables them to ride side by side with the
locomotive – to become limitless automatons in the rhythm of the machine. This
becoming comes at a price, since the cyclists gradually disappear as humans, as
they reach the speed of the train. One of them disappears quite literally as he dies
on his post. However, his decomposing corpse, strapped to the bicycle, pedals
on. The corpse stands as a symbolic marker for how the rest of the bodies also disappear
by being absorbed into the process itself. In the end, the five-man machine
rides alongside the train with the living and dead corpses riding at
maximum speed in order to keep up. This theme, of transformation of man into
machine, is also evident in the rest of the novel, which ends with its key figure dying
while transforming into a machine.43
As Rex Butler points out, the novel helps to draw up the:
[V]ision of a society in ... which humans are unnecessary. We see this vision coming
true in those self-enclosed and self-perpetuating systems of simulation that
Baudrillard analyses, which have no outside and no need to be explained by an other,
and whose best model would be the bicycle proposed by Alfred Jarry, which still
continues to pedal long after its riders have passed away with fatigue.44
The image Jarry paints in the novel illustrates the symbolic disappearance
of subjectivity by emphasising the repetitive and inherently meaningless
relationship we have with various media that surround us. The attempt to
reach a perfect speed and efficiency by way of the mechanic process works
back on subjectivity.
It is not far-fetched to see the recent conceptual inventions in military thought, such as
the Effects Based Approach to Operations (EBAO), Comprehensive Approach (CA), or
Network Centric Warfare (NCW), as part of the characteristic that Baudrillard is
concerned with and Jarry’s novel illustrates. The common denominator of these
concepts is the way they attempt to synchronise, coordinate, and make warfare
more efficient through staff procedures. They are all based on the idea that
perfect operationalisation generates a war in which all means and capabilities are
interconnected in ways that aim to create a seamless economy of violence. This in
turn indicates that the subject of warfare dissolves into operationalised
repetition. Such an argument does not entail that militaries, insurgents, weapon-
systems, logistical capacities and so forth are disappearing on a material level. Rather,
as part of a symbolic disappearance through the fulfilments of technological
processes, warfare strives towards perfection and symbolic aspects
disappear through a model which is being operationalised as if it is war. This
should not be taken to mean that there is an end to violence or suffering. There is of
course bodily violence and death in military operations despite the attempt to fulfil
wars’ every potential through repeated calls for ‘high-precision munition’ and ‘zero-
death warfare’. However, processing and repetition also participate in making
the representation of bodies and subjects disappear in operationalisation.
The concern here is that focusing on the violence displayed in war-as-fighting
might obscure a systemic violence which stems from the way in which war is
operationalised. Baudrillard argues that the type of violence the military normally
battles (such as terrorism) is far less lethal than the violence which replaces the subject
with the will of an operational and technocratic structure.45 What we have, then, is a
certain kind of disappearance which is obscured by (among other things)
the focus on war as violent exchange between subjects.
How do we go from the ontology of war as generative to an ontology of war as
disappearance? To understand the transition it is helpful to return to the idea that war is
considered generative as it exceeds social orders. Albeit helpful in order to understand
war’s excess in terms of productivity it is also possible to understand excess differently,
as a force of disappearance. Baudrillard argues that social reality disappears not
because of a lack, but rather because of excess, arguing precisely that wars fought by
the US tend to be ‘wars of excess’.46 One under-analysed aspect of the ontology of
war is therefore the way in which the excess it gives rise to is not simply generative of
appearances, but in turn forces disappearances. If we complement the generative
notion of war’s excess with Baudrillard’s argument that excess is in and of itself a cause
of disappearance, we can appreciate that the ontology of war might at times be
generative, and at times erase the preconditions for appearance. On one hand
it is correct that bodies, experience or materiality frame our understanding of war by
generating narratives. On the other it is important to acknowledge that
subjectivity disappears through the excess of the processes themselves.
Through such an acknowledgement we can see that warfare conditions the possibility of
appearance as it ‘always, already’ works as a process of disappearance. Arguably
targeting is a prime example of the latter.
Although Baudrillard highlights technology as integral to the effect of war’s disap- pearance into process, he does not
dwell on the exact mechanisms it entails. This is a task that we therefore undertake here. The next part examines the
military targeting process as one example of the attempt to create the perfect war. This process creates ‘an iterative logical
methodology for development, planning, execution, and assessment of effective- ness’.47 In what follows, we examine how
this methodology works to rid war of its underlying principles: subjectivity, antagonism and exchange.

Target Processing and the Disappearance of War

military doctrine has a

How are we to interpret targeting doctrines? As Josef Teboho Ansorge argues,
particular form of arrangement, which helps to ‘both describe and make the
world’.48 Doctrinal text relies heavily on abbreviations and contains an impersonal
and administrative language. It is as if the potential for symbolism – for the
text to mean more than itself – has been subtracted from the paragraphs in
favour of Orwellian ‘new- speak’. We might say that military doctrines not only
make a world appear, but also dissolve meaning and are therefore acts of disappearance.
We can also read the charts, appendices, images, power-point slides, meeting protocols
and organisational routines as part of this disappearance. One amusing example is
the well-known and extremely intricate ‘Afghanistan Stability/COIN dynamics’ slide
(also called ‘the sprawling spaghetti diagram’) which went viral in 2010.49 This slide was
supposed to convey meaning about how to ‘win’ the war in Afghanistan. The flow chart
listed pretty much every targetable process relating to irregular warfare as part of this
attempt. While it utterly failed to make the conflict meaningful (despite its excess of
meaning) it succeeded, by virtue of becoming an overexposed internet joke, to
obscure the fact that war-as-fighting, or war as such, had long since
disappeared from Afghanistan.
A common conception of targeting processes is that they are related to the operational
level of warfare (linking tactical with strategic and political aims). As such they are an
integral part of how warfare aims to translate strategic aims into tactical effects (and vice
versa). Military doctrine represents targeting as the process of selecting and prioritising
targets and matching actions in order to achieve strategic objectives.50 The purpose of
targeting is therefore to ‘provide the commander with a methodology’ and ‘a logical
progression’.51 This is done by virtue of constructing targets, conceptualising them as a
system, linking them to outcomes as part of synchronising other parts of military
operations, and by creating organisational routines – all with the aim of supporting
the ‘battle-rhythm’.52 Technically speaking, a battle-rhythm can be understood as
‘the combination ... of procedures, processes ... and ... actions’ which ‘facilitates
extended-continuous operations’.53 Taken to its limit, this implies heeding the tempo of
the operational process regardless of human subjectivity (just like the bike-train in
Jarry’s novel). In the doctrines, effective targeting is measured by how well it
facilitates operational planning and chosen objectives in an area of operations.
Importantly, it is also measured by how well it enables a particular tempo during
operations. Consequently, targeting ideally strives towards maximum efficiency
according to the model constructed in operational planning, while agency
disappears in the search for a perfect process.
If we look closely at the underlying principles of targeting we notice that they do not
emphasise adversaries, exchange or antagonism, but focus on how to perfect
the model of warfare. We read in JP 3-60 that key principles are: coordination and
synchronisation, rapid response, a minimal duplication of effort, expeditious
assessments of executed operations, a common perspective on targeting efforts, and a
full integration of capabilities of the process. This means that targeting provides a
cycle to describe how warfare should be conducted.55 This cycle is on the one
hand indicative of a methodology of contemporary warfare, and the actualisation of a
model that makes war a type of processing ad infinitum. War gets its own (battle)
rhythm, which territorialises a space (the area of operations) and the pace of the
operation (into current time and future time). This creates a reality-principle
which helps us appreciate that the war conducted is a modelled, repeatable
war. It is dispersed into an enormous amount of operational meetings,
power- points, steering groups and so forth.
On the other hand, we can read targeting as a subtraction of meaning which
pulverises subjectivity through attempted perfection. On a symbolic level
there is no ‘warrior’ in this warfare. Granted, the doctrines often invoke subjects
such as ‘the warfighter’ or ‘the targeteer’ as those who are supposed to decide upon,
detect, deliver effects of, and assess the targeting process.56 However, the ‘agent’ here
is the medium itself which helps to reduce each aspect of subjectivity into
fractal, self-identical molecules which merely mirror functions of the
process. This is not to say that individuals are absent from target- ing. The nomination
and approval of potential targets is a process that involves not only the military but also
politicians, lawyers, political advisors, gender advisors and environ- mental advisors, to
mention but a few. It also involves a number of boards (such as the Joint Target
Coordination Board, Joint Target Working Groups), lists (Target Nomination List, Joint
Integrated Prioritized Target List), and support cells (Target Support Cell, Information
Operation Cell), all involving complex meeting schedules. Not to mention what the
doctrine aptly calls ‘the myriad processes, sub-processes, and cycles associated with joint
targeting’.57 Through these, target-processing proclaims to be concerned with
means and ends, thus linking tactics to politics and creating a seamless
economy of violence. What it really accomplishes is to make subjectivity
disappear in the excess of the process itself.
Judith Butler argues in Frames of War that:
Surely, common sense tells us that persons wage war, not the instruments
they deploy. But what happens if the instruments acquire their own agency,
such that persons become extensions of those instruments?... persons use
technological instruments, but instruments surely also use persons (position them,
endow them with perspective, and establish the trajectory of their action).58
We similarly ask what happens when the process of warfare as such acquires its own
momentum, uses persons, and forms and erases subjectivity. In short, what happens
when the process becomes not only the means but also the end-point of war?
Importantly, if the subject is disappearing in repetitive excess, what happens to the
enemy Other?
At: Topicality
 Consensus Building
The idealistic attempt at the formulation of communicative
rationality is a paradoxical impossibility that cements
asymmetrical power relations under the guise of objectivity –
only critical scrutiny of the conditions constitutive of discourse
itself can undermine ideological hegemony
Devenney 2009 [Mark, senior lecturer in politics and philosophy
at the University of Brighton, UK, The limits of communicative
rationality and deliberative democracy, Journal of Power Vol. 2,
No. 1, April 2009, 137–154] Ronak
The
The counterfactual idealization of communicative validity is not only a condition of possibility of communication – it is also a condition of impossibility.8

project of deliberative democracy is founded on an essentially incommunicable

premise, equivalent to the role that zero plays in the number system, a moment essential to communicative
rationality which cannot be communicated, like the zero in the number system, the number which is not a number and
yet must be. The implications are far-reaching – the concept of communicative rationality requires as its own condition a moment

of constitutive impossibility. This entails that decisions about what constitutes a rational

procedure, or rational decision, will be tainted with traces of power, chance

and uncertainty. A reference back to the ideal of communication as a means of judging the decisions reached cannot deliver the certain answer
that such an idealization would presuppose. Moreover, the conceptual elaboration of deliberative democracy will have to take into account the unaccountable

all consensus is
which is its starting premise. In recent works, Habermas has come to recognize the force of this critique, acknowledging that

fallible, and that the ideal – if realized – would result in paradoxes which are irresolvable, i.e.
communication would come to an end. That is, even under conditions of what
Habermas terms discourse, there can be no guarantee that the force of the better
argument will win out. This recognition builds upon a longer period of reflection on the concept of an ideal communication community. It
culminates with the formulation offered by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms and the 1996 essay ‘Some Further Clarifications of the Concept of
Communicative Rationality’. He repeats the assertion that the ideal community is implicit in every real communication. These context-transcending validity claims
do not transport active participants in communication into a noumenal ideal of perfect communication. Rather, the ideal is a methodological fiction, a foil against
which actual societies can be judged. Crucially for Habermas this is not an abstraction from actually existent relations but is always already raized in specific
contexts. The ideal is, he argues, an enabling condition, rather than a constraint on communication (Habermas 1996, pp. 323–324). In truth, these qualifications

do not fundamentally alter the position Habermas reached in his earliest formulation of this ideal. The idealising presuppositions
of communication were never meant to correspond to a form of life. The failure to
realize these conditions in practice cannot then be deemed a critique of the necessity of their invocation in real communicative contexts. Rather, it is the

ideal itself which requires reformulation. The ‘… universalist anticipation of a muted transcendence from within that does
justice to the irrefutably unconditional character of what is held-to-be-true and what ought-to-be’ (Habermas 1998, p. 338) is the anticipation of the end of

The idealization of
communication, of a perpetual peace without communication. Criticism 2 If this can be agreed a second implication follows.

communicative rationality which specifies conditions of relational symmetry between

autonomous subjects is structured around a constitutive impossibility, an
asymmetry at its core. This irreducible asymmetry interrupts the presupposed symmetry in a variety of guises, two of which are relevant
here. First, the shadow of a power which has not found rational legitimation seems a

necessary component of any communicative forum. Indeed, in order for this

communication to occur there precisely cannot be symmetrical relations between
subjects. While it may be the purpose of such discourses to challenge unaccounted
power, power is already present in the very conceptualization of the subject as
a rational and autonomous agent capable of participation. Second, no matter what
conditions prevail in a discourse the results will always represent the hegemonic
articulation of a common position which is neither stable when agreed, nor stable
after the consensus has been reached. Consensus in fact requires the operations of
unaccountable power if it is to be maintained. Criticism 3 This suggests that rational
consensus is never absolutely distinct from an ideological consensus. Habermas argues that all participants
in communication presuppose a semantic ideal of identical meaning, and a pragmatic ideal of absolute validity, as counterfactuals with a ghostly presence. David
Ingram, a sympathetic critic of Habermas, notes, however, that: Unless Habermas identifies warranted assertability with an infallible notion of rational
justification – a move tantamount to retrieving a consensus theory of truth – he will have to concede that reasonable claims might be ideological. (Ingram 1993, p.
297) Indeed, as already argued, Habermas does not confuse warranted assertability with an infallible justification. In light of the argument above, however,

The ideal of communicative symmetry is

Ingram’s claim that ideology can never be overcome may be reformulated.

ideological in its attempt to represent, even counterfactually, conditions of rational

acceptability for norms. Indeed these conditions of rational acceptability – if claimed –
would veil asymmetrical relations of power and prevent their thematization.

Criticism 4 This opens communicative rationality to that which it cannot theorize , the

possibility of an event which interrupts an established consensus, without

recourse to legitimation. This is best summarized in a wonderfully pithy remark of Derrida’s in response to theorists, such as Critchley
(1999, pp. 267–281), who argue that deconstruction and critical theory are potentially commensurable. It is polite, but firm, in noting an irreducible divergence:
Wherever there is the performative, whatever the form of communication, there is a context of legitimate, legitimising or legitimized convention that permits it to
neutralise what happens, that is, the brute eventness of the arrivant. Performativity … in a certain way … neutralizes the eventness of the event. (Derrida 2007, p.
112) This returns us to Habermas’ initial analysis of performativity and universal pragmatics. On Derrida’s account, performativity is a means of inoculation against
an event, an inoculation which neutralizes the event, but cannot get rid of it. I explore the consequence of this unthought violence against the event, and of the
event, in relation to deliberative democracy in the section which follows. The important point is that the event on the terms in which Derrida here poses it cannot
be thought in light of an ideal of communicative rationality or performativity. This ideal neutralizes the potentiality unleashed by the possibility of an event always

Habermas has
to come, or in Derrida’s terms a democracy to come, a ‘to come’ which surprises that deemed legitimate. The preceding points entail that

not adequately responded to concerns that his account of performativity presupposes the
impossible, overloads the subject engaged in communication and relies on
asymmetries which cannot be resolved in discourse, precisely because they
are constitutive of discourse. It should be noted that as a consequence no adequate account
of subjectivity or of democracy can be derived from the ideal of a discursive vindication of validity claims. Criticism
5 The source of these theoretical abominations lies, I contend, in an untheorized decision made by Habermas when he first

wrote about universal pragmatics. This decision inspired decades of extraordinary work on communicative rationality and deliberative democracy but has itself

become sedimented, almost forgotten. As a consequence, its radicality, its lack of justification, its
‘eventness’ have been forgotten. Reactivating this founding decision enables a different stance on the critiques articulated above. In 1977,
Habermas writes thus about the relationship between universal (formal) pragmatics and structural linguistics: This abstraction of language from the use of
language in speech (langue versus parole), which is made in both the logical and the structural analyses of language is meaningful. Nonetheless, this
methodological step is not sufficient reason for the view that the pragmatic dimension of language from which one abstracts is beyond formal analysis … I would

not only language but speech too – that is, the employment of sentences in utterances – is
like to defend the thesis that

accessible to formal analysis (Habermas 1979, p. 6).

 Policy Education Useless
Policy education is useless – the government is a shut off
oligarchy
Gilens and Page 14. Martin, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Benjamin,
Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University, “Testing Theories of American
Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, American Political Science Association, Perspectives
on Politics, September 2014 | Vol. 12/No. 3, p. 575-577
Each of our four theoretical traditions (Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, Majoritarian Interest-Group Pluralism, and Biased Pluralism) emphasizes different sets of
actors as critical in determining U.S. policy outcomes, and each tradition has engendered a large empirical literature that seems to show a particular set of actors to be highly influential. Yet nearly

all the empirical evidence has been essentially bivariate. Until very recently it has not been possible to test these
theories against each other in a systematic, quantitative fashion. By directly pitting the
predictions of ideal-type theories against each other within a single statistical model (using a
unique data set that includes imperfect but useful measures of the key independent variables for nearly two thousand policy issues), we have been able to

produce some striking findings. One is the nearly total failure of “median voter” and other
Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories. When the preferences of economic elites and
the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the
average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically
non-significant impact upon public policy. The failure of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy is all the more striking
because it goes against the likely effects of the limitations of our data. The preferences of ordinary citizens were measured more

directly than our other independent variables, yet they are estimated to have the least
effect. Nor do organized interest groups substitute for direct citizen influence, by
embodying citizens’ will and ensuring that their wishes prevail in the fashion postulated
by theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. Interest groups do have substantial independent impacts on policy, and a few groups (particularly
labor unions) represent average citizens’ views reasonably well. But the interest-group

system as a whole does not. Overall, net interest-group alignments are not significantly
related to the preferences of average citizens. The net alignments of the most influential,
business-oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizen’s wishes. So existing
interest groups do not serve effectively as transmission belts for the wishes of the
populace as a whole. “Potential groups” do not take up the slack, either, since average citizens’ preferences have little or
no independent impact on policy after existing groups’ stands are controlled for. Furthermore, the
preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent
impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do. To be sure, this does not mean that
ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual

influence. Of course our findings speak most directly to the “first face” of power: the ability of actors
to shape policy outcomes on contested issues. But they also reflect—to some degree, at least—the
“second face” of power: the ability to shape the agenda of issues that policy makers
consider. The set of policy alternatives that we analyze is considerably broader than the set discussed seriously by policy makers or brought to a vote in Congress, and our alternatives are
(on average) more popular among the general public than among interest groups. Thus the fate of these policies can reflect policy

makers’ refusing to consider them rather than considering but rejecting them. (From our data we
cannot distinguish between the two.) Our results speak less clearly to the “third face” of power: the ability of elites to shape the public’s preferences.49 We know that interest

groups and policy makers themselves often devote considerable effort to shaping
opinion. If they are successful, this might help explain the high correlation we find between elite and mass preferences. But it cannot have greatly inflated our estimate of average citizens’
influence on policy making, which is near zero. What do our findings say about democracy in America? They

certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to
respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the

majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens
disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover,
because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly
large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it. A possible objection to
populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence policy making?
Perhaps economic elites and interest-group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they

seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support. But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that— collectively— ordinary citizens
generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.50
Moreover, we are not so sure about the informational advantages of elites. Yes, detailed policy knowledge tends to rise with income and status. Surely wealthy Americans and corporate executives
tend to know a lot about tax and regulatory policies that directly affect them. But how much do they know about the human impact of Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, or unemployment

we see no reason to think that informational

insurance, none of which is likely to be crucial to their own well-being? Most important,

expertise is always accompanied by an inclination to transcend one’s own interests or a

determination to work for the common good. All in all, we believe that the public is likely to be a more certain guardian of its own interests
than any feasible alternative. Leaving aside the difficult issue of divergent interests and motives, we would urge that the superior wisdom of economic elites or organized interest groups should not
simply be assumed. It should be put to empirical test. New empirical research will be needed to pin down precisely who knows how much, and what, about which public policies. Our findings also
point toward the need to learn more about exactly which economic elites (the “merely affluent”? the top 1 percent? the top one-tenth of 1 percent?) have how much impact upon public policy, and
to what ends they wield their influence. Similar questions arise about the precise extent of influence of particular sets of organized interest groups. And we need to know more about the policy
preferences and the political influence of various actors not considered here, including political party activists, government officials, and other noneconomic elites. We hope that our work will

Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies

encourage further exploration of these issues.

for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the
American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe

policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of

that if

affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously
threatened. Clearly, when one holds constant net interest-group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference
what the general public thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same
(around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a
proposed policy change (refer to the top panel of figure 1).
 Gaming k’s
Serious games are training and that’s bad
Hoofd 2007 (Ingrid M. Hoofd, National University of Singapore, “The Neoliberal
Consolidation of Play and Speed: Ethical Issues in Serious Gaming” in “CRITICAL
LITERACY: Theories and Practices Volume 1: 2, December 2007,” p. 6-14, 2007)
Serious games are a fascinating next stage in the continuous exploitation of digital
media technologies over the last decades for training, learning, and education. As
formal education and training always involves the transmission and repetition of
certain culturally and socially specific sets of skills and moral values, it would be of
paramount importance to ensure that developments within the serious gaming industry are
in step with the effects of the good intentions of nurturing people within a social framework
that emphasises a fair, culturally diverse, and blooming society. In this light, it is interesting
that from the very advent of the information society, digital technologies have been
depicted as central to the development of a more just and equal society by harbouring
the promise of bridging gaps between classes, races, and genders locally as well as
globally. Driven by the vision of this utopian potential of new technologies, the
education industry and larger policy organisations have been exploring the
pedagogical possibilities of these technologies both in- and outside the traditional
classroom for the last twenty-five years. Indeed, the implementation of increasingly
more sophisticated and technologically mediated methods and tools for learning and
education, takes as its starting point the techno-utopian assumption that (new)
interactive technologies themselves are the primary harbingers of a fair and
blooming society through facilitating (student) empowerment.
This paper takes issue with this widespread techno-utopian perspective by seeking to shed light on the larger ethical implications of serious gaming. It will do so through foregrounding the relationship
between global injustices, and the aesthetic properties and discourses of serious gaming. So while reframing serious games themselves in a new ethical perspective constitutes the main objective of this

policy papers and academic

paper, it is equally important to situate serious games within a larger political discourse on the teaching of new skills. Firstly then,

studies on serious games all display an assumption of the inherent neutrality of

gaming technologies, as if these technologies were mere tools equally suitable for all.
What also becomes apparent in the language used in these studies and proposals, is how
this instrumentalist vision of gaming technologies for learning goes hand in hand with
a particular neo-liberal assumption of what constitutes a fit individual, and by
extension of what the hallmarks of a ‘healthy’ society may be. For instance, in the European Union
study “Serious Gaming – a fundamental building block to drive the knowledge work society” by Manuel Oliveira on the merits of serious games for education, justification runs along the lines of gaming

the US Orange County

‘encouraging risk-taking and a winning attitude’ and creating a ‘performance-oriented individual.’ Similarly, Michael Guerena from

Department of Education proposes in one of the Department’s web-casts that serious

games instil “twenty-first century skills” like risk-taking, adaptability, self-direction,
interactive communication, and ‘planning and managing for results’ in the students
through the “channelling of fun.” Likewise, the UK-based Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association last year published their white paper
Unlimited learning - Computer and video games in the learning landscape, in which they argue that serious games will “create an engaged, knowledgeable, critical and enthusiastic citizenry” whose “work
practices will be geared towards networked communication and distributed collaboration” (49).

Concerns around the ethical implications of serious games regarding their entanglements with larger social (gendered, classed, and raced) inequalities have until now largely been coined in terms of
game content or representation. In a recent case in Singapore, the government’s proposition of using the RPG Granado Espada in secondary school history classes was followed by an outcry from various
local academics condemning the stereotypical characters and simplistic representation of medieval Europe in the game. Likewise, various authors have critiqued current serious games not only because
of simplistic representation of characters and surroundings, but especially because simulations generally tend to oversimplify complex social problems and situations. Gibson, Aldrich, and Prensky’s
Games and Simulations in Online Learning (vi - xiv) for instance discuss these demerits of serious games. While such a critical analysis of how game content contributes to the reproduction of dominant

the aesthetics of serious games involve much more than mere

discourses is definitely helpful, I would argue that

content. Instead, this paper will argue that the formal quest for instantaneity that research around digital
media has displayed through the development of interactive technologies for education
is already itself by no means a neutral affair. This is because the discourses that inform
this quest and that accompany this search for instantaneity arguably enforce the
hegemony of a militaristic, masculinist, humanist, and of what I will call a ‘speed-elitist’
individual. Moreover, I suggest that the propensity of current games to have sexist or racist content, is merely symptomatic of gaming technology’s larger problematic in terms of the
aesthetic of instantaneity. In short, (serious) computer games have become archives of the discursive and actual

violence carried out in the name of the utopia of technological progress and
instantaneity under neo-liberal globalisation. This archival function is possible
exactly because cybernetic technologies promise the containment and control of such
supposedly accidental violence, while in fact exacerbating these forms of violence. This
leads me to conclude that such violence is in fact structural to new serious gaming technologies, rather than accidental. I will elaborate this hypothesis by looking at various theorists who seek to
understand this structural imperative of new technologies, and their relationship to the neo-liberalisation of learning and education. In turn, I will look at how this problematic structural logic informs the
two popular serious games Real Lives and Global Warming Interactive.

Secondly, the advent of serious gaming interestingly runs parallel with the
contemporary dissemination and virtualisation of traditional learning institutions
into cyberspace. While the existence of learning tools in other areas of society besides actual learning institutions has been a fact since the advent of schools, the shift of
methods of learning into online and digital tools is symptomatic of the
decentralisation of power from ‘old’ educational institutions and its usurpation into
instantaneous neo-liberal modes of production. I am summarising the work of Bill Readings on the university here, because it sheds light
on the shift in education tout court towards virtualisation, and its relationship to the ‘new hegemony of instantaneity.’ In The University in Ruins, Readings

argues that the shift from the state-run university of reason and culture to the
present-day global knowledge enterprise must mean that the centre of power in
effect has shifted elsewhere. More important, says Readings, is that the function of the
new ‘university of excellence,’ one that successfully transforms it into yet another
trans-national corporation, relies on the fantasy that the university is still that
transcendental university of culture in service of the state and its citizens. So the
invocation of the fantasy of an ‘originary’ university of reason and progress, that
produces unbiased knowledge for the good of all, facilitates the doubling of the
production of information into other spaces outside the university walls proper.
While Readings surely discusses only higher education institutions in The University in Ruins, I would argue that the logic of a shifting centre of power from the state into the technocratic networks and

the current virtualisation of

nodes of speed operates quite similarly in the case of primary, secondary, and other types of formal education. Indeed,

learning and the emphasis on lifelong learning marks a dispersal of traditional learning
institutions into online spaces. This dispersal works increasingly in service of the
‘speed-elite’ rather than simply in service of the nation-state. The heralding of serious
games for education can therefore be read as a symptom of the intensified reach of
the imperatives of neo-liberal globalisation, in which consumption enters the lives of
locally bound as well as more mobile cosmopolitan citizens of all ages through harping on
the technological possibility of the confusion of production and play. Through the
imperative of play then, production increasingly and diffusely colonises all niche times
and -spaces of neo-liberal society. In other words, (the emphasis on) play allows not
only a potential increase in production and consumption through the citizen-
consumer after her or his formal education of ‘skills’, but starkly intensifies flows of
production and consumption already at the very moment of learning. While such an integration of play and
production is generally understood within the framework of the neo-liberal demand for the circulation of pleasure, it is useful here to widen the scope from understanding the learner as a mere consumer
of pleasure into the larger set of problematic interpellations that marks subjugation in contemporary society. Intriguingly, a host of research has emerged over the past years pointing towards the
intricate relationship between subjugation, military research objectives, and videogame development. Such research suggests an intimate connection between the C3I logic and humanist militaristic
utopias of transcendence, which incriminates interactive technologies as inherently favouring culturally particular notions of personhood. In the case of computer- and video-games for entertainment,
researchers have argued that the aesthetic properties of gaming technologies give rise to so-called ‘militarised masculinity.’ In “Designing Militarized Masculinity,” Stephen Kline, Nick DyerWitheford, and

interactive games open up very specific subject positions that

Greig de Peuter argue for instance that

“mobilize fantasies of instrumental domination” (255). This specific mobilisation that

video-games invoke, is not only due to the remediation of violent television- and film-
content, but also due to the intimate connection between gaming- and military
industries which grant these technologies their particular cybernetic aesthetic properties
(see also Herz 1997). This element of militarisation partly informs my concept of ‘speed-elitism.’ I extrapolate the idea of ‘speed-elitism’ largely from the works of John Armitage on the discursive and

In “Dromoeconomics: Towards a Political Economy of Speed,”

technocratic machinery underlying current neo-liberal capitalism.

Armitage and Phil Graham suggest that due to the capitalist need for the production of
excess, there is a strong relationship between the forces of exchange and production,
and the logic of speed. In line with Virilio’s argument in Speed and Politics, they argue that
various formerly the less connected social areas of war, communication,
entertainment, and trade, are now intimately though obliquely connected. This is
because all these forces mutually enforce one another through the technological
usurpation and control of space (and territory), and through the compression and
regulation of time. Eventually, Armitage and Graham suggest that “circulation has become an essential process of
capitalism, an end in itself” (118) and therefore any form of cultural production
increasingly finds itself tied-up in this logic. So neo-liberal capitalism is a system
within which the most intimate and fundamental aspects of human social life – in
particular, forms of communication and play – get to be formally subsumed under
capital. In “Resisting the Neoliberal Discourse of Technology,” Armitage elaborates on this theme of circulation by pointing out that the current mode of late-
capitalism relies on the continuous extension and validation of the infrastructure and
the neutral or optimistic discourses of the new information technologies. Discourses
that typically get repeated – like in the policy papers – in favour of the emerging speed-
elite are those of connection, empowerment and progress, which often go hand in hand
with the celebration of highly mediated spaces for action and communication. Such
discourses however suppress the violent colonial and patriarchal history of those
technological spaces and the subsequent unevenness brought about by and occurring
within these spaces. I would claim that Armitage’s assessment of accelerated circulation, and the way new technologies make play complicit in the techno-utopian endeavour of
speed, is crucial for understanding the larger ethical issues surrounding serious games. It is helpful at this point to look at Paul Virilio’s and Jacques Derrida’s work because this helps us understand the

. In “Cyberwar, God, and Television,” Paul

complicity of the aesthetics of interactive and visually oriented gaming technologies in speed-elitism

Virilio talks about the simulation industry’s function of “exposing [one] to the accident
in order not to be exposed to it” (322). What is according to him ‘accidented’ through the
virtualisation of accidents and violence, for instance in video-games, is reality itself.
This ‘accident of reality’ that virtuality brings about, argues Virilio, is due to the fact
that simulation technologies fragment space through their property of instantaneous
connection with previously far-away places. The hallmark of this fragmentation is
therefore that it brings about an intensification of forms of in- and exclusion through
actual disconnection. Eventually, there will be “two realities: the actual and the virtual” (323), and I would claim that consequently the
privileged speed-elite will be able to live in the illusion of engaging with social reality
that the virtual grants, at the cost of the (s)lower classes who will suffer the social and
ecological effects of the accidents of virtualisation. The illusion of mastery for Virilio consists in the sense of the “incorporation of the
world within oneself” that “real time technologies permit” (328) due to their militaristic compulsion that seeks to “reduce the world to the point where one could possess it” (329). I maintain that

these statements spell out exactly the function and logic of serious gaming.
Virilio elaborates the idea of the ‘museum of accidents’ later in his infamously apocalyptic “The Museum of Accidents.” His evaluation of certain visual simulation technologies as ‘museums of accidents’
and in particular in how these accidents involve the increasing stratification of individuals within a new global imperative of speed, resonates well with Jacques Derrida’s work on the ‘archiving’
properties of new technologies and their implications. In Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of Origin, Derrida parallels the concept and the technique of memory and archiving with these

the tragedy of the disappearance of various cultures calls forward a

new technologies. He argues that

desire in the R&D community – like teachers and developers of serious games – to
prevent this from happening by using the immense possibilities of presentday
archiving technologies. However, he cautions that this scientific quest to rescue
through archiving languages and cultures from going extinct due to ongoing
globalisation processes, once more presupposes that cultures and peoples are pre-
given static entities, or simple identities, that can then be simply ‘stored’. Moreover, it
falsely presupposes that archiving technologies are neutral tools, as well as that the
ideology behind this archiving desire is a universal or neutral one. But since the very
technicity of archiving is one that is already entangled with the same dominant
culture that archives, the necessary translation or recognition of materials fit for
archiving will have as its logical parameters this dominant culture. This kind of
messianistic desire, as much as the quest for understanding the other (or rather, the
claim that one does empathise with and understand the other), is therefore actually a
violent, neocolonialist, and possessive sort of encapsulation. Similarly, the well-
intended pedagogical aim to ‘salvage otherness’ from the tragedy of disappearance
under globalisation works completely in accordance with that very tragedy. One could compare this
well-intended encapsulation for instance with the anthropological display of artefacts of certain cultures in Western museums. It may be far more important to save actual humans than to salvage,
understand, and store their perceived culture or language, and Derrida warns that the choice for one generally does not imply a choice for the other.

This ‘virtual empathy’ that new simulation technologies endow, which sadly works in
accordance with the ‘structural accident’ of disenfranchisement under neoliberal
globalisation, is indeed present in the aesthetic of many serious games currently
available. The widely praised and sympathetic game Real Lives is a good example of this.
The pedagogical objective of Real Lives, as its website declares, is to “learn how people
really live in other countries.” The producers maintain that Real Lives is an “empathy-
building world” which will grant the students an “appreciation of their own culture
and the cultures of other peoples.” The game opens with assigning a character who just got born at any place in the world to the player. Since the attribution
of the character is based on actual statistical possibilities of place of birth and economic status, the character has a high propensity of being born poor in countries like India, Mexico, or in other highly

the player can take actions like deciding to go to school or

populated places. During the course of the game,

staying home to help her/his parents, which hobbies to take up, what job to take, and so
forth. The game time takes one-year leaps in which the player can see the outcome of outside events, like
disease or floods, and of his or her own actions. The software shows a map of the
character’s birth region and its statistics, like population density, gross annual income,
currency, health standards, and etcetera. The character is also assigned traits, like happiness, athleticism, musicality, health, and so on. While the
player’s actions definitely influence the health and economic status of the played character and her family, the potentially interesting part of the game lies in the fact that events and situations that are

However,
ostensibly beyond the player’s control influence the outcomes. Such a game structure potentially endows the student with a sense that simple meritocratic discourses are flawed.

what is also obvious in Real Lives, is that the attribution based on statistical facts may
very easily lead to a simplistic view of a country and its inhabitants. While India for
instance surely has many poor people and girls often are not allowed to go to school,
to have the student chance time and again on these representations can easily lead to
the repetition of stereotypes and a failure to grasp the complexity of Indian society.
More serious however is the formal technological mode of objectification and its
distancing effects that the game generates. This objectification resides in how the
‘clean’ interface – the ‘flight simulator’ like visual layout on the screen with the overview of categories and character attributes, the major actions and events in the character’s life
induced at the stroke of a few keys – in reality grants the player a sense of control by engaging with a

machine programmed in such a way that it appears to let the student identify with and
act out his or her empathy vis-à- vis a ‘real’ child in need. This discursive confusion of
reality and virtuality is for instance also present in the web-game Darfur Is Dying, in which
the player and virtual character get confused through the problematic claim that you
can “start your experience (as a refugee)” and that it offers a “glimpse of what it is like”
(emphases mine) to be a refugee. At the same time, the actual children in need on the
ground disappear from the player’s radar, turning them into a distant and vague large
group of ‘others’ who are effectively beyond the student’s reach of immediate
responsibility. As Virilio suggests, the time spend through engaging in virtual empathy eclipses
the ‘real accidents’ from the student’s view and experience. What is more, Real Lives
eclipses the larger social and economical relationships between the material
production and consumption of such virtual engagement and the continuous
exploitation and ‘museumising’ of peoples on the brink of (social, economical, and
environmental) accident, disenfranchisement, and even death. While relatively well-off
youth may indulge in turning other peoples’ distress into a ‘fun’ educational game,
such indulgence is precisely based on a neo-liberal structure that exploits the
environment, especially of the poor, and allows for the outsourcing and feminisation
of ever cheaper third-world labour. As Derrida proposed, the archiving into visual
technologies of certain cultures and peoples threatened with extinction does not at all
imply saving these actual people and their cultures – in fact, it may very well do
exactly the opposite. Long-term minor attitudinal changes in the student
notwithstanding, the disconnecting properties of the new cybernetic technologies of
speed that Real Lives is part of therefore displace the effect of the producer’s and
student’s good intentions and empathy into an instantaneous technocratic violence
that effectively ‘plays with lives.’
Another telling example of this displacement of well-intended interactive play is the environmental game Global Warming Interactive – CO2Fx. This web-
based game, funded by the United States National Science Foundation and developed by a group of people from various American consultancies and educational organisations, aims at
teaching the student about the kinds of decision making involved in global warming. The game
invariably starts with a map of the country of Brazil in the 1960s, and gives statistics about the carbon emission, air temperature, and general welfare of the population. The player

can then control government budget expenditures for science, agriculture, social
services, and development initiatives, after which the system jumps ten years into the
future, generating results based on these expenditures. The game eventually ends by
showing the relative increase in temperature in the virtual year of 2060, warning the
player that more international cooperation is required to really tackle global warming.
The major issue with Global Warming Interactive is once more that it completely
obscures the relationship between the computing technology itself that allows the
CO2Fx simulation, and global warming. A telling moment of this dissimulation is when the
game urges the player to “switch off the television!” because television uses quite a
bit of energy, while the energy consumption of the infrastructure, mode of production,
student consumption, and tools that sustain the game itself is being blissfully ignored.
Armitage’s claim that increasingly modes of thought, learning, and exchange are formally
subsumed under capital through the new technological infrastructure certainly rings true
here. The game is also a stark simplification of how government decisions affect a complex issue like climate change, and is fraught with problematic and often techno-utopian assumptions about
how to tackle the climate change problem. A good example of this assumption is the recurring recommendation throughout the game to the player to spend more money on scientific research, as this

The speed-elitist, humanist, and techno-utopian

expenditure supposedly promises to solve or alleviate the warming problem.

discourses that permeate American academia and consultancy firms are clearly
reflected in Global Warming Interactive, leaving the student inculcated with a
currently dominant belief system that lies precisely at the base of environmental
pollution and economical disenfranchisement that urges certain groups of poor
people in a country like Brazil to survive on environmentally unfriendly business
solutions, like slash-burning the forests. One is also left to wonder why the game uses the country of Brazil in the first place, and not the United
States – arguably the largest global polluter today. There is indeed a problematic (neo)colonialist undertone to the current one-country version of Global Warming Interactive. Extending the content of
the game, as the developers seeks to do, by including more countries in the simulation, would not alleviate this problem, but would simply concur with the actual contemporary shift from previous

giving the player simulated government

colonialist social hierarchies into speed-elitist hierarchies. But more seriously,

omnipotence through the Virilian ‘museumisation’ of the economical and social

structures underlying global warming in that ‘other’ country of Brazil, grants a the
player an illusion of mastering and of dealing constructively with the major ‘accident’
of climate change and its impact on the (s)lower classes while actually fuelling it.
Meanwhile, player or student empathy is displaced into instantaneous networks of
ever increasing neo-liberal circulation and production. Scholars like David Leonard in “’Live in your world, play in ours?’: Race,
video games, and consuming the other” and Lisa Nakamura in “Race in/for Cyberspace” have in the past argued that many entertainment games contain elements of

racial and gendered stereotyping allowing the gamer to engage him or herself on the
basis of what Nakamura calls ‘identity tourism’ and Leonard calls ‘blackface.’ These
problematic modes of (dis)identification allow the user not only to enter the game via
dominant modes of representation, but also entail a form of ‘safely experiencing the
other’ through cybernetic technologies, where the (imagined) other effectively becomes
consumed through the high-tech prosthesis of the self. Neither Nakamura nor Leonard however elaborate how and why this
element of a ‘safe prosthesis’ appears to be a central aesthetic of gaming technologies. After all, much media content suffers from stereotypical representation, and one could argue in line with Derrida’s

what is specific about serious gaming

Monolingualism of the Other that media are always prostheses to the self. I would argue that

technologies that emerges from my interpretations of Derrida’s, Armitage’s, and Virilio’s

assessments is the illusion of control by the self that these technologies facilitate, due to
their element of interactive instantaneity. It is the new technologies’ aesthetic properties
themselves – rather than simply a narrative and its repetition of dominant ideologies –
that grant a ‘fantasy of connection, wholeness, and mastery’ through interactivity as if
it was an immediate and transparent property of the gaming subject. What is therefore at work in serious games like
Real Lives and Global Warming Interactive is a form of double objectification. The illusion of constructive engagement with a

pressing social issue through these seemingly ‘clean’ and ‘neutral’ technologies, combined
with the distancing effect brought about by these technologies from their actual
(social and environmental) implications, make the gamer complicit in the neo-liberal
endeavour that paradoxically precisely leads to contemporary speed-elitist
disenfranchisement. In short, interactive technologies like serious games bring about a displacement of good intentions through claims of technological progress and
empowerment for all. So despite (or perhaps because of) the good intentions of game designers and publishers, these games then in fact exhibit the doubling of the colonialist logic that inspired humanist
narratives of progress. This doubling runs parallel to the virtualisation of learning that is taking place under neo-liberal globalisation and its speed-elitist modes of intensified in- and exclusion this shift
incurs. These games can therefore, in line with Virilio’s argument, be understood as attempts at (eventually unsuccessfully) containing the accident of the real and its social repercussions brought about
by these technologies of speed.

To conclude, the development of serious games is implicated in what Derrida in

Monolingualism refers to as a ‘disappearance’ of those cultures, idioms, and ways of
being that do not conform to these tightening particular hegemonic structures of
acceleration. ‘Healthy’ personhood becomes singularly understood through a
restrictive and stratifying emphasis on mediated learning as more pleasurable, as well
as on humanistic character traits like creativity, activity, risktaking, mediated empathy,
mobility, and competitiveness, as the rhetoric in policy papers and optimistic studies also
shows. Such particular valorisations are problematic because they recreate a
meritocratic, masculinist, militaristic, and speed-elitist hierarchy between
economically as well as otherwise diverse groups and communities within a global
community which understands individuals solely in terms of active and productive
citizenship. In line with this, serious games themselves can in their very form be understood as Virilian ‘museums of accident.’ This means that the
virtualisation of social engagement and sense of social and environmental ‘accident
control’ that these games call forward is obliquely yet intrinsically related to new modes of ‘accidenting’ material reality. This potentially
disenfranchises those who are not (positively) addressed within these properties of
subject-formation, and leads to increasing levels of stress and competitiveness in
individuals and students as it becomes progressively more imperative for individual
survival to conform to the demands of the speed-elite. Without doubt, this paper has analysed only a few serious games currently
available and surely more analyses need to be conducted. I suggest nonetheless that since the problematic of speed, which gives rise to double objectification, is structurally present in all visual
interactive technologies, it is by default at work in all serious games. As I suggested at the start, the pedagogical and ethical enterprise of serious gaming is therefore serious indeed, as its aesthetic
properties become increasingly implicated in precisely the opposite of what serious gaming promises to help make possible – the fair, culturally diverse, and blooming society that we all want.

Topical debates lead to indoctrination

Hoofd 19. [Ingrid Hoofd, Assistant Professor Department of Media and Culture Studies
@ National University of Singapore, “Video games and the engaged citizen: On the
ambiguity of digital play”]
This understanding of games
as having been depreciated as normalization and
indoctrination mechanisms mirrors the ways in which our society conceptually denigrates
play as a mere developmental stage in children. What I claim is at issue, therefore, is finally the
way in which two definitions or versions of play and games are operable in a report like The civic potential of video games
as well as in the more optimistic theories around video games and the ‘ludification’ of culture as such. These two
definitions of play are firstly, the dominant and erroneous psychological definition of play (like in children’s play) as a way
to experiment with and even push social rules and boundaries, and secondly, the cybernetic definition and function of
play, in which play and gaming consists of the manipulation of a system of control toward its optimal performance. The
problem, I contend, is that these two definitions often mesh into one another when debating the positive aspects and
effects of digital play. This is because, while the former definition sees video games as a return to a childlike ‘freedom’
away from or in denial of the demands and responsibilities of society, the latter definition in fact creates a correspondence
between the gaming subject and the objective demands of a capitalist and technocratic system that, for instance, Dyer-
Witheford and De Peuter call “ludocapitalism” (2009, xiv), whereby the gamer obliquely
becomes the eventual object of an insidious form of manipulation. It is for this reason, I
suggest, that JeanBaudrillard’s work on play and games, for instance his ‘Police and play,’
tends to make the point that playing games—and not just digital games, but
also games as mere leisure in general—in our highly mediated
society primarily consists of a “trap” of “symbolic counter-dependence which forms part
of our cultural mechanisms” where “generalized repression […] becomes part of an
intense participation” (2001, 61). The pleasure of playing games, according to
Baudrillard, stems from the artificial production of needs and desires, leading to
a “complicit euphoria” when engaging in the generalized game that
cybernetic society on the whole has become (2001, 61). In other words, Baudrillard suggests
that our entire modern society consists of a capitalist seduction of the masses to engage in
playing, as well as the accumulation of pleasure and experience as not only a new form of
production, but also as a way to divert libidinal energy away from an actual
challenge to or transgression of this seductive system. The ludification of
society, then, far from being a true revolutionary or freeing transformation for
the subject, instead ensures that that subject is “harmoniously integrated into
the dynamics of production” by providing the illusion that play and gaming
allows her or him to guiltily give in to his own childlike desires (2001,
65).Gaming is thus presented in the popular imaginary as a return to a
freer and infantile state,whereas actually it is engaging in the highest-order
demands of cybernetic capitalism. Moreover, the ‘guilty pleasure’ of playing games is
“above all socially orchestrated like any other cultural trait of behavior or
clothing,” ensuring that the consumption of culpability itself allows for the
misunderstanding of the mere “signs of play” as a true playing with the actual stakes of
life and the social order (2001, 66). Actual transgression or radical social
change, then, seems near-impossible, and can only be found in what he calls
the“unpredictable transgressions and convulsions in the system of values.”
One may think here of events that seemingly have little to do with video games, like the never-explained flash crash of
2001, terrorist suicide attacks, or the ongoing increase in high-school shootings in the United States. At the same time,
however, video games may have contributed to such accidental events by raising the stakes of informational capitalism in
much more obscure ways, which I will address next. Play as challenge to neoliberal socialization

After taking the important caveat by Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and De Peuter as well as the assessment by Jean Baudrillard
in ‘Police and play’ seriously,the
possibilities and impossibilities for citizen-directed
liberatory and democratizing play viadigital tools like video games and other forms of
digital play should be understood as paradoxically oppressive because they are
seemingly emancipatory. It is, namely, the very same computational and infrastructural mechanism that
allows for student empowerment, which at the same time re-distributes social and economic hierarchies in exceedingly
unequal ways. But here, too, is an oblique relation to be found between the excessive events mentioned just now and video
games: the flash crash resulted from ‘playing’ the stock market, and the shootings simulate the simulations that are
shooter games. I would therefore also suggest
that a totalizing theory of capitalism as a
system that can completely predict and pre-empt outcomes—
and ultimately eliminate all risk—via games and play in the ways Kline and his colleagues sketch,
forgets that capitalism today actually relies on extremely unstable illusions, which get illustrated via such excessive and
surprising events. Therefore, I propose that one can always imagine upping the stakes
via a challenge to the rules of leisure and pleasure as such; in other words, any system
can be ‘gamed’ beyond its limits. In order to grasp this potential of video-gaming on a more extra-
structural level, I propose that the seemingly pessimistic and totalizing assessment Baudrillard makes in ‘Police and
play’ nevertheless should be complemented with his more intricate analysis of the symbolic logic of rules and games in his
earlier work Seduction (1990). In this work, he seeks
to comprehend ‘prosumerist’ seduction as the
potential thwarter of the pervasive order of production, which he jokingly calls the “Great Neutral
Aleatorium” (1990, 143). Here, too,Baudrillard argues that play today is the “ambience or playful
eroticization of a universe without stakes,” but that games in their original agonistic character of the ‘duel’
actually form a superior form of social ordering vis-à-vis a society based on the production and assuaging of supposedly
essential human needs and desires (1990, 156). This is because in cultures where the gods (or any large powers) are
invited—for instance, by ways of ritual sacrificial offering—to show their powers, humans actually play for real and there
are potentially lethal stakes that may completely change a community, a society or the course of history. This means that
societies that truly acknowledge seduction as the flip-side of production are able to ‘place bets’ that are truly radical in the
face of the law or of authority. So, while in our modern
society games are co-constitutive of a
“demand [which] is prompted by the model, and the model’s precession is
absolute, [so that] challenges are impossible,” still games and rule-based play can be seen as
a remnant of a “yearning to be free of the contract and the social relation,
the longing for a crueller if more fascinating destiny for exchange,” in short, “a
yearning for a more adventurous world, where one plays with value more recklessly” (1990,
152-157).

What I take from Baudrillard’s assessment is that, even if our society is one where seduction in Baudrillard’s words has
become “cool” or “cold” since it no longer raises any stakes (1990, 162)—and therefore does nothing to really change
society toward a more egalitarian or democratic state—the
incessant pushing of production via the
seduction of video gamers into leisurely ‘prosumerism’ nonetheless carries with it an equally
increasing unpredictable or risky element. This is because ‘cold’ seduction via ‘prosumption’ is
centered on the individual satisfaction of desires and pleasures that eventually appear
unreal in the face of truly giving oneself away for a larger cause, whether this cause be
moral, civic, democratic, or otherwise. Altruistic self-satisfaction via digital
engagement is, therefore, always ultimately unfulfilling because the
performance and experience of empathy or leadership is, ultimately, indeed only a
simulatory illusion that will forever stand in tension with actual moral
and material global effects that is in part caused by the machinery of ‘cold’ seduction.
Moreover, it is quite possible that young people, due to their underdeveloped socialization, may at some level be more
sensitive to the tensions around such ‘altruism’ than well-adjusted social researchers. The much-lamented youthful
political and moral “disaffection” that I noted at the onset of this chapter, is hence, I suggest, best interpreted as a
symptomatic effect of the “fake game without stakes” that modern living has become (Baudrillard 1990, 163). Since the
acknowledgement of the power of seduction is, according to Baudrillard, historically gendered in Western societies, this
may also explain why in the United States “girls experience lower civic gaming opportunities” as the authors of The civic
potential of video games bewilderedly note (2009, 47); they may not be as easily seduced into video games’ ‘militarized
masculinity.’ After all, not only are in-game representations frequently sexist (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and De Peuter 2003,
265), but girls are possibly more sensitive to the fact that gaming relies on an illusion that is at some level complicit with a
highly gendered and patriarchal social order. This also means that games are, or at least can be, much more
serious than the regular psychological definition of play as a supposed recursion to a childlike phase
gives it credit for, and that it is finally on the level of the theatrical function of the media industry, which obscures
that industry’s imbrication in the productive and predictive function, that the real challenge to
the inequalities of contemporary capitalism should be played out. Or, as Baudrillard puts it rather obliquely at the end of
‘Police and play’: “only
subversion of an instinctual order can constitute a point
external to the system” (2001, 68).

