1NC

The current consolidation of American Power has relegated war to the status of
a non-event. Single tracked globalization has monopolized all the channels of
international conflict and protest in order to maintain the normal operations of
U.S Intervention, which precludes the occurrence of any event that disrupts the
smooth functioning of the western order. Even as the 1AC claims to reduce
military presence, it should be read as another triumph narrative wherein, like
Vietnam, America loses the war but wins the movie. The 1AC is nothing other
than the latest, greatest iteration of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. This strategy of
global policing, of the reconciliation of all forms of violent antagonism through
the rhetoric of alliances and cooperation, is an attempt to install an
international order that is decked out in the signs of Western Identity and all
societies falling outside of the re-assured order utilitarian societies, all pre-
capitalist, symbolic spaces, must be annihilated on a global scale. The AFF’s
politics is nothing short of de-militarization in the name of total liquidation of
all difference.
---China link – the 1AC completes the project of rendering China a Western subject rather than a
radically other Eastern culture – they are recruited as America’s great apprentice in the global
play of power, a strategy operative since the Nixon Administration

Baudrillard 95. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation: The Precession of Simulacra, pg.
37-40

The simultaneity of two events in the month of July 1975 illustrated this in a striking manner:
the linkup in space of the two American and Soviet supersatellites, apotheosis of peaceful
coexistence - the suppression by the Chinese of ideogrammatic writing and conversion to the
Roman alphabet. The latter signifies the "orbital" instantiation of an abstract and modelized
system of signs, into whose orbit all the once unique forms of style and writing will be
reabsorbed. The satellization of language: the means for the Chinese to enter the system of
peaceful coexistence, which is inscribed in their heavens at precisely the same time by the
linkup of the two satellites. Orbital flight of the Big Two, neutralization and homogenization of
everyone else on earth. Yet, despite this deterrence by the orbital power - the nuclear or
molecular code - events continue at ground level, misfortunes are even more numerous, given
the global process of the contiguity and simultaneity of data . But, subtly, they no longer have
any meaning, they are no longer anything but the duplex effect of simulation at the summit . The
best example can only be that of the war in Vietnam, because it took place at the intersection of
a maximum historical and "revolutionary" stake, and of the installation of this deterrent
authority. What meaning did this war have, and wasn't its unfolding a means of sealing the end
of history in the decisive and culminating historic event of our era? Why did this war, so hard, so
long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic? Why did this American defeat
(the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it
had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would
necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system.
Nothing of the sort occurred. Something else, then, took place. This war, at bottom, was
nothing but a crucial episode of peaceful coexistence . It marked the arrival of China to
peaceful coexistence. The nonintervention of China obtained and secured after many years,
Chinas apprenticeship to a global modus vivendi, the shift from a global strategy of revolution
to one of shared forces and empires, the transition from a radical alternative to political
alternation in a system now essentially regulated (the normalization of Peking - Washington
relations): this was what was at stake in the war in Vietnam, and in this sense, the USA pulled
out of Vietnam but won the war. And the war ended "spontaneously" when this objective was
achieved. That is why it was deescalated, demobilized so easily. This same reduction of forces
can be seen on the field. The war lasted as long as elements irreducible to a healthy politics and
discipline of power, even a Communist one, remained unliquidated. When at last the war had
passed into the hands of regular troops in the North and escaped that of the resistance, the war
could stop: it had attained its objective. The stake is thus that of a political relay. As soon as the
Vietnamese had proved that they were no longer the carriers of an unpredictable subversion,
one could let them take over. That theirs is a Communist order is not serious in the end: it had
proved itself, it could be trusted. It is even more effective than capitalism in the liquidation of
"savage" and archaic precapitalist structures. Same scenario in the Algerian war. The other
aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence, the murderous
antagonism of the adversaries - which seems a matter of life and death, which is played out as
such (or else one could never send people to get themselves killed in this kind of thing), behind
this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes the two adversaries are
fundamentally in solidarity against something else, unnamed, never spoken, but whose
objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity of the two adversaries , is total
liquidation. Tribal, communitarian, precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of
language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished, that is the object of murder
in war - and war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus , is nothing but the medium
of this process of the terrorist rationalization of the social - the murder on which sociality will
be founded, whatever its allegiance, Communist or capitalist. Total complicity, or division of
labor between two adversaries (who may even consent to enormous sacrifices for it) for the
very end of reshaping and domesticating social relations. "The North Vietnamese were advised
to countenance a scenario for liquidating the American presence in the course of which, of
course, one must save face." This scenario: the extremely harsh bombardments of Hanoi. Their
untenable character must not conceal the fact that they were nothing but a simulacrum to
enable the Vietnamese to seem to countenance a compromise and for Nixon to make the
Americans swallow the withdrawal of their troops. The game was already won, nothing was
objectively at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage. The moralists of war, the
holders of high wartime values should not be too discouraged: the war is no less atrocious for
being only a simulacrum - the flesh suffers just the same, and the dead and former combatants
are worth the same as in other wars. This objective is always fulfilled, just like that of the
charting of territories and of disciplinary sociality. What no longer exists is the adversity of the
adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes, the ideological seriousness of war. And also the
reality of victory or defeat, war being a process that triumphs well beyond these appearances.

In any case, the pacification (or the deterrence) that dominates us today is beyond war and
peace, it is that at every moment war and peace are equivalent. "War is peace," said Orwell.
There also, the two differential poles implode into each other, or recycle one another - a
simultaneity of contradictions that is at once the parody and the end of every dialectic. Thus one
can completely miss the truth of a war: namely, that it was finished well before it started, that
there was an end to war at the heart of the war itself, and that perhaps it never started. Many
other events (the oil crisis, etc.) never started, never existed, except as artificial occurrences -
abstract, ersatz, and as artifacts of history, catastrophes and crises destined to maintain a
historical investment under hypnosis. The media and the official news service are only there to
maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of facts. All
the events are to be read backward, or one becomes aware (as with the Communists "in power"
in Italy the retro, posthumous rediscovery of the gulags and Soviet dissidents like the almost
contemporary discovery, by a moribund ethnology, of the lost "difference" of Savages) that all
these things arrived too late, with a history of delay, a spiral of delay, that they long ago
exhausted their meaning and only live from an artificial effervescence of signs, that all these
events succeed each other without logic, in the most contradictory, complete equivalence, in a
profound indifference to their consequences (but this is because there are none: they exhaust
themselves in their spectacular promotion) - all "newsreel" footage thus gives the sinister
impression of kitsch, of retro and porno at the same time - doubtless everyone knows this, and
no one really accepts it. The reality of simulation is unbearable - crueler than Artaud's Theater
of Cruelty, which was still an attempt to create a dramaturgy of life, the last gasp of an ideality
of the body, of blood, of violence in a system that was already taking it away, toward a
reabsorption of all the stakes without a trace of blood. For us the trick has been played. All
dramaturgy, and even all real writing of cruelty has disappeared. Simulation is the master, and
we only have a right to the retro, to the phantom, parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials.
Everything still unfolds around us, in the cold light of deterrence (including Artaud, who has the
right like everything else to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).

This is why nuclear proliferation does not increase the risk of either an atomic clash or an
accident - save in the interval when the "young" powers could be tempted to make a
nondeterrent, "real" use of it (as the Americans did in Hiroshima - but precisely only they had a
right to this "use value" of the bomb, all of those who have acquired it since will be deterred
from using it by the very fact of possessing it). Entry into the atomic club, so prettily named,
very quickly effaces (as unionization does in the working world) any inclination toward violent
intervention. Responsibility, control, censure, self-deterrence always grow more rapidly than
the forces or the weapons at our disposal: this is the secret of the social order. Thus the very
possibility of paralyzing a whole country by flicking a switch makes it so that the electrical
engineers will never use this weapon: the whole myth of the total and revolutionary strike
crumbles at the very moment when the means are available - but alas precisely because those
means are available. Therein lies the whole process of deterrence.

It is thus perfectly probable that one day we will see nuclear powers export atomic reactors,
weapons, and bombs to every latitude. Control by threat will be replaced by the more
effective strategy of pacification through the bomb and through the possession of the bomb.
The "little" powers, believing that they are buying their independent striking force, will buy the
virus of deterrence, of their own deterrence. The same goes for the atomic reactors that we
have already sent them: so many neutron bombs knocking out all historical virulence, all risk of
explosion. In this sense, the nuclear everywhere inaugurates an accelerated process of
implosion, it freezes everything around it, it absorbs all living energy.

The nuclear is at once the culminating point of available energy and the maximization of energy
control systems. Lockdown and control increase in direct proportion to (and undoubtedly even
faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of the modern revolution. It is
still the absolute paradox of the nuclear. Energies freeze in their own fire, they deter
themselves. One can no longer imagine what project, what power, what strategy, what subject
could exist behind this enclosure, this vast saturation of a system by its own forces, now
neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, nonexplosive - except for the possibility of an explosion
toward the center, of an implosion where all these energies would be abolished in a
catastrophic process (in the literal sense, that is to say in the sense of a reversion of the whole
cycle toward a minimal point, of a reversion of energies toward a minimal threshold).

In a world of total American dominance, the world order finds itself

everywhere opposed by hostile forces; the Chinese state has allied itself with
the American leadership in the fourth world war: an attempt to reinstate the
hegemony of the global via the War on Terror.
Nordin 14 (Dr. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
Religion at Lancaster University, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars,” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue: Baudrillard and War, May,
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-norden.html)//AG
III. Chinese approaches to war Before I venture into some discussion of contemporary Chinese modes of war, I shall state the obvious: what I discuss
here is merely a small selection of what one could write of as Chinese wars. There is a large and varied literature engaging the varied traditions of
Chinese strategic culture, the numerous cultural expressions that deal with the theme of war, not to mention the Chinese military in foreign policy. In
what follows I outline three dimensions of contemporary Chinese ‘war’ in order to bring out a number of contrast and themes that have some bearing
on Baudrillard’s discussion of war. I turn, first, to the People’s Republic of China’s participation in the war on terror. I thereafter contrast this allegedly
modern and Western-led war with contemporary rhetoric in Chinese academic and policy discourse, which draws on Ancient Chinese philosophy. This
discourse has focused on the pre-emption of war in conjunction with the language of harmony, innate peacefulness and soft power, portraying such
attitudes in opposition to the West. Having outlined a number of areas where I think Baudrillard’s discussions of war can shed some light on this
allegedly Chinese ontology of war, I thereafter turn to Chinese actors or discourses that act out war in other modes, including in popular culture and
propaganda. How should we understand these simultaneous approaches to war, in relation to the disappearance of war that Baudrillard and others
have described in modern Western practices? (i). Chinese participation in the war on terror As described above, there are aspects of Baudrillard’s
writing where all alternatives to American achieved utopia appear to be erased for Baudrillard (Beck 2009: 110). In
the final parts of America, for example, simulation is portrayed as a means of sustaining and extending American

dominance at home and abroad, which is now ‘uncontested and uncontestable’, a universal
model ‘even reaching as far as China’ (Baudrillard 1989 [1986]: 116). And indeed, this universal model has literally reached the
very territorial border of China in the form of the war on terror that was rolled out all the way to the Sino-

Afghan border and beyond. In Baudrillard’s view, the 9/11 attacks represented “the clash of triumphant
globalization at war with itself” and unfolded a “fourth world war”: The first put an end to European supremacy
and to the era of colonialism; the second put an end to Nazism; and the third to Communism. Each one brought us progressively

closer to the single world order of today, which is now nearing its end, everywhere opposed,
everywhere grappling with hostile forces (Baudrillard, 2003b). In this new fractal state of war and
hostility, the Chinese state has joined forces with the American leadership to reinstate the
hegemony of the global (of which they have surely dreamt, just like the rest of us). To the
American unilateral war on terror in Afghanistan and George W. Bush’s call “you are either with us or against us”, the Chinese
government responded with a (perhaps reluctant) “we are with you!” This wish to be part of the global American self has
not meant, however, the full contribution to the war effort that some American representatives may have hoped. China has, since around

the time of 9/11 shifted from being extremely reluctant to condone or participate in any form of
“peacekeeping” missions, including under United Nations (UN) flag, to being the UN Security Council member
that contributes most to UN peacekeeping missions. Much of this participation has taken the form of non-combatant
personal. Nonetheless, China has been an actively involved party in ‘Operation Enduring Freedom ’. It has

provided police training for Afghanistan’s security forces, as well as mine-clearance. Though it
was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq without UN mandate, China has emerged as one of the
biggest beneficiaries of the occupation, as it is one of the biggest winners of oil contracts in Iraq.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, China has been accused of ‘free-riding’ on American efforts, but China has nonetheless been clearly

positioned as part of the participating and benefiting ‘we’. The Chinese state has benefited from participation in the
war on terror in more ways than one. The war has increased Chinese influence in Central Asia. It has legitimized

China’s harsh clamp-downs in Xinjiang, where the state claims its violence is justified by the presence of
separatist ‘terrorists’ in the Muslim Uyghur community.s Not least, China’s participation in the war on terror has been
used to demonstrate to the world that China is now a ‘responsible great power’, as measured by the
standard of ‘international society’ (see Yeophantong 2013 for a discussion of this ‘responsibility’ rhetoric). Again, this rhetoric of ‘responsibility’

has been deployed by both American and Chinese leaders to tie China more tightly to the
purported American-led ‘we’. More recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has stressed the importance of continued Sino-US co-
operation over Afghanistan post-2014 troop withdrawal. Wang has publicly stressed the common goals of China and the US with regards to
Afghanistan: ‘We both hope Afghanistan will continue to maintain stability … We both hope to see the reconstruction of Afghanistan and we both don’t
want to see the resurgence of terrorism’ (cited in Chen Weihua, 2013). China and the USA have jointly engaged in what is
termed advisory and capacity-building for Afghans, for example in training Afghan diplomats, and
their co-operation continues around shared goals in the region. Much could be said here about China’s
participation in the American-led globalization project and war on terror. My point here is simply to note that whatever we read

America as doing through its war on terror, China is a supporting and benefiting actor in this
process. It is clearly positioned as part of this global idea of self. At the same time, however,
China is also portrayed, from within and without, as a challenger, an alternative, or an ‘other’ to
that global, American or Western order. We therefore turn next to the Chinese scholarly and
governmental rhetoric that claims to offer such an alternative or challenge to the Western way of
war that Baudrillard criticized and that we can see China joining in the war on terror.
Their conception of death as a biological end to life denies the value of death as
a reversible and subjective transformation. The result is the securitization
against death from which social control is made possible and life is reduced to a
capitalist prolongation and prohibition of death. This lays the foundation for all
exclusions against what is deemed “abnormal,” and makes war, genocide, and
discrimination inevitable.
Robinson 12. Andrew Robinson, political theorist and activist based in the UK, “An A to Z of
Theory | Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death” Ceasefire Magazine,
March 30, 2012, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/

The passage to capitalism:Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a central role in the
emergence of capitalism. Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange
(differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony
gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence. Baudrillard’s view of capitalism is derived from Marx’s analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marx’s view that capitalism is
based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract

labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation
or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns economics into the ‘reality-principle’. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the

disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the
Other to an eternal return of the Same. Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value. To
be accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic

Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not

exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable.

According to Baudrillard, capitalism rests on

collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation.

an obsession with the abolition of death. Capitalism tries to abolish death through
accumulation. It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated
with life. But this is bound to fail. General equivalence – the basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-presence
of death. The more the system runs from death, the more it places everyone in solitude, facing
their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through
fixed value is itself deathly. Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress, and linear time, comes from
the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific
knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of
the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed to be preserved – otherwise they will be

destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed,
market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when
it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible

It is also this regime which produces scarcity –

aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other.

Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins’ argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian “death drive”, which is actually an

effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise
the separation of the domains they study – the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning,
which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire
comes into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the
unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires – they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is
an effect of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a liberation will
keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the
unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire
becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he
is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism,
because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility. Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has
repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or
shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the
subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the ‘obscene’, which is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined. This is different from theories of
lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of radical
difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the
repressed remainder. Our culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate
genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first –
destroying its own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also
increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or
imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability. Gift-exchange is radically
subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it
counterposes a different ‘principle of sociality’ to that of the dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist
so that nobody has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of

death remains present among the oppressed , but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’ of immediate retaliation. The Church and State
also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the
Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained
some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the ‘social contract’ was based on the idea of a sacrifice – this
time of liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I haven’t seen Baudrillard say it directly, but
the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art, theatre
and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain
passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillard ’s work. But on closer inspection, this seems to
be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of
symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups. Death: Death plays a central role in Baudrillard ’s theory, and is closely related to symbolic

exchange. According to Baudrillard,what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability
to engage in exchanges with death. Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he
does not mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value

– which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he
also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the “death” of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different

categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and
communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one
generation replaces another. Baudrillard’s concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque. Death refers to
metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation,
as well as physical death. According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or
biological. They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb. And they mark it with
feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not
signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the west’s idea of a biological,
material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally maintain
that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary oppositions. For Baudrillard, the division between life and

death is the original, founding opposition on which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of
others have been created, confining particular groups – the “mad”, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on – to particular segregated situations. The
definition of the ‘normal human’ has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category. The original exclusion was of the

dead – it is defined as abnormal to be dead. “You livies hate us deadies”. This first split and exclusion forms the
basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions – along lines of gender, disability,
species, class, and so on. This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that death as we know
it does not exist outside of this separation between living and dead. The modern view of death is constructed on the model of

the machine and the function. A machine either functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or
does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death. The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of

subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of

death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for
the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer

know how to die – or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation
of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would say, between the category of ‘man’
and the ‘un-man’, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by destroying their actual

connections to others. The symbolic haunts the code as the threat of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of
irruptions of the symbolic. The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure of death. The split never actually stops exchanges across the categories.
In the case of death, we still ‘exchange’ with the dead through our own deaths and our anxiety about
death. We no longer have living, mortal relationships with objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental. It is as if we have a transparent veil between us. Symbolic
exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the state are invented to take their place. It is the process of

excluding, marking, or barring which allows concentrated or transcendental power to come into
existence. Through splits, people turn the other into their ‘imaginary’. For instance, westerners invest the “Third World” with
racist fantasies and revolutionary aspirations ; the “Third World” invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development. In separation,
the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the other brings the

other to the core of society. “We all” become dead, or mad, or prisoners, and so on, through their exclusion.

The goal of ‘survival’ is fundamental to the birth of power. Social control emerges when the
union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead become prohibited. The social repression of
death grounds the repressive socialisation of life. People are compelled to survive so as to become useful. For Baudrillard,
capitalism’s original relationship to death has historically been concealed by the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully visible now this system is collapsing,

and production is reduced to operation. In modern societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed outside
society. For example, elderly people are excluded from society. People no longer expect their own death. As a result, it becomes unintelligible. It keeps returning as
‘nature which will not abide by objective laws’. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual. Western society is arranged so death is never

done by someone else, but always attributable to ‘nature’. This creates a bureaucratic, judicial
regime of death, of which the concentration camp is the ultimate symbol. The system now commands that we must not
die – at least not in any old way. We may only die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health and safety
regulations. On the other hand, murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-converted into

economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a regressive redistribution of death. It is wrested from the circuit of
social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies. For Baudrillard, there is not a social improvement here. People are effectively being killed, or left
to die, by a process which never treats them as having value. On the other hand, even when capitalism becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying

The slave remains within

anxiety about being reduced to the status of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear of being manipulated.

the master’s dialectic for as long as ‘his’ life or death serves the reproduction of domination. A fatal
ontology?: In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard suggests an ontology which backs up his analysis of death. The world itself is committed to extremes and to radical antagonism. It is
bored of meaning. There is an ‘evil genie’, a principle of Evil which constantly returns in the form of seduction. Historical processes are really pushed forward by this principle. All
energy comes from fission and rupture. These cannot be replaced by production or mechanical processes. There is no possibility of a collective project or a coherent society, only

The world is fundamentally unreal. This leads to

the operation of such forces. Every order exists only to be transgressed and dismantled.

a necessity of irony, which is to say, the slippage of meaning. Historically, the symbolic was confined to the metaphysical. It did not affect
the physical world. But with the rise of models , with the physical world derived increasingly from the code, the physical world is

brought within the symbolic. It becomes reversible. The rational principle of linear causality collapses. The world is, and
always remains, enigmatic. People will give for seduction or for simulation what they would never
give for quality of life. Advertising, fashion, gambling and so on liberate ‘immoral energies’ which hark back to the magical or archaic gamble on the power of
thought against the power of reality. Neoliberalism is in some ways an ultimate release of such diabolical forces. People will look for an ecstatic excess of anything – even

What is inescapable is the object

boredom or oppression. In this account, the principle of evil becomes the only fixed point. Desire is not inescapable.

and its seduction, its ‘principle of evil’. The object at once submits to law and breaks it in
practice, mocking it. Its own “game” cannot be discerned. It is a poor conductor of the symbolic order but a good conductor of signs. The drive towards
spectacles, illusions and scenes is stronger than the desire for survival.
The Aff’s presentation of impact scenarios is nothing more than the spectacle of extermination
that is both distant and consumed. This leads to a society built around pacified socialization, as
institutional violence is accomplished through life for life’s sake and the denial of death. This
securitization reduces life and death to a worthless commodity for bureaucratic manipulation,
ensuring a zombified existence for us all.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 173-175
This passionate, sacrificial death overtly accepts the spectacle of death, which, as with all organic functions, we have made into a
moral and therefore clandestine and shameful function. The good souls heavily insist on the shameful character of public executions,
but they do not see that odiousness of this type of execution stems from its contemplative
attitude in which the death of the other is savoured as a spectacle at a distance. This is not
sacrificial violence, which not only demands the presence of the whole community, but is one of
the forms of its self-presence [présence à ellemème]. We rediscover something of this contagious festivity in an
episode in England in 1807, when the 40,000 people who came to attend an execution were
seized by delirium upon seeing a hundred dead bodies lying on the ground. This collective act
has nothing in common with the spectacle of extermination. By confusing the two in the same
abstract reprobation of violence and death, one merges with the thought of the State, that is,
the pacification of life. Now, if the right prefers to use repressive blackmail, the left, for its part, is
distinguished by imagining and setting up future models of pacified socialisation. A civilisation's
progress is thus measured only by its respect for life as absolute value. What a difference from public, celebrated death by torture
(the Black from the Upper Volta laughing in the face of the guns that hit him, cannibalism in the Tupinamba), and even murder and
vengeance, passion for death and suicide! When society kills in a totally premeditated fashion, we do it a
great honour when we accuse it of a barbaric vengeance worthy of the Dark Ages, because vengeance
is still a fatal reciprocity. It is neither 'primitive' nor 'purely the way of nature'; nothing could be more false. It has nothing
to do with our calculable and statistical abstract death, which is the by-product of an agency both moral and bureaucratic (our
capital punishment and concentration camps), and thus has everything to do with the system of political economy. This system is
similarly abstract, but never in the way that a revenge, a murder or a sacrificial spectacle is abstract. We
have produced a
judicial, ethnocidal and concentration camp death, to which our society has adjusted . Today,
everything and nothing has changed: under the sign of the values of life and tolerance, the same system of
extermination, only gentler, governs everyday life, and it has no need of death to accomplish its
objectives. The same objective that is inscribed in the monopoly of institutional violence is accomplished as easily
by forced survival as it is by death: a forced 'life for life's sake' (kidney machines, malformed children on life-support
machines, agony prolonged at all costs, organ transplants, etc.). All these procedures are equivalent to disposing of death and
imposing life, but according to what ends? Those of science and medicine? Surely this is just scientific paranoia, unrelated to any
human objective. Is profit the aim? No: society swallows huge amounts of profit. This 'therapeutic heroism' is
characterised by soaring costs and 'decreasing benefits': they manufacture unproductive
survivors. Even if social security can still be analysed as 'compensation for the labour force in the interests of capital', this
argument has no purchase here. Nevertheless, the system is facing the same contradiction here as with the
death penalty: it overspends on the prolongation of life because this system of values is
essential to the strategic equilibrium of the whole ; economically, however, this overspending unbalances the
whole. What is to be done? An economic choice becomes necessary, where we can see the outline of euthanasia as a semi-official
doctrine or practice. We choose to keep 30 per cent of the uraemics in France alive (36 per cent in the USA!). Euthanasia is already
everywhere, and the ambiguity of making a humanist demand for it (as with the 'freedom' to abortion) is striking: it is inscribed in
the middle to long term logic of the system. All this tends in the direction of an increase in social control. For there
is a clear
objective behind all these apparent contradictions: to ensure control over the entire range of
life and death. From birth control to death control , whether we execute people or compel their survival (the
prohibition of dying is the caricature, but also the logical form of progressive tolerance), the essential thing is that the decision is
withdrawn from them, that their
life and their death are never freely theirs, but that they live or die
according to a social visa. It is even intolerable that their life and death remain open to biological chance, since this is still
a type of freedom. Just as morality commanded: 'You shall not kill', today it commands: 'You shall not die', not in any old way,
anyhow, and only if the law and medicine permit. And if your death is conceded you, it will still be by order. In short, death
proper has been abolished to make room for death control and euthanasia : strictly speaking, it is no
longer even death, but something completely neutralised that comes to be inscribed in the rules and calculations of equivalence:
rewritingplanningprogrammingsystem. Itmust be possible to operate death as a social service, integrate it
like health and disease under the sign of the Plan and Social Security. This is the story of 'motel-
suicides' in the USA, where, for a comfortable sum, one can purchase one's death under the most
agreeable conditions (like any other consumer good); perfect service, everything has been
foreseen, even trainers who give you back your appetite for life, after which they kindly and conscientiously send the gas into
your room, without torment and without meeting any opposition. A service operates these motel-suicides, quite rightly paid
(eventually reimbursed?). Why did death not become a social service when, like everything else, it is functionalised as individual and
computable consumption in social input and output? In order that the system consents to such economic
sacrifices in the artificial resurrection of its living losses, it must have a fundamental interest in withdrawing
even the biological chance of death from people. 'You die, we'll do the rest' is already just an old advertising
slogan used for funeral homes. Today, dying is already part of the rest, and the Thanatos centres charge
for death just as the Eros centres charge for sex. The witch hunt continues. A transcendent, 'objective'
agency requires a delegation of justice, death and vengeance. Death and expiation must be
wrested from the circuit, monopolised at the summit and redistributed. A bureaucracy of
death and punishment is necessary, in the same way as there must be an abstraction of
economic, political and sexual exchanges: if not, the entire structure of social control
collapses.

The 1AC is founded on vampirism of the suffering to nourish the psyche of the
West – their politics necessarily forefronts theories, methods, and explanations
mired in the suffering of others by way of unconscious prefabricated politics of
charity cannibalism. They advance projects of understanding which reproduce
and feed off fantasies of the suffering other resulting in inevitable exploitation
and decimation. All of this plays out like a market: their depictions of suffering
exchange for your ballot and a symbolic economy is reproduced in the moment
of decision which ultimately creates a DEMAND for more suffering, turns the
case.
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
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' ['autre monde].
must today denounce the moral and 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
 material
this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that
exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples,
which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives.
The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-
bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world 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 frontieres, international
solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order . Other
people's destitution 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
our own efforts to alleviate it (which,
delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of
in fact, merely function to secure 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 champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still
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 Europe,
the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and
hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs.
We provide them, through 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 accordance with the implacable logic of the
market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation , when we run out of
disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be
forced to produce its 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 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
Latin America are really going flat out in the distress
monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and
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 against casualties
numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will
break down if we are 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 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 .
Thus, to 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.

Death’s unpredictability and the strive to make it predictable drives the logic of
the Cold War and the War on Terror as simulated death scenarios become a
necromantic means of controlling death. This leads to a zombified existence in
which we frantically and brainlessly consume these images of death. To
understand Death as immanent within the system and without it resists this
simulation of Death—such is the salvation of theory in death, or the salvation
that is death.
Bishop 09. Ryan Bishop, Professor of Global Arts and Politics, Co-Director of the Winchester
Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media, Director of Research and Doctoral Research
within Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton, Baudrillard Now: Current
Perspectives in Baudrillard Studies Edited by Ryan Bishop Polity Press 2009, pg. 64-70

Reality is destroyed, or subordinated to the code, in several ways. It can be generated from
blueprints provided by the code (as discussed in earlier sections). It can be ‘deterred’, such that
real events are not able to happen. Or it can be recuperated through aleatory mechanisms of
power. Let us start with the third possibility. The system is aleatory. This means that it operates through the management of
chance. It is determined in its broad outlines, but relies on chance for its details. It rests on probabilities. Because the system
determines outcomes ‘genetically’ – generating the different options through the code – only certain things are possible. The
variation by chance and probability allows the system to control phenomena at an aggregate level. An aleatory system also brings in
and incorporates resistances as they occur. It assigns them a place in the code, as niche markets, questionnaire options, political
parties, categories of deviance. It is a machine of total recuperation which doesn’t wait for movements to emerge before it assigns
them a category – it catches them in their early stages and pre-empts them. For instance, a new social critique might rapidly give rise
to a new party or NGO which is quickly recuperated. Or it might be articulated by corporations themselves, as a new niche market.
Although this process is often effective, it also contains problems for the system, because ultimately, it means that the system is
governed by chance. We are plunged into an abnormal uncertainty. In response, the system creates an excess of causality and
finality. But this compounds the problem. Determined responses become hypertelic – they exceed their end. They become ends in
themselves, pass the limits of their functions or use-values, and colonise the entire system. This process is also referred to as
excrescence. It is similar to the proliferation of cancer cells in the body. For Baudrillard, this arrangement depends on a particular
religious ontology. An accidental world implies an infinite will and energy, to keep all determinate connections from forming.
According to Baudrillard, reason seeks to break the necessary connections among things which arise within cycles of symbolic
exchange and conceptions of fate. Chance – the possibility of indeterminate, mutually indifferent elements relating ‘freely’ – is an
effect of this decomposition of connections. It is an idea invented in modernity, along with the idea of a formless, unbonded world. It
can only exist in a world without symbolic exchange. And it depends on the continued suppression of symbolic exchange. The idea of
chance or the aleatory can be related to the elimination of symbolic exchange in various ways. Chance is actually impossible on a
It is a world in which one wanders
certain level. It is the perception we are left with after the destruction of causality.
like a dead soul, with little chance of intense connections. Chance, and also statistical causality,
remove both responsibility and seduction (or destiny). The dual rule of chance and necessity
expresses a human desire for control over the metamorphosis of things. This control destroys
the initiatory or ceremonial field. It thus paradoxically destroys any sense of mastery over our
destiny. The order of production exists to make the order of metamorphosis impossible – to
control flow and becoming. Simulation is also associated with a process Baudrillard terms
deterrence. This term is a play on nuclear deterrence between the superpowers (before 1991),
which Baudrillard saw as a telling case of deterrence in general, a simulated conflict which exists
to preclude a real clash, a form of manipulation rather than destruction . Deterrence is not so
much a power relation as a mindset. It holds people in check by making them feel powerless,
disappointed, neutralised – deterred. When it is strong enough, it no longer needs violent
repression or war – it precludes conflict in advance. In nuclear deterrence for instance, life is
reduced to survival and conflicts become pointless , as they can’t reach the ultimate stakes.
Simulation feigns reality and thereby deters or prevents reality . But this feigned reality is not
entirely unreal, because it produces effects of reality – it is like a faked illness which produces
real symptoms. Think for instance of punishments applied in response to acts: they’re neither an
objectively real consequence, since they’re invented, nor an imagined consequence, since they
actually happen. They’re a simulated consequence, an artificially created hyper-reality.
According to Baudrillard, there is no true reality against which simulation can be compared. It is
therefore more subversive of reality than a simple appearance or falsehood. It controls people
in a different way – through persuasion or modelling. Instead of demanding that people submit to a prior model
or norm, it interpellates people as already being the model or the majority. It thereby destroys the distance between the self and
the norm, making transgression more difficult. It creates a doubled self from which it is hard to extract oneself. The question “from
where do you speak, how do you know?” is silenced by the response, “but it is from your position that I speak”. Everything appears
to come from and return to the people. The doubled self is portrayed and displayed in forms such as CCTV images, without a gap
between representation and what is represented. This same doubling happens across different spheres – the model is truer than the
true, fashion is more beautiful than the beautiful, hyperreality is more real than the real, and so on. The effect of excess comes from
the lack of depth (of the imaginary, but also perhaps of relations and of context). Doubles are inherently fascinating. They’re very
different from the seduction of effective images and illusions, such as trompe l’oeil (a type of art which can be mistaken for a real
The double allows a kind of manipulation or blackmail in which the system takes hostage a
object).
part of the self – affect, desire, a secret – and uses it for control. Baudrillard thinks we are
stalked by our doubles, like in the film The Student of Prague. Yet doubles are also insufficient.
People don’t like being ‘verified’ and predicted in advance. People prefer ideas of destiny to
random probability. Deterrence is a barrier between ourselves and our drive for the symbolic.
Deterrence also has an effect of deterring thought, of ‘mental deterrence’. It discourages people
from thinking critically, hence feeding unreality . Disempowerment feeds into this deterrence of
thought, as do the media, and the promotion of superficial sociality. At the same time, the
system also creates a kind of generalised social lockdown or universal security system. This
‘lockup and control system’ is designed to prevent any real event from happening . This system,
based on norms, replaces older systems of violence, war and law, creating a social desert around
itself. It tries to pre-plan everything, to leave nothing to contingencies or chance. It tries to make
everything manageable through statistics and predetermined responses . The system tries to
prevent accidental death through systematic, organised death. For Baudrillard, this is the
culmination of years of civilising process and socialisation. It is the culmination of the evolution
of the dominant system. The failure of progressive teleologies has occurred because powers to
lock-down and control have increased faster than powers to emancipate. The result is a kind of
generalised nihilism. Deterrence induces general mobilisation, pacification and dissuasion – a
death or incorporation of active energies. The state dreams of dissuading and annihilating all
terrorism pre-emptively, through a generalised terror on every level. This is the price of the
security of which people now dream, as Baudrillard already observed in 1983 – eighteen years
before the state’s dream was realised. Overt and selective repression transmutes over time into
generalised preventive repression. For instance, the police according to Baudrillard do not
reduce violence – they simply take it over from crime and and become even more dangerous.
The code deters every real process by means of its operational double. For instance, it prevents
real revolutions by means of simulated revolutions, real wars by means of simulated wars, and
so on. This leaves no space for the real to unfold of its own accord or for events to happen.
Baudrillard thinks prisons and death are being replaced by a more subtle regime of control
based on therapy, reform and normalisation. The right and left are now represented mainly by
the split between direct repression and indirect pacification. Baudrillard sees these options
corresponding to the early, violent phase of capitalism, with its emphasis on conscious
psychology and responsibility, and its more advanced, ‘neo-capitalist’ form, which draws on
psychoanalysis and offers tolerance and reform. A therapeutic model of society, promoted by
advertisers, politicians and modern experts, actually covers up real conflicts and contradictions.
It seeks to solve social problems by re-injecting simulations such as controlled smiles and
regulated communication. He also refers to a regime of social control through security and
safety, blackmailing people into conformity with the threat of their own death . He sees this as
surrounding people with a sarcophagus to prevent them from dying – a kind of living death.
Deterrence functions by an anxiety to act because action brings about massive destruction .
Nuclear states can’t go to war because of mutually assured destruction . Workers won’t strike
because the entire economy would be shut down. Small powers which get nuclear weapons
actually buy into their own deterrence. Memory of the Holocaust is neutralised by its constant
repetition on television. While this shuts down resistance, it also makes the system’s power
unusable. Power becomes frozen and self-deterred . It creates a ‘protective zone’ of ‘maximum
security’ which radiates through the territory held by the system. It is a kind of ‘glacis’, a zone
where any assailant is constantly under fire from the system ’s defenders. In a simulated world,
events are prevented because no social logic or story can be deployed according to its own logic.
A social force risks annihilation if it trie s this. This leads to an evacuation of any historical stake
from society. We are now living through the death pangs of strong referentials, including of the
sense of being in the march of history or in hope/at risk of a pending revolution. It might actually
be better to think of it as incapacitation rather than deterrence . People become unable or afraid
to act because the capacity to fight and win has been taken away. This means that everything is
neutralised, and reinscribed in the system. This ‘absolute model of security’ is according to
Baudrillard elaborated from nuclear war. The nuclear battle station is the point from which the
model of deterrence radiates out through social life. Deterrence is directed against a range of
phenomena such as complexity, finality, contradiction, accident, rupture, chance, and
transversality. Yet paradoxically, events continue to happen ‘at ground level’, below the level of
data-control. Misfortunes and personal crises multiply. The social becomes organised like a
disaster-movie script, with constant struggles to survive, states of exception, discourses of risk-
avoidance and risk-management – a situation of everyday precarity. The function of deterrence
is not to prevent this permanent crisis. It is rather to prevent it from having system-level effects.
Phenomena such as the Gulf War, Watergate, and other political/media events are treated by
Baudrillard as instances of deterrence. They are based on a simulation of a situation where the
old stakes still matter, keeping old antagonisms and lost phenomena artificially alive as
simulacra. They thus exude ‘operational negativity’ – preventing the emergence of real
antagonisms. Non-war in the Gulf The theory of deterrence is exemplified in Baudrillard’s
analysis of what happened in 1991, when according to him, the Gulf War ‘did not take place’.
What took place, instead, was a ‘non-war’. This is a type of conflict specific to the third order of
simulation. A non-war is a simulated war. It reproduces exactly the elements of a real war, down
to its destruction, death, propaganda, and so on. But it is not a situation which arises between
adversaries, which is a real, unpredictable event . A true war is a strategic conflict over an absent
centre of power which no-one can occup y. Both sides believe in a cause; the outcome is
unpredictable. This is why a non-war is not a true war . Real power, according to Baudrillard, is a
strategy, a relation of force, and a stake. It is subject to death and the symbolic. On the other
hand, power exercised to conceal its own absence is no longer subject to death and the
symbolic. It can persist indefinitely, as an object of consumer demand. For Baudrillard, war is
pointless and impossible to wage in the nuclear era. There is no proportion between means
(total annihilation) and ends (strategic objectives). Hence, the ‘scene’ of war – the scenario of
total conflict to the death, or of adversity over stakes between combatants – will never again
take place. War becomes ‘impossible to exchange'; it escapes symbolic exchange . The distillation
of war in everyday fear prevents the final apocalyptic clash. Arguably, non-war is to war as
hyperreality is to reality. A non-war is a simulation in the sense of derivation from a prior model.
Western powers fight non-wars based on models, and go to war based on models. The non-war,
at least on the western side, is an operational unfolding of models and signs already planned in
advance. The symbolic dimension, the exchange with the enemy, the reversibility of actions, are
absent. This is why, for Baudrillard, it is not a war, even though all the other characteristics of
war are very much present. He emphasises repeatedly that non-war is still as deadly as war ever
was. What it has lost is ‘the adversity of the adversaries’, the ‘ideological seriousness’ of a war
between two counterposed possibilities, the reality of victory or defeat as systemic changes. For
Baudrillard, western non-wars are now simulations in that there isn’t really a fight to the death
between two adversaries. Rather, the purpose of western power, and usually of both
adversaries, is to prevent the liquidation of the system ’s deterrence. This requires the
destruction of symbolic exchange, and hence of ‘pre-capitalist’ societies and groups. Non-war is
missing the symbolic dimension a true war might have – the possibility of reversibility, or
conflictual dialogue with an enemy so to speak. Contact between America and Iraq did not
happen during the Gulf War. America can only imagine an adversary in their own image . They
are invulnerable to symbolic violence, due to their pragmatism and masochism. America has
been caught in a spiral of unconditional repression by the aspiration to be a global police force .
They try to humiliate by defeating the enemy impersonally – “nothing personal” – and avoid
seeing or meeting the adversary. They seek to show the infallibility of their machine, displaying
signs of relentlessness. They seek to avoid any reaction or living impulse. In electronic war, the
enemy no longer exists – there is only refractory data to be neutralised and brought into the
consensus. Non-war entails non-recognition of the enemy as such, with precision and abstract
operations displacing direct conflict. On the American side, it is like safe sex – war with a
condom on. But on the other hand, America cannot imagine the other and therefore seeks to
annihilate whatever cannot be converted to the American way of life . Meanwhile, the TV
audience are also deterred, and experience voyeurism and repentance over the fate of
hostages. They consent to be gently terrorised, but never lose their underlying indifference. Yet
even this minimal participation is enough to rescue war and politics, for now. America played
the Gulf War as a game of deterrence . They refused to bargain. Saddam, in contrast, played it as
a symbolic game of ruses, bargains, trickery and disguise. As a result, both missed their target.
They fought in two different times and spaces. The enemy was foreclosed. There was not
enough communication for deterrence or war to be effective. Non-wars are not, however,
directed primarily at rival nation-states. They are primarily waged to domesticate or liquidate
grassroots movements and symbolic challenges which restore the dimensions of the real and
the event which the system fears. Non-war is waged to absorb and reduce what is singular and
irreducible. The Gulf War, Baudrillard suggests, was aimed at the Islamic world. The French
colonial war in Algeria was aimed at the revolutionary movement. The Vietnam War was aimed
at guerilla revolt. Baudrillard ’s reading of Vietnam (which could equally apply to Iraq and
Afghanistan) is that the real goal was to make the enemy predictable . This is why the American
defeat did not destroy American global power. Each war ended as the revolutionary impulse was
tamed or bureaucratised. Non-wars are usually won or lost by which regime comes under threat
from its own population first. Sometimes, they are lost because an accident, an event, or a loss
of power to the other, breaks the machine of war and its appearance of infallibility – as in
Somalia.

The attempt to make the world transparent through information and research
is self-defeating. More knowledge fails to change reality. Facts and evidence are
uniquely dissuasive.
Baudrillard, 81 [Jean, “Simulacra and Simulations,” pg. 79-81]
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. Consider three hypotheses. Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the

Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning is lost and

brutal loss of signification in every domain.

devoured faster than it can be reinjected . In this case, one must appeal to a base productivity to replace failing media. This is the whole ideology of free speech, of
media broken down into innumerable individual cells of transmission, that is, into "antimedia" (pirate radio, etc.). Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational model of
another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely functional, a technical medium that does not imply any
finality of meaning, and thus should also not be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it does, meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the
fact, as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this case, there would simply be no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning. Or, very much on the contrary,

The loss of
there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them.

meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of information, the media, and the
mass media. The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured
by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually
asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus

value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of
capital. Information is thought to create communication , and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that
nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities,

opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our
modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact
is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information
produces meaning, the opposite occurs. Information devours its own content. It devours
communication and the social. And for two reasons. 1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts
itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in
the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in,
participation at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are concerned, you are the event ,
etc." More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic

grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one
stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which , as one knows, is never
anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of
the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal
desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of
meaning. It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in
advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process that of

simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that

is how the real is abolished. Thus not only communication but the social functions in a closed
circuit, as a lure to which the force of myth is attached. Belief, faith in information attach
themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an
unlocatable reality. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was attached to myths in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I
know very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of the
system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the

the
trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses. 2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media,

pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information

dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus
of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.*1 Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the
masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed

according to McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted. That means that all contents of
meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an
event whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all
counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia , etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this
neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a
subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is and this is where McLuhan's formula leads, pushed to its limit there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same
movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be
determined. Even the "traditional" status of the media themselves, characteristic of modernity, is put in question. McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, which is the key formula of the era of simulation
(the medium is the message the sender is the receiver the circularity of all poles the end of panoptic and perspectival space such is the alpha and omega of our modernity), this very formula must be imagined at
its limit where, after all the contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such. Fundamentally, it is still the message that lends credibility to the medium,
that gives the medium its determined, distinct status as the intermediary of communication. Without a message, the medium also falls into the indefinite state characteristic of all our great systems of judgment

the medium is the message not only

and value. A single model, whose efficacy is immediate, simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the "real." Finally,

signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in
the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic mass media) that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and
another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of
distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media
effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us.

It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through

form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is
indecipherable. The fact of this implosion of contents, of the absorption of meaning, of the evanescence of the medium itself, of the reabsorption of every dialectic of communication in a total
circularity of the model, of the implosion of the social in the masses, may seem catastrophic and desperate. But this is only the case in light of the idealism that dominates our whole view of information . We
all live by a passionate idealism of meaning and of communication, by an idealism of
communication through meaning, and, from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of
meaning that lies in wait for us. But one must realize that "catastrophe" has this "catastrophic" meaning of end and annihilation only in relation to a linear vision of
accumulation, of productive finality, imposed on us by the system. Etymologically, the term itself only signifies the curvature, the winding down to the bottom of a cycle that leads to what one could call the
"horizon of the event," to an impassable horizon of meaning: beyond that nothing takes place that has meaning for us but it suffices to get out of this ultimatum of meaning in order for the catastrophe itself to no
longer seem like a final and nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our contemporary imaginary. Beyond meaning, there is the fascination that results from the neutralization and the implosion of
meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social, there are the masses, which result from the neutralization and the implosion of the social. What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge the challenge of
the masses to meaning and their silence (which is not at all a passive resistance) the challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. All the marginal, alternative efforts to revive meaning are
secondary in relation to that challenge. Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed [informe] or informed
[informée] masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them? Sometime ago, in "Requiem for the Media,"
I analyzed and condemned the media as the institution of an irreversible model of communication without a response. But today? This absence of a response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of
power, but as a counterstrategy of the masses themselves when they encounter power. What then? Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the
masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle?
Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity,
they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction (cf. Umberto Eco on this eternal moral dilemma: how can one not

The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they

speak of terrorism, how can one find a good use of the media there is none).

manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the
system and the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation
and a catastrophic resolution. 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,

in the political sphere

passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive just as

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.

The will to transparency of geopolitical events is self-defeating. The moment

war appears, it immediately disappears as it is swamped by media
indeterminacy. This confusion produces constant implosive violence as we
attempt to impose meaning onto the map of 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. Bu t 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).
We don’t have to defend meaning. The form of meaning is always unhappy.
Any attempt to impose meaning paradoxically terminates in its own
disappearance, which is great because any idea that can be defended deserves
to disappear. The form of reality is simply too obvious to be real. We should
engage in the felicitous and happy form of language to push debate through to
its own disappearance. This is the only political act left. Bet on the form of
radical illusion.
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
reality is an illusion, and all thought
that reality could only oppose them violently, and thereby unmask itself. For
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
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 -- in a different, convulsive,
contradictory world, a world with issues and passions! That being the 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 passionless 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.
 1NC Alternative – Seduction
We affirm a process of seduction, rather than imposing a specific value criteria
by which we understand bodies, we affirm the affective unknowability present
in all object. We are a refusal of the affirmative’s/negative’s static value
judgments that destroy singularity
Baudrillard 77. Jean Baudrillard, dead French philosopher, former professor emeritus at the University de
Paris X, Forget Foucault, MIT Press, pg. 37-41

The production channel leads from work to sex, but only by switching tracks; as we move from
political to "libidinal" economy (the last acquisition of '68), we change from a violent and archaic
model of socialization (work) to a more subtle and fluid model which is at once more "psychic"
and more in touch with the body (the sexual and the libidinal). There is a metamorphosis and a
veering away from labor power to drive (pulsion) , a veering away from a model founded on a
system of representations (the famous "ideology") to a model operating on a system of affect
(sex being only a kind of anamorphosis of the categorical social imperative) . From one discourse
to the other-since it really is a question of discourse-there runs the same ultimatum of
production in the literal sense of the word. The original sense of "production" is not in fact that
of material manufacture; rather, it means to render visible, to cause to appear and be made to
appear: pro-ducere. Sex is produced as one produces a document, or as an actor is said to
appear (se produire) on stage. To produce is to force what belongs to another order (that of
secrecy and seduction) to materialize. Seduction is that which is everywhere and always
opposed to pro-duction; seduction withdraws something from the visible order and so runs
counter to production, whose project is to set everything up in clear view, whether it be an
object, a number, or a concept. Let everything be produced, be read, become real, visible, and
marked with the sign of effectiveness; let everything be transcribed into force relations, into
conceptual systems or into calculable energy; let everything be said, gathered, indexed and
registered: this is how sex appears in pornography, but this is more generally the project of our
whole culture, whose natural condition is “obscenity.” Ours is a culture of "monstration" and
demonstration, of "productive" monstrosity (the "confession" so well analyzed by Foucault is
one of its forms) . We never find any seduction there-nor in pornography with its immediate
production of sexual acts in a frenzied activation of pleasure; we find no seduction in those
bodies penetrated by a gaze literally absorbed by the suction of the transparent void. Not a
shadow of seduction can be detected in the universe of production, ruled by the transparency
principle governing all forces in the order of visible and calculable phenomena: objects,
machines, sexual acts, or gross national product.5 Pornography is only the paradoxical limit of
the sexual, a realistic exacerbation and a mad obsession with the real-this is the "obscene,"
etymologically speaking and in all senses. But isn't the sexual itself a forced materialization, and
isn't the coming of sexuality already part of the Western notion of what is real-the obsession
peculiar to our culture with "instancing" and instrumentalizing all things? Just as it is absurd to
separate in other cultures the religious, the economic, the political, the juridical, and even the
social and other phantasmagorical categories, for the reason that they do not occur there, and
because these concepts are like so many venereal diseases with which we infect them in order
to "understand" them better, so it is also absurd to give autonomy to the sexual as "instance"
and as an irreducible given to which all other "givens" can be reduced. We need to do a critique
of sexual Reason, or rather a genealogy of sexual Reason, as Nietzsche has done a genealogy of
Morals-because this is our new moral system. One could say of sexuality as of death: "It is a
habit to which consciousness has not long been accustomed." We do not understand, or we
vaguely sympathize with, those cultures for which the sexual act has no finality in itself and for
which sexuality does not have the deadly seriousness of an energy to be freed, a forced
ejaculation, a production at all cost, or of a hygienic reckoning of the body. These are cultures
which maintain long processes of seduction and sensuousness in which sexuality is one service
among others, a long procedure of gifts and counter-gifts; lovemaking is only the eventual
outcome of this reciprocity measured to the rhythm of an ineluctable ritual. For us, this no
longer has any meaning: for us, the sexual has become strictly the actualization of a desire in a
moment of pleasure—all the rest is "literature." What an extraordinary crystallization of the
orgastic function, which is itself the materialization of an energetic substance. Ours is a culture
of premature ejaculation. More and more, all seduction, all manner of seduction (which is itself
a highly ritualized process), disappears behind the naturalized sexual imperative calling for the
immediate realization of a desire. Our center of gravity has in fact shifted toward an
unconscious and libidinal economy which only leaves room for the total naturalization of a
desire bound either to fateful drives or to pure and simple mechanical operation, but above all
to the imaginary order of repression and liberation. Nowadays, one no longer says: "You've got a
soul and you must save it," but: "You've got a sexual nature, and you must find out how to use it
well." "You've got an unconscious, and you must learn how to liberate it." "You've got a body,
and you must know how to enjoy it." "You've got a libido, and you must know how to spend it,"
etc. , etc. This compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is
psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market
value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of
investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every
direction. This is the form itself which the current realization of value takes. It is the form of
capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it appears at the level of bodies.
Besides, the body to which we constantly refer has no other reality than that of the sexual and
productive model. It is capital which gives birth in the same movement to the energetic of labor
power and to the body we dream of today as the locus of desire and the unconscious. This is the
body which serves as a sanctuary for psychic energy and drives and which, dominated by these
drives and haunted by primary processes, has itself become primary process-and thus an anti-
body, the ultimate revolutionary referent. Both are simultaneously conceived in repression, and
their apparent antagonism is yet another effect of repression. Thus, to rediscover in the secret
of bodies an unbound "libidinal" energy which would be opposed to the bound energy of
productive bodies, and to rediscover a phantasmal and instinctual truth of the body in desire, is
still only to unearth the psychic metaphor of capital. This is the nature of desire and of the
unconscious: the trash heap of political economy and the psychic metaphor of capital. And
sexual jurisdiction is the ideal means, in a fantastic extension of the jurisdiction governing
private property, for assigning to each individual the management of a certain capital: psychic
capital, libidinal capital, sexual capital, unconscious capital. And each individual will be
accountable to himself for his capital, under the sign of his own liberation. This is what Foucault
tells us (in spite of himself) : nothing functions with repression (repression), everything functions
with production; nothing functions with repression (refoulement) , everything functions with
liberation. But it is the same thing. Any form of liberation is fomented by repression: the
liberation of productive forces is like that of desire; the liberation of bodies is like that of
women's liberation, etc. There is no exception to the logic of liberation: any force or any
liberated form of speech constitutes one more turn in the spiral of power. This is how "sexual
liberation" accomplishes a miracle by uniting in the same revolutionary ideal the two major
effects of repression, liberation and sexuality.
 1NC Alternative – Word-Play
This overproliferation of harmony has created an immune system of dissent
suppression in the Chinese government– protest was not censored, it simply
had been harmonized; traitorous officials did not die, they simply had been
suicided
In response to this endless analysis of the World Fair, the globe’s simulation of
harmony, the 1AC is act of 恶搞 (Ègǎo), an effusive playing with language – the
rendering of 和谐 (héxié) into 河蟹 (héxiè), of harmony into river crab, of
debate into the bait for the trap of its own making –an act onco-operativity
giving rise to a cancerous metastases that the system has no choice but to
destroy, yet cannot destroy without destroying itself – the great firewall has
paradoxically been great firewalled
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin [Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster
University], “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of
Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages
174-213)

Chinese discourse on “harmony” operates by way of

ITERATION AND LANGUAGE PLAY: RESISTNIG HARMONISATION Previous chapters of this thesis have examined how the

exclusion of discord, and through the violent spatio- temporal double-act of inclusion into
sameness and exclusion as “behind”. If such attempts at harmonisation of others have been traced in various times and spaces, this is not to imply that they are not crucially linked to the sovereign

This version of harmony has bordered its national

power of the policy discourse, by way of which we began the exploration of harmony in this thesis: Hu’s harmony.

space in many ways, including by the insistence on territorial sovereignty so closely associated
with Hu’s “harmonious world” policy. This insistence on sovereignty and non-interference has
been deployed precisely to legitimate in the international arena the various forms of
harmonisation that have come to be associated with harmonious world’s policy twin,
“harmonious society”. One key tactic employed by the state for containing dissidence
Being harmonised online

and making resistance more difficult has been through harmonising expression on the Internet.
Where some may initially have imagined the Internet to provide the space for near-unlimited freedom of expression and provide a tool to hold government accountable, more empirical studies soon resulted in more sober analyses (Chase and Mulvenon, 2002;

state has been active in trying to include the public through e- governance
Kurlantzick, 2004; Lagerkvist, 2005). On the one hand, the

and “guidance” (导向), and by shaping opinion through overt or covert propaganda online (Lagerkvist,

Officials have portrayed the implementation of information and communications

2005: 206).

technologies in police and security organs as a “necessary strategic choice”, echoing Hu’s view of the future in terms of an “inevitable

One example of such propaganda is the anonymous

choice” (Minister of Public Security, Jia Chunwang, in Huliang - 175 - zhoukan, 2002, cited in Lagerkvist, 2005).

participation in online fora by what netizens call the “50 cent party”, individuals paid to tow the
party line and steer online discussion so as to be favourable to the party. Another example is the
increasing amount of what Johan Lagerkvist has called “ideotainment”. This term denotes “the
juxtaposition of images, symbolic representations, and sounds of popular Web and mobile
phone culture together with both subtle and overt ideological constructs and nationalistic
propaganda”, which may be exemplified by the Online Expo examined in the previous chapter
(Lagerkvist, 2008: 121). The desired outcome of such e-governance, according to Lagerkvist, is “installing a machine” that can provide “‘scientific and correct’ knowledge among citizens and state officials” (2005: 197). The success of the state in achieving the goals of

its inclusionary “thought work” (思想工作) nonetheless remains questionable (Lynch, 1999). On the other hand, the state has been simultaneously active in trying to
exclude the public, through deleting posts and blocking the Internet . Border regions like Xinjiang have been without Internet access for long

about the work of their “harmony makers” and to pre-empt the spread
periods as a way to hinder communication and spread of information

of “splittism”.115 A parallel strategy deployed to keep the flow of information harmonious and
pure throughout China has been to surround Chinese virtual space by a “Great Firewall”, a
programme that blocks many sites based outside China from being accessed from within China
and to simultaneously demand extensive policing and censorship of sites
(including Google+, Facebook, Twitter and other social media),

located “inside” this walled space. An important part of this exclusionary censorship practice has
been the widespread blocking of specific words in online communication. A message that
includes one of the thousands of characters that at any particular moment is deemed “sensitive”
can be instantly deleted by censorship software. The line between acceptable and unacceptable expression remains elusive and shifting (Breslin and Shen, 2010: 266). In drawing it,
however, explanatory emphasis is on a language of “health”, with censorship purported to 115 The blackouts were noted in the Western mainstream press (Blanchard, 2009; AFP, 2011). For a fuller explanation of exactly what this blockage entailed in terms of

In response to the governmental policing

access, see Summers (2009) - 176 - cleanse “pollution” and “unhealthy” elements in favour of “health” and “hygiene” (Lagerkvist, 2008: 123, 134).

of the Internet, and to its “harmony makers” in off-line conflicts, the notion of having “been
harmonised” has grown popular as a way of expressing discontent. The use of this
(bei4hexie4le 被和谐了)

passive grammatical voice dubbed by one commentator the “passive subversive

(bei 被), ” (Kuhn, 2010),

indicates that one has been coercively made to (appear to) do something. The term gained such
popularity that the “passive tense era” made the top of the list (beishidai4 被时代) of Southern4Metropolis4Weekly’s 2009 list of most popular neologisms
(Southern Metropolis Weekly, 2009), and bei4was made quasi-official when an arm of the Education Ministry elected it the Chinese character of the year in 2009. Lei Yi, one judge of the event and a historian of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the term
won by a landslide by popular Internet vote: “[w]e felt we should recognize this result … so we named ‘bei’ as the character most representative of China’s situation last year” (in Kuhn, 2010). Doubleleaf, a Beijing-based blogger who had his blog “harmonised”,

[f]or centuries we’ve been told that the emperor represented the
meaning shut down, emphasised in an interview the subversive nature of bei:

people’s interests … or that some organization or some leader represented our interests. People
did not realize that they had ‘been represented’. This word of the year signals the awakening of
citizens’ consciousness Chinese netizens have made use of this language in particular to
(in Kuhn, 2010).4

criticise the Chinese censorship of the Internet to shut down any uncomfortable discussion. For
example, one Flash animation, found at an online competition to raise awareness about
scientific development and harmonious society, features a Bulletin Board System (BBS)
comment thread that gets “harmonised”. It shows the BBS thread of net jargon, discussions of a
famous person, people trading insults and the posts being suddenly deleted. When one netizen
asks what happened the answer is “they have been harmonised”. Finally, a smiling Hu Jintao
appears alongside the slogan “Everyone is responsible for a harmonious society ” (renren4you4ze4hexie4shehui4 人人有责，

The Flash animation that has “been harmonised” is part

和谐社会) (Martinsen, 2007; Zhuru cilei, 2007). Egao: Resistance in the sphere of politics and the political

of a wider form of online culture known as egao4(恶搞), which has become popular since the
launch of the harmonious policies and received international attention since around 2006. The
term is made up of characters e (恶), which means bad or evil, and gao (搞), which means to
change or deal with, leading to translations of the word as “evil jokes reckless doings ” (Li Hongmei, 2011: 71), “ ” (Meng

or simply “spoofing”
Bingchun, 2009: 52), This spoofing culture uses irony and satire to mock power
(Lagerkvist, 2010: 150).

holders as well as government policies and practices. Scholars have almost universally described
egao as a form of “resistance”, “subversion” or “contestation”. “[e]very 116 Many base their claim on George Orwell’s comment that

joke is a tiny revolution” it is moreover based on an

(for example Li Hongmei, 2011: 72; Tang Lijun and Bhattacharya, 2011: 2.4). To a number of commentators,

understanding of a discrepancy between on the one hand PRC party-state language, including
tifa like “harmonious world” and “harmonious society”, and on the other hand an “alternative
political discourse” ( “hidden transcript” Meng Bingchun, 2009: 39) or (Perry, 2007: 10; Esarey and Xiao Qiang, 2008: 752; Meng Bingchun, 2009: 39), including expressions like having “been
harmonised”.117 The most pervasive scholarly interpretation of this relation between official and unofficial discourse has been in terms of Bakhtinian carnival – an unruly and fantastic time and space in medieval and renaissance Europe. One volume characterizes
the entire Chinese cyberspace as a quasi-separate space of the carnivalesque (Herold and Marolt, 2011). On this understanding, the carnival is an event in a time and space 116 For example Séverine Arsène (2010), Larry Diamond (2010: 74), Nigel Inkster (2010: 7.2),
Tang Lijun and Yang Peidong (2011: 680, 682, 687), Seth Wiener (2011: 156) and Xiao Qiang (Xiao Qiang, 2011a: 52). 117 Scholars have discussed this discrepancy in various contexts. See for examples Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (2001), He Zhou
(2008), Esarey and Xiao Qiang (2008), Patricia Thornton (2002). - 178 - where rules are suspended, separate from normal constraints (Herold, 2011: 11, 12). It is the antithesis of normal life, “free and unrestricted” (Bakhtin cited in Herold, 2011: 12). Similarly, to Li

Hongmei, this space “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin, 1984 [1965]: 10, cited in Li Hongmei, 2011: 72). Meng Bingchun reads a “collective attempt at resistance” (2011: 44) in the egao
“virtual carnival” resistance is said to be directed against the “official”
(2011: 45, 46). This (Meng Bingchun, 2011: 46) or
“established” (Li Hongmei, 2011: 71) order . Tang Lijun and Syamantak Bhattacharya, despite reading egao as carnivalesque, take it to reveal a “widespread feeling of powerlessness, rather than offering the general public any
 in such online spoofs “the potential to generate a chain of related satirical
political power” (2011). Nonetheless, they see

work, which can create a satire movement and subject power to sustained shame and ridicule”
(Tang Lijun and Bhattacharya, 2011). One scholar who has remained decidedly skeptical to such claims about resistance is Johan Lagerkvist, who asks with regards to egao: “[i]s it a weapon4of4the4weak, or is it a rather feeble expression among well-heeled and
largely apolitical urban youth-” (2010: 151). Lagerkvist explains egao as “[p]ermeated with irony and an ambivalence that occasionally resembles, or indeed is, resistance” (2010: 146). Nonetheless, to him, “[t]he crux of the matter is only what larger influence you

[i]nstead of viewing the egao phenomenon as politically

have on politics, if that is at all desired, if your critique is too subtle” (2010: 146). Therefore, he concludes:

subversive, at least in the short term, it may make more sense to view it as the growth of an
alternate civility, more indicative of social and generational change, building up ever more
pressure against the political system – in the long term (Lagerkvist, 2010: 158). To Lagerkvist the point of egao then, for now at least, is to vent anger in a non-

Egao is “neither performed to be, nor perceived as, a direct threat against the Party-
revolutionary manner.

state” This claim in itself, however, says little about

(Lagerkvist, 2010: 159). In this chapter I take Lagerkvist’s point that irony is not by4definition radical or revolutionary.

what it does do (or undo), but simply leaves the question open. In previous analyses of egao, the
focus is clearly on potential for changing politics, but none of the authors sustain any discussion
about what they mean by this “politics”. In order to understand their disagreement, we can benefit from returning to the distinction made at the outset of this thesis between politics in the
narrow sense, or politics,4and politics in the wider sense, or the4 political. I have taken the latter to be concerned with “the establishment of that very social order which sets out a particular, historically specific account of what counts as politics and defines other

depoliticization” is equal to “a reduction to calculability” or the

areas of social life as not politics” (Edkins, 1999: 2). On such a reading, “

application of rules To repoliticize, again, is instead “to interrupt discourse, to challenge

(Edkins, 1999: 1, 11).

what have, through discursive practices, been constituted as normal, natural, and accepted
ways of carrying on” (Edkins, 1999: 12). In view of this differentiation between politics and the political, Lagerkvist’s evaluation of egao with regards to what larger influence it has on politics seems to refer to politics in the narrow

These accounts, then,

sense, rather than the political. Tang and Bhattacharya’s judgment of egao4with reference to its potential to “create a satire movement” seems to be concerned with the same narrow politics.

dismiss egao as not political unless it can achieve some movement or influence with regards to
politics (in the narrow sense). This makes the scholars’ readings of egao themselves
depoliticizing. My concern, by contrast, is rather with the question of the political, and I will comment on this in more detail at the end of this chapter.118 It is in this realm of discourse and the political that I ground an understanding of
resistance. The previous chapter pointed to the problems of conceptualizing resistance as revealing “realities”, “the facts”, when what we are dealing with is a hyperreal system. Rather, I argued, we need to think about theory and resistance as a challenge. What
does this mean- Roland Bleiker has written about the type of resistance that occurs in this realm of the discursive, a resistance that revolves around interactions between different types of speech. To him: 118 My discussion of the literatures on egao in relation to
politics and the political here draws on Nordin and Richaud (2012), where we discuss the distinction as perceived by the young netizens who produce and consume it, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. [o]vertly committed art forms often do no more

Aesthetic politics, by contrast, has to do with the ability of artistic engagements to

than promote a particular position….

challenge, in a more fundamental way, how we think about and represent the political . Here the
political content lies in the aesthetic form itself, which often is not political in an explicit and
immediately recognisable manner engaging with language is engaging in (Bleiker, 2009: 8). On this understanding, Bleiker has shown that

social struggle Alternative forms of language, he argues, can challenge “the state’s
(2000: 43).

promotion of a black-and-white, one-dimensional and teleological approach to history ” by

celebrating multiplicity and making ambivalence part of language 2000: 43). He moreover shows that this is part of global (Bleiker,

politics through drawing on David Campbell to the effect that the everyday life in which these forms of linguistic resistance are deployed is not “a synonym for the local level, for in it global interconnections, local

Alternative forms of
resistances, transterritorial flows, state politics, regional dilemmas, identity formations, and so on are always already present” (Campbell, 1996: 23, cited in Bleiker, 2000: 44).

speech and writing, then, show how political change can be brought about by forms of
resistance that “deliberately and self-consciously stretch, even violate existing linguistic rules”
because in doing so they can provide us “with different eyes, with the opportunity to reassess
anew the spatial and political [and, I would add, temporal] dimensions of global life” (Bleiker, 2000: 45).