In truth games are but a very small thing, but we want to win,
because mom says if we get enough ballots she’ll turn us into a
real boy
Galloway 07. Alexander Galloway, professor of media, culture, and communication
at New York University, Radical Illusion (A Game Against), Games and Culture 2:4, pg.
378

In Baudrillard, the ludic is a space that is, as it were, beyond good and evil. His term
is immoral, which I shall interpret essentially as “metamoral” to avoid the nor- mative
tinge that amoral or immoral must necessarily afford. Here he writes on the “immoral”
with great reverence:
There might be a moral circle, that of commodity exchange, and an immoral circle,
that of play, where the only thing that counts is the gamic event itself and the advent
of a shared rule. To share a rule is something entirely different than referring oneself to a
common general equivalent. One must be completely involved in order to play. It
creates a type of relation between the players that is more dramatic than commodity
exchange could achieve. In such a relation, individuals are not abstract beings who can
be swapped one for another. Each has a position of singularity opposite the
stakes of victory or defeat, of life or death.5 (Baudrillard, 2000b, p. 23)
Play generates singularities. Play bucks the corrupting influence of systems
of exchange. Commodity exchange is a “moral” sphere for Baudrillard because it creates
criteria for winners and losers, not because the system itself is morally
defensible. Thus in entering an “immoral,” or metamoral, state, one is able to
experience the artifice of the real in all its seductive beauty.
In this sense, play is a general critical methodology in Baudrillard. As he says about
evil, “play it up, play it back, play it out [en jouer, s’en jouer et le déjouer]”
(Baudrillard, 2000b, p. 48). “The great game of seduction,” he writes, referring to
one of the most important concepts in his entire lexicon, “is less a play on desire than it
is a play with desire. Seduction does not negate it, nor is it its opposite, but it puts it in
play. . . . It is the sphere in which a being’s play-making [mise en jeu “putting into
play” – JK translation] is a sort of professional practice” (Baudrillard, 2000b, pp. 33-
34).6 Play, therefore, is firmly connected to seduction and thus is also at the heart
of the more hopeful, or shall we say, politically progressive, wing of Baudrillard’s
thought. The play of thinking will destroy the perfect crime of positivism, he
suggests. “Yes, there’s a violence of interpretation,” he says elsewhere. “One must
do violence to the facts and the evidence” (Baudrillard, 1997b, p. 128).7 Is this a
denialism, an antirealist delusion? Not exactly. Baudrillard is opposed to the sort of
thinking that fixes everything in advance, such that all uncertainty is
preempted by the logic of a system that desires to know the future as well as it knows
the past. “There is in the temporality of words,” he writes, “an almost poetic
play of death and rebirth” (Baudrillard, 2000b, p. 10). Like Derrida or Roland
Barthes, Baudrillard sees language as the seat of play: “Fundamentally, the use of
language is how we meet up with, not an instinctive animality, but a radicality of
forms. While belonging to the domain of illusion, language allows us to play with
that same illusion” (Baudrillard, 1997b, p. 84).8 Thus an illusion does not mean
that one is playing with the real, for this would position Baudrillard within an age-old
philosophical tradition of falsehood versus truth, ideology versus enlightenment.
No, illusion for Baudrillard means that one is playing with play. His notion of
play is an internally redundant one. It is tautological rather than normative.
“The play of the seducer is with himself” (Baudrillard, 1979, p. 148).
This is essentially the crux of the argument in his book on the 1991 Gulf War:
The war was a nonevent not primarily because it was a media spectacle; it was a
nonevent because every move, every outcome, every drop of blood both spilt
and withheld, was already planned, modeled, and simulated in advance,
exterminating all possibility of the unknown or the unexpected. (His word for
this, perhaps counterintuitively, is a catastrophe; the converse future, open and
unplanned, is a destiny.)9 In other words, the Gulf War was a nonevent because of
the logical precision of the Powell Doctrine, which determines the outcome of
warfare before it even begins, not simply because of the real-time information of
CNN—this point in Baudrillard is often misunderstood. Elsewhere he christens this
“meteorological” thought, that is, a way of thinking that works entirely within
a logic of statistical modeling, prediction, risk analysis, preemption, and so
on. Instead, Baudrillard (2000b) suggests that thought “must make uncertainty a
rule of the game. But thought must realize that it plays without a possible
conclusion, within a definitive form of illusion or play-making [mise en jeu]”
(pp. 101-102). This is precisely Baudrillard’s quarrel with Michel Foucault, that the
celebrated historian’s discourse is “a fluid objectivity, a writing that is nonlinear, orbital,
and without fault” (Baudrillard, 1977, p. 10). The same power described in Foucault is
mirrored by the very rhetoric of Foucault, majestic and totalizing. “In the perfect
crime,” Baudrillard would write later, “it is the perfection that is criminal”
(Baudrillard, 2000b, p. 75; emphasis added).10 Foucault’s own virtuosity as a thinker
returns in the form of a totalitarian discourse. What could be worse for Baudrillard?
The Computer’s Melancholia
Here is the philosopher’s analysis of the series of chess games played in 1996 and 1997
between Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue (the computer lost the
first round of matches but won the second):
For Kasparov there is an opponent, there is an other. But for Deep Blue there is
nothing across the table, no other, no adversary. Deep Blue progresses within the
world of its own programming. . . . Now this is exactly where one can imagine man
to be definitively superior, far beyond the mental power of number crunching: in this
relation of alterity which is based on giving up his own thought. This is something
that Deep Blue will never know. It’s the subtle presupposition of play. It is here that
man may set himself out in terms of illusion, of decoy, of defiance, of seduction,
of sacrifice. The computer understands little of this strategy of weakness, of a game
played below one’s skill level, because it is condemned to play always at maximum
capacity. This omission, this ellipsis of presence by which you bring the other to life,
even in the case of a microprocessor’s virtual ego, is the real thinking of game play. . . .
Obviously with a simulacrum one must play against nature. (Baudrillard, 1997a, pp. 183-
184)
One must play against nature—what a marvelous formulation. Using
Baudrillard’s lexicon, Kasparov creates a “scene” whereas Deep Blue is forever the
“obscene.” The only response to the perfect catastrophe, the philosopher suggests,
is seduction. It is always mis en scène that must win out over objective realism. Stage
play over power play. Blue’s promiscuity, its total machinic immediacy, is only ever
countered by a fatal strategy of otherness, of separation. The pornography of
the ultraclose is countered by a dramaturgy of distancing (or what Martin Heidegger
called, in a twist of the term one degree further, “de-distancing”).
Baudrillard (1997a) continues,
Now, the machine’s ultimate end (its hidden ambition perhaps?) is to be perfect,
unbeatable, and immortal. In this the machine understands nothing of the essence
of play, and for this reason it will always get beaten in the end, if not by an
opponent, then at least by play itself. . . . Thus the machine may be insurmountable in
all sorts of tasks, but it is forever handicapped—forever out of play—when it tries to
approach the essence of play. (p. 185)
Perfect, unbeatable and immortal, this again is what Baudrillard calls a
catastrophe. Etymologically, the catastrophe, as “down turning,” is not too far from
another concept in Heidegger, that of falling; in Deleuze the word is territorialization; in
Badiou, representation. Each describes the process of sloughing into a fixity of
routine, a known rhythm, or clichéd habituation. As a perfect precision of
code, Deep Blue is the perfect catastrophe. On the other hand, the very essence of
game playing—which in Baudrillard means seduction, dramaturgy, otherness,
distancing, relinquishment, illusion, sacrifice, metaphor, mis en scène—is an
expression of finitude, of withdrawing and submission within a universe of
illusion.
This is why in Baudrillard, simulation is often a metonym for his entire body of work.
There is no clean-versus-dirty binarism in Baudrillard, no hacker hero who can unplug
from the matrix. (My apologies to the Wachowski brothers who, on this point at least,
misread their master.) Yes, there are “events” and “singularities” and “voids” in
Baudrillard’s cosmos, but his Gnosticism keeps these firmly at bay, trapped in a
messianic kairotope of perpetual deferral. Both Kasparov and Deep Blue are neck deep in
the fog of the hyperreal. They are both living in a thicket of fictions upon fictions. The
difference is that only Kasparov can seduce Blue; Blue is unable to seduce
Kasparov. Mathematically speaking, Baudillard’s is the “absolute value” of the
dialectic.
The trick, though, is that there are different modalities of the hyperreal. Not
negations precisely, they are alternations “on an artificial earth,” to ape the elegant
expression of Iain Hamilton Grant. First, there is the short-circuit modality of Deep Blue,
the expedient, declarative modality of pure machinic transparency, pure abstraction,
frictionless symbolic exchange. After all, computers are entirely artificial or “simulated.”
This is true. But second, there is the artifice of seduction, of psychic complicity
and oblivion, that accompanies any game player’s experience of illusion or
magic. This, too, is an artifice of simulation. The former is what Baudrillard calls evil,
the catastrophe, the perfect crime, the ecstasy of communication, lucidity,
the banality of the system; the latter is what he calls aesthetic illusion,
seduction, phantasm, singularity, or in a slightly different context, a “fatal
strategy.” As the philosopher puts it, we can play with Deep Blue because we invented
it, but the computer will only become a true player when it invents us.
The genius of cybernetics was to drive the Other to extinction. As he writes, “The
perfect crime destroys alterity, the other. It is the kingdom of the same”
(Baudrillard, 2000b, p. 78). The origin of the word extinction is delightful in its
redundancy: from the Latin prefix ex, meaning “out,” and the root stinguere, meaning
“to put out or quench.” One can never simply drive the Other out, because of the fact that
expulsion is the structural genesis of the Other to begin with. Instead, to
make the Other ex-tinct one must put it out out. “Only the redoubling of the
sign truly puts an end to what it designates” (Baudrillard, 2002b, p. 12). Or, as
Baudrillard put it once, in the middle of an almost autobiographical litany of
hypertrophic phenomena, “Disappearance of the Other into its double”
(Baudrillard, 2000a, p. 22).
This is why simulation gets so much traction in Baudrillard, even to the point of cliché in
the writing of his detractors (who for the most part never understood a word he wrote):
Both sides of the fence are equally artificial. There is no “before” and “after” in
Baudrillard. There is certainly no liberation rhetoric around “mystical shells” versus
“rational kernels.” There is only a choice between “disenchanted simulation”
and “enchanted simulation.”11 Both are equally irreal, even if the former is
expressive and overt (obscene). The, as it were, moral question in Baudrillard—I only
hesitate because the specific term moral is so scarce in his writings, even if a stern
conscience dominates throughout—the moral question, the thing that most stokes
his undying scorn toward the present state of the world, is simply that of
picking and choosing between two mystical reals: the “perfect crime” of
positivism on one hand or the “fatal strategy” of play on the other. What shall
it be, the magic of a pure economism or the magic of ritual play? Of course, either
selection is equally unreal. The first conjures the unreality of fascism, whereas the
second the unreality of the phantasm. This is also why Baudrillard took so easily to
writing about virtual reality, when his soixante-huit peers never wrote anything
interesting about it. Baudrillard was doing virtual reality before the fact, and so
the advent of the actually existing cyberspace of the 1980s and ’90s was nothing more
than an obscene extension of his own familiar critical turf. Schtroumpfland, Gulf
War 1, or Second Life are all equally obscene, equally criminal, equally
pornographic, but still at the same time equally irreal.
Nous Governs the World
“They did it, but we wanted it”—a key to his general ontology (Baudrillard, 2002a, p.
11).12 The wanting is here. The doing is there. Nous (mind, intellect) is near—yes, it is most
likely ours or, like Heidegger, mine. But the material doing of physis (nature) is always there, it is Other. Physis
withdraws, but nous draws with. The “we” is always in spirit, but the “they” is always in deed. (What delicious cataclysm if
the “we” was in deed and the “they” was in spirit! Would this not be that form of society whose name is banished from all
discourse?) There is thus a segregation effect at the heart of his ontology. As such, a more specialized term is required:
Baudrillard’s metaphysics.

Oh bankrupt world, oh depraved divisions—not simply of object and spirit but of the unworthy and the acclaimed—why
are metaphysics and injustice so perfectly aligned? The one is a foil for the other. In his diaries, Baudrillard (2000a)
observes the sans abri of the street:

Her things are always there. She doesn’t throw any of them away. She cares for them just as she would her own body. They
have no right to decay before she does. The more hum- ble and down-trodden they are, the more they have a right to exist.
Existence is all that remains with them—just as with her, and it’s not much. Those who do great things have no need to
exist. Existence is for the poor, a poverty of desire, poverty of pleasure, and poverty of spirit. The rich have projects, but
beggars have only their things.13 (pp. 40-41)

We want and wish; they do. The rich have projects, spirit, nous. The poor have physis and nothing else. We have the
privilege of the ontological; they the ontical. Heidegger: Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological. Baudrillard:
The poor are onti- cally indistinctive; they are ontical.14 The poor can only possess phatic expression— and in this sense
the French riots of October 2005 were like a mobile phone conversation: “Can you hear me now? Can you hear me
now?”—but the rich have the luxury to end all expression entirely.15 Is it metaphysics that is amoral? No, it is the amoral
itself, pure evil, that exudes its own real world, just as sure as the earth turns.

Baudrillard’s work offers a sort of inverted Molyneux’s question for the new millennium.
Imagine if you will a human being who from birth has been saturated with freedom,
democracy, identity, and connectivity. If his singularity were suddenly restored to
him, would he be able to recognize it?16 “A cosmic precedent: the parting of the light and
the world becomes visible. Second mutation: the parting of thought and the world
becomes intelligible. Third phase: it disappears?” (Baudrillard, 2000a, p. 121).17 A
reinvention of Molyneux’s question for the new millennium would require not the
sudden onset of optical lucidity but exactly the reverse: the removal of the lucidity
pact, the lucidity patch from the eye, bringing an abrogation of all laws governing
cognition and sense. The subject is deaf, dumb, blind, and unfeeling in the absence of all
sense input. It disappears? “It disappears”? He is suddenly a singularity. And would he
know it? It would be an event.
Don’t ever forget that the real is only a model for simulation, for regulation,
for fixation of the radical becoming, of the radical illusion of the world and
its appearances, a model for the reduction of all internal singularity, of events, of
beings and things to the common denominator of reality. (Baudrillard, 1997b, p. 129)
“Radical becoming” and “radical illusion”; what is their status? Are they the really-real
beyond the real-as-simulation? For there is a beyond, is there not, in Baudrillard’s
ontology, even if he rarely speaks of it? What does he mean by “world as it is”?
(Baudrillard, 1997b, p. 129). Is Baudrillard simply a romantic in wolf’s clothing? There
is “something within us,” he writes, that is beyond the bleak reality of
accumulation and production.18 There is an “incalculable force” waiting off in
the wings somewhere, only to implode in “events” such as May 1968 or
October 2005 (Baudrillard, 1979, p. 80). Or as in the 1991 Gulf War, he makes
reference to “the substance of fact,” which exists beyond the war, itself a
nonevent, and which emerges from what he calls the void (1991, p. 22).19 Is
metaphysical an unfaithful epithet for such a philosophy of the world?
He thinks not: “My point of view is completely metaphysical,” he admitted to his
publisher and interlocutor Sylvère Lotringer. “If anything, I’m a metaphysician”
(Baudrillard, 1987a, p. 84).20 Indeed, starting in the late 1970s, a certain Gnosticism
is evident in his writings. Radical illusion (the game against) is the spiritual
salvation from this fallen, repugnant reality assaulting us on all sides. What
could be worse than the existence of the real? Instead, games and play offer a way to
transcend the world through a process of becoming. It is what Christian theologians call
grace.
Many have lamented, if he did not exist he would surely have been invented. But it is
precisely the opposite. If Baudrillard were not invented, he would have to exist. This is
the crux of his thought: Nous generates physis. The artifice runs before the real.
Invention before existence. He is like some dark avatar of Hegel but with the
dialectic neutered and inverted into pure, ugly positivity. Again,
mathematically speaking, this is the “absolute value” of the dialectic. “To
positivize the world,” is mankind’s lot in life (Baudrillard, 2000b, p. 35). The real in Baudrillard
is always already an expression of what in Hegel was provocatively termed “Objective Thought” or, in another delightful
turn of phrase, a “petrified intelligence”; the real is second nature for both philosophers, it is “nature as the system of
unconscious thought” (Hegel, 1975, p. 37). In the ancient epigram of Anaxagoras (the pre- Socratic whom Hegel loved
most), nous governs the world. Baudrillard would likely agree that nous governs the world, but it is a blank nous, an
undead intellect that fled the spongy innards of human skulls long ago only to waft back from the far corners of our lived
surroundings dirty and smelling of sulfur. “Reality is a principle,” writes Baudrillard (2002a), “the ultimate and most
redoubtable fiction” (pp. 38-39). He is a Hegelian, but a dark and inverted Gnostic Hegel. To read Baudrillard is to experi-
ence an overwhelming disgust for the present state of the world. There is Jacques Rancière’s (2007) Hatred of Democracy
or Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer’s (2001) Hatred of Capitalism. But the implicit subtitle to every Baudrillard text ever
written was always Hatred of the Real.

The Separative Cause

There exist causes from whose nature some effect does not follow. There exist causes that
preempt their own effects from coming to be. In an early text from 1969, “Play and the
Police,” Baudrillard (2001a) speaks of a “principle of separation.” This principle is
how he rethinks repression not through the notions of negation, aggression, or vital
forces being blocked but through the concepts of ambiance, integration, and
participation. The “unity of desire” is broken, he suggests, into a never ending
series of private-sphere negotiations. The question becomes Am I liberated? not Are
we? “The separative cause, which bursts through the unity of desire and establishes
human activity across several zones . . . is most effective at neutralizing energies”
(Baudrillard, 2001a, pp. 18-19). Thus, in what Deleuze would describe later as the
distinction between discipline and control, Baudrillard here posits a model of
repression through expression, a stunting of the drives through the very
facilitation of those drives into new control spaces. A new ambiance
permeates the social field. The masses are not repressed, no never, they are
allowed to dream! With reference to Marcuse’s concept of “repressive desublimation,”
Baudrillard (2001a) calls this “the repression of desire . . . through the
emancipation of needs” (p. 20).
Again, “they did it, but we wanted it.” The separative cause reveals how ideology
and reification operate under neoliberalism. Summarize it like this:
Exploitation is material, liberation is semiotic. The material is the realm of
political failure; the social is the realm of utopian compromise. In Baudrillard, the
principle of separation is the principle by which the two are segregated and divided into
two distinct domains, the one to play the fool for the other.
The separative cause has two steps. To achieve some semblance of pedagogical
coherence, I will telescope them into a cause-and-effect narrative, but to be precise, Step
1 and Step 2 both happened at the same time.
In Step 1, the given phenomenon, which exists primordially as an undivided prob-
lematic containing both progressive and reactionary political impulses, is first separated
into (a) a material modality and (b) a social modality. For example, with global warming,
there is the material modality of carbon dioxide emissions, automobiles and
roads, the oil industry, and so on, while at the same time there is the symbolic social
modality of desiring clean air, “thinking green,” and the so-called awareness
campaigns.
The principle of separation occasions the phenomenon first through an alliance
formed between the progressive political impulse and the domain of the
social or public sphere. A progressive moral horizon of significant magnitude
invests itself in the social sphere. This moral plane develops its own independent
logic and will likely experience a flourishing cycle of achievement and resolution
but always within the “symbolic” realm of the social or public sphere. From
time to time, small material changes may be incorporated into the logic of
moral resolution but only those minor enough not to impinge upon the
superiority of the social.
In Step 2, the progressive political impulse is negated and as negation finds
its home in the domain of the material. Thus a reactionary political project
blossoms within the realm of the physical world. This project realizes its ends,
developing the necessary mechanisms and infrastructures required to
continue and grow.
In Baudrillard, the separative cause is this overall structure. What the separative
cause occasions, or “makes present,” is the ability for both gratuitous exploitation
and a heightened moral instinct to coexist within the same universe. It is
perhaps seen best in Baudrillard’s controversial critique of sexual liberation in Part 1 of
Seduction. A structure of both liberation and deferral, of dazzlement and insight, of both
ignorance and realization, of both expression and silence—all sides unify together
but only at the cost of a complete and incontrovertible segregation between
the symbolic and the material. The progressive stance of the one allows for
the reactionary stance of the other. The end result is the current state of
affairs: an oil company that is nevertheless “green,” a world bathed in blood
but devoted to peace, a global consumer product that is still tagged “fair trade.”
The separative cause occasions. But it occasions a “presence,” a presence that must be
crossed out or held in suspension with quotation marks. The presence occasioned by the
separative cause is in fact an abatement of presence, a lessening of being.
What it makes present is a structure of suspension. A “subject” is the name given to those
entities able to flourish within such a structure of suspension.
As Baudrillard was able to see, most all phenomena in contemporary life are
occasioned through this “separative cause” or principle of separation. The
environmental movement is a perfect example. In today’s world, it is structurally
impractical if not outright impossible to be an environmentalist in any true
sense. Imagine: An activist drives to a rally against global warming. The contradiction is
clear. His actual spiritual liberation is undercut by the tailpipe fumes of his own
expression. His intentions are good, but there is a physical base—that
depraved automobile contraption—that creates conditions of impossibility
that are symbolically if not practically insurmountable. Of course, many today
refuse to participate in the global system of environmental exploita- tion by
casting off all worldly possessions. But this comes at the cost of complete
withdrawal from the world system, a price too high to pay for most. Like the computer
at the heart of today’s planetary organization, the costs are thus binary in
that they offer an all-or-nothing option, but only an “option” insofar as the
nothing is reified into material reality and the all spins on into oblivion. This
is how the separative cause operates.
Other examples include the curious and no doubt tense axis of inaction forged between
the United Nations and American foreign policy after the new millennium on issues such
as Darfur peace: the symbolic assertion on the side of the United States that, in
no uncertain terms, “this is genocide,” flanked only by a negation of that same
claim in abandonment and blindness within the realm of real material
commitment. Or consider the structural adjustment agreements of the International
Monetary Fund, which travel on wings of hope to the so-called backward economies of
the globe but carry enclosed the harshest austerity measures, leaving the infected
country with a curse of legalized deterritorialization and fiscal and cultural
subjugation for decades to come. Exploitation is material, liberation is
semiotic. This is how the separative cause occasions, or brings to presence, certain
phenomena in today’s global kingdom. The democratization of Iraq is
realizable only through subjugation; clean air is realizable only through a
futures market in “pollution credits”—and around and around. Might this
separative cause be also known by a synonym twin, “civilization”? In
Baudrillard, the term was simply the real. It occasions real human worlds by
allowing them to come to be.

We sovle – new type of gaming

Schnurer 04. Maxwell Schnurer, professor of communication at Humbolt State
University, “Gaming as Control: Will to Power, the Prison of Debate and Game Called
Potlach,” Contemporary Argumentation & Debate; Sep 2003, Vol. 24, online

The big question is: does gaming contribute to these revolutionary format changes? I
will answer no. Rather, I would like to position gaming as a controlling force. Gaming
is a challenging, innovative, and adaptable theory but, fundamentally, a theory of
control. Gaming works as an answer to the question of what debates do. But while we
can answer that we play a game (albeit a serious and complex one), we also say
something about the players and why we play the game. Gaming became a tool for
control – convincing debaters that energies of criticism should be reinvested into the
debate community. The very parameters of Snider’s goals, to encourage more
participants in debate, belie a rigged question. We are intended to succeed through
gaming to bring a few other voices into debate. But like the plus-one activist struggle
that simply seeks representation, this approach is doomed to failure.
We should not be surprised that the traditional agents of social control have a brilliant
new theory that encourages limited change. Gaming in fact operates to
metastasize the crisis-politics of modern policy debate, covering over the
rotting corpse with a sweet perfume. For example, gaming minimizes and cripples
the increasing tension over activist-oriented arguments in debate rounds. Gaming
encourages such argument innovation not for the world community but for the debate
community, teaching students to passionately plead for change to an empty
room. How can a theory understand the desire of debaters to crack open the debate
methods and introduce something “outside” of debate as Snider points to in his most
recent gaming essay? The answer is that it can’t. Debate as a model can only create
more debate, and so long as our goal for debate is more debate, then we will never
emerge to challenge larger forces of control.
Worse than being satisfied with shouting at walls, approaching debate from the
perspective of games encourages a god-complex that teaches debaters that saying
something poignant in a debate round translates into something larger in the world.
Christopher Douglas, a professor of English at Furman University, explores how games
teach us to adore the replay: “This is the experience structured into the gaming process—
the multiple tries at the same space-time moment. Like Superman after Lois Lane
dies, we can in a sense turn back the clock and replay the challenge, to a
better end” (2002, p. 7). What kind of academic activity encourages students to
fantasize about making change without considering for the slightest bit how to bring
that change about?
Douglas positions this impulse alongside the Sisyphean burden of trying to make the
world into a structured, controlled, sterile environment. Sisyphus and the
reset button on a videogame console share a common ancestor with the debate model
that has thirty debate teams advocating different policies in separate rooms at exactly the
same time. All of these examples showcase humans desperately attempting to
construct meaning out of a confusing world, where the human will to power
forces the world to fit a structure. Douglas reminds us that games help to structure an
oft-confusing world, imbuing the person imagining with god-like powers (McGuire,
1980; Nietzsche 1966):
Games therefore do not threaten film’s status so much as they threaten religion,
because they perform the same existentially soothing task as religion. They
proffer a world of meaning, in which we not only have a task to perform, but
a world that is made with us in mind. And indeed, the game world is made with us,
or at least our avatar in mind. (Douglas, 2002, p. 9).
Gaming draws forth a natural impulse of humans – to make the world in our image.
But debate and videogames contain the same fantastic lure that encourages
people to pore their energies into debate. Fiat and utopian flights of fancy are both
seductions of our will to power, encouraging us to commit to becoming better
debaters.
This process of self-important distraction has its model in the theories of the hyper-
real posited by Jean Baudrillard. He argues that modern economies are geared to sell
humans mass produced products, but whose advertising attempts to convince people
that they have an authentic experience with the product. Economic structures
make products that are more-than real – hyperreal in order to sell their products.
The hyperreal creates games and fantasylands that are far richer and
pleasurable than real life. One example of the hyperreal is Epcott center at
Disneyland, which reduces foreign cultures to their most base natures – ensuring
that everything is uniform, bland, and suitably “ethnic.”
While one never need worry about eating food that is “too strange” in the Epcott lands,
other negatives emerge in the world of the hyperreal. Humans who desire order
and structure to our worlds often come to prefer the hyperreal to the real.
The hyperreal has a world with all of the attractions of our own, but with none of the
depressing realities of our own world. The hyperreal doesn’t have credit card bills or
racism. The hyperreal is filled with beautiful people (who all want to have sex with you).
The hyperreal is a hot seduction pulling our vision and hearing away form
our own lives.
Describing Snider’s gaming as a dangerous distraction that pulls us away from our
communities and our lives is a bit simplistic. Rather, gaming greases the wheels for
powers of control to remain in control. Douglas articulates some of the specific
ways games solidify structures of power.
In board games or computer games, however, players actually do start out in relative
equality (although there are some chance elements as well, depending on the game),
whereas in real life, so many characteristic of one’s life are already determined before
birth, including social and economic standing, political freedom, skin color, gender, etc.
What games accomplish is the instilling of the ideology of equality, which postulates
that we are born equal and that differences emerge later on; the primary different to be
explained away in this way is that of economic disparity, and games help explain that
difference as the result of, in America, hard work and effort vs. laziness. Thus
gaming helps inculcate the ideology that covers over the fact that, with the exception of
the information technology bubble, most of those who are wealthy in the United States
were born that way. Beyond this narrow ideological function, the game helps create
subjects that accept the inevitability of rules as things that are given and must be
“played” within—or else there is no game. This process is not total or ever complete, as
the current gaming discourse complaining about the rules shows; here, player critique a
games rules in view of a conventionalized notion of how “reality” works, or, less often,
how a game’s playability is compromised by rules that are too “realistic (Douglas, 2002,
p. 24).
Viewing debate as a game may have the opposite effect that Snider desires. Gaming
teaches participants to play by the rules and even when challenging the game, to
do that within the games structures. Debaters who are moved by poetry are encouraged to bring that poetry
back to the debate realm – not to become poets.1

There are certainly debate-activists who bring their debate skills to bear on the political community. These debaters
seamlessly slide between academic hyperbole in the First Affirmative Constructive and talking to homeless folks at a Food
Not Bombs meal. But these folks are few and far between. Most who hear the call to conscience turn their backs on the
call and justify their (in)actions by valorizing debate.2

It is a positive drive that

Let me be clear that the desire of individuals to make the world is not the enemy.
encourages debaters to fiat worlds into existence or hypothesizes that the world would be
good if George Bush were before the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes
against humanity. This drive to create a better world is the will to power. The big
question is, what we do with that will to power? Recognizing that there are many
complex problems in the world that require smart articulate people to solve them, we can
appreciate the potential value of will to power (McGuire). In the debate context, will
to power becomes reified in a hyper-real role-playing exercise.
Debate can be an amazing experience where students learn about complex ideas and
then take those ideas into their own lives and communities. Debate can be a method for
learning that people have their own voices in a world drowning with mediated/televised
slime-balls. Debate can encourage intellectual growth and cause epiphanies.
Debate encourages solidarity and teaches people to struggle together. Debate is
primed to be a blast furnace for the will to power and take it to the furthest
level of revolutionary potential. The only limitation is our own. If we frame
debate to limit the revolutionary potential of the participants, then we do a disservice
not only to our students, but also to the world.
Nietzschean will to power is a drive for self-overcoming, transforming fuel
for personal and collective change.3 Will to power exists in all of us as a
lunging to escape our current world and create another beyond the moral
structure and hierarchy of this world. This desire to create a better world is
admirable and is at the root of social change. My criticism of gaming is that this energy
is sublimated into a fantasy world rather than being brought to the larger world. But
perhaps there is a kind of game that might elicit something of what I desire .
. . from within debate.
The Real Game: Potlatch

1 There are some debaters who have become exceptionally good at meshing poetry with
competitive debate. I would point out Nader Hadad from Cal State Long Beach and Lana
Langsweirdt from the University of Vermont as debaters who have both become
powerful poets and good debaters (who use poetry in their rounds).
2 For more on this see Gordon Mitchell’s (1998) article on the pedagogy of public
debates. He outlines a number of debate initiatives that have used public debate outside
of the policy debate realm.
3 Gilles Deleuze writes about Nietzsche’s unique take on the will to power. “The will to
power alone is the one that wills, it does not lend itself be delegated or alienated to
another subject, even to force. (49).
As pointed out in the last section, the stakes for the game of debate are high. The
method of debate contains the possibility for revolutionary insight and revolutionary
praxis. The question is how to understand an activity without systematizing
and controlling the potential of debate. What we really must do is let free
the will to power within debaters. In this sense, we can use gaming as the
topoi to launch our conversation to a debate game that might encourage
revolution.
But what does will to power look like? How do we encourage it? Lets get a feeling from
George Bataille, who orients the Nietzschean impulse of will to power alongside a quote
from Nietzsche himself:
Through the shutters into my window comes an infinite wind, carrying with
it unleashed struggles, raging disasters of the ages. And don’t I too carry
within me a blood rage, a blindness satisfied by the hunger to mete out
blows? How I would enjoy being a pure snarl of hatred, demanding death:
the upshot being no prettier than two dogs going at it tooth and nail! Though
I am tired and feverish . . .
“Now the air all around is alive with the heat, earth breathing a fiery breath.
Now everyone walks naked, the good and bad, side by side. And for those in
love with knowledge, it’s a celebration.” (The Will to Power) (4).
Will to power can be the outgrowth of debate that challenges existing
structures. Bataille and Nietzsche desire a wild emancipation from traditional
structures, far beyond conventional morality. Coupling Nietzsche’s theorizing
with the practice of debate something new can emerge, but only if we free
ourselves from the shackles of conventional debate, including gaming. How
to break these chains? How do we get beyond that which has brought us so far? To help,
I want to turn to Guy Debord and the Situationists.
Guy Debord was a French revolutionary whose political theorizing and activism
culminated in the creation first of the Letterist International and later in the
establishment of the Situationist International. The Letterists/Situationists were
revolutionary philosophers who believed that the situations of the modern world were
increasingly controlled by mediated/corporate experience. They viewed
traditional politics in all of its reformist formats as a waste of time. Through
a variety of situations (manipulated by the situationists) it was possible to create
revolutionary meaning. They used a variety of tactics in order to elicit revolutionary
change. Some of their methods, like detournement, have become common post-modern
critical theory concepts.4
I focus our attention on the Situationists because they succeeded in creating a
revolution. Situationist propaganda and theorizing were at the heart of the
Parisian rebellion of May of 1968. This was the most powerful expression of
malaise against the increasingly wealthy industrial western world. The riots in Paris,
which upended cars and collectives emerged in downtown, became a model

4 Detournement is most well known from the Canadian magazine Adbusters, who re-
popularized Debord’s work in the 1990s doing mock-ups of popular advertisements.
for revolutions in the industrialized north. Debord was seen as an intellectual
architect of the uprising of students and workers. Situationists/Letterists were
increasingly capable of articulate criticisms of the nature of the spectacle. These were
often told through journals, graffiti, and posters (Dark Star Collective, 2001;
Debord, 1995; Jappe, 1992; Hussey, 2001).
One of the most important Situationist tactics was articulated in the potlatch. The
potlatch was a practice modeled on American indigenous communities of increasingly
committed giving. In the potlatch, indigenous would give everything they had to each
other, ever increasing the stakes of the gifts until the gifts were so outlandish
the offers exposed the foolish nature of ownership. Potlatch became so
important to these revolutionaries that they named their first journal potlatch because
the writings held within the journal would hopefully be given on and on in an ever
increasing spiral. Potlatch became an extended metaphor for the
Situationists/Letterists, indicating all the possible spaces where revolution
could emerge without capitalist economies. Every non-capitalist moment eked
out of the day was articulated as a potlatch. Every relationship that emerged along side
revolutionary dialogue became a potlatch. In a recent biography of Debord and the
situationists, the author Hussey describes the Potlatch.
Potlatch . . . is the highest form of game. It is also the living moment of poetry,
a moment which breaks down or reverses conventional chronological patterns. Most
significantly, the object or gift which the Letterist International gave functioned
symbolically between the giver, the International Letterists, and the receiver. The
relationship between the two constitutes a third term – the gift is also a catalyst of the
future in the form of a crystallization of desire. ‘Don’t collect Potlatch!’ ran a line at the
end of the journals second year. “Time is working against you!” (Hussey, 2001, p. 89)
For the Situationists, the potlatch was the ultimate resistance to traditional
economies. Originally a concept theorized by George Battaille, the potlatch was seen as
a method to criticize the acquisition/showcase methods of modern capitalist economies.
Because the potlatch could never be returned, it highlighted the foolishness of
the modern economy and state. Through sacrifice and destruction, the act of
giving overwhelms the possible response. Eventually, the social requirements of
the potlatch necessitate that every society member give away everything they could ever
have.
Yet we should not move too far from the fundamental truth of the potlatch: it is in fact
a game. Indigenous nations would choose to exchange gifts in the potlatch as a form
of entertainment. But let us not understate the importance of games. This
game was made illegal because it was so dangerous to colonial economies.
The Potlatch was recognized as threatening the burgeoning trading economy that was
central to westward expansion. The potlatch was the most dangerous idea that
indigenous nations could forward against the white/capitalist drive.5

5 In my theorizing about this essay, I contemplated including a reference to Ernest

Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia. In this novel, Callenbach’s protagonist enters a closed off
zone of ecologically sustainable territories in the Pacific Northwest of the former-USA.
One of the most hotly contested differences between the protagonist and the Ecotopians
The act of giving too much was the threat. This move disturbed the intense drive
for acquisition. Why fight to trade beaver pelt, when at the next potlatch your neighbor
might give you all her possessions? Potlatch was threatening because it made
competition meaningless.
Non-competitive social structure was only one threat from the Potlatch. Situationist
biographer Jappe discovers an obscure quotation by Debord on the Potlatch (Debord
himself was remarkably close-lipped about the meaning of Potlatch): “Debord refers
explicitly to the Indian custom of Potlatch and announces that ‘the non-saleable goods
that a free bulletin such as this is able to distribute are novel desires and problems; and
only the further elaboration of these by others can constitute the corresponding return
gift’” (148). What was exchanged in Debord’s vision was not necessarily goods
but rather ideas.6
Debate is the ultimate potlatch, demanding that we offer up something inside of
ourselves without asking for something in return. Debate provides a few minutes
carved out of lives that are otherwise consumed by pop-up ads, or email.
When I think about the moments that I treasure in my life, few of them are moments of
consumption. I don’t remember when I bought my television, but I remember with
painful longing the last bicycle ride I took with friends.
Alongside the memories of moments with friends and in nature, I treasure a collection of
moments in debate. Moments when I first learned about ideas, late nights in
the squad room, the friendships that emerged, and watching my debaters
grow and develop. The parts of the potlatch where humans draw out
moments of freedom with each other are increasingly the only thing that
keeps me interested in debate. Debord and the Situationists wanted people to take
their initial offerings of the Potlatch and move them along into their own lives. We can
do the same thing with debate. Almost all of us have debate memories that are
deeply infused with the Potlatch-ethic. All it takes is for us to seek out and
celebrate those moments, and our community will change. But these
moments of time have to be grappled away from the industrial-capitalist
state with great gusto. We must be brave to crack open debate.
In our own lives, we should strive to bring about the kinds of realizations that elicit
revolutionary transformation. Snider’s gaming does not bring us forward in direct
revolutionary thinking. Rather, it encourages revolutionary thought and then focuses

is a game. The Ecotopians use ritual physical combat to explore the visceral experience
that is part of humans. Young men will gather and fight each other with spears. It seems
as though there is a good comparison between my proposal of the potlatch and
Callenbach’s war games. Both are visceral games that are intended to alter the state of
the participants. In Ecotopia, the war game is the turning point of the book, where the
protagonist, torn between two worlds appreciates the Ecotopian world and begins to
consider living in Ecotopia. I would hope that my reference to the potlatch would have a
similar affect.
6 Debord was a committed life-long abuser of drugs and alcohol, and he certainly would
have appreciated gifts of these sorts.
its power into the system of debate. The solution for Snider is not to continue
looking for a way to explain and systematize debate but, rather, to embrace the
confluence of potential meaning in debate and lunge forward. Debate should be
about taking risks and creating new meaning out of our desires.
We should never sublimate our feral interests and instead should seek the highest level
of meaning. Let us push gaming further. Let us find games that fulfill our
revolutionary potential, take whatever moments we can for ourselves and try to push for
as much change as we possibly can. In this case, perhaps it is not the game, but the
players who have not yet made their move.
 No Benefit of Debate
the benefits of debate are contrived and wrong.
Hester 13. This is a note posted to the CEDA Forums. The note is from Mike Hester,
an extremely successful and influential policy debate coach at University of West
Georgia. I have had a lot of respect for him through the years. -Alfred Snider, editor
November 22, 2013, 01:27:03 AM.
http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic,5407.msg11974.html#msg11974
To whom it may concern, CEDA-NDT Debate is a hot mess right now. There are so
many things wrong, it can sometimes seem like they're all related. Maybe they are (reference Homer Simpson's "one big ball of lies"
explanation to Marge), but a delineation may still provide some guidance as to what we can change, what we may have to accept, and where (if anywhere) we may go from here... the

foundation We no longer have one, and haven't for more than two decades.
Fewer and fewer debate coaches are communication scholars, which is fine because
Communication Departments don't consider us anything more than the
bastard cousins who show up at the family reunion piss-drunk and
demanding more potato salad. Our activity long ago (40 years?) lost any
resemblance to a public speaking event attracting outside audiences. The problem is we
vacated that academic space without being able to find a home anywhere else. Despite the pious assumptions of some with "policy" in mind, we
are not a legitimate "research" community of scholars. The "portable skills"
we currently engrain in our students via practice are: all sources are
equivalent, no need for qualifications; "quoting" a source simply means
underlining ANY words found ANYWHERE in the document, context and
intent are irrelevant; and we are the only group outside of Faux News that
believes one's argument is improved by taking every point of logic to its
most absurd extreme. Simply put, 99.9% of the speech docs produced in debates
would receive no better than a C (more likely F) in any upper division undergraduate research-based class. Comically,
we are the public speaking research activity that is atrocious at oral
persuasion and woefully in violation of any standard research practices. But this
letter is not intended to bury Debate, even though it's hard to praise it in its current state. Before any peace treaty ending the Paradigm Wars can be signed and ratified, an honest appraisal of
where Debate fits in the Academy is necessary.
 at: framework – spill up
How we frame discussions of the military matter – even if our
understanding of events doesn’t directly shape policy, analysis
of it is key to allow for insight and create self-reflection about
assumptions
Robinson 15 – Nick, Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies,
University of Leeds, “Have You Won the War on Terror? Military Videogames and the
State of American Exceptionalism” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43.2
(January 2015) doi: 10.1177/0305829814557557 //KohlW
The existing literature on military games also suggests that popular culture can be
used to further support the exceptionalism narrative by propagating the idea that
the nonwestern world is threatening and needs America’s civilising/democratising
influence. It demonstrates that most military games portray representations based on
Orientalism, with the Middle East depicted as backward, violent and resistant to civil
order. This manifests itself in games in which the streets are devoid of ‘normal’ citizens
and, further, in which society is represented as bereft of domestic law-enforcement
agencies such that the only solution is foreign military intervention, not only to liberate
but also to restore a sense of legal order.8
Overall, reflecting the increasing acknowledgement of the importance of popular culture
for world politics, this article argues that an examination of videogames can open up key
insights for our understanding of American exceptionalism. It shows that a crossreading
of videogames and American exceptionalism theory can help reveal the foundations and
theoretical assumptions on which American exceptionalism is based and can help
identify important gaps in focus and understanding within American exceptionalism.
This is demonstrated with analysis of the representations and gameplay within military
videogames in four key areas: the threats facing the USA, debates on the competence of
political leadership in response to those threats post 9/11, the temporal dimension of
politics and IR, and analysis of political power as contained within the military industrial
complex.
Popular culture and world politics: a framework for analysis
… a critique of IR entails an analytical engagement with documents that can
mediate between theoretical reflection and the lived dramas of everyday life,
such as those mediations produced in popular culture.9
There has been an increasing acknowledgement in recent scholarship that popular
culture matters for world politics and that world politics matters for popular
culture.10 Neumann and Nexon offer a particularly helpful fourfold typology that
demonstrates the full scope of this: popular culture and politics (with popular culture
seen either as cause of political events or with political events motivating its
production); popular culture as mirror (‘which can force us to reflect on our theoretical
and pedagogical assumptions’); popular culture as data, (allowing insight into the
‘dominant norms, ideas, identities, or beliefs’ within a particular political community);
and popular culture as constitutive of politics (i.e. as integral to meaning making
and myth construction, acting to constrain and enable different political
outcomes).11
 at: negative state action/newman/“we critique the state”
Questioning the failures of American military strategy just
identify those failures as because of modern political leadership,
inculcating a Tea-Party style demand for a return to the “golden
age” of American hegemony
Robinson 15 – Nick, Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies,
University of Leeds, “Have You Won the War on Terror? Military Videogames and the
State of American Exceptionalism” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43.2
(January 2015) doi: 10.1177/0305829814557557 //KohlW
There are a small number of games that also open up spaces for critical reflection on the
sources of American exceptionalism (e.g. ‘America as God’s country’ and ‘America as an
exemplar nation’) as identified earlier in the article.53 Yet military videogames do this in
a very particular way, suggesting that the escalation of American military action (and the
subsequent ‘failure’ of that action) are products of a failure of Washington-based
political competence and leadership. Such concerns have taken on an important
contemporary aspect with the rise of the Tea Party and associated groupings which
advocate the return to what may be termed a ‘reified golden age of American
politics’ as idealised in the American constitution: that is, to small government, an
absence of bureaucracy, a purity of vision and mission, and a sense of
America as a beacon of democracy with a unique destiny.54 The game Medal of
Honor (2010), set in late 2001 during the initial phase of the invasion of Afghanistan,
provides perhaps the clearest example of a game that exposes the links between the
‘purity of American democracy’ (represented here through political leadership) and its
relationship to American exceptionalism.
The game, which is openly acknowledged by the developers to be based on events from
the Afghan war (in particular Operation Anaconda),55 raises explicit questions about
American political leadership, which its narrative implicates in the failures of the
contemporary Afghanistan conflict. Of central importance are a series of separate
arguments centred on battlefield strategy that precede key missions between the
Washingtonbased General Flagg and Afghanistan-based Colonel Drucker. In the first of
these (Mission 3, ‘Power it Up’), General Flagg (who is characterised as a bureaucrat,
sitting behind a desk and wearing a suit) orders Colonel Drucker (portrayed in army
fatigues within the Afghan war room, establishing him as a credible soldier) to escalate
the numbers of ‘boots on the ground’ against Drucker’s advice.56 Washington’s orders
prevail: the subsequent military action (Mission 5, ‘Send in the Rangers’) results in
serious battlefield errors, with Afghan allies killed in the collateral damage directly
resulting from US military action, and a number of American Special Forces being
captured and killed, so escalating hostility in Afghanistan.57 This battlefield catastrophe
results in a further argument between Drucker and Flagg, with Drucker wishing to
commit military personnel to rescue the captured operatives whereas Flagg rejects this
course of action (Mission 10, ‘Back in the Fight’).58 Here Drucker goes against Flagg’s
direct order and commits US Army Rangers to rescue the captured operatives. Whilst the
mission is successful, one of the key playable characters (Rabbit) dies while awaiting
extraction (Mission 11, ‘Drucker’s Call’).59
So what are we to make of this game in light of debates about American exceptionalism?
At one level, the game reflects a common discourse in ‘real world politics’ that Operation
Anaconda was itself a failure because of political constraints.60 The game thus serves as
a fictionalised story about real fears and a real operation that elicited those fears. At
another level, this analysis of Medal of Honor suggests that underpinning exceptionalism
is a desire to reaffirm or return to a ‘golden age of American politics’. The
character of Drucker represents autonomy from centralisation (here represented by the
Washington-based Flagg). Flagg, in contrast, represents a nation bloated with big
government, which is prone to make mistakes, driven by battlefield incompetence and
which ultimately undermines the endeavours of the ‘heroic troops’ on the battlefield to
deliver on the missionary potential of exceptionalist foreign policy. The message is
clear – if decision making were placed in the hands of Drucker then the USA
could return to the golden age of exceptionalism in which its troops (who
personify virtuous American values through their behaviour on the battlefield) could
deliver on America’s historic mission and succeed in the liberation of Afghanistan.
In this way, I would suggest, Medal of Honor reveals a deeper yearning within
exceptionalist thinking itself, and enables us to identify the normative underpinnings of
a call for the USA to return to an idealised vision of small government as contained
within the original mission of the founding fathers. The ideological roots of American
exceptionalism as revealed within this game thus share a number of affinities with the
political project of the contemporary Tea Party and neo-conservative thinkers in the
USA.
 AT FW - USFG
The USfg does not exist
Richardson 5/24/19 (Paul B. Richardson is an author and professor at
Birmingham University. Paul B. Richardson (2019): Sovereignty, The Hyperreal, and
“Taking Back Control”, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI:
10.1080/24694452.2019.1587283, VR)
Notions of sovereignty in crisis are not particularly new to the literature (Sidaway 2003). Many have already
noted that a sovereign-spatial order premised on a “claim to final and ultimate authority
over a political community” has long been undercut by multiple factors, such as
“national” currency values and interest rates being determined by the decisions of
international markets, political citizenship reconfigured through calls for nonterritorial
forms of citizenship, and the granting of sovereignty to institutions that transcend states
(Flint 2009, 707; Russell 2005). The European Union (EU), for example, has been indicative of what Agnew
(2005) termed an integrative sovereignty regime, whereby many of the founding states of the Westphalian
system have “thrown in their lot with one another” to create a larger entity that “challenges
existing state sovereignty in functionally complex and oftentimes nonterritorial ways” (445). Jones and
Johnson (2016, 194) highlight how Sassen (2006) has charted the “partial ‘unbundling’ of the key
constitutive ties between territory, authority, and rights that made up modern nation-states” whereby the
“unitary character of nation-states” has eroded due to the “rise of various cross-border
regimes, instantaneous and difficult-to-regulate capital flows, and new assemblages of
decision making power.” Sovereignty is itself a term that has evolved to accommodate new entities,
with Krasner (1999) arguing that international system norms, “including those associated with Westphalian
sovereignty and international legal sovereignty, have always been characterized by organized hypocrisy”
(220), while others, such as Luke (1996), have outlined a decentering of sovereign authorities and a post–
Cold War world made up of “unfixed ‘sovran’ authorities against fixed ‘sovereign’ rule” (500). Why, then, if
sovereignty can no longer be seen as the exclusive domain of the state—and in many regards
never was (Agnew 1998)—has there not been a corresponding shift in the way in which the political-
territorial order is imagined (Agnew 2005, 2009; Murphy 2013)? Even as sovereignty’s material and
functional relevance has been destabilized, deconstructed, and dislocated in academic
debates, it has at the same moment become imagined by political classes as ever more
precise and perfect. This article interprets this disjuncture as a shift to the hyperreal—a
condition that denies all of sovereignty’s contradictions and inconsistencies and one that
prevents politicians, political actors, and populations from acknowledging and
negotiating disconcerting transformations in the sociospatial order. What follows is a
theoretical engagement with notions of the hyperreal and sovereignty, which are then
explored through the case studies of Brexit and the “America First” presidency of Donald Trump.
Sovereignty and the Hyperreal Drawing on the body of work associated with Baudrillard (1976, 1978, 1980,
1983, 1985, 1988, 1994, 2004, 2006), and multiple interpretations of this work (e.g., Luke 1991a, 1991b;
Merrin 1994; Weber 1995, 2017; Debrix 1999; Gane 2003; Hussey 2003; Rubenstein 2008; Lane 2009;
Hehir 2011; Lundborg 2016; Lalonde 2018), the hyperreal is broadly understood in this article as
a simulated world coming to replace reality; where a consciousness of things has become
corrupted by a perception of something that never existed; and where the image of this
world becomes imbued with characteristics it has never had and could not possess (see
Hehir 2011). A hyperreal interpretation of sovereignty emphasizes its idealized image and
the ways in which this distracts and conceals inherent contradictions and hypocrisies. In
the realm of the hyperreal, sovereignty demands increasing attention, iteration, and
visibility, yet all the while its disintegration and deterritorialization accelerate. To date,
surprisingly few studies have attempted to relate the state of the hyperreal to sovereignty (although on
hyppereality’s wider applicability to international politics see, e.g., Der Derian 1990; Luke 1991a, 1996;
Merrin 1994; Hehir 2011; Lundborg 2016). What follows in this article is an explanation of how, in terms
of sovereignty, citizens of advanced 2 Richardson mediacracies have “lost the ability to
distinguish between the model and the real” (Der Derian 1990, 299). To illustrate our condition of
the hyperreal, this article turns to an analysis of recent declarations and speeches on sovereignty by populist
politicians and political elites, as well as media commentary and opinion reflecting on these
pronouncements and policies. Using examples drawn from the United States and the United
Kingdom, the aim is to analyze and interpret the ways in which the distinction between the real and its
representation begin to be effaced (Gane 2003). Or, in Baudrillard’s terms, when it becomes a
Simulacra: “a copy of a copy which has been so repeatedly acknowledged, referred to and
disseminated, that it has come to be accepted as more real than the original” (Baudrillard
1994, 2). Baudrillard (1985, 11, cited in Bleiker 2002) traces the annihilation of reality in stages, whereby
“the distinctions between reality and virtuality, political practice and simulation are
blurred to the extent that they are no longer recognisable.” In a world of media
saturation and obsession, “electronic mediations of experience and meaning substitute
the imaginary for the real” (Luke 1991b, 358). For Baudrillard, this occurs over four successive
phases of the image: First as a reflection of a basic reality; second, the image masking
and perverting of a basic reality; third, masking the absence of a basic reality; and, in its
fourth and final stage, it “bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure
simulacrum” (Baudrillard 1985, as cited in Bleiker 2002). In this final stage, in a condition of the
hyperreal, “no adequate analysis of systems of representation can simply refer to the
‘real’ world, as if this was unproblematic,” because “in each phase of representation a
former, dominant conception of the ‘real’ is taken as the reference model of ‘current’
reality” (Gane 2003, 95). It is through these successive phases of the image that “the model takes the
place of the ‘real’” (Baudrillard 1976, 100, cited in Gane 2003, 97). To illustrate the point, Baudrillard
drew on Jorge Luis Borges’s fable of imperial cartographers who create a map of such
perfection that it overlays the entire territory of the empire, only to be left by subsequent
generations to ruin by the elements until all that remains are frayed and tattered
fragments in the empire’s distant deserts. For Baudrillard ([1981] 1988) the lesson is this: 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. (166, italics in original) The map’s precedence to territory has not escaped the
attention of geographers, with Elden (2005) noting how we find ourselves in circumstances where “the
abstract space we have imposed over the world is taken more and more as real in itself,
rather than as a reflection of something below it, something that it seeks to represent”
(15–16). For Baudrillard ([1981] 1988), “It is no longer a question of either maps or territory. … 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” (166–67). This article suggests that the sovereign
image and imaginary is increasingly taken for the real, as the distinction between the real and the
imaginary— between truth and untruth—is annihilated. In response to this world of hyperreality and
hyperspace, Baudrillard ([1981] 1988) suggested that where 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. … 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. (171–72) To chart the demise of the real,
Baudrillard ([1981] 1988) drew on the examples of Disneyland—and its presentation of an “imaginary in
order to make us believe that the rest is real”—and the Watergate affair—“a scandal-effect”
concealing the fact that the scandal is not the aberration but the norm (171–73). In the case
of sovereignty, its invocation as absolute conceals a reality principle in distress, a striving
“to revive a moribund principle” through simulation by “proving the real by the
imaginary” (176–77). Attempts to reanimate sovereignty with realness and relevance
abound. The spell of sovereignty becomes a trick demonstrating how “simulation
corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs”; a false promise
“to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum” (182). If institutions like parliaments,
governments, and their bureaucracies were once the representatives of the sovereignty of
the people (see Debrix [1999] on Rousseau 1973; and Locke 1982), then, in the sovereignty of the
hyperreal—under conditions of simulation—“it is no longer possible to distinguish
between a good and a bad representation, a correct or an erroneous interpretation, a
truth or a falsehood. … The simulacrum, the real of/in simulation, is no longer the
product of interpretive mechanisms, but, rather, the outcome of operative media” (Debrix
1999, 12). For Debrix (1999), such a shift in our ways of perceiving the “objective” world
(reality) is revolutionary: “The Cartesian cogito has truly been superseded. New relations of perception
and knowledge have arisen. … [I]n simulation, visual signs lie. Or, they may tell the truth. … What is real
is what, as Baudrillard puts it, is hyperreal” (210). In this sense the binary of hyperreal
(appearance or falsehood) versus real (actuality or truth) collapses. The state of the hyperreal is no
longer the illusion, and the real no longer affirms the truth. Appearance and actuality are no longer poles
apart but instead fused together. In such conditions, and drawing on Baudrillard, Lundborg (2016)
suggested, “Only when simulation is the master does the desire for total sovereignty
become possible; only then can all ambivalence be removed; and only then does the
world as such become ‘perfectly impossible’” (264; see also Baudrillard and Noailles 2007; Lalonde
2018). The conditions for total, absolute sovereignty emerge in the proliferation of
hyperreal environments, in the form of geographical information systems, war game
simulations, global television emissions, and cinematic sign systems (O Tuathail 1996), all
of which constitute a virtual world in which the absolute becomes possible. Hehir (2011)
explored such “a simulated world” whereby our perception of things is “corrupted by a
perception of a reality that never existed. Thus entities and phenomena are imbued with
characteristics they do not and cannot have, yet are treated as though they do” (1073). Hehir (2011) focused
on the desire of the West to create “liberal” and “democratic” political communities in the
developing world which mirror idealized, unreal and unrealized visions of the Western
state. Within this conceit of perfection, sovereignty becomes presented as an ever more
“idealized composite image” (1074), a simulated form and “a virtual universe from which
everything dangerous and negative has been expelled” (Baudrillard 2004, as cited in Hehir 2011,
1078). All threats and challenges are externalized beyond the unity and inviolable ideal of
absolute sovereignty, which has become “an almost uncontestable article of faith despite
the evidence to the contrary,” a universal good “legitimised as progressive and
emancipatory” (Hehir 2011, 1078).1 Ince and Barrera de la Torre (2016) reflected more broadly on such
articles of faith, suggesting that much to the detriment of equality and social justice, statism—which in their
terms is “an integrated set of socially-embedded organisational logics establishing the state as the dominant
model of governing society”—has shaped, and continues to shape, “geographical epistemologies, producing
structures of knowing that can generate epistemic distance between representations of the world and
immanent experiences of it” (17). The examples of hyperreality and sovereignty that follow speak to this
broader aspiration of freeing geographical epistemologies from statism’s restrictive patterns of thought and
reflection. They seek to move beyond the “doublemove” of state making and its tendency to
illuminate “ontological uncertainty (about identity, space, time and meaning) [while] positing
the sovereign state as the solution to that uncertainty” (Dunn 2010, 86). To progress beyond
such a double move means first recognizing the state of the hyperreal and the condition of postmodernity
that paradoxically maintains and sustains an illusionary territoriality of the modern. It is a state
whereby sovereignty becomes ever more absurd and delusional, an ever more vivid and
valorized image no matter what shifts and reconfigurations take place in the political-
territorial order. Brown (2017) noted such a process in the case of border walls, suggesting that they
“function as symbolic and semiotic responses to crises produced by eroded sovereign state capacities to
secure territory, citizens and economies against growing transnational flows of power, people, capital,
religions, ideas or terror” (2). Yet, for Brown, these “walls do not merely index but accelerate
waning state sovereignty” (2). They represent “a last vestige of a dying system of
territorially bounded sovereignty (Brown 2010)” (Jones and Johnson 2017, 2), “a political-
theatrical response to eroding nation-state sovereignty (Brown 2010)” (Brown 2017, 2)—a
territory of the real “whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map” (Baudrillard [1981] 1988, 166). 4
Richardson
 AT Topic Education
Their conception of USfg sovereignty is an illusion – their
attempts to enforce sovereign action creates a simulated reality
that commits endless violence through structured hierarchies in
the name of ending chaos. Any claims to learning about the topic
causes the studying of simulation and allows for the creation of
new realities which disguise the simulacrum of war and
normalize crises in the name of the real.
(Paul B. Richardson is an author and professor at Birmingham University. Paul B.
Richardson (2019): Sovereignty, The Hyperreal, and “Taking Back Control”, Annals of
the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2019.1587283, VR)
America First The sovereignty delusion is by no means restricted to Brexit as the blurring of fact
and fiction, and of 8 Richardson reality and illusion, has been accelerated in the United
States with the ascendency to the presidency of reality TV star, Donald Trump (for
examples beyond Brexit, see Dunn 2010; Backman 2011; Cocks 2014; Juss 2017). In our age of the
hyperreal, Trump has been called a “sovereign father” for our times (Connelly 2016), a leader
who has risen on the tide of a sovereignty myth. It was a myth outlined by Trump at some
length during his maiden speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017 in
which sovereignty dominated and defined his address, with the words sovereign and
sovereignty mentioned twenty-one times (Tatar 2017). In the speech, Trump repeatedly equated
sovereignty with global harmony, declaring, “Our success depends on a coalition of strong and independent
nations that embrace their sovereignty, to promote security, prosperity, and peace, for themselves and for
the world” (Haldevang 2017). He declared that “strong, sovereign nations allow individuals to
flourish in the fullness of the life intended by God” (Miller 2018) and talked of a “great
reawakening of nations, for the revival of their spirits, their pride, their people, and their patriotism.” That
this has historically not been a recipe for “harmony and friendship” went unnoted in the
speech (Chhabra 2017). In the Washington Post, Jaffe and DeYoung (2017) suggested that in his
appearance at the United Nations, Trump had “cast his presidency as an avatar of international
renewal,” a catalyst for a renewed patriotic spirit, national self-interest and cooperation among
sovereign nations, which are posited as the solution for all international ills. Trump asked in his speech, “Are
we still patriots? Do we love our nations enough to protect their sovereignty and take ownership of their
future?” He also invoked sovereignty to attack the “mammoth multinational trade deals” that have
supposedly empowered faceless global bureaucracies over nation-states, sent factory jobs overseas, and
hollowed out the middle class (Jaffe and De Young 2017). Trump railed against the “unaccountable
international tribunals and powerful global bureaucracies” that sap the sovereignty of
nations (Jaffe and De Young 2017) and as a counter offered a passionate and populist defense of the
principles of sovereignty and patriotism, which in his words could spark a “rebirth of devotion” across the
world (Jaffe and De Young 2017). It is a devotion to a sovereign idyll and illusion through a
missionary zeal anchored in the ether of hyperreality. As Nasr pointed out, Trump’s definition
of sovereignty in the speech is derived “from a very narrow domestic prism” (cited in Landler
2017) out of which the United States emerges as the first among equals. It is a foreign
policy doctrine that has been interpreted by some as the fusion of sovereigntism with “a
style of big-power nationalism” and, in an echo of earlier presidencies, one that has been
labeled by the president and his advisors as “principled realism” and “America first” (Bierman
and Lauter 2017). For Patrick (2017a) it represents an invocation of sovereignty to “assert
universal truths and to deflect messy realities.” Patrick suggested that Trump’s speech should be
seen as part of a broader “sovereigntist” critique of the global order, which has been evident in policy stances
from leaving the Paris Climate Agreement, to renouncing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the criticism of
alliances like NATO, through to threats to ignore the World Trade Organization, and moratoriums on any
new multilateral treaties (Patrick 2017b). It is in Trump’s sovereigntist agenda that we glimpse a
mourning for the waning of U.S. hegemony in the face of “messy realities,” a lament for
the absence of power, which “for some time now produces nothing but signs of its
resemblance …; an obsession with its death; an obsession with its survival which
becomes greater the more it disappears” (Baudrillard [1981] 1988, 180). Baudrillard ([1981] 1988)
wrote of a “[m]elancholy for societies without power,” whereby “power is no longer present
except to conceal that there is none” (180–81). It is out of this melancholy for power, and a
rage against its loss, that the sovereigntist agenda can materialize in ever more
disturbing ways. One such moment occurred on 4 April 2018, with the release of a memo by
Trump titled, “Securing the Southern Border of the United States,” in which National
Guard troops were ordered to the U.S.–Mexico border in response to a “caravan” of
refugees traveling to the United States from Central America (Jacobs 2018). The first
paragraph sets the scene of a sovereignty principle in crisis: 1) The security of the United
States is imperiled by a drastic surge of illegal activity on the southern border. Large
quantities of fentanyl, other opioids, and other dangerous and illicit drugs are flowing across our southern
border and into our country at unprecedented levels, destroying the lives of our families and loved ones. …
Deadly transnational gangs are systematically exploiting Sovereignty, the Hyperreal, and
“Taking Back Control” 9 our unsecured southern border to
enter our country and develop
operational capacity in American communities throughout the country. The anticipated
rapid rise in illegal crossings as we head into the spring and summer months threatens to overwhelm our
Nation’s law enforcement capacities. (Trump 2018, italics added) The memo stresses a border regime
where the ability to ensure the sovereignty of the nation is in doubt (see Miller [2018] on
Trump’s preference for the term nation), with it suggesting that “our American way of life hinges on
our ability as a Nation to adequately and effectively enforce our laws and protect our
borders. A key and undeniable attribute of a sovereign nation is the ability to control who
and what enters its territory” (Trump 2018). Throughout the memo a sovereignty principle
in crisis is invoked, with paragraphs 4 and 5 warning, “The lawlessness that continues at our
southern border is fundamentally incompatible with the safety, security, and sovereignty
of the American people. … the highest sovereign duty of the President is to defend this
Nation, which includes the defense of our borders” (Trump 2018). The memo’s unsubtle generation of
an existential threat to “our American way of life” works to regenerate the sovereign
nation; it strives to revive a moribund “moral and political principle … in distress”
(Baudrillard [1981] 1988, 172–73). From it emerges a pure and perfect U.S. sovereignty that
contrasts with the disorder and chaos beyond, “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” (Baudrillard 2004). To maintain the illusion of
sovereign perfection, in June 2018 children of asylum seekers were separated from their
parents at the U.S. border, as Trump declared, “The United States will not be a migrant
camp … You look at what’s happening in other places—we can’t allow that to happen to the United States.
Not on my watch” (Gambino and Lartey 2018). In the simulated sovereignty of Trump’s America
First, the “circulation of hyperreal signs of his ability and often his ability alone … deliver
what he defines as truly in the US national interest” (Weber 2017, S-137, italics added; on Trump
scripting himself as the superhero, see Dittmer 2018). In one sense, Trump is a continuation of U.S.
presidents since Ronald Reagan who have each told us “a meta-theoretical story about Baudrillardian sign
theory where presidents … mark different moments of the simulacrum” (Rubenstein 2008, 11). For
example, on George W. Bush’s presidency, Suskind (2004) outlined a faith-based
administration with a disdain for “the reality-based community.” A senior advisor to Bush at
the time, stated to Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort
out.” Suskind described a presidency of “unflinching confidence [that] has an almost
mystical power. It can all but create reality.” 3 Trump is also a continuation and confirmation of
the practice of “statecraft as mancraft” (Weber 2016, 4; see also Ashley 1989), whereby the sovereign
foundation of the modern state is presented as a “phantastical yet presumed-to-be-
factual ‘sovereign man’—as if it were the singular, preexisting, ahistorical ground that
authorizes all sovereign decisions in its political community” (Weber 2016, 4–5). Applied to our
own phantastical times, Trump as sovereign man could claim on 5 April 2018—without any
corroborating evidence—that in the caravan of refugees “women are raped at levels that
nobody has ever seen before” (cited in Z. B. Wolf 2018). Then, in October 2018, as a group of mainly
Honduran asylum seekers moved through Mexico toward the U.S. border, Trump called it an “onslaught
of illegal aliens” (Darrah 2018). On 31 October he tweeted, “We will NOT let these Caravans, which are
also made up of some very bad thugs and gang members, into the U.S. Our Border is sacred” (Evans 2018).
In a speech at the White House on the same day, Trump added that if “they want to throw rocks at
our military, our military fights back. I told them to consider it a rifle” (Weaver and Manson
2018). In such hypermasculine declarations and denunciations, a state of crisis and threat
becomes the norm—a form of “banal geopolitics,” whereby crises and extreme remedy
become “nothing out of the ordinary,” “routine,” “normal, taken-for-granted geopolitics”
(Sidaway 2001, 606–7). These episodes also recall Brown’s interpretation of border walls and their
paraphernalia and performance “as symbolic and semiotic responses to crises” (R. Jones et al. 2017, 2). For
against Trump’s refrain that “a secure border is a sovereign right” (Swoyer 2016), Anderson (2018) noted in
The San Diego UnionTribune that the immense efforts at securitizing the U.S.–Mexico border have had the
counterfunction of 10 Richardson jeopardizing U.S. sovereignty and human security as “[s]trong, militarized
enforcement has resulted in a stronger militarized response by well-financed drug cartels and increased
corruption, violence and death, but not a decrease in the flow of drugs.” Extreme violence and
discipline were anticipated by Baudrillard ([1981] 1988), who noted that power threatened
by simulation “risks the real, risks crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social,
economic, political stakes. This is a question of life or death for it” (180). It also becomes a
question of life and death for those caught in the “collective demand for signs of power—
a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power” (180). In the desert of
“Making America Great Again” are the drowned of the Rio Grande and the missing of the arid
U.S.–Mexico borderlands—victims of a melancholy for a society without power. While
hyperreality’s scenario of power conceals the fact that the real power has disappeared
(Baudrillard [1981] 1988), simulation does not exclude the violent counterconvulsions of a
sovereign tormented by the ebb of its power. As Baudrillard (1983) insisted, the simulacrum of
war does not make it “any less heinous for being a mere simulacrum—the flesh suffers
just the same, and the dead ex-combatants count as much there as in other wars” (70, cited
in Merrin 1994, 444). A condition of the hyperreal makes possible absolute sovereign
authority and with it the full realization of sovereignty’s devastating foundational logic—
the operation of a binary of those who are protected and those who could legitimately die
(Agamben 1998). For Weber (2017), the Trump “campaign and presidency are part and parcel of earlier
historical ‘experiments’—in white, Western, heteropatriarchal authoritarian leadership, in neoliberalism and
the specific modalities of citizenship, governance and reason” (S-134; see also Adorno et al. 1950; Brown
2003; Bauman 2016; Connelly 2016). Weber saw Trump’s simulated form as president as akin to
Badiou’s (2001) description of the function of the simulacrum under Nazism: in which a
hyperreal national allegiance to the selfreferential simulacrum as heteropatriarchal
leader piles specific fictions upon fictions. It does so not only to mask … the absence of
the reality principle but to generate a dangerous, materializable, national fantasy that
depends upon particularizing, identifying and regulating abstract allies and enemies. (74;
see also Weber 2017, S-135) For Weber, Trump “opposes the ‘righteous’ to the ‘unrighteous’,
who he variously named during the campaign as all or many of ‘the blacks’, ‘the gays’,
‘the Mexican rapists’ and the ‘radical Islamic terrorists’” (Weber 2017, S-136). In her polemic,
Weber highlighted how simulation and dissimulation “re-code sovereignty … in the name of
that particular abstract set of sovereign US subjects on whose behalf the administration
(pretends to) claim(s) its authority to rule—‘righteous Americans’” (Weber 2017, S-138). In a
haze of “fake news” and “alternative facts” (which are read by some as “real news”) the administration’s
strategy is one “that attempts to overwhelm US democracy with … representations, simulations and
dissimulations of facts and fictions, so all that remains intact is the authority of Trump and Trump as our
authoritarian leader” (Weber 2017, S-137–39). These hyperreal simulations and dissimulations of
sovereignty are far from intangible, unreal, or benign but effectively maintain violent
exclusionary hierarchies through privileging “righteous Americans” and the elevation of
“a particular people and its mode of life above those marked as alien” (Cocks 2014, 3; Weber
2017, 136). It is out of the sovereignty of the hyperreal that there emerge new terrains and
possibilities for the “violent reactivation of a form of power that despairs of its rational
foundations” (Baudrillard 1980, 110, cited in Kroker 1984, 58).
 2ac set col
Manifest manners
Yu 08. Ying-Wen Yu, professor of English at the University of Arizona, “Playing
Indian: Manifest Manners, Simulation, and Pastiche” in Survivance: Narratives of Native
Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor, 2008: google books

The term Indian according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has several meanings. It
refers to a "native or inhabitant of India or of the East Indies" or to "a person of Indian
descent." It also means an "American Indian," from the belief held by Columbus that the
lands he discovered were part of Asia." Moreover, it is one of the native languages of
American Indians." The definition of American Indian is "a member of any of the
aboriginal peoples of the western hemisphere except often the Eskimos; especially: an
American Indian of North America and especially the U.S." Therefore we have to point
out that Indian and American Indian are colonial terms that have been used to designate
native peoples of different tribes since Columbus's "discovery" of the American
continent. The term Indian for Gerald Vizenor implies manifest manners and is
an occidental misnomer, an overseas enactment that has no referent to real native
cultures or communities.'"
In this chapter I intend to use Vizenor's discussion on what Indian means to scrutinize
the representation of Indian from Jean Baudrillard's viewpoint on simulation. Vizenor's
manifest manner is in fact a simulation proposed by Baudrillard, which implies the
absence of Indian and is "without a referent to an actual tribal rememberance."2
Moreover, in the capital society, or as Fredric Jameson suggests, the "late capital
society," the simulated Indian representation has become commodified and
therefore lacks the relation to the history and culture. However, in the capital
society people tend to believe the representation of the simulated Indian that souvenirs,
novels, and movies with Indian flavor make popular. Ironically, viewing or possessing
the products does not make people understand native culture or history; on the
contrary, these items are collected as museum exhibits for the purpose of
nostalgia. The so-called Indian has become commodity production, even a
fragmented pastiche that lacks depth in relation to the history of any sort. Within the
framework of the following discussion, I use Vizenor's works as examples to show how he
alternates the Indian representation with his ironic portrayal of Indians in order to
criticize and to make ridicule the commodified and simulated Indian
As Vizenor states, The word [Indian] has no referent in tribal languages or cultures."3
The term's generalization not only erases the uniqueness of each tribe, but it also labels
the so-called Indian as the Other. N. Scott Momaday claims in EverlastingSky that the
Indian has been for a long time generalized in the imagination of the white man. Denied
the acknowledgement of individuality and change, he has been made to become in theory
what he could not become in fact, a synthesis of himself. "4 In other words, Indian
does not refer to the actual native tribes. On the contrary, it represents the false
homogeneity of the dominant culture, namely the western white culture.
According to Vizenor, The word Indian, and most other tribal names, are
simulations in the literature of dominance. "5
In the contemporary debates over tribal identity, integrity, and authenticity, Indian is
still the term that has been generalized by ethnographers, historians, and
colonial misnomers to refer to individual native tribes. In the history of American
literature, the earliest accounts of natives were, in fact, written almost entirely by
nonnatives from an outsider's point view, with "tribal words and concepts translated into
a foreign language-English. "6 English, Vizenor argues, has been the linear tongue
of colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, the simulation of
tribal cultures, manifest manners, and the unheard literature of dominance
in tribal communities." 7 The constructed Indian is viewed as the Other in the
dominant culture and literature. It is, according to Vizenor, a simulated nonentity
that insinuates the obvious simulation and ruse of colonial dominance,
namely manifest manner: "Manifest manners are the course of dominance,
the racialist notions and misnomers sustained in archives and lexicons as
'authentic' representations of indian culture. Manifest manners court the
destinies of monotheism, cultural determinism, objectivism, and the structural conceits
of savagism and civilization.'"
Vizenor claims that the Indian simulation of manifest manners continues through "the
surveillance and domination of the tribes in literature," which he regards as "the ruins
of representation "9 The manifest manners of the literature of dominance will
threaten tribal survivance, including cultures as well as creative voices. Vizenor points
out that the tribal cultures considered in the linear representation of time, place,
and person are actually manifest manners. Moreover, of the three kinds of manifest
manners, Vizenor considers "nationalism., [to be] the most monotonous simulation
of dominance" because some tribes are simulated as national cultural emblems, and
certain individuals are honored by the nation and the tribe as real representations." 10
For this reason individual tribal names and languages become nouns and pronouns.
Vizenor writes in The People Named the Chippewa that the colonial term Chippewa is
different from the tribal word Anishinaabe, the language used by the Anishinaabe
people: "In the language of the tribal past, the families of the woodland spoke of
themselves as the Anishinaabeg until the colonists named them the Ojibway and
Chippewa. The word Anishinaabeg, the singular is Anishinaabe, is a phonetic
transcription from the oral tradition Tribal people used the word Anishinaabeg to refer
to the people of the woodland who spoke the same language. The collective name was not
an abstract concept of personal identities or national ideologies. Tribal families were the
basic political and economic units in the woodland and the first source of personal
identities."" It is ironic that the manifest manners of performance are honored
more than the real native peoples. Tribal identities thus have been misconstructed
as the Other and authenticated as simulation.
In the chapter "Terminal Creeds at Orion" in Bearheart, Vizenor, in using the term
terminal creeds, proposes that the fragile identities as Indians have been dreadfully
shaken. 12 He utilizes the scene of conversation between the people of Orion and
Belladonna, a native girl, to suggest that Indian is an invention. Belladonna is asked to
explain the so-called tribal value and the meaning of Indian. She applies the
stereotypical representation of Indian to the meaning of the two terms:
We are tribal and that means that we are children of dreams and visions. Our bodies are
connected to mother earth and our minds are part of the clouds. Our voices are the living
breath of the wilderness.... I am different than a whiteman because of my values and my
blood is different.... We are different because we are raised with different values.... Tribal
people seldom touch each other.... We do not invade the personal bodies of others and
we do not stare at people when we are talking. Indians have more magic in their lives
than whitepeople.... An Indian is a member of a recognized tribe and a person who has
Indian blood.... My tribal blood moves in the circles of mother earth and through dreams
without time. My tribal blood is timeless and it gives me strength to live and
deal with evil. 13
Belladona, influenced by the manifest manner of the dominant culture, believes that
there are essential differences between Indians and white people. She
internalizes the ideas unconsciously. Therefore the people of Orion say, You speak
from terminal creeds. Not a person of real experience and critical substance." 14 After
listening to Belladonna's talk on the Indians, these people point out that her
explanations about the Indian is nothing more than an invention: "Indians are in
invention... You tell me that the invention is different than the rest of the world when it
was the rest of the world that invented the Indian. An Indian is an Indian because
he speaks and thinks and believes he is an Indian, but an Indian is nothing
more than an invention"15
The story of "Terminal Creed" indicates that the public, including natives and whites, are
profoundly influenced by the terminal creeds and the invented notion of Indians.
Belladonna's lecture on Indian not only fails to define the term but also makes her
interpretation elusive. The example of Belladonna shows that Indian is no longer a
word with reference to the tribal; on the contrary, it has become a pronoun to
indicate all Native Americans. The favor of the nonentity pronouns are "neither the
source, causes, nor tribal intentions; autobiographies, memories and personal stories are
not the authentic representations of either pronouns, cultures, or the environment. "16
As a believer of terminal creeds, Belladonna is blind to the rules relinquishing her
responsibility for growth," and becomes, as one character says, her own victim"17
Vizenor finds that the threat of death by terminal creeds is particularly ominous for
Native Americans; as Blaeser indicates, "He devotes much of his writing to delineating
the 'invented indian.' "18 Vizenor by mediating between the invented Indian and
terminal creeds makes clear that the failure for tribal people to outwit the imposed
stereotypes would allow them to be captured as Indians imprisoned by words and
stereotypes.
In Manifest Manners Vizenor elaborates on his idea of indians 19 Indian, according to
Vizenor, is the absence of the real natives and the simulation of tragic
primitivism Natives, on the other hand, are the actual storiers of motion and
presence. In order to exemplify this difference, Vizenor applies Rene Magritte's
painting Ceci nest pas une pipe (This Is Not a Pipe) in order to suggest that the images
we perceive, whether in books or on the screen, are not natives but a mere
simulation without actual reference. Magritte's painting is included in the
collection called The Betrayal of Images and is a representation of what we understand
pipe to be. However, by capturing the essential pipeness in the painting, Magritte aims to
show the differences between the conceptual pipeness and the visual representation of a
pipe. Utilizing the painting as an example, Vizenor suggests that there is a gap
between stereotypical representations of Indian and the real native, which,
contrary to Indian, is of "actual action," "imagic presence," and "the actual tease of
human contingencies. "20 Thus the "portrait" of indian familiar to the public "is
not an Indian "21 Vizenor's repetitive statement that "this portrait is not an Indian"
challenges tribal representations and provokes further discussion on the idea of
simulation in light of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations.
In Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard points out that the simulation is a product of
contemporary consumer culture and imperialistic western science and philosophy,
especially ethnography. In the consumer society, desires, which are stimulated by
the dominant cultural discourses, mandate human needs. People are precoded with
the simulation of what they desire so that they process the relation to the world through
the images. The world is thus made in the simulated images of people's desire. For
example, the image of simulated indian is the product of such consumer
culture, and the indian simulation gradually stands for native cultures.
Vizenor points out that the most romantic representations of natives are the
advertisements of cultural dominance, not the natural sources of motion and
sovereignty. "22 The Indian, as he puts it, is "a case of cultural nostalgia of the presence
of tradition in a chemical civilization; on the other hand, the indian is the very
absence and inexistence of reason and literature."23 A consumer society
provides a precession of simulacra such as the simulation of Indian, which is a
parade of images projecting a life that consumers are encouraged to live. Therefore the
boundary between the real and the simulation, according to Baudrillard, is blurred: 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.... A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from
the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real the imaginary, leaving room
only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of
difference. "24
Simulation is no longer the pure reflection of the reality. It gradually takes the place of
reality and thereby becomes its own pure simulacrum Indian, like simulation,
also replaces the tribal real with its simulated reality. As a seemingly authentic
experience becomes even harder to conceive, simulation, willed or not, rules the
perception. All we can see are "hyperrcal simulations of Indian, created from a model
without actual origin or reality. "25 Moreover, following Baudrillard's discussion,
Vizenor reaches his idea on simulation: The simulations are the practices, condition,
characteristics, and the manifold nature of tribal experiences. The simulations would
include tribal documentation, peer recognition, sacred names and nicknames,
cultural anxieties, cross-blood assurance, nationalism, pan-tribalism, new
tribalism and reservation residence."26 Vizenor considers that the simulation is
everywhere and has taken the place of the real so that people can only learn or know
from the false reality-the dead reality. Baudrillard indicates that "everywhere we live in a
universe strangely similar to the original -things are doubled by their own scenario. But
this doubling does not signify, as it did traditionally, the imminence of their death-they
are already purged of their death, and better than when they were alive; more cheerful,
more authentic, in the light of their model, like the faces in funeral homes."27
The "death" is in fact created by ethnologists according to Vizenor and
Baudrillard. For Baudrillard in order for ethnology to live, its object must die
because by dying the object takes its revenge for being "discovered" and
because with its death it defies the science that wants to grasp it.28 In "Heirs of Patronia"
in Hotline Healer, Almost Browne, the novel's protagonist, is interviewed by an anthropologist, who is amused by Almost's
tricky stories, including his birth by chance and the mongrel healers and so on. Instead of appreciating the stories for their
humor and imagination, the anthropologist writes that the tricky stories "could be an overstated sense of mythic presence,
as [Almost Browne] never revealed the sacred location. "29 In order to make fun of the anthropologist, Almost tells her
the cultural
different stories and tries to show contradictions in them to see if she can make sense of them However,
anthropologist is so "dedicated.... and without a trace of irony, she recorded his stories as
true representations of native traditions. "30
Thus the anthropologist, as well as other scholars, tries to discover the native traditions
from a racialist point of view, which is also the manifest manners, so as to produce a
hierarchy of values. Almost Browne exaggerates the influence of manifest manners and
overturns the simulation with his ironic stories, representing the Indians in the primitive
stage of life and treating them like fossils. Baudrillard observes that "the Indian thus
returned to the ghetto, in the glass coffin of the virgin forest, again becomes the model of
simulation of all the possible Indians from before ethnology.... These Indians it has
entirely reinvented - Savages who are indebted to ethnology for still being savages:
what a turn of event, what a triumph for this science that seemed dedicated to their
destruction! Of course, these savages are posthumous: frozen, cryogenized,
sterilized, protected to death, they have become referential simulacra, and
science itself has become pure simulation "31
Both Belladonna and the anthropologist's beliefs are static and even dead. As
Louis Owens comments in the afterword to Bearheart, the attempts of terminal creeds to
"impose static definitions upon the world" are "destructive, suicidal, even
when the definitions appear to arise out of revered tradition"32 The simulation of
Indian not only, as Baudrillard says, "threatens the difference between the 'true'
and the 'false,' the 'real' and the 'imaginary,'" but also destroys "every referential,
of every human objective, that shattered every ideal distinction between true and false,
good and evil. "3 3 The simulation or the stereotypical representations reiterate
throughout history and culture. Subsequently, Baudrillard suggests that [the capital]
does nothing but multiply the signs and accelerate the play of simulation. "34
 2ac afropess
Exterior critiques of the system miss the point by being too close
to the mark: they only reify the reality principle of semiotic
systems: the ground these radical moves chose to fight on is
demarcated in advance and they are beaten in advance. All are
complicit and so attempts to criticize the system on the plane of
the real succumb to the will towards integral reality.

The only option is a radical passivity, a mimicry of the forms of

the system, one that accelerates them to the point of their
obvious vacuity. Duality re-emerges; duality will out: every
attempt at coherence, presence, life and the Good is met by a
concomitant move towards incoherence, absence, and Evil. We
affirm this dualistic ontology in a moment of semiotic rupture.
“Nothing becomes wholly transparent without also becoming
enigmatic.” Duality emerges as a fatal strategy, we embrace its
complicity in a re-emergent dualistic mocking that maintains the
possibility of mystery, Evil, and radical alterity.

You should bet on a subtle mimicry of established

communicative forms, accelerating and pushing them through
to trigger their own symbolic collapse.
Pawlett 14. William Pawlett, senior lecturer in media, communications, and cultural studies at
the University of Wolverhampton, UK, “Society At War With Itself,” International Journal of
Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)

It all depends on the ground we choose to fight on … most often … we choose to

fight on ground where we are beaten before we begin (Baudrillard 2001: 119).
This paper examines Baudrillard’s assertion, made in later works includingImpossible
Exchange (2001), The Intelligence of Evil (2005) and Pyres of Autumn(2006), that
individuals, society and indeed the global system, are internally and irreconcilably
divided, that modernity is ‘at odds with itself’ (Baudrillard 2006: 1). In his view
dissent, rejection and insurrection emerge from within, not from external
challenges such as alternative ideologies or competing worldviews, but from
within bodies, within borders, inside programmes. For Baudrillard much of the
violence, hatred and discomfort visible around the globe can be understood as a latent
but fundamental ‘silent insurrection’ against the global integrating system and
its many pressures, demands and humiliations (2001: 106). This is anendogenic or intra-
genic rejection, it emanates from within the system, from within individuals, even from
within language, electronic systems and bodily cells, erupting as abreaction,
metastasis and sudden reversal.2
For Baudrillard then, despite the many simulations of external threat and enmity –
radical Islam currently being the best example – the most dangerous threat lies
within: ‘society faces a far harder test than any external threat: that of its own
absence, its loss of reality’ (2006: 1). The global order, conventionally labelled
“capitalist”, is neutralising its values and structures, its ideologies disappear, its
principles are sacrificed. Even the sense of “reality” produced by the abstract
sign and by simulation models begin to disappear (2005: 67-73; 2009: 10-15).
The goal is ‘integral reality’, a limitless operational project geared towards the total
transcription of the world into virtuality: ‘everything is realised and technically
materialised without reference to any principle or final purpose’ (2005: 18).
Yet there is an internal war or “backlash” taking place between integralist violence
which seeks ultimate control by eliminating all otherness, and duality. Duality, for
Baudrillard, is “indestructible” and is manifest as the inevitable or destined
re-emergence of otherness: of death, Evil, ambivalence, the ghosts of
symbolic exchange, the accursed share within the system. The integrating
system then suffers a ‘dissent working away at it from inside. It is the global
violence immanent in the world-system itself which, from within, sets the
purest form of symbolic challenge against it’ (2005: 22). This is a war or conflict
that does not end, the outcome of which cannot be predicted or programmed. It is a
war that is quite different from the disappearance of war into simulated
non-events, such as occurred with the Gulf wars (Baudrillard 1995). Indeed,
Baudrillard suggests, the deterrence of world wars, and of nuclear wars, does not
result in peace, but in a viral proliferation of conflicts, a fractalisation of
war and conflict into everyday, local, and ubiquitous terror (1993b: 27).
This paper will examine Baudrillard’s position on internal rejection through two closely
related themes: complicity and duality. Complicity, and the closely related term
collusion, are themselves dual in Baudrillard’s sense. That is, complicity or collusion
express an internal division or ‘duality’ which is not a simple opposition of
terms. As is so often the case, Baudrillard’s position builds on his much earlier
studies: Requiem For the Media (orig. 1972, in Baudrillard 1981: 164-184) had already
argued that the dominance of the abstract sign and of simulation models meant that any
critique of the system made through the channels of semiotic abstraction
were automatically re-absorbed into the system. Any meaningful challenge
must invent its own, alternative medium – such as the silk-screen printings,
hand-painted notices and graffiti of May 1968 – or it will lapse into an
ineffectual complicity with the system it seeks to challenge (Baudrillard 1981:
176). In his later work, Baudrillard’s emphasis on duality and complicity is extended
much further, taking on global, anthropological and even cosmological dimensions, and
increasingly complicity and collusion are seen as dual, as encompassing both acceptance
and a subtle defiance. This paper examines the dual nature of complicity and collusion. It
considers the influence of La Boetie’s notorious Essay on Voluntary Servitude on
Baudrillard, seeking to draw out what is distinctive in Baudrillard’s position. The second
section turns to the notion of duality, examining Good and Evil and Baudrillard’s
assertion that attempts to eliminate duality merely revive or re-active it.
Complicity implies a complexity of relations, and, specifically, the condition of being
an accomplice to those in power. To be an accomplice is to assist in the
committing of a crime. If the crime is murder, the term accomplice implies one who
plans, reflects, calculates – but does not strike the lethal blow. The crime which is of
particular interest to Baudrillard is, of course, the perfect crime: the elimination of
otherness, of ambivalence, of duality, even of “reality” and of the abstract
representational sign which enables a sense of “reality” (Baudrillard 1996). The
global, integral, carnivalising and cannibalising system, which might loosely
still be called capitalist, is at war against radical otherness or duality; yet, for
Baudrillard, as duality lies at its heart, locked within its foundations, it is
indestructible and emerges through attempts to eliminate it. If the system has
been largely successful at eliminating external threats, it finds itself in an
even worse situation: it is at war with itself.
II. Complicity
Complicity is a particularly slippery term. In the 1980s Baudrillard’s thought, mistakenly
assumed to be “Postmodernist”, was argued to be complicit with capitalism, largely because it
questioned the ability of dominant strands of Marxism and feminism to significantly challenge
the capitalist system (Callinicos 1989; Norris 1992). At the same time, Baudrillard was alleging
that the work of supposedly radical theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari (1984 orig. 1972) and
Lyotard (1993 orig. 1974) was, with their emphasis on desire as productive and liberatory force,
complicit with the mechanisms of advanced consumer capitalism (Baudrillard 1987: 17-20). So
which branch of contemporary theory is most complicit with capitalism? Liberals, humanists and
environmentalists who see their clothes stolen by mainstream politicians? Marxists and
Communists who by refusing to update their thinking provide a slow moving target for right-
wing snipers? Post- Modernists and Post-Structuralists who attack Enlightenment thought but
refuse to speak of the human subject and so have “thrown the baby out with the bath water”?
Network and complexity theory which flattens all phenomena and experience to a position on a
grid, producing a very complex simplification? The list could go on but it is a question that
cannot be answered because all critical theories are complicit with the system they critique.
They fight on a terrain already demarcated by their opponents, a terrain on which they are
beaten before they begin, one where the most compelling argument can always be dismissed
as doom-mongering or irresponsible intellectualism. This includes Baudrillard’s own critical
thinking, as he readily acknowledges (Baudrillard 2009a: 39). Further, and even more damaging
to the project of critique, in a hegemonic or integral order the system solicits critique and it
criticises itself, so displacing and making redundant the laborious attempts at academic
critique. The latter continue, even proliferate, but with decreasing impact.

So, what does Baudrillard mean by complicity with the global order? Baudrillard’s concern is
primarily with complicity at the level of the form of the (capitalist) system, not at the level of
belief, consent or allegiance to particular contents of capitalist life (consumer products, plurality
of ‘lifestyles’, a degree of ‘tolerance’ etc.). Complicity is often seen, by critics of capitalism, as
acceptance of consumerism and its myriad choices and lifestyles, but this is a reductive level of
analysis from Baudrillard’s perspective. By complicity or collusion Baudrillard means, on the one
hand, the very widespread willingness to surrender or give up beliefs, passions and “symbolic
defences” (2010: 24), and on the other – as the dual form – an equally widespread ability to
find a space of defiance through the play of complicity, collusion, hyperconformity and
indifference (1983: 41-8). That is, while many of us (in the relatively affluent West) share in the
profanating, denigrating and “carnivalising” of all values, embracing indifference, shrugging
“whatever”, we do so with very little commitment to the system, rejoicing inwardly when it
suffers reversals: we operate in a dual mode.

While such attitudes of indifference may seem to accept that there is no meaningful alternative
to capitalism: an attitude that has been called ‘capitalist nihilism’ (Davis in Milbank and Zizek,
2009) and ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2008), Baudrillard’s notions of “integral reality”, duality
and complicity may have significant advantages over those approaches. Unlike thinkers who
remain anchored to critical thinking defined by determinate negation, Baudrillard’s approach
emphasises ambivalence, reversal and both personal and collective modes of rejection more
subtle than those envisioned by the increasingly exhausted mechanisms of critique. The
critique of consumer capitalism – the consumption of junk food, junk entertainment and junk
information – is now integral to the system; the critique of finance capitalism – banker’s
bonuses, corporate tax avoidance – is integral to the system, yet it fails to bring about
meaningful or determinate social transformation. Indeed, such critiques may do no more than
provide the system with a fleeting sense of “reality” – real issues, real problems to deal with –
around which the system can reproduce its simulacra, perhaps to reassure us that “something
is being done”, “measures are being put into place” etc. “Reality” cannot be dialectically
negated by critical concepts when both ‘reality’ and the critical concept disappear together,
their fates clearly tied to each other (Baudrillard 2009b: 10-12).

There is a sense then in which the production of critique is in complicity with the system, the
unravel-able proliferation and excess of critical accounts of the system has the effect of
protecting the system. Complicity consists in a sharing of the denigration of all values, all
institutions, all ideas, all beliefs: so long as we believe in nothing – at least not passionately –
then the system has us, at least superficially. For example, in recent decades we have seen the
denigration of religious faiths – or their reduction to ‘cultural identity’ and ‘world heritage’
objects; the denigration of public services and welfare provision accompanied by their
marketisation; the denigration of the poor, the young, immigrants and the unemployed. Yet this
is not only the denigration of the powerless or disenfranchised, there is also the widespread
denigration of those seen as powerful: politicians, corporations, celebrities. For Baudrillard, it is
quite inadequate to focus only on the power of global neo-liberal policies such as
marketisation in these processes of denigration. This is where Baudrillard’s position departs
decisively from anti-globalists and from neo-Communists such as Negri, Zizek, and Badiou.
Global power has deliberately sacrificed its values and ideologies, it presents no position, it
takes no stand, it undermines even the illusion that “free markets” function and has made
“capital” virtual; become orbital it is removed from a terrestrial, geo-political or subjective
space. These are protective measures enabling power to become (almost) hegemonic
(Baudrillard 2009a: 33-56; 2010: 35-40).
Baudrillard often emphasises the fragility and the vulnerability to reversal of the “powerful”
and the distinction between powerful and powerless is radically questioned in his work. So
what is this global power? Where is it? The answer, of course, is that it is everywhere and it is in
everyone. We have not liberated ourselves from slavery, but, Baudrillard
contends, internalised the masters: ‘[e]verthing changes with the emancipation of the slave
and the internalisation of the master by the emancipated slave’ (2009a: 33). We tyrannise
ourselves, for example by demanding that we maximise our opportunities, fulfill our potential.
This is a deeper level of slavery – and complicity – than any previous historical system could
inflict (Baudrillard 1975; 2009a: 33).

Yet duality always re-emerges, Baudrillard insists: indifference is dual, complicity is dual.
Carnivalisation and cannibalisation are themselves dual: the global system absorbs all
otherness in a ‘forced conversion to modernity’ (2010: 5), reproducing otherness within the
carnival of marketable “difference”, yet cannibalisation emerges as a reversion and derailing
of this process. The world adopts Western models: economic, cultural, religious – or it appears
to. Hidden within this complicity with the West, there is, Baudrillard suggests, a deeper sense of
derision and rejection. The allegiance to Western models is superficial; it is a form of mimicry
or hyperconformity that involves a ritual-like exorcism of the hegemonic system. Further, such
mimicry reveals the superficiality of Western cultural and economic models: this is not only a
superficial acceptance, but an acceptance of superficiality. Western values are already parodic,
and, in being accepted, they are subject to further parody as they circulate around the globe
(2010: 4-11). The West has deregulated and devalued itself and demands that the rest of the
world follows: "It is everything by which a human being retains some value in his own eyes that
we (the West) are deliberately sacrificing … [o]ur truth is always to be sought in unveiling, de-
sublimation, reductive analysis …[n]othing is true if it is not desacralised, objectivised, shorn of
its aura, dragged on to the stage" (Baudrillard 2010: 23).

Western desacrilisation amounts to a powerful challenge to the rest of the world, a potlatch:
desacralise in return or perish! But who has the power? Who is the victor? There isn’t one,
according to Baudrillard. Of the global order, Baudrillard writes: ‘We are its hostages – victims
and accomplices at one and the same time – immersed in the same global monopoly of the
networks. A monopoly which, moreover – and this is the supreme ruse of hegemony – no one
holds any longer’ (2010: 40). There is no Master, no sovereign because all the structures and
dictates of power have been internalised, this is the complicity we all share with global order,
yet it is a dual complicity: an over-eager acceptance goes hand-in-hand with a deep and
growing rejection.
Baudrillard’s discussions of power, servitude and complicity make frequent reference to Estienne La Boetie’s essay on
voluntary servitude, completed around 1554. The fundamental political question for La Boetie is: ‘how can it happen that a
vast number of individuals, of towns, cities and nations can allow one man to tyrannise them, a man who has no power
except the power they themselves give him, who could do them no harm were they not willing to suffer harm’ (La Boetie
1988: 38). It seems people do not want to be free, do not want to wield power or determine their own fates: ‘it is the people
who enslave themselves’ (La Boetie 1988: 41). People in general are the accomplices of the powerful and the tyrannical,
some profit directly through wealth, property, favour – ‘the little tyrants beneath the principal one’ (1988: 64), but many
do not, why do they not rebel? Baudrillard takes up La Boetie’s emphasis on servitude being enforced and maintained
from within, rather than from without. Yet, there are also major divergences. La Boetie deplores the “common people” for
accepting the narcotising pleasures of drinking, gambling and sexual promiscuity, while Baudrillard rejects such elitism
and celebrates the masses abilities to strategically defy those who would manipulate them through perverse but lethally
effective practices such as silence, radical indifference, hyperconformity – dual modes of complicity and rejection
(Baudrillard 1983: 1-61). Though La Boetie’s essay prefigures the development of the concept of hegemony, he never
doubts that voluntary servitude is unnatural, a product of malign custom that is in contradiction with the true nature of
human beings which is to enjoy a God-given freedom. Baudrillard, by contrast, examines voluntary servitude as a strategy
of the refusal of power, a refusal of the snares of self and identity, as strategy of freedom from the tyranny of the will and
the fiction of self-determination (Baudrillard 2001: 51-7). For Baudrillard the “declination” or refusal of will disarms those
who seek to exert power through influencing or guiding peoples’ choices and feelings towards particular ends. It also
allows for a symbolic space, a space of vital distance or removal, a space in which to act, or even act-out (of) a character
(Baudrillard 2001: 72-3). This is a space where radical otherness may be encountered, a sense of shared destiny which is a
manifestation of the dual form at the level of individual existence (Baudrillard 2001: 79).

It could certainly be argued that modern subjects are confronted by a far more subtle
and pervasive system of control than were the subjects discussed in La Boetie’s analysis.
In theorising the nature of modern controls Baudrillard develops suggestive themes from
La Boetie’s work. Speaking of slavery in the Assyrian empire, where, apparently, kings
would not appear in public, La Boetie argues, ‘the fact that they did not know who
their master was, and hardly knew whether they had one at all, made them
all the more willing to be slaves’ (1988: 60). Whatever its historical provenance, this
strategy of power is, it seems, generalised in modernity; particularly after the shift
away from Fordist mass production it has become increasingly hard to detect who
the masters actually are. While workers are persecuted by middle managers,
supervisors, team leaders, project co-ordinators who are the masters of this universe?
Who are the true beneficiaries? Rather than trying to identify a global neo-liberal
elite, as do many proponents of anti-capitalist theory, Baudrillard suggests that the
situation we confront is so grave because “we” (those in the West in relatively privileged
positions) have usurped the position of masters; we have become the slave masters
of ourselves, tyrannising every detail of our own lives: trying to work
harder, trying for promotion or simply trying to avoid redundancy. We are all
the accomplices of a trans-capitalist, trans-economic exploitation. We are all
tyrants: a billion tiny tyrants servicing a system of elimination. But this is not to say
that Baudrillard ignores power differentials altogether: ‘it is, indeed, those who
submit themselves most mercilessly to their own decisions who fill the greater
part of the authoritarian ranks, alleging sacrifice on their parts to impose even
greater sacrifices on others’ (2001: 60-1). We all impose such violence on
ourselves and on others as part of our daily routines, hence Baudrillard’s
injunction to refuse power: ‘Power
itself must be abolished –
and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated,
which is at the heart of all traditional struggles – but
also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate’
(2009a: 47).
Yet, even on the theme of systemic violence and elimination, Baudrillard differs sharply
from neo-communist theory, while retaining a position of defiance. Systemic
eliminationism should not be conceived in individual or subjective terms, despite good
points made in recent studies of work and education under neo-liberalism, such as
Cederström and Fleming’s Dead Man Working (2012). At a formal level, neo-liberal
eliminationism does not merely eliminate jobs and also lives (for example in the
recent textile factory fires in Bangladesh), it eliminates meaning, symbolic space
and thought. And it eliminates not by termination but by “ex-termination”.
That is, by transcribing the world into integral reality, the system produces a
single, meaning-depleted, virtual space which encourages participation,
engagement and campaigning, on condition that these are produced as part and
parcel of an integrated void where “[t]he real no longer has any force as sign, and
signs no longer have any force of meaning” (Baudrillard 2001: 4). Most of the
developed world has been conferred the right to blog and to tweet as they please
and they are indebted to the system in a way which far exceeds the paying of a small
tribute or rent to Microsoft or Apple (Zizek 2010: 233). The symbolic debt imposed by
the modern world and its technologies is of a metaphysical or cosmological order.
Through it we take leave of this world Baudrillard suggests, we become
extra-terrestrials. We will recognise no Other, no singularity, no debt to
anyone because we attempt to cancel everything out in an integral,
technological system that has no outsides because it was, in a sense, created
from the outside.
In making this argument, Baudrillard takes up Hannah Arendt’s striking suggestion that modern science and technology,
from Galileo’s invention of the telescope to the launch of the first space satellite in 1957, enacts a “fateful repudiation” of
the Earth and of the terrestrial human condition. Human beings, Arendt argues, seek to eliminate their rootedness to
Earth and their relationship to all other species on Earth (an ambition which also drives the science of genetics). There is
for Arendt: "… a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking),
which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself" (Arendt 1958: 2-3).