Rather than seeking a quick-fix by revealing the scandalous “truth”, or forming a mass
movement explicitly aimed at intervening in narrow politics , this discursive form of resistance
works through pushing gradually at the terms in which we can conceive of the world. It thereby
“resists the temptation to provide ‘concrete’ answers to ‘concrete’ questions” (Bleiker, 2000: 45). In the rest of this chapter I examine
egao as one particular instance that can help us think further about such linguistic resistance in/to “harmonious world”. Resisting harmonisation and deconstructive reading The above example of having “been harmonised” shows how Chinese netizens are “being

By re-citing official language

harmonised” by the government, but also how they are negotiating such “harmonisation” through language and grammar. This is what I mean when I write that tifa are iterative.

and reinscribing it in other chains of meaning, Chinese netizens are turning its purported
message against itself. Where Hu’s harmony purports to be inclusive, peaceful and open, its re-
iteration with a simple grammatical modifier, bei, reads this official take on harmony as being
exclusive, violent and working to close down possibilities for difference. This shows us that
language is indeed a crucial part not only for the government to try to harmonise dissidents, but
also for these to negotiate (or possibly resist) such harmonisation. This language play is thus
made possible by iterability, which means we can remove the repeatable meaning of a term like
“harmony” from the specific context in which it was first deployed and “recognize other
possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting4it onto other chains ” harmony” (Derrida, 1988: 9, cf. Massey, 2005: 19). For this reason “

does not have one fixed meaning, but we can play with it, graft it into other chains of
signification that can reveal meanings that were always already there in harmony in the first
place. This possibility is exploited by netizens. We can read deconstruction taking place in the term “harmony” in many places. What dissident use does is precisely shake it loose from its intended meaning in Hu’s policy documents, reversing and displacing
its meaning, without therefore separating it from that policy discourse. Below I illustrate how this takes place in various tactics of resisting harmonisation in China. The point is to not simply accept “harmony” as having one straightforward meaning, to obey, avoid or
bin the term. Instead, we can, as Baudrillard would have it, “recycle” it in potentially subversive ways. Recycling4harmony4(和谐)41:4Close4reading4of4the4radicals4that4make4up4a4character4 - 182 - Figure 9: Close reading the radicals of “harmony” (Source:
Danwei.org) Derrida’s way of reading a text is often termed “close reading”, which involves paying attention to the details of structure, grammar and etymology of a term or text. This is a tactic we often use in academia when we discuss the meaning of Chinese
terms through a close reading of the radicals that make up a character. This is also a common practice among netizens, in online discussions and in other media, like the above logo from the Economic4Observer for its feature section on the 2006 NPC and CPPCC
Sessions (Martinsen, 2006). The English term “harmony” comes from Greek harmos or harmonía, meaning “joint, agreement, concord”.119 和谐 is usually translated as “harmonious” or “concordant”, the individual characters carrying the same meaning. 谐 is
composed of radicals 讠(言) “words” and 皆 “all”.120 With the 口 “mouth” radical the 和 character, pronounced hé, can signify singing in harmony, or talking together.121 If what we see in China’s current “harmonising” of dissidents is a harmonious society or
harmonious world, harmony here retains only its meaning of “singing in harmony” (as we saw through the example of Expo avatars singing the Expo song in harmony), its “talking together” is only in “agreement” or “concord”. 119 According to dictionary definition
(Hoad, 1993; Oxford Dictionaries, 2011c: 6.3996.3910). 120 According to dictionary definition (Karlgren, 1974 [1923]: 364; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995). 121 According to dictionary definition (Wieger, 1965 [1915]: Lesson 121a; Karlgren, 1974 [1923]: 70;
Lindqvist, 1991: 187; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.602.601). - 183 - Recycling4harmony4(和谐)42:4Differently4pronounced4Chinese4character4gives4alternative4 meaning4 Figure 10: 和 pronounced hú1is the battle cry when winning a game of mah\jong
(Source: Zhang Facai, 2008) This, however, takes us to another tactic of bringing out and playing with the differently pronounced alternative meanings that Chinese characters often have. 和 can also be pronounced hú, a battle cry of victory when completing a game
of mah- jong. Through this battle cry competition or conflict returns to visibility in harmony, as the excluded term on which it relies. This disruption acknowledges the antagonism involved in play, unsettling the notion of permanent harmonious “win-win” purported
by the party-state. It reminds us of the violence we have traced in previous chapters of a dominant China’s turning other into self. What goes on in this reading is in a sense the first of the two moves of Derrida’s deconstructive double gesture. We have read Hu’s
harmony in a way that is faithful to its purported meaning, where the end-state of “harmony” rests on the exclusion of violence, discord and conflict. His harmonious world, as we saw in chapter 1, is one that has done away with misgivings and estrangement, where
everyone wins and no one loses. The “inevitable choice” (or what if we were nasty we could call “the single prescribed future without responsibility of choosing”) is a future harmonious world order where China will always stand for “fairness and justice”. Anyone
who disagrees with this sense of justice is simply wrong and irrational, euphemised as “unscientific”. - 184 - What the pronunciation hú does is acknowledge the excluded other of Hu’s “harmony”, namely discord and competition. Hú can only be achieved after
vanquishing the opponent, there is no win-win here.122 The hú of mah-jong, just like the harmonious Tianxia utopia, is premised on the superiority of the self to the other. Only this hierarchy can establish order, harmony or hú. Acknowledging that competition is
always already there in harmony, implied in the alternative pronunciation hú, I propose that we can acknowledge a third tactic of resistance, the play with homonymous characters. Recycling4harmony44(和
谐)43:4“Rivercrab”4(héxiè)4as4a4nearWhomonym4for4“harmony”4 (héxié)4 Derrida’s first deconstructive move is reversal, identifying an operational binary – such as harmony/discord – and showing how the exclusion of the second term from the first is artificial
and that in fact the first is reliant on the second. An equally important move is displacement, the creation of a term that is not fully contained within the old order. We can get at such a displacement through paying attention to “rivercrabs” (héxiè4 河蟹), a near
homonym for “harmony” (héxié4 和谐). Before I go on to discuss these rivercrabs in more detail, I should point out that these two deconstructive moves are not separate, chronologically or otherwise. My discussion of them here in turn is for the benefit of my
reader, in order to illustrate more clearly what this dissident language play can do for us. Similar sounding characters are often used to replace sensitive words as a way to get through the keyword searches of censorship software that has been bolstered as a way to

simultaneously avoid and criticise “being harmonised”. When netizens are blocked by harmonising government software from writing “harmony” (héxié 和谐), they can replace the term by the similar sounding characters for “rivercrabs” (héxiè 河蟹). In
recent years, the rivercrab has become popular as a signifier of resistance. In 122 Indeed, the very game of mah-jong is itself involved
in contestation as a battle ground for politics, where popular practice has been shown to resist official campaigns to regulate and “sanitize” a “popular mah-jong” (民间麻将) and promote “healthy mahjong” (健康麻将 4or 卫生麻将, meaning no gambling) as “a
competitive national sport and a symbol of China’s distinctive cultural legacy” (Festa, 2006: 9). - 185 - popular Chinese language a “crab” is a violent bully, making its image a new playful and satirical, but heavily political, way of criticising the harmonising “rivercrab
society” (Xiao Qiang, 2007).123 Figure 11: Insist on three watches, establish rivercrab society (Source: Xuanlv, 2010) One popular satire on it can be seen in the above rivercrab with three watches. The caption overhead reads: “insist on three watches, establish
rivercrab society” (jianchi4 san4ge4daibiao4,4chuangjian4hexie4shehui4 坚持三个戴表， 创建河蟹社会). The first phrase is a nonsensical mockery of the party slogan “insist on the three represents” (jianchi4san4 ge4daibiao4 坚持三个代表)124 and the second is
a mockery of the slogan “establish harmonious society” (chuangjian4hexie4shehui4 创建和谐社会). The political tactic here is one of intentional (mis)reading of official discourse, an iteration of party-state language against itself in order to reveal aspects of harmony
that remain hidden from view in official discourse. Again, the acknowledgement of the purported message and its hierarchical binary as well as the first deconstructive move of reversing that hierarchy are here in this picture, this is not a separate stand-alone symbol
or event. 123 As a simple indication of the popularity of satirical depictions of the “rivercrab”, a Google image search for the Chinese term “rivercrab society” (河蟹社会) gave ca 212 000 hits on 3 March 2011. 124 The “three represents” is previous General Secretary
Jiang Zemin’s legacy tifa, which became a guiding ideology of the CCP at its Sixteenth Party Congress in 2002, together with Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory. It stipulates that the CCP should be representative to advanced social
productive forces, advanced culture, and the interests of the overwhelming majority. The tifa was part of the shift to Chineseness as a legitimising force of the CCP as a ruling party representative of the majority of Chinese people as opposed to its original

rivercrab also displaces this binary

legitimisation as a vanguard revolutionary party driven by the “proletariat”. It also helped legitimise the inclusion of capitalist business elites into the party. However, the

and functions as a new term which does not obey that order in any simple manner, but rather
shakes it up and brings to the fore the irresolvable contradiction between these terms. To clarify the position of
my analysis here in relation to Derrida’s, I speak of the rivercrab as a “second term” which displaces the harmony/discord binary implied in Hu’s harmonious world and society. As such, it does not obey the order of that binary in a simple manner. However, it also

This mockingly reiterative form of resistance is not

does not necessarily function as a new “master term” in the way Derrida often seems to understand the role of a new term.

confined to the Internet egao culture, but has spread beyond its online origins to impact both on
official state media and on forms of resistance offline. Artist Ai Weiwei staged one such example
that received attention in the West some time before his infamous detention by the authorities.
When his newly built Shanghai studio was to be demolished by the authorities, Ai threw a grand
farewell party in November 2010, to which he invited several hundred friends, bands and other
supporters to feast on a banquet consisting of rivercrabs. Ai was put in house arrest in Beijing to
prevent him from attending the banquet, but the event took place nonetheless with supporters
chanting: “in a harmonious society, we eat rivercrabs” ( The official party-state Branigan, 2010). Party\state response

strategies of responding to such resistance take the form of harmonising it, ignoring it, or on
occasion acknowledging its presence whilst attempting to again re-read its meaning, significance
and implications in an effort at downplaying its critical potential. With respect to the “passive subversive” bei making the top of lists of neologisms in
2009, a Xinhua article displays the latter tactic. The article stresses state tolerance through emphasising that the poll, which resulted in bei4being elected character of the year, was “jointly conducted by a linguistic research centre under the Ministry of Education and

The example of “being

the state-run Commercial Press”. The tense was said “to convey a sense of helplessness in deciding one’s own fate” and to reflect “dissatisfaction over the abuse of official power” (Xinhua, 2010c).

suicided” was discussed, explaining that the abuse of official power concerned was
(bei4zisha4 被自杀)

perpetrated by a local official, who was duly sentenced to death by higher authorities. Other examples were “being
volunteered” (bei4ziyuan 被自愿) and “being found a job” (bei4jiuye4 被就业). From the “passive subversive” bei4the article turns into proof of how good and improving the government is: ‘[b]ei’ was not censored in the government-run poll of buzzwords, and
grassroots’ voices are finally being heard and even recognized by the government … The government is beginning to respond to inquiries from the public, instead of ‘dodging’ them as it did before (Xinhua, 2010c). Yet much resistance is still treated with violence or
silence by Chinese official sources. According to interviews by Tessa Thorniley at Ai Weiwei’s rivercrab banquet over 40 domestic media sources were invited and none showed up, and amongst the over 50 media outlets that interviewed Ai in house arrest regarding
the event the only domestic media that spoke to him was the English language edition of conservative paper Global4Times4(Goldkorn, 2010). Within half a year of the rivercrab banquet, Ai had been detained by Chinese police, accused of a number of crimes. After
81 days in detention he was released on “bail” (取保候审), on the condition that he did “not speak” (Branigan, 2011; Committee to Protect Journalists, 2011; US Asia law NYU, 2011). During his disappearance Chinese Internet sites such as Sina Weibo blocked
searches on Ai Weiwei (艾未未), a number of his nicknames and puns on his name, including “艾未” (Ai Wei), “未未” (Wei Wei), “艾” (Ai), “未” (Wei), “艾胖子” (Fatty Ai), “胖子” (Fatty) and “月半子” (Moon Half Son). They also blocked writing including the term “未
来”, meaning “future”, which is built up of characters similar to “Weiwei” (Xiao Qiang, 2011b). ONCO\OPERATIVE HARMONY From the above analysis we see that there are similarities between Derridean approaches to reading deconstruction in academia and
practices of subversive iteration of “harmony” amongst dissident netizens in contemporary China. The possibilities for alliances that reside within such shared tactics are potentially valuable to both parties and may help us here to bridge the theory/practice divide. -
188 - Derrida and Baudrillard were both masters of language play, frequently building on the various meanings that can be drawn out of words by way of their etymological roots, their different pronunciations, by playing with homonyms and near-homonyms and by
combining words into new ones to reverse and displace previous binaries. Such techniques pervade the writing of both thinkers.125 However, this is not to say that the similar practice of Chinese language that I outline above is an entirely new phenomenon created

Linguistic play with

by recent practices of Internet censorship and/or influences from some “Western postmodernity”. On the contrary, the struggles and practices that I have outlined have a long and rich history in China.

characters and homonyms has been a sensitive topic in China for millennia. Such practices have
also been known to academics in the Anglophone world for decades. For example, a 1938 article
argues that literary persecution was especially cruel during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911 AD) (Ku Chieh-Kang, 1938 [1935]: 254),

and continues with a description that could just as well be of contemporary Chinese censorship
regimes on the Internet: under the circumstances they [Chinese scholars, artists, intellectuals
and others] could do nothing but resort to veiled satire. This being the situation, their words and
writings were spied on and scrutinized; if they did not use every care they suffered the severest
punishments But, the author continues, although the Qing were the worst
(Ku Chieh-Kang, 1938 [1935]: 254).126

offenders, similar practices of harsh censorship had taken place since the Qin and Han (361-206 BC) (206 BC-8 AD),

the first two dynasties of what is typically considered imperial China. 125 In Derrida, some such terms that I have touched upon in the course of
this thesis include iterability, which plays on “reiterate” and combines the Latin iter (“again”) with the Sanskrit itara4(“other”) (Wortham, 2010: 78), and différance, which combines the two meanings of French différence, difference and deferral, “changing an ‘e’ to
an ‘a’ adds time to space” (Massey, 2005: 49). It also includes terms such as artifactuality, activirtuality, circonfession, avenir/à4venir, hauntologie and so on. Despite what may be interpreted as a dismissal at points of Derrida’s deployment of word play (as discussed
in chapter 1. See also Baudrillard, 1996 [1990]: 25), Baudrillard uses very similar tactics in his deployment of terms such as seduction, drawing on the original Latin sense of seducere, “to lead away”, and semiorrhage, semiotic haemorrhage (Baudrillard, 2002 [2000]:
208). 126 I should be noted that this article was written by a Chinese author at a time when the 1911 nationalist revolution had recently thrown the Qing dynasty from power, which may have affected this commentary. - 189 - The article goes on to list numerous
death sentences during the Ming dynasty (1368- 1644 AD), occasioned by the “homophonic nature of certain words employed” (1938 [1935]: 262). As in contemporary PRC, although “misreading” set texts could be very dangerous (1938 [1935]: 296-301), the
attempt to provide set phrases and pre- structured models for expression could not prevent such double meanings from seeping through text (1938 [1935]: 263). There is thus Chinese historical precedent of interplay between violent oppression of speech and the
kind of linguistic resistance that builds on reiterative, mocking punnery in ways similar to the contemporary deployment of rivercrabs. Crabs as cancerous disease Where associations emerging from Chinese language aligns crabs with harmony, bullies and
competition, most European languages associate it with the disharmony of the body that shares its name: cancer.127 In what follows I introduce the European roots of this term in order to foreground my subsequent analysis of the above “harmony/rivercrabs”,
where I argue that these “rivercrabs” operate precisely according to a cancerous logic. The term “cancer” is originally Latin, meaning “crab or creeping ulcer”, with its etymological roots in Greek karkinos, said to have been applied to such tumours because they were
surrounded by swollen veins that looked like the limbs of a crab (Demaitre, 1998: 620-6; Oxford Dictionaries, 2011b). Although the European term, like the Chinese one, has mythological connotations,128 a contemporary dictionary entry for “cancer” describes it as
“a malignant growth or tumour resulting from an uncontrolled division of cells”, but also as “an evil or destructive practice or phenomenon that is hard to contain or eradicate” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2011b). 127 Scandinavian languages have interpreted cancer to
equate a crayfish, rather than a crab, to give the Swedish kräfta, Norwegian kreft4and Danish kræft. 128 In astronomy, the “Cancer” constellation represents Hercules crushing a crab with his foot. This tale derives from Greek mythology, where the crab nipped
Heracles when he was battling the monster Hydra and was crushed. The mother deity Hera who was at odds with Heracles at the time honoured the crab’s courageous efforts by placing it in the heaven. In astrology, the cancer/crab is the fourth sign of the zodiac,
which the sun enters at the northern summer solstice, about 21 June (Oxford Dictionaries, 2011a). The term also has spatial connotations, indicating the direction south, as in the tropic of cancer. - 190 - In this second capacity, cancer is not separate from
contemporary understandings of international politics and visions of a harmonious world. Rather, the language of cancer and tumours has long been common in IR and politics, and cancer is frequently used as a metaphor for moral and political ills on the body politic
to be cured or removed.129 At the same time, descriptions of biomedical cancer often resort to metaphors or similes borrowed from societal relations130 and from military conflict and battle.131 In Chinese language, the close link between security in the medical
and political realms is explicit in the character zhi (治), which refers to both therapy (zhi4 liao 治療) and governance (zhi4li 治理) (Unschuld, 2010: xxvi; Cheung, 2011: 7). Many studies have shown how the knowledge systems of Western biomedicine and Traditional
Chinese Medicine (TCM) reflect the intellectual and political landscape in which they respectively developed.132 As such, many have understood the spatial distance between China and Europe as a foundation for an epistemological difference in understanding of
their medical bodies, which directly parallels that which is claimed to underpin the understanding of the 129 Hobbes gave a detailed analysis of dangers to the state as illnesses to the body politic (Hobbes, 1996: 221-30), building on an established metaphor of
societies as bodies (Hale, 1971). For another example of early European use, Italian thinker Francesco Guicciardini, writing in the 16th century, constantly repeats the metaphors of medicine and cure. Guiccardini identifies the disease with the Italian city states’
willingness to ally with outside states that are more powerful than themselves, and cautions against ignoring “how dangerous it is to use medicine which is stronger than the nature of the disease” (Guicciardini, 1984: 20-1). The French Revolution saw the use of
illness/therapy metaphors to justify the terreur as a cure for societal illness (Musolff, 2003: 328). In contemporary scholarship, Susan Sontag in her famous Illness4as4Metaphor singled out cancer as a type of “master illness” that is “implicitly genocidal” (Sontag,
1991: 73-4, 84). Otto Santa Anna describes how the American civil rights movement used cancer as a metaphor for racism in the 1960s (Santa Anna, 2003: 215-16, 222). In contemporary IR Kevin Dunn has written at length about the how Mobutu’s cancer-ridden
body led to a recasting of him as a cancer on the body politic of the Republic of Zaire, and Zaire in turn as a tumour on the region (Dunn, 2003: especially 139-42). See also Deborah Wills (2009) for recent use of “cancer” terminology in English language IR, and Wang
Yizhou (2010: 11) for similar use in Chinese language IR. 130 For a good overview of such metaphorical use in patients and media, see Lupton (2003). For a good overview of other forms of cultural and artistic expression relating to the narrativisation of cancer, see
Stacey (1997). 131 For such military metaphors, see for example Annas (1995: 745), Clarke (1996: 188), Stibbe (1997), Clarke and Robinson (1999: 273-4), Lupton (2003: 72), Reisfield and Wilson (2004) and Williams Camus (2009). 132 For its treatment in recently
discovered Chinese medical literature, see Lo and Cullen (2005). For commentary on the parallel emergence of political and medical epistemologies in imperial China, see Unschuld (2010). For commentary on parallel developments of political and medical knowledge
in Europe, see Have (1987) and Stibbe (1997). - 191 - Chinese geo-body, examined in previous chapters.133 Western biomedicine, it is thus said, follows Descartes and builds on the idea that parts of the body are discrete and can be calculated, measured and cured

Chinese medicine is said to build instead on a “holistic” idea of the body where
in isolation (Have, 1987; Kaptchuk, 2000).

illness is explained in terms of a “pattern of disharmony” (Kaptchuk, 2000: 4). Just as a bounded notion of space is typically portrayed in terms of an imposition on
China by Western imperialism, so too is a biomedical imaginary and representation of discrete body parts portrayed as an imposition by the West and a catching up by a China that had fallen behind (Cheung, 2011: 9; Gilman, 1988: 149, 151, 154). With regards to the
geo-body, I have argued throughout previous chapters that its two spatial imaginaries (that of discrete units and that of a holistic system) are not mutually exclusive, but rather coexist in practices in contemporary China. The scope of this thesis does not allow for a
thorough deconstruction of the parallel epistemology that is applied to debates over the medical body.134 Suffice it to say at this point that contemporary literature on Chinese medicine typically reflects on how biomedicine and TCM are complementary.135 Most
importantly for my argument here, and as I will explain in what follows, TCM and biomedicine have produced strikingly 133 This imagination of the human body is particularly clear in writing on pictorial representations thereof. The negotiation of Chinese-Western
power relations and self/other hierarchisation through modes of pictorial representation has been traced in the mid-19th Century medical paintings of Lam Qua, who focused on depicting tumours on Chinese bodies for Western consumption. Discussions of these
can be found in Gilman (1988) and Heinrich (2008), as can some of Lam Qua’s pictures of tumours and abscesses (Gilman, 1988: 150; Heinrich, 2008: 50, 54, 55, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87), as well as earlier and later Chinese images of such growths (Heinrich, 2008: 57, 91,
92; see also Barnes, 2005: 292). 134 Such an endeavour might point to the early exchange and hybrid nature of information, and to similarities of TCM and early forms of European medicine: the inner body as masculine (or Yang) and the outer body as feminine (or
Yin) (for expression in European tradition, see Erickson, 1997: 10, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 12); the focus on balance of a holistic system (for expression in European tradition, see Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in
Chinese tradition, see Unschuld, 2010: xxve); the focus on bodily flows and the understanding of blockage of flows as cause for disease (for expression in European tradition, see Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang,
2009: 28), the discursive parallels to the societal body and the need for governance of both societal and medical body (for expression in European tradition, see Porter, 1997: 158; Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Unschuld, 2010), and so on.

There are many examples of this

135 (for example Cui Yong et al., 2004; Bao Ting et al., 2010; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010; Wong and Sagar, 2010). - 192 -

similar responses to the appearance of cancer: to cleanse and purge in conjunction with studied
manipulation of the immune system. Reading cancer and the autoimmune in Baudrillard and Derrida The

His interest in the

previous chapter drew on Baudrillard’s interest in the pre-programmed character of contemporary culture to examine the (re)production of human bodies as computer coded avatars on the Expo screen.

coding of the human body also extended to the replication and transmission of data on the
micro level, in the form of genetic code and cellular regeneration. As pure information, the
human body is not understood as the source of selfhood, but rather as an effect produced by
the code Embedded in this code is the potential for cancer and
(Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 98, see also Toffoletti in Smith, 2010: 28).

autoimmune disease According to Baudrillard, consumer society or European

(Baudrillard, 2002 [2000]: 98, 207).136

democracy is driven by a “perverse” logic where a range of phenomena – terrorism, (2002 [2000]: 97, 207),

fascism, violence, depression, and so on – are the outcome of “an excess of organization,
regulation and rationalization within a system” These societies tend to suffer from an (2002 [2000]: 97).

excess of rationality and logic, surveillance and control, which in turn leads to the emergence for
no apparent reason of “internal pathologies … strange dysfunctions … unforeseeable, incurable
accidents … anomalies”, which disrupt the system’s capacity for totality, perfection and reality
invention This is the logic that Baudrillard reads of an excessive system that fuels the
(2002 [2000]: 97).

growth of anomalies – just like cancer and autoimmune disease (Baudrillard, 2002 [2000]). What characterises these anomalies in Baudrillard’s theorising
is that “they have not come from elsewhere, from ‘outside’ or from afar, but are rather a product of the ‘over-protection’ of the body – be it social or individual” (Smith, 2010: 59): 136 Like cancer, the question of immunity reinforces the close link between the
governance of the socio- political and the bio-medical body, as “immunity” was originally a legal concept in ancient Rome (Cohen, 2009: 3). For my analysis of cancer and autoimmunity in Baudrillard’s work, I focus on the various articles collected in Screened Out

[e]very structure, system or social body which ferrets out its

(2002 [2000]), and particularly the essay “Aids: Virulence or Prophylaxis-” (2002 [1997]).

negative, critical elements to expel them or exorcise them runs the risk of catastrophe by total
implosion and reversion, just as every biological body which hunts down and eliminates all its
germs, bacillae and parasites – in short, all its biological enemies – runs the risk of cancer or, in
other words, of a positivity devouring its own cells. It runs the risk of being devoured by its own
anti-bodies the system’s overcapacity to protect, normalise and integrate”
(Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 3). On this reading, “ (Smith,

is shown throughout society as natural immunity is replaced by artificial systems

2010: 60) (we could say “harmonise”)

of immunity – like pre-programmed firewalls (Baudrillard , 2002 [2000]: 98). This replacement happens in the name of science and progress (or perhaps a “scientific
outlook on development”). Derrida developed a strikingly similar deployment of the autoimmune, where for example the West since 9/11 is “producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm” (2003a: 99).137 Derrida analyses this
“perverse” logic in terms of an autoimmune process (2003a: 99); “that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunise itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (2003a: 94). This term recalls previous
Derridean terms,138 but particularly reinforces Baudrillard’s claim about cancer and immunity: “[i]n an over-protected space, the body loses all its defences” (Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 3). In this way, to Baudrillard and Derrida, in cancer and autoimmunity it is the
system’s own logic that turns it against itself; the code works too well in its overzealous cleansing, integrating, normalising logic. Derrida reads in this process a double and contradictory discourse of concurrent immunity and auto-immunity in endless circulation,
where the system “conducts a 137 For Derrida, I draw mostly on his reading in “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides” on 9/11 (2003a) and in Rogues:4Two4Essays4on4Reason (2005 [2003]-a), rather than on earlier mention of autoimmunity in texts such as
“Faith and Knowledge” (1998) or Resistances4of4Psychoanalysis (1998 [1996], for some comments on the use of the "autoimmune" in this volume, see Wortham, 2010: 160). 138 As expressed by one commentator: “[u]ndecideability, aporia, antinomy, double bind:
autoimmunity is explicitly inscribed in Rogues into a veritable ‘best of collection’ of Derrideo-phemes or deconstructo- nyms” (Naas, 2006: 29). - 194 - terrible war against that which protects it only by threatening it” (1998: 46).139 The immune and the autoimmune
may not, then, be easily distinguishable: “murder was already turning into suicide, and the suicide, as always, let itself be translated into murder” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 59). Derrida and Baudrillard – and others who have since deployed this aspect of their
analyses140 – tend to describe autoimmunity as generated by the current Western system, although they sometimes indicate the more general nature of such praxis (Thomson, 2005). I have argued in previous chapters that other phenomena they bring to our
attention (such as the deconstructibility of language, or simulacra) cannot be confined in time and space to a bounded notion of “the West”, “late capitalism”, “postmodernity” or some other unit to which we posit China as the “other country”. In the same way, the
observed “unfettered process of a techno-metastatic production of value, the hyperinflation of meaning and signs” is not confined to democracy/capitalism/the West/America that they take as the primary focus of their analyses (I. C. R., 2007). Rather, this cancer has
its parallel in contemporary China, precisely in the form of rivercrabs. Reading cancer and the (auto)immune through biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine To explain this point, and to dispel any understanding of my argument in terms of a Chinese
“catching up”, let me elaborate slightly on how biomedicine and TCM have understood cancer. 139 Derrida sometimes takes the term to denote a specific targeting of a body’s defence mechanisms, its “protecting itself against its self-protection” (Derrida, 1998: 73,
note 27), which is closer to the biomedical definition of autoimmunity and further from its description of certain forms of cancer. At other times, the autoimmune involves an attack against any part of the body, “in short against its own” (son4propre4tout4court)
(Derrida, 1998: 44). We note here the numerous meanings of French “propre”, translated here as “own”, but which also means self-possession, propriety, property and importantly cleanliness, stressing again the cleansing that I emphasise in this chapter (cf. Spivak's
translation in Derrida, 1976 [1967]: 26). Where some have found this ambiguity problematic (Haddad, 2004: 39-41), I think it points to an important aspect of autoimmunity that is the impossibility of separating a part that “defends” a (geo)body from one that simply
“is”. It acknowledges the malleability of the system. For this reason I also allow for (auto)immunity and cancer to denote the same process, as they do to Baudrillard. 140 For example Bulley (2009: 12, 25-29), Vaughan-Williams (2007: 183-92), Osuri (2006: 500),
Thomson (2005), and Haddad (2004: 30). - 195 - The disease that in English is called cancer is called ai (癌) in modern TCM terminology, and cancerous tumours can also be referred to as liu (瘤).141 TCM philosophy is based on the idea that a body is healthy when it
is in harmony, and illness and pain occur when harmony fails to be achieved, manifest in a “pattern of disharmony” (Bao Ting et al., 2010: 171).142 Cancer/ai/liu is on this view “a systemic disease from the start” (Schipper et al., 1995; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3).
Cancer and tumours are understood as the manifestation of disharmony (Bao Ting et al., 2010: 170; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 344), and more specifically of the relative lack of Zhengqi4(正气), a concept analogous to the biomedical notion of immune system
competency/strength (Abbate, 2006; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57). The understanding of TCM’s potential to aid the body in restoring harmony is similarly centred on immunity.143 Biomedicine, which has been associated with the West and with the
imagination of body-parts as discrete and calculable, explains cancer in a very similar way, emphasising the role of immunity. In this school of thought, cancer is a development where transformed cells “acquire the ability to disregard the constraints of its
environment and the body normal control mechanisms” [sic] (Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3), or “the abnormal and uncontrollable proliferation of cells which have the potential to spread to distant sites” (Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 343). Like TCM, biomedicine
thus understands cancer as immune system failure (Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 349). Microscopically, cancer cells display features indicative of a faster proliferative rate and disorganised alignment in relation to other cells, and 141 The first known description
of ai comes from Wei4Ji4Bao4Shu circa 1171 AD, in the Song Dynasty (Pan Mingji, 1992, in Bao Ting et al., 2010: 57). Cancerous tumours were also referred to as liu in inscriptions on oracle bones over 3,500 years old (Pan Mingji, 1992, in Bao Ting et al., 2010: 57).
142 For a more thorough explanation for the lay person of the philosophical foundations of TCM as well as an outline of its foundational texts, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang (2009). 143 This is a marked trait throughout contemporary TCM literatures (Abbate, 2006;
Lahans, 2008; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 342, 349; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3, 4, 15). TCM scepticism of biomedical forms of treatment – such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy – stems from their “collateral damage”, the
killing of normal cells along with the malign cancer cells, which leads to further immune suppression and hence further reduction of zhengqi. TCM treatment focuses on strengthening zhengqi in order to maximize the immunity of the system beset by cancer. Herbal
medicines used to treat cancer are thus (partly) focused on strengthening the body’s general immunity (fuzheng) (Lahans, 2008; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57). - 196 - differences between cancer cells and normal cells are increasingly understood at the level of
genetic code (Marcovitch, 2005: 111). The very code that is pre-programmed in the system thus has the capacity to produce the cells that threaten it, and the spread of malignancy in the system is a result of its failed attempts at “regulation” and cleansing. Like
cancer/ai/liu, the Chinese crab has early associations with cleaning and purification of spaces, with one legend having the emperor using the crab to rid his palace of the scorpions, fleas, mosquitoes, and mice that disturbed his harmony and caused dis-ease.144 In
Europe, like in China, cancer has a long history of association with insufficient cleansing, since its description in pre-modern pathologies that attributed it to insufficient purging of black bile.145 One contemporary cancer self-help book likewise describes cancer in
terms of societal disorder strikingly reminiscent of disruptions to the harmony conveyed by Hu Jintao and Zhao Tingyang respectively: “[c]ancer growths are made up of cells which belong to our body but which have stopped behaving in a co-operative and orderly
fashion” (Reynolds, 1987: 26, cited in Lupton, 2003: 71). It further observes that the multiplication of cancer cells “has no purpose … unlike normal body cells we can think of cancer cells as unco-operative, disobedient, and independent … [n]ormal cells exist
peacefully side by side with their neighbours” (Reynolds, 1987: 27, cited in Lupton, 2003: 71). This description is certainly fitting to characterise the Chinese “rivercrabs” described above. Crabs/cancer disturb and threaten the harmony of the system. They are truly
“malignant” in the sense that they disregard normal mechanisms of control and cleansing (they are unco-operative), and they are capable of spatio-temporal spread into secondary deposits or “metastases”. As such, we may understand crabs/cancer in terms of the
European medieval rendition as a parasitic animal (Pouchelle, 1990: 169; Demaitre, 1998: 624), pervasive also in contemporary society (Herzlich and Pierret, 1987). 144 Renditions of this lore can also be found online (The Vanishing Tattoo, 2011). 145 On this
understanding, breast cancer for example was caused by insufficient cleansing by menstruation of the blood from the dregs of spoiled black bile (Caulhiaco and McVaugh, 1997: n. 9, 94, see also Demaitre, 1998: 618 and notes 37, 38). An overview of the
development of European ideas of cancer can be found in Demaitre (1998). - 197 - Yet, crabs/cancer are indeed “a systemic disease from the start” (Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3), their malignancy is a direct product of the code. The possibility for drawing out the various

Moreover, the
meanings of hexie4 和谐 explored at the outset of this chapter was always already there in the character – through its pictographic make-up, its alternative pronunciation as hú and through its homonym the rivercrab.

ironic critique displayed by these iterations was provoked by Hu ’s policy of overzealous

“harmonisation” and the online deployment of rivercrabs came about as a way to
simultaneously avoid and criticise “being harmonised” by the great firewall and other
government censorship software. In this way, it is the harmonious system itself that produces
that which leads to disharmony. As such, rivercrabs are not simply unco-operative, but onco-
operative: they operate like cancerous metastases that derive from the code of the system itself
to cause dis-harmony and dis-ease. the Chinese THE COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES OF ONCO\OPERATIVE HARMONY The claim I have made up to this point of the chapter is that

“harmonious” system is not so different from what Derrida and Baudrillard describe in contemporary “Western democracy” or late capitalist “consumer society”. Although China is often recast as the opposite of these systems

suffer from the same autoimmune problems. Its symptoms may be different,
and their logic – the “other country” – it seems to

but the onco-operative character of its dis-ease is the same. What, then, are the implications of such an illness – and how do we deal with it- Looking for cures in
an onco\operative system Biomedical and TCM treatments of cancer/ai/liu do, as I have indicated above, follow a similar pattern to those commonly prescribed for dealing with unco-operative elements of the geo-body. Biomedicine typically resorts to screening,

The lack of precision of these therapies give them a quasi-suicidal

“surgical strikes”, chemo- and radio-therapies (Marcovitch, 2005: 112).

nature through which the parts of the body deemed “healthy” or “normal” become collateral
damage. This in turn often further endangers the system through weakening its immune system. The alternative approach, of strengthening the system’s own immune capacity or zhengqi, urges the - 198 - system to auto-harmonise, to turn the bad qi
into the good – another form of cleansing, or “purging the excessive” and ousting “evil Qi” (Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 30). Both these ways of dealing with unco-operative elements of the medical body thus echo the problems seen in relating to “others” in the

In this way, the onco-operative character of the

geo-body: we eliminate through radical separation (cutting off) or through radical harmonisation (turning the bad into the good).

system means its over-zealous attempts at cleansing – through therapy and governance ( (zhi4liao) zhi4li) –

actually come to threaten the system itself. This, in turn, exposes an aporia at the very heart of
the system, in that the dis-ease must be cured, but cannot be cured without sacrificing the
system itself: “there is no effective prevention or therapy; the metastases invade the whole
network ‘virtually’ … He who lives by the same will die by the same ” (Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 2). Or, in Derrida’s words: “there is no absolutely
reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune. By definition” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-b: 150-1). To Baudrillard, the fact that cancer is a reflection of the body’s victimisation by the disruption of its genetic formula is thus what makes it impossible for conventional
medicine to cure it: “[t]he current pathology of the body is now beyond the reach of conventional medicine, since it affects the body not as form, but as formula” (2002 [1997]: 1). To put it a different way, the fact that the system itself produces, through its own
code, that which threatens it means there is little use looking to the rationality of the system to combat its excrescences: “[i]t is a total delusion to think extreme phenomena can be abolished. They will, rather, become increasingly extreme as our systems become

spontaneous self-regulation of systems is something well- known:

increasingly sophisticated” (Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 7). On Baudrillard’s reading,

systems produce accidents or glitches in their own programme, interfering with their own
operation enables systems to survive on a basis contrary to their own principles,
(Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 5). This

against their own value-systems: they have to have such a system, but they also have to deny it
and operate in opposition to it…. But it is entirely as though the species were … producing …
through cancer, which is a disruption of the genetic code and therefore a pathology of
information, a resistance to the all-powerful principle of cybernetic control…. With … cancer, - 199 -

we might be said to be paying the prize for our own system: we are exorcising its banal virulence
in a fatal form Again, this is precisely how rivercrabs operate: they metastasise and
(Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 5).

spread through a disruption of the code that lets them slip through it ’s pre-programmed
screening/fire- wall/censorship. This is indeed a resistance to cybernetic control, but one generated by the system itself. If we bring this analysis back to the discipline of IR, this way of understanding cancer

military
complicates things. Within Chinese IR, Wang Yizhou has argued that analysing terrorism in terms of cancer calls for the question of how cancer comes into being. He reads it as a symptom of structural imbalance (Wang Yizhou, 2010: 11). Where

action can only “cure the symptom but not the source ”, harmonisation or re- balancing of the
system will prevent radicalism from breeding (2010: 16). In view of the above explanation of cancer, we may concur with both him and Baudrillard that traditional treatment may only
serve to aggravate the problem through weakening the system and causing collateral damage. However, having excavated the forms of therapy suggested by the “alternative” of “harmonisation” by TCM or Chinese IR, it appears that it stands equally powerless.