Economic alienation, as theorised by Marx, is an echo of a far more

fundamental “world alienation” Arendt suggests. Baudrillard’s reading of Arendt’s
work is surprisingly faithful, though he pushes a little further. What Arendt calls the
invention of an ‘Archimedean point outside the world’, when Galileo’s telescope
hardened philosophical speculations that the Earth might not be the centre of the
universe into demonstrable scientific fact, is, for Baudrillard, the moment the “real
world” began to exist: ‘the moment when human beings, while setting about
analysing and transforming the world, take their leave of it, while at the same time
lending it force of reality … the real world begins, paradoxically, to disappear at
the very same time as it begins to exist’ (Baudrillard 2009b: 11). Human beings do
not, cannot, live in the “real world”, they live elsewhere in a space of symbolic
belonging, and the “real world” can only be posited on condition that human
beings are removed from it, removed to a vantage point from where they can
observe it. Hence the process of measuring, representation and
conceptualisation produces a ‘real world’ subject to scientific knowledge
and, at the same time, hastens the progressive disappearance of the real
world. Concepts “capture” things only as things begin to disappear into concepts:
‘the real vanishes into the concept’ (Baudrillard 2009b: 12) and human being, as
products of nature, are progressively eliminated from the “real” they have fashioned.
Further, Baudrillard suggests, human beings are complicit in this process, they are
unique in inventing a “mode of disappearance”. The alienating effects of modern
science and technology are not only to be deplored, they can also be seen as
a freeing of human intelligence to engage in useless, sovereign and radical
thought (Baudrillard 2001: 119-121).
The disappearance of the human being from nature, and then from “reality” has dual,
irreconcilable consequences. We lead double lives, or we have a life but also mere
sur-vival; a destiny but also a biological, functional, performative existence.
The latter terms appear to be dominant, and to denigrate all else as meaningless or
whimsical. Yet, Baudrillard suggests, life itself, with its destiny, radical otherness,
singularity and duality is actually the more potent. Performative existence, or
integral servitude, can be diverted, annulled, suspended or even sacrificed in sudden,
radically escalated events: from 9/11 to cases such as that of Jean-Claude
Romans who massacred his family, eliminating his simulated sense of self and all
those who, apparently, believed in his simulation (Baudrillard 2001: 67-70). According
to Baudrillard: “[as] we break the symbolic pact and the cycle of metamorphoses, two
kinds of violence ensue: a violence of liberation, and an opposite violence in reaction
against the excess of freedom, safety, protection and integration, and hence against the
loss of any dimension of fate, of destiny – a violence directed against the
emergence of the Ego, the Self, the Subject or the Individual, which takes its
toll in the form of self-hatred and repentance” (2001: 46). Two forms of violence
emerging from the same source: the breaking of symbolic obligation and the expulsion of
otherness, the foundation upon which modern society is based (1993a: 1-5; 131-135).

there is a recrimination DA as the attempt to redeem all history

merely re-sutures the coherence of an empowered humanitarian
cogito bent on humanitarian salvation.
Baudrillard ‘3 /Jean, Fragments, 106-111/

On the necessity of Evil and Hell There is no longer any irrevocable damnation today. There is no longer any hell. We may
concede that we are still within the mongrel concept of Purgatory, but virtually everything falls within the scope of
redemption. It is clearly from such an evangelism that all the manifest, promotional signs of well-being and fulfilment
derive that are offered us by a paradisaical society subject to the Eleventh Commandment ('Be happy and give all the signs
of contentment!') - the one that cancels out all others. But we can also read this
demand for salvation and
universal atonement in the way that not only all current violence and injustices, but also,
retrospectively, all the crimes and contradictory events of the past are now coming in for
condemnation. The French Revolution is put in the dock and slavery is condemned, along with original
sin and battered wives, the ozone layer and sexual harassment. In short, the pre-trial investigation
for the Last Judgement is well under way. We are condemning, then pardoning and
whitewashing, our entire history, exterminating the Evil from even the tiniest crevices
in order to present the image of a radiant universe, ready to pass into the next world. A gigantic
undertaking. One that is inhuman, superhuman, too human? As Stanislaw Lee says, 'We no doubt have too
anthropomorphic a view of man.' And whyfeed this eternal repentance factory, this chain
reaction of bad conscience? Because everything has to be saved. This is what we have come to
today: everything will be redeemed, the entire past will be rehabilitated, polished to the
point of transparency. As for the future, there's even better in store, and even worse: everything will be genetically
modified to achieve biological perfection and the democratic perfection of the species. Salvation, which was defined by the
equivalence of merit and grace, will, once the abscess of evil and hell has been drained, be defined by the equivalence
between genes and performance. Actually, once happiness becomes purely and simply the general equivalent of salvation,
there is no further reason for heaven. No heaven without hell, no light without darkness. No one can be saved if no one is
damned (by definition, but we also know this intuitively: where would the elect find pleasure, except in the contemplation
of God, were it not for the spectacle of the damned and their torment?). And once everyone is virtually saved, no one is.
Salvation no longer has any meaning. This is the fate in store for our democratic enterprise: it is vitiated from the outset by
the neglect of necessary discrimination, by the omission of evil. We therefore need an irrevocable presence of Evil, an Evil
with no possible redemption, a definitive discrimination, a perpetual duality of Heaven and Hell, and even in a way a
predestination to Evil, for no destiny can be without some predestination. There is nothing immoral in this. By the rules of
the game there is nothing immoral in some losing and others winning, nor even in everyone losing. What would be
immoral would be for everyone to win. Now, this is the contemporary ideal of our democracy: that everyone be saved. And
this is possible only at the cost of a perpetual upping of the stakes, of endless inflation and speculation, since ultimately
happiness is not so much an ideal relationship to the world as a rivalry with, and a victorious relation to, others. And this
is good: it means that the hegemony of Good, of the individual state of grace, will always be thwarted by some challenge or
passion, and that any kind of happiness, any kind of ecstatic state, can be sacrificed to something more vital, which may be
of the order of the will, as Schopenhauer has it, or of power, or of the will to power in Nietzsche's conception, but
something which, in any event, is of the order of Evil, of which there is no definition, but which may be summed up as
follows: that which, against any happy intended purpose [destination heureuse}, is predestined to come to pass. Beneath
its euphoric exaltation, this imperative of optimum performance, of ideal achievement, certainly bears evil and misfortune
within it, then, in the form of a profound disavowal of such fine prospects, in the form of a secret, anticipated disillusion
ment. Perhaps even
this is again just a collective form of sacrifice - a human sacrifice, but a
disembodied one, distilled into homeopathic doses. Wherever humans are condemned
to total freedom or to ideal fulfilment, this subversion seeps in - this automatic abreaction to their
own good and their own happiness. When they are ordered to get the maximum efficiency and pleasure out of themselves,
they remain out of sorts and live a split existence. In this strange world, where everything is potentially available (the
body, sex, space, money, pleasure) to be taken or rejected en bloc, everything is there; nothing has disappeared physically,
but everything has disappeared metaphysically. 'As if by magic or enchantment', you might say. Only the fact is, it is more
by disenchantment. Individuals, such as they are, are becoming exactly what they are. With no transcendence and no
image, they pursue their lives like a function that is useless in respect of another world, irrelevant even in their own eyes.
And they do what they do all the better for the fact that there is no other possibility. No instance, no essence, no personal
substance worthy of singular expression. They
have sacrificed their lives to their functional
existences. They coincide with the exact numerical calculation of their lives and their performances. An
existence fulfilled, then, but one at the same time denied, thwarted, disavowed. The
culmination of a whole negative counter-transference. This imperative of optimum performance at the same time comes
into internal contradiction with the democratic moral law which ordains that everyone be perpetually re-set to equality
and everything re-set to zero, on the pretext of democracy and an equal sharing of opportunity and advantage. Given the
prospect of salvation for all and universal redemption, no one has the right to distinguish himself, no one has the right to
captivate [siduire}. For justice to be done, all privilege must disappear; it is for all to rid
themselves voluntarily of any specific qualities, to become once again an elementary particle2 - collective
happiness, based on levelling down and repentance, leading to the coming of the lowest
common denominator and basic banalities. This is like a reverse potlatch, with everyone outdoing
each other in minimalism and victimhood, while fiercely cultivating their tiniest differences and cobbling
together their multiple identities. Repentance and recrimination are all part of the same
movement: recrimination means going back over the crime to correct its course and effects. This is what we are
doing in going back over the whole of our history, over the criminal history of the human
race, to do penance here and now as we await the Last Judgement. For God is dead, but
his judgement remains. Which explains the immense syndrome of resipiscence and (historical) rewriting (with
the future genetic and biological rewriting of the species still to come) that has seized the twentieth century's end; with an
eye, as ever, to deserving salvation and - with the prospect of the final accounting before us - to presenting the image of an
ideal victim. Naturally, we are not speaking of a real trial or of genuine repentance. It is a matter of fully
enjoying the spectacle of one's own misfortune: 'Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of
contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can
experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order' (Walter Benjamin).3 This is but the latest episode
in a heart-rending process of revisionism - running down not just the history of the twentieth century, but all the violent
events of past centuries, to subject them to the new jurisdiction of human rights and crimes against humanity (just as
every action today is subjected to the jurisdiction of sexual, moral or political harassment). As part of the same trend by
which all works of art (including the human genome) are listed as world heritage sites, everything is put on the
list of crimes against humanity. The latest episode, then, of this revisionist madness has been the proposal to
condemn slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. An absurd proposal to rectify the past in
terms of our Western humanitarian consciousness or, in other words, in terms of our own
criteria, in the purest traditions of colonialism. This imperialism of repentance really is
the limit! The idea is, in fact, to enable the 'peoples concerned' to put this tragedy behind them thanks to this official
condemnation and, once their rights have been restored and they have been recognized and
celebrated as victims, to complete their work of mourning and draw a line under this
page of their history in order to become full participants in the course of modernity. It
might be seen, then, as a kind of successful psychoanalysis. Perhaps the Africans will even be able to
translate this moral acknowledgement into damage claims, using the same monstrous measure of
equivalence from which the survivors of the Shoah have been able to benefit. So we shall go on compensating,
atoning and rehabilitating ad infinitum, and we shall merely have added to raw
exploitation the hypocritical absolution of mourning; we shall merely, by compassion,
have transformed evil into misfortune. From the standpoint of our recycled humanism, the
whole of history is pure crime - and, indeed, without all these crimes there quite simply would be no history:
'If we eliminated the evil in man,' wrote Montaigne, 'we would destroy the fundamental
conditions of life.' But, on this basis, Cain killing Abel is already a crime against humanity - and almost a genocide
(there were only two of them!), and isn't original sin already a crime against humanity? All this is absurd, all this
humanitarian, retrospective fakery is absurd. And it all stems from the confusion between evil and
misfortune. Evil is the world as it is and as it has been, and one may look upon this with lucidity. Misfortune is the
world as it never should have been - but in the name of what? - in the name of what should be, in the name of
God or a transcendent ideal, of a Good it would be difficult indeed to define. We may take a criminal view of crime - that is
the tragic view - or we may take a
recriminatory view - and that is the humanitarian view, the
pathos-laden, sentimental view, the view which constantly calls for reparation. We have
here all the ressentiment dredged up from the depths of a genealogy of morals, and
requiring in us reparation for our own lives. This retrospective compassion, this
conversion of evil into misfortune is the twentieth century's most flourishing industry.
First as a mental blackmailing operation, to which we all fall victim, even in our actions, from which
we can now hope only for the lesser evil (keep a low profile, do everything in such a way as anyone else could have done it -
decriminalize your existence!). Thenas a profitable operation with gigantic yields, since
misfortune (in all its forms: from suffering to insecurity, oppression to depression) represents a symbolic
capital, the exploitation of which - even more than the exploitation of happiness - is endlessly
profitable from the economic standpoint. It's a gold-mine, as they say, and there is an inexhaustible source
of ore, because the seam lies within each of us. Misfortune commands the highest prices, whereas evil cannot be traded. It
is impossible to exchange. To
transcribe evil into misfortune and then to transcribe misfortune
into commercial, or spectacular, value - most often with the collusion or assent of the
victim himself. But the victim's collusion with his own misfortune is part of the ironic
essence of Evil. It is what brings it about that no one wants his own good, and nothing is
for the best in the best of all worlds

This also accesses a Ressentiment DA because the reactive

definition of blackness to a merely opposable term destroys the
possibility of freedom and the active creation of value.
Marriot ‘7 /David, associate professor in the History of Consciousness Department at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, Haunted Life: Visual culture and Black
modernity, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, Pg. 233-237/

Fanon borrows this formulation from Nietzsche, in particular The Genealogy of Morals
and The Will to Power. Nietzsche defines "ressentiment" as developing in those "natures
who are denied true reactions, those of deeds."!' Ressentiment psychology – and this
point is crucial both for Nietzsche and for Fanon's appropriation – is distinguished by a
consciousness of loss, by a failure to integrate experiences of powerlessness, leaving this
experience to remain in the memory as a traumatic kernel, leading to an obsession with
past racial injuries that poison the ability of the self to function in the present or project
an active future. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche defines "Slave ethics are what]
begins by saying no 110 to an "outsider," an "other," a non-self, and that no is its creative
act. This reversal of direction of the evaluating look, this invariable looking outward
instead of inward, is a fundamental feature of rancor. Slave ethics requires for its
inception a sphere different from and hostile to its own. Physiologically speaking, it
requires an outside stimulus in order to act at all; all action is reaction" (Nietzsche, The
Birth, 170-171). The slave blames the other, or outsider, for his suffering, makes him or
her the symbol of evil and a phobic object. This response remains reactive. The slave
does not act on the basis of his or her sovereignty, but in opposition to the other's
domination. Nietzsche argues that ressentiment indicates a failure, not so much to
accept responsibility for one's existence (Sartrean "bad faith"), but a failure to affirm life
as a spirit of becoming. Fanon terms it a slavish, reactive attitude toward the future and
the past. In this "pessimism of indignation" one assumes that one can do nothing
because one is wretched, and one blames someone else for one's wretchedness. This is
why, in Wretched of tlte Earth, Fanon argues that the first stages of spontaneous
anticolonial violence are always reactive: "racism, hatred, resentment," "the legitimate
desire for vengeance," cannot sustain a war of liberation. 14 Such reactive moments are
linked to questions of time but in a negative sense, as examples of a reactive affirmation
of history. It is precisely because he recognizes racist historicity in these attitudes that
Fanon's work is taken up with the problem of time and death. If the limit set to black life
is the significance conferred on presence by racism which voids all black life of value as
life, with the result that one cannot live it, racism also robs the black of his or her ability
to live and so to die as a free subject. Spurned by history, the attempts by blacks to
reimmerse themselves in time have resulted in a turn toward allegory and myth. These
attempts are condemned because they restrict the life as lived to one held in abeyance, in
suspension, a life ossified either by its slavish reverence for the precolonial past or by its
abject sacrificing of itself to the future to come, the freedom always to come in eternity.
Both attitudes are positings of finite being that refuse to tarry with death as the true
scandal of black historical experience and so become even less capable of resolving it.
This is not to say that Fanon has lost faith in a redemptive future, or that he wants to
routinize and categorize such temporal ecstasies by representing death as life's
categorical commandment. Rather that, as in the letter to Tayeb, what matters is the life
earned when it plunges into the inexplicable and emerges from it; what matters is how
we, like Orpheus, take up the cunning and creativity of ressentiment as a culture on the
edge of nothingness. Only by negotiating power and violence can we engage and
reconfigure virtue for the modem polity (the "new humanism" that emerges from the
"tabula rasa" opened up by the colonized on the path toward revolution-a possibility
which is neither an end nor a beginning but an endless "tension of opening" between the
twO).IS That is, death as lawless violence is the predicament and possibility of who we
are and might become, here, now, the tenses through which we belong irreducibly to this
time. This is also why Fanon rejects Sartrean, Hegelian, and other forms of determinate
historicism, the logic according to which everything that happens had to happen. Against
dialectical logic – and its view that out of experience, no matter how negative. something
emerges – Fanon posits a black existential time in which what happened happens and
keeps on happening in ways that remain unforeseeable and unknowable but which
nonetheless forces us to be responsible at the level of ethics, politics, and will.
Throughout Fanon's oeuvre. antihistoricism turns on the difficulty of naming and
situating a black orphism beyond identity and alterity, beyond loss and the annihilation
of being. True anticolonial violence, if it is to go beyond such Manichacism, must arrive
at a teleological suspension of the ethical and so go beyond the spurious opposition
between murder and illegitimate right, or murder dressed up as political vengeance.
Manichean violence is ressentiment, for liberation is not a higher ethical law than
murder and can only be justified in the pursuit of freedom, which is incommensurable
with domination but nevertheless implicated in its violence. Hence Fanon is not trying to
ethically justify the violence of anticolonial war (as he is often accused of doing). but
trying to account for the use of violence in the revolutionary pursuit of freedom."
Liberatory violence. in brief. as one possible memory of the future; as one possible
pathway through the unjust violences of the political world. Both the conclusions to
Black Skill, While Masks and Wretched of t/-ie Earlh define that memory as thc horizon
of revolutionary hope and politics. as a rupture of time without end but within time's
workings. POl' this reason, I cannot accept Patrick Taylor's dircrnpuvc opposition
between Black Skill, While Masks as a work that ends with ethics over history. and
Wretched of the Earth as a work that moves from ethics to revolutionary history (Taylor.
Narratives, 74-76). Such opposition misreads the conclusion to Black Skill, White Mllsks.
where Fanon writes, "I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors"
(230). Antillean culture is a slave culture for Fanon, following Nietzsche, because its
ressentiment represents a cultural-historico paralysis which has not yet become creative
and so achieve that active forgetfulness of the past that accompanies successful
repression and defines a noble memory of the will. This peculiar anamnesis, which is the
result of historically distinct configurations of power, dominarion. and race war, reveals
how, for Fanon, the traumas of cultural assimilation for the colonial subject is already
marked by historical forces and decisive events whose trauma cannot simply be dispelled
by the time of analysis or the methods of genealogy. 17 Slave ethics, insofar as it is
reactive and denies responsibility and its ability to act, cannot achieve this cultural-
historico transmutation. Through decolonization and violence the colonized can break
through the impasse of ressentiment and enter into history. The task for the colonized,
Fanon implies, is to risk the orphic "leap" into the "black hole" while also moving Out to
the universal (199). One must move beyond the "absurd drama" of colonialism
dialectically. One must move to ethics from history because ethics is the affirmation of
the radical transformation of time, a decision to change both the meaning of the
deathliness of black life and its sign of ressentiment. In the essay "West Indians and
Africans," Fanon writes, 'The task consists of removing the problem, puuing the
contingent in its place, and leaving the Martinican the choice of supreme values. One
sees everything that could be said by envisaging this situation in accordance with the
Kierkegaardian stages. "18 These stages arc the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious,
Fanon's turn to Kierkegaard is not, as Patrick Taylor presents it, a move from ethics to
history or, more accurately, inner morality to objective or ethical freedom. but a
recognition of how violence and law pervade each other, and of how ethics is an
encounter with the violence of power and its legitimation. The task is to move, not
from values based on race to human values understood as transcending the
old humanisms of Europe, which formed the foundations of colonial racism,
but to address the phantasmatic and racist underpinnings of value as such.
Fanon explicitly mentions Kierkegaard when discussing how law and violence remain
implicated in the movement from ethics to freedom in history. The slave's struggle for
freedom cannot only be defined in ethical terms. On the other hand, it is naive to assume
that the decolonial world will exist beyond law and coercion. In Black Skin, W!tiLe
Masks Fanon writes, "The former slave, who can find in his memory no trace of the
struggle for liberty or of that anguish of liberty of which Kierkegaard speaks, sits
unmoved before the young white man singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence"
(22t). Because the slave has no memory of that "anguish of liberty," the ethical and the
historical condition of freedom remains unavowable. The slave remains a dumb wimess
to his own violated singularity which he can neither comprehend, renounce nor test.
Fanon says that "the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence" (229).
One shows how the ethical is mediated by the promise and actuality of such "invention"
by becoming actively creative at the level of history. Acceptance of this coexistence does
not "eliminate ... the ethical in oneself," but forces one to return to the ethical as the
always potential encounter with the violence of the world as a test of one's faith (Taylor,
Narmtives, 76).

The commodification of difference is a uniquely important locus

for determining the success of radical politics.
hooks 99. bell hooks, famous author, social activist, and black feminist, currently
Distinguished Professor in Residence at Barea College, “Eating the Other” in Black
Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, 1999: 21

This is theory’s acute dilemma: that desire expresses itself most fully where only those
absorbed in its delights and torments are present, that it triumphs most completely over
other human preoccupations in places sheltered from view. Thus it is paradoxically in
hiding that the secrets of desire come to light, that hegemonic impositions and their
reversals, evasions, and subversions are at their most honest and active, and that the
identities and disjunctures between felt passion and established culture place themselves
on most vivid display. – Joan Cocks, The Oppositional Imagination
Within current debates about race and difference, mass culture is the contemporary
location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to
be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference. The
commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a
new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and
feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can
liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture. Cultural taboos around
sexuality and desire are transgressed and made explicit as the media bombards folks
with a message of difference no longer based on the white supremacist assumption
that “blondes have more fun.” The “real fun” is to be had by bringing to the surface all
those “nasty” unconscious fantasies and longings about contact with the Other
embedded in the secret (not so secret) deep structure of white supremacy. In
many ways it is a contemporary revival of interest in the “primitive,” with a distinctly
postmodern slant. As Marianna Torgovnick argues inGone Primitive: Savage Intellects,
Modern Lives:
What is clear now is that the West’s fascination with the primitive has to do with
its own crises in identity, with its own need to clearly demarcate subject and object
even while flirting with other ways of experiencing the universe. Certainly from the
standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the hope is that desires for the
“primitive” or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such
exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo.
Whether or not desire for contact with the Other, for connection rooted in the longing for
pleasure, can act as a critical intervention challenging and subverting racist domination,
inviting and enabling critical resistance, is an unrealized political possibility. Exploring
how desire for the Other is expressed, manipulated, and transformed by encounters with
difference and the different is a critical terrain that can indicate whether these
potentially revolutionary longings are ever fulfilled. Contemporary working-
class British slang playfully converges the discourse of desire, sexuality, and the Other,
evoking the phrase getting “a bit of the Other” as a way to speak about sexual encounter.
Fucking is the Other. Displacing the notion of Otherness from race, ethnicity, skin-color,
the body emerges as a site of contestation where sexuality is the metaphoric Other that
threatens to take over, consume, transform via the experience of pleasure. Desired and
sought after, sexual pleasure alters the consenting subject, deconstructing notions of
will, control, coercive domination. Commodity culture in the United States exploits
conventional thinking about race, gender, and sexual desire by “working” both
the idea that racial difference marks one as Other and the assumption that sexual agency
expressed within the context of racialized sexual encounter is a conversion
experience that alters one’s place and participation in contemporary cultural
politics. The seductive promise of this encounter is that it will counter the
terrorizing force of the status quo that makes identity fixed, static, a
condition of containment and death. And that it is this willingness to transgress
racial boundaries within the realm of the sexual that eradicates the fear that one
must always conform to the norm to remain “safe.” Difference can seduce
precisely because the mainstream imposition of sameness is a provocation
that terrorizes. And as Jean Baudrillard suggests in Fatal Strategies: Provocation –
unlike seduction, which allows things to come into play and appear in
secret, dual and ambiguous – does not leave you free to be; it calls on you to
reveal yourself as you are. It is always blackmail by identity (and thus a
symbolic murder, since you are never that, except precisely by being
condemned to it).

Affirming damage is the new means of overcoming it in the

pursuit of wholeness – this
James 15. Robin James, professor of philosophy at UNC Charlotte, Resilience &
Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, Zero Books, 2015: 88

Resilience must be performed explicitly, legibly, and spectacularly.

Overcoming is necessary, but insufficient; to count and function as resilience, this
overcoming must be accomplished in a visible or otherwise legible and
consumable manner. Overcoming is a type of "affective labor" which, as Steven
Shaviro puts it, "is productive only to the extent that it is a public performance, it
cannot unfold in the hidden depths; it must be visible and audible" (PCA
49n33). In order to tune into feminine resilience and feed it back into its power supply,
MRWaSP has to perceive it as such.
"Look, I Overcame!" is the resilient subject's maxim or mantra. Gender and
race have always been "visible identities," to use philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff's
term, identities strongly tied to one's outward physical appearance. However,
gendered/ racialized resilience isn't visible in the same way that conventional
gender and racial identities are visible. To clarify these differences, it's helpful to
think of resilience in terms of a "Look, I Overcame!" imperative. "Look, I
Overcame!" is easy to juxtapose to Frantz Fanon's "Look, a Negro!", which is
the touchstone for his analysis of gendered racialization in "The Fact of Blackness." In
both cases, looking is a means of crafting race/gender identities and distributing white
patriarchal privilege. But, in the same way that resilience discourse "upgrades"
traditional methods for crafting identities and distributing privilege, the
"looking" in "Look, I Overcame!" is an upgrade on the "looking" in "Look, a
Negro!"
According to Fanon, the exclamation "Look, a Negro!" racializes him as a black man. To
be "a Negro" is to be objectified by the white supremacist gaze. This gaze
fixes him as an object, rather than an ambiguous transcendence (which is a more
nuanced way of describing the existentialist concept of subjectivity). "The black man," as
Fanon argues, "has no ontological resistance for the white man" (BSWM 110)
because, as an object and not a mutually-recognized subject, he cannot return the white
man's gaze ("The Look" that is so important to Sartre's theory of subjectivity in Being &
Nothingness). The LIO narrative differs from Fanon's account in the same way it differs
from Iris Young's account of feminine body comportment: in resilience discourse,
objectification isn't an end but a means. Any impediment posed by the
damage wrought by the white/male gaze is a necessary prerequisite for
subjectivity, agency, and mutual recognition. In other words, being looked at
isn't an impediment, but a resource.
Resilience discourse turns objectification (being looked at) into a means of
subjectification (overcoming). It also makes looking even more efficient and
profitable than simple objectification could ever be. Recognizing and
affirming the affective labor of the resilient performer, the spectator feeds the
performer's individual overcoming into a second-order therapeutic
narrative: our approbation of her overcoming is evidence of our own overcoming of our
past prejudices. This spectator wants to be seen by a wider audience as someone
who answers the resilient feminine subject's hail, "Look, I Overcame!". Just
as individual feminine subjects use their resilience as proof of their own goodness,
MRWaSP uses the resilience of its "good girls" as proof that they're the "good
guys"—that its social and ethical practices are truly just, and that we really mean it this
time when we say everyone is equal. For example, the "resilience" of "our" women is
often contrasted with the supposed "fragility" of Third-World women of color. Or, in
domestic US race-gender politics, the resilience of some African-American women (their
bootstraps-style class ascendance) is contrasted to the continued fragility of other
African-American women, and thus used to reinforce class distinctions among blacks.
There are a million different versions of this general story: "our" women are already
liberated—they saved themselves—but, to riff on Gayatri Spivak, "brown women need
saving from brown men." Most mainstream conversations about Third-World women
are versions of this story: discussions of "Muslim" veiling, female circumcision,
sweatshops, poverty, "development," they're all white-saviorist narratives meant to
display MRWaSP's own resilience. Look, I Overcame!" upgrades "Look, a Negro!"
by (a) recycling objectification into overcoming .and (b) compounding
looking, so that one can profit from others' resilience, treating their
overcoming as one's own overcoming. This upgrade in white supremacist
patriarchy requires a concomitant upgrade in "looking." This shift in looking
practices parallels developments in film and media aesthetics. As Steven Shaviro has
argued, the values, techniques, and compositional strategies most common in
contemporary mainstream Western cinema—like Michael Bay's Transformers—are
significantly different than the ones used in modernist and post-modernist cinema, and
that these differences in media production correlate to broader shifts in the
means of capitalist and ideological production. Neoliberalism's aesthetic is,
he argues, "post-cinematic." This post-cinematic aesthetic applies not just to film and
media, but to resilience discourse. Its performance practices and looking relations
configured by the "Look, I Overcame!" imperative, resilience is, in a way, another type
of post-cinematic medium. In the next section I use Shaviro's theory of post-
cinematic media to identify some specific ways in which traditional patriarchal tools are
updated to work compatibly with MRWaSP resilience discourse. The looking in the
"Look, I Overcame!" narrative is not the same kind of looking described by concepts like
"the male gaze" or "controlling images." This looking is a type of deregulated
MRWaSP visualization.

The Will to rigorous justification and testing acts as a liberal

safety valve that maintains the hegemony of symbolic values –
no impact to debate other than total social consensuys and
violence.
Galloway 07. Alexander Galloway, professor of media, culture, and communication
at New York University, Radical Illusion (A Game Against), Games and Culture 2:4, pg.
385

There exist causes from whose nature some effect does not follow. There exist causes that
preempt their own effects from coming to be. In an early text from 1969, “Play and the
Police,” Baudrillard (2001a) speaks of a “principle of separation.” This principle is
how he rethinks repression not through the notions of negation, aggression, or vital
forces being blocked but through the concepts of ambiance, integration, and
participation. The “unity of desire” is broken, he suggests, into a never ending
series of private-sphere negotiations. The question becomes Am I liberated? not Are
we? “The separative cause, which bursts through the unity of desire and establishes
human activity across several zones . . . is most effective at neutralizing energies”
(Baudrillard, 2001a, pp. 18-19). Thus, in what Deleuze would describe later as the
distinction between discipline and control, Baudrillard here posits a model of
repression through expression, a stunting of the drives through the very
facilitation of those drives into new control spaces. A new ambiance
permeates the social field. The masses are not repressed, no never, they are
allowed to dream! With reference to Marcuse’s concept of “repressive desublimation,”
Baudrillard (2001a) calls this “the repression of desire . . . through the
emancipation of needs” (p. 20).
Again, “they did it, but we wanted it.” The separative cause reveals how ideology
and reification operate under neoliberalism. Summarize it like this:
Exploitation is material, liberation is semiotic. The material is the realm of
political failure; the social is the realm of utopian compromise. In Baudrillard, the
principle of separation is the principle by which the two are segregated and divided into
two distinct domains, the one to play the fool for the other.
The separative cause has two steps. To achieve some semblance of pedagogical
coherence, I will telescope them into a cause-and-effect narrative, but to be precise, Step
1 and Step 2 both happened at the same time.
In Step 1, the given phenomenon, which exists primordially as an undivided prob-
lematic containing both progressive and reactionary political impulses, is first separated
into (a) a material modality and (b) a social modality. For example, with global warming,
there is the material modality of carbon dioxide emissions, automobiles and
roads, the oil industry, and so on, while at the same time there is the symbolic social
modality of desiring clean air, “thinking green,” and the so-called awareness
campaigns.
The principle of separation occasions the phenomenon first through an alliance
formed between the progressive political impulse and the domain of the
social or public sphere. A progressive moral horizon of significant magnitude
invests itself in the social sphere. This moral plane develops its own independent
logic and will likely experience a flourishing cycle of achievement and resolution
but always within the “symbolic” realm of the social or public sphere. From
time to time, small material changes may be incorporated into the logic of
moral resolution but only those minor enough not to impinge upon the
superiority of the social.
In Step 2, the progressive political impulse is negated and as negation finds
its home in the domain of the material. Thus a reactionary political project
blossoms within the realm of the physical world. This project realizes its ends,
developing the necessary mechanisms and infrastructures required to
continue and grow.
In Baudrillard, the separative cause is this overall structure. What the separative
cause occasions, or “makes present,” is the ability for both gratuitous exploitation
and a heightened moral instinct to coexist within the same universe. It is
perhaps seen best in Baudrillard’s controversial critique of sexual liberation in Part 1 of
Seduction. A structure of both liberation and deferral, of dazzlement and insight, of both
ignorance and realization, of both expression and silence—all sides unify together
but only at the cost of a complete and incontrovertible segregation between
the symbolic and the material. The progressive stance of the one allows for
the reactionary stance of the other. The end result is the current state of
affairs: an oil company that is nevertheless “green,” a world bathed in blood
but devoted to peace, a global consumer product that is still tagged “fair trade.”
The separative cause occasions. But it occasions a “presence,” a presence that must be
crossed out or held in suspension with quotation marks. The presence occasioned by the
separative cause is in fact an abatement of presence, a lessening of being.
What it makes present is a structure of suspension. A “subject” is the name given to those
entities able to flourish within such a structure of suspension.
As Baudrillard was able to see, most all phenomena in contemporary life are
occasioned through this “separative cause” or principle of separation. The
environmental movement is a perfect example. In today’s world, it is structurally
impractical if not outright impossible to be an environmentalist in any true
sense. Imagine: An activist drives to a rally against global warming. The contradiction is
clear. His actual spiritual liberation is undercut by the tailpipe fumes of his own
expression. His intentions are good, but there is a physical base—that
depraved automobile contraption—that creates conditions of impossibility
that are symbolically if not practically insurmountable. Of course, many today
refuse to participate in the global system of environmental exploita- tion by
casting off all worldly possessions. But this comes at the cost of complete
withdrawal from the world system, a price too high to pay for most. Like the computer
at the heart of today’s planetary organization,

the costs are thus binary in that they offer an all-or-nothing option, but only
an “option” insofar as the nothing is reified into material reality and the all
spins on into oblivion. This is how the separative cause operates.
Other examples include the curious and no doubt tense axis of inaction forged between
the United Nations and American foreign policy after the new millennium on issues such
as Darfur peace: the symbolic assertion on the side of the United States that, in
no uncertain terms, “this is genocide,” flanked only by a negation of that same
claim in abandonment and blindness within the realm of real material
commitment. Or consider the structural adjustment agreements of the International
Monetary Fund, which travel on wings of hope to the so-called backward economies of
the globe but carry enclosed the harshest austerity measures, leaving the infected
country with a curse of legalized deterritorialization and fiscal and cultural
subjugation for decades to come. Exploitation is material, liberation is
semiotic. This is how the separative cause occasions, or brings to presence, certain
phenomena in today’s global kingdom. The democratization of Iraq is
realizable only through subjugation; clean air is realizable only through a
futures market in “pollution credits”—and around and around. Might this
separative cause be also known by a synonym twin, “civilization”? In
Baudrillard, the term was simply the real. It occasions real human worlds by
allowing them to come to be.
NEG
Link
 Control
Their demand for a uniform rationality inculcates a violent
technocratic eradication of irrationality while only
recapitulating a tragic ontology of ressentiment.
Ossewaarde 10. Marinus Ossewaarde, Associate Professor in Sociology at the
University of Twente, “The Tragic Turn in The Re-Imagination of Publics: Resentment
and Ressentiment,” Animus 14, 2010
tragedy transforms this unbearable absurdity of life
For Nietzsche, the Heraclitean vision sees the truth about reality while subsequently

into an aesthetic public without masking the horror itself The Socratic dialectic and its
, .

Apollonian publics intellectually involve people who are incited to search for the good in
the realm of ideas in spite of the phenomenological flux and absurdity of things.
,

Dionysian publics do not try to check the becoming of reality but incite the , instead,

participants to live it as art , by making them become part of the story itself. In Socratic dialogues, disputing friends critically question all established orders in their search for the rational or good

The urge to control drives bureaucracies which

order. Both the Dionysian and the Apollonian publics can disturb an established order and institutions. , , in

have to destroy all forms of publics that have the potential to upset order
order to effectively fix one type of reality, . In

bureaucracies impose an enlightenment model of rational order devoid of

modern societies,

mythical content and uncertain self-knowledge upon a reality that is thereby made ,

fully intelligible controllable and correctible , . Nietzsche considers the European enlightenment as the modern successor to the Socratic myth-annihilation, which

The enlightenment movement’s confidence in the capacity of reason and

characterizes the Apollonian publics.8

its belief in the rational order of reality are Socratic in origin . However, Nietzsche suggests that the enlightenment goes steps further than
Socrates in its annihilation of myth. Although Socrates ridicules and destroys the legendary tales of the tragedians, his dialogues are premised upon the myth of the Delphic oracle (which revealed that there was no one wiser than Socrates). And,
although Socrates maintains that reason rather than myth is the foundation of European culture, reason, the nous, is itself a mythical entity (Nietzsche 2000: 72): the ‘voice of reason’ is the ‘divine voice’ of Socrates’ daimonion, wh ich makes itself

the enlightenment
be heard in the dialogues (Nietzsche 2000: 75). In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, inspired by Nietzsche (c.f., Wellmer 1991: 3), maintain that

movement postulates a vision of reason that is devoid of mythical content Enlightenment .

reason seeks to make people think for themselves and to liberate them from their
, in its origin,

fears and superstitions but in the modernization process it becomes an instrument that
, , ,

serves bureaucratic objectives , such as enforcing laws effectively, fixing a machine, or making a business run more efficiently.9 Horkheimer and Adorno (2007: 57) emphasize

this pathology of enlightenment reason turns into a bureaucratic

that Nietzsche, like Hegel before him, had grasped that

instrument Enlightenment reason provides the

. The reduction of the Socratic nous to an instrumental reason has far-reached political and cultural implications.

static concepts to construct bureaucratic limits and

, mummified categories, classifications and catalogues that are required

boundaries, which in turn rationally order reality Dialogical or democratic (Honneth 2007: 70).

practices have no place in such a technical organization of reality . Bureaucracies, whose function is to
implement the enlightenment or any other theoretical model of reality, have no need for the Socratic publics and consider dialogues and the need for intellectual justification rather troublesome and disorderly (Gouldner 1973: 76; Gardiner 2004:

35). The
participants of Socratic dialogues are turned into bureaucratic subjects
(potential) , like workers,

into ‘spectators without influence’ whose lives are governed by the

consumers and clients, that is, ,

enlightened power elites and civil servants The identity of bureaucratic subjects is (Honneth 2007: 33).

determined by typically large and powerful organizations, such as government agencies

and enterprises (Mills 1956: 355). The Enlightenment movement is, in Nietzsche’s words (2000: 85), ‘the most illustrious opponent of the tragic world-view.’ Horkheimer and Adorno stress that the enlightenment
movement, or perhaps more exactly, some kind of process deriving from it, eventually comes to substitute the plebeian entertainment of mass culture industries for the tragic art of the aesthetic publics. According to Nietzsche,

bureaucratic subjects who live in a disenchanted world in which myths are annihilated
by Apollonian reason cannot bear the horrific and absurd truth about their own
existence The subjects of the culture industries no longer have the opportunity to
.10

participate in enchanting tragic myths that cultivate powerful passions and the Dionysian
will to live , which characterize Nietzsche’s ‘good European’. The entertainment provided by manufactured images and commodity forms, like music productions, films, television programmes and glossy magazines, ensures

Being thoroughly rationalized such subjects

that the absurdity of life and the Dionysian abyss are forgotten (Horkheimer and Adorno 2007: 159).11 ,

cannot develop the mythical imagination or a certain sensitivity that would have allowed
them to ‘live the tragedy’ in and through the aesthetic publics subjects cannot . In a bureaucratic culture,

experience feel or live the tragic fate of the Dionysian hero because
, shielded , , as Nietzsche (2000: 45) insists,
by bureaucracies they are not ‘equipped for the most delicate and intense suffering.’
,

Bureaucracies expect and demand passive obedience from their subjects, which makes cultural movement nearly impossible. Such passive spectators or

governed to take refuge in comfortable

so-called ‘consumers of art’ (Shrum 1991: 349; 371), are, Horkheimer and Adorno (2007: 155; 166) point out, deluded en masse, ,

boring and mindless bureaucratic forms of entertainment Culture industries provide .

ready-made experiences to a passive public that is willing to buy them to fill the
emptiness of a disenchanted world and appease the cowardly fear of living in the flux ,

The experience of the flux can also be

which they explicitly experience in temporary relationships and the continuous flow of new products and changed consumption patterns.

more implicit or unconscious, resulting in a sort of malaise, feeling of insecurity or

restlessness the escape from life into a manufactured dream-world of cultural
. However,

productions does not really quench the thirst which allows the , as the Socratic dialogue and the Dionysian festival do, , therefore,

culture industry to carry on with its provision of manufactured dream-worlds, to fill an

emptiness that never decreases .
 Enjoyment
In post-9/11 America, digital war games have increasingly come to provide a
space of cyber-deterrence where Americans are able to ‘play through’ the
anxieties that attend uncertain times and new configurations of power. We
must focus on the contribution that digital war games make to a culture of
perpetual war and in the manufacture of consent for US domestic and foreign
policy, and attempt to destroy the modern version of the noble war fantasy.

Power 07, Marcus. Marcus Power is a professor at the Department of Geography at University
of Durkham, UK. He has written articles such as: The Dissemination of Development, ‘The Tears
of Portugal’: Empire, Identity, ‘Race’, and Destiny in Portuguese Geopolitical Narratives, etc; //
“Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 Cyber-Detterence” pg 271-273

MANY OF THE NEWS REPORTS compiled by embedded reporters during Gulf War II contain
stories of US troops referring to their experience of combat as ‘like a video game’. In the
quotation above, from a story written in November 2004 by a Daily Telegraph journalist Special
Issue on Securitization, Militarization and Visual Culture in the Worlds of Post-9/11 © 2007
PRIO, www.prio.no SAGE Publications, http://sdi.sagepub.com Vol. 38(2): 271–288, DOI:
10.1177/0967010607078552 Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV
on September 19, 2016 watching the destruction of Fallujah, Lieutenant Farley bemoans the fact
that the Marines didn’t get to do ‘the fun stuff’, while Sergeant Anyett of the US Army Phantoms
sounds as if he has just stepped out of a game: ‘I got my kills, I’m coming down’. The war-as-
game motif is obviously a very old idea (Stahl, 2004), but what is new are the digital games1
themselves, the ‘virtual experiences’ of distant combat theatres they promise and the kind of
stories they tell about the USA, its technologies and its ‘others’. Games are now beginning to
filter down through the ranks to the lowest levels of infantry soldiers, while the broader vision
that is being contemplated for digital games at the highest levels of the Pentagon is also
unprecedented (Harmon, 2003). Today, a walk through the aisles of any digital games retailer
‘can seem like a visit to your local military academy’ (Kane, 2005: 1), offering a range of ‘grittily
realistic’ games that seek to represent and celebrate the arts of war. A big part of the appeal of such
games is that most seek to ‘proudly transport the gamer into immersive, gut wrenching virtual
battlefields. They persuade the gamer that, in an echo of WWII era journalism, “you are there” – on the
beaches of Normandy, in the jungles of Vietnam, in modern military hotspots [like the deserts of Iraq]’
(Cowlishaw, 2005: 1). Such games, in a fashion similar to wartime newsreels from World War II, provide a
real world hook by offering privileged glimpses from the front lines, and some of the backgrounds in these
games are lifted directly from video footage of landscapes in which the US military has recently been
engaged (Halter, 2002, 2006). Since 9/11, a critical analysis of virtual war has become increasingly
important given that many video war-game releases have exhibited a growing desire to mirror
‘real’ world conflict scenarios, particularly the recent US military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Thus, game developers often turn to the national enemy de jour for ideas. Almost as soon as a new
‘rogue’ nation has been identified in Washington, a combat game appears ‘to exploit the thrilling
potential of slaughtering its people’ (Deck, 2004: 12). Kuma: War, for example, a tactical first- and third-
person episodic shooter game, comes as a set of online PC ‘missions’ including ‘Fallujah: Operation al Fajr’
and ‘Uday and Qusay’s Last Stand’. Kuma Reality Games, set up in 2004 by a group of retired military
officers, currently offers 74 missions through a subscription website and is intended as a reporting as well
as a recruiting tool. The Kumawar.com website also allows for messages of support to be left for
the troops in Iraq, and even invites serving US troops to submit their own accounts of gunfights,
ambushes and rescues as the basis of future missions. Although such games are often a
valorization of past US military conflicts, their plots have sometimes come to parallel
contemporary American geopolitics in ‘rather disturbing ways’ (Allen, 2005: 2). The games in
question involve simulations of guns, explosions, enemies and death. Virtual recruits do battle
with ‘enemies’ from the past or present including communists, terrorists and other assorted
‘evil-doers’. Yet, these (racialized) enemies are portrayed as groups that exist in the ‘real’ world,
with the Iraqi army in particular very easy to find here, resurrecting the idea of the Iraqi enemy
in the popular imagination of American gamers. As such, American civilians can enlist and fight
in a ‘virtual Iraq’ (Stahl, 2004) without ever leaving the couch. There is a metaphor peculiar to
this new crop of war-themed video games then: ‘that to play is to be a virtual recruit in a war
consumed’ (Stahl, 2004: 151). Digital games are worthy of critical attention for a number of
reasons, not the least of which is their growing popularity and commercial lucrativeness (Berger,
2002). It has been estimated that 75% of US households play digital games, with 228 million
digital games sold in 2005 alone, effectively two games for every household (Elkus, 2006).
Popular console releases often rival Hollywood films in terms of earnings. Globally, the games
industry was said to be worth $23.2 billion in 2003, which is predicted to rise to $33.4 billion in
2008 (DFC Intelligence, 2004). Aside from their profitability, digital war games represent a
powerful medium to explore the ways in which visual culture can be used to elicit consent for
the US military and to enable the expression of militaristic fantasies. Many games like America’s
Army (the official US Army game) exist as virtual advertisements for the present and future glory
of the US Armed Forces in ways that Frank Kapra, director of the Why We Fight series of seven
World War II propaganda films funded by the War Department, could only have dreamt of. As
Barron & Huntemann (2004: 3) have argued, current games focused on militarism and warfare
are similar to the Why We Fight films ‘except they’ve morphed into “how we fight” video games
which takes away from a lot of the other “why” questions, and all the moral questions that are
connected to that’. Such games, besides primarily serving as an increasingly effective military
recruitment tool and as the ‘next generation of wartime propaganda’ (Halter, 2002: 1) are a kind of ‘shock
and awe’2 display of what the US military is capable of ‘without the consequences of context’ (Barron & Huntemann, 2004: 2). This
article seeks to examine the increasingly close relationship between the US military and the video-game industry, and the
contribution this has made to the militarization of US popular culture. In particular, the article explores the geographies of militarism
that digital war games produce and the roles they play in the ‘shaping of civilian space and social relations by military objectives,
rationales and structures’ (Woodward, 2005: 4). Tracing the connections and networks produced by the entanglement between the
military and the digital-games industry enables us to pay more attention to ‘the small, the unremarkable, the commonplace things
that military activities and militarism make and do’ (Woodward, 2005: 14), and also offers a different point of entry into thinking
about popular, everyday understandings of geopolitics. Also of concern here are the cultural geographies of military representation
constructed in digital games and the ways in which those games legitimize and justify US military interventions or are implicated in
the production of geopolitical discourses of war and security. My aim is to critically interrogate the ‘visual economy’ (Poole, 1997) of
post-9/11 digital war-game releases and the ways in which such games are imbricated in wider military networks of materials,
technologies, markets and geopolitical contexts. Crandall argues that militarization, with its own logic of ordering the world, runs on
a productive economy of fear (the fear of an omnipresent enemy who could be anywhere), but also on an economy of desire, often
oriented around consumer products like video games: [Militarization is]
tied into the media and entertainment
industries and very much a player in the youth-driven field of video game culture. It’s a powerful
rhetorical frame and a machine of territorialisation, indoctrination and recruitment (Crandall,
2005: 20). In this sense, it is important to bring militaristic issues down to the ‘homefront’,
dealing with ‘ground level practices of subjectivisation’ (Crandall, 2005: 18). Digital war games
invite Americans to ‘participate in a militarism of consumption and pleasure’ (Stahl, 2004: 21),
and they do so by presenting a clean, sanitized and enjoyable version of war for popular
consumption, obscuring the ‘realities’, contexts and consequences of war.

We must reject Uncle Sam’s desire for us to play war.

Power 07, Marcus. Marcus Power is a professor at the Department of Geography at University
of Durkham, UK. He has written articles such as: The Dissemination of Development, ‘The Tears
of Portugal’: Empire, Identity, ‘Race’, and Destiny in Portuguese Geopolitical Narratives, etc; //
“Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 Cyber-Detterence” pg 278-280

There has never been, in history, a crop of young soldiers who were so pre-stuffed on so much
realistic-but-not-real war-like-but-not-war material (Seal, 2003: 2). In charting the geographies
of militarism that video war games produce, it is useful to consider the cultural geographies of
military representation constructed in video war games and the ways in which they legitimize
and justify US military interventions. Arguably, such interventions have become part of a
‘cyclical economic machine’ (Deck, 2004: 1) ‘greased’ by media products (including digital
games) that endorse any war that can be made to appear necessary. Digital war games put a
friendly, hospitable face on the military, manufacturing consent and complicity among
consumers for military programmes, missions and weapons. By ‘mystifying the relationships
between consumers, institutions and economies of violence’ (Hall, 2006: 13), representations of
war and combat in digital games help to suture consumerism to citizenship ‘within a militarised
ideology’ (Hall, 2000: 1). For some critics, this helps to ‘perform, practice and consume a
militarised, technologically based form of citizenship training’ (Hall, 2000: 3). Further,
warthemed video games offer a discourse that ‘displaces the citizen with the virtual soldier’
(Stahl, 2004: 131), a virtual displacement that (re)presents a 278 Security Dialogue vol. 38, no. 2,
June 2007 Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19,
2016 version of war (sanitized and enjoyable) that is increasingly designed for easy, popular
consumption. So how, then, can video games, as powerful rhetorical frames, be considered part
of a ‘machine of territorialisation, indoctrination and recruitment’ (Crandall, 2005: 20)? The
official US Army game America’s Army (released on 4 July 2002) is not directly concerned with
mirroring ‘real’ world conflict scenarios in Afghanistan and Iraq but has been deployed by the
Army as a recruiting tool, one that has had more success than any US military-recruitment
campaign since the Uncle Sam I Want You ads in World War II (Cowlishaw, 2005), with nearly
eight million people registered to play worldwide as of January 2007 (America’s Army, 2007).
The use of such games as recruitment tools suggests that video gamers’ virtual prowess and
enjoyment translate directly into real-world Army suitability and success (Cowlishaw, 2005). The
game was first developed at the Naval Postgraduate School in California through an initiative
called Operation Star Fighter (after the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter, a film about a teenager
who is recruited by aliens to fight in an intergalactic war after getting a perfect score on his local
arcade machine). The US military has invested millions of tax dollars in developing the game,
with a view to enabling players to virtually explore and ‘experience’ the Army from basic training
through to deployment and live situations that might be found in the so-called Global War on
Terrorism (see Figure 1), creating ‘surrogate soldiers’ along the way (Schiesel, 2005: 3).
Developed by the US Army and seeking to model US Army experiences, the game can claim a
‘real material referent’ (Galloway, 2006: 79) in ways that other war games like Conflict: Desert
Storm or SOCOM: US Navy Seals simply cannot. This remains however a ‘simulation of a
simulation of a soldier’s life’ (Kumar, 2004: 6). When first released for the PC, the game
originally featured two parts, one a training simulator called Soldiers (which includes boot camp)
and another more traditional FPS called Operations, in which players work together in teams to
carry out missions. In late 2003, a new version – Special Forces – was released, which had more
than 200,000 people playing in the first week (Stahl, 2004: 157). In 2005, a console version of
the game (subtitled Rise of a Soldier) was released for the Playstation 2. The PC game can be
legally downloaded by gamers as young as 13 and is often bundled together with gaming
magazines and given away at stock-car racing (NASCAR) events and state fairs. Marcus Power
Video War Games and Post-9/11 Cyber-Deterrence 279 4 This is not the only military-funded
game available to the public. PC games like Real War and Real War: Rogue States are modified
versions of the Joint Force Employment, a trainer developed by the DoD that pits US forces
against a global terrorist threat (Halter, 2002). Joint Force Employment was produced for the
Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1997 by the defence contractor OC Inc., and the game’s commercial
release was prophetically set for 11 September 2001, under the name Real War, but was
delayed until 27 September 2001 (Stahl, 2004). Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at
PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 The game lets gamers play at soldiers
online, banding together with other Internet warriors to battle national enemies, and on a
typical day more than 30,000 people log on to the Army’s official servers (which originally cost
just under $1 million a year to maintain), while the game has proven so popular that the Army’s
civilian developers now release updates every few months (Schiesel, 2005). The Army even
sends soldiers and returning veterans to advise civilian game developers, but the developers
also get to play at war games for a few days each year in what the Army calls ‘green up’ events
held in Wyoming. In March 2004, a huge America’s Army gaming tournament was held, offering
hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money and computer equipment (Cowlishaw, 2005).
Game tournaments are also held at Army recruiting offices and high schools (Stahl, 2004). The
latest version of America’s Army is based on actual soldiers’ experiences (including brief in-game
biographies), and players can now take control of one of nine ‘real’ US soldiers who have been
actively engaged in recent US interventions and whose likenesses appear in the game (with
these hypermasculine soldiers also immortalized as accompanying action figures) (Silverstein,
2006). Some missions involve defending or capturing prisoners 280 Security Dialogue vol. 38, no.
2, June 2007 Figure 1. A selection of screenshots from the game America's Army. Army Game
Project. Used by permission. Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV
on September 19, 2016 of war, but players can also do battle with ‘terrorists’. One mission in
the initial release of Operations was modelled after a raid conducted in Afghanistan (Kennedy,
2002), and the games are scattered with references to the Afghan landscape. One ‘insurgent
camp’ is described as ‘high desert rolling with sand dunes and Wadis’ (where Wadi is Arabic for
‘valley’). While the subject the gamer is mapped onto is always American, there is a refusal to
name the enemy here, constructing a space where the ‘enemy is irrelevant and technology
provides a virtual cure for a global insecurity’ (Kumar, 2004: 14). The equipment and uniforms in
the game are designed with maximum ‘realism’ in mind, but death and injury are treated
differently. As Schiesel (2005: 3) points out, ‘limbs are never blown off. Instead, wounds are
marked by a puff of red smoke. Injured foes never writhe and scream in agony’. The deliberate
censorship of explicit violence in this game further mimics the US government and media
censorship of images of dead US soldiers and coffins – in the game bodies vanish after being
killed (Allen, 2005). No matter how many waves of enemy troops come at the virtual solider,
body counts do not pile up visually (Hall, 2000). The game as such is a ‘bold and brutal
reinforcement of current American society and its positive moral perspective on military
intervention, be it the war on terrorism or “shock and awe” in Iraq’ (Galloway, 2006: 79). The official
site for the game consistently denies that players can learn the basics of using weapons from gameplay. Rhetorically, then, the
military has distanced itself from the violence of other video games, reinforcing a sense that it
has a legitimate monopoly on violence (Allen, 2005). The games are, however, ‘seductive’ to
potential recruits and may suppress an aversion to killing. According to Anthony Swofford’s
(2003) best-selling memoir, Jarhead, soldiers in the Gulf War used scenes from antiwar movie
Apocalypse Now to hype themselves up for combat. Perhaps in Gulf War II, video games like
America’s Army offered an alternative means of pre-stuffing the troops and getting them
‘pumped’ for combat? Gulf War I veteran Mary Spio (now the editor of the US popular culture
magazine One2one) has argued that ‘what we saw in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was the tip
of the iceberg – it was a glimpse of a generation of war gamers coming of age. Video games that
allow players to kill real human beings are desensitizing generations of American society’ (cited
in Elkus, 2006: 3). There is an important body of literature on the desensitization of killers in
20th-century warfare (Bourke, 1999; Marshall, 2000), but a focus on video war games might
help to extend these debates in new directions. Seal (2003) is also concerned with the impacts
on soldiers who have trained extensively on approved military simulations (where they are
encouraged to ‘shoot at anything that moves’) and with the impact of exposure to such games
on men enlisted in ‘missions involving real weapons and real lives’ (Seal, 2003: 1). As Seal puts it,
‘once in the field . . . these soldiers may become Marcus Power Video War Games and Post-9/11
Cyber-Deterrence 281 Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on
September 19, 2016 “charged” in the same way stimulated by the games and with lethal results,
thanks to the “disconnect” between 3-D flesh and blood and 2-D pixel people’. Within the ‘hyper
adrenalised disconnect’ that US soldiers exhibit, any consideration of consequences is lost. Seal
(2003: 2) recommends the use of pre-discharge support groups for troops, facilitated by older
vets from Vietnam or Gulf War I as a way of preventing ‘smouldering PTSD [Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder] from gaining an upper hand’. In 2005, the ICT initiated just such a project
together with the Office of Naval Research (ONR): an initiative that is creating an immersive
virtual reality system for the treatment of Iraq war veterans diagnosed with combatrelated
PTSD. The treatment approach involves recycling and adding to the virtual assets that were
initially built into the combat tactical simulation incorporated in the commercially available Xbox
game Full Spectrum Warrior (Rizzo & Pair, 2006). The version created is designed to resemble a
Middle Eastern city and outlying village and desert spaces, and it offers the clinician the chance
to monitor the patient’s behaviour and customize the therapy experience. Full Spectrum
Warrior is another game originally produced in 1999 by the US Army in two versions, one for
military training and one for commercial release. The Army intended Full Spectrum Warrior to
help reinforce the values troops learned about in their training and offered a realtime strategy
game that combined a highly rendered street-level perspective with proven Army tactics in the
art of urban warfare or MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) (Loftus, 2004). The game
was set in the fictional country of ‘Zekistan’,5 but for all the dusty alleyways, mosques and Arab
villages the setting could easily be Iraq or Afghanistan. OXM gaming magazine referred to Full
Spectrum Warrior as the ‘game that captured Saddam’, in that the game was made to train the
US army infantry and ‘they were the ones who dug Saddam out of his hole’ (cited in Cowlishaw,
2005: 5).With the initiation of the ICT ‘virtual therapy’ project, then, we seem to have come full
circle. Not only are video games now used to recruit for the US armed forces and to train and
prepare troops after they have enlisted, but they are also played by US troops during a tour of
duty and are even now being used to treat the consequences of combat engagement in the
form of PTSD ‘virtual therapy’. It is important, however, to remember that games are often used in ways not intended or anticipated by their
developers and military sponsors. Game data, rules and codes can be modified to produce different narratives, characters and outcomes. In May 2006,