Increasing harmonisation is unlikely to curb cancer/crabs, but may rather contribute to spurring them on. There is no use looking to the systems own rationality to
combat the crabs it produces. Spatiotemporal bordering in an onco\operative system What, then, are the spatio-temporal implications of these crabs, as metastases of an (auto)immune and onco-operative
system- Nick Vaughan-Williams (2007) has productively drawn on Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity to discuss spatial and temporal bordering. The temporal bordering he discusses draws on Brian Massumi’s description of “flashes of … sovereign power” as a

parallels what Baudrillard thinks of as a pre-

particular form of pre-programmed decision making in the “space of a moment” (Massumi, 2005: 6; Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 187-8). This

programmed instantaneous operation. Understanding borders in terms of this decisionist

ontology highlights the specificity of contemporary wordplay and rivercrabs, in relation to
previous historical deployment of homonyms to avoid censorship in China , as described earlier in this chapter. Previous forms of
bordering decisions with regards to such homonymous wordplay involved a deliberative process of human interpretation. In this era of the virtual and the hyper-real, the bordering decision is pre-programmed and instantaneous. Vaughan-Williams, following

When it arrives, it always seems to

Massumi, argues that this approach is the temporal equivalent of a tautology: “[t]he time form of the decision that strikes like lightning is the foregone conclusion.

have preceded itself. Where there is a sign of it, it has always already hit ” (Massumi, 2005: 6, cited in Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188).

This form of decision is accordingly a foregone conclusion because it sidesteps (or following Hu perhaps an “inevitable choice”) “

or effaces the blurriness of the present in favor of a perceived need to act on the future without
delay”, in the face of a threat of an indefinite future yet to come (Vaughan- Williams, 2007: 188; Massumi, 2005: 4-5). Both authors read this as a

In parallel to
temporal shift, from “prevention” to “pre-emption”, from the temporal register of the indefinite future tense to the future perfect tense: the “always-will-have-been-already” (Massumi, 2005: 6-10; Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188).

the autoimmune, this politics induces rather than responds to events: [r]ather than acting in the
present to avoid an occurrence in the future, pre- emption brings the future into the present. It
makes present the future consequences of an eventuality that may or may not occur, indifferent
to its actual occurrence. The event’s consequences precede it, as if it had already occurred (Massumi, 2005:

The Chinese practice of censoring/harmonising specific terms through its Great

7-8, cited in Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188).

Firewall works through this form of pre-programmed code, which sensors in a “flash of
sovereign power”. Terms are censored pre-emptively to harmonise some not-yet- existing but
possible future dissident deployment of a once unthreatening term (such as the term “future”
未来 itself, as seen earlier in this chapter in relation to Ai Weiwei ’s detention). In this manner,
PRC Internet censorship policy acts as a temporal bordering process: it pre-empts threats to the
government’s version of “harmonious world/society” that come from the future, thus securing
time and the future as something that belongs to the state and not to the crabs or dissidents (c.f.

As an actual wall, the form of electronic bordering that is exercised by the Great
Vaughan- Williams, 2007: 189).

Firewall is also a form of spatial bordering, in that it is intimately connected to questions of

sovereignty, territory and governmental power in . Vaughan-Williams draws on William Walters to refer to this spatial bordering as “firewalling” –

contemporary China another term for having “been harmonised” by the Great Firewall is having
“been GFWed” (Walters, 2006, for examples see Calon, 2007; Chow, 2010). The self-attacking or autoimmune logic of such GFW-ing is clear in the “blocking” of Internet and telephone access that was used in attempts to harmonise Xinjiang

This, too, is the spacing

during the 2009 riots. This firewalling was intended to prevent “splittism” from spreading, yet could only do so by splitting Xinjiang as a spatial unit off from the rest of China, in virtual/physical space.

by which the Great Firewall operates – to maintain a harmonious space, that space must be
sealed off as a (virtual) geobody from the rest of the world . Again, what is described in Vaughan-Williams as “innovations in the ways sovereign power attempts to

The practices of Internet

secure the temporal and spatial borders of political community” could refer to something less localised in time and space than may at first appear (Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 191).

“harmonisation” in China can thus be described in terms of a bordering of time and space that
has parallels in contemporary expressions of (auto)immunity in the European system. Having
said this, the particular practice of using homonymous characters like the rivercrab, to
simultaneously criticise and avoid “being harmonised” on the Chinese Internet, is a locally
specific way of negotiating this particular kind of virtual bordering in time and space. This
particular form and double function differentiates it from other forms of satire or political irony
that can be found in other systems around the world. Moreover, in attempting to secure time
and space as belonging to the state, these harmonising Chinese censorship regimes effectively
provoke the kind of critical wordplay that I exemplify here through rivercrabs. In this way,
cancer/crabs work within the system and yet repeatedly escape it: where “harmonisation” may
be understood as an attempt at temporal bordering, the experience of cancer has been
described as a disturbance to such temporality, a “falling out of time” (Stacey, 1997: 10). The more the Chinese government attempts to secure,
cleanse and harmonise, the more creative and subversive are the iterations that use its language against itself. Rivercrab metastases and heterotemporalities As a consequence of this (auto)immune logic of the onco-operative system, rivercrabs, like cancer cells,

In the “here-now”, crabs, like cancer, are

increasingly display features indicative of a faster proliferative rate and disorganised alignment in relation to other cells (Marcovitch, 2005: 111).

marked by the way they spread and metastasise through mutation of the code. In this way, we
can understand how Chinese crabs similarly migrate, multiply and change in what is precisely an
“iterative” manner. Every crab draws on previous iterations of harmony and crabs, but also mutates into something different. One example of such a “metastasis” can be seen in the figure below. It shows a replica of the logo for
the computer game “World of Warcraft”, saying instead “Rivercrab World” (hexie4shijie 河蟹世界). The text at the top means “do things others could never do” (做别人永远做不到的事), and the one below means “the late arrival of the battle expedition” (迟到的
远征). The links to themes discussed throughout this thesis are marked, including the direct link to Hu’s “harmonious world” policy, the competition inherent in games and play and the violent military underpinning of harmonious world. Figure 12: Rivercrab world of
warcraft (Source: Heifenbrug, 2008) - 203 - The rivercrab metastasises in similar ways into numerous constellations – some very close copies, some with more creative distance. The rivercrab recurrently appears on blogs and can be found in an online dictionary
compiled by China Digital Times (Xiao Qiang, 2010; China Digital Space, 2011a), where it appears together with dozens of other characters and expressions that have metastasised from similar homonymic wordplay and in reaction to governmental harmonisation. It
also appears as a permanent feature on the cap of another Internet meme, the “Green Dam Girl” (绿坝娘). The Green Dam Girl is an anthropomorphism of the “Green Dam Youth Escort” software (绿坝·花季护航) that was developed under the direction of the
Chinese government to filter Internet content on individual computers.146 The Green Dam Girl and rivercrab also appear in merchandise (Xu Yuting, 2009; Gaofudev, 2011; Lotahk, 2011), numerous cartoons (Hecaitou, 2009a; Hexie Farm, 2011) and music videos
(Stchi, 2009; Tutuwan, 2009; DZS manyin, 2010) that typically work through copies of copies, interweaving the themes and symbols discussed throughout this thesis. In one such music video, the connection between rivercrabs, harmony and Tianxia is once more
highlighted (Tutuwan, 2009). This cover-song called “Harmony or die” features the chorus “Green dam, green dam – rivercrab/harmonise your entire family (lv4ba,4lv4ba,4hexie4ni4quanjia4 绿坝绿坝 – 河蟹／和谐你全家), sometimes writing the same- sounding
lyrics as “harmony” (和谐), sometimes as “rivercrab” (河蟹) in the subtitles. The second verse begins: Green dam - green dam, will kill you in the bud. Rivercrabs all under heaven, arrogant attributes erupt [She] has asked you not to open your eyes too wide Is it
possible that [she is] envious and jealous-147 146 According to China Digital Space: “Pre-installation of Green Dam software was originally intended for all new computers; however, because the proposed policy proved deeply unpopular, mandatory pre-installation
has been delayed to an undetermined date. Green Dam girl first appeared sporadically in June 2009 on Baidu’s online encyclopaedia” (China Digital Space, 2011b). Some, however, suggested that the actual reason for the government’s about-face was the many
security flaws within the software that allowed hackers to take over computers (jozjozjoz, 2009), and that it was built on copyright and open sourcecode violations (Koman, 2009). Popular Chinese blogger Hecaitou (和菜头) says the Green Dam Girl shows the
creativity of the post-80s generation in resisting Internet regulation (Hecaitou, 2009a). 147 绿坝‐绿坝 把你萌杀 (lv4ba4W4lv4ba,4ba4ni4meng4sha) - 204 - This kind of video typically brings together numerous key elements discussed here with reference to the
onco-operative nature of contemporary Chinese society: the Green Dam Girl, rivercrabs, harmony, Internet censorship, cleansing and Tianxia.148 This mixing of online lingo and symbols is reiterated also in art off-line. In a 2011 art exhibition at the Postmaster
Gallery in New York, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung exhibited his mixed media installation “The Travelogue of Dr. Brain Damages” (Hung, 2011). The installation was a response to the increasing harmonisation of artistic and netizen dissidence in China, and explored the role
of the Internet in facilitating “both freedom and suppression” (Hung, 2011). The Chinese title Naocan4youji4(脑残游记) is a wordplay on Lao4Can4youji (老残游记), “The Travelogue of Lao Can”, a late Qing dynasty novel attacking the injustice and hypocrisy of
government officials at the time. The project thus questioned whether the Internet in China is an effective tool for social change, through remixing Chinese netizens’ meme languages with Western icons. The installation consisted of 10 framed digital prints, a 6-
minute long video and a ping-pong table sculpture, seen in the figure below. Several of the prints in this installation include replicas of one or more rivercrabs, often copied from images circulated on blogs. For example, in the piece titled “Justice Bao faces the Red
Sun everyday” (天天见红日), Bao4Zheng (包拯), a Song dynasty judge who is a symbol of justice in China, is holding a laptop of the “Great Firewall” brand displaying a copy of the rivercrab with three watches that was discussed at the beginning of this chapter

On the walls behind the prints were written in large red characters: “You are not a real man
(Hung, 2011).

until you have leaped the Great Wall of China ” which is one character from (Bu4fan4changcheng4fei4haohan 不翻长城非好汉),

the original quote from Mao: “You are not a real man until you have been to the Great Wall of
China” (Bu4dao4changcheng4fei4 河蟹天下 傲娇属性大爆发 (hexie4Tianxia,4aojiao4shuxing4de4baofa) 拜托了你们 眼别睁态大 (baituo4le4nimen,4yan4bie4zheng4tai4da) 莫非羡慕妒嫉了吗- (mofei4xianmu4duji4le4ma-) My translation. Full video
with Chinese subtitles can be found online (Tutuwan, 2009). 148 See for example (Hrehnr, 2009b; Stchi, 2009, which later got a avatar dancetroop found at Hrehnr, 2009a; DZS manyin, 2010). - 205 - haohan 不到长城非好汉). The calligraphic style recalls the hand-
painted signs that forbid uncivilised behaviour (like spitting) and promote harmonisation in Chinese cities, but also the signs that appear on walls to be demolished. Figure 13: “Ping, ping, no pong” artwork by Kenneth Tin\Kin Hung (Source: Kenneth Tin\King Hung)
The central sculpture of the installation, seen in the figure above, was titled “Ping, ping, no pong” (Ping,4ping,4wu4pang4 乒乒无乓) and consisted of a ping-pong table with a whole cut out in the shape of a rivercrab on the Chinese side panel. The net was replaced
by a sculptured wall, symbolising the Great Firewall of China, and accompanied by a ping-pong ball to symbolise the exchange of information (Hung, 2011). The sculpture highlights how the purported harmonious “win-win” of mutuality is undermined by

The
harmonisation, in the form of the rivercrab. Through depicting the rivercrab as a clearly visible and distinct hole or void, this installation also highlighted the undecidable nature of rivercrabs as neither present nor absent, but simultaneously both.

metastasising, hybridising, prostheticising, mutating displacement of harmony 和谐/rivercrabs

河蟹 goes so far as to penetrate and reformulate the very characters themselves , as can be seen in the images below. The
mutating of characters into new ones became popular after China’s Ministry of Education unveiled a list of standardised Chinese characters in common usage, including 44 characters that were - 206 - slightly revised in their print formats in the Song style, a popular
Chinese character style in book printing format (Jiang Aitao, 2009). This re-formation of characters has grown in popularity since 2009, and can be seen in off-line art such as Hung’s (on the ping-pong racket above) and on blogs and webpages on the Internet.149
Figure 14: Hybrid hexie1shehui, rearranging the characters for 河蟹社會 (Source: Keso) The image above shows a T-shirt printed by critical blogger Keso. The print displays a rearrangement of the classical Chinese characters, used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for
“rivercrab society” (hexie shehui 河蟹社会). The characters below similarly display an amalgamation of the characters for “harmony” (hexie 和谐) and “rivercrab” (hexie 河蟹). 149 The first instance of this trend may be when on August 31 2009, netizens created
three new Chinese characters together with other digital artwork within twelve hours. These new characters can be seen on Hecaitou’s blog and include a character pronounced “nan”, which combines the characters for “brain damage” (naocan4 脑残), which is
online lingo used to describe someone incapable of thinking straight because they have been crippled by party ideology; “wao” combining the characters for “fifty cents” (wumao 五毛) in a reference to the “Fifty cent party” which is an online term for online
commentators paid and trained by the government to anonymously spin online debate in favour of the Party Line; and “diang”, combining the characters for the CCP Central Committee (dangzhongyang 党中央) interpreted to mean “the ultimate, sacred, absolutely
correct, cannot be questioned; you get the shit beaten out of you but cannot say a word” (意思是至高无上的，神圣的， 绝对正确的，不容质疑的， 抽你丫没商量的) (Hecaitou, 2009b, for English language commentary at China Digital Times, see Xiao Qiang,

This hybridisation of crabs has clear parallels to

2009). - 207 - Figure 15: Hybrid hexie, combining the characters 和谐 and 河蟹 (Source: Alison, 2010)

Baudrillard’s alignment of metastases and prostheses, where the fractal (geo)body, “fated to
see its own external functions multiply, is at the same time doomed to unstoppable internal
division among its own cells. It metastasises: the internal, biological metastases are in a way
symmetrical with those external metastases, the prostheses, the networks, the connections ”
Having examined the hybrid nature of the
(Baudrillard, 2002 [2000]: 3). In this way rivercrabs, too, metastasise in time and space. Heterotemporalities and the undecidability of rivercrabs

metastasising crabs, the final point I want to argue is that this hybridity, in combination with the
autoimmune logics of which they are part, imbues them with a radical undecidability . Derrida too emphasises this
link between the autoimmunitary and undecidability: suppression in the name of the (harmonious) system may be legitimate in protecting it from those who threaten it, but is simultaneously autoimmunitary in exposing the immune system by which the system
defends itself as an “a4priori abusive use of force” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a). In this final section I thus want to emphasise the links between cancer/crabs and undecidability of the future against which harmonisation attempts to secure “harmonious world/society”.

The undecidable nature of cancer/crabs is visible in an aspect of the lore surrounding them, that
refers to the way the crab moves in time and space , in a forward and backwards motion that has
been connected to threatening dishonesty, but also to the inability to decide something one
way or the other, or to predict where it is going (Demaitre, 1998). This undecidability embodied in the crab is also emphasised by the Chinese interpretation of harmony that sees its
roots in cooking. The crab can at times be poisonous and as a bottom-feeder it often includes contaminated substances. At the same time, however, it is considered a delicacy and is believed to nourish the marrow and semen, making it a symbol of male potency and
virility (The Vanishing Tattoo, 2011). As crabs are considered exemplary “salty” they can in the logic of TCM either disturb or restore harmony of the body through their effect on the kidneys, and can thus cause or treat cancer (Lu, 1986: 52, 125-6; Wong and Sagar,
2010: 16).150 Like Derrida’s reading of the pharmakon in “Plato’s Pharmacy”, the crab, then, is simultaneously potential poison and potential cure – indeed Derrida says that “[t]he pharmakon is another name, an old name, for this autoimmunitary logic”.151 Again,
the interpretation of the crab as alimentary poison/cure as always already central to the concept of harmony can be seen in the building blocks of the harmony concept itself. An alternative explanation of the character 和 reads the radical to the left 禾, which
depicts standing grain,152 with the radical to the right 口, which depicts an opening or mouth.153 Together they link harmony to eating, or having plenty of grain 禾 to eat 口.154 David Hall and Roger Ames accordingly argue that “harmony is the art of combining
and blending two or more foodstuffs so they come together with mutual benefit and enhancement without losing their separate and particular identities, and yet with the effect of constituting a frictionless whole” (Hall and Ames, 1998: 181, cited in Callahan, 2011:
259). Callahan also draws on this metaphor in a famous passage from the Spring4and4Autumn4Annals (Lüshi4chunqiu 呂氏春秋), where a minister uses it to explain to his king the art of empire building: “[y]our state is too 150 For one example of such a cure: “Bake
one male crab and one female crab and grind into powder, take the powder with wine all at once to facilitate healing of breast cancer” (Lu, 1986: 126). 151 Derrida (2003a: 124, see also, Derrida, 1976 [1967]: 292; 1981 [1972]; 1995 [1989]-a: 233; Derrida, 2005
[2003]-a: 52, 82, 157). This is also how Chinese lore traditionally conceives of poisons/cures more generally, as is clear from the “Five Poisons” (wu4du 五毒), incidentally near-homonymous with “no poison” (wu4du4 无毒). These are, like the crab, actually five
animals that have traditionally been held to counteract harmful influences through counteracting poison with poison. They also had corresponding medicines made from five animals or corresponding herbs, used to treat ulcers and abscesses, probably through active
ingredients such as mercury and arsenic (Yetts, 1923: 2; Williams, 1976). 152 According to a dictionary definition (Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 4.2588.1). 153 According to a dictionary definition (Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.566.14). 154 This
etymology can be found in a number of dictionaries and books on Chinese characters (Wieger, 1965 [1915]: 121a; Karlgren, 1974 [1923]: 70; Lindqvist, 1991: 187; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.602.1). small and is inadequate to have the full complement of
the necessary ingredients. It is only once you are the Emperor that you would have the full complement” (Lvshi4 chunqiu, 1996, cited in Callahan, 2011: 260). To Callahan, this shows the constructed nature of harmony, built through “an active political process, and
judged from a particular perspective – in this case the king’s perspective” (Callahan, 2011: 260). In Chinese mythology, the crab is similarly associated with sovereign power and violent might, as well as with guarding and screening the passage into secured spaces.
For example, in Chinese mythology and popular fiction, the Chrystal Palaces of the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas are guarded by shrimp soldiers and crab generals (Mythical Realm, 2011). This stands as a parallel to the guarding of Chinese sovereign space by the
Great Firewall, and the Green Dam Girl with her crab sign of repressive authority. At the same time, however, this crustacean army is parodied in the Chinese idiom of “shrimp soldiers and crab generals” (xiabing4xiejiang4 虾兵蟹将), which is used to denote useless
troops, a connotation which remains with contemporary Internet users, as can be seen in the image below, which depicts shrimp soldiers and crab generals as precisely “ineffective troops” (Lee, 2011). Figure 16: Shrimp soldiers and crab generals: Ineffective troops

What is clear from these metastases and their association is the undecidability of these
(Source: Sean Lee)

crabs of the onco-operative Chinese system. They are simultaneously poison and cure, effective
harmonisers and useless troops, a consequence of sovereign bordering of time and space and
that which “falls through” or escapes such confines. This undecidability is inseparable from the
“mutual contamination” seen above in the crabs’ interaction with their environment and with other species of the zoology that has emerged as part of netizens’ play with humorous homonyms in the face of Internet

It is this “mutual contamination” that I think makes these rivercrabs and their peers step
harmonisation.

up to the challenge of coeval multiplicities that was outlined in chapter 2 of this thesis, which Hutchings articulated as the attempt to think “heterotemporality” which refers to “ultimately
neither one present nor many presents, but a mutual contamination of ‘nows’ that participate in a variety of temporal trajectories, and which do not derive their significance from the one meta-narrative about how they all fit together” (Hutchings, 2008: 166). These

Their
différantial metastases, differentiated and deferred through spacing, are of the system yet fall through the cracks of its time and space to engage in a “mutual contamination of ‘nows’” that each incorporates undecidable futures in the “here-now”.

very undecidability means that we have to take responsibility in the “here-now” for which of
their possible readings, or temporal trajectories, we chose to put across. In this chapter I have
chosen to put across one such narrative, of crabs as (auto)immune metastases of an onco-
operative harmony. Their significance, however, cannot be ultimately decided or locked in by
this narrative – it is not a meta-narrative from which we can judge how they all fit together. It is
indeed impossible to do justice to the excess of meaning embodied in these crabs . Nonetheless,
I have traced some of them here and pointed to some of their significance, in a way that I
believe can emphasise their radical undecidability as a “plurality of trajectories” or “simultaneity
of stories-so-far”. egao word play that
CONCLUSION In this chapter I have explored how Hu’s version of a harmonious world is being challenged and reproduced by a particular form of Chinese

works through deploying official language against itself. These redeployments make visible how
Hu’s harmony has come to work through violent “harmonisation” of others . I have argued that these forms of wordplay draw on

I have moreover argued that these

tactics similar to Derrida’s in particular, but also to Baudrillard’s, thus providing for a resonance here between academic scholarship and dissident practice in China.

forms of resistance are inherently linked to Hu ’s “harmonious world/society” through the

autoimmune logic of what I have termed an onco-operative system: a system that in seeking to
protect and cleanse itself actually violates itself as the consequence of a violent non-recognition
of the “other” in the self. In exploring this quasi-suicidal interplay of harmony and rivercrabs, I
have shown how they are intimately linked to party-state attempts at spatial and temporal
bordering as a means to maintain a cleansed/harmonious timespace. Deconstruction highlights the impossibility of ever making a clear-cut
division between inside and outside, self and other and thus brings out a key feature of the logics of “harmonious world” (or perhaps any system). Resistance to4harmony/harmonisation can in this way not be thought outside the resistance

it is impossible for harmony to

of4harmony/harmonisation, the resistance of the system itself to itself, of and to its “self” as “other”, a resistance of the “other” of itself to itself. For this reason,

acquire the conceptual unity or self-identity which would be needed in order for it to be placed
as a secure “object” to be straightforwardly resisted, critiqued or condemned. In this manner I
have insisted on the impossibility of succeeding in creating such a purified space or object, and
on the undecidability of both harmony and crabs: like harmony, the crabs are simultaneously
poison and cure, they are intimately linked to the possibility of the system in the first place, yet
threaten it with murder/suicide. Because of a tendency of any community to close in on itself and exclude the outside on which it relies for survival works according to an autoimmune logic, “[t]his tendency is

“[t]his
not a perversion of proper community (whether inoperative, unavowable, - 212 - or coming, as for Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben), but the condition of its existence” (Thomson, 2005). This is certainly the case for Hu’s “harmonious world”. In this way

self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to
something other and more than itself ” (Derrida, 1998: 51). Finally, then, I have argued that this undecidability is what makes it possible to think of this onco- operative system of metastases in terms

Returning to the question of the political in harmony/rivercrabs, it seems

of the “heterotemporalities” or “coeval multiplicities”.

the claim that the online world of egao4offers a “free and unrestricted” time and space of
Bakhtinian carnival is premature. Rivercrabs are used to circumvent constraints, not abolish
them, and constraints are certainly still in place. The descriptions of this culture as a separate
sphere or “the antithesis of normal life” seem similarly exaggerated. However, Lagerkvist’s idea that egao4is for venting anger as4opposed4to
offering the public political power hinges on a focus on politics in the narrow sense, which is seen throughout prior analyses of egao. Much previous scholarship rests on the assumption that egao4should be judged on its potential to influence politics, to contest the
legitimacy, accountability or policy of the PRC government. Others imply that it should be measured against its potential to cultivate collective resistance, collective empowerment or grassroots communities. If measured against such standards, rivercrabs certainly

They make us laugh, but offer no way out, no alternative telos towards
appear as “ineffective troops” in battling out Chinese politics.

which a movement of mass resistance can be directed. They even refuse to adapt a single
meaning and always oscillate – they are simultaneously harmony and rivercrab, resisting and
perpetuating the proliferation of harmony. Precisely herein lies the political potential of
rivercrabs. Previous scholarship has aimed to understand the meaning of egao, to pin down its
potential significance in terms of a resisance/not resistance divide of politics. I suggest instead
that we can approach such phenomena by way of interrogating the political, where
“repolitcization” involves a disruption of the regular proliferation of allochronically organized
harmony, a “challenge” to “what have, through discursive practices, been constituted as - 213 -

normal, natural, and accepted ways of carrying on ” Through repeatedly deploying (Edkins, 1999: 12).

expressions like having “been harmonised” or “rivercrab world” the meaning of the official
“harmonious world” discourse is “hollowed out” or “disrupted”, rather than contested head on.
The point is not necessarily to resist or not resist, but to “make strange”. This is what pushes
rivercrabs into the political, where multiple meanings or doings – of words and purported
significance – leads to instances of openness where we need to make “impossible decisions”
with regards to their use and interpretation. It is only if we shift the focus from politics to the
political that it makes sense to conceive of this language play as “alternative political discourse”
repoliticisation is not stable, but egao too is repeatedly
(Meng Bingchun, 2011: 39) or “alternate civility” (Lagerkvist, 2010: 158). With this said,

depoliticised, by being designated as unimportant or as meaning only one thing (only revolution,
only apolitical escapism, only4a potential to become a proper political movement). The point of
this chapter is not to designate to egao another correct4meaning, but to indicate the
undecidability of this meaning-making process . The point, precisely, is to open back up the question of egao as potentially political even if it does not lead to a revolutionary politics.

Because of the onco-operative logic of the system “our solutions to problems, our attempts to
perfect the world… are but a step on the way to worse viruses developing ” (Coulter, 2004). The question, then, has to be asked:
“[w]hat is cancer a resistance to, what even worse eventuality is it saving us from-” (Baudrillard, 1993 [1990]: 10). It is thus to the question of eventualities that I turn in my conclusion, to the (im)possibility of openness to this Other “to come”.
 1NC – Bifo
The 1AC only increase the speed of production increasing the spasms inherent
in the status quo. Rather than produce we ought to occupy the space of a
Chaoide and decode the excess chaos caused from semoicapitalism. Only
engaging the chaos inherent to spasms can we create a new rhythm of life not
defined by capital.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 216-222

While info-technologies are provoking an acceleration of the rhythm of information and

experience, simultaneously the space for physical movement is shrinking and the resources for
economic expansion are becoming exhausted. I call this double process of acceleration and
exhaustion: the spasm. A spasm is a sudden, abnormal, involuntary muscular contraction, or a
series of alternating muscular contractions and relaxations. A spasm is also a sudden, brief spell
of energy and an abnormal, painful intensification of the bodily nervous vibration. In his book Spasm
(1993), Arthur Kroker speaks of cyberpunk aesthetics and of partitioned recombinant bodies, in order to describe the effects of info-
technology on the body-machine. According to Kroker, the introduction of electronic devices in the flesh of the
organic body (prostheses, pharmacology) and in the space between organic bodies (digital enhancement of the
bodily interaction, advertising, virtual sex) is the cause of an acceleration of the nervous vibration up to the
point of spasm. In Guattari’s parlance a refrain (retournelle) is the link between the subject of enunciation
and the cosmos, between a body and the surrounding environment, between the consciousness
of a social group and its physical and imaginary territory. Deterritorialization breaks the chains,
and jeopardizes the relation between subjectivity and its environment. As a reaction, the refrain
tends to harden, to become stiff in order to dam the process of deterritorialization. In the case of
neurotic identity the refrain is embodied in hardened representations, as an obsessional ritual or an aggressive reaction to change.
In the current anthropological mutation induced by digital info-technology and market globalization, the
social organism is
subjected to an accelerated deterritorialization that takes the form of a spasm . In his last book,
Chaosmosis (1992), Guattari writes that ‘Among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millenaire, the question of
subjectivity is now returning as a leit motiv . . .’ He first adds: ‘All
the disciplines will have to combine their
creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental implosion and chaosmic spasms
looming on the horizon.’ Then he writes: ‘We have to conjure barbarianism, mental implosion,
chaosmic spasm’.2 This last expression marks the consciousness of the darkness, and of the
pathology that capitalism is bringing about . In that book Guattari foretold that the millennial transition
was going to be an age of fog and miasmas, of obscurity and suffering. Now we know that he
was perfectly right. Twenty years after Chaosmosis, we know that the fog is thicker than ever
and that the miasmas are not vanishing, but becoming more dangerous, more poisonous than
they have ever been. Chaosmosis was published just a few months before the death of its author in 1992, when the world
powers met in Rio de Janeiro to discuss and possibly to decide about the pollution and global warming that in those years was
becoming increasingly apparent as a threat to human life on the planet. The American President George Bush Senior declared that
the American way of life was not negotiable, meaning that the US did not intend to reduce carbon emissions, energy consumption
and economic growth for the sake of the environmental future of the planet. Then, as on many other occasions afterwards, the
United States government refused to negotiate and to accept any global agreement on this subject. Today, twenty years later, the
devastation of the environment, natural life and social life have reached a level that seems to be
irreversible. Irreversibility is a diffi cult concept to convey, being totally incompatible with
modern politics. When we use this word we are declaring ipso facto the death of politics itself.
The process of subjectivation develops within this framework, which reshapes the composition
of unconscious flows in the social culture. ‘Subjectivity is not a natural given any more than air
or water. How do we produce it, capture it, enrich it and permanently reinvent it in order to
make it compatible with universes of mutating values? ’3 The problem is not to protect
subjectivity. The problem is to create and to spread flows of re-syntonization of subjectivity in a
context of mutation. How can the subjectivity flows that we produce be independent from the corrupting effects of the
context, while still interacting with the context? How to create autonomous subjectivity (autonomous from the surrounding
corruption, violence, anxiety)? Is this at all possible in the age of the spasm? A
spasm is a painful vibration which
forces the organism to an extreme mobilization of nervous energies. This acceleration and this
painful vibration are the effects of the compulsive acceleration of the rhythm of social
interaction and of the exploitation of the social nervous energies. As the process of valorization
of semiocapital demands more and more nervous productivity, the nervous system of the
organism is subjected to increasing exploitation. Here comes the spasm: it is the effect of a violent
penetration of the capitalist exploitation into the fi eld of info-technologies, involving the sphere
of cognition, of sensibility, and the unconscious. Sensibility is invested by the info-acceleration,
and the vibration induced by the acceleration of nervous exploitation is the spasmic effect . What
should we do when we are in a situation of spasm? Guattari is not using the word ‘spasm’ in isolation. He says
precisely: ‘chaosmic spasm’. If the spasm is the panic response of the accelerated vibration of the
organism, and the hyper-mobilization of desire submitted to the force of the economy,
chaosmosis is the creation of a new (more complex) order (syntony, and sympathy) emerging from the
present chaos. Chaosmosis is the osmotic passage from a state of chaos to a new order, where the word ‘order’ does not have
a normative or ontological meaning. Order is to be intended as harmony between mind and the
semioenvironment, as the sharing of a sympathetic mindset. Sympathy, common perception.
Chaos is an excess of speed of the infosphere in relation to the ability of elaboration of the
brain. In their last book, What Is Philosophy?, which is about philosophy but also about growing old, Deleuze and Guattari speak of
the relation between chaos and the brain. ‘From Chaos to the Brain’ is the title of the last chapter of the book: We require just a
little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fl y off, that
disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infi nite
variabilities the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They
are infinite speeds that blend into the
immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought. This
is the instant of which we do not know whether it is too long or too short for time. We receive
sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas. 4 As consciousness is too slow
for processing the information that comes from the world in acceleration (info-technology
multiplied by semiocapitalist exploitation), we are unable to translate the world into a cosmos,
mental order, syntony and sympathy. A transformation is needed: a jump to a new refrain, to a new
rhythm; chaosmosis is the shift from a rhythm of conscious elaboration (refrain) to a new
rhythm, which is able to process what the previous rhythm could not process. A shift in the speed of consciousness, the creation
of a different order of mental processing: this is chaosmosis. In order to shift from a rhythm to a different rhythm, from a refrain to
another refrain, Guattari says we
need a ‘chaoide’, a living decoder of chaos. Chaoide, in Guattari’s parlance, is
a sort of de- multiplier, an agent of re-syntonization, a linguistic agent able to disengage from
the spasmic refrain. The chaoide is full of chaos, receives and decodes the bad vibrations of the
planetary spasm, but does not absorb the negative psychological effects of chaos, of the
surrounding aggressiveness, of fear. The chaoide is an ironic elaborator of chaos. ‘The ecosophical cartography’, writes
Guattari, ‘will not have the finality of communicating, but of producing enunciation concatenations able to capture the points of
singularity of a situation’.5 Where are today’s concatenations that offer conscious organisms the possibility of emerging from the
present spasmogenic framework, the framework of financial capitalism? The rhythm that financial capitalism is
imposing on social life is a spasmogenic rhythm, a spasm that is not only exploiting the work of
men and women, not only subjugating cognitive labour to the abstract acceleration of the info-
machine, but is also destroying the singularity of language, preventing its creativity and
sensibility. The financial dictatorship is essentially the domination of abstraction on language, command of the mathematical
ferocity on living and conscious organisms. This is why we need to produce and to circulate chaoides, that is,
tools for the conceptual elaboration both of the surrounding and of the internalized chaos. A
chaoide is a form of enunciation (artistic, poetic, political, scientific) which is able to open the linguistic
flows to different rhythms and to different frames of interpretation. Chaosmosis means
reactivation of the body of social solidarity, reactivation of imagination, a new dimension for
human evolution, beyond the limited horizon of economic growth.