DoD public diplomacy specialist Dan Devlin (speaking to the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence) warned the US Congress that the makers of combat video games have unwit282
Security Dialogue vol. 38, no. 2, June 2007 5 Most combat video games, as Deck (2004) reminds
us, do not portray the streets of US towns and cities but rather places that look like the most
recent war zones visited by US troops. Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA
STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 tingly become part of a global propaganda campaign by
Islamic militants to exhort Muslim youths to take up arms against the USA (Morgan, 2006). The
DoD warned that ‘tech-savvy’ militants from al-Qaeda and other groups have modified video
war games so that US troops play the role of bad guys in running gunfights against heavily
armed Islamic radical heroes, and that children as young as seven can play at being troop-killing
urban guerrillas if they register with the site’s sponsors. One of the most popular games, Devlin
said, was Battlefield 2, which had been the subject of considerable software modification. The
game’s publishers, Electronic Arts, claimed they had no control of the many game modifications
that existed around the world, describing the process of modification as like ‘drawing a
moustache on a picture’ (cited in Morgan, 2006). The game Battlefield 2 ordinarily shows US
troops engaging forces in China or a united Middle East coalition, but modified versions depict a
man in Arab headdress carrying an automatic weapon into combat with US invaders. In a
strange and surprising parallel with games like America’s Army, Islamic militants, Devlin claimed,
were using video games to train recruits and to condition young people to attack US-led
coalition forces in Iraq. The manufacture and distribution of the first Arab 3D digital war game,
Under Ash (later renamed Under Siege), occurred in 2002 and was released by Syrian publisher
Dar Al-Fikr. Finding that no US company would sell them the basic graphics engine required, the
game designers built their own, and Under Ash is seen as a direct response to games that
encourage players to bomb Arab cities. Game players take the form of Ahmad, a young
Palestinian, who has decided to resist and join the intifada (Stahl, 2004). There is also Special
Force, published by the Central Internet Bureau of Hizbullah, an FPS based on the armed Islamic
movement in South Lebanon, where the central character is a holy warrior fighting against
Israeli occupation. The ideological opposite of America’s Army, these two FPS games are played
from the perspective of a young Palestinian participating in the Islamic jihad, and although they
contain similar militaristic representations to US-made shooters and have a similar look and feel,
the narratives are very different. The existence of such games and the culture of game
modification reminds us, then, that we should be attentive to the nascent counter-movement in
the gaming sector and should look beyond the ‘blood ’n’ guts’ marketing of combat video
games, avoiding the assumption that a product’s narratives cannot be read in different ways just
because it bears a military title (Kane, 2005). Nonetheless, repeated rehearsing of the will to
power and exertion of global domination and the experience of death within controlled and
renewable parameters creates a false sense of power and invincibility among American
consumer-citizens, which in turn ‘contributes to US
 Shapiro
This is part and parcel with a new era of communication – the
endless appeals to objectivity and evidence near and dear to the
status quo have lost all weight in the world of alternative facts
and fake news – attempts to decipher the world through
transparent metaphysics prove to not only be futile but also
infinitely destructive as the quest to know everything merely
reveals all that we can never know – meaning is contrary to its
own intent; all information inevitable crumbles into the void of
illusion
Shapiro, 17 [Alan N, Professor in Transdisciplinary design at Folkwang, 1/5,
“Baudrillard and Trump: Simulation and Object-Orientation, Not True and False,”
http://www.alan-shapiro.com/baudrillard-and-trump-simulation-and-object-
orientation-not-true-and-false-by-alan-n-shapiro/, ]
I see an op-ed piece in yesterday’s Washington Post (January 2nd, 2017) by Greg Sargent. It is called
“Yes, Donald Trump ‘lies.’ A lot. And news organizations should say so.” This article is
typical of the entire approach of the “liberal establishment” towards Trump.
During the election campaign, journalists and commentators kept pointing out that
Trump is a liar, a snake oil salesman, etc. (see the brilliant 1964 Philip K. Dick novel Lies, Inc.) That
may all be true, but it doesn’t make a dent in the number of his supporters.
Baudrillard comments throughout his work on the difference between critical theory
discourse (which liberal journalists like Sargent are stuck in with respect to Trump)
and what he called “fatal theory.” Critical theory discourse is ineffective. Trump is
the candidate of Reality TV, of the celebrity culture, of media hyper-reality
entertainment, of everyone’s 15 minutes of fame (Warhol), of the “trans-political”
(Baudrillard), and of object-orientation (OO). OO: Trump will be the Presidency and not the President – end of the
distance between human agent and office –Trump is misogyny itself and not a misogynist, he is racism itself and not a
racist, Trump hates no one [“nobody loves Group X more than I do”], he simply associates himself rhetorically with the
social-psychological “object” which is hatred). Beyond the epistemology of the human subject, Trump will identify with
any iconic or mental-image “object” necessary as he performs “the art of the deal” and the practice of “winning” in larger
and larger arenas. Trump identifies with the political-science-object that is the historically dormant China-Taiwan conflict
itself (and its reawakened provocation). The “social actors” (Bruno Latour) of China and Taiwan are irrelevant. In other
words, Trump is the candidate of the era of simulation. Invoking “the truth” against him
does not work as a strategy. Trump is already more advanced than the discourse of
truth. We are in a hyper-reality where there is no more truth and no more
falsehood. Carl “The Truth” Williams, a former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, passed away in April
2013. Alan Cholodenko comments: If hyper-reality was born for Baudrillard during or just after the Second World War,
then there have already been several simulation-Presidents: JFK the first televisual
President, Reagan the Hollywood actor and first TV show host (of the General Electric
Theatre)-President. Trump takes his place in this lineage. He is the second TV show host
(of The Apprentice)-President, the first live show, reality TV show CEO host become live show, reality TV show CEO
host-President of the live show, reality TV show America, Inc.) The mistake of the multitudes of
journalists and editorialists like the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent is to not
understand that the system of “truth and lies” is not some eternal, ahistorical or
“scientifically objective” reality. It is an historically constructed cultural discourse
or arrangement tied to an epoch which is finite in time. As Foucault might say, the concern
with “true” and “false” is an epistème – an epistemological a priori, an expression of a
specific power-knowledge constellation within an era – whose time has come and
gone. The insistent belief in “truth and lies” is also embedded in the Plato-initiated
“metaphysics” of the “human subject,” the subject-centered worldview, the sovereign
(democratic or scientific) subject who “knows” and can therefore judge and determine
when “knowledge” or a “fact” has been betrayed. In the new epistemological
system beyond “truth and lies” to which Trump is finely attuned, of which he is the master, and
which liberals do not get, the object itself is the hot thing. The spotlight is on objects (conceptual not physical), and they
are arelationship, an association which knows nothing of whether they are real or fake.
They transcend and straddle true and false. “Things have found a way of avoiding a
dialectics of meaning that was beginning to bore them: by proliferating
indefinitely, increasing their potential, outbidding themselves in an ascension to the
limit, an obscenity that henceforth becomes their immanent finality and senseless
reason.” (Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies; p.7) When Trump says something, it becomes true
because Trump says it, and there is nothing that the New York Times and the
Washington Post can do about it. Trump will change what he says on any given topic
from day to day, or on any given Sunday. The liberal media will “prove him wrong” with
evidence, but this demonstration will have an effect exactly the opposite than that
intended upon and for the “silent majority” of half of Americans for whom they are
the liars. The institutional bases for consensus or legitimation of “the truth” have
disappeared beneath the sheer load of mountainous piles of information, and the
virtualization, delocalization, de-physicalization, and disembodiment of
discourse. When did this happen (when was the “Canetti point”)? Impossible to say. To know the point of origin of that
would be to overstate the claims of knowledge, to violate the methodological recursivity of our awareness of being lost
within the culture of simulation (as Baudrillard has taught us in his fascinating lengthy discussions of the “Canetti point,”
and as Gerry Coulter has taught us, for example, in his essay on America). When
Trump said that
thousands of Muslims were celebrating on rooftops in Jersey City, New Jersey on
9/11, he was right. 100% right, as he later tweeted. Within the epistemology (theory of
knowledge) of the humanist-democratic subject and of truth, the alleged rooftop event
of course “did not take place.” Yet in the hyper-modernist epistemology, the
rhetorical and emotional power of the words invoked and the mental images evoked
by Trump (the advent of hyper-imagination) carry the weight and dynamic force of
the image-immersed beyond-chimerical “object” of those evil Muslim celebrators.
Probably Trump saw on TV in September 2001 some cynical celebrations in the Palestinian territories. The clandestine
wormhole connection between physically remote points in space is plausibly extant. In
the culture of virtual
images, it is perfectly OK to transpose the bin Laden-sympathetic revelers from one
geographical location to another, the hyper-space of Trump’s creative memory
mingled with the hyper-dimensional expanding televisual space on the interior of the
flatscreen. Fantasy is possible in a world that is still real. A fantasy could be said to be
not true, some sort of illusion (in the non-Baudrillardian meaning of this word) or deception. But
when images are everywhere, and they are universally exchangeable with each other, the
made-up mental images become hyper-real. Which now (literally) means (hyper-means)
more real than real. Meaning becomes hyper-meaning. Would not the ubiquity of
video documentation and recording devices of every kind increase the
availability of truth? Whipping the cam around, looking amazing from every angle? No, the effect is just
the opposite. When documentation and recording are everywhere, then they are
nowhere. They cease to exist in any meaningful sense. They serve no purpose
whatsoever anymore. They are pure technology fetish in the bad sense, decoupled through their
excess from what they were supposed to enhance or invent. As a hybrid radical-leftist-and-
mainstreamer, I do believe that there is a good side to surveillance, a deterrence of crime. But if surveillance is
everywhere, then this good side no longer functions. This
is the same paradoxical logic that is
operative for all virtual and digital media technologies. Yes, all of these wonderful new things are
available to us, but we omitted the step of thinking carefully about the appropriate measure of their application. We forgot
to humanly judge this. Hybrid posthumanist and humanist. We never took seriously the great thought of Albert Camus,
that in almost every area, we need to have a sense of limits (as Dominick LaCapra pointed out). Academic referentiality –
which Baudrillard was opposed to – is like this too. If you overdo it, become obsessed with footnotes, then you enter
into the twilight zone of hyper-referentiality and then the whole business does not
function anymore. You do it because you have to do it and the original purpose is
lost. The “proof” (ha ha!) is now upon us that Baudrillard was right all along. We are
now fully in the era of simulation and telemorphosis, of the New Truth of the
omnipresent image (both picture-image and word-image – the multi-media of the screen having transformed
written words from texts into images). The New Truth is not a lie – that would be too easy and the
claim is retrograde. The New Truth institutes its own hyper-reality, which is at
present our only reality. The only way to contest simulation and the New Truth would be a strategy or
perspective of “taking the side of objects” (see, for example, my most recent IJBS essay, for an elaboration of this). We
would have to get to know the codes which underlie and instantiate simulation and
reverse them. Reversibility of the code comes from “objects” within the code which want more objecthood. Until
we can start to do that, to paraphrase David Cronenberg’s Videodrome: LONG LIVE THE NEW TRUTH!
Bernie Tuchman writes: “Your piece on Trump has great power because his election has defeated
deniability. Something is Happening and You Don’t Know What It is Mr. Jones. The media continues to
‘analyze’ what it cannot understand. It is like a world which has entered into
dementia — where the dream life is more real than the ‘awake’ life, and where no one can
say which is which. It is the nervous breakdown of hierarchical order.”
 Charity Cannibalism
Today the west operates on a consumption of images of pain –
the affirmative only keeps putting quarters into our moral
register making it hinge upon listening to the suffering of the
others and feeling for them – absent the constant injection of
new images of suffering, the west would collapse – the
affirmative is sustaining a system in its death throes.
Baudrillard 94. Jean Baudrillard, dead French philosopher, former professor
emeritus at the University de Paris X, The Illusion of The End, pg. 66-70
We must today denounce the moral and
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' ['autre monde].

sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse

than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a
destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The
extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable
condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We
should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a
new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to

material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw

the Marxist analysis, that

material that is the misery of people which serves as psychological s,

nourishment for our daily lives the rich countries and media nourishment for . The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again

The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world

beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum.

as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the
waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the
latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of
raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans

Other people's destitution

frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order.

becomes our adventure playground . Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing
Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe,

our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure

and of the moving spectacle of

the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the

order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme
poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and
sentimental equilibrium of the West . In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should
profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a
sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and

Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still
champagne?

exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only
when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern

We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen.

Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.).

And the poor countries are the best suppliers We provide them, through - as, indeed, they are of other drugs.

our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the
means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives
off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried
forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and
ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-
development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by
the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point , in

when we run out of disasters

accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation,

from elsewhere the West will be forced to produce its

or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities,
own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that
voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point
where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed

Latin America are

on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and

really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing
symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping
earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the
means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without
any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a
tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one
immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead

One day, the West will break down if we are

against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down.

not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries
does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and
catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear
weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is
not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case, the under-
developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success.
In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so
in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial
ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism

Thus, to
which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples.

encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them,
in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal
absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not
seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical
or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated
and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes.
Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy – by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them
down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse
of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race.
 Action Impossible
Action fragments existence – the greater, sharper and more
persistent our search for truth only ensures the more effectively
it eludes us.
Bataille 45. Georges, can’t take people seriously, originally written in French as Sur Nietzsche, 1945, On
Nietzsche translated by Bruce Boone, published 2004, p. xxii-xxvi //edited for language + clarity
But what does that fragmentation mean? Or better, what causes it if not a need to act that
specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be
for the general interest (which normally isn’t true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects
to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts, substitutes a
particular end for what [they are] as a total being: in the least specialized cases it is the glory of the state or the
triumph of a party. Every action specializes insofar as it is limited as action. A plant usually doesn’t act, and isn’t specialized; it’s
I cannot exist entirely except when somehow I go beyond the
specialized when gobbling up flies!
stage of action. Otherwise I’m a soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a “total human
being.” The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an
object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for instance, you act and
know what you have to do. The possibility of failure isn’t important—and right from the start, you insert your existence
advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the
possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march
toward that goal—what’s normally called living. Similarly, if salvation is the goal. Every action makes
you a fragmentary existence. I hold onto my nature as an entirety only by refusing to
act—or at least by denying the superiority of time, which is reserved for action. Life is whole only when it isn’t
subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is
freedom. Still, I can’t choose to become an entire human being by simply fighting for
freedom, even if the struggle for freedom is an appropriate activity for me—because within me I can’t confuse
the state of entirety with my struggle. It’s the positive practice of freedom, not the
negative struggle against a particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated
existence. Each of us learns with bitterness that to struggle for freedom is first of all to alienate ourselves. I’ve already said it: the
practice of freedom lies within evil, not beyond it, while the struggle for freedom is a struggle
to conquer a good. To the extent that life is entire within me, I can’t distribute it or let it serve
the interests of a good belonging to someone else, to God or myself. I can’t acquire anything at all: I can
only give and give unstintingly, without the gift ever having as its object anyone’s interest. (In this
respect, I look at the other’s good as deceptive, since if I will that good it’s to find my own, unless I identify it as my own. Entirety exists
within me as exuberance. Only in empty longing, only in an unlucky desire to be consumed simply by the desire to burn with desire, is
entirety wholly what it is. In this respect, entirety is also longing for laughter, longing for pleasure, holiness, or death. Entirety lacks further
tasks to fulfill.) You have to experience a problem like this to understand how strange it really is. It’s easy to argue its meaning
by saying, Infinite tasks are imposed on us. Precisely in the present. That much is obvious and undeniable.
Still, it is at least equally true that human entirety or totality (the inevitable term) is making its initial appearance now. For two reasons.
The first, negative, is that specialization is everywhere, and emphasized alarmingly. The second is that in our time overwhelming tasks
nonetheless appear within their exact limits. In earlier times the horizon couldn’t be discerned. The object of seriousness was first defined as
the good of the city, although the city was confused with the gods. The object thereafter became the salvation of the soul. In both cases the
goal of action, on the one hand, was some limited and comprehensible end, and on the other, a totality defined as inaccessible in this world
(transcendent). Action
in modern conditions has precise ends that are completely adequate to
the possible, and human totality no longer has a mythic aspect. Seen as accessible in all
that surrounds us, totality becomes the fulfillment of tasks as they are defined
materially. So that totality is remote, and the tasks that subordinate our minds also
fragment them. Totality, however, is still discernible. A totality like this, necessarily aborted by our work, is nonetheless offered by
that very work. Not as a goal, since the goal is to change the world and give it human dimensions. But as the inevitable result. As change
comes about, humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single
and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed to humanity-as-entirety. For
humanity this result seems remote, but defined tasks describe it: It doesn’t transcend us like the gods (the sacred city), nor is it like the soul’s
afterlife; it is in the immanence of “humanity-attached…” We can put off thinking about it till later, though it’s still contiguous to us. If
human beings can’t yet be consciously aware of it in their common existence, what separates them from this notion isn’t that they are
human instead of divine, nor the fact of not being dead: It’s the duties of a particular moment. Similarly, a man in combat must only think
(provisionally) of driving back the enemy. To be sure, situations of calm during even the most violent wars give rise to peacetime interests.
Still, such matters immediately appear minor. The toughest minds will join in these moments of relaxation as they seek a way to put aside
their seriousness. In some sense they’re wrong to do so. Since isn’t seriousness essentially why blood flows?
And that’s inevitable. For how could seriousness not be the same as blood? How could a free life, a life unconstrained by combat, a life
In a world
disengaged from the necessities of action and no longer fragmented—how could such a life not appear frivolous?
released from the gods and from any interest in salvation, even “tragedy” seems a
distraction, a moment of relaxation within the context of goals shaped by activity alone .
More than one advantage accrues when human “reason for being” comes in the back way. So the total person is first
disclosed in immanence in areas of life that are lived frivolously. A life like this—a frivolous
life—can’t be taken seriously. Even if it is deeply tragic. And this is its liberating prospect—
it acquires the worst simplicity and nakedness. Without any guile I’m saying, I feel grateful to those
whose serious attitudes and life lived at the edge of death defined me as an empty human being and dreamer (there are
moments when I’m on their side). Fundamentally, an entire human being is simply a being in whom
transcendence is abolished, from whom there’s no separating anything now. An entire
human being is partly a clown, partly a God, partly crazy…and is transparence.
 Hegemony
American power has exhausted its relevance and transformed
itself into a killing machine, constructing global threats in an
attempt to reinvigorate the geopolitical theater
Baudrillard, 05 [Jean, “Pornography of War,” Cultural Politics, vol. 1 no. 1, pg. 23-
25, ]
In the case of 9/11, the thrilling images of a major event; in the other, the shaming images of
something that is the opposite of an event, a non-event of obscene banality, the atrocious
but banal degradation not merely of the victims but also of the amateur stage managers of
this parody of violence. For the worst thing about this is that here we have a parody of violence, a
parody of war itself, pornography becoming the ultimate form of abjection of a war that
is incapable of being merely war, of merely killing, and that is being drawn out into an
infantile, Ubuesque “reality show,” a desperate simulacrum of power. These scenes are the
illustration of a power that, having reached its extreme point, no longer knows what to do with
itself, of a power now aimless and purposeless since it has no plausible enemy and
acts with total impunity. All it can do now is inflict gratuitous humiliation, and, as we
know, the violence we inflict on others is only ever the expression of the violence we do to
ourselves. And it can only humiliate itself in the process, demean and deny itself in a kind of
perverse relentlessness. Ignominy and sleaze are the last symptoms of a power that no longer knows what to do
with itself. September 11th was like a global reaction of all those who no longer know
what to do with – and can no longer bear – this world power. In the case of the abuse inflicted
on the Iraqis, it is worse still: it is power itself that no longer knows what to do with itself and can
no longer bear itself, other than in inhuman self-parody. These images are as lethal for America as
the pictures of the World Trade Center in flames. Yet it is not America in itself that stands accused, and
there is no point laying all this at the Americans’ door: the infernal machine generates its own
impetus, freewheeling out of control in literally suicidal acts. The Americans’ power
has in fact become too much for them. They no longer have the means to exorcize it. And we are party to that
power. It is the whole of the West whose bad conscience crystallizes in these images; it is
the whole of the West that is present in the American soldiers’ sadistic outburst of
laughter; just as it is the whole of the West that is behind the building of the Israeli wall.
This is the truth of these images; this is their burden: the excess of a potency designating itself as abject and pornographic.
The truth of the images, not their veracity, since, in this situation, whether they are true or false
is beside the point. We are henceforth – and forever – in a state of uncertainty where
images are concerned. Only their impact counts, precisely insofar as they are embedded in war. There
isn’t even a need for “embedded” journalists any more; it’s the military itself that is
embedded in the image; thanks to digital technology, images are definitively integrated into
warfare. They no longer represent; they no longer imply either distance or perception or
judgement. They are no longer of the order of representation, or of information in the strict sense and, as a result, the
question of whether they should be produced, reproduced, broadcast or banned, and even
the “essential” question of whether they are true or false, is “irrelevant.” For images to
constitute genuine information they would have to be different from war. But they have
become precisely as virtual as war today and hence their own specific violence is now superadded to the specific violence
of war. Moreover, by their omnipresence, by the rule that everything must be made visible, which now applies the
world over, images – our present images – have become in substance pornographic; they
therefore cleave spontaneously to the pornographic dimension of war. There is in all this,
and particularly in the last Iraqi episode, a justice immanent in the image: he who stakes his all on
the spectacle will die by the spectacle. If you want power through the image, be
prepared to die by the image playback. The Americans are learning this, and will continue to learn it,
by bitter experience. And this despite all the “democratic” subterfuge and despite a despairing
simulacrum of transparency commensurate with the despairing simulacrum of military
power. Who committed these acts and who is really responsible for them? The military higher-
ups? Or human nature, which is, as we know, brutish – “even in a democracy”? The real scandal lies not in the
torture but in the perfidy of those who knew and remained silent (or of those who revealed it?).
At any rate, the whole of the real violence is diverted on to the question of openness,
democracy finding a way to restore its virtue by publicizing its vices.
 Nukes
Representation and images of nuclear war is the most obvious
example of Baudrillard’s concept of deterrence. Nuclear war
doesn’t exist, no actor with nuclear weapons will ever use them,
but their threat locks in worldwide securitization of the real or
the event. Every action and inaction has to be calculated as to
not start war, which locks politics into paralyzation, unable to
make any real change, deterred by the nuclear.
Baudrillard 81(Jean Baudrillard – French Postmodern Philosopher, “Simulacra
and Simulation” https://www.e-
reading.club/bookreader.php/144970/Simulacra_and_Simulation.pdf)
The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear. However, the balance of terror is never
anything but the spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself
from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. Nuclear suspension only serves to seal the
trivialized system of deterrence that is at the heart of the media, of the violence without
consequences that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory apparatus of all the
choices that are made for us. The most insignificant of our behaviors is regulated by
neutralized, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those that regulate the
"strategy of games" (but the true equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely
that variable of simulation which makes of the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a
simulacrum that dominates everything and reduces all "ground-level" events to being
nothing but ephemeral scenarios, transforming the life left us into survival, into a stake
without stakes - not even into a life insurance policy: into a policy that already has no
value). It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives, it is
deterrence that gives them leukemia. And this deterrence comes from that fact
that even the real atomic clash is precluded - precluded like the eventuality
of the real in a system of signs. The whole world pretends to believe in the
reality of this threat (this is understandable on the part of the military, the gravity of
their exercise and the discourse of their "strategy" are at stake), but it is precisely at
this level that there are no strategic stakes. The whole originality of the
situation lies in the improbability of destruction. Deterrence precludes war -
the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive
violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject
of deterrence, nor an adversary nor a strategy - it is a planetary structure of
the annihilation of stakes. Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take
place. The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the
sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to
such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity), for installing a universal
security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at
all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question, except without a doubt in the
very initial stages of the cold war, when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with
conventional war) but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real event, of
anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance
of terror is the terror of balance. Deterrence is not a strategy, it circulates and is
exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly as is international capital in the orbital
zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations suffice to control all global exchanges.
Thus the money of destruction (without any reference to real destruction, any more than
floating capital has a real referent of production) that circulates in nuclear orbit suffices
to control all the violence and potential conflicts around the world. What is hatched in
the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal, "objective," threat, and
thanks to Damocles' nuclear sword, is the perfection of the best system of control
that has ever existed. And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through
this hypermodel of security. The same goes for peaceful nuclear power stations.
Pacification does not distinguish between the civil and the military:
everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated,
everywhere where the notion of security becomes omnipotent, everywhere
where the norm replaces the old arsenal of laws and violence (including war),
it is the system of deterrence that grows, and around it grows the historical, social, and
political desert. A gigantic involution that makes every conflict, every finality,
every confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts,
neutralizes, freezes them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be
deployed according to its own logic because it risks annihilation. No strategy
is possible any longer, and escalation is only a puerile game given over to the
military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully
circumscribed stakes remain
 Environment
Environmental apocalypticism is a profoundly conservative force which
shuts down deliberation and stultifies environmental movements –
turns the case
Coward 14 Jonathan Coward, MSc in Environment, Culture, and Society from the
University of Edinburgh, 2014, "'How's that for an Ending?' Apocalyptic Narratives and
Environmental Degradation: Foreclosing Genuine Solutions, or Rhetorical
Necessity?"http://www.academia.edu/5431894/_How_s_that_for_an_ending_Apocalyptic_n
arratives_and_environmental_degradation_Foreclosing_genuine_solutions_or_rhetorical_nec
essity page 1//
‘How’s that for an ending?’ Apocalyptic
narratives and environmental degradation: Foreclosing
genuine solutions, or rhetorical necessity? Suddenly there is an earthquake. Suddenly the sea floods
the city, pouring down through the mouths into the corridors of council and institute and
short-circuiting everything[…] How’s that for an ending? - Nastler These banal world destructions prove nothing
but the impoverished minds of those who can think of nothing better[.] - Lanark (Gray 1984, 497) The above dialogue is taken from the Scottish
novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books , by Alastair Gray. Lanark, the protagonist, meets his ‘creator’, Nastler: A thinly veiled Gray penned into his
own story as the omniscient, god-like author. A curious Lanark asks of his own future, and the future of his hometown, only to receive this
hopeless, fatalistic response. Later, as the book comes to a close, Lanark is mildly disappointed when the catastrophe he expected does not occur,
despite the certainty of Nastler’s prophecy. Gray’s dystopian-realist novel was published in 1981, at a juncture
for modern apocalypticism: it was the tail end of the Cold War, and within the decade, climate change would be
put on the global political agenda at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in
Toronto. Since then, ‘the climate’ has become an increasingly publicized issue. International
agreements have been created and subsequently ignored, and despite increasingly
alarming calls for decisive action to be taken, society has all-in-all continued as usual. Some
environmentalists, seeking to end this complacency, have capitalized on the apocalyptic imagination to
provide us with a universal ending like that of Nastler’s, without disclosing exactly how and
when it will occur. What we are told, however, is that it’s coming soon and that everyone will be affected. This communicative trend is
not exclusive to environmental academic literature, and can also be found in popular print media, and documentary film. I argue—
against claims that apocalyptic rhetoric ultimately encourages activism, and beyond shallow
accusations of alarmism and neo-ludditism—that there is a deep systemic issue at play rendering
apocalyptic narratives to be counter-productive to the overall environmental cause. Late-
capitalism and its socio-political superstructure have converted ecological catastrophe
into profitable, manageable crises, thus perpetuating the very ideological norms which the
apocalyptic rhetoric seeks to overcome originally. First, I give a brief overview of apocalyptic thought,
providing the cultural and historical context for contemporary environmental catastrophism. Second, I critically examine
environmental apocalyptic rhetoric and its intended responses, utilizing existing survey data on the subject,
before unpacking the criticisms of those who argue against ‘end of the world’ narratives. I then
look at the role of this discourse in relation to ‘capitalist realism’, the notion that capitalist economy has
become a totalizing reality, before a brief reflection on the pervasiveness of capitalist ideas in popular cultural presentations of apocalypse.
Apocalypse of past and present Although the apocalypse is a recurrent theme in environmental and climate change literature (Veldman 2012, 1;
Killingsworth and Palmer 1996, 21), such ideas are by no means limited to it. For instance, ecological apocalypticism takes its cue from Judeo-
Christian eschatological tradition, as part of what Keller (2005, 2) calls the yet “unfinished history of apocalyptic finalities.” Both strands are
united by a broad vision of eventual decline and the recognition that apocalypse is an as yet unrealized future-event, but the secular-scientific ,
and religious versions can be distinguished by three factors, identifiable in Jay (1994): First, the secular-scientific derives its catastrophic
predictions from “statistical extrapolation”, opposed to symbolic signs a wrathful God ( ibid., 33). Second, the alleged apocalyptic causality is
identifiable and verifiable in the secular-scientific version, rather than relying on faith in the actions of God ( ibid. ). Finally, religious
apocalypticism retains the hope of post-apocalyptic redemption, whereas its secular counterpart seems only to assert the permanence of
destruction ( ibid. 34; Wojcik 1997). The separation, then, appears as a clear distinction between belief in science and belief in God, but it cannot
be assumed that the former necessitates support for the current trajectory of scientific progress, as discussed below.Aside from religion, the
most striking, and pervasive apocalyptic ideas can be found today in works of fiction. This is the ‘mass-culture’—to borrow the term from
Adorno and Horkheimer (1944)—of armageddon, and takes the form of film, music and literature. Obviously apocalypse is not a single, coherent
genre, rather it encompasses themes such as nuclear holocaust (i.e. Bob Dylan 1963 song, Talking World War III Blues ), astronomical (J.G.
Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World ), pandemic (i.e. Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake) , and, of course, environmental
triggers (i.e. the 2004 film, The Day After Tomorrow ). The
apocalyptic imagination is also embraced in real-life
experiences such as the ‘urban exploration’ of existing ‘post-apocalyptic’ landscapes (see Trigg
2006, 179-91). In some cases, these are areas abandoned merely for social or economic reasons, while other places, such as the town of Pripyat
near the infamous Chernobyl nuclear power plant, stand empty due to a previously occurring catastrophe. It can be argued that the
exposure to deserted scenery serves to satisfy, in reality, the type of environments that usually
reside in the imagination. So, this overview points to a move away from faith based prophecies of ‘the end’. Instead, what’s
emerged is a popular imaginary of apocalypse based on scientific understanding, and
recognizing the human agency—and suffering—inherent in planetary decline. While it is clear, as Baines
(2009, 21) has recognized, that “[t]he apocalypse might well be embedded in our collective
consciousness”, uncovering the reasons for its ubiquity in Western culture will not be necessary for
the present discussion. Rather, the implications of Baines’ other observation—that “it performs many functions[…] in the contemporary
world”—are of most concern ( ibid. ). Environmental apocalypse: changing consciousness? With the salience of climate change and
environmental degradation in recent years, apocalyptic messages have served a definite function in
literature relating to these issues. Texts which are worthy of mention in this regard are: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962); Bill
McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) ; The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (2006); and The Enemy of

Nature by Joel Kovel (2002). Although each differs with regard to the precise cause of environmental change -
for instance, Carson’s thesis on the negative effect of pesticides differs greatly from Kovel’s

ecological critique of capitalism - the bleak prism through which their messages are
communicated is strikingly similar. In a nutshell, the overall message conveyed in each is that
humanity’s relationship with nature has become increasingly destructive, whether through
increased technological domination, excessive population, or the fact that climate change is
equal to the very end of nature itself. Furthermore, visions of environmental catastrophe have
become increasingly persistent in print media. Cutting through the ironic, and often satirical tone adopted by tabloid
newspapers in the U.K., Boykoff (2008, 562) recognizes that “ media coverage of these [climate change] related
issues has developed a catastrophic discourse.” Boykoff (2008, 561) provides examples of this trend
in the fear inducing, and somewhat absurd headlines such as: ‘POLLUTION IS TURNING THE
SEAS INTO ACID ( Daily Mail 11 November 2006 )’. Admittedly, these are extreme examples, but when the scope is widened to include
approach of broadsheets to environmental stories, instances of catastrophic framing still occur: “The final countdown” (
The Guardian, 1 August 2008 ); Population growth and over-consumption could have 'potentially catastrophic implications for human well
being'” ( The Independent, 14 June 2012 ). What, then, is the function of the ‘environmental apocalypse’, and
how might it be perceived as a rhetorical necessity? I perceive it to have two core functions. The first is that apocalypse acts as a teleological-
critical tool and second, that it indeed has a political role in environmentalism. First, environmental literatures, such as those specified above,
can be seen to have traditionally served the two primary functions of criticism: diagnostic, and remedial. The
inclusion of an
apocalyptic tone adds a third aspect, oriented to the future. Put simply, this teleological-critical function says implicitly or
explicitly: Either the status quo must change, or humanity and nature will end. Second, in
uncovering this desire or need to change, the implementation of the apocalyptic narrative in environmental literature
is political. It is employed both to increase the saliency of environmental issues in the minds of

the public and to encourage change on an individual or collective level. The technique recognizes the fact
that although awareness of environmental issues is now very high, they continue to be low
priority for many (Whitmarsh 2011, 691). Killingsworth and Palmer (1996, 22) succinctly observe that for political change to actually
occur, a transformation in consciousness is required to translate awareness into action. This is
achieved through the teleological-critical function of apocalypse, thus indicating the link between its two facets. From theory to reality?:
Criticisms and capitalism’s co-option It is important, however, to state that although
the role of apocalypse in
environmentalism appears to be useful in theory, this is not necessarily translated into
reality. Ultimately, the intended consequences of framing environmental degradation in an
apocalyptic manner do not always materialize. Instead, the result is not that of
transformation, but of a perpetuation of the political and economic forces that underlie
environmental degradation, and thus the possibility of change becomes its opposite.
Criticisms of the apocalyptic tendency in environmentalism go some way towards explaining its failings. I argue that these are: alarmism;

quasi-religious undertones, and anti-progressivism. The accusation that certain environmental texts—or even that
environmentalism itself—tends to exaggerate to the point of alarmism is a common criticism put forward
(Bailey 1993; Simon 1995, 23; Risbey 2008). Arguably, exaggeration has its merits. In a broad, philosophical sense, Adorno (2003) claims it to be
the contemporary “medium of truth,” while in terms of apocalyptic narratives s pecifically, Killingsworth and Palmer (1996, 41) claim that,
“if the “predicted devastation is extreme in the apocalyptic narrative, then the change in consciousness of political agenda recommended by the
narrator is correspondingly extreme or radical.” In other words, exaggeration is required, because anything less would result in mere reformism
and this simply isn’t enough to protect what’s under threat. And although this is a fair rebuttal, empirical
evidence shows that
the criticism is valid and that apocalyptic rhetoric can disengages the wider public from
partaking in environmental activism. In Feinberg and Willer’s (2011) study, individuals who
were primed with just-world statements, followed by exposure to dire messages of the
severity of global warming, reported higher levels of climate change skepticism (ibid, 36).
These participants were also less likely to change their lifestyle to reduce their carbon

footprint. This indicates a problem with the public perception of environmental apocalypticism. Furthermore, through its use of apocalyptic
narratives, ecology has been perceived as having quasireligious qualities . While it is worth questioning some
of the ecology-as-religion arguments made by critics such as Simon (1995, 23), the possibility that the religious qualities of ecology are more
than superficial should not be dismissed. One view is that a
prophetic ecology cannot espouse radical change
because, like religion, it in fact holds an inherently conservative worldview. This conservatism comes
in two forms. One, of lesser concern, which is neo-luddite in character, and seeks the return to a less technologically demanding time, and the
other which looks to conserve present economic and political systems because change is perceived as being inherently bad. As Žižek states,
although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of
change, of development, of progress: every radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe. (Žižek 2008)
Instead, I would argue that ecological movements that are framed by catastrophic rhetoric do not distrust progress generally, and where radical
change is argued to be necessary—i.e. Kovel’s (2002) eco-socialist agenda—that there is a genuine commitment to this change. Rather the

opposition is to a highly political ideology of progress based upon the technological

domination of organic life in the name of capitalist productivism and economic growth.
 War Porn
The aff is invested in spetacles of disaster
Stam 92 (Robert Stam is a Professor in the Cinema Studies Department at New York
University, “Mobilizing Fictions: The Gulf War, the Media, and the Recruitment of the
Spectator", 1992, Pgs 110-113)
THE AMBIGUITIES OF POSTMODERN WAR With the Gulf War, the representation of war
seemed to shift from classical realist representation to the brave new public-
relations world of hyperreality evoked by Baudrillard. Not only was the war
experienced by the spectator as a postmodern video game, but the war itself
proliferated in simulacral strategies - fake runways, fake bomb damage, fake missile
silos, even fake heat to attract heat-seeking missiles. Postmodern war, as Virilio points
out, is a highly mediated experience even for its participants; it demands a “dedoublement” of
observation - an immediate perception and a mediated perception through video and radar - a doubling itself
doubled by the dual najectory of military objects (planes, missiles) which have one real uajectory in the
actual space of battle, and another virtual trajectory in the electromagnetic environment.12 The simulations
used by the media during the war, moreover, as James Der Derian points out, existed on a
continuum with other, parallel military simulations, such as the strategic and
counterterrorist games played at the National Defense University and the tactically onented
computerized “Janus” game perfected at the Army War College, all of which themselves existed
alongside the commercially available simulation games like the popular realpolitik computer
game Balance of Power, the film/video Wargames, and the video games modeled on Top Gun. The IranIraq war
was first played out as a video game, Der Derian reminds us, in the form of the macro-
strategic game which the consulting company BDM International sold to Iraq,l3 just as the invasion of Kuwait,
according to General Schwarzkopf, was rehearsed in the form of computer simulations provided
by an American c0mpany.1~ That there was now a generation brought up on such video-
strategic games further “normalized” the brutality; since no sentient beings inhabit the
interior space of video monitors, the suffering “over there” on the ground was deemed equally inconsequential. War
games, models, and simulations have in common the feature of playing at
war via representation. In the Gulf War, the major electronic media plugged into these apparatuses. The
snippets of infrared video footage released by the Pentagon, taken from cameras
mounted on the noses of bombers, were strikingly similar to pre-war animation
materials offering views from cockpits showing direct hits fired on imaginary targets.
These same materials were euphorically described by newscasters as “riveting,” proof of the “astounding accuracy” of the
equipment. It was as if the Pentagon and its corporate suppliers made an offer that the
media could not refuse -
and which they were not ideologically inclined to refuse - theoffer of consummate war-game
visuals. With few opportunities for firsthand reports due to censorship and the “pool system,” the media began
to rely on Government-issued videotapes. Just as the Reagan White House provided photo-ops and the
“line of the day” and thus cued daily news reports, so the Pentagon and the White House dictated the
imagery of war through what amounted to video press releases.15 The Pentagon, and its corporate
suppliers, became the producers and the sponsors of the sounds and images, while the “news” became a
form of military advertising. Technological fetishism reigned. Pieces of military
equipment were called “stars” by technophiliac newscasters - their successes touted to a world all the more eager to buy
them - and later went on to “star” in military parades. If
the Gulf War revealed the descriptive aptness
of the Baudrillardian account of postmodernism, it also signaled that paradigm’s
political vacuousness. The postmodern account of the implosive collapse of boundaries in
a mass-mediated global society is exhilaratingly apt in its rendering of the hyper-
real “feel” of consumerist life in the simulacral world, but inadequate in its
account of global power relations. For Baudrillard, all cultures are now equally
caught up in the meaningless whirl of mass-mediated simulacra. But what the Gulf War reveals is
a fundamental asymmetry in how the depthless surfaces of postmodernity are lived, an asymmetry not only
between the experience of television and the experience of war, but also between the
experience of the two sides engaged in the war. While one side lived the war as a
simulacral video-war or’ miniseries, with only minimal suffering, the other lived it as a real
war replete with death, dismemberment, and disease. Technology facilitated seeing and hearing
on the one side, and obliterated it on the other. While Americans, as Jonathon Schell put it, waged war in
three dimensions, the foe was trapped in two dimensions: “. . . we kill and they die, as if a race of gods were making war
against a race of human beings.”’6 If postmodernity has spread the telematic feel of First World media around the world,
in sum, it has hardly deconstructed the relations of power that marginalize, devalue, and time and time again massacre
Third World peoples and cultures. The Gulf War also exposed some of the blind spots of the optimistic reception theories
of writers like John Fiske. In an effort to combat the cultural melancholia of the Frankfurt School view of mass culture,
Fiske sees viewers as mischievously working out “subversive” and “aberrant” readings of TV programming based on their
own counterhegemonic popular knowledge. Fiske is right to reject the “hypodermic needle” view of bourgeois ideology, a
view that reduces telespectators to “cultural dupes.” And he is undoubtedly right to suggest that housewives do develop
Critical readings of soap operas, and that African-Americans “see through” the racism of the dominant media, but if they
do so it is only because everyday life and historical memory have generated an alternative framework through which to
understand texts and events. In
the case of the Gulf War, most American viewers lacked any
alternative grid, for example one rooted in comprehension of the Middle East and of the
legacy of colonialism. Rather, they were culturally primed by colonialist and
Orientalist discourse to give credence to whatever simplistic and caricatural
view the administration chose to present, to believe the worst about our
“enemies” and the best about ourselves.

The war we see is masked- we are in the video war game. The judge is the escape
button in this simulation, that breaks us from the cage and confronts the American
Killing War Game Machine -that forces us to continue the narrative of the “real” war.

Baudrillard 06, Jean. French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator,
and photographer. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and
technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and
hyperreality// “War Porn” pg. 85

For September 11th, the exhilarating images of a major event; in the other, the degrading
images of something that is the opposite of an event, a nonevent of an obscene banality, the
degradation, atrocious but banal, not only of the victims, but of the amateur scriptwriters of this
parody of violence. The worst is that it all becomes a parody of violence, a parody of the war
itself, pornography becoming the ultimate form of the abjection of war which is unable to be
simply war, to be simply about killing, and instead turns itself into a grotesque infantile reality-
show, in a desperate simulacrum of power. These scenes are the illustration of a power which,
reaching its extreme point, no longer knows what to do with itself – a power henceforth without
aim, without purpose, without a plausible enemy, and in total impunity. It is only capable of
inflicting gratuitous humiliation and, as one knows, violence inflicted on others is after all only
an expression of the violence inflicted on oneself. It only manages to humiliate itself, degrade
itself and go back on its own word in a sort of unremitting perversity. The ignominy, the vileness
is the ultimate symptom of a power that no longer knows what to do with itself September 11th
was a global reaction from all those who no longer knew what to make of this world power and
who no longer supported it. In the case of the abuse inflicted on the Iraqis, it is worse yet:
power no longer 86 journal of visual culture 5(1) knows what to do with itself and cannot stand
itself, unless it engages in selfparody in an inhuman manner. These images are as murderous for
America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. Nevertheless, America in itself is not on
trial, and it is useless to charge the Americans: the infernal machine exploded in literally suicidal
acts. In fact, the Americans have been overtaken by their own power. They do not have the
means to control it. And now we are part of this power. The bad conscience of the entire West is
crystallized in these images. The whole West is contained in the burst of the sadistic laughter of
the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth
of these images lies; this is what they are full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself
as abject and pornographic. Truth but not veracity: it does not help to know whether the images
are true or false. From now on and forever we will be uncertain about these images. Only their
impact counts in the way in which they are immersed in the war. There is no longer the need for
‘embedded’ journalists because soldiers themselves are immersed in the image – thanks to
digital technology, the images are definitively integrated into the war. They don’t represent it
anymore; they involve neither distance, nor perception, nor judgment. They no longer belong to
the order of representation, nor of information in a strict sense. And, suddenly, the question of
whether it is necessary to produce, reproduce, broadcast, or prohibit them, or even the
‘essential’ question of how to know if they are true or false, is ‘irrelevant’. For the images to
become a source of true information, they would have to be distinct from the war. They have
become today as virtual as the war itself, and for this reason their specific violence adds to the
specific violence of the war. In addition, due to their omnipresence, due to the prevailing rule of
the world of making everything visible, the images, our present-day images, have become
substantially pornographic. Spontaneously, they embrace the pornographic face of the war.
There exists in all this, in particular in the last Iraqi episode, an immanent justice of the image:
those who live by the spectacle will die by the spectacle. Do you want to acquire power through
the image? Then you will perish by the return of the image. The Americans are having and will
make of it a bitter experience. And this in spite of all the ‘democratic’ subterfuges and the
hopeless simulacrum of transparency which corresponds to the hopeless simulacrum of military
power. Who committed these acts and who is really responsible for them? Military superiors?
Human nature, bestial as one knows, ‘even in democracy’? The true scandal is no longer in the
torture, it is in the treachery of those who knew and who said nothing (or of those who revealed
it?). In any event, all real violence is diverted by the question of transparency – democracy
trying to make a virtue out of the disclosure of its vices. But apart from all this, what is the
secret of these abject scenographies? Once again, they are an answer, beyond all the strategic
and political adventures, to the humiliation of September 11th, and they want to answer to it by
even worse humiliation – even worse than death.
 Catastrophe Prediction

Their prediction of catastrophes is the western universities

latest neoliberal resilience strategy leads to a real repression of
a virtual crime, and this reduces existence to pure policing.
Information thus merely becomes the production of these non-
events that produces a terror that power ends up exerting on
itself as it turns against its own populations fueling the global
war machine.
Baudrillard 05. [Jean Baudrillard, you should know who he is, excerpt from “Event
and Non-Event” originally published as "Le Virtuel et l'événementiel" in "Cahier de
L'Herne 84: Jean Baudrillard", edited by François L'Yvonnet, 2005. This translation
published as part of Semiotexte(e)'s 2007 edition of Baudrillard's "In the Shadow of the
Silent Majorities" by Stuart Kendall 2007, http://insomnia.ac/essays/event_and_non-
event/]
Two images: a bronzed technocrat, leaning on his briefcase, sitting on a bench at the foot of the
Twin Towers, or rather buried in the dust of the fallen towers, like the bodies recovered from
the ruins of Pompeii. It was like the signature of the event, the pathetic phantom of a world
power struck by an unforeseeable catastrophe. The other figure: an artist working in his Tower
studio on a sculpture of himself, of his body cut by an aircraft -- meant to rise on the plaza of the
World Trade Center, like a modern St. Sebastian. He was still working on it on the morning of
September 11th, swept away with his work, by the very event that it foreshadowed. Supreme
consecration for a work of art, being completed by the event that destroys it.

Two allegories from one exceptional, fulgurating event, instantly projected from monotony to
the end of history. The only event worthy of the name, standing out against the non-event to
which we have been condemned by the hegemony of a world order that nothing can disturb. At
this stage, when every function, body, time, language, is plugged into the network, when
every mind is subjected to mental perfusion, when the slightest event is taken as a threat;
history itself is a threat. It will be necessary to invent a security system that forewarns the
irruption of any kind of event. An entire strategy of prevention and deterrence that passes for a
universal strategy.

Steven Spielberg's Minority Report offers a recent illustration. Using minds endowed with the
power of premonition ("pre-cogs"), capable of identifying imminent crimes ahead of time, the
police squad ("pre-crime") intercepts and neutralizes the criminal before they can act. Dead
Zone is a variant: the hero, also gifted with pre-cognitive powers following a serious accident,
ends up killing a policeman he identifies as a future war criminal. This is also the plot of the war
in Iraq: eliminating the embryonic crime on the basis of an act that has not taken place
(Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction). The obvious question is whether the crime
really would have taken place. But no one will ever know. Therefore here we are dealing with
the real repression of a virtual crime.
Extrapolating beyond war, we grasp the outline of a systematic deprogramming not only of
every crime, but of everything that could upset the order of things, the policed order of the
planet. Today "political" power can be summarized like this. It is no longer animated by some
positive will, it is no longer anything but the negative power of deterrence, of public health, of
prophylactic, immunizing, security forces. This strategy plays not only with the future, but with
past events too -- with September 11th, for example, attempting to erase the humiliation
through the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. This is why this war is basically an illusion, a virtual
event, a "non-event". Stripped of an objective clear goal, it simply takes the form of a
conspiracy, of an exorcism. This is also why it is interminable: one can never be finished with
plotting such an event. They called it preventive -- in fact it is retrospective, meant to defuse the
terrorist event of September 11th, whose shadow floats over the entire strategy of planetary
control. Effacing the event, effacing the enemy, effacing death: the imperative of Zero death is
part of the obsession with security.

This world order is aiming at a definitive non-event. It is in some ways the end of history, not
through the fulfillment of democracy, as Fukuyama would have it, but through preventive
terror, a counter-terror that precludes every possible event. A terror that power ends up
exerting upon itself, under the sign of security.

There is a ferocious irony here: an antiterrorist world system that ends up internalizing terror,
inflicting terror on itself and emptying itself of all political substance -- to the point of turning
against its own population. Is it a trace of the cold war and of the equilibrium of terror? But this
time it is a deterrence without cold war, a terror without equilibrium. Or rather it is a universal
cold war, crammed into the smallest cracks of social and political life.
Impact
 Transparency
The appeal to information as a means of democratic truth-
speaking is a procedure in the nihilistic dissection of the world
within the paradigm of absolute transparency. Their faith in
consciousness raising and mediated digital activism as a
methodology for proliferating the truth of violence is a failing
project that passively invests blind faith in representation as a
praxis for mobilization and ultimately serves to obfuscate and
mystify the global violence of the imperial west.
Artrip and Debrix 14. Ryan E. Artrip, Doctoral Student, ASPECT, Virginia
Polytechnic Institute, and Francois Debrix, professor of political science at Virginia
Polytechnical Institute, “The Digital Fog of War: Baudrillard and the Violence of
Representation,” Volume 11, Number 2
The claim about a certain quality of reality or even realism to new digital informational
or communicative technologies has played a formative role in the global staging of
several recent social and political conflicts. In both the Arab Spring and the
Occupy movements of 2011, for example, digital technologies were celebrated for
their real-time capacity and their subversive (democratic) potentials. The virtue
of reporting “from the ground” of the event itself was championed as a matter of authenticity. There was a
common sense that “truth” would finally be able to speak from its “real”
source (the demos itself?). Not only is there a prevalent uncritical (even if sometimes well-intentioned)
faith in new media and their digital technologies today, but, more importantly, there is often an
impulse of liberation. Yet, this impulse is stifled by its faith in representation.
The hope for openness, transparency, immediacy, and indeed liberation is
so tethered to the real (and to the will to reality) that it ends up being
negative or, at least, self-defeating. It often becomes evident that the so-called
democratic uses of new media technologies—particularly in terms of reporting violent war events or
conflicts of allegedly great concern/importance to the global demos—are, far from producing a clearer
picture of an objective event, contributing to an ever thickening fog of meaning and
truth. These new media technologies in and of themselves are not the object of our critique here. Moreover, we are
not interested in “clearing the fog” of the real or war. Again, our critical intervention in this essay has
more to do with deploying perspectives that may expose the violent dispositions of the contemporary mythos of war (and
revealing the complicit role of the digitalized demos in the intensification of this mythos) than with attempting to clear the
way for a different ethos about everyday reality, digitalized media, and the prevalence of warfare in political
representations. In fact, part of our argument is also to suggest that the various cultural, political, and ethical mechanisms
The lure to criticize and debunk
that seek to clear the fog of the real (and war) often end up reproducing it.
reality often requires that another real, another certainty, another dominant meaning, or
indeed another democratic necessity be established through the same means and
techniques, and media, that had to be challenged in the first place (thus, the simulacrum
continues to proliferate its reality-effects). Behind the widespread “global” celebration of digitalized
technologies for their newly found representational capabilities and accuracies, there lies the idea that, perhaps following
a collective disgust with the dealings of Western media outlets as more or less uncritical props for the
social/economic/ethical status quo in the past several decades, disseminated and “democratized” media technologies can
de-mystify the world, lift its aura in a way, or perhaps “dig deeper” into the “truth” than, say, what the media networks
involved in reporting news (including war news) in the 1980s and 1990’s (the famous CNN effect) ever could do. Because
these technologies are far more in real-time than news networks, they are also generally thought to be able to evade
oppressive/repressive censorship of particular corporate/class/state/ideology interests. But even more than escaping
filters, digital representations today are often thought to be able to eliminate all of the
ambiguities born of time. Thus, we (members of the public/demos) want to believe that mediation
can be removed. And we want to subscribe to the view that any distortion occurring between an event and its
perception/memory, or between the “actual” and its account, can evaporate. By reducing to the virtually infinitesimal or
invisible the filter/screen between the image that represents and the real that is and, furthermore, by placing the
productive responsibilities for the image into the hands of the user (literally into the digits), the
digital
establishes itself as something capable of demolishing the “malicious”
surface of appearances to reveal a meaningful density of truth through the
quasi-immediate interface. This is the dream of immediacy rediscovered
and perhaps finally realized. At a most basic level of analysis, the risk involved in pointing to
this desire for mediatized or digitalized immediacy would be to undermine the visual
evidence of the violent/virulent occurrence of the omnipresence of war. For example,
could we have deployed a critique of the US military’s and the US
government’s use of torture in the War on Terror were it not for the
seemingly unfiltered “shock and awe” of the Abu Ghraib photos? Again, from the
point of view of the ethos of virtual/virulent war, the lure of digitalized immediacy has its uses (and, possibly, benefits, too,
even for the demos). But,
from the perspective of war’s mythos, it must be said that the “truth”
about war and war operations cannot be fully revealed because representation, no matter
how immediate or seemingly unmediated, always works by imposing some meaning onto
things/events that are made visible/representable. Consider the role played by digital media in the
Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013. Within a matter of minutes of the blasts, even before the smoke could clear the
scene, images and videos of terror taken from spectators’ mobile devices circulated through cyberspace. Everything was
seemingly captured in that instant. The horror that drew so many people to capture images through their smart phones
seems to speak on its own; it needs no commentary, no meaning to be given to it. In fact, it appears to have no mediation,
no appropriation or narrativizing, no contextualizing either. That is precisely why smart phones are so apt at giving us
such images, such representations, such “pure” meanings about things. Especially,
such a horrifying
violence, it is said, needs no commentary, no sense to be made of it. An
immeasurable violence is done to the violated when one tries to make sense
of the senseless (Agamben, 1999). Yet, as Baudrillard had already pointed out in his remarks on the Gulf War,
“everything which is turned into information becomes the object of endless speculation,
the site of total uncertainty. We are left with the symptomatic reading on our screens of the effects of the war, or
the effects of discourse about the war, or completely speculative strategic evaluations” (Baudrillard, 1995: 41). In their
digital representation, images of war and images of terror are dissolved into their own information. Information
(what the image/event wants to tell us, to reveal, allegedly) already infiltrates the tweeted or
texted image/scene (of horror, of war) with an urgency of signification and
meaning. Images of horror cannot make sense, perhaps must not be made sense of, and yet they somehow beg for
meaning, for circulation, or for propagation, in the hope that they may reveal something to someone. Thus, the
digitalized mediation of the image, even in its instantaneity, still takes place. Images—or
whatever event might have been “caught”—must succumb to a will to information, to a
will to meaning, even if it is falsely affirmed that what is digitally rendered needs no
commentary. Put differently, the image levels the event it represents by entering
into a mass/global indifferent exchange, into a virulent global
(representational) circulation that murders singularity or, indeed, the moment of
trauma (on this question of the erasure of trauma, see Debrix, 2008: 4-5; Edkins, 2003: 37-38). The enigmatic
singularity of the event—which, for Baudrillard, was once a precondition for any sort
of historical transition—gives way to an endlessness of representation,
whether such representation appears to have a clear ethical or political
purpose/signification or not. It is in this always operative tendency of
rendered appearances to yield meaning (even if their meaning is to be information-worthy), not in
the image or event itself, that we situate the conditions of possibility and reproducibility for the
ever-thickening representational fog and for the violence/virulence of images, or better
yet, of appearances. To make war or, as the case may be, the terror event mean
something—even in some of the most immediate reactions often designed to
evoke injustice or, indeed, incomprehension—is the generative point of
violence, the source of representation as a virulent/virtual code and mode of
signification. Baudrillard writes, “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render
it visible.” He adds, “We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; […] we are gorged with meaning
and it is killing us” (Baudrillard, 1988: 63). Indeed, the Western world—increasingly, the global—has found
itself with a proliferation of meanings and significations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is as if the so-called
crisis of nihilism (thought to be characteristic of much critique and philosophical suspicion throughout the 20th century)
later on produced something of the opposite order. The
mass violence of the 20th century
inaugurated not a complete void of despair or meaninglessness, but instead
a flood of meaning, if not an overproduction of it. Baudrillard refers to this frantic explosion
of meaning/signification as “a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of
material production […]” (Baudrillard, 1983: 7). Here, Baudrillard describes a mode of production of a
different kind, not motivated by class interests or exploitation of value, but by an
automated, perhaps viral, abreaction to the empty core or disenchantment of things and
the world: that is to say, the degree to which things seem to lack a singular center of gravity or have lost a justifiable
reference to the real world, and yet each thing that “matters” is also an attempt to get at reality as a question of
accumulation (of meaning), circulation (of signs), and filling up of all interstitial spaces of communication and value. The
end result is an over-abundance of signs and images of reality, something that culminates in what Baudrillard calls
hyperreality—things appear more real than reality itself. The story that needs to be told is thus not about the undoubtedly
deplorable “truth” or fact of explosive and warlike violence, but about a violence of another sort. In the radical digital
transparency of the global scene, we (members of the demos) often have full or direct exposure to explosivity, as we saw
above with the image of terror. But what
still needs to be thought and problematized is impalosivity or
what may be called implosive violence. Implosive violence is a violence for which we
do not, and perhaps will never, have much of a language (Rancière, 2007: 123).
Although, not having a language for it or, rather, as we saw above, seeking to find a language to talk about it and, perhaps,
to make sense of it is still sought after. This is, perhaps, what digital pictures of war/terror violence seek to capture or want
to force through. Implosive violence, often digitally rendered these days, is in close contact with media technologies and
representational devices and techniques because it seeks representation and meaning. This is why implosive violence
insists on calling in wars (against terror, for example) and on mobilizing war machines (against terrorist others, against
vague enemy figures), but wars and war machines that no longer have—to the extent that they ever had—a clearly
identifiable object and subject, or a clear mission/purpose. As such, this implosive violence and its wars (the
new Western/global way of war, perhaps) must remain uncertain, unclear, foggy, inwardly
driven, representational, and indeed virulent. They must remain uncertain
and confused even as they are digitally operative and desperately capture
events/images to give the impression that meanings/significations can and
will be found. Yet, as we saw above, it is not meanings exactly that must be found, but information and the endless
guarantee of its immediate circulation. As information occupies the empty place of meaning,
certainty, or truth, images must be instantaneously turned into appearances that search
for meanings that will never be discovered because, instead, a proliferation of
information-worthy facts and beliefs will take over (perhaps this is what US fake pundit and comedian
Stephen Colbert famously referred to as “truthiness”). Or, as Baudrillard puts it, “free from its former
enemies, humanity now has to create enemies from within, which in fact
produces a wide variety of inhuman metastases” (Baudrillard, 2003). Thus, this
implosive violence is destined to be a global violence since it "is the product
of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity,
including of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. […] It is a
violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself and strives to
establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear […]
Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by
contagion, produces by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist"
(2003; our italics). In a way, this global virulence is all-out and everyday war itself. It is also the Global War on Terror, a
war whose virulence and ever present (virtual, potential) violence mediatizes and hyper-realizes everyday life for a lot of
human bodies in the West and beyond (is that not also something that the Boston Marathon bombing smart phone
representations struggled to tell us?). For Baudrillard, this is how we should apprehend the mythos of globalization (since
globalization is all about virulence). To suggest, as many still do, that there is any sort of remaining
hegemony in the production of cultural and political meanings (as, for example, Horkheimer and
Adorno once told us; see Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002) is anachronistic. But it is also a convenient claim to
make. As we mentioned above, such a posture implies that hope can be around the
corner, that things can be changed, that the demos can be rescued and liberated,
that it can trust the immediacy offered by today’s digitalized media, and that such an immediacy is the
guarantee that not all meanings are lost (again, it is about proving meaning by way of information, the real
by way of appearances). Viral, virtual, and virulent media representations have assumed the
empty throne abandoned by the modern sovereign/core of power in the
implosive West/global. The implosive immediacy of proliferating videos, images, memes, articles, utterances,
leaks, wikis, blogs, clips, blips, flips, or flops reigns supreme and sovereign. And it is this proliferating
sovereignty of digitalized mediation/representation that ensures the circulation of war’s
violence/virulence too (it is, in this way, war’s platform and generator). As Baudrillard intimates, this representational,
mediatized, and informational virality or virulence is simply the historical logic of the West/modernity brought to its fatal
and perhaps absurd end, a tautology of Western modernity and globality inwardly and mediatically hyper-realized (truth,
being, and language all operating as one and the same, indifferently, in a circulatory movement of immediately available
appearances). Itis the eternal recurrence of the same, or perhaps the eternal
recurrence of the always already replayed. Of course, we (digital modern subjects) could ignore
all this. We could go on to celebrate representational, real-time digital technologies and
their visual/viral/virulent practices in the belief that, somehow, they will continue to give
us the truth of war, the truth of violence, the truth of senseless terror/horror . Perhaps, they
may even give us a new hope/meaning about the demos, about “our” ontological positioning in, through, and with digital
media. And maybe the ethical impulse is indeed to ignore or, at least, selectively use this Baudrillardian critique of war’s
and representation’s violence and virulence. But another posture, one we advocate, is to take another look at the violence
of representation itself, at the virulence of the West and the global, and at modernity’s own implosive history—which, of
course, is the history of representation, too—to which today’s digitalized technologies and media owe their significance
and, at times, urgency.
 War against Unknown
War has subsequently become digital – a hyperreal play of
information that transcends violence itself. As the spreadsheet
becomes the most dangerous weapon on the battlefield, the
structural law of domination escapes the material – yet this does
not make termination within the matrix any less of a threat
Öberg 16 (Dr. Dan Öberg, Professor in Department of Military Science, Swedish
Defense College, Associate Editor for Journal of Narrative Politics, War, transparency
and control: the military architecture of operational warfare, Cambridge Review of
International Affairs, October 20, 2016, p. 3-13)
In what way does warfare relate to social control? Historically, war studies and military science, as well as military
doctrine in general, tend to understand warfare as the how of waging war, typically involving force-on-
force military operations on a demarcated field of battle (Creveld 1991, 10; Gat 2006, 9; Keegan 2004, 28; US DOD 2013,
I2). That is, warfare as the “how” of war
tends to be reduced to the application of military
battlefield tactics taking place in a more or less demarcated space/time. As Caroline Holmqvist
has stated, the focus on the question of “how” risks making the method of war a
preoccupation in its own right. Moreover, this might lead to a neglect of the way warfare is
always already interlinked with dominant legal, political and colonial discourses
(Holmqvist 2010, 111–113; Mbembe 2003, 25; Pretorius 2008, 114). As part of attempts to understand warfare beyond
such a ‘bare technique’ so as to
properly conceive of it as ‘a technological instrument in the
management of a global(ised) system’ (Behnke 2006, 937), there have been a number of empirical studies
which relate warfare (and predominately Western military imaginaries) to discourses of control. They have studied the
relationship between control and industrialized-mechanized warfare (see Bousquet 2009), network-centric warfare
(Lawson 2011), the interplay between military representations of strategy (Wasinski 2011), and the co-constitutive aspects
of fighting and political theory (Brighton 2013). As Dillon and Reid (2000, 2001, 2009) argue in their work on “the liberal
way of war”, to
understand global warfare, we need to investigate the way it exerts control as
a specific liberal practice. They suggest that: the liberal way of rule … necessarily correlates
with its own brand of war-making … (and is) … shaped by its commitment to war, and the
exigencies not simply of war-making but of the continuous state of emergency and security
as well as constant preparedness for war, which characterize liberal rule as such. (Dillon and Reid 2009, 8)
This is one reason why it makes sense to turn to the various preoccupations that characterize the discursive character of
liberal regimes: knowledge networks, complexity, self-adaption (Dillon and Reid 2001, 45) and, in addition to this,
transparency. Although a plural and complex enterprise, global liberal governance is comprised of
techniques on managing populations that operate a strategic game highly dependent on
assimilating war into its practices of power (Dillon and Reid 2001, 41–42). Both historically and
in the present, liberal wars, most notably the US-led counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reflect the
countries that wage them. They rest on the policing of a foundational narrative of
emancipation and humanitarian values. Such policing points towards an increasing
logic of surveillance against the movements of populations and thereby risks leading to
an “unending war” directed against the uncertainty and interconnectivity of
political life. The current militarization of the refugee situation in the Mediterranean is one
case in point. In fact, other areas such as aid-work can be seen as a complementary strategic
facet which relies on military interventions to clear the way and to protect. This is what
has been known as the “Humanitarian Empire” (Duffield 2010, 69; Evans 2013, 47; see also Holmqvist
2014). It is interesting, moreover, to consider the way war and practices of liberal peace came together in the “war on
terror”. This conflation can be seen in how strategies
of violent interventions are committed to the
advancement of liberalism as a social organization. One example is the way liberalism
is based on rational means and ends deliberation that neglects how wars of
“emancipation” involve radically different perspectives on life, consequently leading to
depolitization and dehumanization of the Other. This in turn suggests that liberal warfare
stems out of liberal peace interventionism and principles of ‘total governance’ (Behnke 2004,
280–287; Bell 2011, 310–312, 323–325; Duffield 2010, 53–56). As Brad Evans has argued, even humanitarian
intervention rests upon an ‘operative fabric of … faith’ which leads to a politics of pre-
emption (2013, 179). Indeed, as we shall see in the final parts of this article, such logic is an integral part of
the operationalization of warfare. However, before we do so, the following sections turn to Baudrillard, to
better unpack the way warfare relates to transparency as a means of control. Transparency and control Already in the
1960s, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard warned of the way transparency works as an ideology
of social control. In challenging transparency, Baudrillard has looked particularly at the way urban architecture
combines mirroring and light with interconnected open spaces. He argues that these features stand in direct relation to
what he calls “operational violence”: namely, that transparency is generated by operational modelling,
algorithms, and the processing that occurs in networks and closed loops. This in turn
gives rise to a type of alienation that violently circumscribes the subject from lived
experience (Baudrillard 2005a, 43; 2005b, 25–38). Baudrillard spent considerable effort investigating the way
operational violence and transparency are generated by capitalist and techno- scientific
structures of production and liberation. Such structures in turn create systemic effects in
which lived experience works as an expression of an ideological system based on total
visibility (Baudrillard 1975, 54–64; 1994a, 61–73; 2005b, 17, 146). Baudrillard draws upon these insights in a number
of ways, claiming that transparency indicates a subtle form of censorship or even a ‘terror’ as it
makes the global subject hostage to the fluid and systemic aspects of various
architectures of control (Baudrillard 1994b, 58; Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002, 9, 64). Understood in this way,
architectures of control help to generate a ‘hegemonic visibility’ which is best characterized
as a world ‘where everything must be immediately visible and immediately
interpretable’ (Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002, 9). Arguably, the problem of control through transparency centres on
how to ‘invest mental and visual space’ (Baudrillard 2014, 11). Control is enabled through summoning
banal appearances that are “already there”—repeating and modulating themselves to
infinity, according to the nuances of a programmed operational code (Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002, 63; Baudrillard
2014, 22–23). Baudrillard aptly summarizes this ideology as construing a world in which
‘everything is to be legible’, ‘visible’, ‘measurable’, ‘said, accumulated, indexed and
recorded’ (1990a, 34–35). In the wake of Baudrillard (and other thinkers like Foucault and Virilio), critical debate on
the politics of transparency took off in the 1990s. Often situated as part of a critique of liberal governing, such research
emphasizes three important points (see for comparison Mahmud 2012, 1196; Hansen and Flyverbom 2014, 875–876).
Firstly, the notion of transparency is related to a modernist desire of democratic
rationality. For example, it emphasizes displays and gives the illusion of choice, but works as
an imperceptible limit which might trap subjectivity in particular
organizational architectures (see Gabriel 2005; Schuman 2007; Nordin 2016). Secondly,
transparency, regardless of its aims, tends to relate to surveillance, in turn making the
notion strongly linked to social control. As Achille Mbembe has argued, both state and
emancipatory violence has often been historically characterized by striving towards
absolute transparency between the state and its people. Such a striving tends to be built on
creating an open space in which ‘error’ is reduced, ‘truth’ enhanced and ‘aberrations’
eradicated (Mbembe 2003, 19). Thirdly, transparency is often considered to be a voluntary but necessary aspect of
global capitalism. The insight that transparency works as a means of corporate control is evident in research which
argues that media exposure and scientific progress often lead to less rather than more
accountability in global capitalist structures. For example, exposure of certain issues tends to
enable blind spots in other areas. Similarly, scientific discourse tends to remove ethical
issues from the agenda by relying on a specialized language which is difficult for the
layman to understand (Zyglidopoulos and Fleming 2011, 692–693). Arguably, these logics work as central
dimensions in what we might call “an ideology of transparency” conflated with liberal core values. As Slavoj Zizek has
illustrated, ‘ideology’ should not be taken to mean (as in the orthodox Marxist premise) a ‘false consciousness’. Rather it
implies the formation of ‘a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge
of its participants as to its essence’ (Zizek 1989, 21). To outline and challenge transparency as
an ideology is therefore not an attempt to unveil a “better” reality through theory. It is
rather an attempt to understand, theoretically and empirically, what global liberal fantasies of
making the world appear through techniques of total visibility do in terms of producing
specific discourses as reality. As has been outlined, this ideology is present, and indeed
produced, in distinct spheres such as information technology, corporate culture or
knowledge algorithms (Valentine 2000; Zyglidopoulos and Fleming 2011; Hansen and Flyverbom 2014). But it
is also an inherent part of the gendered and racialized visual regimes that underlie
surveillance activities and security practices in contemporary Europe, for example in the way the “colonial
gaze” persists through exoticizing difference (see Vaughan-Williams 2008; Jones 2011). This is
evident particularly in the way transparency helps to create an impetus for racialized
othering in a world in which “all is uncovered”. Transparency and warfare As the previous parts
established, the logic of global warfare is characterized by its interrelation to liberal
discourses of interventionism. Moreover, transparency needs to be understood, not as “good
governance” but as part of an ideology which strives to render the world visible,
measurable, indexed and recorded, so as to invest it as a mental and visual space.
How does this ideology of transparency relate to global warfare? One of the few thinkers who have connected warfare with
transparency as a means to control a battlefield is Paul Virilio. He explicitly locates an ideology of transparency as part of
the military imaginary waging war. In doing so, Virilio argues that social
control over demarcated spaces
has given way to global control of the environment dependent on various techniques of
transparency (such as aerial imagery or radar), often enacted through military vision (Virilio 1989, 72;
2000a, 61). Tracing how the world gradually becomes more and more transparent as a result of the visualization of the
battlefield, Viriliointerprets historical events in warfare, such as the bombings of Belgrade
by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1999, as part of an attempt to extend a ‘matchless
transparency’ to the globe (Virilio 2000b, 23). His argument mirrors other critics of liberal warfare (often
drawing upon Foucault) who state that when a population is targeted the consequences go beyond injury as it aims to
pacify global subjectivity. For example, Vivianne Jabri has argued that technologies that target
bodies and populations are not isolated occurrences but part of liberal governing (Jabri,
2006, 55). The argument that there is a politics that unfolds on the field of battle is also evident in Shane Brighton’s urging
that the study of warfare should engage directly with ‘the killing mechanism on the battlefield’ so as to better grasp its
politics (2013, 663–665). The point that warfare is about killing and violence is well taken. However, it might be a mistake
to think of battlefield practices as the locus of the way warfare exerts control. Arguably, thinking warfare in this way
indirectly helps to create a demand for more transparency on the field of battle. This
is not to say that the
“terror” Baudrillard identifies in the hegemonic visibility of modern life is any less
relevant when it comes to the battlefield, but simply that it extends beyond it. The
“matchless transparency” that Virilio found in the Kosovo war was enacted not merely through the
Belgrade bombings but also as part of the whole operational machinery which supported
this effort. In fact, there is a whole subset of “supportive functions” which occur beyond
the field of battle. Much of the military supporting systems can be interpreted as a design aiming to efficiently
orchestrate combat.3 This design is called “operational warfare” and typically deals with planning,
employment and the supportive functions of war (see Vego 2007; Olsen and Creveld 2011). The idea
that warfare is operational underlies all US and NATO doctrine and can be exemplified by the way it is considered
an “effects-based” process which is fought by being coordinated, modelled and planned
(see AFDD 2007a, 1-2, 37-40). In fact, the military itself defines the art of operational warfare as the processes which
‘visualize how best to efficiently and effectively employ military capabilities ….’ (AFDD 2007b, 70). Let us, therefore, in
order to better understand the relationship between warfare, transparency and control, consider the military architecture
beyond the field of battle and the way it operationalizes warfare. As Antoine Bousquet has outlined, the
military has
been preoccupied for centuries with eradicating friction and uncertainty from
warfare. In recent times, attempts to lift the ‘fog of war’ in order to get an omniscient, real-
time view of the battlefield are often associated with ‘network centric warfare’ (Bousquet
2009, 215–234). While most authors emphasize the way network-centric warfare relates to information and
communication, what concerns me here is not so much the alleged shift in warfare due to new technology. Rather, I find
network-centric warfare interesting as part of an attempt to extend a “matchless transparency” to the global battlefield
through a logic of operational violence. In fact, the
core characteristics of network-centric warfare are
part and parcel of operational warfare. As Steve Niva has shown, what today is called ‘shadow wars’ is to a
large degree enabled as a result of organizational changes in American bureaucratic structures which stem out of network-
centric warfare (Niva 2013, 197–198). It is therefore not far-fetched to examine military
discourses in accordance
with a logic that aims to create “hegemonic visibility” due to administrative and bureaucratic
rituals. The historical attempt to lift the fog of war and create an omniscient view of the
battlefield mesh well with the way modern life is characterized by hegemonic visibility,
but with one important addition. As the following parts illustrate, the military fantasy to extend a
“matchless transparency” by global war is directed towards its external surroundings—the
deepened and widened global battlefield—but also towards itself as an organizational form.
The self-referential repetitions and modulations according to programmed codes that
Baudrillard claimed characterizes an ideology of transparency therefore need to be
analysed as part of a military operational coding. The rest of the article examines this, by a reading of US
military doctrine documents and manuals, in order to explore and investigate the implications of transparency as a
technique of control. The military architecture as excess What does the inside of the military architecture look like? How
does it invest space and time discursively as part of ‘its own brand of war-making’ (Dillon and Reid 2009, 8) and what self-
images are “already there” modulated according to the codes of operational warfare? Military
doctrines and
manuals are characterized both by discursive content and by the hierarchical and
syntactical architecture they form (Ansorge 2010, 362–363, 377). The easiest way to encounter doctrines is as
part of doctrine trees clustering through hyperlinks into open-source documents available online. The fact that such
documents are “official” creates a self-evident hierarchy between representations, as the doctrines represent an official
version of warfare in a synchronized manner, “one click away”.4 Such dissemination creates a technical
and transparent modus operandi. The architecture of military doctrines codes warfare as part of a discursive
shift that emphasizes “post-heroic” aspects of war. This shift is evident in that warfare is understood to be a
matter of “administrative processing” that functions in the same way as a
“telecommuting job for office workers” (see Chamayou 2015a; Nordin and Öberg 2015). Let us consider the
operational code through the way “geo-spatial intelligence” is collected by drones. Doing so one finds in the doctrines
various displays of detailed ‘end to end architectures’ over organizational relations for tasking, collecting and processing
data (US Air Force Instruction, 2012, 6). The doctrines string together dozens of abbreviations and combine them with
features such as synchronization, integration, managing, assessment and facilitation, supposedly guiding “warfighting”
integration at all levels of warfare (AFI 14–132, 7–15). This is but one example of the way the
key aspects of
warfare (and the factual issues or decisions it involves) appear as a flowchart of organizational
routines written in a specialized and technocratic language. A common denominator of US military
doctrines is the way warfare is modelled and rendered transparent as an operational and
bureaucratic practice. The amount of “knowledge” in this architecture is excessive to the
point where it makes oversight difficult. Consider how the US Department of Defense alone lists 80 joint
publications ranging from various types of military operations, homeland defense and electronic warfare to logistics and
personnel support. To this we can add hundreds
of commission instructions, commission orders, staff
policy documents and directives, not to mention the respective doctrine hierarchy of the
military services. Taken together this documentation uncovers an operational,
organizational and bureaucratic practice which comes out of an attempt to efficiently
plan and conduct warfare. The doctrines thereby render warfare visible through an
excess of information consisting largely of what resembles Orwellian “newspeak”, an
excess of abbreviations, and a transparency of organizational routines (see for example AFDD
2013b, 8). The open and accessible form of warfare obscures the many extremely difficult decisions that are involved in
waging war and that take place in briefings, staff meetings, analysis cells and other arenas where there is no transparency
at all. But if one is to look for actual responsibility in a campaign, for possibilities of agency, or for old-
fashioned concepts like glory or combat, there is very little in the doctrinal architecture. What we
find is not warfare but operational warfare, more characterized by a PowerPoint
slideshow at a business meeting than an old-fashioned “Clausewitzian” war.5 The point here is not simply to
criticize military doctrines for masking certain content while creating smokescreens. Rather, I find it interesting that the
excess of doctrinal hierarchies and forms and the newspeak of military doctrines obscure
the way this operational coding enables a control of space and time. As argued in the
introduction, the widening and deepening of the battlefield, and the dissolving of spatial and temporal distinctions that
follows from this, is often considered to be a result of the way operational warfare has increased firepower, logistics and
joint operations. However, in an era of drone warfare and global surveillance through space
satellites, it is hardly a coincidence that military manuals and doctrines tend to talk
about “operational environment”, “area of interest”, or even “the playbox” rather than
the “battlefield”.6 One central tenet of the military architecture is that war is an activity that can be
modelled, simulated and constructed through planning. Traditionally, war has been considered to be
limited in space (through the battlefield) and in time (through distinctions between peace and war).7 The “already
visible” coding of warfare enables ‘an operational environment that is ever expanding’
(AFDD 2007b, 1) which makes the space of war resemble the model of a global battlefield. The
doctrinal organizational schedules work exactly the same at all times and make no
distinction between peacetime and wartime (AFDD 2013b, 1, 37). The military
architecture thereby codes space as an expanding area of operations and time as
operational time (what is often called “battle rhythm”). As the previous part illustrated, the military architecture is
best understood through an excess of bureaucratic and administrative doctrinal details. But what happens when we focus
on its outside? What do we see from within the military architecture? In what way are space and time coded through the
imaginary of operational warfare? The
military architecture arguably displays an obsession with
rendering space and time visible through authority and control. Typically, when a military
force is deploying it does so by establishing a whole life-world along with it. Moving troops, building camps and securing
the surrounding area indicate techniques of control over what is called ROMO—the range of military operations—that is,
time and space. Every military operation depends on proper air-, sea- and land-lines of
communication. Such lines are transportation bridges to deploy and sustain forces within a particular area. In order
to do so the military architecture depends on a system of supporting nodes such as airfields, ports and other locations, and
every system depends on the extent to which it is able to visualize space and time, for
example by keeping track of cargo, passengers, medical patients or property through real-time visibility (AFDD 4–0, 1–15,
27–33, 42–47). The modelling of warfare is both a way of preparing for what will occur in an
area of operations and a means for conditioning this area of operation into a particular
space/time. Military operations appropriate, visualize and control space by occupying roads, ports, airfields or
airspace. Coding takes place through, for example, training cycles for deployment, and each
step in such training amounts to repeating particular preparations. Taken together, they are
considered to give all the necessary knowledge when deployed. One example is when, in the 2003 Iraq War, military
intelligence or logistics was often considered to “drive” warfare. Consider the way in which inventions
in logistics
systems used delivery routes as mapping functions in order to render the surrounding
“operational areas” as transparent as possible.8 This meant that logistics convoys made the area of
operations appear. Ideally, that which occurred in relation to the “global area of operations”
would then be screened out from within, and visualized in relation to this particular point
of view. Therefore, the possibility to kill, for example by striking at a target, is indirectly
produced as part of mundane tasks such as delivering food and supplies. Through the way it
is made to appear, the battlefield became an indirect consequence of operational warfare.
The time of warfare is coded as operational (a “battle rhythm”). This notion goes back to the perceived need to synchronize
tactical, operational and strategic processes in order to coordinate the planning, preparation and execution of warfare. The
“battle rhythm” is an attempt (together with notions like “zulu time”) to create a universal, military time zone which is
staff-driven. The name “battle” basically means the same thing as “efficiency” in this context. The
operational level
of warfare is defined as a constant search for efficiency through coordination and ‘[i]t is
essentially a schedule of important events which should be synchronized with the other Service or functional components
and combined forces …’ (AFDD 2–8, 9), within a given space/time. However, such coding of space/time obscures that
warfare works through specialized functions and compartmentalization in which all is
reduced to practical questions and organizational routines. Warfare becomes a
matter not of killing, not of ethics, not of politics, but of technical questions such as
“Who is responsible for resources?”, or “Who commands which staff-processes?” or, put more bluntly: “When is the
next staff meeting?” The doctrinal architecture on operational warfare is characterized by a
constant, real-time coding of the world as an area of operations through planning and
modelling. Consider how war games, concept creations and experiments are used in order to generate insights in the
use of space and time in warfare by demonstrating future unanticipated consequences, vulnerabilities and concerns. This
is done in order to fight more efficiently and to discover a more lethal relation to future space (AFDD 2011d, 40; AFDD
2011c, 40). The control
of space/time is a key characteristic of a military discourse on
operational warfare that looks for threat assessments of social activity to ‘predict future
actions or provide advanced indications and warnings of attack’ (AFDD 2011b, 15; see also 24–25)
and intelligence as a means to ‘forecast’ and ‘anticipate future conditions’ (AFDD 2011d, 25). Such forecasting has little to
do with whether the monitoring affects the space/ time of one’s own forces, of neutral forces and of the enemy. It
is the
patterns and dynamics of the global life-world itself (for example, weather or socio-biological patterns)
which needs to be monitored so as to render space/time transparent for targeting (see
AFDD 2013b; US JFCOM 2011a; 2011b; White 2006; Brown 2007). That is, planning warfare obscures that the
operationalization of space into a global area of operations and of time into an
operational rhythm is a violent appropriation of lived space and time. As Brighton and
others have pointed out, the battlefield involves a politics. However, warfare is not political, or violent, simply because of
the way it kills, but also through the way its operationalization codes space/time as a derivate of global warfare. This also
goes for the way the supporting functions of warfare involve a politics which occurs beyond the battlefield. The
military discourse constantly interlinks knowledge from the global battlefield through
feedback loops, validates it through more combat, and disseminates it into the structure
of the architecture in a transparent fashion (see for example USAF 2014a, 10). In the liberal discourse, the
increased transparency of an everexpanding battlefield is considered a stroke of luck. This is because it enables better
information management that ‘may contribute in providing prompt, accurate intelligence … and … improving shared
situational awareness’ which in turn might facilitate decision-making (’t Hart and Sundelius 2013, 453). However, such a
view fails to recognize that terms like “situational awareness” and “accurate intelligence” are
enabled, and thereby constructed as needs, not only through the uncertainty that violence brings, but also through
the institutional and organizational demands that are ritualized in the supporting
functions of warfare. The transparency of global warfare The global battlefield expands through the
operational coding of a military architecture which constantly aims to make space and
time a derivate of an operational planning model. As space is rendered visible as a global
area of operations and time as a constant operational rhythm, the doctrinal architecture emphasizes that surveillance
is on-going, seamless and comprehensive: ‘a network of interrelated, simultaneous operations that can, at
any given time, feed and be fed by other operations’ (AFDD 2012, 4; see also 5, 52–55). Surveillance is a crucial
part of global liberal control as it monitors the widened and deepened global battlefield.
In this way it works as a ‘core function’ of warfare through the notion of ‘global strikes’ across the full spectrum of
conflicts, ‘holding
any target on the planet at risk’ (Deptula and Francisco 2010, 15; USAF 2014b, 8). The
US military has massive systems at its disposal for surveillance. For example air,
space and cyber operations
centres and sensor systems are placed around the globe and in orbit. Consider the MQ-9 Reapers
wide-area electro-optical and ground moving-target-indicator surveillance and the Gorgon Stare: a wide-area airborne
surveillance system with a spherical array of many hundreds of video cameras for each drone (Deptula and Francisco
2010, 14). These sensors continuously transfer data globally (each covering about 100 square kilometres),
which is processed and disseminated into ‘actionable intelligence’ that enables an
‘understanding of the operational environment’ (AFDD 2012, 2–3, 5). But what does such “intelligence”
and “understanding” amount to? The ultimate dream of the military architects is that data might
be ‘globally interconnected’ into an ‘end-to-end set of information capabilities for collecting, processing, storing,
disseminating, and managing information on demand to warfighters…’ (US DOD 2009, 10). This future system in
the making is called a “global information grid” (or GIG) and will work as a comprehensive database
that functions as an operational code for how one might ‘efficiently plan and conduct warfare’. This is very much
the end-point of the fantasy of network-centric warfare aiming to ‘achieve shared
situational awareness, increased speed of command, a higher tempo of operations,
greater lethality, increased survivability, and … operational synergy’ (AFDD 2007b, 21). The
military goal is therefore to reach the point where all are interconnected and visible according to the logic of “global
strike”. One example of this logic is the way surveillance anticipates control over the global operational environment
through visual sensors, real-time threat predictions, weapons and warning systems, satellite surveillance or horizon
scanning. This in turn implies a global, integrated, all-encompassing surveillance
which scans capabilities, civil or bureaucratic activities and behaviours in general, as part
of a network-centric and uninterrupted, on-going process (AFDD 2012, 52–55). It hardly needs
mentioning that rendering areas (such as northern Pakistan) transparent through surveillance
implies extreme violence. As one example, consider how US targeting methods against “insurgents” in
Afghanistan at the end of the last decade started focusing more on networks (consider the call to target “skill-bearers” and
“knowledge”).9 At face value, it might seem ironic that “knowledge”—a core value of the liberal imaginary if there ever
was one—is made to appear a characteristic of enmity. However, if seen in relation to an architecture in
which the global battlefield is ever-present in real time, it follows suit that the
banality of everyday life
appears as a target. The demand for unveiling space/times of war is well illustrated by the military method of
analysing according to social and biological patterns. The main aim of such analysis is to ‘notice when something
is out of the ordinary’ in relation to everyday behaviour and actions (US JFCOM 2011a, 21)—for
example, to notice the types of people who go to the market, the times of day that children play outdoors, where and when
groups of males meet, what the prayer times and prayer locations are, and so forth. The
aim of this surveillance
is to ‘understand’ the way in which patterns of a community’s ‘battle-rhythm’ emerge
and are broken (US JFCOM 2011a, 20–22). The acts are then entered into a ‘plot-sheet’ with
exact times so as to deduce large-scale patterns and ‘predict future enemy actions’ (US
JFCOM 2011b, 173). This in turn creates potential objects which are erased through military
targeting. The desire to predict and create the future as a threat constantly demands
flows of more information, more visibility and more knowledge. Moreover, it
constantly demands the means (such as weaponry, education, technology) to maintain this demand. Leading officers have
illustrated this logic at its purest by arguing that the US needs to act more like ‘hunters’: The foundations of (the US
military’s) achievement will hinge on the ability to sense, know, decide, and act ahead of our adversaries on a global scale.
These technologies and challenges have trumped the buffer of geography that historically afforded us the luxury of time to
think and act, demanding that we alter our … farmer-culture mind-set and begin to act more like hunters…. In the future,
Air Force … professionals must assure the availability of information necessary to bring a strategy to a successful outcome
well before we need it. (Deptula and Francisco 2010, 16, my emphasis) As Grégoire Chamayou has argued, one
quintessential aspect of contemporary warfare post 9/11 is the fact that combat has in many ways been supplanted by
“hunting”. This insight is important as it helps us understand part of the purpose of the immediate and all-encompassing
unveiling of the globe. The underlying idea of warfare as a ‘manhunt’ is the attempt to
keep any and all threats
in check by simply erasing them at a higher pace than they form (Chamayou 2015b, 71).
Operational warfare is conceived of as a technical and administrative process run by “hunters” who, as they peek into the
military architecture, see themselves as being constituted through a continuous race towards the
future. In sharp contrast to this military subject, the global object that is unveiled—be it a skill-bearer, a
social pattern, a cluster of cell-phone signals, or a group of children gathering— resembles a target signature
more than a human subject. In the self-enclosed network which connects a continuous, seamless collection of
data, the military architecture creates an interior which revolves around the display of scenarios relating to global
superiority, mobility and strike capacity. The end-point of operational space/time is the ‘ultimate
position … the position of total control’ of the Earth (Lyndon B. Johnson, quoted in AFDD 2011d,
1). The methodology of operational warfare—the way it makes global space an area of operations and the
past and the future a derivate of operational time— constantly strives towards this (imaginary) position
of control. The importance of the operational coding of space/time cannot be
overstated as it creates an underlying feature of a military imaginary which
warns against being ‘a prisoner of the future’ as it aims to increase its ‘future impact’
(USAF 2014a, particularly 4–13). The goal is for warfare to be absolutely transparent—or “agile”
as it is called in military discourse—so as to reduce its presence and footprint, improving response times, constantly
streamlining the way it meshes with other war processes (AFDD 2013b, 2; AFDD 2013a, 19). In short, the
end point
of the military architecture is to control not only space and time, but also to make itself
into a pure and transparent potentiality for warfare as control. Read in this manner, the
military urge to render the world transparent and invest it as a mental and visual
operational space and time becomes part of a liberal ideology that constantly strives to
make the world visible, calculable, decipherable and foreseeable. The “ideology of transparency”
therefore needs to be understood as interrelated with a liberal way of peace which constantly emphasizes transparency as
“good governance”. But it also needs to be seen in relation to a type of “liberal
warfare” which strives to
operationalize a violence that is transparent not only to itself, but also to the global
battlefield it renders visible.
Alt
 Refusal
In the face of their imposition of meaning onto the map of the
globe, we must use the only option left – the refusal as such
Baudrillard 96. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, pg. 96
Say: This is real, the world is real, the real exists (I have met it) -- no one laughs. Say:
This is a simulacrum, you are merely a simulacrum, this war is a
simulacrum -- everyone bursts out laughing. With forced, condescending
laughter, or uncontrollable mirth, as though at a childish joke or an obscene
proposition. Everything to do with the simulacrum is taboo or obscene, as is everything relating to sex or death.
Yet it is much rather reality and obviousness which are obscene. It is the truth we should
laugh at. You can imagine a culture where everyone laughs spontaneously
when someone says: `This is true', `This is real'. ¶ All this defines the
irresolvable relationship between thought and reality. A certain form of
thought is bound to the real. It starts out from the hypothesis that ideas have
referents and that there is a possible ideation of reality. A comforting polarity, which is
that of tailor-made dialectical and philosophical solutions. The other form of thought is
eccentric to the real, a stranger to dialectics, a stranger even to critical
thought. It is not even a disavowal of the concept of reality. It is illusion, power of
illusion, or, in other words, a playing with reality, as seduction is a playing with desire, as
metaphor is a playing with truth. This radical thought does not stem from a philosophical doubt, a
utopian transference, or an ideal transcendence. It is the material illusion, immanent in this so-called
`real' world. And thus it seems to come from elsewhere. It seems to be the
extrapolation of this world into another world. ¶ At all events, there is
incompatibility between thought and the real. There is no sort of necessary or natural
transition from the one to the other. Neither alternation, nor alternative: only otherness and
distance keep them charged up. This is what ensures the singularity of thought,
the singularity by which it constitutes an event, just like the singularity of the world,
the singularity by which it too constitutes an event. ¶ It has doubtless not always been so. One may
dream of a happy conjunction of idea and reality, cradled by the Enlightenment and modernity, in the heroic age of critical
thought. Yet critical thought, the butt of which was a certain illusion -- superstitious, religious or ideological -- is in
substance ended. Even if it had survived its catastrophic secularization in all the
political movements of the twentieth century, this ideal and seemingly necessary
relationship between the concept and reality would, at all events, be destroyed today.
It has broken down under pressure from a gigantic technical and mental simulation, to
be replaced by an autonomy of the virtual, henceforth liberated from the real, and a
simultaneous autonomy of the real which we see functioning on its own account in a
demented -- that is, infinitely self-referential -- perspective. Having been expelled, so to
speak, from its own principle, extraneized, the real has itself become an extreme
phenomenon. In other words, one can no longer think it as real, but as exorbitated,
as though seen from another world -- in short, as illusion. Imagine the stupefying
experience which the discovery of a real world other than our own would represent. The objectivity of our world
is a discovery we made, like America -- and at almost the same time. Now what one has
discovered, one can never then invent. And so we discovered reality, which
remains to be invented (or: so we invented reality, which remains to be
discovered). ¶ Why might there not be as many real worlds as imaginary ones? Why a single real world? Why such
an exception? Truth to tell, the real world, among all the other possible ones, is
unthinkable, except as dangerous superstition. We must break with it as
critical thought once broke (in the name of the real!) with religious superstition.
Thinkers, one more effort! 1 ¶ In any case, the two orders of thought are
irreconcilable. They each follow their course without merging; at best they slide over
each other like tectonic plates, and occasionally their collision or subduction creates fault
lines into which reality rushes. Fate is always at the intersection of these two lines of
force. Similarly, radical thought is at the violent intersection of meaning and non-
meaning, of truth and non-truth, of the continuity of the world and the
continuity of the nothing. ¶ Unlike the discourse of the real, which gambles on the fact
of there being something rather than nothing, and aspires to being founded on the
guarantee of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought, for its part, wagers
on the illusion of the world. It aspires to the status of illusion, restoring the non-
veracity of facts, the non-signification of the world, proposing the opposite
hypothesis that there is nothing rather than something, and
going in pursuit of that nothing which runs beneath the
apparent continuity of meaning. ¶ The radical prediction is always the prediction of the
non-reality of facts, of the illusoriness of the state of fact. It
begins only with the presentiment of that
illusoriness, and is never confused with the objective state of things. Every confusion of
that kind is of the order of the confusion of the messenger and the message, which leads
to the elimination of the messenger bearing bad news (for example, the news of
the uncertainty of the real, of the non-occurrence of certain events, of the
nullity of our values). ¶ Every confusion of thought with the order of the real -- that
alleged `faithfulness' to the real of a thought which has cooked it up out of nothing -- is
hallucinatory. It arises, moreover, from a total misunderstanding about language, which is
illusion in its very movement, since it is the bearer of that continuity of the
void, that continuity of the nothing at the very heart of what it says, since it is,
in its very materiality, deconstruction of what it signifies. Just as photography
connotes the effacing, the death of what it represents -- which lends it its intensity
-- so what lends writing, fictional or theoretical, its intensity is the void, the
nothingness running beneath the surface, the illusion of meaning, the ironic
dimension of language, correlative with that of the facts themselves, which are never anything but what they
are [ne sont jamais que ce qu'ils sont]. That is to say, they are never more than what they are and they are, literally, never
only what they are [jamais que ce qu'ils sont]. The
irony of the facts, in their wretched reality, is
precisely that
they are only what they are but that, by that very fact, they are necessarily
beyond. For de facto existence is impossible -- nothing is wholly obvious without
becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true. ¶ It is this ironic
transfiguration which constitutes the event of language. And it is to restoring this
fundamental illusion of the world and language that thought must apply itself, if it is
not stupidly to take concepts in their literalness -- messenger confused with the message,
language confused with its meaning and therefore sacrificed in advance. ¶ There is a twofold,
contradictory exigency in thought. It is not to analyse the world in order to extract from it an improbable truth, not to
adapt to the facts in order to abstract some logical construction from them, but to set in place a form, a matrix of illusion
and disillusion, which seduced reality will spontaneously feed and which will, consequently, be verified remorselessly (the
only need is to shift the camera angle from time to time). For reality asks nothing other than to submit itself to hypotheses.
And it confirms them all. That, indeed, is its ruse and its vengeance. ¶ The theoretical ideal would be to set in place
propositions in such a way that they could be disconfirmed by reality, in such a way that reality could only oppose them
violently, and thereby unmask itself. For reality
is an illusion, and all thought must seek
first of all to unmask it. To do that, it must itself advance behind a mask and
constitute itself as a decoy, without regard for its own truth. It must pride itself on
not being an instrument of analysis, not being a critical tool. For it is the world which
must analyse itself. It is the world itself which must reveal itself not as truth,
but as illusion. The derealization of the world will be the work of the world itself. 2 ¶
Reality must be caught in the trap, we must move quicker than reality. Ideas,
too, have to move faster than their shadows. But if they go too quickly, they lose even
their shadows. No longer having even the shadow of an idea. ... Words move quicker than
meaning, but if they go too quickly, we have madness: the ellipsis of meaning can
make us lose even the taste for the sign. What are we to exchange this portion of shadow and
labour against -- this saving of intellectual activity and patience? What can we sell it to the devil for? It is very difficult to say. We are, in fact, the orphans of a reality come too late, a reality which is itself, like truth, something registered only after the event. ¶ The ultimate is for an idea to disappear as idea to become
a thing among things. That is where it finds its accomplishment. Once it has become consubstantial with the surrounding world, there is no call for it to appear, nor to be defended as such. Evanescence of the idea by silent dissemination. An idea is never destined to burst upon the world, but to be extinguished into it, into its
showing-through in the world, the world's showing-through in it. A book ends only with the disappearance of its object. Its substance must leave no trace. This is the equivalent of a perfect crime. Whatever its object, writing must make the illusion of that object shine forth, must make it an impenetrable enigma -- unacceptable
to the Realpolitiker of the concept. The objective of writing is to alter its object, to seduce it, to make it disappear for itself. Writing aims at a total resolution -- a poetic resolution, as Saussure would have it, that resolution indeed of the rigorous dispersal of the name of God. ¶ Contrary to what is said about it (the real is what resists, what all hypotheses run up
against), reality is not very solid and seems predisposed, rather, to retreat in disorder. Whole swathes of reality are collapsing, as in the collapse of Baliverna (Buzzati), where the slightest flaw produces a chain reaction. We find decomposed remnants of it everywhere, as in Borges's `Of Exactitude in Science'. 3 ¶ Not only does it no longer put up any resistance against those who denounce it, but it even eludes those who take its side. This is perhaps a way of exacting vengeance on its
partisans: by throwing them back on their own desire. In the end, it is perhaps more a sphinx than a bitch. ¶ More subtly, it wreaks vengeance on those who deny it by paradoxically proving them right. When the most cynical, most provocative hypothesis is verified, the trick really is a low one; you are disarmed by the lamentable confirmation of your words by an unscrupulous reality. ¶ So, for example, you put forward the idea of simulacrum, without really believing in it, even hoping that
the real will refute it (the guarantee of scientificity for Popper). ¶ Alas, only the fanatical supporters of reality react; reality, for its part, does not seem to wish to prove you wrong. Quite to the contrary, every kind of simulacrum parades around in it. And reality, filching the idea, henceforth adorns itself with all the rhetoric of simulation. It is the simulacrum which ensures the continuity of the real today, the simulacrum which now conceals not the truth, but the fact that there isn't any --
that is to say, the continuity of the nothing. ¶ Such is the paradox of all thought which disputes the validity of the real: when it sees itself robbed of its own concept. Events, bereft of meaning in themselves, steal meaning from us. They adapt to the most fantastical hypotheses, just as natural species and viruses adapt to the most hostile environments. They have an extraordinary mimetic capacity: no longer is it theories which adapt to events, but the reverse. And, in so doing, they mystify
us, for a theory which is verified is no longer a theory. It's terrifying to see the idea coincide with the reality. These are the death-throes of the concept. The epiphany of the real is the twilight of its concept. ¶ We have lost that lead which ideas had over the world, that distance which meant that an idea remained an idea. Thought has to be exceptional, anticipatory and at the margin -- has to be the projected shadow of future events. Today, we are lagging behind events. They may sometimes
give the impression of receding; in fact, they passed us long ago. The simulated disorder of things has moved faster than we have. The reality effect has succumbed to acceleration -- anamorphosis of speed. Events, in their being, are never behind themselves, are always out ahead of their meaning. Hence the delay of interpretation, which is now merely the retrospective form of the unforeseeable event. ¶ What are we to do, then? What becomes of the heterogeneity of thought in a world won
over to the craziest hypotheses? When everything conforms, beyond even our wildest hopes, to the ironic, critical, alternative, catastrophic model? ¶ Well, that is paradise: we are beyond the Last Judgement, in immortality. The only problem is to survive there. For there the irony, the challenging, the anticipation, the maleficence come to an end, as inexorably as hope dies at the gates of hell. And it is indeed there that hell begins, the hell of the unconditional realization of all ideas, the hell
of the real. You can see why, as Adorno says, concepts prefer to scupper themselves rather than reach that point. ¶ Something else has been stolen from us: indifference. The power of indifference, which is the quality of the mind, as opposed to the play of differences, which is the characteristic of the world. Now, this has been stolen from us by a world grown indifferent, as the extravagance of thought has been stolen from us by an extravagant world. When things, events, refer one to

-- in a different, convulsive, contradictory world, a world with issues and passions! That being the
another and to their undifferentiated concept, then the equivalence of the world meets and cancels out the indifference of thought -- and we have boredom. No more altercations; nothing at stake. It is the parting of the dead sea. ¶ How fine indifference was in a world that was not indifferent

case, indifference immediately became an issue and a passion itself. It could preempt the indifference of the world, and turn that pre-emption into an event. Today, it is difficult to be more indifferent to their reality than the facts themselves, more
indifferent to their meaning than images. Our operational world is an apathetic world. Now, what good is it being passionle ss in a world without passion, or detached in a world without desire? ¶ It is not a question of defending radical thought.

Every idea one defends is presumed guilty, and every idea that cannot defend itself deserves to disappear . On the other hand, one must fight all charges of irresponsibility,
nihilism or despair. Radical thought is never depressive. On this point, there is total
misunderstanding. Ideological and moralistic critique, obsessed with meaning and
content, obsessed with the political finality of discourse, never takes into account
writing, the act of writing, the poetic, ironic, allusive force of language, of
the juggling with meaning. It does not see that the resolution of meaning is to be found there -- in the form
itself, the formal materiality of expression. ¶ Meaning, for its part, is always unhappy. Analysis
is, by definition, unhappy, since it is born of critical disillusionment. But language, for its
part, is happy, even when referring to a world without illusion and without hope. That
might even be the definition of a radical thinking: a happy form and an
intelligence without hope. ¶ Critics, being unhappy by nature, always choose ideas as their
battleground. They do not see that if discourse always tends to produce
meaning, language and writing, for their part, always create illusion -- they
are the living illusion of meaning, the resolution of the infelicity of meaning by the
felicity of language. And this is surely the only political -- or transpolitical -- act
that can be accomplished by the person who writes. ¶ As for ideas, everyone has
them. More than they need. What counts is the poetic singularity of the
analysis. That alone can justify writing , not the wretched critical objectivity of ideas. There never will be any resolving the contradictoriness of ideas, except in the energy and felicity of language. `I do not paint sadness and loneliness,' says Hopper.