Focus on rational economic science has created a bloodthirsty form of

capitalism which attempts to erase affect and makes violence inevitable.
Neoliberalism constantly produces crisis to demonstrate its capacity for control.
While this system focuses on total peace, its hatred of uncertainty makes the
destruction of all life immanent.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 107-110

How does digital capitalism intertwine with the concept of uncertainty? What key changes have taken place in the structuring of
the world, via the digital and the biotechnological, what forces have emerged or coalesced, and finally, how do they affect the
realm of subjectivity and consumption? Here, Arthur Kroker has transposed McLuhan into the twenty-first century, performing an
interrogation of what he calls the
"digital nerve," basically the exteriorization of the human
sensorium into the digital circuitry of contemporary capitalism (Kroker, 2004:8I).This
(in)formation, "streamed capitalism," rests not exclusively on exchange value, nor material
goods, but something much more immaterial, — a postmarket, postbiological, postimage
society where the driving force, the "will to will," has ushered in a world measured by
probability. In other words, this variant of capitalism seeks to bind chaos by ever-
increasing strictures, utilizing an axiomatic based on capture and control, with vast
circuits of circulation as the primary digital architecture. This system runs on a densely
articulated composition, similar to the earlier addressed concept of sado-monetarism,
based upon extensive feedback loops running between exchange value and abuse value.
This assemblage, however, has multiple levels, and not all are connected to the grid at the same speeds; a number of different times
exist within this formation, including digital time, urban time, quotidian time, transversal time, etc. Spatially, the
structure relies not on geography but "strategic digital nodes" for the core of the
system, and connectivity radiates out from these nodal points (Kroker, 2004: 125). For example, a
key site for these points would be the Net corporation, defined as "as a self-regulating,
self-reflexive platform of software intelligence providing a privileged portal into the digital
universe" (Kroker, 2004: 140). Indeed, his mapping of digital capitalism has clear parallels with the shifts Katherine Hayles
analyzes, in particular the underlying, driving mechanism whereby information severs itself from embodiment. Boredom and
acquisitiveness become the principle markers of this new form of capitalism, which
provides a rationale, or a new value set for the perpetual oscillation between the two
poles, producing an insatiable desire for both objects and a continuing stream of fresh
and intense experience. Perhaps the most densely argued assessment of capitalism, whose obvious parallel would
be Marx's Capital, is the two volumes by Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, With all the concern over the
it remains extremely important to understand the
theoretical concepts developed in these books,
analysis as possessing a fundamental focus on the question of political economy.
Capitalism forms, via its structural and affective matrix, a system capable of unparalleled cruelty and
terror, and even though certain indices of well-being have increased, "exploitation grows
constantly harsher, (and) lack is arranged in the most scientific ways" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 373).
Their framework for analysis targets the global, where the deepest law of capitalism sets
limits and then repels those limits, a process well known as the concept of
deterrorialization. Capitalism functions, then, by incessantly increasing the portion of
constant capital, a deceptively concise formulation that has tremendous resonance for
the organization of the planet—resources continually pour into the technological and
machinic apparatus of capture and control, to the increased exclusion of the human
component (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 466—7). In other words, it not only thrives on crisis but one of
the principle definitions of capitalism would be to continually induce crisis; nostalgia
for a "los time" only drives these processes. The planet confronts the fourth danger, the
most violent and destructive of tendencies, characterized as a turning to destruction,
abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 229). Deleuze and Guattari
make clear this fourth danger does not translate as a death drive, because for them desire is "always assembled," a creation and a
composition; here the task
of thinking becomes to address the processes of composition. The
current assemblage, then, has mutated from its original organization of total war, which
has been surpassed "toward a form of peace more terrifying still," the "peace of
Terror or Survival" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 433). Accordingly, the worldwide war machine has
entered a postfascist phase, where Clauscwitz has been dislocated, and this war machine now targets
the entire world, its peoples and economies. - An "unspecified enemy" becomes the
continual feedback loop for this war machine, which had been originally constituted by
states, but which has now shifted into a planetary, and perhaps interstellar mode, with a
seemingly insatiable drive to organize insecurity, increase machinic enslavement, and
produce a "peace that technologically frees the unlimited material process of total war"
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467).7 Deleuze has analyzed these tendencies extensively in his own work, in particular with his
dissection of active and reactive forces in his book on Nietzsche but also in his work on Sade and Masoch, where he points to a type
of sadism that seems capable of attempting a "perpetually effective crime" to not only
destroy (pro)creation but to prevent it from ever happening again, a total and
perpetual destruction, one produced by a pervasive odium fati, a hatred of fate that seeks absolute
revenge in destroying life and any possible recurrence. (Deleuze, 1989: 37). This tendency far outstrips
what Robert Jay Lifton has described as the " Armageddonists ," in their more commonly analyzed religious variant and in
what he calls the secular type, both of which see the possibility of a "world cleansing," preparing the
way for a new world order, be it religious or otherwise (Lifton, 1987: 5—9). Embedded
within the immanence of capitalism, then, one can find forces which would make
fascism seem like "child precursors," and Hitler's infamous Telegram 71 would be applied to
all of existence, perpetually. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:467). One final complication in terms of
currently emerging subjectivities, the well-known analysis in Anti-Oedipus where capitalism , as basically
driven by a certain fundamental insanity, oscillates between "two poles of delirium, one
as the molecular schizophrenic line of escape, and the other as paranoiac molar
investment" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 3I5). These two markers offer dramatically different
8

possibilities for the issues of subjectivities and agency, and questions of consumption
and the political can be posed within their dense and complex oscillations.

The expectation of a ballot for cognitive labor in the round accelerates the
productive system of Semiocapitalism inherent in the speech act. Time is now
fractalized, broken into pieces to be consumed. Capitalism has moved past the
material and now infiltrates all knowledge becoming Semiocapitalism, a game
of mirrors that hides itself from the material view.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 136-142

Semiocapitalism is based on the exploitation of neural energy. Attention is under siege, both in
the space of production and in that of consumption . Attention implies a constant investment of nervous energy,
and this is much more difficult to manage and is much more unpredictable than the muscular effort required of workers on the
assembly line. During the years of the Prozac economy, cognitive workers were motivated to invest their
creativity in the process of production, in expectation of the success and profit that would be
their reward – they were persuaded that work and capital could be forged together in the same
process of mutual enrichment. Workers were encouraged to think of themselves as free agents,
and that phenomena such as the dotcom bubble were based on real expansions of revenue,
generating high career expectations. But the alliance of semiocapital and cognitive work was not
to last forever. Neuro-Exploitation and Collapse In the last year of the dotcom decade, when the technoapocalypse was
announced in the guise of the Millennium Bug, dark clouds were looming in the clear skies of the self-
appointed ‘new economy’. The social imagination was so charged with apocalyptic expectation
that the myth of the global techno-crash sent a thrilling wave of anticipation around the world .
Although the announced apocalypse went by the name of the ‘Millennium Bug’, when the clocks turned twelve on the
night of the millennium itself, the absence of any cataclysmic event left the global psyche
teetering on the brink of an abyss of the collective imagination. A few months later, in spring of the year
2000, the dotcom crash ushered in the slowmotion collapse – a collapse that, in one way or another, has never been really
overcome – despite Bush’s infi nite war, despite the proclaimed recovery. The recombinant alliance of cognitive
work and fi nancial capital was over. The young army of free agents, selfexploiters and virtual
prosumers was transformed into modernity ’s horde of precarious cognitive workers : cognitarians,
cognitive proletarians and internet-slaves who invest nervous energy in exchange for a precarious revenue. Precarity is the
general condition of semio-workers. The essential feature of precarity in the social sphere is not
the loss of regularity in the labour relation, since labour has always been more or less
precarious, notwithstanding legal regulations. The essential transformation induced by the
digitalization of the labour process is the fragmentation of the personal continuity of work, the
fractalization and cellularization of time. The worker disappears as a person, and is replaced by abstract fragments of
time. The cyberspace of global production can be viewed as an immense expanse of
depersonalized human time. In the sphere of industrial production, abstract labour time was
embodied in a worker of fl esh and bone, with a certifi ed and political identity. When the boss was in
need of human time for capital valorization, he was obliged to hire a human being, and was obliged to deal
with the physical weaknesses, maladies and rights of this human being; was obliged to face
trade unions reclaims and the political demands of which the human was a bearer. As we move
into the age of info-labour, there is no longer a need to invest in the availability of a person for
eight hours a day throughout the duration of his or her life. Capital no longer recruits people,
but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers. In the
internet economy, fl exibility has evolved into a form of fractalization of work. Fractalization is
the modular and recombinant fragmentation of the period of activity. The worker no longer
exists as a person. He or she is only an interchangeable producer of micro-fragments of
recombinant semiosis that enter into the continuous fl ux of the internet. Capital no longer pays
for the availability of a worker to be exploited for a long period of time; it no longer pays a salary
that covers the entire range of economic needs of a person who works. The worker (a machine endowed
with a brain that can be used for fragments of time) is paid for his or her occasional, temporary services. Work time is
fragmented and cellularized. Cells of time are put up for sale online, and businesses can
purchase as many of them as they want without being obligated in any way to provide any social
protection to the worker. Depersonalized time has become the real agent of the process of
valorization, and depersonalized time has no rights, no union organization and no political
consciousness. It can only be either available or unavailable – although this latter alternative
remains purely theoretical inasmuch as the physical body still has to buy food and pay rent,
despite not being a legally recognized person. The time necessary to produce the info-
commodity is liquefi ed by the recombinant digital machine. The human machine is there,
pulsating and available, like a brainsprawl in waiting. The extension of time is meticulously
cellularized: cells of productive time can be mobilized in punctual, casual and fragmentary
forms. The recombination of these fragments is automatically realized in the network . The
mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the connection between the needs of semiocapital
and the mobilization of the living labour of cyberspace. The ringtone of the mobile phone
summons workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux. In this new labour dimension,
people have no right to protect or negotiate the time of which they are formally the proprietors, but are effectively expropriated.
That time does not really belong to them, because it is separated from the social existence of the people who make it available to
the recombinant cyber-productive circuit. The time of work is fractalized, reduced to minimal fragments
that can be reassembled, and the fractalization makes it possible for capital to constantly fi nd
the conditions of the minimal salary. Fractalized work can punctually rebel, here and there, at
certain points – but this does not set into motion any concerted endeavour of resistance. Only
the spatial proximity of the bodies of labourers and the continuity of the experience of working
together lead to the possibility of a continuous process of solidarity. Without this proximity and this
continuity, the conditions for the cellularized bodies to coalesce into community do not pertain. Individual behaviours can
only come together to form a substantive collective momentum when there is a continuous
proximity in time, a proximity that info-labour no longer makes possible . Cognitive activity has
always been involved in every kind of human production, even that of a more mechanical type.
There is no process of human labour that does not involve an exercise of intelligence. But today, cognitive capacity is becoming the
essential productive resource. In the age of industrial labour, the
mind was put to work as a repetitive
automatism, the neurological director of muscular effort. While industrial work was essentially
repetition of physical acts, mental work is continuously changing its object and its procedures .
Thus, the subsumption of the mind in the process of capitalist valorization leads to a true mutation. The conscious and sensitive
organism is subjected to a growing competitive pressure, to an acceleration of stimuli, to a constant exertion of his/her attention. As
a consequence, themental environment, the info-sphere in which the mind is formed and enters
into relations with other minds, becomes a psychopathogenic environment. To understand
semiocapital’s infi nite game of mirrors, we must fi rst outline a new disciplinary fi eld, delimited
by three aspects: the critique of political economy of connective intelligence; the semiology of
linguistic-economic fl uxes; and the psychochemistry of the info-sphere, focused on the study of
the psychopathological effects of the mental exploitation caused by the acceleration of the info-
sphere. In the connected world, the retroactive loops of general systems theory are fused with the
dynamic logic of biogenetics to form a post-human vision of digital production. Human minds
and fl esh are integrated with digital circuits thanks to interfaces of acceleration and simplifi
cation: a model of bio-info production is emerging that produces semiotic artefacts with the
capacity for the auto- replication of living systems. Once fully operative, the digital nervous
system can be rapidly installed in every form of organization. The digital network is provoking an
intensifi cation of the info-stimuli, and these are transmitted from the social brain to individual
brains. This acceleration is a pathogenic factor that has wide-ranging effects in society. Since
capitalism is wired into the social brain, a psychotic meme of acceleration acts as pathological
agent: the organism is drawn into a spasm until collapse.

The world is accelerating towards the catastrophe, the only question we can
ask when faced with the current political sphere is Should We Take Shelter?
Our alternative is one where instead of reaching for survival and failing we
engage the coming apocalypse through a banishing of hope for the future.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 212-215

Curtis’s nightmares are frightening. He dreams of a yellow brownish rain and of a tempest
destroying everything, particularly destroying his family, his wife and daughter, and the house
where they live, one of those depressing but comfortable houses scattered in the fl at landscape
of the American Midwest. Are nightmares life, or is life a nightmare? Curtis’s life is happy, he loves his wife Samantha and
he loves his daughter Hannah, who suffers from deafness. The company he is working for gives Curtis a good insurance plan that will
make it possible for his daughter to have surgery to resolve her hearing problems. Samantha is a stay-at-home mom who tries to
supplement the family income. Money is tight, but, thanks to his job, Curtis manages to pay for the
mortgage of the house. Yet during the night Curtis ’s sleep is troubled by the nightmarish
premonition of catastrophe. He decides to build a storm shelter in his backyard. To build the
shelter he needs money, his salary is not enough for the task, and he goes to the bank to ask for
a loan. ‘Beware my boy’, says the good bank director, ‘these are diffi cult times. You have a family – running
into debt is dangerous’. But Curtis insists that he needs money in order to build a shelter and to
protect his family from the imaginary tempest. Signifi cantly, Jeff Nichols conceived the plot of the movie described
here, Take Shelter, at the end of 2008, after
the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, during the time in which,
in the collective imagination, fi nance came to be increasingly linked to catastrophic events.
Samantha, Curtis’s wife, is worried. Her husband’s behaviour is strange. She is alarmed by the
loan, and she understands that Curtis has mental health problems . She knows that his mother
has been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Then things take a turn for the worse. In order to
excavate the backyard and make room for the shelter, Curtis takes a digger from the site where he works. Somehow the boss comes
to know about this, and Curtis is fi red. He
is now jobless, anguished, on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
The shelter is ready, and one night a tornado warning sends him and his family into the shelter.
They sleep in the shelter, but the tempest is not the fi nal catastrophe, and the following
morning the sky is bright, and the neighbours are cleaning up some debris. Samantha persuades Curtis
to see a therapist. The doctor suggests that they take a beach holiday before Curtis begins serious
therapy, to return more relaxed and ready to start a new life. They go to the beach for a few
days of vacation and relax. Curtis is on the beach with his daughter building a sandcastle, when
the little deaf-mute girl looks at the horizon and makes the sign of a storm. Curtis turns his head
and looks at the sky: impressive clouds are announcing the most frightening of all storms.
Samantha comes out of the house running, and the thick brownish rain of Curtis’s nightmares begins to fall. She looks at the
ocean, where the tide is pulling back, and a tsunami is growing in the distance. Take Shelter
recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, not only in the sequences involving birds attacking humans
but also in the inexplicable premonition of an indefi nable threat. The premonition is the same
as that of the present global unconscious, as the inner landscape of mankind is assaulted by fi
nancial predation and by the coming environmental catastrophe. Should we take shelter? Should
we go to the bank and ask for a loan, and invest our future in protecting our future? Should we take our premonitions seriously?
Should we accept that paranoia is a reasonable response to a danger that we cannot dispel, or
should we dispel this as a paranoid delusion? Nichols answers our questions: by investing our energy in
building a shelter, we fall into the trap, to accept the dilemma of depression and catastrophe.
When the tempest comes, we won’t be home anyway, we’ll be too far away from the shelter.
The European hope is turning into a nightmare, as Northern Protestants remain reluctant to pay the bill for the perceived laxity of
Southern Catholics and the Orthodox. Goldman
Sachs has sown the wind, and now the harvest of tempest
is ripe. The hope of the Arab Spring is turning into a nightmare too: Syrian civil war is spreading
beyond the Syrian borders. The Islamic State is declared. The implausible idea of the Caliphate is
becoming real and taking hold of a territory. And the Egyptian revolution has been trashed by
the democratically elected Islamist government, subsequently overthrown by Sisi, Mubarak ’s
avatar. Israel is threatening Iran and Iran is threatening Israel, while Hezbollah announces the
creation of a special force destined to occupy Northern Israel. Money is our shelter, the only
way we have to access life. But at the same time, if you want money you have to renounce life.
Don’t build a shelter, it is surely going to be useless. Furthermore, building shelters is the job of
those who are preparing the storm. Remain calm. Don ’t be attached to life, and most of all:
don’t have hope, that addictive poisonous weed.
Chaos dictates the struggle, infinite dichotomies as the relationship
between the brain and reality. Complexity swirls around the world,
creating an environment in continual flux. The determinism based on
understanding and ordering has failed to relate to intricate
relationships. The singularity is the inexplicable event that creates the
acceptance of the mysteriousness of the future instead of attempting to
fix it. The space of possibility is infinite; that is the only future with
consciousness and a space for creativity.
Bifo 11. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, “After the Future”, AK Press, pg. 159-163

Guattari is wondering here about

the possibility of a process of liberation, defining liberation
as "resingularization." He also speaks of fogs and miasmas. After the illusion of peace that
followed the crash of the Soviet empire, a chaotic war exploded in the Persian Gulf.
The Cold War geopolitical order was over and the new conflict was a symptom of a
general chaos in world relations. In 1992, in order to make some decisions about the global environment, a
summit of the leading nations of the world was called in Rio de Janeiro. On that occasion George Bush senior informed
the world that the American lifestyle was non-negotiable, and the Americans refused to talk about the environmental
catastrophe. The Rio de Janeiro summit was a failure, and it opened the way to the present environmental chaos. When Felix
Guattari died, some months after the Rio de Janeiro summit, he was conscious of the extreme dangers of the world situation. In
the last years of his life, he experienced the double black hole of internal and external chaos. In the black hole that psychiatrists
call depression, we can never distinguish among the personal, the social, and the planetary. Peoples, races, mobs are always
there in the mental landscape of schizo-consciousness (and unconsciousness). This is my starting point about chaos: the
world-chaos that Guattari talks about in his last book is not only depression, fog, and miasma. Chaos
is much more
than this. It's also the infinity of colors, dazzling lights, hyperspeed intuitions, and
breathtaking emotions. Chaos is a twofold word: in the last book they wrote together (What Is Philosophy?),
Guattari and Deleuze say that Chaos is both friend and foe. It's both enemy and ally: "It is as if
the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy"
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994,203). Chaos is an enemy, but it can also become a friend, because
chaos is the door of creation. We are walking in darkness, but we are able to create
concepts that illuminate the surroundings. Friendship is one of the keywords of this last book by Deleuze
and Guattari. Friendship means sharing a refrain, a semiotic set that allows us to see the
same vision and helps to create a world out of chaos. Chaos is not in the world;
reality knows neither chaos nor order. Chaos is in the relationship between the
speed of our brain and the changing speed of reality. Chaos is a complexity that is too dense,
toothick, too intense, too speedy, too fast, too much for our brains to decipher. We
speak of chaos when our speed of psychic elaboration is overwhelmed by the speed
and the complexity of the world. Chaos chaotizes, disentangles any consistency into
infinite pieces. But the task of philosophy is the creation of planes of consistency
without losing the infinity out of which thought arises. The chaos we are dealing
with has both a mental and a physical existence — not the physical existence of the
world, but the physical existence of the organism (as a conscious and sensitive entity).
The physical existence of the body is the space where chaos arises and takes place. In
this space of unhappiness and mental disorder, of panic, depression, and loneliness,
the projected order of the world collapses. Chaos is too complex an environment to
be decoded by the available explanatory grids, it is an environment in which
semiotic and emotional flows are circulating too fast for our minds to elaborate. The
elaboration of chaos is made possible by the emergence of a semiogenetic machine that Guattari calls a refrain. This is
chaosmosis, the emergence of a form: creative morphogenesis. The morphogenetic process has
long been described in deterministic terms by modern epistemology: Newton and Galileo founded physics on the idea that a
unifying language — the language of Mathematics — frames the whole of creation. The final goal of theoretical and scientific work
was the understanding of laws that describe the determinist generation of any natural process. Biology and biogenetics have
developed in the same deterministic frame: they describe biological morphogenesis in terms of a deterministic relation
between the code and the organism. Following the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, the body has been conceived of as
development and realization of the code, an implied order that accounts for the unfolding of life. This vision of nature went
along with the social episteme of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was based on a deterministic relationship
between economic factors and social effects. The epis-temological framework based on determinism
has been fertile in the modern age, in the sense that the mechanical paradigm has
been useful to understand a world that was based on industrial production and
mechanical technologies. But the acceleration that electronic technologies have
imposed on production and knowledge has opened a new dimension that cannot be
described in deterministic terms. Determinism fails to understand the fuzzy,
hypercomplex organization of the network of cognitive labor: the relation between
labor time and value is dissolved, and the very idea of determination fades. The
uncertainty principle, first asserted by Heisenberg in the field of microphysics, frames the new
social consciousness. Just as in microphysics you cannot determine the moment and the
speed of a particle, because the presence of the observer alters the picture, so too in sociology you cannot determine
the relation between the present and the future, because the subjective factor is too complex to be
understood and described . At the present moment, the predictive power of knowledge is at
stake. The global mind's complexity is beyond the understanding of the situated mind
of any individual, group, party, or state. Marxism has long been understood as a
form of predictive science. Being able to analyze the relationship between
different so cial actors (bourgeoisie and working class), being able to predict the dynamics
of economic crises (overproduction, fall of the profit rate, breakdown of the capitalist economy), the scholastic
vision of Marxism claimed to also predict the outcome of the story: the final victory of communism, the abolition of classes,
and the realization of reason. In the official version of dialectical materialism (Diamat), inherited from Hegel and reformulated
by Engels, the relationship between the present condition and the future was
explained in terms of a deterministic reduction. The future was imagined as the
unfurling of a tendency inscribed in the present. Repetition prevailed, and dif ference
was ignored. The faith in a progressive future was based on this deterministic
reduction, and it evaporated as soon as that conceptual framework was abandoned.
The event is not predictable because it is not the development of what we presently know. The event is a
creative gesture creating a new refrain. So, I answer the question: why resist, why persist in
seeking autonomy from power? Where is the hope? The hope is in the limits of my
knowledge and understanding. My knowledge and understanding don't see how any development of the social
catastrophe could cultivate social well-being. But the catastrophe (in the etymology of kata and strophein) is
exactly the point where a new landscape is going to be revealed. I don't see that
landscape because my knowledge and my under standing are limited, and the limits of my
language are the limits of my world. My knowledge and understanding miss the event, the
singularity. So I must act "as if." As if the forces of labor and knowledge might
overcome the forces of greed and of proprietary obsession. As if the cognitive
workers might overcome the fractalization of their life and intelligence, and give
birth to the self-organization of collective knowledge. I must resist simply because
I cannot know what will happen after the future, and I must preserve the
consciousness and sensibility of social solidarity, of human empathy, of gratuitous
activity—of freedom, equality, and fraternity. Just in case, right? Just because we don't
know what is going to happen next, in the empty space that comes af ter the future
of modernity. I must resist because this is the only way to be in peace with myself. In
the name of self-love, we must resist. And self-love is the basic ethical rule that an
anarchist prizes. The present ignorance has to be seen as the space of a possibility.
We have to start from the ignorance of the general intellect. The force of collective
intelligence is boundless. Theoretically. But it currently lacks any consciousness of
itself. Intelligence without self-consciousness. I am talking about the self-consciousness of the general
intellect, millions and millions of people worldwide producing the infoflow that makes the planet go around. Creating
a form of self-conscious ness of the general intellect is the political task of the
future. And it is not only political, but philosophical, epistemological , and, in the
end, therapeutic. Poetry and therapy (thera-poetry) will be the forces leading to the
creation of a cognitarian self-consciousness: not a political party, not the
organization of interests, but the reactivation of the cognitarian sensibility. The
ignorance of the general intellect is the starting point, after the future. Why are
the cognitariat weak and disunited and unable to as sert their rights as laborers,
their knowledge as researchers? Because they live in a bifurcated form, because
their brain is detached from their body, because their communication
communicates less and less, while more and more freezing sensitivity to life. The
new space of activism is here, in the connection of poetry, therapy, and the creation
of new paradigms.
 2NC A2: Survival
Survival is the dismissal of death, the nexus of modernity lies in the view of
death as deviant. That original deviance of death formulated the ongoing
exclusive tactics which make life a banal process no different from death.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, dead French philosopher, former professor emeritus at the
University de Paris X, “Theory, Culture & Society” in Jean Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange and
Death, Sage Publications Ltd., pg. 126-27

Foucault's analysis, amongst the masterpieces of this genuine cultural history, takes the form of
a genealogy of discrimination in which, at the start of the nineteenth century, labour and
production occupy a decisive place. 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. There is an irreversible evolution from savage societies to our own: little
by little, the dead cease to exist. They are thrown out of the group's symbolic circulation. They
are no longer beings with a full role to play, worthy partners in exchange, and we make this
obvious by exiling them further and further away from the group of the living. In the domestic
intimacy of the cemetery, the first grouping remains in the heart of the village or town,
becoming the first ghetto, prefiguring every future ghetto, but are thrown further and further
from the centre towards the periphery, finally having nowhere to go at all, as in the new town or
the contemporary metropolis, where there are no longer any provisions for the dead, either in
mental or in physical space. Even madmen, delinquents and misfits can find a welcome in the
new towns, that is, in the rationality of a modern society. Only the death-function cannot be
programmed and localised. Strictly speaking, we no longer know what to do with them, since,
today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly;
nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. The dead
are no longer inflicted on any place or space-time, they can find no resting place; they are
thrown into a radical utopia. They are no longer even packed in and shut up, but obliterated. But
we know what these hidden places signify: the factory no longer exists because labour is
everywhere; the prison no longer exists because arrests and confinements pervade social space-
time; the asylum no longer exists because psychological control and therapy have been
generalised and become banal; the school no longer exists because every strand of social
progress is shot through with discipline and pedagogical training; capital no longer exists (nor
does its Marxist critique) because the law of value has collapsed into self-managed survival in all
its forms, etc., etc. 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. 3 Survival, or
the Equivalent to Death It is correct to say that the dead, hounded and separated from the
living, condemn us to an equivalent death: for the fundamental law of symbolic obligation is at
play in any case, for better or worse. Madness, then, is only ever the dividing line between the
mad and the normal, a line which normality shares with madness and which is even defined by
it. Every society that internalises its mad is a society invested in its depths by madness, which
alone and everywhere ends up being symbolically exchanged under the legal signs of normality.
Madness has for several centuries worked hard on the society which confines it, and today the
asylum walls have been removed, not because of some miraculous tolerance, but because
madness has completed its normalising labour on society: madness has become pervasive, while
at the same time it is forbidden a resting place. The asylum has been reabsorbed into the core of
the social field, because normality has reached the point of perfection and assumed the
characteristics of the asylum, because the virus of confinement has worked its way into every
fibre of 'normal' existence. So it is with death. Death is ultimately nothing more than the social
line of demarcation separating the 'dead' from the 'living': therefore, it affects both equally.
Against the senseless illusion of the living of willing the living to the exclusion of the dead,
against the illusion that reduces life to an absolute surplus-value by subtracting death from it,
the indestructible logic of symbolic exchange re-establishes the equivalence of life and death in
the indifferent fatality of survival. In survival, death is repressed; life itself, in accordance with
that well known ebbing away, would be nothing more than a survival determined by death.
 2NC A2: Biology
Their biological rationality distinguishes the living and non-living in order to legitimate itself as a
code and create a good artifact for scientific development. Thus biology, the study of life,
becomes equivalent to the death drive, since we are constantly murdering to create objects of
scientific study. In their scientific rationalism, they have inevitably swept us into the axiomatics
of a system of death.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 152-153

Eros in the service of death, all cultural sublimation as a long detour to death, the death drive
nourishing repressive violence and presiding over culture like a ferocious super-ego, the forces
of life inscribed in the compulsion to repeat; all this is true, but true of our culture. Death
undertakes to abolish death and, for this very purpose, erects death above death and is haunted
by it as its own end. The term 'pulsion' or 'drive' is stated metaphorically, designating the
contemporary phase of the political-economic system (does it then remain political economy?)
where the law of value, in its most terroristic structural form, reaches completion in the pure
and simple compulsive reproduction of the code, where the law of value appears to be a
finality as irreversible as a pulsion, so that it takes on the figure of a destiny for our culture.
Stage of the immanent repetition of one and the same law, insisting on its own end, caught,
totally invested by death as objective finality, and total subversion by the death drive as a
deconstructive process the metaphor of the death drive says all of this simultaneously, for the
death drive is at the same time the system and the system's double, its doubling into a radical
counter-finality (see the Double, and its 'worrying strangeness', das Unheimliche).

This is what the myth recounts. But let's see what happens when it sets itself up as the objective
discourse of the 'pulsion'. With the term 'pulsion', which has both a biological and a psychical
definition, psychoanalysis settles down into categories that come straight from the imaginary of
a certain Western reason: far from radically contradicting this latter, it must then interpret itself
as a moment of Western thought. As for the biological, it is clear that scientific rationality
produces the distinction of the living and the non-living on which biology is based. Science,
producing itself as a code, on the one hand literally produces the dead, the non-living, as a
conceptual object, and, on the other, produces the separation of the dead as an axiom from
which science can be legitimated. The only good (scientific) object, just like the only good
Indian, is a dead one. Now it is this inorganic state to which the death drive is oriented, to the
non-living status that only comes about through the arbitrary decrees of science and, when all's
said and done, through its own phantasm of repression and death. Ultimately, being nothing but
the cyclical repetition of the non-living, the death drive contributes to biology's arbitrariness,
doubling it through a psychoanalytic route. But not every culture produces a separate concept
of the non-living; only our culture produces it, under the sign of biology. Thus, suspending the
discrimination would be enough to invalidate the concept of the death drive, which is ultimately
only a theoretical agreement between the living and the dead, with the sole result that science
loses its footing amongst all the attempts at articulation. The non-living is always permanently
sweeping science along into the axiomatics of a system of death (see J. Monod, Chance and
Necessity [tr. Austyn Wainhouse, London: Collins, 1970] ).
 2NC A2: Euro-Centrism
The affirmative has engaged in a creation of the other in the image of the ideal
model, which engenders ressentiment as the perpetual pursuit of perfect. This
production of difference and destruction of Otherness is the factor underlying
contemporary racism.
Baudrillard 94 “Figures de l'alterite” (Jean, spoke French) //pday
Starting with modernity, we have entered an era of production of the Other. It is no longer a
question of killing, of devouring or seducing the Other, of facing him, of competing with him,
of loving or hating the Other. It is first of all a matter of producing the Other. The Other is no
longer an object of passion but an object of production. Maybe it is because the Other, in his
radical otherness [alterite], or in his irreducible singularity, has become dangerous or
unbearable. And so, we have to conjure up his seduction. Or perhaps, more simply, otherness
and dual relationships gradually disappear with the rise of individual values and with the
destruction of the symbolic ones. In any case, otherness [alterite] is lacking and, since we
cannot experience otherness as destiny, one must produce the other as difference. And this is
a concern just as much for the body as it is for sex, or for social relationships. In order to escape
the world as destiny, the body as destiny, sex (and the other sex) as destiny, the production of
the other as difference is invented. This is what happens with sexual difference. Each sex has
its own anatomical and psychological characteristics, its own desire with all the insoluble
events that emerge from that, including an ideology of sex and desire, and a utopia of sexual
difference based on law and nature. None of this has any meaning [sens] whatsoever in
seduction where it is not a question of desire but of a play [jeu] with desire, and where it is
not a question of equality between different sexes or of an alienation of one by the other
since this play [jeu] implies a perfect reciprocity of each partner (not difference or alienation,
but alterity/otherness [alterite] or complicity). Seduction is nothing less than hysterical, since
no sex projects its sexuality onto the other. Distances are set. And otherness [alterite] is left
untouched. This is the very condition of this greater illusion, of this play with desire. What is
produced with the romantic turn, at the turn of the 19th century, is on the contrary the putting
into play of a masculine hysteria and, with it, of a change in sexual paradigms that once again
must be reinserted in the more general and universal context of a change in the paradigms of
otherness. During this hysterical phase, it is to a certain extent the femininity of men that is
projected onto women and that shape them as ideal figures of likeness [ressemblance].
Romantic love is no longer about winning over a woman's heart, or about seducing her. It is
rather a matter of creating her from inside [de l'interieur], of inventing her, either as a realized
utopia (an idealized woman), or as a "femme fatale", a star, which is yet another hysterical and
supernatural metaphor. This is the entire work of the romantic Eros: he is the one who has
invented such an ideal harmony, such a love fusion, almost an incestuous form, between twin
beings (woman as a projected resurrection of the same, and woman who takes her supernatural
shape only as an ideal of the same), an artifact from now on destined to love, that is to say
destined to a pathos of ideal likeness [ressemblance] of beings and sexes, a pathetic confusion
that replaces the dual otherness [alterite] of seduction. The entire erotic machinery changes
meaning/direction [sens] because the erotic attraction that once came from otherness
[alterite], from the strangeness of the Other, now shifts to the side of the Same, to the side of
similarity and likeness [ressemblance]. Auto-eroticism? Incest? No, but rather a hypostasis of
the Same. Of the same that eyes the other, that invests and alienates himself in the other. But
the other is never more than the ephemeral form of a difference that draws me closer to the I
[me rapproche de moi]. It is also the reason why, with romantic love and all its current by-
products, sexuality draws nearer to death: it is because sexuality is getting closer to incest and
to its own destiny, even if it is banalized (for it is no longer a question of a mythical or tragic
incest; with modern erotism we are only dealing with a diverted form of incest, that of the
projection of the same into the image of the other, which is the same thing as a confusion and
a corruption of all the images). Finally, it is the invention of a femininity which renders women
superfluous, the invention of a difference which is nothing more than a diverted copulation
with one's double. In the final analysis [au fond], any encounter with otherness [alterite] is
made impossible (by the way, it would be interesting to know whether there has ever been a
hysterical counterpart to this phenomenon from the feminine side in the construction of virile
and phallic mythologies. Feminism is in fact an example of hystericization of the masculine by
women, a hysterical projection of their masculinity which follows exactly the hysterical
projection by men of their femininity in the mythical image of a woman). But there still
remains a dissymmetry in this forced allocation to difference. And this is why I was saying, in a
paradoxical way, that men are more different from women than actually women are from
men. This means that, in the context of sexual difference, men are above all different whereas
there is some remnant of radical otherness within women, a radical otherness of women
which precedes the degraded status of [masculine] difference. In short, in this extrapolation
process of the Same in the production of the Other, in this hysterical invention of the sexual
other as a twin brother or sister (if the issue of twinning is so up-to-date, it is because it reflects
this very mode of libidinal cloning), there is a progressive assimilation of the sexes which goes
from difference to a lesser difference, and from there to a visual inversion and non-
differentiation of the sexes which, in the last analysis, turns the sexual function into something
totally useless. In the cloning process, useless sexual beings will be reproduced. They are useless
since sexuality is no longer necessary to their reproduction. The real woman seems to
disappear in that hysterical invention of femininity (but she has many more ways to resist
that), in that invention of sexual difference whereby the masculine side is from the beginning
the privileged pole and through which all the ideological and feminist struggles will be
doomed to reconstruct either that very privilege or that unreconciled difference. But, at the
same, the so-called masculine desire also becomes, through the same invention, completely
problematic since it is no longer able to project in an other its own image, and thus to become
purely speculative. All this nonsense about the phallus and the sexual privilege of masculinity
must also be re-examined. There is a sort of transcending justice in this process of sexual non-
differentiation, a justice which drives both sexes to inexorably culminate in total non-
differentiation where they lose their singularity and their otherness [alterite]. This is the era of
Transsexualism where all the struggles linked to sexual Difference are perpetuated well after any
real sexuality or any type of real otherness has disappeared. This (successful?) merger of a
masculinely projected hysteria onto femininity is renewed by every individual (man or
woman) on their own bodies. An identification and an appropriation of the body as if it was a
projection of the self, of a self no longer seen as otherness or destiny. In the facial traits, in
sex, in illnesses, in death, identity is constantly "altered." There is nothing you can do about it:
that's destiny. But it is precisely that which must be exorcized at any cost through an
identification with the body, through an individual appropriation of the body, of your desire,
of your look, of your image: plastic surgery all over the place. If the body is no longer a place
of otherness [alterite], a dual relationship, but is rather a locus of identification, we then must
reconcile to it, we must repair it, perfect it, make it an ideal object. Everyone uses their body
like man uses woman in the projective mode of identification described before. The body is
invested as a fetish, and is used as a fetish in a desperate attempt at identifying oneself. The
body becomes the object of an autistic cult and of a quasi-incestuous manipulation. And it is
the likeness [ressemblance] of the body with its model which then becomes a source of
eroticism and of "white" [fake, virgin, neutral,...] self-seduction to the extent that this likeness
virtually excludes the Other and is the best way to exclude a seduction which would emerge
from somewhere else. Many more things partake of that production of the Other, of that
hysterical and speculative production: like racism, for instance, with its development
throughout modernity and with its current outbursts. Logically, racism should have diminished
thanks to Enlightenment's progress. But, the more we know that a genetic theory of race is
unfounded, the more racism is reinforced. It is because racism is an artificial construction of
the Other based on an erosion of cultural singularities (of their otherness between one
another) and on an acceptance of a fetishistic system of difference. As long as there is
otherness [alterite], strangeness, and dual relationships (event violent ones), there is properly
speaking no such thing as racism. This was more or less the case until the 18th century, as
anthropological reports indicate. Once such a "natural" relationship is lost, one enters an
exponential relationship with an artificial Other. And nothing in our culture allows racism to
be curbed since our entire cultural movement goes in the same direction [sens] which is that
of a frenzied differential construction of the Other and of a perpetual extrapolation of the
Same through the Other. An autistic culture which takes the shape of a fake altruism.
Everyone talks about alienation. But the worst alienation is not to be dispossessed by the other
but to be dispossessed of the other, that is to say to have to produce the other in his absence,
and thus to be continuously referred back to oneself and to one's image. If we are today
condemned to our own image (condemned to cultivate our body, our look, our identity, and
our desire), this is not because of an alienation, but because of the end of alienation and
because of the virtual disappearance of the other , which is a much worse fatality. In fact, the
paradoxical limit of alienation is to take oneself as a focal point [comme point de mire], as an
object of care, of desire, of suffering, and of communication. This final short-circuiting of the
other opens up an era of transparency. Plastic surgery [la chirurgie esthetique] becomes
universal. That surgery of the faces and bodies is only the symptom of a more radical one: that
of otherness and destiny. What is the solution? Well, there is none to this erotic movement of
an entire culture, none to such a fascination, to such an abyss of denial of the other, of denial of
strangeness and negativity. There is none to that foreclosing of evil and to that reconciliation
around the Same and his proliferated expressions: incest, autism, twinning, cloning. We can
only remember that seduction lies in not reconciling with the Other and in salvaging the
strangeness of the Other. We must not be reconciled with our own bodies or with our selves.
We must not be reconciled with the Other. We must not be reconciled with nature. We must
not be reconciled with femininity (and that goes for women too). The secret to a strange
attraction lies here.

Radical otherness cannot and should not be subsumed in your understanding

Baudrillard 90 “The Transparency of Evil” pg. 147-148 (Jean, cool dude)//pday
Radical otherness is simultaneously impossible to find and irreducible. Impossible to find as
otherness per se (obviously a dream); but at the same time--- irreducible as a symbolic rule of
the game, as a rule of the game that governs the world. The promiscuity and general confusion
in which differences exist do not affect this rule of the game as such: it is not a rational law, nor
is it a demonstrative process - we shall never have either metaphysical or scientific proof of this
principle of foreignness and incomprehensibility: we simply have to accept it. The worst thing
here is understanding, which is sentimental and useless. True knowledge is knowledge of exactly
what we can never understand in the other, knowledge of what it is in the other that makes the
other not oneself - and hence someone who can in no sense become separated from oneself,
nor alienated by any look of ours, nor instituted by us in either identity or difference. (Never
question others about their identity. In the case of America, the question of American identity
was never at issue: the issue was America's foreignness.) If we do not understand the savage, it
is for the same reason that he does not understand himself (the term 'savage' conveys this
foreignness better than all later euphemisms). The rule of exoticism thus implies that one should
not be fooled by understanding, by intimacy, by the country, by travel, by picturesqueness, or by
oneself. The realm of radical exoticism, moreover, is not necessarily a function of travel: 'It is not
essential, in order to feel the shock [of the exotic I, to revive the old-fashioned episode of the
voyage. [ ... I The fact remains that such an episode and its setting are better than any other
subterfuge for reaching this brutal, rapid and pitiless hand-to-hand conflict and making each
blow count.' Travel is a subterfuge, then - but it is the most appropriate one of all.

They are super wrong about power

Baudrillard 77 “Forget Foucault” (Jean, professor of philosophy and media criticism at the
European Graduate University)//pday

According to Foucault, this is the come-on that power offers, and it is not simply a discursive
trap. What Foucault does not see is that power is never there and that its institution, like the
institution of spatial perspective versus "real" space in the Renaissance, is only a simulation of
perspective-it is no more reality than economic accumulation-and what a tremendous trap that
is. Whether of time, value, the subject, etc., the axiom and the myth of a real or possible
accumulation govern us everywhere, although we know that nothing is ever amassed and that
stockpiles are selfconsuming, like modern megalopolis, or like overloaded memories. Any
attempt at accumulation is ruined in advance by the void.* Something in us disaccumulates unto
death, undoes, destroys, liquidates, and disconnects so that we can resist the pressure of the
real, and live. Something at the bottom of the whole system of production resists the infinite
expansion of production-otherwise, we would all be already buried . There is something in
power that resists as well, and we see no difference here between those who enforce it and
those who submit to it: this distinction has become meaningless, not because the roles are
interchangeable but because power is in its form reversible, because on one side and the other
something holds out against the unilateral exercise and the infinite expansion of power, just as
elsewhere against the infinite expansion of production. This resistance is not a "desire" it is what
causes power to come undone in exact proportion to its logical and irreversible extension. And
it's taking place everywhere today. In fact, the whole analysis of power needs to be
reconsidered. To have power or not, to take it or lose it, to incarnate it or to challenge it: if this
were power, it would not even exist. Foucault tells us something else; power is something that
functions; " ... power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we
are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a
particular society" ( The History of Sexuality, p. 93). Neither central, nor unilateral, nor
dominant, power is distributional; like a vector, it operates through relays and transmissions.
Because it is an immanent, unlimited field of forces, we still do not understand what power runs
into and against what it stumbles since it is expansion, pure magnetization. However, if power
were this magnetic infiltration ad infinitum of the social field, it would long ago have ceased
meeting with any resistance. Inversely, if it were the one-sidedness of an act of submission, as in
the traditional "optic," it would long ago have been overthrown everywhere. It would have
collapsed under the pressure of antagonistic forces. Yet this has never happened, apart from a
few "historical" exceptions. For "materialist" thinking, this can only appear to be an internally
insoluble problem: why don't "dominated" masses immediately overthrow power? Why
fascism? Against this unilateral theory (but we understand why it survives, particularly among
"revolutionaries" -they would really like power for themselves), against this native vision, but
also against Foucault's functional vision in terms of relays and transmissions, we must say that
power is something that is exchanged. Not in the economical sense, but in the sense that power
is executed according to a reversible cycle of seduction, challenge, and ruse (neither axis nor
indefinite relay, but a cycle). And if power cannot be exchanged in this sense, it simply
disappears. We must say that power seduces, but not in the vulgar sense of a complicit form of
desire on the part of those who are dominated-this comes down to basing it in the desire of
others, which is really going overboard in taking people for idiots-no, power seduces by that
reversibility which haunts it, and upon which a minimal symbolic cycle is set up. Dominators and
dominated exist no more than victims and executioners. (While exploiters and exploited do in
fact exist, they are on different sides because there is no reversibility in production, which is
precisely the point: nothing essential happens at that level.) With power there are no
antagonistic positions: it is carried out according to a cycle of seduction. The one-sidedness of a
force relation never exists, a one-sidedness upon which a power "structure" might be
established, or a form of "reality" for power and its perpetual movement, which is linear and
final in the traditional vision but radiating and spiraling in Foucault. Unilateral or segmentary:
this is the dream of power imposed on us by reason . But nothing yearns to be that way;
everything seeks its own death, including power . Or rather-but this is the same thing- everything
wants to be exchanged, reversed, or abolished in a cycle (this is in fact why neither repression
nor the unconscious exists: reversibility is always already there). That alone is what seduces
deep down, and that alone constitutes pure jouissance, while power only satisfies a particular
form of hegemonic logic belonging to reason. Seduction is elsewhere. Seduction is stronger than
power because it is a reversible and mortal process, while power wants to be irreversible like
value, as well as cumulative and immortal like value. Power shares all the illusions of the real
and of production; it wants to belong to the order of the real and so falls over into the imaginary
and into self superstition (helped by theories which analyze it even if only to challenge it) .
Seduction, however, does not partake of the real order. It never belongs to the order of force or
to force relations. It is precisely for this reason that seduction envelops the whole real process of
power, as well as the whole real order of production, with this never-ending reversibility and
disaccumulation-without which neither power nor production would even exist. Behind power,
or at the very heart of power and of production, there is a void which gives them today a last
glimmer of reality. Without that which reverses them, cancels them, and seduces them, they
would never have attained reality. Besides, the real has never interested anyone. It is the locus
of disenchantment par excellence, the locus of simulacrum of accumulation against death.
Nothing could be worse. It is the imaginary catastrophe standing behind them that sometimes
makes reality and the truth fascinating. Do you think that power, economy, sex-all the reals big
numbers-would have stood up one single instant without a fascination to support them which
originates precisely in the inversed mirror where they are reflected and continually reversed,
and where their imaginary catastrophe generates a tangible and immanent gratification? Today
especially, the real is no more than a stockpile of dead matter, dead bodies, and dead language.
It still makes us feel secure today to evaluate this stock of what is real (let's not talk about
energy: the ecological complaint hides the fact that it is not material energy which is
disappearing on the species' horizon but the energy of the real, the reality of the real and of
every serious possibility, capitalistic or revolutionary, of managing the real). If the horizon of
production has vanished, then the horizon of speech, sexuality, or desire can still carry on; there
will always be something to liberate, to enjoy, and to exchange with others through words: now
that's real, that's substantial, that's prospective stock. That's power. Not so, unfortunately. Not
for long, that is. This sort of thing consumes itself as it goes along. We have made, and have
wanted to make, an irreversible agency (instance) out of both sex and power; and out of desire
we have made a force or irreversible energy (a stock of energy, needless to say, since desire is
never far from capital) . For we give meaning, following our use of the imaginary, only to what is
irreversible; accumulation, progress, growth, production, value, power, and desire itself are all
irreversible processes-inject the slightest dose of reversibility into our economical, political,
institutional, or sexual machinery ( dispositif) and everything collapses at once. This is what
endows sexuality today with this mythic authority over bodies and hearts. But it is also what
makes it fragile, like the whole structure of production. Seduction is stronger than production. It
is stronger than sexuality and must never be confused with it. It is not an internal process of
sexuality, although it is generally reduced to that. It is a circular and reversible process of
challenge, one-upmanship, and death. The sexual, on the contrary, is the form of seduction that
has been reduced and restricted to the energetic terms of desire. What we need to analyze is
the intrication of the process of seduction with the process of production and power and the
irruption of a minimum of reversibility in every irreversible process, secretly ruining and
dismantling it while simultaneously insuring that minimal continuum of pleasure moving across
it and without which it would be nothing. And we must keep in mind that production
everywhere and always seeks to exterminate seduction in order to establish itself over the
single economy governing force relations; we must also keep in mind that sex or its production
seeks everywhere to exterminate seduction in order to establish itself over the single economy
governing relations of desire.

The postcolonial subject is naught but an involution of the liberal humanism

that it intended to oppose
Gupta 15 “Hyper reality and Identity in a Postcolonial World” (Indrani Das, professor of English
at Jamia Millia Islamia University)//pday

As Edward Said observed, reflections on identity inevitably invokes the “secret sharer” of
difference, and the “exploration of the remote” (Gupta & Ferguson 2). Postcolonial studies
beginning with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) critiqued colonialist discourses of having
functioned in binaries, the creation of a “vision of reality whose structure promoted the
difference” between “us” and “them” (qtd. in Loomba 43), but transformed its victimised
subjects into agents of resistance by the invocation of the very tenets of liberal humanism that it
sought to challenge. The appeal to justice, equality, and freedom which is the focal point of
postcolonial studies reveals according to Ivison, “the simultaneous invocation of the inadequacy
and yet the indispensability of liberal values” (qtd.in McCarthy ix). If, for Ashish Nandy,
colonialism was an effect of the rise of modern individualism and the “insane search for
absolute autonomy” (qtd. in McCarthy ix), so, the articulation of Postcolonial subject is more of
a repetition, a re-colonization of the colonialist legacy. Feminist and anticolonialists critics
discourse often hinges on the need to reclaim a space characterized by ‘essentialism’. But this
positing of an identity based on binary oppositions, merely juggles the term as Gunew and
Yeatman pointed out and which, does not contribute in “changing the power structures behind
such construction” (qtd. in Grace 78). Hyperreality in Postcolonial Domain In the postcolonial
contexts particularly, the distinctiveness of identity is predicated upon notion of space, “located
elsewhere”. However, people who inhabit the peripheries, what Anzaldua called the “narrow
strip along steep edges” (Gupta and Ferguson 7), forces us to rethink the identity/difference
dichotomization. The structuring polarization between identity as positive and difference as
negative needs to be questioned, and the need of the hour is to move along the lines of
differences structured in accordance with the “precession of the model” to rethink the
subjectivities configured in accordance with a logic of simulation (McCarthy xiii). With the places
and localities becoming blurred and indeterminate in the implosion of the simulation of
reference, Baudrillard’s fourth ‘fractal’ order, the erasure of all differences, has led to a renewed
interest in the culturally and ethnic distinctions. Simulacra and hyperreality allows for a re-
examination of the Postcolonial subject under question as well as problematize the production
and dissemination of knowledge in relation to identity and cultural difference. In the hyperreal
mode, the representation or image, no longer denotes the referent, as the sign has itself
become the real. “The territory no longer precedes the map, but rather the map precedes the
territory. The image bears no relation to reality, it is its own simulation” (Baudrillard 11).
Hyperreality facilitates an interrogation of the ‘real’ in both colonialist and anti-colonialist
discourses making us aware of Kristeva’s “writing as experience-limits” (Hutcheon 8). If identity
established in these discourses is “no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even
parody”, but “a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real ” (Baudrillard 2), one
could read that “colonialism and neo-imperialism are functions of a broader Western
civilizational strategy of obfuscating the hidden absence of the ‘real’ by simulating reality as
normative” ( qtd. in McCarthy ix). As William Merrin signals, Baudrillard’s work can be
understood most fruitfully as occupying a space between historicity and philosophy. As an
ideological site for the negotiation of postcoloniality, hyperreality allows postcolonial subjects to
move beyond merely identifying with the past (with a retrograde voyeurism) to a deconstructive
identification with unfixable and positional identities within the simulacrum (qtd. in McCarthy
xx). Now, with the “whole edifice of representation, being a simulation ” (Baudrillard 11), one
needs to ask in the words of Clifford, “what processes rather than essences are involved in the
present experience of cultural identity ” (qtd. in Gupta and Ferguson 14). Hyperreality critiques
“the imperialist and colonialist notions of purity as much as it question[s] the nationalist
notions” (Bhabha 64). Baudrillard’s views on simulacra and hyperreality shifts the ground
considerably, in its insistence to question what is at stake on the importance of “irreducible
difference” (Grace 89). This ‘strategic essentialisms’ to use Spivak’s term, obfuscates the
situatedness, locatedness which cannot be subsumed within the all-pervasive notions of identity
based on oppositional binaries. Hyperreality tends to highlight the limitations of an identity
based on the fragmented space of ‘imagined communities’ of a modern state. And the rapid
advances in technology and the processes of globalization which have resulted in new
configurations of margins and peripheries marked by migrations and the diasporic community,
what is termed by Gupta and Ferguson, as ‘the transnational public sphere’ meaning that the
fiction of the postcolonial nation- state, whose boundaries enclose cultures and regulate cultural
exchange can no longer be sustained. Baudrillard’s description of consumptive society
inundated with simulated images “offers a ‘paradoxical space” for the agency of the subject,
facilitating both creative potential and selfdefining possibilities being also subjected identities to
the law of the market. The “reversibility” implied in the “images preceding the real” is
particularly important in terms of the debates around identity predicted on difference as it
eventually shows the fictionality of all discourses about identity and cultural differences
exemplifying the change implicit in “collective memory and orientation” (Rojek 115). Conclusion
The world of Baudrillard cannot be said to be devoid of agency, or nihilistic as one is
continuously aware of being a part of simulations, a world of consumption, which allows for
“the radical operation of the interrogating the ‘otherness’ of the other” (Gupta and Ferguson
16). To conclude, hyperreality critiques the identity realized on what Arjun Appadurai has
termed the “spatial incarceration of the native”, and allows for a rethinking of the between
“culture, power, and space” (Gupta and Ferguson 17). ). Moreover, through the myriad
images/signs which constitute our culture, our identity is constantly renewed and expanded
with the “signs being appropriated, translated, rehistoricised and read anew ” (Bhabha 37).
 2NC A2: Heg Good
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, //MW]
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.
 2NC A2: Policy-Making Good
Policymaking and international relations are predicated on the symbolic
exchange of semiotics. Their binaristic thought process of normative legal
scholarship misinterprets the importance of art and makes impact calculus
impossible.
Polat 12 (Necati, professor of IR at Middle Eastern Technical Institute, “International Relations,
Meaning and Mimesis." Interventions (2012))

This book argues for imitation and exchange, and all that is associated with these notions, such
as copy, repetition, derivation, representation, mediation, illustration, reflection and narrativity,
as a pervasive force in the construction of meaning in the study of international politics.
Usually a concept of disdain in the mainstream imagination in the study area, this force is often
shorthanded as mimesis. The established thinking, which dismisses mimesis as simply
subordinate and insignificant, tends to treat meaning as fixed, self-same and unified beyond
the fluidity it presents in its specific manifestations. I hold that a radical distinction between
meaning and mimesis that informs this mindset not only fails to provide adequate explanations
of basic phenomena in inter-state politics but is also unsound ethically for excluding difference,
or alterity, that defines mimesis. Strictly associated with literary and aesthetic theory, the
concept of mimesis has become an increasingly significant theme that inspires and guides
research in diverse fields of learning, social, political, even biological (as in memetics). The study
of international politics has so far remained aloof from this interdisciplinary current. Almost
equally uncharted and unexplored in the study area is the very concept of meaning, long
transformed in the philosophy of language, chiefly through the work by Wittgenstein . In this book, I
try to show how these two themes, both new to the study of international politics, are linked by applying
Wittgenstein’s insights on reproduction and repetition (as constitutive of meaning in language) to
processes of knowledge production in making sense of inter-state politics, equally defined by
representation and exchange. Added to this coupling of meaning and mimesis in the book is
the notion of the empowered and discerning subject, of agency, that I consider to be a
perennial function of mimesis in each and every case, as taught by Lacan, rather than anterior,
or an exception, to mimesis. Obviously, the relevance and practical use of some such undertaking
may be questioned from the perspective of mainstream theorizing. Yet, like many, pondering on
the issue of relevance, I cannot help but notice how remote and useless the theories of the
established imagination seem to be, as I put these words down, in drawing mere sense out of
the monumental developments of regime change that have been taking place in several states
in north Africa since late 2010, let aside their utter failure in having predicted them . I try to offer an
explanation in Chapter 1 for the apparent success of the settled imagination in the research community in the face of its inadequacy
to explain and predict eventualities that are central to the practice of the community, notably as observed following the momentous
shift in eastern Europe from the late 1980s that, similarly, mostly eluded the gaze of the mainstream. An alternative to this gaze,
with arguably more practical use, would be to locate and focus on ‘the event’ that is the object of inquiry in some form, not as a
category that can be placed against a narrative of it, but as a condition that negates an absolute distinction of the event and the
narrative – what Wittgenstein would call a ‘game’, and what is perhaps best exhibited in the remarkable filmic oeuvre of Abbas
Kiarostami. The immersionin the event would draw on a world of exchange, that is, on
intersubjectivity, as the primordial condition that licenses (and is sustained by) exchange,
possibly along the lines assumed in the early phenomenology of Heidegger. This valorizing of
exchange would re-humanize the study area away from its present, highly abstracted, de-
humanized state through tentative explorations of everyday modalities of existence enabled
in the modern order of formally autonomous entities . How exactly do we, as people, relate to the body politic,
to borders, foreign languages, military service, passport, international markets, sports competitions, religion and so on? Responses
to these and similar questions would be fluid to the extent that they could only be captured in ‘stories’ that would leave out radical
differentiations of reality and narrativity, of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. That is, the
humanism urged here is
hardly the Enlightenment version of it, which, purportedly cut off from (and despising) the
domain of mundane exchange, is only a power tool. It is rather a re-humanization that is
perhaps reminiscent of Husserl in the 1930s on the ‘crisis’ of European sciences: we certainly
have smart, elegant theories, and complicated research programmes based on them, but we do
not seem to be any closer to understanding international politics, for we gravely ignore the
narrativity in our down-to-earth, everyday experiences of phenomena, in which policy-makers
as main sponsors have no interest. The human person as the agent of experiences in this
heightened sense of awareness towards the event – alert to worldly exchange that is
constitutive of all meaning – is a subject that is inseparable from practices of subjugation in
time and space, as suggested by Foucault. Yet, this is not what I do in this book. I do not try to sample this gaze as an
alternative to the mainstream, although my conviction that some such approach to international politics would be more genuinely
relevant and practical underwrites much of what I do. Instead, I offer some justification for this gaze by hopefully
demonstrating how deeply problematic the conventional imagination is on meaning in inter-
state relations in its trade mark reliance on a distinction between meaning and mimesis, not
only in the more dominant political realisms in the mainstream but also in forms of theorizing
that are critical of those. In so doing, I target a set of binary oppositions focal to the mainstream
and try to read them closely, as instructed by Derrida: sovereignty and intervention, peace and
war, identity and difference, law and violence, and integration and the nation state. In each of
these binary oppositions, which simply reiterate one overarching distinction of meaning and
mimesis, the first term is typically privileged as ‘present’ or essential, at the cost of the other
term deemed to be inessential, thus ‘absent’. Derrida, like Wittgenstein, argues for narrativity as
intrinsic to meaning; and since narrativity is traditionally assumed to be a quality of the term
in the binary that is absent, each and every one of the binaries is rendered in this interaction
as ultimately susceptible to a deconstructive transfiguration . I pursue this reading by locking on
a handful of concepts that are pivotal to the study of international politics: the modifier
‘international’, peace, ethics, law and integration. The reassessment of these concepts ventures at once into the
assumptions, mostly tacit, that underlie a host of issue areas, offering critical appraisals. These issue areas include peace
research, normative theories, international law and European studies.

Their vision of world politics is predicated on meaningless meanings and fictive

facts. Vote (aff/neg) to unsettle this hierarchy between the origin and
representation, between reality and what is made of it. The anti-realism of this
concept of art invokes a reality of its own and is well recognized as familiar
convention.
Polat 12 (Necati, professor of IR at Middle Eastern Technical Institute, “International
Relations, Meaning and Mimesis." Interventions (2012))

The fact that Waltz uses a mere tale, a flight of imagination, a playful moment with reality, in
putting through his hard-nosed message on state security is arguably more significant than the
message itself. His reliance on the mediation and license of a story in constructing the reality of
inter-state relations seems to be more of a revelation, leading to rich theoretical insights, than
the lessons he ultimately draws from the story; namely, a vision of world politics predicated on
dour facts and stern practice, uninfected by fiction and fantasy. What is more, Waltz does not
simply tell a tale; admittedly he retells a tale. In advancing the parable, he only repeats – that is,
copies – an earlier narrative by Rousseau. Yet the reproduction, which is the representation of a
representation, and which comes in a hugely influential discussion of Rousseau, in which the
latter is associated with a brutally cynical view of state conduct, is in effect only a semblance of
the original. The parable is originally and briefly offered by Rousseau as an illustration of how primitive humans, moving from an
earlier state of nature with a solitary life to a next stage when they came to mix with others, ‘were strangers to foresight, and far
from troubling their heads about a distant futurity, they gave no thought even to the morrow.’ 2 The parable replicated by Waltz is
presented immediately after these words in Rousseau’s discourse. Last but by no means least, Waltz uses the tale
he appropriates from Rousseau to suggest an image, a representation, of world politics. The
thematic account of state behaviour he advances is not the practice itself, the real thing, but a
picture, a mirror, reflecting the practice. The curious conceptual realm implied in the words
parable, tale, imagination, play, mediation, representation, fiction, narrative, fancy, repetition,
copy, reproduction, semblance, replication, illustration, appropriation, image, picture, mirror,
and reflection – used in the preceding paragraph to define the exploitation of the stag-hunt analogy by Waltz – is at the heart
of the main argument in the present book. This argument is about mimesis, a notion that roughly refers to the
elusive interaction between the same and the similar, that which is and its representation, the
real thing and emulation, the original and the copy .3 The interplay between the terms forms a semantic domain
often identified through the aid of concepts such as imitation, reiteration, and narrativity. The interchange denoted in
these concepts – mimesis – is treated in the bulk of conventional explanations of international
politics as secondary and irrelevant. In these accounts, the emphasis is placed instead on the
real thing, assumed to be the origin of, and prior to, mimesis. Mimesis as such is a mere
derivation rooted in, and parasitic on, reality . In the book, I aim to unsettle this hierarchy between
the origin and representation, between reality and what is made of it, by highlighting mimesis as
focal to processes of meaning formation in thematic grasps of international politics and
therefore constitutive of reality. Starting with the very modifier ‘international’, which, as I claim, is emblematic of the
ambivalent exchange between meaning and mimesis, I explore in the book some of the main themes in the study of inter-state
relations that defy a radical dichotomy between reality and mimesis; namely, peace, ethics, law, and integration beyond the nation
state as instanced by the transformation in Europe. I try to disclose the key function performed by mimesis in each and every theme,
introducing an integral ambivalence in meaning, by drawing on insights from a host of study areas outside the mainstream
imagination on international politics. Hinting at this ambivalence in the functioning of the mimetic that is apparently irreducible,
Adorno describes the relationship between representation and what it represents as ‘nonconceptual’. 4 The designation not only
refers to the insurmountable difficulty of capturing with precision the interaction in a specific case between representation and what
Adorno calls ‘its unposited other’ – as this interaction is always already subject to the unsettling fluidity in contexts in which the
representation is produced and received, which Adorno finds akin to what is often understood in popular culture as ‘the 2
Introduction magic of art’. 5 But the resistance to conceptualization also brings up the inevitable limitations of possible thematic
exercises in making sense of mimesis as such, a concern and a considerable part of efforts in more recent attempts to define and
theorize mimesis. Crucially, this ambiguity is eschewed in the mainstream understanding of mimesis, which remains largely attached
to the Platonic view of it as a mere imitation, a shadow, in an antipodean relationship with reality for the illusion it imparts, hence at
once a threat to reason.6 This view, which has subsequently been revised – following Aristotle,7 to treat mimesis as rational and
part of irresistible worldly interchange, of communicability and narration, whether through gestures or words and marks – has
nevertheless persisted in treating mimesis as simply derivative and suspect. On this take, mimesis
inevitably produces an
effect in its functioning that estranges those exposed to it from the genuine article. After all, the
re-presentation is not the same as that which is present, but a simulation, which is ultimately a
distortion for the unavoidable, defining gap that the representation analytically has with what it
represents. The reality (the origin) reproduced is assumed in this thinking to stand unmatched,
unique, autonomous, self-contained, and self-referential; whereas the representation is an
epiphenomenon, a shadow, lacking substance, autonomous essence, capable of signifying only
through what it mimics. That this view may be an oversimplification in its radical distinction of reality and mimesis is cued in
‘the magic of art’ cliché, of which Adorno speaks. A vivid statement of incredulity in the conventional notion
of mimesis, as offered in this prosaism, is the response of the painter to the obtuse inquiry by one of the
visitors at an exhibition regarding the theme in a specific painting. ‘Is this a fish?’ ‘No,’ answers
the painter, ‘it’s a painting.’ (Magritte only adds a further layer of playfulness to this by
articulating the negation in the painting itself: ‘This is not a pipe.’ 8 ) The anti-realism of this
concept of art, which invokes autonomy – that is, a reality of its own – for mimesis, is well-
recognized and largely accepted, if not as self-evident truth, as familiar convention. More
controversial is the function of representation in everyday, mundane life in defiance of a notion of originary reality which is outside
the representation and to which the representation can be traced. These
floating forms of representation, called
‘simulacra’ by authors such as Deleuze and Baudrillard, who posit the notion in making sense of
the role of representation in popular culture often established through the intermediaries of
mass communication, point precisely to some such autonomous, constitutive mimesis that is
indistinguishable from reality

By utilizing mimesis we can use their portable skills against them. Take that.
Polat 12 (Necati, professor of IR at Middle Eastern Technical Institute, “International Relations,
Meaning and Mimesis." Interventions (2012))