`What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.' ¶ At any rate, better a despairing analysis in felicitous language than an optimistic analysis in an infelicitous language that is maddeningly tedious and demoralizingly platitudinous, as is most often the case. The absolute tediousness secreted by that idealistic,
voluntaristic thought is the secret sign of its despair -- as regards both the world and its own discourse. That is where true depressive thought is to be found, among those who speak only of the transcending and transforming of the world, when they are incapable of transfiguring their own language. ¶ Radical thought is a
stranger to all resolving of the world in the direction of an objective reality and its deciphering. It does not decipher. It anagrammatizes, it disperses concepts and ideas and, by its reversible sequencing, takes account both of meaning and of the fundamental illusoriness of meaning. Language takes account of the very illusion of
language as definitive stratagem and, through it, of the illusion of the world as infinite trap, as seduction of the mind, as spiriting away of all our mental faculties. While it is a vehicle of meaning, it is at the same time a superconductor of illusion and non-meaning. Language is merely the involuntary accomplice of

communication -- by its very form it appeals to the spiritual and material imagination of sounds and rhythm, to the dispersal of meaning in the
event of language. This
passion for artifice, for illusion, is the passion for undoing that too-
beauteous constellation of meaning. And for letting the imposture of the world
show through, which is its enigmatic function, and the mystification of the world,
which is its secret. While at the same time letting its own imposture show through -- the impostor, not the
composteur [composing stick] of meaning. This passion has the upper hand in the free and witty use of language, in the
witty play of writing. Where that artifice is not taken into account, not only is its charm lost, but the meaning itself cannot
be resolved. ¶ Cipher,
do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to
create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is
only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false
transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or
viruses of a radical illusion -- in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real. Viral,
pernicious thought, corrosive of meaning, generative of an erotic perception
of reality's turmoil.
 Radical Thought
Thus, the 1AC is radical thought about arms sales, an operation
of theory-fiction that cultivates illusory and surreal readings of
the resolution in an effusive play with language.
Strehle 14. Samuel Strehle, fellow in the DFG research training group "The Real and Modern Culture" at the
University of Konstanz, Germany, MAs in sociology and philosophy from Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg,
Germany, researcher in the department of anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany, currently pursuing a PhD in
sociology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, "A Poetic Anthropology of War: Jean Baudrillard and the 1991 Gulf
War," International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014) KZaidi

The production of war signs is linked to the issue of war not only in matters ofcontent,
but also in matters of form. Content-wise, war is just one of many fields in which reality
signs are produced; regarding its form, however, it is the pure logic of war itself that
works in this industry. The production of reality for Baudrillard is a kind of warfare
itself: Not only is it a monologue of power, a “speech without response”, as he states
in Requiem for the Media (1971: 172); even more, the “terrorism of the code” (ibid.: 179) is a war-like attack on
our senses.
We, the viewers, are targets of a bombardment of signs and images. “Semiocracy”, Baudrillard (1976: 78)
calls this terror in his writing on the New York Graffiti scene: we live under a dictatorship of signs (against
which the Graffiti raise their anti-semiotic counterforce). The war sign industry is just one
of many subdivisions of a society-wide ‘reality sign industry’ that floods our lives with all
kinds of spectacular products and information.“We are all hostages of media intoxication,
induced to believe in the war just as we were once led to believe in the revolution in
Romania, and confined to the simulacrum of war as though confined to quarters. We are already all strategic
hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day” (Baudrillard 1991b: 25).
Finally now, this is where Baudrillard’s genuine theoretical intervention takes place. Like
the Graffiti writers,
Baudrillard attempts to fight back against the terrorism of the code and its work of
purification—somehow continuing Graffiti writing by other means. Baudrillard is leading his own
war, his own counter-guerilla warfare against the reality principle. What are his spray cans? Which are
the walls on which he puts his ‘mark on society’? It is the holy walls of theoretical discourse that
Baudrillard defaces with a low tech weapon called “theoretical terrorism”, as he called it once
(Baudrillard 1983a: 91, my translation)—a thinking made to oppose, to challenge the hegemony of reality.

The idea of ‘theoretical

terrorism’ is strongly linked to his concept of “reversibility”13 —a key
term in Baudrillard’s thinking. The term
may be characterized by two main aspects: At first, it
refers to the reciprocity of gift exchange in which there is no closure of exchange but an
endless changing and challenging of sides. In this regard, it is a name for the symbolic
fluidity of power.14 At second, it refers to a principle of changing a situation by radically
reversing its viewing angle—“poetic transference of the situation”, as Baudrillard calls it in Impossible
Exchange (1999: 85).

Being a rather “phantastic principle” (Zapf 2010: 145, my translation), the concept of reversibility is
linked with the most powerful and yet most clandestine subtext in Baudrillard’s oeuvre:
’Pataphysics. The idea behind this absurd science of “imaginary solutions” is as simple as it is
mysterious: It is an attempt to create a different reality through imagination.15 Pataphysicians
fight reality through the use of imaginary forces, through creating illusion and deceit.
It is easily overlooked how central this pataphysical approach has been for Baudrillard; even his most serious
book, Symbolic Exchange and Death, is surprisingly full of pataphysical statements, especially in the dense, programmatic
introductory pages: “The only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics, ‘a science of imaginary
solutions’; that is, a science-fiction of the system’s reversal against itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible
simulation in a hyperlogic of death and destruction” (Baudrillard 1976: 4 f.).

How can “science-fiction” shatter the system of reality? Baudrillard explains his strategy later in The Perfect Crime (1995),
especially in the section on “Radical Thought”, and in Impossible Exchange (1999). Ideas, he claims, can create
their
own reality, since thinking is a performative act that builds its own ‘parallel world’:
“Thought […] does not seek to penetrate some mystery of the world, nor to discover its
hidden aspect—it is that hidden aspect. It does not discover that the world has a double
life—it is that double life, that parallel life” (Baudrillard 1999: 149). In the performative “act of
thinking” (ibid.: 115), reality is not so much depicted but challenged. The purpose of theory
for Baudrillard is the exact opposite of what we normally would expect: It should not
recognize and analyze reality, instead it must deny and contradict its hegemony. It has to
create illusion and establish a power of seduction that makes one lose the path of reality.
The “value of thought”, claims Baudrillard (1995: 94), “lies not so much in its inevitable
convergences with truth as in the immeasurable divergences which separate it from
truth.”
Only in awareness of those abstract ’Pataphysics can we distill any sense out of some of the oddest remarks in
Baudrillard’s oeuvre, for example his “delirious self-criticism” from Cool Memories where he accuses himself of “having
surreptitiously mixed my phantasies in with reality” and of “having systematically opposed the most obvious and well-
founded notions” (Baudrillard 1987: 38). He even complains about readers taking his theories for actual facts and reading
them in a “realist version”: “Simulacra are today accepted everywhere in their realist version: simulacra exist, simulation
exists. It is the intellectual and fashionable version of this vulgarization which is the worst: all is sign, signs have abolished
reality, etc.” (Ibid.: 227).

Instead of this “realist version”, Baudrillard suggests that even

his most prominent terms can be
regarded as pataphysical attempts to seduce his readers through fictitious ideas, for
example when he admits to having “put forward the idea of simulacrum, without really
believing in it, even hoping that the real will refute it” (Baudrillard 1995: 101). Apparently he
understands his thinking to be something like a playful simulacrum itself, for also theory can
precede—and thereby seduce—reality: “The theoretical ideal would be to set in place
propositions in such a way that they could be disconfirmed by reality, in such a way that
reality could only oppose them violently, and thereby unmask itself. For reality is an
illusion, and all thought must seek first of all to unmask it. To do that, it must itself
advance behind a mask and constitute itself as a decoy, without regard for its own truth .
[...] Reality must be caught in the trap, we must move quicker than reality” (ibid.: 99).

In this sense, Baudrillard’s writing is “theory-fiction” (Baudrillard 1991c: 202) rather than theory, as he
borrows a term from Jean-François Lyotard (1979: 92 f., cp. Blask, 2002: 133). Like all ’Pataphysics, this notion of
“theory-fiction” maybe traced back to the surrealists and their “poetic anthropology”, as Dietmar
Kamper (1981, my translation) has called it. Such an anthropology is “poetic” because it refers to the
art of writing, but also because it touches the original notion of “poiesis”, meaning to
create something. ‘Poetic anthropology’ does not seek to describe a reality that lies out
there, instead it aims to autopoietically produce the subject it writes about through its
own act of description.
Theory for Baudrillard is a “paradoxical
political intervention” (Zapf 2010: 241, my translation). Thinking
itself has to become the ambiguous kind of “singularity” (Baudrillard 1995: 96) and “event” (ibid.:
104) that is eliminated from almost any other sphere of the system: “Cipher, do not
decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what
is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself
unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic
confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion—in other words, a radical
disillusioning of the real.” (Ibid.: 104).
Maybe this is the most unique aspect of Baudrillard’s thinking altogether. He is a thinker
who tries to think the world different from what it actually is. He sees himself as
something like a smuggler or drug dealer, pushing forbidden items on a “black market in
thought” (Baudrillard 1999: 104), promoting “a clandestine trade in ideas, of all
inadmissible ideas, of unassailable ideas, as the liquor trade had to be promoted in the
1930s” (Baudrillard 1995: 104 f.).
If Baudrillard is the drug dealer of sociology, what does this imply for his analysis of war and his reference to the
principles of symbolic exchange and the duel form? If we want to believe Baudrillard that he is not interested in
rehabilitating older wars, we should read his reference systematically rather than historically16—there might have never
been any historical war as glamorous and honorable as portrayed by Clausewitz anyway. Hence, the introduction
of
symbolic exchange and the duel principle into the analysis of war might be more like a
strategy to introduce a different view of things into the common perception of war. It
delivers the necessary contrast against which the aestheticized, whitewashed reality of
the war can be scrutinized and deconstructed as not the only possible reality of war. Only
in the light of its radical other can the reality of war be denaturalized and revealed as a
self-display of power and hegemony.
In this regard, Baudrillard
has always remained a critical thinker who seeks to intervene into
reality instead of just observing it. To the same degree he is neither a cynic nor a fatalist,
that is—a resigned thinker. On the contrary, in an interview on the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center he
even aligns himself with the ideas of the Enlightenment: “Fatalism offers an unpalatable interpretation of the world, for it
leads to resignation. I don’t resign myself, I want clarity, a lucid consciousness. When we know the rules of the game, then
we can change them. In this respect, I am a man of the Enlightenment” (Baudrillard 2002b). There is one major
difference, though, between Baudrillard and the classical Enlightenment: He wishes for “clarity” and lucidity, he wants to
“know the rules of the game”, but he does not
seek the truth; he wants to “change” the rules of the
game by diverting the game from its truth.
It does not seem to matter so much to Baudrillard if his instance of contrast—symbolic
exchange and the duel principle—is more fictitious or real, illusionary or true; most possibly
it has something of both sides, being undecidable like a simulacrum in the strongest sense. When
Baudrillard writes about the Gulf War, he creates an odd mixture of lucid observations
on the one hand and theoretical seductions on the other. If there could ever be
something like ‘war studies’ in the spirit of Baudrillard, they would have to dare not to
eliminate this undecidability, otherwise they would lose the spirit.
What matters the most for Baudrillard is the effort to break open the uniform process of
reality production and shatter its seeming self-evidence into pieces. Theory according to
Baudrillard is an attempt to reverse our view of the world—shifting our perspective by
introducing something new and unsettling into the order of things. What seemed natural
before, now starts to look artificial; what presented itself as a glorious triumph suddenly
appears stale; what was evident becomes shady. Baudrillard’s theories are like evil
ghosts: They haunt reality by staging its excluded other—no matter if this other really
exists or if it has to be feigned.
 Turn System on Head
It's time to turn the system on it’s head, the war on terror has
shown that all resistance to western hegemony of meaning fails
and only reifies the system. We must infinitely reflect meaning
without absorbing it, proliferating simulation to destroy all
meaning and tearing the system apart from within. We’ll
simulate the simulators to show the system’s fundamental
absurdity with “ridiculous” contradiction just as arbitrary as
what we’re contradicting.
Baudrillard 81
(Jean Baudrillard – French Postmodern Philosopher, “Simulacra and Simulation”
https://aaaaarg.fail/upload/jean-baudrillard-simulacra-and-simulation-1.pdf, 1981)
With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble
double bind - exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children
are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects,
responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert,
obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory
demand he responds with a double strategy. To the demand of being an object, he
opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total
claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately
and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness,
hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy has more
objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and
viewed as positive - just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom,
emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable
and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of
all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning -
precisely the practices of the masses - that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation
and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the
constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not
respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects, of
liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing,
deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game - a form of blackmail and ultimatum
just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is
oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood.
But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are
still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the
system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic
resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word - or of the
hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of
refusal and of non-reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning
to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without
absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it
was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. To choose the wrong strategy
is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the
resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness
raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see
that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the
overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.
 Radical Mimicry
The only option is a radical mimicry of the forms of the system,
one that accelerates them to the point of their obvious vacuity.
Duality re-emerges and duality will out: every attempt at
coherence is met by a concomitant incoherence and absence. We
affirm this dualistic ontology in a moment of semiotic rupture.
“Nothing becomes wholly transparent without also becoming
enigmatic.” Duality as a strategy maintains the possibility of
mystery and radical alterity.
Pawlett 14. William Pawlett, senior lecturer in media, communications, and cultural studies at
the University of Wolverhampton, UK, “Society At War With Itself,” International Journal of
Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)

It all depends on the ground we choose to fight on … most often … we choose to

fight on ground where we are beaten before we begin (Baudrillard 2001: 119). This
paper examines Baudrillard’s assertion, made in later works includingImpossible
Exchange (2001), The Intelligence of Evil (2005) and Pyres of Autumn(2006), that
individuals, society and indeed the global system, are internally and irreconcilably
divided, that modernity is ‘at odds with itself’ (Baudrillard 2006: 1). In his view
dissent, rejection and insurrection emerge from within, not from external
challenges such as alternative ideologies or competing worldviews, but from
within bodies, within borders, inside programmes. For Baudrillard much of the
violence, hatred and discomfort visible around the globe can be understood as a latent
but fundamental ‘silent insurrection’ against the global integrating system and
its many pressures, demands and humiliations (2001: 106). This is anendogenic or intra-
genic rejection, it emanates from within the system, from within individuals, even from
within language, electronic systems and bodily cells, erupting as abreaction,
metastasis and sudden reversal.2 For Baudrillard then, despite the many
simulations of external threat and enmity – radical Islam currently being the best
example – the most dangerous threat lies within: ‘society faces a far harder test
than any external threat: that of its own absence, its loss of reality’ (2006: 1). The
global order, conventionally labelled “capitalist”, is neutralising its values and
structures, its ideologies disappear, its principles are sacrificed. Even the sense of
“reality” produced by the abstract sign and by simulation models begin to
disappear (2005: 67-73; 2009: 10-15). The goal is ‘integral reality’, a limitless
operational project geared towards the total transcription of the world into virtuality:
‘everything is realised and technically materialised without reference to any
principle or final purpose’ (2005: 18). Yet there is an internal war or “backlash”
taking place between integralist violence which seeks ultimate control by eliminating all
otherness, and duality. Duality, for Baudrillard, is “indestructible” and is
manifest as the inevitable or destined re-emergence of otherness: of death,
Evil, ambivalence, the ghosts of symbolic exchange, the accursed share
within the system. The integrating system then suffers a ‘dissent working
away at it from inside. It is the global violence immanent in the world-
system itself which, from within, sets the purest form of symbolic challenge
against it’ (2005: 22). This is a war or conflict that does not end, the outcome of which
cannot be predicted or programmed. It is a war that is quite different from the
disappearance of war into simulated non-events, such as occurred with the
Gulf wars (Baudrillard 1995). Indeed, Baudrillard suggests, the deterrence of world
wars, and of nuclear wars, does not result in peace, but in a viral proliferation of
conflicts, a fractalisation of war and conflict into everyday, local, and
ubiquitous terror (1993b: 27). This paper will examine Baudrillard’s position on
internal rejection through two closely related themes: complicity and duality. Complicity,
and the closely related term collusion, are themselves dual in Baudrillard’s sense. That is,
complicity or collusion express an internal division or ‘duality’ which is not a
simple opposition of terms. As is so often the case, Baudrillard’s position builds on
his much earlier studies: Requiem For the Media (orig. 1972, in Baudrillard 1981: 164-
184) had already argued that the dominance of the abstract sign and of simulation
models meant that any critique of the system made through the channels of
semiotic abstraction were automatically re-absorbed into the system. Any
meaningful challenge must invent its own, alternative medium – such as the
silk-screen printings, hand-painted notices and graffiti of May 1968 – or it
will lapse into an ineffectual complicity with the system it seeks to challenge
(Baudrillard 1981: 176). In his later work, Baudrillard’s emphasis on duality and
complicity is extended much further, taking on global, anthropological and even
cosmological dimensions, and increasingly complicity and collusion are seen as dual, as
encompassing both acceptance and a subtle defiance. This paper examines the dual
nature of complicity and collusion. It considers the influence of La Boetie’s notorious
Essay on Voluntary Servitude on Baudrillard, seeking to draw out what is distinctive in
Baudrillard’s position. The second section turns to the notion of duality, examining Good
and Evil and Baudrillard’s assertion that attempts to eliminate duality merely revive or
re-active it. Complicity implies a complexity of relations, and, specifically, the
condition of being an accomplice to those in power. To be an accomplice is to
assist in the committing of a crime. If the crime is murder, the term accomplice
implies one who plans, reflects, calculates – but does not strike the lethal blow. The
crime which is of particular interest to Baudrillard is, of course, the perfect crime: the
elimination of otherness, of ambivalence, of duality, even of “reality” and of
the abstract representational sign which enables a sense of “reality”
(Baudrillard 1996). The global, integral, carnivalising and cannibalising system,
which might loosely still be called capitalist, is at war against radical otherness
or duality; yet, for Baudrillard, as duality lies at its heart, locked within its
foundations, it is indestructible and emerges through attempts to eliminate it. If
the system has been largely successful at eliminating external threats, it
finds itself in an even worse situation: it is at war with itself. II. Complicity
Complicity is a particularly slippery term. In the 1980s Baudrillard’s thought, mistakenly
assumed to be “Postmodernist”, was argued to be complicit with capitalism, largely because it
questioned the ability of dominant strands of Marxism and feminism to significantly challenge
the capitalist system (Callinicos 1989; Norris 1992). At the same time, Baudrillard was alleging
that the work of supposedly radical theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari (1984 orig. 1972) and
Lyotard (1993 orig. 1974) was, with their emphasis on desire as productive and liberatory force,
complicit with the mechanisms of advanced consumer capitalism (Baudrillard 1987: 17-20). So
which branch of contemporary theory is most complicit with capitalism? Liberals, humanists and
environmentalists who see their clothes stolen by mainstream politicians? Marxists and
Communists who by refusing to update their thinking provide a slow moving target for right-
wing snipers? Post- Modernists and Post-Structuralists who attack Enlightenment thought but
refuse to speak of the human subject and so have “thrown the baby out with the bath water”?
Network and complexity theory which flattens all phenomena and experience to a position on a
grid, producing a very complex simplification? The list could go on but it is a question that
cannot be answered because all critical theories are complicit with the system they critique.
They fight on a terrain already demarcated by their opponents, a terrain on which they are
beaten before they begin, one where the most compelling argument can always be dismissed
as doom-mongering or irresponsible intellectualism. This includes Baudrillard’s own critical
thinking, as he readily acknowledges (Baudrillard 2009a: 39). Further, and even more damaging
to the project of critique, in a hegemonic or integral order the system solicits critique and it
criticises itself, so displacing and making redundant the laborious attempts at academic
critique. The latter continue, even proliferate, but with decreasing impact. So, what does
Baudrillard mean by complicity with the global order? Baudrillard’s concern is primarily with
complicity at the level of the form of the (capitalist) system, not at the level of belief, consent
or allegiance to particular contents of capitalist life (consumer products, plurality of ‘lifestyles’, a
degree of ‘tolerance’ etc.). Complicity is often seen, by critics of capitalism, as acceptance of
consumerism and its myriad choices and lifestyles, but this is a reductive level of analysis from
Baudrillard’s perspective. By complicity or collusion Baudrillard means, on the one hand, the
very widespread willingness to surrender or give up beliefs, passions and “symbolic defences”
(2010: 24), and on the other – as the dual form – an equally widespread ability to find a space
of defiance through the play of complicity, collusion, hyperconformity and indifference (1983:
41-8). That is, while many of us (in the relatively affluent West) share in the profanating,
denigrating and “carnivalising” of all values, embracing indifference, shrugging “whatever”, we
do so with very little commitment to the system, rejoicing inwardly when it suffers reversals: we
operate in a dual mode. While such attitudes of indifference may seem to accept that there is
no meaningful alternative to capitalism: an attitude that has been called ‘capitalist nihilism’
(Davis in Milbank and Zizek, 2009) and ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2008), Baudrillard’s notions of
“integral reality”, duality and complicity may have significant advantages over those
approaches. Unlike thinkers who remain anchored to critical thinking defined by determinate
negation, Baudrillard’s approach emphasises ambivalence, reversal and both personal and
collective modes of rejection more subtle than those envisioned by the increasingly exhausted
mechanisms of critique. The critique of consumer capitalism – the consumption of junk food,
junk entertainment and junk information – is now integral to the system; the critique of finance
capitalism – banker’s bonuses, corporate tax avoidance – is integral to the system, yet it fails to
bring about meaningful or determinate social transformation. Indeed, such critiques may do no
more than provide the system with a fleeting sense of “reality” – real issues, real problems to
deal with – around which the system can reproduce its simulacra, perhaps to reassure us that
“something is being done”, “measures are being put into place” etc. “Reality” cannot be
dialectically negated by critical concepts when both ‘reality’ and the critical concept disappear
together, their fates clearly tied to each other (Baudrillard 2009b: 10-12). There is a sense then
in which the production of critique is in complicity with the system, the unravel-able
proliferation and excess of critical accounts of the system has the effect of protecting the
system. Complicity consists in a sharing of the denigration of all values, all institutions, all ideas,
all beliefs: so long as we believe in nothing – at least not passionately – then the system has us,
at least superficially. For example, in recent decades we have seen the denigration of religious
faiths – or their reduction to ‘cultural identity’ and ‘world heritage’ objects; the denigration of
public services and welfare provision accompanied by their marketisation; the denigration of the
poor, the young, immigrants and the unemployed. Yet this is not only the denigration of the
powerless or disenfranchised, there is also the widespread denigration of those seen as
powerful: politicians, corporations, celebrities. For Baudrillard, it is quite inadequate to focus
only on the power of global neo-liberal policies such as marketisation in these processes of
denigration. This is where Baudrillard’s position departs decisively from anti-globalists and from
neo-Communists such as Negri, Zizek, and Badiou. Global power has deliberately sacrificed its
values and ideologies, it presents no position, it takes no stand, it undermines even the
illusion that “free markets” function and has made “capital” virtual; become orbital it is
removed from a terrestrial, geo-political or subjective space. These are protective measures
enabling power to become (almost) hegemonic (Baudrillard 2009a: 33-56; 2010: 35-40).
Baudrillard often emphasises the fragility and the vulnerability to reversal of the “powerful”
and the distinction between powerful and powerless is radically questioned in his work. So
what is this global power? Where is it? The answer, of course, is that it is everywhere and it is in
everyone. We have not liberated ourselves from slavery, but, Baudrillard contends, internalised
the masters: ‘[e]verthing changes with the emancipation of the slave and the internalisation of
the master by the emancipated slave’ (2009a: 33). We tyrannise ourselves, for example by
demanding that we maximise our opportunities, fulfill our potential. This is a deeper level of
slavery – and complicity – than any previous historical system could inflict (Baudrillard 1975;
2009a: 33). Yet duality always re-emerges, Baudrillard insists: indifference is dual, complicity is
dual. Carnivalisation and cannibalisation are themselves dual: the global system absorbs all
otherness in a ‘forced conversion to modernity’ (2010: 5), reproducing otherness within the
carnival of marketable “difference”, yet cannibalisation emerges as a reversion and derailing
of this process. The world adopts Western models: economic, cultural, religious – or it appears
to. Hidden within this complicity with the West, there is, Baudrillard suggests, a deeper sense of
derision and rejection. The allegiance to Western models is superficial; it is a form of mimicry
or hyperconformity that involves a ritual-like exorcism of the hegemonic system. Further, such
mimicry reveals the superficiality of Western cultural and economic models: this is not only a
superficial acceptance, but an acceptance of superficiality. Western values are already parodic,
and, in being accepted, they are subject to further parody as they circulate around the globe
(2010: 4-11). The West has deregulated and devalued itself and demands that the rest of the
world follows: "It is everything by which a human being retains some value in his own eyes that
we (the West) are deliberately sacrificing … [o]ur truth is always to be sought in unveiling, de-
sublimation, reductive analysis …[n]othing is true if it is not desacralised, objectivised, shorn of
its aura, dragged on to the stage" (Baudrillard 2010: 23). Western desacrilisation amounts to a
powerful challenge to the rest of the world, a potlatch: desacralise in return or perish! But who
has the power? Who is the victor? There isn’t one, according to Baudrillard. Of the global order,
Baudrillard writes: ‘We are its hostages – victims and accomplices at one and the same time –
immersed in the same global monopoly of the networks. A monopoly which, moreover – and
this is the supreme ruse of hegemony – no one holds any longer’ (2010: 40). There is no Master,
no sovereign because all the structures and dictates of power have been internalised, this is
the complicity we all share with global order, yet it is a dual complicity: an over-eager
acceptance goes hand-in-hand with a deep and growing rejection. Baudrillard’s discussions of power,
servitude and complicity make frequent reference to Estienne La Boetie’s essay on voluntary servitude, completed around
1554. The fundamental political question for La Boetie is: ‘how can it happen that a vast number of individuals, of towns,
cities and nations can allow one man to tyrannise them, a man who has no power except the power they themselves give
him, who could do them no harm were they not willing to suffer harm’ (La Boetie 1988: 38). It seems people do not want
to be free, do not want to wield power or determine their own fates: ‘it is the people who enslave themselves’ (La Boetie
1988: 41). People in general are the accomplices of the powerful and the tyrannical, some profit directly through wealth,
property, favour – ‘the little tyrants beneath the principal one’ (1988: 64), but many do not, why do they not rebel?
Baudrillard takes up La Boetie’s emphasis on servitude being enforced and maintained from within, rather than from
without. Yet, there are also major divergences. La Boetie deplores the “common people” for accepting the narcotising
pleasures of drinking, gambling and sexual promiscuity, while Baudrillard rejects such elitism and celebrates the masses
abilities to strategically defy those who would manipulate them through perverse but lethally effective practices such as
silence, radical indifference, hyperconformity – dual modes of complicity and rejection (Baudrillard 1983: 1-61). Though
La Boetie’s essay prefigures the development of the concept of hegemony, he never doubts that voluntary servitude is
unnatural, a product of malign custom that is in contradiction with the true nature of human beings which is to enjoy a
God-given freedom. Baudrillard, by contrast, examines voluntary servitude as a strategy of the refusal of power, a refusal
of the snares of self and identity, as strategy of freedom from the tyranny of the will and the fiction of self-determination
(Baudrillard 2001: 51-7). For Baudrillard the “declination” or refusal of will disarms those who seek to exert power
through influencing or guiding peoples’ choices and feelings towards particular ends. It also allows for a symbolic space, a
space of vital distance or removal, a space in which to act, or even act-out (of) a character (Baudrillard 2001: 72-3). This is
a space where radical otherness may be encountered, a sense of shared destiny which is a manifestation of the dual form at
the level of individual existence (Baudrillard 2001: 79). It
could certainly be argued that modern
subjects are confronted by a far more subtle and pervasive system of control than were
the subjects discussed in La Boetie’s analysis. In theorising the nature of modern
controls Baudrillard develops suggestive themes from La Boetie’s work. Speaking of
slavery in the Assyrian empire, where, apparently, kings would not appear in public, La
Boetie argues, ‘the fact that they did not know who their master was, and
hardly knew whether they had one at all, made them all the more willing to
be slaves’ (1988: 60). Whatever its historical provenance, this strategy of power is, it
seems, generalised in modernity; particularly after the shift away from Fordist mass
production it has become increasingly hard to detect who the masters actually
are. While workers are persecuted by middle managers, supervisors, team leaders,
project co-ordinators who are the masters of this universe? Who are the true
beneficiaries? Rather than trying to identify a global neo-liberal elite, as do many
proponents of anti-capitalist theory, Baudrillard suggests that the situation we confront
is so grave because “we” (those in the West in relatively privileged positions) have
usurped the position of masters; we have become the slave masters of ourselves,
tyrannising every detail of our own lives: trying to work harder, trying for
promotion or simply trying to avoid redundancy. We are all the accomplices
of a trans-capitalist, trans-economic exploitation. We are all tyrants: a billion
tiny tyrants servicing a system of elimination. But this is not to say that Baudrillard
ignores power differentials altogether: ‘it is, indeed, those who submit
themselves most mercilessly to their own decisions who fill the greater part of
the authoritarian ranks, alleging sacrifice on their parts to impose even greater
sacrifices on others’ (2001: 60-1). We all impose such violence on ourselves and
on others as part of our daily routines, hence Baudrillard’s injunction to refuse
power: ‘Power
itself must be abolished – and not solely
because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the
heart of all traditional struggles – but also, just as
violently, in the refusal to dominate’ (2009a: 47). Yet, even on
the theme of systemic violence and elimination, Baudrillard differs sharply from neo-
communist theory, while retaining a position of defiance. Systemic eliminationism
should not be conceived in individual or subjective terms, despite good points made in
recent studies of work and education under neo-liberalism, such as Cederström and
Fleming’s Dead Man Working (2012). At a formal level, neo-liberal eliminationism
does not merely eliminate jobs and also lives (for example in the recent textile factory
fires in Bangladesh), it eliminates meaning, symbolic space and thought. And it
eliminates not by termination but by “ex-termination”. That is, by
transcribing the world into integral reality, the system produces a single,
meaning-depleted, virtual space which encourages participation,
engagement and campaigning, on condition that these are produced as part and
parcel of an integrated void where “[t]he real no longer has any force as sign, and
signs no longer have any force of meaning” (Baudrillard 2001: 4). Most of the
developed world has been conferred the right to blog and to tweet as they please
and they are indebted to the system in a way which far exceeds the paying of a small
tribute or rent to Microsoft or Apple (Zizek 2010: 233). The symbolic debt imposed by
the modern world and its technologies is of a metaphysical or cosmological order.
Through it we take leave of this world Baudrillard suggests, we become
extra-terrestrials. We will recognise no Other, no singularity, no debt to
anyone because we attempt to cancel everything out in an integral,
technological system that has no outsides because it was, in a sense, created
from the outside. In making this argument, Baudrillard takes up Hannah Arendt’s striking suggestion that
modern science and technology, from Galileo’s invention of the telescope to the launch of the first space satellite in 1957,
enacts a “fateful repudiation” of the Earth and of the terrestrial human condition. Human beings, Arendt argues, seek to
eliminate their rootedness to Earth and their relationship to all other species on Earth (an ambition which also drives the
science of genetics). There is for Arendt: "… a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from
nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself" (Arendt 1958:
2-3). Economic alienation, as theorised by Marx, is an echo of a far more
fundamental “world alienation” Arendt suggests. Baudrillard’s reading of Arendt’s
work is surprisingly faithful, though he pushes a little further. What Arendt calls the
invention of an ‘Archimedean point outside the world’, when Galileo’s telescope
hardened philosophical speculations that the Earth might not be the centre of the
universe into demonstrable scientific fact, is, for Baudrillard, the moment the “real
world” began to exist: ‘the moment when human beings, while setting about
analysing and transforming the world, take their leave of it, while at the same time
lending it force of reality … the real world begins, paradoxically, to disappear at
the very same time as it begins to exist’ (Baudrillard 2009b: 11). Human beings do
not, cannot, live in the “real world”, they live elsewhere in a space of symbolic
belonging, and the “real world” can only be posited on condition that human
beings are removed from it, removed to a vantage point from where they can
observe it. Hence the process of measuring, representation and
conceptualisation produces a ‘real world’ subject to scientific knowledge
and, at the same time, hastens the progressive disappearance of the real
world. Concepts “capture” things only as things begin to disappear into concepts:
‘the real vanishes into the concept’ (Baudrillard 2009b: 12) and human being, as
products of nature, are progressively eliminated from the “real” they have fashioned.
Further, Baudrillard suggests, human beings are complicit in this process, they are
unique in inventing a “mode of disappearance”. The alienating effects of modern
science and technology are not only to be deplored, they can also be seen as
a freeing of human intelligence to engage in useless, sovereign and radical
thought (Baudrillard 2001: 119-121). The disappearance of the human being from
nature, and then from “reality” has dual, irreconcilable consequences. We lead
double lives, or we have a life but also mere sur-vival; a destiny but also a biological,
functional, performative existence. The latter terms appear to be dominant, and to
denigrate all else as meaningless or whimsical. Yet, Baudrillard suggests, life itself,
with its destiny, radical otherness, singularity and duality is actually the
more potent. Performative existence, or integral servitude, can be diverted, annulled,
suspended or even sacrificed in sudden, radically escalated events: from 9/11 to
cases such as that of Jean-Claude Romans who massacred his family,
eliminating his simulated sense of self and all those who, apparently, believed in his
simulation (Baudrillard 2001: 67-70). According to Baudrillard: “[as] we break the
symbolic pact and the cycle of metamorphoses, two kinds of violence ensue: a violence of
liberation, and an opposite violence in reaction against the excess of freedom, safety,
protection and integration, and hence against the loss of any dimension of fate, of
destiny – a violence directed against the emergence of the Ego, the Self, the
Subject or the Individual, which takes its toll in the form of self-hatred and
repentance” (2001: 46). Two forms of violence emerging from the same source: the
breaking of symbolic obligation and the expulsion of otherness, the foundation upon
which modern society is based (1993a: 1-5; 131-135).
Additional
 From a Baudrillard book
Topic Link
Baudrillard 90 – Jean, “Cool Memories: 1980-1985: October 1982” Verso, 1990,
Translated by Chris Turner //KohlW
There is much more to be hoped for in an excess of information or of weapons than in
the restriction of information or arms control.
 Impact D – Extinction
There are no absolutes – death is fake news!
Baudrillard 90 – Jean, “Cool Memories: 1980-1985: October 1982” Verso, 1990,
Translated by Chris Turner //KohlW
The mystery of absolute zero. Whereas there are no bounds to how high heat can rise,
there is a limit to the depths of cold. What goes on around this -270 degree point, that
makes it impossible to cross? The absolute motionlessness of molecules, the halting of
Brownian motion itself - and hence the end of uncertainty?
Death is merely a relative phase. When you think about it, the corpse continues
to swarm with the frantic movement of electrons. For our ancestors, this
swarming only went as far as the crawling of worms in the decaying carcass, for us it goes
right down to that of particles in the primal soup.
It's the other way round with speed: there is no speed beyond the speed of light, the
absolute limit of acceleration, whilst slowness can descend to an infinitesimal point.
There is no absolute stillness.
Wild speculations these, which are in fact connected with superstitions
about numbers: it is linearity which gives rise to this idea of a limit point. Qualities,
for their part, have no limits: beyond red, there is violet, and beyond violet,
another potential sensation. This is the field of metamorphoses.
 Steal the aff
Vote neg
Baudrillard 90 – Jean, “Cool Memories: 1980-1985: October 1982” Verso, 1990,
Translated by Chris Turner. //KohlW
It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop,
better than you could have done it yourself. You feel no intellectual jealousy at
seeing yourself outstripped in this way. You only feel jealous when you are overtaken by
your shadow.
 AT: Baudrillard – VTL
There’s value to be found in life
Baudrillard 90 – Jean, “Cool Memories: 1980-1985: October 1983” Verso, 1990,
Translated by Chris Turner. //KohlW
Life in itself is not to be despaired of; it is only mildly melancholic. Something
diffuse in the daylight, something impalpable as language, gives things an air of
melancholy which comes from much further back than our unconsciouses or our
personal histories.
 Ressentiment --> Miscalc
Ressentiment causes miscalc – great power war and extinction
Baudrillard 90 – Jean, “Cool Memories: 1980-1985: October 1983” Verso, 1990,
Translated by Chris Turner. //KohlW
Depressive moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur,
our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake,
and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of
accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange
power.
ANSWERS
 Jones & Smith
Error replication and Serial Policy Failure are conspiracy theories based
on gross overgeneralizations and cherrypicking. Rational subjects are
able to resist socialization and improve
Jones and Smith 11 (David Martin, Senior Lecturer, School of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, M.L.R., Department of War Studies, King's College, University of London,
London, United Kingdom, “Terrorology and Methodology: A Reply to Dixit and Stump,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume
34, issue 6, June lid)

In our original review we particularly took issue with the belief, held by a number of contributors to Critical Studies on
Terrorism, and reflected in British and Australian university programs, that conventional terrorism research deliberately
conspires both to de-legitimize the critical voice and marginalize the non-Western “other.” In this regard, we found that
critical theory engages in sweeping generalizations about the Western media presentation of
terrorism and assumes or cherry picks facts to demonstrate political bias and a predetermined state
conspiracy. Such a critical worldview again unconsciously mirrors the weakness of traditional terror studies during the
Cold War, where writers like Claire Sterling in The Terror Network detected the hidden-hand of the Soviet Union behind every
significant violent sub-state actor of the time. As we stated in our review, conventional and critical approaches often seem two
sides of the same debased coin. More generally, the soi disant critical orientation of Critical Studies on Terrorism embraces the
uncritical assumption that Western democracies have engaged in a conspiracy to demonize resistance by third world and
particularly Muslim non-state actors. The critical approach thus places the assumption of the questionable and
malign motivation of democratic governments (that nevertheless, and somewhat ironically, support the critical
research agenda through the grant giving machinery) above conceptual precision and hypothesis testing. In
the process, critical thinking problematically imports the paranoid outer reaches of the blogosphere
into academia, thus legitimizing the conspiracies of hidden-hands, sinister schemes, malign forces, secret agendas, and
controlling systems of power purveyed on websites like Spinwatch and Neocon Europe. In this context, Dixit and Stump's
proposal to advance critical inquiry by “de-naturalizing the state” is less than helpful, not least because it merely reinforces the
obsessive suspicion of the state that defines critical terrorology's worldview. In particular, Dixit and Stump's suggestion is
based on the reductionist claim by Weldes, Laffey, Gusterson and Duvall that the whole field of “security studies” (an ill-
defined subject area at the best of times) is predicated on immutable state threats. Consequently: Actors and their insecurities
are naturalized in the sense that they are treated as facts that, because they are given by the nature of the interstate system,
can be taken for granted. Taken as natural facts, states and other organized actors become the foundational objects the taken-
for-granted of which serves to ground security studies.3 The proposed “de-naturalizing” of the state rests on this flimsy
criticism of security studies, which raises more questions than it answers. What, we might ask, does “de-naturalizing” the state
really mean? Taken to its logical conclusion it implies that we cannot discuss states as social facts. Nor can a de-naturalized
perspective accept that the international system is primarily composed of states that express themselves through collective
identities and interests and give material form to these through institutions and symbols that range from flags and anthems to
national airlines and armed forces. From the constructivist ontology that Dixit and Stump embrace it appears that because
there are no social facts that are not socially constituted there can be no such thing as facts at all. But if states cannot at a
minimum be construed as social facts with histories and interests then how, we might wonder, can we begin to study their
actions? In their subsequent discussion of terrorism as practice, the world Dixit and Stump inhabit is comprised purely of
discourses and practices. Even a state's terror strategy, from this perspective, erroneously assumes an “objectively existing
phenomenon.”4 Extending the process of de-naturalization, moreover, leads to some bizarre and nihilistic conclusions. The
logic of constructivism would entail “de-naturalizing” not just the state, but all social
arrangements, and any human organization, from nationalities, governments, and sub-state actors, to universities,
academic journals, language and the constitution of the self itself. Ultimately, such “de-naturalization” undermines the
foundations of social inquiry. All human institutions, from the state downwards, rest on assumptions and practices
that are socially and historically constituted. All institutions and social structures can therefore be deconstructed.5
Fundamentally, there is nothing particularly novel about this insight that in fact began with the ancient Greek distinction
between nomos and physis.6 Yet, if a program of inquiry simply regards constitutive processes as the only thing worth
studying, then all
phenomena collapse back into language, which robs everything, including
constructivism itself, of
meaning. As the Australian philosopher John Anderson observed of this style of thinking, it
functions “as a substitute at once for philosophy and for a real theory of language.”7 The point
is, as we argued in our review, that to achieve a genuine understanding we must either investigate the facts that are talked
about or study the fact that they are talked about in a certain way. If we concentrate on the uses of language we are in danger
of taking our discoveries about manners of speaking as answers to questions about what is there. This path leads not to any
meaningful insight, but to the paradoxes of idealism Jorge Luis Borges explored in his Ficciones. In Borges's short story “Tln,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the metaphysicians of the imaginary world of Tln (or the world conceived by constructivism) do not
seek “for the truth, or even for verisimilitude,”8 which they consider devoid of interest, but instead pursue a “kind of
amazement.”9 For, ultimately, if human agents are themselves, as Dale Copeland notes, merely “puppets of the ideational
system in which they find themselves” then “each would exist as
a socially conditioned 'Me', without the
free-willed 'I' capable of resisting the socialization process.”10 Such a condition of linguistic
mutability, in fact, undermines any transformative possibility for the international system, or indeed
anything else. Yet, ironically, this is the very thing constructivists and critical theorists want to show is possible. Furthermore,
if Dixit and Stump do not accept the logic of their constructivism, which abandons academic engagement for the path of Tlnist
astonishment, then they must assert, somewhat arbitrarily, that we should de-naturalize the state, yet leave all other social
institutions in their “natural” state. Such
a method only frames the debate in a way that favors a set of
ideological preferences, which inevitably prejudices the outcome of any inquiry by determining that
all problems are the fault of the state and its insidious systems of exclusion. Dixit and Stump's proposed de-naturalization of
the state, therefore, fails any adequate standard of hypothesis testing. Put simply, you cannot “de-naturalize” the one thing you
might object to in the current political system, but leave all other practices and social arrangements, including the constitutive
positions you occupy, naturalized as if you existed in Olympian detachment. As we pointed out in our review, at best this
position is intellectually incoherent, and at worst hypocritical. We exemplified this point in our initial review with reference to
Ken Booth's contradictory assertion that critical theorists must recognize that they inhabit a world constituted by powerful
ideological systems, yet must themselves “stand outside” those systems.11 Such schemes
repeat the Marxian
fallacy of false consciousness, asserting that everyone, apart from the critically initiated, has
their understanding distorted by the ideology in dominance. Critical theory apparently endows its
disciples with the unique capacity to “stand outside” these systems of dominance and see through the othering processes of
the state. Meanwhile, those trapped in the quotidian reality of the state have no access to this higher insight. Booth's article in
Critical Studies on Terrorism shows where this style of thinking leads: to the conviction that the followers of critical theory
alone can transcend the mundane and the political.
 Noisecat
Gains are gains: Don’t footnote the hard work
NoiseCat 16 Julian Brave NoiseCat is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band
Tsq'escen in British Columbia and a graduate of Columbia University and the University of
Oxford, 2016, “The Indigenous Revolution,” Jacobin, 11/26,
https://jacobinmag.com/2016/11/standing-rock-dakota-access-pipeline-obama/ Accessed
07/03/2018
Many Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders believe that indigenous people are long
gone and defeated. Inheritors of the imperial myth of “Manifest Destiny,” they presume the colonizers’ victory was
inevitable and even predetermined. This racist myth has led empires and states to underestimate
indigenous power. Global histories of indigenous resistance, survival, and resurgence tell
another story. On these Oceti Sakowin plains in 1876, a cocksure General Custer rushed into the Battle of the
Little Bighorn only to be soundly defeated by allied Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces. Dalrymple appears poised
to repeat Custer’s mistake. Countless indigenous communities, nations, and confederacies from the
Americas to Australasia, and South Africa to Siberia, including Aboriginal Australians, Apache, Arapaho, Cherokee,
Cheyenne, Chukchi, Comanche, Cree, Creek, Diné, Hawaiian, Haudenosaunee, Kiowa, Maori, Modoc, Nez Perce, Pueblo,
Salish, Sauk, Seminole, Shawnee, Tasmans, Tlingit, Ute, Xhosa, Yakima, Zulu, and others have resisted imperial
powers and industrial states and prevailed. Before defeating Custer, the Oceti Sakowin had a long history
of settler handling. In 1862, the Dakota pushed thousands of settlers off the Minnesota frontier. Six years later, the
Lakota defeated the United States Army in Red Cloud’s War. Retribution followed many indigenous victories. In
California, entire communities were hunted like animals. After taking dozens of Dakota men as prisoners of war
following the uprising of 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed an order to execute thirty-eight of them — the largest mass
execution in American history. Later in 1890, the United States Army gunned down three hundred Lakota at Wounded
Knee. This history continues to devastate. Indigenous
people remain the poorest of the poor and the
most likely to be killed by law enforcement. Four of the fifteen most impoverished counties in the United
States include Lakota reservations in South Dakota. The two poorest, Oglala Lakota and Todd County, lie entirely
within the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations, where half of all residents live in poverty. In Ziebach County, which
includes parts of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations, 45 percent of the population lives at or below
the poverty line. Elsewhere in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, indigenous people are among
the poorest, most oppressed, and least visible. They are overrepresented in prisons and underrepresented in
universities. Their economic realities are bleak. Their pain is intergenerational. In short, colonialism endures.
Yet these same communities are uniquely positioned to resist unjust systems and force them to
retreat. We must hold these two seemingly contradictory realities of devastation and
resilience in our minds at the same time. The Fourth World lives in devastation. The Fourth World is
unconquered and on the rise. Since the 1970s, indigenous people in the United States, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand have danced impressive victories. They have compelled states to forego
assimilationist policies like the involuntary removal of indigenous children to abusive residential
schools and the relocation of indigenous workers to cities. Overtly coercive policies have been slowly
and steadily replaced with policies that recognize indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.
Gains are limited, but they are still gains. At certain times over the past thirty years, indigenous
claims have prevented corporations from exploiting natural resources. In New Zealand in the
1980s, Maori claims under the Treaty of Waitangi stopped a state drive to privatize fisheries and hydroelectric
power. In Canada and Australia, from the 1990s to the present, aboriginal claims have increased risk for prospective
investors in extractive industries. But the dance with the state can be perilous. In recent decades, some
indigenous groups mistook neoliberals who denounced “big government” for allies. They accepted land
claims settlements, treaty agreements, and business deals that enabled states to slash social services
for the most vulnerable while restructuring indigenous communities as junior corporate partners in the global
economy. As Trump prepares to take power in the US and Brexit changes the economic calculus in Britain and across
the world, it is clear that the
dance with the state is entering a new age. The New Colonialism The new
age has precedents. Any Howard Zinn reader knows that the United States is built on stolen land with
stolen labor. However, this is an observation too imprecise to help us understand and predict
the trajectory of a global political economy steered and shaped by the likes of Trump and Nigel
Farage. If you squint hard enough, Jack Dalrymple might look like a young George Custer, but that does not make him
so. To prevail, indigenous
people and the Left must fully understand the precise ways that
emerging systems will dispossess indigenous communities. In the nineteenth century, the United
States Army incarcerated indigenous people on reservations, claimed land for homesteaders, protected prospectors,
and cleared the way for railroad barons. In the 1960s, a different set of historical, political, and economic forces
erected the Lake Oahe Dam on the Missouri River, flooding two hundred thousand acres of the Standing Rock
reservation to provide power to suburban homeowners. Today, the drive for independence from OPEC sees a solution
in hydraulic fracturing technology. North American oil fields and infrastructure are funded by a financial system that
encourages speculation, drives massive inequality, and fails to account for costs associated with human and
environmental risks — passing these very real risks and consequences on to communities, workers, and indigenous
nations. Inherently unaccountable capitalists are paid big money for being even more unaccountable, and indigenous
dispossession continues on new frontiers. Preliminary post-election forecasts indicate that Trump’s victory and
Brexit will redirect capital back toward the American West and the British Commonwealth. In particular, Trump —
a DAPL investor himself — will expedite completion of DAPL and similar projects. He will push to reopen
and complete the Keystone XL Pipeline. If he keeps his campaign promises, he will support infrastructure projects
and extractive industries, including coal and fracking, in indigenous homelands across the American hinterlands. At
the same time, a conservative Supreme Court, an Interior Department led by Sarah Palin or oil baron Lucas Forrest,
and a Justice Department led by Jeff Sessions means limited but hard-won Native rights will be rolled back. If this
gang of reactionary appointees can’t figure out how to dismantle complex legal precedents, they can just cut funding
to essential services like housing, schools, and health care that are already woefully underfunded, putting tribes in a
stranglehold of austerity. Native resistance will be policed by Orwellian surveillance systems finely tuned by the
Obama administration. Militarized law enforcement will find reinforcements in the booming private security and
prison industries. Surveillance, state law enforcement, and private security will drive mass arrests, as we’re seeing at
Standing Rock. Law enforcement will have more power than ever to quash protesters and silence dissent. In the
former British Wests of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where the right-wing populist revolution has yet to take
hold in the same way, suppression of indigenous resistance may be less visibly coercive — perhaps with the exception
of skyrocketing policing, incarceration, and deaths-in-custody of indigenous people, particularly Aboriginal
Australians (the “most imprisoned people in the world”). Politicians in the Commonwealth will look to roll back or
restructure indigenous rights won over the last three decades in ways that are favorable to capital. Governments, like
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in Canada, are already abandoning campaign promises to indigenous people, opting instead
to grab land and resources (as seen in the ham-fisted effort to force through the Site C Dam against indigenous
opposition). Trudeau’s minister of natural resources has already stated that Canada will no longer ask First Nations
for consent before going forward with lucrative natural resource projects like Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain
Expansion project and Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipelines. In Australia, the government is steamrolling the
Wangan and Jagalingou peoples’ Native Title claims in order to move forward with the massive Carmichael Coalmine
in Queensland. With the Commonwealth clamoring to cash in on opportunities created by Brexit, new free trade deals
with the United Kingdom will be struck, resuscitating and rebuilding the capital networks of the former British
Empire, previously weakened by globalization and the European Single Market. The Tory dream of a revived
Anglosphere, long derided as fanciful, nostalgic, and bad business by Liberals, may even emerge as a legitimate
principle and framework of international relations and trade. It will compete with increasingly powerful Chinese and
Indian capital throughout the Commonwealth, as already witnessed in the Canadian tar sands, Australian coalmines,
and New Zealand real estate and dairy. Combined with the rise of China and India, this will bring new waves of
exploitive capital into indigenous homelands, along with increased policing and the dismantling of indigenous rights.
Renewed colonial and capitalist pressure on indigenous people means that the Fourth World’s
adversarial relationship with the state will become more central to the struggle to transform
political and economic systems for all. If the history of the indigenous dance with the state is any indication,
the Fourth World will suffer tremendously while at the same time standing athwart the forces of capitalism and
exploitation. The Left must stand with the Fourth World in our collective struggle. The Fourth World and a Fourth
Way On November 14, the Army Corps of Engineers temporarily halted DAPL’s progress, stating that “the history of
the Great Sioux Nation’s dispossessions of lands” and the United States’ “government-to-government” relationship
with indigenous nations demanded that the route of the proposed pipeline be reassessed. The Army told Energy
Transfer Partners (ETP), the company building DAPL, that construction beneath the Missouri River required explicit
approval, and asked the Standing Rock Sioux to negotiate conditions for the pipeline to cross tribal territory. Faced
with a momentary victory for Standing Rock, Kelcy Warren, Dallas billionaire and CEO of ETP, denounced the decision
as “motivated purely by politics at the expense of a company that has done nothing but play by the rules.” Warren was
right. Had it not been for thousands of people mobilizing behind an indigenous-led coalition, DAPL would have been
business as usual. ETP would have desecrated the graves of Standing Rock ancestors unimpeded. Workers, lured by
relatively high wages, would have taken on toxic and insecure work. The tribe’s hunting and fishing grounds would
have been jeopardized, and if the pipeline leaked, Standing Rock and its downstream communities would have been
poisoned. Environmental degradation and runaway climate change would have pressed ahead unabated. Carbon
dependency would have become even more deeply engrained in our political economy. Eventually, ETP and their
investors would have cashed out, and future generations would have been robbed. And all of this still will happen if
President Obama doesn’t heed the water protectors and instead sides with ETP. ETP spent $1.2 million over the last
five years paying politicians to legislate in its favor. Warren personally donated $103,000 to the Trump campaign. But
when indigenous people organized, turning to direct action and the law to pressure elected officials and government
systems, they wrested power from ETP’s hands. DAPL is
just one chapter in a much longer story of
indigenous resistance to, and victories against, pipelines across North America. In 2015, the
Obama administration nixed the Keystone XL Pipeline, yielding to pressure from the Cowboy Indian Alliance.
In Minnesota, Enbridge shelved plans for the Sandpiper pipeline, after encountering tribal opposition.
The Unist’ot’en camp in northern British Columbia has held out against numerous proposed pipelines through their
territory, building a space where indigenous sovereignty stands tall on lands defined by industry as an “energy
corridor.” The American and Canadian oil industries are more vulnerable than we realize.
Fracked oil from the Bakken and Tar Sands is expensive to extract and refine. Meanwhile, OPEC is pumping at
breakneck speed, driving down global oil prices. Oil infrastructure is costly, not only for indigenous people, workers,
and the environment, but for investors too. Canadian oil producers have sold crude at a loss. The North Dakota and
Tar Sands oil booms have busted. Indigenous opposition to pipelines through their territories has made investors
uneasy. ETP was concerned that their $3.7 billion pipeline would be cancelled. Just this week, Warren used another
one of his companies, Sunoco, to buy ETP for $20 billion in order to cut his losses. The move will lower profits for
shareholders of ETP in order to protect profits for Energy Transfer Equities (ETE), the DAPL umbrella company in
which Warren owns more than 10 percent of shares. Simply put, in the face of massive opposition, the Dallas
billionaire reshuffled his companies at shareholders’ expense in order to safeguard and grow his own vast fortune.
The show of force against indigenous protesters, however brutal, is an act of desperation to
protect his infinitely deep pockets. If DAPL is not moving oil by the New Year, shipping contractors
can cancel their transportation agreements. Warren’s time is running out. Standing Rock, on the other
hand, is the future. Populism is killing the “Third Way” politics advocated by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and their
equivalents around the world. This is the Fourth Way. The Fourth Way will harness the power and strategic location
of indigenous people, exploiting pressure points beyond the workplace to oppose and transform unjust, unequal, and
undemocratic systems. Movements working to reshape infrastructure, environmental policy,
financial systems, policing, and work will be of particular importance to indigenous people.
Fossil fuel divestment and the “Keep It in the Ground” movement can weaken and even undermine companies
seeking to exploit fossil fuels on indigenous lands. Regulations that dismantle financial instruments and policies that
profit from natural resource speculation could divert and damage returns on capital flows. The abolition of mass
incarceration would loosen the death grip of prisons and police on indigenous communities. Unions can turn
individual workers into collective forces of resistance, helping drive up costs for developers and protect laborers
from unsafe working conditions. Long-term efforts to reimagine work through full automation and a universal basic
income could prevent laborers from having to seek such dangerous work in the first place. As Standing Rock has
shown, indigenous nations that use their unique standing to advocate for viable alternatives to unjust systems will
gain supporters. Our traditional territories encompass the rivers, mountains, and forests that capital exploits with
abandon. Our resistance — to the pipelines, bulldozers, and mines that cut through our lands and communities — has
greater potential than yet realized. Ours is a powerful voice envisioning a more harmonious and sustainable
relationship with the natural world rooted in the resurgence of indigenous sovereignty. As long as indigenous
people continue to make this argument, we are positioned to win policies, court decisions, and
international agreements that protect and enlarge our sovereignty and jurisdiction. As our
jurisdiction and sovereignty grow, we will have more power to stop, reroute, and transform carbon-based, capitalist,
and colonial infrastructure. When the Justice Department halted construction of DAPL in October, they also said they
would begin looking into Free Prior Informed Consent legislation. This is a minimal first step, and we must hold them
to it. Longstanding alliances with progressive parties and politicians are key to our success. In the United States,
Native people have worked with Democratic elected officials like Bernie Sanders and Raúl Grijalva to advance bills
like the Save Oak Flat Act, which aimed to stop an international mining conglomerate from exploiting an Apache
sacred site in Arizona. In Canada, First Nations have supported the New Democratic Party. In New Zealand, the Maori
Rātana religious and political movement has an alliance with the Labour Party that stretches back to the 1930s. Some
indigenous leaders, such as outspoken Aboriginal Australian leader Pat Dodson, a Labour senator for Western
Australia, have won prominent positions in these parties. This does not mean, of course, that we should pay deference
to elected officials. In 2014, Obama became one of the first sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he
travelled to Standing Rock. His visit was historically symbolic and emotionally important, but if Obama fails to stop
DAPL, indigenous people should renounce him. Politicians are helpful when they change policies and outcomes. We
cannot and should not settle for symbolic victories. If there is to be an enduring indigenous-left coalition, the Left
must support indigenous demands for land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. At their core, these demands undermine
the imperial cut-and-paste model of the nation-state, stretching from Hobbes to the present, which insists that there
is room for just one sovereign entity in the state apparatus. Thomas Piketty’s call for a global wealth tax implies an
international governance structure to levy such a tax. He pushes us to think beyond the state. Similarly, indigenous
demands for lands, jurisdiction, and sovereignty imply that we must think beneath it. As the Fourth World continues
to push states to recognize our inherent, constitutional, and treaty rights as sovereign nations, the Left cannot remain
neutral. To remain neutral is to perpetuate a long history of colonization. To remain neutral is to lose a valuable,
organized, and powerful ally. Struggle Without End On November 15, more than 1,500 protesters gathered in Foley
Square in Manhattan. With songs and chants of “Water is life,” we expressed our solidarity with Standing Rock, and
sent a strong message to Obama and the Army Corps of Engineers, whose offices lie just across the street: rescind
DAPL. We were just a fraction of the thousands who came together in cities across the country that day. Marching into
the street, a few dozen of us locked arms, sat down and stopped traffic in an act of civil disobedience. We refused to
move. We became the bodies blocking the behemoth. Police corralled us. An automated announcement warned us
that we faced imminent arrest if we refused to move. The machine blared louder and louder: “you are unlawfully in
the roadway and blocking vehicular traffic . . .” We responded with even louder chants and songs to drown out the
machine. The officers tightened their ranks and arrested us one by one. In jail, I was surprised to learn that I was just
one of two indigenous arrestees. The radical potential of July’s canoe journey had spread farther and wider than
anything we’d imagined just a few months earlier. We can still stop the Dakota Access pipeline. The police may
turn water cannons on us, assault and maim us, and lock us up, but we own the momentum. And even if we fail to
defeat this pipeline, we will have prevailed in many battles along the way, and we can still win the long war. As we
seek a way forward amid an ascendant right, the Fourth World has opened up a new window of political possibility.
The Left must stand with them and start stitching their successful formula for resistance and transformation together
with movements for economic, racial, environmental, gender, and sexual justice into a winning coalition.
 Gilman Opalsky
Baudrillard is wrong— err against his callousness in favor of alleviating
concrete suffering
Gilman-Opalsky 10 --- Associate Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of
Political Science at the University of Illinois (Richard Gilman-Opalsky, 2010, "Selectively
Forgetting Baudrillard: Rescuing Praxis From The Wreckage." Theory In Action. Vol. 3 Issue
2, 6-30-2016, pages 25-34)//jonah
By now, it should be clear that I not only appreciate Baudrillard’s work, but also, that I find much of it rather convincing. Yet, I have
described his work, and particularly its development during the last 30 years of his life, as
a dangerous wrong turn best
untaken. In a certain sense, it is very easy to critique Baudrillard, for he does not substantiate his
arguments with the formal rigors of traditional scholarship conventional within the social
sciences. Yet, in another sense, this same thing makes it very difficult to critique Baudrillard, and to some extent, criticism that parses his
words even seems misplaced from the start. This is because a self-conscious fragmentary perspectivism does not offer up a system that weakens
or collapses from scrutiny that reveals its argumentative holes and logical fallacies. Therefore, approaching critique in this way is like a “cheap
shot” that misses the point. That said, unless
we want to follow Baudrillard fully into the debris (which,
admittedly, many do), we must be allowed to bring some of the tools that he despises to bear on his
work. And, if he has effectively superseded such mechanisms, then it ought not to matter if we try. Nietzsche presents a similar problem of
slippery elusiveness. But with Baudrillard, the stakes are higher than with Nietzsche because of the
implications for politics. Hence, and despite certain difficulties, I shall now bring my critique of Baudrillard into focus.
Simulacra are, by definition, indistinguishable from real events. Nevertheless, the actual
existence and constant possibility of simulacra are not sufficient causes for adopting
reality agnosticism. It may be impossible to distinguish the fake holdup and fake sickness
from the real holdup and real sickness, but the child has really been sick, and most criminals
are not playing. Those involved in staging the act of simulation itself do mostly know the difference. But Baudrillard would rightly point
out that, from the outside, for those of us confronting simulacra phenomenologically (instead of making them), our general inability to tell the
difference means that we can never be too confident about reality. Reality
agnosticism is tantamount to treating
every event as a possible simulacrum. This is the same as to treat no events as real. This is
precisely what Baudrillard wants to do, yet I think this is a mistake. Baudrillard presses us to recognize that even suffering and death can be and
have been simulated (i.e. the Timioara Massacre in 1989 in Western Romania, where protestors were gunned down by the army. While the
massacre was real, it was later disclosed that 27 bodies were exhumed from the Timioara “Paupers’ Cemetery” to exaggerate the massacre for
TV effect. This series of events marked the end of Ceauescu’s Stalinist regime in Romania.).32 However, despite
such
manipulation, we do live in a world where suffering and death are real. That even
suffering and death could be staged, and that we cannot always tell when that is the case, does not mean that
we should make such suspicion into an operational logic—there is always the other side,
the side of actual suffering and death. Baudrillard makes too much out of the fake, and he
errs on the wrong side of the equation. What I mean by saying “too much” and “wrong side,” is precisely to raise a
normative objection. Wherever we cannot tell the difference (that is, wherever there are functional simulacra), I