Waltz provides an account of inter-state politics that is avowedly imitative, faithful to the
practice. In so doing, he retells a tale, which happens to be less than accurate. In other words, in
his use of the stag-hunt analogy, the Waltzean descriptionism exhibits all that is traditionally
attributed to mimesis to discredit it: narrativity (the stag hunt), copy (from Rousseau),
semblance (departure from the original). More important, however, is the functioning of
mimesis in this discourse when recourse to fiction and fantasy is not as clearly flagged. Mimesis that
is all too obvious in the reliance on the stag-hunt analogy in the face of a simultaneous, if tacit, commitment to the traditional
posture on mimesis, can be shown to be at work in all its assumed duplicity in the account of inter-state politics offered by Waltz as
an unwitting exercise in mimesis. In the first place, the imitation or depiction of reality aimed in the account
presents a curious problem of fidelity to the represented other, which is often identified with
realism in art, more specifically in painting. As is well known, these efforts in art in the reproduction of reality
have historically relied on a distinctly European perception . The Chinese and Japanese paintings, the
Iranian and Ottoman miniatures, or indeed the medieval European practice in painting, do not seem to follow the linear
perception identified with the mainstream European artistic vision in the representation of
reality. This vision is typified in a specific notion of spatiality, depth and perspective, and in the slavish reproduction of the
corporeal form. Realism – if this is what it is – as a product of this vision follows a particular layout that is invented (the ‘invention’ of
perspective, as often referred to, is a clue in this regard), rather than simply mirroring an extension or form of reality that is out
there. This archetypal imagining of reality inevitably leaves out aspects of what is being represented that are perhaps better covered
in the non-European art, Introduction 5 such as the multiplicity of time and space in miniatures – more faithful to the intertextuality
of life – in the depiction of one single moment. The
non-European perception of reality along these lines is
comparable to the painting style that emerged in Europe in the early twentieth century, which
was partly instructed by non-European art. This style arguably abandoned a ‘correspondence’
theory of truth in the approximation of reality, as paradigmatically evident in photographic
transmission of the object, for a view of truth as no more than a ‘model’ of reality, leaving the
gaze at the object open and de-centred. This model of reality gives up on the realist physical
transmission, the enchanting corporeal reproduction in realist art, but is able to accommodate
in the depiction a depth that is alien to realism. Notably given up is the privileging of a fixed gaze (a God’s eye
viewpoint) that ignores or represses various alternative points of observation in relation to the object. What is introduced in the
place of this fixed gaze is a perpetual concern about the interaction between what is out there and the manner in which it is being
perceived. Thus, Girl with a Mandolin by Picasso captures a fragmented, inherently chaotic object –
an effect of various, often conflicting gazes. The painter seeks to include a multiplicity of gazes,
privileging none (although, inevitably, there is still an overarching gaze as limited and highlighted by the frame of the painting).
The result is not only a fragmented object but also a de-centred subject. The reality depicted
remains open and is as such more true to life perhaps than a photographic rendition that
reproduces a linear perception of the physical presence, only part of reality, leaving out all else .
To go one step further, the uncertainty that emerges out of the painting by Picasso is arguably more
‘real’ than forms of realism from the Renaissance onwards, in the sense that quantum physics,
with its inherent uncertainty, is considered to be more real than the conventional physical
accounts it has come to replace; uncertainty in some fashion is at the heart of our efforts to
interact with reality. The gaze not simply depicts but in effect constitutes the object, an insight
that reverses the conventional hierarchy between reality and its representation . The vision of inter-
state politics articulated by Waltz as a mere depiction of reality can be said therefore to be in serious denial of reality it otherwise
champions. His representation of reality may be compelling, as the realist European art is, in its limpid outline of what it purports to
depict, but it also crucially excludes many pertinent features, chiefly the intertextuality intrinsic to life, and is oblivious, unlike, say,
quantum physics, to the problems related to the authority of the gaze. Take the following representation of state behaviour on war,
offered by Waltz in the context where he introduces the stag-hunt analogy. ‘A
state will use force to attain goals ’, he
observes, ‘if, after assessing the prospects for success, it values those goals more than it values
the pleasure of peace.’ 12 This reproduction of state behaviour in theory relies on a logic that is
perhaps admirable in its artless, forthright realism and in its economy with words. Peace is
obviously an interest for the state, thus desirable. But there are also interests which the state
can achieve through war. Prospects for going to war will ultimately depend on an assessment of
conflicting interests 6 Introduction by the state. This estimation of war and peace seems to be
unassailable, until we notice that the brutally realistic representation it relies on critically leaves
out the value and meaning of peace, treated in the account as a mere interest among others;
entities – as interests attainable through either war or peace – are de-contextualised by Waltz
beyond recognition. They are transformed into mere entries in the same broad category marked as ‘interests’, a wholesale
treatment of a range of concepts out of touch with the intersubjective meaning and purpose associated with each. The impressive,
yet abstract, logic through which Waltz identifies friendship between states as a mere interest excludes from its depiction of reality a
great deal, operating in a vacuum-like thought experiment greatly dissociated from the pertinent reality. Besides, even if peace is to
be treated as a mere interest among others, it should be possible to make a case for peace as the overriding interest regardless of
circumstances, as has been suggested in forms of liberal idealism, given the unavoidable loss and misery associated with war, even
for those fighting on the victorious side. But this is precisely the point. Waltz’s elegant calculation of state interests makes sense only
if it remains at a certain level of economy in representation, with the cost suffered by human persons in war crucially filtered out,
omitted from the picture. The state, on whose behalf people fight, is reified by Waltz as yet another abstraction that serves no
practical purpose in terms of everyday intersubjectivity. This domain of mundane exchange that seems to evade the account by
Waltz is, incidentally, the only possible source of meaning, theoretical or otherwise. The everyday mimesis as the source of meaning,
notably suspended in the reconstruction of the state behaviour on peace, does go on to make unannounced appearances in Waltz’s
discourse nevertheless, to remind us of its all-powerful presence, as in the statement, only a few lines removed from the discussion
of peace as a mere interest: ‘love affairs between states are inappropriate and dangerous.’ 13
 2NC A2: Simulation Good
In the construction of a realm of meaning that has minimal contact with
historically specific events or actors, simulations have demonstrated the power
to displace the "reality" of international relations they purport to represent.
Simulations have created a new space where actors act, things happen, and the
consequences have no origins except the artificial cyberspace of the simulations
themselves. Their realism has become hyperrealism.
der Derian 90 (James, recipient of the Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy at the American
Academy and professor at the University of Sydney, “The (S)pace of International Relations:
Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed.” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special
Issue: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies (Sep., 1990), pp. 295-
310)
The 1AC was a spectacularized simulation of the semiocratic IR system where Surveying the rise of a consumer society, anticipating
the failure of conventional, radical, spatial politics in 1968, Guy Debord, editor of the journal Internationale Situa- tionniste, opened
his book Society of the Spectacle with a provocative claim: "In
societies where modern conditions of production
prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was
directly lived has moved away into a representation " (1983: 1).8 At the root of this new form of
representation was the specialization of power, with the spectacle coming to speak for all other
forms of power, becoming in effect "the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself,
where all other expression is banned" (1983: 23). After analyzing the political economy of the sign
and visiting Disneyland, Jean Baudrillard, the French master of edifying hyperbole, notified the
inhabitants of advanced mediacracies that they were no longer distracted by the technical
repro- duction of reality, or alienated and repressed by their over-consumption of its spec-
tacular representation. Unable to recover the "original" and seduced by the simula- tion, they had lost the ability to
distinguish between the model and the real: "Abstrac- tion today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation
by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal " (1983a: 2). Baudrillard exceeds Nietzsche in his
interpretation of the death of god and the inability of rational man to fill the resulting value-void with stable distinctions be- tween
the real and the apparent, the true and the false, the good and the evil. In the excessive, often nihilistic vision of Baudrillard, the
task of modernity is no longer to demystify or disenchant illusion-for "with the real world we
have also abolished the apparent world" (see Nietzsche, 1968: 40-41; Der Derian, 1987: Ch. 9)-but to save a
principle that has lost its object: "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us
believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no
longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simula- tion. It is no longer a question of
false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer
real, and thus of saving the reality principle" (1983a: 25).9 7 See Kracauer, 1987 and 1963. 8 In a more recent work,
Debord (1988) persuasively-and somewhat despairingly-argues that the society of the spectacle retains its
representational power today. 9 For related analyses of the representational shift that marks modernity and
postmodernity see also Baudrillard (1983b), Benjamin (1969), McLuhan (1964), and Kittler (1987). The representation of
international relations is not immune to this development. In a very short period the field has oscillated: from
realist representation, in which world-historical figures meant what they said and said what they meant, and diplo- matic historians
recorded it as such in Rankean fashion ("wie es eigentlich gewesen ist"); to neorealist, in which structures did what they did, and we
did what they made us do, except of course when neorealists revealed in journals like the International Studies Quarterly and
International Organization what they "really" did; to
hyperrealist, in which the model of the real becomes
more real than the reality it models, and we become confused .'0 What is the reality principle
that international relations theory in general seeks to save? For the hard-core realist, it is the sovereign state
acting in an anarchical order to maintain and if possible expand its security and power in the face of penetrating, de-centering forces
such as the ICBM, military (and now civilian) surveillance satel- lites, the international terrorist, the telecommunications web,
environmental move- ments, transnational human rights conventions, to name a few of the more obvious. For the soft-core
neorealist and peace-research modeler, it is the prevailing pattern of systemic power which provides stable structures, regime
constraints, and predicta- ble behavior for states under assault by similar forces of fragmentation. Before we consider how
simulations in particular "work" to save the reality princi- ple, we should note the multiple forms that these simulations take in
international relations. From the earliest Kriegspiel (war-play) of the Prussian military staff in the 1830s, to the annual "Global
Game" at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, simulations have been staged to prepare nation states for future wars; by
doing so, as many players would claim, they help keep the peace: qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. Simulations are used at
other defense colleges, such as the strategic and counterterrorist games played at the National Defense University or the more
tactically oriented computerized "Janus" game perfected at the Army War College." Then there are the early academic models, like
Harold Guetzkow's seminal InterNa- tion Simulation (INS), which spawned a host of second- and third-generation models: SIPER
(Simulated International Processes), GLOBUS (Generating Long- term Options by Using Simulation), and SIMPEST (Simulation of
Military, Political, Economic, and Strategic Interactions).'2 Many simulations are now commercially available: the popular realpolitik
computer game Balance of Power; the remarkably sophisticated video games modeled on Top Gun, the Iranian hostage rescue
mission, and other historical military conflicts; and the film/video WarGames, in which a hacker taps into an Air Force and nearly
starts World War III. And then there are the ubiquitous think-tank games, like those at the Rand Corporation, that model everything
from domestic crime to nuclear war, as well as the made-to-order macro- strategic games, like the war game between Iraq and Iran
that the private consulting company BDM International sold to Iraq (the highest bidder?). It may grate on the ears of some of the
players to hear "gaming," "modeling," and 10 An
added impetus to leave reality behind can be found in the
hyperrational test that much of international relations theory has set up for itself-the model's
congruence with reality. See Keohane, 1989. As well, the clean, abstracted techniques of the game theoretic, or the
structures of the more positivistic neorealists, have a certain technical appeal that the interpretive archives of genealogy and
intertextualism do not. For eloquent yet varied defenses of genealogy and intertextualism in international relations theory, see the
exchange between Richard Ashley and William Connolly in the epilogue to InternatzonallIntertextual Relatzons, pp. 259-342. I' For
other examples of military simulations, see Thomas Allen's fine book on the subject, War Games: The Secret World of the Creators,
Players, and Policy Makers Rehearsing World War III Today (1987). 12 See Ward (1985) for a compilation of essays in honor of Harold
Guetzkow, which provide a lengthy if uneven account of simulation in the discipline of international relations. See also Howard,
1987. "simulation" used interchangeably.'3 Yet in the literature and during interviews I found users using all three terms to describe
practices that could be broadly defined as the continuation of war by means of verisimilitude (Allen, 1987: 6-7). Conventionally, a
game uses broad descriptive strokes and a minimum of mathematical abstraction to make generalizations about the behavior of
actors, while simulation uses algorithms and computer power to analyze the amount of technical detail considered necessary to
predict events and the behavior of actors. Judging from the shift in the early 1980s by the military and think-tanks to mainly
computerized games-reflected in the change of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gaming organization from SAGA (Studies, Analy- sis, and
Gaming Agency) to JAD (Joint Analysis Directorate)-it would seem that simulation is becoming the preferred "sponge" term in
international relations. "Sim-
ulation" also has the obvious advantage of sounding more serious than
"gaming" and of carrying more of a high-tech, scientific connotation than "modeling." The object
of this inquiry is not to conduct an internal critique of the simulation industry, nor to claim some
privileged grounds for disproving its conclusions.'4 Rather, the intent is to show how, in the
construction of a realm of meaning that has minimal contact with historically specific events or
actors, simulations have demon- strated the power to displace the "reality" of international
relations they purport to represent. Simulations have created a new space in international
relations where actors act, things happen, and the consequences have no origins except the
artificial cyberspace of the simulations themselves. Over the last four years I have collected numerous examples
of this new phenome- non; I will share two of them here. 15 The first is the case of the U.S.S. Vincennes which shot down an Iranian
civilian airliner on July 3, 1988, in the mistaken belief that it was a military aircraft. The Vincennes was equipped with the most
sophisticated U.S. naval radar system, the Aegis, which according to a later military investigation functioned perfectly.'6 It recorded
that the Iranian Airbus was on course and flying level at 12,000 feet, not descending towards the Vincennes as the radar operator,
the tactical information coordinator, and one other officer reported at the time. Some- how, between machine and man, a tragic
misreading took place which resulted in the death of 290 people. One possible cause is stress: the Vincennes and its crew had never
been in combat and were engaged with Iranian speedboats when the Airbus was first detected. Yet stress has many origins, and the
military shows signs of ignoring the most serious one. The Vincennes trained for nine months before it went into the Persian Gulf.
That training relied heavily on tapes that simulate battle situations, none of which included overflights by civilian airliners-a common
occur- rence in the Gulf.17 13 I was, in fact, counseled against conflating the terms by a top modeler at Rand, Paul Davis, who
provided me with some valuable insights into the state of the art of simulations (interview, Rand Corporation, 18 February 1988).
See also his monograph with Bankes and Kahan, 1986. 14 Two excellent criticisms of the internal assumptions of gaming can be
found in a review of the literature by Ashley, 1983, and in Hurwitz, 1989. 15 A fuller account, based on teaching the prisoner's
dilemma to-as well as learning it from-inmates at Gardner and Lancaster State Prisons in Massachusetts, interviews with lieutenant
colonels from the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) materials, can be found in
Der Derian (1990). 16 See The New York Tzmes, 20 August 1988, pp. 1 and 5: "The 53-page 'Investigative Report' appeared to
confirm earlier news accounts that human error resulting from combat stress was among the main causes of the tragedy. 'Stress,
task fixation, and unconscious distortion of data may have played a major role in this incident,' it said." 17 See The New York Tzmes,
3 August 1988, pp. Al and A6: "A Pentagon officer who previously served in an Aegis ship said crew train constantly with tapes that
simulate every conceivable battle situation. But he said, 'the excite- ment factor is missing in such drills, because regardless of the
realism of the simulation, it is just that, a simulation of the real thing.' " To
be sure, much more was involved in the
decision to fire at the Airbus, not least the memory of the U.S.S. Stark which was nearly
destroyed in the Persian Gulf by an Exocet missile from an Iraqi warplane. But I would like to
suggest that the reality of the nine months of simulated battles displaced, overrode, absorbed
the reality of the Airbus. The Airbus disappeared before the missile struck: it faded from an
airliner full of civilians to an electronic representation on a radar screen to a simulated target.
The simulation overpowered a reality which did not conform to it. Let us look at another case, an exemplary
intertext of simulation: the work of Tom Clancy. Clancy saves U.S. hegemony in The Hunt for the Red October when a Soviet
commander of a nuclear submarine defects, with the submarine which contains ad- vanced technology, more advanced than the
silencing technology that the U.S. four years later penalized Toshiba (and jeopardized relations with Japan) for transfer- ring to the
Soviets. Clancy, whose Red October dustjacket sports a hyperbolic blurb from Reagan, supplied in kind one for Thomas Allen's book
on strategic simulations, War Games Today: "Totally fascinating," Clancy wrote, "his book will be the standard work on the subject
for the next ten years." Clancy's Patriot Games received a lauda- tory review from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in the
Wall Street Journal, which was then reprinted in the Friday Review of Defense Literature of the Pentagon's Current News for the
edification of the 7,000-odd Defense and State Department officials who make up its readership (Current News 7 August 1987: 6).
Clancy's Red Storm Rising, inspired by war gaming, was cited by Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle in a foreign policy speech to
prove that the U.S. needs an anti-satellite capability.i8 In Patriot Games, Clancy magnifies the threat of terrorism to prove that the
state's ultimate power, military counter-terror, still has utility. In a later novel, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clancy plots the
revelations of a mole in the Kremlin to affirm the need to reconstruct with Star Wars the impermeable borders of the sovereign
state. Takentogether, Clancy's novels stand as strategic simulations: jammed with technical detail
and seductive ordnance, devoid of recognizably human characters, and obliquely linked to
historical events, they have become the perfect free-floating intertext for saving the realist
principle of the national security state. What policy implications are raised by these proliferating
simulations? In the military arena we soon could see life copying the hyperreal art of Aliens, where the Colonial Marines are
buffeted as they enter the planet's atmosphere and Ripley asks the obviously anxious Lieutenant how many drops this is for him. He
replies "Thirty- eight," pauses, and then adds "Simulated." He quickly proves incapable of respond- ing to situations that do not
follow his simulation training. In interviews I conducted with fast-track lieutenant colonels attending the U.S. Army War College,
where a state-of-the-art, multi-million dollar simulation center is currently under construc- tion, I learned that simulations are
becoming the preferred teaching tool. And at the Foreign Service Institute simulations like the "Crisis in Al Jazira" are
being used to train junior-level diplomats in the art of crisis management and counterterrorism (see Redecker, 1986). This is not
to issue a blanket condemnation of simulations. Their proliferation can, from another
perspective, be seen as symptomatic of a "neither war nor peace" situation that may be fraught
with dangers but is certainly preferred to a shooting war. Properly executed, simulations can play an edifying
role in alerting individuals to the horrors of war. It has been said that Ronald Reagan's participation in a 18 The address, given to the
City Club of Chicago, was the same one at which Quayle articulated his preference for offensive weapons systems: "Bobby Knight
[the Indiana University basketball coach] told me this: 'there is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense [sic].' In
other words a good offense wins." See The New York Times, 9 September 1988, p. 1.
 2NC A2: Suffering Representations Good
Calls to take action and alleviate suffering from within the debate space are
nothing more than us vampirically draining the life out of the so-called
“victims,” commodifying their pain for the ballot and inserting them into the
liberal exchange economy and the military-industrial-complex – turns case
Baudrillard 96. Jean Baudrillard, the French master of edifying hyperbole, former professor emeritus at the
University de Paris X so more qualifications than Steinberg and Freely, The Perfect Crime , pg. 133 – 137

Our reality: that is the problem. We have only one, and it has to be saved. `We
have to do something. We can't do
nothing.' But doing something solely because you can't not do something has never constituted
a principle of action or freedom. Just a form of absolution from one's own impotence and
compassion for one's own fate. The people of Sarajevo do not have to face this question. Where they are, there is an
absolute need to do what they do, to do what has to be done. Without illusion as to ends and without compassion towards
And this is not at all the `objective' reality of their
themselves. That is what being real means, being in the real.
misfortune, that reality which `ought not to exist' and for which we feel pity, but the reality
which exists as it is -- the reality of an action and a destiny. This is why they are alive, and we are the ones who
are dead. This is why, in our own eyes, we have first and foremost to save the reality of the war and
impose that -- compassionate -- reality on those who are suffering from it but who, at the very
heart of war and distress, do not really believe in it. To judge by their own statements, the Bosnians do not really
believe in the distress which surrounds them. In -- 134 -the end, they find the whole unreal situation senseless, unintelligible. It is a
hell, but an almost hyperreal hell, made the more hyperreal by media and humanitarian harassment, since that makes the attitude
of the whole world towards them all the more incomprehensible. Thus, they live in a kind of spectrality of war -- and it is a good
thing they do, or they could never bear it. But we know better than they do what reality is, because we have chosen them to
the whole of the West -- most lack. We have to go and
embody it. Or simply because it is what we -- and
retrieve a reality for ourselves where the bleeding is. All these `corridors' we open up to send them
our supplies and our `culture' are, in reality, corridors of distress through which we import their force
and the energy of their misfortune . Unequal exchange once again. Whereas they find a kind of additional strength in
the thorough stripping-away of the illusions of reality and of our political principles -- the strength to survive what has no meaning --
we go to convince them of the `reality' of their suffering -- by culturalizing it, of course, by theatricalizing it so that it can serve as a
point of reference in the theatre of Western values, one of which is solidarity. This
all exemplifies a situation which has
which inoffensive and impotent intellectuals exchange their woes for those of
now become general, in
the wretched, each supporting the other in a kind of perverse contract -- exactly as the political
class and civil society exchange their respective woes today, the one serving up its corruption
and scandals, the other its artificial convulsions and inertia. Thus we saw Bourdieu and the Abbé Pierre
offering themselves up in televisual sacrifice, exchanging between them the pathos-laden language and sociological metalanguage of
wretchedness. And so, also, our whole society is embarking on the path of commiseration in the literal sense, under cover of
ecumenical pathos. It is almost as though, ina moment of intense repentance among intellectuals and
politicians, related to the panic-stricken state of history and the twilight of values, we had to
replenish the stocks of values, the referential reserves, by appealing to that lowest -- 135
-common denominator that is human misery, as though we had to restock the hunting grounds
with artificial game. A victim society. I suppose all it is doing is expressing its own
disappointment and remorse at the impossibility of perpetrating violence upon itself. The New
Intellectual Order everywhere follows the paths opened up by the New World Order. The misfortune, wretchedness
and suffering of others have everywhere become the raw material and the primal scene.
Victimhood, accompanied by Human Rights as its sole funerary ideology . Those who do not exploit it
directly and in their own name do so by proxy. There is no lack of middlemen, who take their financial or symbolic cut in the process.
Deficit and misfortune, like the international debt, are traded and sold on in the speculative
market -- in this case the politico-intellectual market, which is quite the equal of the late,
unlamented military-industrial complex. Now, all commiseration is part of the logic of misfortune [malheur]. To
refer to misfortune, if only to combat it, is to give it a base for its objective reproduction in
perpetuity. When fighting anything whatever, we have to start out -- fully aware of what we are doing -- from evil, never from
misfortune.
 2NC A2: Threats Real
Their prediction of catastrophes 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. This makes war
inevitable.
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.

This precipitation of power into its own trap reached a dramatic extremity in the episode of the
Moscow theater, where hostages and terrorists alike were commingled in the same massacre.
Just as in mad cow disease, the entire herd slaughtered as a prevention -- God will recognize his
own. Or as in the Stockholm Syndrome: their confusion in death makes them virtual accomplices
(that the presumptive criminal should be punished in advance in Minority Report proves a
posteriori that he couldn't have been innocent).

And that is effectively the truth of the situation: in one way or another, the populations
themselves are a terrorist threat to power. And it is power itself that, through repression,
involuntarily seals this complicity. The equivalence in repression shows that we are all virtually
the hostages of power. By extension, one can hypothesize a coalition of every power against
every population -- we have had a foretaste of it with the war in Iraq, since it has happened,
with the more or less covert assent of every power, in contempt of world opinion. And if global
demonstrations against the war have offered the illusion of a possible counter-power, they have
certainly revealed the political insignificance of that "international community" confronted with
American realpolitik.

Henceforth, we are concerned with the exercise of power in its pure state, without bothering
about sovereignty or representation, the integral reality of a negative power. As long as it draws
its sovereignty from representation, as long as political reason exists, power can find its
equilibrium -- in any case it can be challenged and contested. But the erasure of that sovereignty
leaves power unchecked, without counterpart, wild (with savagery no longer natural, but
technical). And, by a strange twist of fate, it recovers something from primitive societies, which,
according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, lacked history because they knew nothing about power. What
if our present global society, basking in the shadow of this integral power, was again becoming a
society without history?
But this integral reality of power is also its end. A power that is only founded on prevention and
the policing of events, which has no other political will than to brush specters aside, in turn
becomes spectral and vulnerable. Its virtual power is total, its power to program everything in
terms of software, indexes, packages, etc., but suddenly it can no longer take any chances,
except at its own expense, through all kinds of internal weaknesses. At the height of its mastery,
it can no longer lose face. Such is, literally, the "Hell of Power."

Policing the event is essentially the job of information itself. Information is the most effective
mechanism for the derealization of history. Just as political economy is a gigantic mechanism
for the fabrication of value -- the fabrication of signs of wealth, but not of wealth itself -- thus
the entire system of information is an immense machine made to produce events as signs, as
values exchangeable on the universal market of ideologies, of spectacle, catastrophes, etc., in
short, for the production of non-events. The abstraction of information is no different from the
abstraction of the economy. And just as all commodities, thanks to the abstraction of their
value, are exchangeable among themselves, so every event becomes substitutable one for
another on the cultural market of information. The singularity of the event, irreducible to its
coded transcription and to its mise-en-scène -- which, simply put, makes an event an event -- is
lost. We enter into a realm where events no longer really happen, thanks to their production
and diffusion in "real time" -- but rather lose themselves in the void of information. The
information sphere is like a space that, once events have been emptied of their substance,
recreates an artificial gravity and returns the events to circulation in "real time." Once divested
from history, events are thrown back onto the transpolitical stage of information.

The non-event is not where nothing happens. On the contrary, it is the domain of perpetual
change, of a relentless actualization, of an incessant succession in real time, from whence this
general equivalence, this indifference, this banality which characterizes the degree zero of the
event.
 2NC Accident
Death is natural and death is inevitable, but ours is the culture of the Accident. The Aff’s
fantasies of catastrophic death is symptomatic of a societal phantasm of sacrifice and the violent
artifice of death. This imagination of the accidental death reduces non-catastrophic deaths to
meaninglessness and dooms all of us to banality and thus, we all become hostages in the
simulacra of accidental death, willed by the rest of society to Die.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 164-166

Why is it that today there are no expected and foreseen deaths from old age, a death in the family,
the only death that had full meaning for the traditional collectivity , from Abraham to our grandfathers? It is
no longer even touching, it is almost ridiculous, and socially insignificant in any case. Why on the other hand is it that violent,
accidental, and chance death, which previous communities could not make any sense of (it was
dreaded and cursed as vehemently as we curse suicide), has so much meaning for us: it is the only one that is generally
talked about; it is fascinating and touches the imagination . Once again, ours is the culture of the
Accident, as Octavio Paz says. Death is not abjectly exploited by the Media since they are happy to gamble on the fact that the
only events of immediate, unmanipulated and straightforward significance for all are those which in one way or another bring death
onto the scene. In this sense the most despicable media are also the most objective. And again, to interpret this in terms of
repressed individual pulsions or unconscious sadism is trivial and uninteresting, since it is a matter of a collective passion. Violent
or catastrophic death does not satisfy the little individual unconscious , manipulated by the vile mass-
media (this is a secondary revision, and is already morally weighted); this death moves us so profoundly only
because it works on the group itself, and because in one way or another it transfigures and
redeems in its own eyes. 'Natural' death is devoid of meaning because the group has no longer
any role to play in it. It is banal because it is bound to the policed and commonplace [banalisé] individual subject, to the
policed and commonplace nuclear family, and because it is no longer a collective mourning and joy. Each buries his own dead.
With the primitives, there is no 'natural' death: every death is social, public and collective, and it
is always the effect of an adversarial will that the group must absorb (no biology). This absorption takes
place in feasting and rites. Feasting is the exchange of wills (we don't see how feasting would reabsorb a biological event). Evil wills
and expiation rites are exchanged over the death's head. Death deceives and symbolically gains esteem; here
death gains
status, and the group is enriched by a partner. To us, the dead have just passed away and no
longer have anything to exchange. The dead are residual even before dying. At the end of a lifetime of
accumulation, the dead are subtracted from the total in an economic operation. They do not become
effigies: they serve entirely as alibis for the living and to their obvious superiority over the dead.
This is a flat, one-dimensional death, the end of the biological journey, settling a credit: 'giving
in one's soul', like a tyre, a container emptied of its contents. What banality! All passion then
takes refuge in violent death, which is the sole manifestation of something like the sacrifice , that is
to say, like a real transmutation through the will of the group. And in this sense, it matters little
whether death is accidental, criminal or catastrophic: from the moment it escapes 'natural'
reason, and becomes a challenge to nature, it once again becomes the business of the group,
demanding a collective and symbolic response; in a word, it arouses the passion for the artificial, which is at the
same time sacrificial passion. Nature is uninteresting and meaningless, but we need only 'return' one death to
'nature', we need only exchange it in accordance with strict conventional rites , for its energy (both the dead
person's energy and that of death itself) to affect the group, to be reabsorbed and expended by the group,
instead of simply leaving it as a natural 'residue'. We, for our part, no longer have an effective rite for reabsorbing
death and its rupturing energies; there remains the phantasm of sacrifice, the violent artifice of death. Hence the intense and
profoundly collective satisfaction of the automobile death. In the fatal accident, the
artificiality of death fascinates
us. Technical, non-natural and therefore willed (ultimately by the victim him- or herself),
death becomes interesting once again since willed death has a meaning. This artificiality of
death facilitates, on a par with the sacrifice, its aesthetic doubling in the imagination, and the enjoyment
that follows from it. Obviously 'aesthetics' only has a value for us since we are condemned to contemplation. The sacrifice is
not 'aesthetic' for the primitives, but it always marks a refusal of natural and biological succession, an intervention of an initiatory
order, a controlled and socially governed violence. These days, we can only rediscover this anti-natural violence in the chance
accident or catastrophe, which we therefore experience as socially symbolic events of the highest importance, as sacrifices.
Finally, the Accident is only accidental, that is to say, absurd, for official reason; for the symbolic
demand, which we have never been without, the accident has always been something else
altogether. Hostage-taking is always a matter of the same scenario. Unanimously condemned, it inspires
profound terror and joy. It is also on the verge of becoming a political ritual of the first order at a time when politics is
collapsing into indifference. The hostage has a symbolic yield a hundred times superior to that of the automobile death, which is
itself a hundred times superior to natural death. This is because we rediscover here a time of the sacrifice, of the ritual of execution,
in the immanence of the collectively expected death. This death, totally undeserved, therefore totally artificial, is therefore perfect
from the sacrificial point of view, for which the
officiating priest or 'criminal' is expected to die in return,
according to the rules of a symbolic exchange to which we adhere so much more profoundly
than we do to the economic order. The workplace accident is the concern of the economic order and has no
symbolic yield whatsoever. Since it is a machinic breakdown rather than a sacrifice , it is as indifferent to the
collective imagination as it is to the capitalist entrepreneur. It is the object of a mechanical refusal, of a mechanical revolt, based on
the right to life and to security, and is neither the object nor the cause of a ludic terror. 29 Only the worker, as
is well known, plays too freely with his security, at the whim of the unions and bosses who understand nothing of this challenge.
We are all hostages, and that's the secret of hostage-taking, and we are all dreaming, instead of dying
stupidly working oneself to the ground, of receiving death and of giving death. Giving and receiving
constitute one symbolic act (the symbolic act par excellence), which rids death of all the indifferent negativity it holds for us in the
'natural' order of capital. In the same way, our relations to objects are no longer living and mortal, but
instrumental (we no longer know how to destroy them, and we no longer expect our own death), which is why they are really
dead objects that end up killing us, in the same fashion as the workplace accident, however, just as one object crushes another. Only
the automobile accident re-establishes some kind of sacrificial equilibrium. For death is something that is shared out, and we must
know how to share it out amongst objects just as much as amongst other men. Death has only given and received
meaning, that is to say, it is socialised through exchange. In the primitive order, everything is done so that death is
that way. In our culture, on the contrary, everything is done so that death is never done to anybody by
someone else, but only by 'nature', as an impersonal expiry of the body. We experience our death as
the 'real' fatality inscribed in our bodies only because we no longer know how to inscribe it into a ritual of
symbolic exchange. The order of the 'real', of the 'objectivity' of the body as elsewhere the order of political economy, are
always the results of the rupture of this exchange. It is from this point that even our bodies came into existence as the place in which
our inexchangeable death is confined, and we end up believing in the biological essence of the body, watched over by death which
in turn is watched over by science. Biology is pregnant with death, and the body taking shape within it is itself pregnant with death,
and there are no more myths to come and free it. The myth and the ritual that used to free the body from
science's supremacy has been lost, or has not yet been found. We try to circumscribe the others,
our objects and our own body within a destiny of instrumentality so as no longer to receive death from
them but there is nothing we can do about this the same goes for death as for everything else: no longer willing to give or
receive it, death encircles us in the biological simulacrum of our own body.
 2NC Alternative
What emerges is not silence but an understanding that there exist the very
same Systems of assimilation which are not merely an extension of American
capitalism and democracy, and should not be essentialized into Alterity. The
same critical lens should be applied to people designated as radical Others
simply due to their geographic location.
Nordin 14 (Dr. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
Religion at Lancaster University, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars,” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue: Baudrillard and War, May,
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-norden.html)//AG

IV. Baudrillard’s war and others’ wars in China and Asia As shown at the outset of this article, Baudrillard
advocates an interest in
the other as Other, but is unclear about how this feeds in to knowledge about that other. What form can our ‘interest’
take, if we disallow the attempt to gain knowledge? We return, then, to the question of how we as scholars may approach
Others’ wars, as they are thought, operationalised and simulated in other places. What I think
emerges from the above is an understanding that ‘the global’, as we may understand it through Baudrillard, is precisely global.
Systems that try to assimilate anything and everything into their own programmes exist in
different forms in different places, including in Asia. To essentialize these systems into one great
mysterious unit of imagined Alterity would ironically be a way to deny such alterity by fetishizing
it and reducing it to an Identity of Otherness. From Baudrillard's notion that every system contains the seed of its own demise
stems his suspicion of centralized systems and the pretence to holistic unity . These systems, of which the

American-led war on terror is one example and Zhao's Sinocentric Tianxia is another, always claim
to do good and attempt to assimilate everything and anything into their system, striving towards
perfection. Asia offers no respite from this logic. Clearly, They grapple with the same problems
as We do, and can offer no greener grass where the scholar can comfortably stretch out assured
at having escaped the confines of The System. In this way, perhaps China’s wars can indicate to us that the logics of
Baudrillard’s globality does not only have to be understood in the narrow sense of an operational system of total trade, but that its logic is
recognisable also in other systems – systems that are not just some extension of Western capitalism
and attempts at democracy, but that have their roots in other philosophical traditions. Moreover, as
Baudrillard tells us, these systems are always susceptible to challenge by singularities of culture, that

which is excluded and condemned by the system because it tries to stand outside it – the Other
that does not want to be turned into self, the barbarian that does not want to be civilized, or
what Baudrillard himself calls ‘the other who will not be mothered ’, whose call to arms is ‘fuck
your mother’ (Baudrillard 2006, see also Nordin 2013; forthcoming 2014). Baudrillard reads a clear antagonism as existing between the global
and the singular (Baudrillard 2006, 2002 [2000], 155-6). To him, ‘foreignness is eternal’ (Baudrillard 1993 [1990]), or as Coulter writes: ‘Just as all those
cultural singularities will never merge into one global monoculture, people remain radically other to each other’ (Coulter 2004). This alterity or radical
otherness, then, is there whether the theorist recognises it or not. Of course, an argument could be made that all
attempts at
understanding, studying or explaining something is a violent act that reduces its purported
object to a knowable unit and denies its alterity. That argument would have a point – after all, speaking is an act
of violence and there are numerous problems with the scholarly endeavour to make visible, to
communicate and to reveal things as though they were not hyper-visible already. If, however,
we decide that we will choose to commit this violence of speaking (rather than, say, choose a lifetime of silence or
expressing ourselves only through the means of interpretative dance), there seems to be no reason for remaining silent
on swathes of people we have chosen to designate as radical Others because of their
geographical location. That is to say, there are no reasons except ones based on the imposition of an artificial
a priori Identity as Other, for the purposes of exclusion, which again is surely intolerably patronising. Perhaps we can
draw on Baudrillard not so much to remind ourselves only of the alterity of exotic Others elsewhere, but to remind ourselves of the Other in the Self.
Perhaps the most crucial thing is to remember, with Coulter I think, that it is not those other (Asian, foreign) Others and Their wars that are radically
other to Us and Our wars, but people that are radically other to each other – and we who are radically other to ourselves, despite and through all our
attempts to knowledge.

So refuse the affirmatives engagement to allow the cloak of mystery to fall once
again
Nordin 2014 “Baudrillard and War Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars” (Dr.
Astrid, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, UK) //pday

Baudrillard’s reading of the Gulf war, then, gives us a thought provoking account of the effects
of an American or Western system that simulates war in a manner that never meets or engages
the Asian other that is purportedly at the receiving end of this violence. This analysis of war
mirrors Baudrillard’s interest elsewhere in a code or system that disallows alterity, the seduction
of the irreconcilable, or any form of Rumsfeldian ‘unknown unknown’, allowing only
domesticated forms of knowable ‘difference’. This raises the question of how we deal with the
idea of otherness in Baudrillard ’s own writing, and for the purposes of this article in his writing
on war.