contend that we should err on the side of a different obligation. And this is indeed a moral
obligation to take human suffering seriously, an obligation that outweighs the integrity
of Baudrillard’s skepticism. To put it bluntly, I would rather be fooled into thinking a faked death
was real than that a real death was faked. We must also ask, from a political point of view, what it means to be
agnostic about reality. Can one act with certainty and resolve against human suffering,
against inequality, against growing macroeconomic disparity, against misrecognition,
etc., if we cannot know anything with any certainty about these things? It is no misuse or abuse of

Baudrillard’s work to observe that his arguments do in fact distance us from a political consideration
of the material conditions of poverty, war, repression, and oppression. He explicitly
intends for his arguments to be—inasmuch as this is possible—incompatible with or unusable for
moral judgment and political argument. Baudrillard happily argues for the abandonment of moral argument and
normative theory altogether (again, much like Nietzsche, who also intended to think beyond good and evil). For example, Baudrillard writes, “It
is no longer a matter here of philosophical morality of the sort that says ‘the world isn’t what it ought to be’ or ‘the world isn’t what it was’. No,
the world is as it is.” Of course, Baudrillard is right that the world is as it is, but what of the role of human action in making it that way? So

much of the world is as it is because of the cumulative effect of collective human action
and inaction over time. In light of this, we do have some space within which to consider
what ought to be, what human action can do to move us in that direction and. This is a tenuous
space indeed, for it promises us nothing and many people already stand in it pushing and pulling in different directions. But, it is in this
space of consideration of the impact and effect of human action where the possibility for
politics remains, and where one hopes that the best heads will enter the fray.34
 Turner
info is good
Turner 93 (Bryan, Dean of Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia,
“Baudrillard for Sociologists,” in “Forget Baudrillard?” 1993, Routledge London and New
York, pg. 80-83)
While, as far as one can tell, Baudrillard was not influenced by Bell’s vision of the role of technology and the media in shaping post- industrialism, he was
influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s analysis (Gane 1991b:48) of the impact of new media on the transformation of modern culture, especially in The Gutenberg
Galaxy (McLuhan 1967). McLuhan was particularly sensitive to the idea that we live in a processed social world where human beings live in a complete
technostructure. This technological environment is carried with us as extensions of our own bodies, but McLuhan did not adopt a pessimistic view of the age of
anxiety, because his ‘technological humanism’ (Kroker et al. 1984) and Catholic values committed him to the idea of the immanence of reason and the hope of an
escape from the labyrinth. Indeed, a global technological system could become the basis of a universalistic culture. Although he was fully aware of the sensory
deprivation which he associated with the impact of the mass media, he none the less remained committed to the hope that these negative effects were not fatal.

Baudrillard, who as we have noted was deeply influenced by McLuhan’s idea that the content of messages was relatively unimportant in relation to their
form, has embraced a very nihilistic position with respect to our processed environment. Baudrillard’s pessimistic view of the fissure
in the historical development of the modern is based on his view of the masses. Baudrillard’s analysis of the masses is a product of the Situationist responses to the
May events of 1968, when it became increasingly obvious that the critical social movements of modern society would not be dominated by Marxist theory or
directed by a vanguard of the working class. The crisis of May 1968 had not been predicted by Marxism or by mainstream sociology, but they did validate the claims
of Situationists like Guy Debord in the journal Internationale Situationiste . However, if the crisis had been unanticipated by conventional political analysis, then
the sudden collapse of the students’ and workers’ movements of 1968 found no easy explanation in the framework of mainstream social sciences.
Baudrillard’s concept of the inexplicable nature of the mass depend a great deal on the
unusual circumstances surrounding the May events. By 1973 with the publication of The Mirror of Production
(Baudrillard 1975), Baudrillard was already moving away from an orthodox Marxist view of production, arguing that Marxism, far from being an external critique
of capitalism, was merely a reflection or mirror of the principal economistic values of capitalism. Instead of engaging in the production of meaning, a subversive,
oppositional movement would have to challenge the system from the point of view of meaninglessness. Subversion would have to rob the social system of
significance. In taking this stand, Baudrillard followed the Situationist claim that whatever can be represented can be controlled (Plant 1992:137). The mass events
of 1968 offered a promise of the nonrepresentational moment, the pure event of authenticity, which could not be explained, and therefore could not be
manipulated. Baudrillard, in dismissing Marxist theory as a means of representing events, sought to replace the idea of a mode of production with a mode of

disappearance. In taking this attitude towards modern social movements, Baudrillard’s argument also rests on the various
meanings of the word ‘mass’. Baudrillard is thus able to make allusions to the idea of
physical substance, matter, the majority and the electrical meaning of earth. The translator’s note to
In the Shadow of the Silent Majority points out that faire masse can mean to form a majority and to form an earth. Baudrillard argues by

allusion that the mass absorbs the electrical charges of social and political movements;
the mass thus neutralizes the electrical charge of society. This use of allusion, parody and
irony is typical of Baudrillard’s mode of analysis, which is a type of sociological poetics, a style which is likely to make
sociologists feel uncomfortable (Gane 199la:193). There is here also a continuity with the style of Dada and the Situationists. The poetic and

striking character of Baudrillard’s style has no counterpart in professional social science,

least of all in the British context. Baudrillard’s ‘sociological fictions’ (1990a:15) are striking and challenging, but they are not

ultimately convincing. Arguments which depend on allusion, allegory and similar

rhetorical devices are decorative but they are not necessarily powerful. The notion of ‘mass society’ already has a clearly worked out
sociological critique. The idea of ‘mass society’ might have been relevant in describing the new markets which were created in the post-war period with the advent
the trend
of innovative technologies, which had the immediate effect of lowering prices and making commodities available to a mass audience. However,

of sociological analysis in the last two decades has been to assert that mass audiences
have been broken down into more selectively constructed niches for more individualized
products. It is controversial to argue that industrialization necessarily produces a mass society, characterized by a common culture, uniform sentiments or
an integrated outlook. The idea of a mass society was often associated with the notion that the decline of individualism would produce a directionless mass as the
modern equivalent of the eighteenth- century mob. Critical theorists like Adorno and Marcuse associated the massification of society with authoritarianism and a
potential for fascism. Of course, Baudrillard’s version of mass society is based on a particular view of the mass media creating a hyperreality in which the real has
been absorbed by the hyperreal; meaning has imploded on itself. Although Baudrillard’s analysis of hyperreality is post- critical (Chen 1987), he does adopt in
practice a critical position towards American civilization, which is the extreme example of massification. Rather like critical theorists, Baudrillard believes that the

sociological research on mass

(bourgeois) individual has been sucked into the negative electrical mass of the media age. However,

audiences shows that there is no ground for believing that media messages are received,
consumed or used in any standardized manner, and the majority of social scientists working on culture have attempted to
argue that cultural objects in the age of the mass media are appropriated, transformed and

consumed in diverse forms and according to various practices (de Certeau 1984). In fact, sociologists, largely
inspired by the Situationists, have argued that everyday life is resistant to massification and that the concrete

reality of everyday life-situations is the principal arena within which opposition to

massification can be expected. Everyday life was regarded by both Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre (1991) as the
foundation of authenticity. Baudrillard, by arguing that criticism belongs to the period of
modernism and not to the age of hyperreality, has ruled out opposition to the system, at
least at the level of public debate and formal politics.
 Schwabach
Baudrillard is wrong about simulation
Schwabach 3 --- Professor of Law and Director of Center for Global Legal Studies,
Thomas Jefferson School of Law, J.D., University of California at Berkeley (Aaron, 2003,
“Kosovo: Virtual War and International Law,” Law and Literature at Thomas Jefferson
School of Law, 7-8-16, pages 1-21)//jonah
Baudrillard presents fewer problems of interpretation; his word is simulacrum (simulacre), which he uses in more or less the same sense, albeit with more

Academics are often criticized for over-reliance on opaque jargon.

elaboration, that it is ordinarily used.10

In comparison to many of his compatriots and their American emulators, Baudrillard

indulges in jargon only sparingly. For the most part, he writes the most arrant
nonsense in a clear, readily accessible style. His basic point is that the Gulf War was not a war but the simulacrum of a war;
it happened not on the battlefield but on television. All of the traditional trappings of the buildup to war were presented, even grotesquely exaggerated, on
television; at the end, however, we (the audience) were deprived of the final battle, left with neither victory for the Allies nor defeat for Saddam Hussein. In light of
the bold promise of the book’s title, this is rather disappointing. Rather than arguing unequivocally that the entire war was a fraud perpetrated upon the television-

viewing public, Baudrillard is simply nattering on again about simulacra . (At one point, though, he does suggest
that “[o]ne is reminded of Capricorn One,” a movie about a government conspiracy to fake a Mars landing in a film studio and present it to the public as news.)11
Baudrillard, after all, is a man who, like his compatriot and predecessor Descartes, spends an inordinate amount of time
wondering whether he exists. Unlike Descartes, however, he is not convinced that he exists merely
because he thinks that he does. His identity, and that of everything and everyone else, is
lost in a kaleidoscope of endlessly precessing simulacra that ultimately
preclude the existence of any baseline reality. The Gulf War is not then real or unreal in any absolute sense, because there is
no ultimate “reality.” It is simply less real than some things and more real than others. (Baudrillard draws many comparisons between “events” in the war and
television commercials, for example.) The Gulf War (or simulacrum of war) is thus at least as real as international law, and by extension so is the Kosovo war; I

Baudrillard begins by asserting that “It might have been

shall therefore have to continue writing about all three.

supposed that the defection of the Eastern Bloc would have opened up new spaces of
freedom for war by unlocking deterrence. Nothing of the sort[.]”12 Baudrillard, writing these words at
the beginning of 1991,13 was simply too impatient. As the world has since learned to its dismay, the defection of the Eastern Bloc and
subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has opened up a great number of new spaces of freedom for war, most notably in the expression of the

Baudrillard himself would undoubtedly deplore

ethnic conflicts previously repressed by authoritarian Communist regimes.

the idea that the facts of his life might be responsible for his opinions. But his reactions on such topics as
America and superpower conflict (and, as we shall see later, Arabs and Islam) are often surprisingly conventional for a person of his age, gender and nationality.
Baudrillard was born in Reims in 1929.14 He would thus have been three or four years old when Hitler came to power, fifteen during the liberation of France, and
sixteen when World War II ended. The bilateral Allied/Axis conflict was almost immediately replaced with a similar conflict between the more or less free-market
countries of the West and the communist countries of the Soviet bloc. As a result, it is perhaps natural that Baudrillard would see a world with two opposing

At the time of communism’s

ideological camps as a prerequisite for war, or at least for war of the sort to which he is accustomed.

collapse, he found it difficult to believe in the possibility of war in a post-Soviet world. By the
time Baudrillard opined that the collapse of the Eastern bloc had opened up no new spaces of freedom for war, in fact, Croatia and Slovenia had already begun to
make secessionist noises; six months later the first of Yugoslavia’s ethnic cleansing wars would begin. The Romanian revolution (or its simulacrum) had already
taken place, as Baudrillard repeatedly acknowledges, after his fashion. 15 Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait could have been designed as a test case for the role of the United
States in the post-Cold War world, as the first major act of territorial aggression in which the response of the Soviet Union (which itself would not last out the year)

was more or less insignificant. Thus, simulacrum or not, the Gulf War was important historically .
Baudrillard himself says, somewhat inconsistently in light of his other conclusions, that “what is at stake in this one is war itself: its status, its meaning, its

future.”16Much of what strikes Baudrillard as different about the Gulf War, though, is actually
not new at all. For example, he sees the role of hostages as one of the Gulf War’s novel qualities:
“The hostage has taken the place of the warrior. He has become the principal actor, the
simulacral protagonist, or rather, in his pure inaction, the protagoniser of non-war.”17 Later,
in Kosovo, the Serbian government would make an entire civilian population hostage. Yet the use of hostages in war, even on this scale, is

hardly new; warring parties have always viewed hostages “as exchange value and
liquidity.”18 Using hostages as human shields and bargaining chips is as old as war
itself. It is when Baudrillard likens the plight of the audience to the plight of the hostages ,
though, that he begins to exhibit the indifference to human suffering for which he has

so often been criticized.19 He writes that “all of us [are] information hostages on the world media
stage….20 We are already all strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we
are virtually bombarded day by day, even while serving as exchange value.”21 It is this
element of the concept of simulacral war that is most difficult to accept. The
difference between the hostage and the viewer should be obvious even to one
who affects to disbelieve in his own existence; the viewer can simply turn off the
television and thus escape his or her predicament. Nor do the viewers have
significant “exchange value,” unless the governments concerned would discontinue
the charade of war if they thought no one was watching, or unless the simulacrum exists
only to the degree it is perceived. Thus the claim that “[t]he complement of the
unconditional simulacrum in the field is to train everyone in the unconditional reception
of broadcast simulacra” makes sense only if one also accepts that the simulacrum
experienced by the viewer is identical to that experienced by the viewed. Those who believe in the
reality of human suffering are likely to react to this idea with a certain amount of hostility, however. This reaction can only be exacerbated by the assertion that “it
is [the hostages’] virtual death that is at issue, not their real death.
 Robinson
Research proves info is not disausive --- there is zero evidence
supporting the alternative’s “implosion” and it’s just as likely to
reproduce conservatism and genocidal racism
Robinson 04 [Andrew,
http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/baudrillard-zizek-and-laclau-on-
common.html]
Baudrillard's claim that the masses are "dumb", silent and conduct any and all beliefs (SSM 28) and "the reversion of any
social" (SSM 49) is problematised by the persistence of subcultures and countercultures, while his claim that any remark could
be attributed to the masses (SSM 29) hardly proves that it lacks its own demands or beliefs. He is
leaping far too
quickly from the confused and contradictory nature of mass beliefs to the idea that the
masses lack - or even reject - meaning per se. He wants to portray the masses as disinterested in meaning, instinctual
and "above and beyond all meaning" (SSM 11), lacking even conformist beliefs (87-8) and without a language of their own
(22). This is contradicted by extensive evidence on the construction of meaning in everyday
life, from Hoggart on working class culture to Becker, Lemert, Goffman and others on deviance. Even in the sphere of media
effects, the evidence from research on audiences, such as Ang on Dallas viewers and Morley on the Nationwide
audience, suggests an active construction of meaning by members of the masses, negotiating
with or even opposing dominant codes of meaning. This may well show a decline of that kind of meaning
promoted by the status quo - but it hardly shows a rejection of meaning per se. When the masses act stupid, it may well be due
to what radical education theorists term "reactive stupidity" - an adaptive response to avoid being falsified and "beaten" by
acting stupid. Baudrillard again wrongly conflates the dominant system with meaning as such. Indeed, Baudrillard seems to
have changed his mind AGAIN by the time of the Gulf War essays, when he refers to the MEDIA, not the masses, as in control
(GW 75), and to stupidity as a result of "mental deterrence" (GW 67-8), which produces a "suffocating atmosphere of
deception and stupidity" (GW 68) and a control through the violence of consensus (GW 84). Baudrillard's view that the masses
respond to official surveys and the like in a tautological way (SSM 28) may well be true, without proving what Baudrillard
claims it does about the absence of meaning in the masses. The attitudes of subaltern groups towards dominant beliefs has
often taken such forms throughout history, but this does not preclude the parallel existence of what Jim Scott terms "hidden
transcripts" - a parallel set of beliefs with a separate structure of meaning which are not compromised by power. Baudrillard
does not dig deep enough into evidence on mass culture to assess whether such transcripts exist or not. He simply
assumes the omnipotence of the official, "public" system of meaning. Further, his claim that what
passes through the masses leaves no trace (SSM 2) is very problematic, as his claim that the masses are the negation of all
dominant meanings (SSM 49). There are some very strange 'proofs' in Baudrillard's work: for instance, the claim that people
don't believe the myths they adopt rests on the statement that to claim the opposite is to accuse the masses of being stupid and
naive (SSM 99-100). He does not explain why we should not believe this - especially since he elsewhere calls them "dumb like
beasts"! Occasionally, Baudrillard acknowledges evidence against his approach: namely, the research of the "two-step flow"
theorists on audience effects, and also the kind of syncretic resistances analysed by Scott, which resist the dominant social
system and reinterpret or "recycled" its messages towards different codes and ends, often linked to earlier social forms (SSM
42-3). However, he does not dwell on such evidence. This, he says, is simply a different issue, unrelated to the question of the
MASSES as "an innumerable, unnameable and anonymous group" operating through inertia and fascination (SSM 43-4).
Attempts to recreate meaning at the periphery are a "secondary" matter (SSM 103-4). Similarly, at times, Baudrillard admits
both the unsatisfactory nature of the society of the spectacle for many of its participants, and the existence of spheres of belief
and discourse beyond its borders. For instance, people don't fully believe the hyperreality which substitutes for reality (SSM
99); some groups, so-called "savages" such as the Arab masses, are not submerged in simulation and can still become
passionately involved in, for instance, war (GW 32); the real still exists underground (GW 63). Indeed, although his analysis of
the Gulf War suggests that the WEST is trapped in simulacra, his account of the rest of the world suggests it follows a different
logic (eg GW 65). Wars or non-wars today are waged by the west against symbolic logics which break with the dominant
system, such as Islam (GW 85-6), to absorb everything which is singular and irreducible (GW 86). Also, though he thinks the
risk of it is low, he admits that an accident, an irruption of Otherness, or an event which breaks the control exerted by
information can disrupt the "celibate machine" of media control (GW 36, 48). If this is the case, however, there
is no
basis for assuming its totality, and it is still meaningful to try to win people over to alternatives.
In SSM Baudrillard retreats from this analysis, suggesting the reduction of society to a rat race is a result of the masses'
resistance to 'objective' economic management (SSM 45) - the system benefits as a result but that is not the main issue. This
contrasts with Baudrillard's earlier analyses and also those of others such as Illich, who see the destructive social effects of
such competition. However, Baudrillard does attack "the social", which he identifies with control through information,
simulation, security and deterrence (SSM 50-1) - though how it can be resisted since he thinks it "produces" us is never
explained. Baudrillard tends to conflate existing dominant beliefs with thought and meaning
per se. As a result, he leaves it impossible to critique dominant ideas in a meaningful way.
For instance, he poses political problems in terms of "resistance to the social", with the social
in general being conflated with the EXISTING social system (SSM 41); ditto on the existing sign system,
which Baudrillard identifies with meaning per se. In such cases, Baudrillard misses the whole question of
countercultural practices and the creation of alternative hegemonies. Baudrillard's
conflation of meaning per se with dominant beliefs leads to a refusal to countenance the
possibility of transforming mass beliefs. Raising the cultural level of the masses, Baudrillard claims, is
"Nonsense" because the masses, who want spectacle rather than meaning, are resistant to "rational
communication" (SSM 10). An "autonomous change in consciousness" by the masses, Baudrillard tells us, is a "glaring
impossibility" (SSM 30) - though he never tells us how he deduces this. Furthermore, he also claims that
people who try to raise consciousness, liberate the unconscious or promote subjectivity "are acting in
accordance with the system" (SSM 109). This anathematisation is a result of Baudrillard's
strange claim that the system's logic is based on total inclusion and speech! It is on this basis that
Baudrillard rejects argument based on empirical claims and locates truth outside such claims (SSM 121-2). From the second
pole of his contradictory argument about the masses, which portrays them as de facto agents engaging in resistance, defiance
and so on, Baudrillard wants to draw a politics starting from the refusal of meaning (SSM 15), and from the contradictory
combination of the two he draws his model of hyperconformity as annulling control (SSM 30-3). He can't deal with the
contradiction, especially since he uses terms which imply consciousness - such as ruse and offensive practice - when he admits
the object of such terms is acting unknowingly (SSM 43). Indeed, he actually writes as if one can UNKNOWINGLY carry out a
CONSCIOUS act (SSM 42). This is sinister, reproducing the Stalinist idea of objective alignment - especially when used against
Baudrillard's theoretical rivals (SSM 123). Further, it is
not clear from where he is deducing his idea that
one can destroy a system by pushing its logic to the extreme (SSM 46), which he sees as a resistance to
demands to participate (SSM 106-8). There are a few cases of the letter of the law being used to subvert its implementation,
such as go-slows at work; these, however, are rooted in concrete practices elsewhere. There are also a few cases of
hyperconformity disrupting official projects - for instance, the disastrous effects of Chinese peasants' literal reading of Maoist
imperatives to (eg.) kill all birds. These, however, did not
actually LIBERATE anyone or DESTROY the
system; and most hyperconformity simply produces a more oppressive variant on the system -
for instance, hyperconformist racism produces genocide. He also never sets out the stakes of the conflict
between the masses and society or the effects of the masses' victories, though he vaguely links these to the (unspecified) goals
of radical critics (SSM 49). Indeed, he uses the opt-out that our present epistemology prevents us knowing what possibilities
would be offered by the system's destruction (SSM 52). Furthermore, to be a resistance, there would have to be an AGENT
CHOOSING to be an object. Baudrillard's sectarianism is clearly shown by his belief that popular rethinking of ideas is always a
"misappropriation" or "radical distortion" rather than an improvement (SSM 8). He also engages in a highly essentialist attack
on popular ethics, representing the stress on real practices and small images in popular religion as "degraded", banal and
profane, a way of "refusing the categorical imperative of morality and faith", as well as of meaning, because it stresses
immediacy in the world (SSM 7-8). Popular ethics, as Hoggart, Scott and others show, is far more than a mere refusal, and its
rejection of the transcendentalism of the intellectual allies of dominant strata is hardly evidence that they are degraded, banal
or anti-ethical. Furthermore, on an empirical level, fatalism DOES occur in popular ethics, contrary to Baudrillard's claims. The
problem is further complicated by Baudrillard's vague claim that something passes between the masses and terrorism (SSM
52-3), which seems to imply that isolated terrorist acts can somehow transform overnight the entire structure of meaning by
rendering representation impossible and meanings reversible (SSM 54, 116), and which is also based on a definition of
terrorism which is so restricted that it rules out virtually all actual "terrorists" and which Baudrillard admits (116) does not fit
the identities of the Baader-Meinhof group, the one example he gives. His
politics results directly from the
artificial grimness of his analysis of popular beliefs, since it involves a radical
subjectlessness and a random blow against victims who are punished for being nothing (SSM
56-7). Like Zizek, he calls for the suicidal destruction of one's own perspective (SSM 69-70), and denounces everything short
of this as strengthening the system (SSM 72). Furthermore, his model
of social change, which rests on the
inevitability of implosive catastrophe (SSM 61), has no room for any human intervention. It
simply assumes that another reality lies beyond our own perspective which can be reached in this
way, but which is presently blocked by our way of thinking (SSM 104). Baudrillard substitutes "logical exacerbation" and
"catastrophic revolution" for alternatives (SSM 106), and locates the frontier of struggle at the level of "production of truth"
(SSM 123). The progressive side of this struggle seems to involve unknowability and fascination. The lack of
alternatives seriously blunts Baudrillard's critical force, and can even lead to conservative
positions, such as portraying manipulation of the media as better than pursuing truth (GW
46).
 Condit
Abstract movements won’t produce political results besides
violence – embrace the hard work of pragmatic reform
Condit 15 [Celeste, Distinguished Research Professor of Communication Studies at the
University of Georgia, “Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social
Change,” Feb 4, 2015, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Volume 101, Issue 1, 2015]
Thus, when Žižek and others urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a
vision of an alternative, on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never certain,
we can call his appeal both a failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for
reality, we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the historical record indicates quite
clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what I call “AnarchoNiceness” to
gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian
states and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by
predicting that it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void. All symbolic movement
has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a potentially realizable alternative
for that trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is biological predispositions—
the first iteration of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is what
experience with revolutions has shown to be the most probable outcome of a
revolution that is merely against an Evil. The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby
reveals itself to be critical, so it is worth pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social
theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap into a void because the symbolized alternative that the
context of the twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e.,
communism. That rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined
forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9). The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as
dramatically enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is piecemeal, intellectually
difficult, requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires more
creativity than the typical academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable
alternative, the appeals to Radical Revolution seem to have been sustained by the
emotional zing of the kill, in many cases amped up by the appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the
former term and deploys the ethos of the latter). But if one does not provide a viable vision that offers a
reasonable chance of leaving most people better off than they are now, then Fox News has a better
offering (you'll be free and you'll get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot succeed as a
horizon of history, other than as constant local scale violent actions, perhaps connected by
shifting networks we call “terrorists.” This analysis of the geo-political situation, of the onto-epistemological character of
language, and of the limitations of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that the
focal project for
progressive Left Academics should now include the hard labor to produce alternative
visions that appear materially feasible.
 Turner
Their information overload argument is wrong – high volume of
information doesn’t render it meaningless, and information is
not consumed uniformly by a mass society – it’s diffused,
meaning individuals and social groups can accurately process
and employ the information they consume for pragmatic
political reforms
Turner 04 – Bryan S. Turner, Dean of Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia, “Baudrillard for
Sociologists,” in Forget Baudrillard?, 2004 edition, p. 80-83
While, as far as one can tell, Baudrillard was not influenced by Bell’s vision of the role of technology and the media in shaping
postindustrialism, he was influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s analysis (Gane 1991b:48) of the impact of new media on the
transformation of modern culture, especially in The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan 1967). McLuhan was particularly sensitive to the
idea that we live in a processed social world where human beings live in a complete technostructure. This technological
environment is carried with us as extensions of our own bodies, but McLuhan did not adopt a pessimistic view of the age of
anxiety, because his ‘technological humanism’ (Kroker et al. 1984) and Catholic values committed him to the idea of the
immanence of reason and the hope of an escape from the labyrinth. Indeed, a global technological system could become the
basis of a universalistic culture. Although he was fully aware of the sensory deprivation which he associated with the impact of
the mass media, he none the less remained committed to the hope that these negative effects were not fatal. Baudrillard,
who as we have noted was deeply influenced by McLuhan’s idea that the content of
messages was relatively unimportant in relation to their form, has embraced a very nihilistic
position with respect to our processed environment. Baudrillard’s pessimistic view
of the fissure in the historical development of the modern is based on his view of the masses. Baudrillard’s
analysis of the masses is a product of the Situationist responses to the May events of 1968, when it became increasingly obvious
that the critical social movements of modern society would not be dominated by Marxist theory or directed by a vanguard of the
working class. The crisis of May 1968 had not been predicted by Marxism or by mainstream sociology, but they did validate the
claims of Situationists like Guy Debord in the journal Internationale Situationiste. However, if the crisis had been unanticipated by
conventional political analysis, then the sudden collapse of the students’ and workers’ movements of 1968 found no easy
explanation in the framework of mainstream social sciences. Baudrillard’s concept of the inexplicable nature of the mass depend
a great deal on the unusual circumstances surrounding the May events. By 1973 with the publication of The Mirror of Production
(Baudrillard 1975), Baudrillard was already moving away from an orthodox Marxist view of production, arguing that Marxism, far
from being an external critique of capitalism, was merely a reflection or mirror of the principal economistic values of capitalism.
Instead of engaging in the production of meaning, a subversive, oppositional
movement would have to challenge the system from the point of view of
meaninglessness. Subversion would have to rob the social system of significance. In taking this stand, Baudrillard followed
the Situationist claim that whatever can be represented can be controlled (Plant 1992:137). The mass events of 1968 offered a
promise of the nonrepresentational moment, the pure event of authenticity, which could not be explained, and therefore could
not be manipulated. Baudrillard, in dismissing Marxist theory as a means of representing events, sought to replace the idea of a
mode of production with a mode of disappearance. In taking this attitude towards modern social movements, Baudrillard’s
argument also rests on the various meanings of the word ‘mass’. Baudrillard is thus able to make allusions to the idea of physical
substance, matter, the majority and the electrical meaning of earth. The translator’s note to In the Shadow of the Silent Majority
points out that faire masse can mean to form a majority and to form an earth. Baudrillard argues by allusion that the mass
absorbs the electrical charges of social and political movements; the mass thus neutralizes the electrical charge of society. This
use of allusion, parody and irony is typical of Baudrillard’s mode of analysis, which is a type of sociological poetics, a style which is
likely to make sociologists feel uncomfortable (Gane 199la:193). There is here also a continuity with the style of Dada and the
Situationists. The poetic and striking character of Baudrillard’s style has no counterpart in professional social science, least of all
in the British context. Baudrillard’s ‘sociological fictions’ (1990a:15) are striking and challenging, but they
are not ultimately convincing. Arguments which depend on allusion, allegory and similar rhetorical devices are decorative
but they are not necessarily powerful. The notion of ‘mass society’ already has a clearly worked out sociological critique. The idea
of ‘mass society’ might have been relevant in describing the new markets which were created in the post-war period with the
advent of innovative technologies, which had the immediate effect of lowering prices and making commodities available to a
mass
mass audience. However, the trend of sociological analysis in the last two decades has been to assert that

audiences have been broken down into more selectively constructed niches for
more individualized products. It is controversial to argue that industrialization necessarily produces a mass society, characterized
by a common culture, uniform sentiments or an integrated outlook. The idea of a mass society was often associated with the
notion that the decline of individualism would produce a directionless mass as the modern equivalent of the eighteenthcentury
mob. Critical theorists like Adorno and Marcuse associated the massification of society with authoritarianism and a potential for
Baudrillard’s version of mass society is based on a particular view of the
fascism. Of course,

mass media creating a hyperreality in which the real has been absorbed by the
hyperreal; meaning has imploded on itself. Although Baudrillard’s analysis of hyperreality is postcritical
(Chen 1987), he does adopt in practice a critical position towards American civilization, which is the extreme example of
massification. Rather like critical theorists, Baudrillard believes that the (bourgeois) individual has been sucked into the negative
 However, sociological research on mass audiences shows that
electrical mass of the media age.
there is no ground for believing that media messages are received, consumed or used in
any standardized manner, and the majority of social scientists working on culture
have attempted to argue that cultural objects in the age of the mass media are appropriated,
transformed and consumed in diverse forms and according to various practices (de
Certeau 1984). In fact, sociologists, largely inspired by the Situationists, have argued that everyday life

is resistant to massification and that the concrete reality of everyday life-situations is the principal arena within
which opposition to massification can be expected. Everyday life was regarded by both Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre (1991) as
the foundation of authenticity. Baudrillard, by arguing that criticism belongs to the period of modernism and not to the age
of hyperreality, has ruled out opposition to the system, at least at the level of public debate and
formal politics.
 Robinson
Seriously, Baudrillard is explicitly hostile to minorities.
Robinson 12 – (Andrew, “An A to Z of Theory – Jean Baudrillard and Activism: A
critique”, 2012)
There are serious limits to Baudrillard’s work, in terms of his hostility to ‘minority’ struggles.
Many of his formulations are inadvertently sexist and racist. There are also times when Baudrillard
comes across as ableist in his critiques of the therapeutic. There are also times when Baudrillard attacks activism in
strong terms: Hippies reproduce capitalist ideology; Feminists displaying images of porn
are actually being seductive, against their will; The left is keeping capitalism alive with its moral critiques and its quests for
meaning. There are times when it is hard to tell if Baudrillard is a reactionary, attacking the concerns of

progressives, or an ultra-left, criticising every rebellion as insufficiently extreme.

 Wheeler
Baudrillard is privileged – reject his scholarship
Wheeler 91 – (Elizabeth A. Wheeler, "Bulldozing the Subject," Postmodern Culture,
muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.3wheeler.html)
We cannot sufficiently counter the dryness of Baudrillard's logic without invoking the category of
experience. When Baudrillard speaks through the voice of the media or of the nuclear arms race, he speaks of "the
inconsequential violence that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory contrivance of every choice which is
made for us." Violence is inconsequential unless it happens to you. Baudrillard's

indifference reveals the comfort of his own position. For the man who has his
freedom, freedom is unimportant, both personally and theoretically. Black South Africans know that
freedom is real because they do not have it. A woman unwillingly pregnant who cannot
obtain an abortion knows choice is real because she does not have it. When Baudrillard
writes that "prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its
banal omnipresence, which is carceral" (25), we know for certain he has never been to
jail.
 Merrin
Baudrillard’s theory is necessarily self-defeating – they could
win every argument and it still doesn’t justify a ballot.
Merrin 01 (William, Prof. of School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, “To play with phantoms:
Jean Baudrillard and the Evil Demon of the Simulacrum” Economy and Society Volume 30 Number 1)

The power of the simulacrum, therefore, may prove to be greater than Baudrillard
realized. On a personal level this is certainly the case. In a candid 1984–5 interview he reveals that his courtship of its
demon became an unlivable experience: ‘I stopped working on simulation. I felt I was going totally nuts’ (1993a: 105). The
simulacrum, however, could not be so easily disposed of. Despite his desire to ‘cast off this yoke of simulacres and
simulation’ (1993a: 184), the ‘simulacrum’ has thrived, becoming an idea popularly and irrevocably identified with
Baudrillard. It
has, appropriately, exerted its simulacral power to appear in the popular
imagination as the real philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, eclipsing his critique, and all other aspects of
his work and career. Journalistic commentary and student texts are typical here in identifying the simulacrum as
Baudrillard’s sole approved project. Thus the problem of finding Baudrillard’s flat is turned into an obvious and banal
hook by one interviewer, who takes the opportunity to enquire whether ‘Baudrillard himself . . . might be a simulacrum’:
Does he really exist? (Leith 1998: 14). More importantly for Baudrillard, however, is the simulacral efficacy of doubling –
the theoretical strategy of employing simulation which, quite naturally, has a simulacral effect. The theory of simulation
Baudrillard did not believe in has now been realized: as the Japanese interviewer makes clear, the simulacrum has become
reality. Volatized in, and as, the real, its victory is the concept’s defeA2: once it is ‘true’, the simulacrum becomes a
commonplace, robbed of its capacity to arouse the world’s denial and thus its critical force: if there is nothing beyond the
simulacrum then it is not even open to question but is simply ‘our absolute banality, our everyday obscenity’ (Zurbrugg
1997: 11). Hence Baudrillard’s emphasis upon the theoretical challenge of the simulacrum. Once realized, unless – as
Baudrillard hopes – it can itself be reversed against simulation, then this critical function is lost. Opposing
Baudrillard with the simulacrum – with its success – is, therefore, the most effective
means of critique. For his work is not wrong, but too true: the simulacrum has become reality and
this is his end; the game is over. It is, therefore, in the hyperdefence of Baudrillard that we find a means of leaving
him behind. With his success, Baudrillard disappears. If we want him to survive, we must condemn
him as a nihilistic proponent of the simulacrum and oppose him with an outraged,
vituperic, moral appeal to reality, as Kellner and Norris do; thereby restoring his work to life. For, if it is only
in its contradiction that it can live as a provocation and diabolical challenge, then once it is true this ends. Kellner and
Norris, therefore, may yet prove to be Baudrillard’s greatest defenders. Baudrillard, of all people, should have anticipated
his disappearance, for the simulacrum’s demonic power rests also in its attraction for, and hold over, humanity. Aristotle,
for example, recognized this, writing of this instinctive pleas- ure of imitation in man, ‘the most imitative of living
creatures’ (1997: 5), while Nietzsche also speaks of ‘the delight in simulation’ and of its effects in ‘explod- ing as a power
that pushes aside one’s so-called “character”, 􏰝 ooding it and at times extinguishing it’ (1974: para. 361). One courts this
demon, therefore, at one’s own risk, as it captivates and ovearwhelms our personality. As the author of the Psalms
cautioned the makers and worshippers of idols, ‘they that make them are like unto them: so is everyone who trusteth in
them’ (Barasch 1992: 20). The efficacy of simulation and the danger of disappearance are key themes in Roger Caillois’
influential essay on animal mimicry and the mimetic instinct – no less powerful in insects than in man (Caillois 1984). The
instinct of mimesis parallels primitive magic, Caillois says, though it is a mimetic spell which is too strong for those who
cast it. For the insects it is a spell which has ‘caught the sorcerer in his own trap’ (1984: 27) – Phylia, for example, ‘browse
among them- selves, taking each other for real leaves’ (1984: 25). So, Caillois argues, simulation absorbs the simulator,
leading to their mimetic ‘assimilation to the surroundings’ with a consequent ‘psychasthenic’ loss of distinction,
personality, and also, in a thanatophilic movement, the loss of the signs of life itself (1984: 28, 30). Simulation, therefore,
􏰝 nally overwhelms the simulator: as Caillois warns in the epigram which opens his article, ‘Take care: when you play
If the simulacrum
with phantoms, you may become one’ (1984: 17). So Baudrillard’s game has the same result.
has been realized; if simulation is now our everyday banality, then Baudrillard is
condemned to a lifeless disappearance as a sorcerer trapped by his own magical
invocation, absorbed by his own simulation. Baudrillard may not believe in the ghost of the
simulacrum, but he himself becomes this very ghost. His game with phantoms ends, as Caillois knew it would, with his
own phantasmatic transformation, with his apparitional disappearance. But this is only fitting, for in the pact with the
devil it is always your soul that is the stake.
 Mattson
Simulations are real – even if they aren’t a 100% objective, the
alternative is worse and ahistorical.
Mattson 12 (Michelle, Rhodes College German politics and culture professor, “Rebels Without Causes:
Contemporary German Authors Not in Search of Meaning”, Monatshefte, 104.2, Summer, project muse)

I shall not venture to judge whether Baudrillard’s diagnosis of postmodern society is accurate,
although it appears that many of Germany’s current writers agree with him or were influenced by postmodern theories of
late 20th-century consumerist societies. I can, however, say in conclusion that it is not helpful or
productive on either an individual or social level in imagining ways of living in today’s
world. As Steven Best points out: Baudrillard’s radical rejection of referentiality is premised upon a one-dimensional,
No-Exit world of self-referring simulacra. But, however, reified and self-referential postmodern
semiotics is, signs do not simply move in their own signifying orbit. They are
historically produced and circulated and while they may not translucently refer to
some originating world, they none the less can be socio-historically contextualized,
interpreted, and critiqued.(57) In other words, human beings generate the simulacra in
specific historical contexts that are subject to interpretation and challenge.
Regardless of how pervasively the media spin our reality, real people suffer and—
occasionally [End Page 259] prosper—because of political decisions made at the local,
national, and international level. Media images may overpower us, but they shouldn’t
make us lose sight of the real ramifications of political and economic
development. Many critics have suggested that Baudrillard’s chief accomplishment was to serve as an agent
provocateur. In an interview with Mike Gane, Baudrillard himself saw his method of reflection as “provocative, reversible,
[ . . . ] a way of raising things to the ‘N’th power [ . . . ] It’s
a bit like a theory-fiction” (Poster 331). One
could argue that this is precisely the function of such novels and short stories as the ones
examined here: to provoke us. But to what end? Naters, Regener, and Hermann all write very
readable literature, and they challenge us to understand the world of the insipid, self-centered, and myopic characters that
they have created. It would indeed be a disservice to the authors to imply that they do not view their own characters with
critical distance. Thus, I am not suggesting that they believe their readers should emulate the characters they have created.
They have not, however, successfully demonstrated either why we should care about them or—more importantly—what we
can learn from them.
 Dutton
Baudrillard’s a joker and his theories are wrong – his totalizing
claims are unfounded and he blatantly ignores evidence to the
contrary.
Dutton 90 Denis Dutton, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Canterbury, Jean
Baudrillard, Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990): 234-38., http://denisdutton.com/baudrillard_review.htm

The editor who anthologizes the work of a single author typically feels compelled in an introduction to explain why the
book’s contents are so splendid and worthy of our every attention. In just this respect, Mark Poster’s entree to his
anthology, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford University Press, $32.50 cloth, $10.95 paper), is a refreshingly
honest exception. Poster presents what is probably as clear and intelligent an exposition of Baudrillard’s ideas as you’ll
find anywhere. But despite his obvious sympathy with Baudrillard, he is willing to add that the writing “is open to several
criticisms.” Baudrillard ignores contrary evidence for his claims, which are expressed in
a style characterized by Poster as “hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking in sustained, systematic
analysis when it is appropriate” Baudrillard extrapolates from limited areas of
experience, such as television images, “as if nothing else in society mattered.” Poster regrets that Baudrillard
“fails to define his major terms,” and that he “totalizes” his claims without qualification
or limitation. Jean Baudrillard To this list of charges I would add only that, when it isn’t unintelligible,
almost everything Baudrillard says is either trite or somehow — vaguely or baldly —
false. We are not allowed long to forget that Baudrillard is a sociology professor. Poster believes
that “Baudrillard’s work is invaluable in beginning to comprehend the impact of new communication forms on society.” I’d
advise anyone seeking to understand the broad implications of computer and video technologies for information and
entertainment to search elsewhere, but if you want to know which way the wind is blowing in “theory,” this is the place.
The selections in this book begin in 1968, when Baudrillard was still some kind of a Marxist, and continue through “The
Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media” (1985). This last piece proposes the familiar notion that we are
imprisoned in a world of media simulations, video phantasms, and that we cannot come to know the real not because we
are ignorant but because we are overinformed: “we will never in the future be able to separate reality from its statistical,
simulative projection in the media.” This isn’t an uncertainty we’ve experienced in the past, but a brand new kind of
uncertainty brought about by an excess of information. So much for the trite part about video simulations replacing reality
and media/ information overload. The false part comes when Baudrillard talks about the public reaction to this. The
response of “the masses” (he still fancies bits of Marxist parlance) to the media is silence — people get even with public
opinion polls, television, advertising, and so forth by plunging themselves into a state of stupor. Like McLuhan,
Baudrillard doesn’t want to call this sort of thing good or bad; unlike McLuhan, he gives very few examples
of the phenomena he purports to describe. There are no examples whatsoever of how public silence,
passivity, and alienation serve as “strategies” to counter and undermine the oppression of the media. And how could he
give an example of this? To be sure, there is an abundance of stupified people out there sitting in front of television
screens; but to portray their stupefaction as a form of calculated revenge on the media is frivolous without even being
interesting. Just as frivolous, but at least more amusing, is Baudrillard’s travel adventure though America (Verso, $24.95).
I’ve met young people who at their first encounter with Europe will gush that it was “just like a movie.” Naive, yes, though
it’s a perfectly natural reaction if you’ve never seen Europe except in movies; eventually the feeling wears off. I do hope
Baudrillard will continue to visit the States, as I’m sure he’ll outgrow his sense that in America “cinema is true because it is
the whole of space, the whole way of life that are cinematic . . . life is cinema. . . . The American city seems to have stepped
right out of the movies.” A week’s visit with relatives — anybody’s relatives — in Des Moines, sleeping on a sofa bed, might
have cured such delusions, but he seems to have spent most of his time either on the freeways or in such “paradisiacal”
haunts as Santa Barbara. Most European accounts of America adopt an angle, and besides the mandatory clichés about
Disneyland and American hyperreality, Baudrillard’s theme is the untamed primitivism of the place. Old Europe is gray
with thought, bent under the weight of history. But there’s a savage animalism about these Americans. Of the Black and
Puerto Rican women of New York, he remarks that “black, the pigmentation of the dark races, is like a natural make-up
that is set off by the artificial kind to produce a beauty which is not sexual, but sublime and animal.” Like most Europeans,
he’s much impressed by the desert, and in fact some of his genuinely best writing describes Death Valley. But theory
demands more than mere landscape narratives: “for us the whole of America is a desert. Culture exists there in a wild
state: it sacrifices all intellect, all aesthetics in a process of literal transcription into the real.” Indeed, that is why
“searching for works of art or sophisticated entertainment here has always seemed tiresome and out of place to me.” Not
that there aren’t things to admire: “This is a world that has shown genius in its irrepressible development of equality,
banality, and indifference.” Baudrillard is excited to see his theories confirmed in America by “the disappearance of
history and the real in the televisual.” Between “Tupanga Canyon” and “Willshire Boulevard,” our doughty traveler visits
the Getty Museum, which predictably follows “American logic, the pure baroque logic of Disneyland.” It is a place “where
old paintings look new, bleached and gleaming, cleansed of all patina and craquelure, with an artificial lustre.” Okay about
the patina, but how did those conservators get rid of the craquelure? Did they paint in the cracks? Does Professor B. have
any idea what he’s talking about? (The Getty ought to consider issuing sepia-toned spectacles to people who think old
paintings ought to look as grimy as the Sistine ceiling used to be.) Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference to Baudrillard as
far as America is concerned, since there is “no culture here, no cultural discourses. No ministries, no commissions, no
subsidies, no promotion.” Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge and criticism from
their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrillard’s
hyperprose demands only that you grunt
wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He yearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend
off any serious analysis of his own writing, remaining free to leap from one
bombastic assertion to the next, no matter how brazen. Your place is simply to buy his
books, adopt his jargon, and drop his name wherever possible.