In Baudrillard’s writing on this ‘system’ of simulation, it is sometimes European democracy,

sometimes the modern West, sometimes consumer society more broadly, that are driven by the
‘perverse’ logic he describes (Baudrillard 2002 [2000]: 97, 207; 2004 [2002]). Baudrillard appeals
to a ‘we’, the specificity of which varies across his writings (Baudrillard 1989 [1986]: 116). Thus,
as John Beck has noted, ‘there is no outside of the American rhetoric of achieved utopia; for
Baudrillard, it erases all alternatives’ (Beck 2009: 110). In The Spirit of Terrorism, Beck similarly
notes the deployment of a Western ‘we’ in opposition to an enemy ‘them’, ‘not dissimilar to
those utilized by official American (and British) discourse determined to externalise the other
side’ (Beck 2009: 112). Beck argues that the 9/11 attacks revealed to Baudrillard that there is
‘another side, a reading of American power that can move inside it but remains other to it’ (Beck
2009: 112). This, however, does little to destabilise the original us/them binary.
On anything we may imagine beyond these imagined units of the ‘we’, Baudrillard is largely
silent. Of course, we should not over-emphasise the potentially problematic consequences of
Baudrillard’s focus on these specific spatio-temporal configurations – after all, nobody can write
about everything, nor should they necessarily try. Nonetheless, Baudrillard’s ascription of the
logics he describes to the modern West, European democracy and consumer society raises the
question of what lies outside those configurations and on what logics that outside may operate.

Baudrillard has a limited amount to say about this outside, but with regards to Asia, and more
specifically Japan, he argues for increased exoticisation (Baudrillard 2003a). For Baudrillard, it is
the modern West’s refusal of alterity that spawns nostalgia for the Other, who is now always
already domesticated (Baudrillard 1990 [1987]:145, 165). Despite this nostalgia, we must not try
to ‘foster’ difference. It is counterproductive to call for ‘respecting the difference’ of
‘marginalized groups’, as this relies on a presumption that they need to have an Identity and
makes the marginal valued as such, thus leaving the marginal where they are, ‘in place’.
Difference must therefore be rejected in favour of greater otherness or alterity: ‘otherness
[l’altérité] is not the same thing as difference. One might even say that difference is what
destroys otherness’ (Baudrillard 1993 [1990]: 127, 131). Thus ‘the other must stay Other,
separate, perhaps difficult to understand, uncontrollable ’ (Hegarty 2004: 118). In this way,
Baudrillard advocates more ‘exoticism’, an interest in the other as Other. The Other can only
remain Other insofar as we resist the urge to assimilate.

The biggest threat to the global order lies within. In the transcapitalist era, any
oppositional revolution against the system that acts through means of semiotic
abstraction risks being complicit in the evils it tries to critique. Deterrence leads to
war, not peace. Terror leads to true insurrection against the system.
Pawlett 14 (William Pawlett, a professor of media and cultural studies at the
University of Wolverhampton, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Baudrillard and War, “Society at War With Itself,” Volume 11, Number 2, May
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-pawlett.html , LD)
I. Introduction 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 including Impossible 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 an endogenic 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

, the deterrence of world wars, and of nuclear wars, does not result in
1995). Indeed, Baudrillard suggests

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
, and increasingly complicity and collusion are seen as dual, as encompassing
even cosmological dimensions

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.

*All methods of resistance through critical theory is complicit with the system they critique
because they act within the terrain demarcated by their opponents. The system criticizes
itself, making their academic critique a redundant action that only helps give a sense of reality
to the system. The critique of neoliberalism is integral to 21 st century society, which renders
any means of traditional revolution a reproduction of the simulacra.
Pawlett 14 (William Pawlett, a professor of media and cultural studies at the
University of Wolverhampton, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Baudrillard and War, “Society at War With Itself,” Volume 11, Number 2, May
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-pawlett.html , LD)
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

all critical theories are complicit with the system they critique . They
question that cannot be answered because

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

Baudrillard’s notions of “integral reality”, duality and complicity may have

‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2008),

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,

. Global power has deliberately sacrificed its values and ideologies, it presents no
Zizek, and Badiou

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).

*It has become impossible to locate a nexus of power – power is everyone and
in everyone. We have internalized power and usurped the position of the
master, but this power turns on the self as tyranny of the self by demanding
maximization of opportunities. The West has already parodized and
desacralized itself; there is no sovereign. We are now dually complicit with the
system – over-eager acceptance and deep rejection. The most pure form of
subjugation of the system is through subtle defiance – through silence, radical
indifference, and hyperconformity.
Pawlett 14 (William Pawlett, a professor of media and cultural studies at the
University of Wolverhampton, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Baudrillard and War, “Society at War With Itself,” Volume 11, Number 2, May
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-pawlett.html , LD)
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:

We tyrannise ourselves, for example by demanding that we maximise our opportunities,

33).

fulfil 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
deeper sense of derision and rejection. The
to. Hidden within this complicity with the West, there is, Baudrillard suggests, a

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,

Baudrillard rejects such elitism and celebrates the masses abilities to strategically defy
while

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

Whatever its historical provenance, this strategy of power is, it seems,

willing to be slaves’ (1988: 60).

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).

*In an attempt to rid society of the otherness, society has reduced the duality
of the world to binary oppositions that fail to capture the unknown of the
radically dual other. Good and Evil have been distilled by modern morality to
reduce Evil to the accidental, that which can be controlled and eradicated. This
allows for the violence of the axis of good. The diversion of Good and Evil has
given Evil the autonomy to change the rules of the game. Strategies of sudden,
ironic reversions through symbolic exchange have the potential to bring back
Evil and radical otherness and disrupt the ‘hell of the same’
Pawlett 14 (William Pawlett, a professor of media and cultural studies at the
University of Wolverhampton, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Baudrillard and War, “Society at War With Itself,” Volume 11, Number 2, May
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-pawlett.html , LD)
III. Duality There is a kind of progressive break with the world, the terminal phase of which
might be said to be that in which the Other has disappeared, and in which one can now feed
only on oneself (with a relish mingled with horror and disgust) (Baudrillard 2010: 42). The notion of duality and the “duel”
is fundamental to Baudrillard’s thought and can be seen running through all of his major terms, processes and relations. In Passwords Baudrillard

defines reversibility as ‘the applied form’ of duality (2003: 81). Baudrillard’s analysis of duality and its conflict with
‘integrism’ spans the largest, anthropological, global and structural levels through to the micro-level of everyday life, and smaller still into the world of viruses (Baudrillard

, symbolic exchange consists in a dual and reversible process of gift and

1993b: 161-3). For example

counter-gift which work against or in defiance of the abstract, unified and hierarchic process
of commodity exchange. The notion of seduction consists in the dual and reversible relations
that take place between masculine and feminine not in the biological opposition of male and
female. Fatal strategies are closely related to symbolic exchanges in that they consist in the
sudden ironic reversions and failures of the system of power, which falters precisely because
it is unable to respond to the rule of symbolic exchange (1990b; Baudrillard & Noailles
2007: 78). In Baudrillard’s later terminology ‘the hell of the same’ is always haunted by
radical otherness (1993b: 113-123); there is always ‘the other side’ of the perfect crime, ‘the
nothing’ or singularity that ‘runs beneath’ the something (2001: 6-9). Duality, in
Baudrillard’s sense (seemingly inspired by the religion of Manichaeism – see
Smith (2004) and Pawlett (2014)) challenges as reductive all thought based on
determinate conceptual oppositions: good/evil, real/unreal, masculine/feminine, both
dialectical and empirical. Duality posits something else, something unknown, unmanageable
and beyond understanding in terms of oppositions. This something, or “nothing”, forms the
duality along with, and in antagonism to, the great series of oppositions which are taken to
constitute the totality of life. In other words, what is generally taken to be real, material,
objective and universal is strictly limited. From the perspective of duality, the vast sum of
identities and differences, the immense plurality of the world, is still homogeneous at the
level of signs. Duality, in Baudrillard’s sense, does not contend that the world is divided into two opposed principles, nor that there are two fundamental
perspectives on the world. Rather, it posits two worlds: one world of order, value, meaning, and another

world in which these concepts have little or no purchase (2004: 37). The system of
oppositions are contrasted with what Baudrillard calls radical otherness or singularity : life
beyond performative existence, beyond Will and subjectivity, where the otherness of self meets
the otherness of others: "What defines otherness is not that the two terms are not
identifiable, but that they are not opposable. Otherness is of the order of the incomparable …
not exchangeable in terms of general equivalence; not negotiable, yet circulating in the mode
of complicity and the dual relation, both in seduction and in war " (Baudrillard 1996: 122).
Duality does not refer to a position or resource outside of the system, something that might
negate the system, or alternatively be assimilated by it . Rather duality is “the reversibility
internal to the irreversible movement of the real” (2005: 21). Reversibility is not the
movement from one conceptual term to the other, but the reversion of complementary
oppositions such that the ‘reality’ they jointly produce is annulled, suspended or shattered
(1993a: 133). Good and Evil are perhaps Baudrillard ’s most developed example of duality.
Good and Evil as symbolic forms are irreconcilable yet inseparable, they alternate or ‘duel’,
neither can vanquish nor eliminate the other. The unending, cyclical duel of Good and Evil is dramatised in the great myths and
tragedies. Heroes and heroines do not lay the foundations for social order, they experience or embody the metamorphosis, collusion or reversibility of Good and Evil (2001: 54).

Good and Evil, considered as dual or symbolic relations are eternal and destined to emerge from each other . The dynamic, alternating energy of
duality defies structure, value, power and hierarchy. However, morality seeks to separate or
“distil” Good and Evil, working to produce the conceptual opposition good/evil, literally
barring their symbolic exchange, denying their duality. Modernity, or Post-modernity, is even
less tolerant of Good and Evil as symbolic forms, and works to replace both the symbolic and
moral dimensions of Good and Evil with the reductive, individualised and psychologised notions
of happiness/wellbeing in opposition to misfortune/ victimhood (2005: 139-158). “Evil”
reduced to misfortune is understood as something accidental, something that can and should
have been secured, controlled and finally eliminated, for example by a culture of insurance,
surveillance, risk assessment and “future-proofing”. Reduced to a quantifiable scale happiness
should always increase, and misfortune decrease. The cultural demand now is that we show all
the signs of happiness at all times, and, for Baudrillard, the simulacra of happiness and
wellbeing sustain the system and flourish precisely in order to obscure the symbolic
dimension of Evil, which is nevertheless ineradicable. This is not a historicist position,
Good and Evil as symbolic forms are not eliminated, they are diverted, disjointed, severed,
smothered yet they remain, and indeed take their revenge on happiness/misfortune . Good has been
progressively disarticulated from Evil, the goal being its universalisation, yet, Baudrillard insists, Evil reappears or “transpires” through the hegemony of this enervated sense of

Good, often generated by very measures employed to eliminate it : "by denying the very existence of Evil (all the forms of
radical, heterogeneous, irreconcilable otherness) … Good has, in a way, given Evil its freedom.
In seeking to be absolute Good, it has freed Evil from all dependency and given it back its
autonomous power, which is no longer simply the power of the negative but the power to
change the rules of the game" (Baudrillard 2010: 55-6). Where Good attempts to eliminate Evil, Evil will reappear in the measures taken by Good.
Misfortune and happiness, as binary oppositions, feed and complement each other, indeed Baudrillard notes that misfortune and

victimhood become increasingly attractive to all as ‘a kind of escape route from the terroristic
happiness plot’ (Baudrillard 2005: 145). To give some examples, it is through the
misfortune/happiness binary that violent and tragic events are produced as instances of types
of events such as “human rights violations” or “crimes against humanity”. Not allowed to be
singular events of tragedy, the awarding or conferral of the title “crime against humanity”
produces an event to be deplored by the media, not one to be thought about, but one to be
consumed quickly. A violent event cannot, under this way of thinking, be worse than a crime
against humanity, there is nothing worse. Further, for Baudrillard, the current political
fashion for apologies, for ‘the rectification of the past in terms of our humanitarian
awareness’ (2005: 150) is an extension of colonial rule and global liberal capitalist
hegemony because it declares – Ok, we are sorry, get on with your mourning and then you can
join the new economic order that we have defined: ‘we make imbeciles of the victims
themselves, by confining them to their condition of victim, and by the compassion we show
them we engage in a kind of false advertising for them ’ (Baudrillard 2005: 153). It might well be that those who are genuinely
deprived and powerless simply do not have the time or energy to promote themselves as victims, however it might also be, as Baudrillard suggests, that the

powerless sense or implicitly understand the snares, humiliations and loss of symbolic
defences that await them if they try to play by the rules imposed upon them by liberal
humanitarian discourse (Baudrillard 1983: 48-61). This is the violence of the good, the “Empire” or, in a particularly memorable phrase, the ‘axis
of good’ (Baudrillard 2010: 88 & 111). If Evil has no essence, neither does Good. They are
relational; each is internal to the other, a charge that is carried by the other. Good and Evil as symbolic forms are not reducible to individual acts or choices , but they
emerge in the ambivalence and reversibility of order and system, and in events or exchanges
between people caught up in the cycle.
 2NC China Link
Politics of harmonization eradicates that which presents itself as an alternative
option ordering the world into hierarchies of difference. The formulation of
politics in this manner pits the insiders versus the outsiders promoting
perpetual antagonism within the populous.
Nordin 16 (Astrid, “Futures beyond ‘the West’? Autoimmunity in China’s harmonious world”, Review of
International Studies, 42, pp 156-177, January 2016) DP

The party-state version of harmonious world has then been deployed to ‘do’ various concrete
things in Chinese international politics. At the level of imagining difference, it appears to share
our concern here with multiplicity and openness. However, groups and cultures are described in
ways that correspond with David Kerr’s ‘blending diversity under universalism’, which tends
towards an imagination of difference as hierarchically ordered, and sometimes as something
that should be eliminated. The future harmonious world is envisaged as an ‘inevitable choice’,
and China is imagined as having a privileged position in the construction of this future because
of its purported harmonious nature based on history. It is inevitable, yet needs to be
constructed and fostered. Against this background, ‘harmonious world’ is said by some to
indicate ‘an increasingly confident China relinquishing its aloofness to participate and undertake
greater responsibilities in international affairs’. Nonetheless, the term remains to a significant
extent a ‘catch all’ phrase of friendly connotations. ‘Harmonious world’ may be useful precisely
because of its vague and elusive implications, that nonetheless speak to both Chinese and non-
Chinese sensibilities. Indeed, ‘who could argue against global peace and prosperity ?’
Nonetheless, what emerges from accounts of harmony as articulated in China in the last decade
is a tension in the harmony concept between its need for multiplicity on the one hand, and its
presupposition of universalisability on the other. Bart Rockman has suggested that harmony
may be a ‘necessary glue without which neither a society nor a polity are sustainable ’, but that
‘complete social harmony is ultimately suffocating and illiberal ’. Jacob Torfing has also taken
issue with predominant understandings of harmony in Southeast Asia that he argues present a
‘post-political vision of politics and governance that tends to eliminate power and antagonism ’.
Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe, he understands such a post-political vision as both theoretically
unsustainable and politically dangerous. It is unsustainable because power and antagonism are
inevitable features of the political dimensions of politics. Therefore politics: cannot be reduced
to a question of translating diverging interests into effective [win-win] policy solutions, since
that can be done in an entirely de-politicized fashion, for example, by applying a particular
decision-making rule, relying on a certain rationality or appealing to a set of undisputed virtues
and values. Of course, politics always invokes particular rules, rationalities and values, but the
political dimension of politics is precisely what escapes all this. Politics, then, unavoidably
involves a choice that means eliminating alternative options. Moreover, although we base our
decisions on reasons and may have strong motivations for choosing what we choose, we will
never be able to provide an ultimate ground for any given choice – in Derridean terms, such
grounds will always be indefinitely deferred. Therefore, ‘the ultimate decision will have to rely
on a skillful combination of rhetorical strategies and the use of force’. The acts of exclusion that
politics necessarily entails will produce antagonism between those who identify with the
included options and those who do not. For this reason, the attempt by the promoters of
harmony to dissociate harmonious politics from the exercise of power, force and the production
of antagonism, claiming a harmony where everyone wins and no-one looses, is bound to fail.
Moreover, the post-political vision of politics and harmony is dangerous because its denial of
antagonism will tend to alienate those excluded from consideration. This, Torfing writes, will
tend to displace antagonistic struggles from the realm of the political to the realm of morals,
‘where conflicts are based on non-negotiable values and the manifestation of “authentic”
identities’. Such non-negotiable values would be the opposite of the cooperative harmony
sought. To both Rockman and Torfing, then, complete or perfect harmony will defeat harmony
and create disharmony. In this way, the excessive production of harmony is what produces the
disharmonious elements that come to threaten it. We can see this happening in contemporary
China, where the ‘harmonising’ policies enforced under the ‘harmonious society’ slogan have
produced a range of oppositional movements, from Chinese youth mocking harmony online to
the increasing number of selfimolations we currently witness in and around Tibet. Numerous
scholars argue that in order to imagine harmony, we need to imagine heterogeneity and
multiplicity. We can now add that the problematic organisation of difference that remains in
imaginations of harmonious world eliminates the multiplicity in the here-now that is a
prerequisite for harmony. What these renditions of harmony show, I believe, is that the tensions
in and logics of harmony are very similar to the ones that are described by Derrida and others in
terms of the autoimmune. What we see in these accounts is an irresolvable contradiction, which
mirrors the autoimmune logic outlined at the beginning of this article. Harmony must by
definition be universal, but its universalisation by definition makes harmony impossible. In this
respect harmony works on a self-defeating and self-perpetuating logic that is very similar to
what we saw described in the ‘modern West’ and in ‘democracy’.
 2NC China Rise Link
The world no longer operates through the logic of nation building, but rather
the over profusion of simulation - the expo was not isolated to Shanghai, the
entire globe is a world fair – a harmonius simulation of international coherence
where countries are isolated spatial and cultural totalities, where the
distinctions between visiting the expo and being the expo are blurred until all
notions of subject are rendered incoherent, copies of copies without originals,
simulacra avatars in a virtual hyper-reality – This is the expo; have fun at the
American pavilion!
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin [Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster
University], “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of
Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages
149-168)
TAKING BAUDRILLARD TO THE FAIR Above, I have examined different ways in which China is imagined as ahead in the historical queue that is posited at Expo 2010. However, as explained in the introduction to this thesis, a most common way of imagining China
elsewhere in discourse on the country’s relation to the world is as behind, or catching up. This way of understanding China’s role in international politics has its roots in an imagination of Chinese experience as radically different to that of Western modernity – as the

In recent years a key Chinese strategy for negotiating both its claims to
“other country” (Chow, 1991: 81).

particularism and to being a modern great power has been through the public diplomacy of
“mega events”, including Exp 2010. As symbols of a The success of Chinese mega events in altering international opinion is debatable (Manzenreiter, 2010: 29-48).

changing Chinese identity and outlook they have nonetheless come to be understood as an
important aspect of Chinese “image management” we need to (Xin Xu, 2006; Brownell, 2008; Price and Dayan, 2008). In this section I argue that

take the next step and understand China’s mega events not only on the level of representation
and ideology, but also on the level of simulation and simulacra. such a reading is 106 I moreover argue that a consequence of

that we need to stop imagining China as the “other country”. Mega event genres came about in Western industrialising capitalist countries engaged in nation

Roche has connected mega events as a phenomenon to

building and imperial consolidation of the late 19th century (Rydell, 1984: 8, 236; Roche, 2003: 100). Maurice

“a temporal world view framed in terms of ‘progress,’ the assumed responsibility to build a
diffuse western ‘civilisation,’ and the assumed capacity to do so by actively ‘making history’ ” (Roche,

mega-events are potentially memorable because they are a special-kind

2003: 103, see also Roche, 1999: 1-31). He has further suggested “

of time-structuring institution in modernity time and modernity are ” (Roche, 2003: 102, emphasis in original). Like Roche, I examine how

negotiated by a mega event, but rather than looking for this time-shaping capacity in the scale
and cyclical occurrence of events I examine one particular event, that is Expo 2010. World fairs have been described as
instrumental in creating the distinction between reality and representation, a dualism that has become central to the way we capture the modern world (Mitchell, 1988; Harvey, 1996). In the remainder of this chapter I 106 Penelope Harvey has begun the work of
reading world fairs as simulacra in Hybrids4of4Modernity:4 Anthropology,4the4Nation4State4and4the4Universal4Exhibition (1996). Recent publications have hinted at the possibility of such a reading of Chinese mega events. Most notably, Price and Dayan’s
Owning4the4 Olympics4takes off in an imaginary of the Beijing Olympics as “spectacle, festival, ritual, and finally as access to truth” and concludes: “Or should we rewrite MacAloon’s sequence in a style inspired by Baudrillard: ‘spectacle, festival, ritual, and finally…
simulacrum-’” (Dayan, 2008: 400). To my knowledge none have followed through with an empirical analysis of what such a reading may look like in the Chinese case. explore what happens when we read the world fair – symbol of modernity – through the work of

I suggest that we read Expo 2010 not only as an exercise of nation-building, but
Jean Baudrillard – symbol of postmodernity.

as shaping also the imaginary of the world as a holistic unit. Expo 2010 could easily be read as a
representation of the world, as mimicry or a fake version of the real world beyond its gates. I
read it instead as simulation. the world fair is everywhere, that in fact the world is a fair,
My key claim is that

reading of the world fair as simulacrum

and that this has serious consequences for the study thereof. The we may be mistaken to shows how

imagine Chinese experience as radically other to that of Western modernity, or postmodernity

for that matter. It provides a different way of thinking about space, time and subjectivity . Importantly, I argue
that Baudrillard, who is often accused of being intellectually uncritical or irresponsible (for example by Norris, 1992), can help us think differently about intellectual strategy in our study of such a simulacral harmonious world fair. I first outline Baudrillard’s

the fair is not a fake copy of a “real” world, but that as

discussions of the simulacrum and use this discussion to interrogate the “being” of the world fair. I argue that

simulation it marks the breakdown of the distinction of the copy from the original, of the fair
from the world. Having asked where the fair is, arguing that fairness is everywhere, anywhere
and nowhere , I next ask when the fair is. I show that the fair works through recycling, revival and reuse. I thereafter ask who is the fair through an exploration of what happens to subjectivity in the interactive technologies of the fair. I examine

being in the world fair turns us into simulacral

how our simulation as subjects and objects of interactive technologies breaks both of these categories down. I argue that

avatars, circulated in virtual hyper-reality . I finally conclude through asking how to be fair in such a simulacral world fair. I argue that thinking the world in terms of its simulacral fairness does

the world we live in has

not need to rob us of intellectual strategy, but that we can draw on Baudrillard to think of theory as challenge. To be simulacral, or where is the fair- Let us return to Baudrillard’s claim that

passed into the hyper-real, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality ” (Baudrillard, 1994

As a
[1981]: 1). What has been lost, he argues, is metaphysics: “[n]o more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept” (1994 [1981]: 2). Crucially, this is not a question of imitation, duplication or even parody, but of substitution.

consequence the real will never again have a chance to produce itself, but is replaced by a
“hyper-real” where there is no distinction between the real and the imaginary, “leaving room
only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences ” (1994 [1981]: 3).
What is at stake in Baudrillard’s analysis, then, is the reality principle: [t]o dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that
because simulating is not pretending … Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the

In few places is the question of the real and the imaginary, the true and the false,
‘imaginary’ (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 3).

the original and the fake as pertinent and as sensitive as in contemporary China. The lack of
respect in China for copyright is a frequent bone of contention in its foreign relations. Domestic relations have been shaken in recent years by the “tainted milk” scandal, where a number of infants were killed and

underestimating the “China threat”

hundreds of thousands fell ill from ingesting “fake” milk powder containing melamine (Barriaux, 2011). In IR, voices are raised that worry about Westerners

because China may be faking it, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” ( Expo 2010 was a highly Gang Lin, 2005: 1).

controlled space, yet it too had its own associated scandals of fakery . Some suggested that Expo 2010’s mascot, Haibao, was a resurrection of

The Chinese national pavilion was exposed to similar

American cartoon character Gumby, dubbing it “The Gumbygate scandal” (V Saxena, 2010).

allegations of plagiarism, facing claims that it looked a lot like the Japanese pavilion from the 1992 Seville Expo, and

The biggest diplomatic scandal, nonetheless, surrounded the promotional

equally similar to the Canadians pavilion at Montreal in 1967.

tune Waiting for You which was officially written for Expo 2010, its video featuring all-Chinese
superstars like Jackie Chan and Yao Ming. A scandal erupted as it was revealed to bear an
uncanny resemblance to Mayo Okamoto’s 1997 Japanese hit Stay the Way You Are. The irony was not lost on foreign
commentators, with one commentator noting: [i]f the Shanghai Expo is the ultimate showcase of an economy roaring to world dominance, then the organizers have selected a theme song that perfectly captures China on the cusp of the 21st century: strident, stirring
– and ripped off (Lewis, 2010). The composer of the fair tune first strongly denied plagiarism allegations. Expo 2010 organisers thereafter suspended all use of the song citing “copyright reasons” and after “a flurry of face-saving efforts” Expo 2010 organisers, without
admitting any problematic recycling, asked if they could please use Okamoto’s work. The songwriter, whose practically forgotten tune had suddenly returned to the top of Japanese charts, selflessly acquiesced (Lewis, 2010). These revelations of scandalous fakery,
whether on the low level of song writing or the high level of lethal state violence, are typically understood as a form of resistance. They are taken to reveal the real4state of affairs. Some commentators extrapolate fakery to a “Chinese characteristic”, portraying
resistance to elite-led fakery as a resistance to power. In a short film on Chinese netizens and state power, blogger Wang Xiaofeng comments on Chinese fakes, with video shots of the Expo interspersed: China is a country who likes to make fake things. Lying is a
virtue (美德) of the Chinese. This is evident in all kind of matters. Statistical numbers are fake (假的) and whatever we create, even the good things, are fake. They [the PRC government] must say that some other countries are worse than China, to make common

The existence of mainstream media is based on this process of the

people (老百姓) think that China is the best place to live in (最好的国家).

never-ending creation of fake. the government itself is constantly creating this ‘fake’.
And If you go to remote places
in China you discover very shocking realities, people can’t even find something to eat, but you still think this country is a great country. So when you want to know the facts and get information you are actually challenging power. They are afraid of this (Wang

The claim of the denouncers of scandalous fakery is that reality is being masked
Xiaofeng in Marianini and Zdzarski, 2011). ,

the distinction between the real and the

and the purpose of denunciation is to reveal this reality through exposing fakery. My claim in the reminder of this chapter, and in this thesis, is that

fake of the harmonious world is disappearing in a system of self- referential signs. the Through this process:

whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum – not
unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itsel f, in
an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 5-6). In this respect, simulation is very different from representation.107
The way the latter is often used implies an equivalence of the sign and the real – even if it is a utopian equivalence. Simulation, on the contrary: stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the
reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 6). As
outlined in chapter 2, Baudrillard explains this in terms of successive phases of the image that I reiterate here:108 [1] it is the reflection of a profound reality … [2] it masks and denatures a profound reality … [3] it masks the absence of a profound reality … [4] it has

The shift “from signs that dissimulate something to signs that

no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 6).

dissimulate that there is nothing” is crucial because the real is no longer what it once was. This is
the 107 Problematising the dichotomizing relationship between the sign and the real is, of course, by no means originary with Baudrillard, but has a long and varied tradition from Friedrich Nietzsche (1999 [1872]) to Derrida (1981 [1972]). 108 As explained in chapter

we need not read Baudrillard ’s successive phases of the image as aligned in linear time. The
2,

“era of simulation” need not be understood as temporally fixed or discreet.

(1994 [1981]: 2) significance of simulation, and its key
effect is that in place of “the truth” we have a myriad of truths taking the shape of signs of reality and myths of origin (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 6). Baudrillard uses the example of Disneyland to model the “entangled orders of simulacra” because he sees it primarily

The adults’ parallel to Disneyland in the contemporary era is the world

as a play of illusions and fantasy (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 12).

fair, the most recent, the biggest, the most expensive and the most visited of which, again, was
Expo 2010. Expo 2010 is built up of fantasm and as one of its feature books announces
4Like Disneyland,

“100 years of Expo dream” (Shanghai shibohui shiwu xietiaoju, 2009). At the same time, as will be seen in this chapter, Expo 2010 involved truth claims in an explicit way that Disneyland never has, which makes it

Expo 2010 was constructed as a simulacrum of the world in

pertinent to examining both 1st and 2nd phase images and those of the 3rd and 4th phase.
ways that mix dreams with truth claims (and, as I have argued above, the claims that the dreams are indeed the true dreams of humanity and that these dreams will come true). Just like

Disneyland, the Expo is ideological: digest of the Chinese way of life, panegyric of Chinese values, idealised transposition of a contradictory reality. Nonetheless, the “Chineseness” of Expo 2010 can
be overemphasised in a format that is all about recycling. 109 As Penelope Harvey writes: [i]n many ways the form of the great exhibitions has been maintained
despite the changing economic, social and political circumstances. Nation states displayed cultural artefacts and technological expertise in their individual pavilions, seeking to educate and entertain the visiting public. The obligations of the organizers of a fair with

The
universal status are less concerned with the actual bringing together of exhibitors from all over the globe than with enacting a theme that simultaneously promotes the unity of mankind and the uniqueness of individual societies (Harvey, 1996: 35).

nation state has been the key cultural, political and economic unit through which both IR and
world fairs have traditionally told the tale of global community, and Expo 109 Indeed, this paper,
too, works through recycling and intentionally so. the spatial
(of Baudrillard, Harvey, Expo 2010) 2010 recycles this conceptualisation. As I argue above,

organisation of the Expo sites, in Shanghai and online, is a starkly visual simulacrum of the
purported organisation of the international state system. Essentialised culture is encapsulated in
the spatial containers that are Expo pavilions, which in turn are encapsulated in continents or
regions, which in turn are a subdivision of the neatly bounded and mapped world fair. These
mappings are presented as neutral and innocent, helpful and real – some lines on a surface, fair
and square (Expo Shanghai Online, 2010d). This particular model depends on a metaphor of scale by which the international community reproduces the form of its constituent parts: “[b]oth part and whole function as self-contained, coherent,

This imaginary reproduces units that differ

bounded entities which are mutual transformations of each other through simple principles of aggregation and disaggregation” (Harvey, 1996: 50).

from each other, but through a difference that is one of equivalence. Whether we think of these
units as natural or culturally constructed, they are defined by precise boundaries in temporal,
spatial and cultural terms, they are distinct but equivalent entities. This model of equivalence by difference was highly visible at Expo 2010 as at
previous world fairs (Harvey, 1996: 51). The world fair appears as a taxonomisation of equivalent national units with their own pavilion, listing in official guidebooks and dedicated day of cultural display. The official Opening Celebration of Expo 2010 saw the parading
of national flags, carried by Chinese youth made up to look as repetitions and copies of each other (CCTV Documentary, 2010). In this way Expo 2010 recycled the form of Expo 1992 in Seville on which Harvey writes: [t]he Expo provided a concrete instance of endless
replication, a cultural artefact built as if to demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of an entirely consumerist world. Thus there was the appearance of choice, of multiple perspectives, yet the cultural forms on show were nevertheless clearly reformulations and
repetitions of each other and of previous events. Sameness and familiarity undermined the promise of difference (Harvey, 1996). What we learn from Baudrillard is that this second phase ideology moreover “functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order [or

The world fair, in this vein, exists in order to

phase]: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 12).

hide that it is the “real” world, all of the “real” world that is the fair. The presentation of the Expo world as imaginary and as a dream functions to

The world fair takes us further than Disneyland does, as it is not content with a
make us think that the rest is real.

country, but must simulate the world – always striving to be more inclusive, with Expo 2010
priding itself on including pavilions of more countries than ever before, an inclusion which cost
the PRC government large sums in the form of subsidies (Xinhua, 2010e). In this way Expo 2010 marks a shift from ideological nation-building to worlding by simulation.
Shanghai, China and the world that surround the Expo are no longer real, but hyper-real, belonging now to the order of simulation: “[i]t 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” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 12-13). The relation between Baudrillard’s different phases or orders – those that dissimulate something and those that dissimulate that there is nothing – comes to the fore in the hyper-awareness and
self-reflexivity of Expo 2010, as it had begun to do in previous world fairs (Harvey, 1996). There were frequent references to the self- representations of previous world fairs, in TV programs, books and in the “Expo museum” at Expo 2010 (see for example Shanghai

In many instances of its replication, the world fair reflected on itself as the exhibition
shibohui shiwu xietiaoju, 2009).

of the exhibition of the exhibition without end, as world fair exhibiting world fair. Key emblems, monuments and mascots
of previous fairs were brought together with the effect of appearing as self-referential signs, as copies of copies, representations of representations without original, signifiers of signifiers without signifieds, ad4 infinitum. In this way: [t]he exhibition represents the
world, provides contexts and connections for an understanding of external realities, but its reflexivity simultaneously confuses or confounds the distinction of insider/outsider, representation and reality” (Harvey, 1996: 37). The implication is one of implosion of the
careful construct and of moving to the fourth phase: “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 6). Therefore, we must take the step beyond understanding how the exhibition represents the world and

grapple with how the harmonious exhibition is the world, and the harmonious world the exhibition. Reading the Expo through Baudrillard thus turns the world
into fair and the fair into the world . As I will continue to show throughout this chapter, the distinction between one as real or original and the other as fake or copy can no longer be upheld. All4we4
have4are4versions4or4layers4of4the4harmonious4world/fair,4all4simulacra. This is why I argue with this chapter that we4need4to4take4the4step4and4study4it4as4such, rather than limit ourselves to reading China’s mega events purely on the level of
representation and ideology, upholding the reality principle. The layers of simulacra are all world/fair, but cannot be4the fair in a fully present way because Baudrillard, and others with him, have upset the dichotomisation of presence and absence.110 For this
reason, the relation between the layers of simulacra is not that of a coherent system, of stable exchange or of dialectics. The world/fair is simultaneously nowhere and now here. To be recycled, or when is the fair- I have asked in the previous section where the fair is
and argued that “fairness” is everywhere and anywhere – that the world/fair is simultaneously nowhere and now here. I turn next to the temporality of simulacra in this formulation to ask when the fair is. Looking for the world/fair somewhere and sometime beyond
the dichotomisation of presence and absence I argue that the fair works through recycling, revival and reuse, that as a rem(a)inder, it is not new. What better place to start than with beginnings and origins- “We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible
myth of origin, which reassures us about our end. 110 This problematique has been discussed among others by Jean-Luc Nancy (1991 [1983]), Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988 [1980]) and Derrida (1976 [1967]). - 159 - Because finally we have never believed in

Beginnings were certainly important to displays of China at Expo 2010. Throughout

them” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 10).

the Chinese national pavilion and dozens of Chinese regional pavilions, China is described as the
origin of the world, echoing wider media and academic discourse in China. Various Chinese regional pavilions also pride China for
figuring as the origin of (Chinese) civilisation. I use brackets here because there is some discrepancy or ambiguity in terms of communicating such messages to Chinese speaking and English speaking audiences. In the Gansu province case, for example, which circles

This
around its “long history” of more than 8000 years of civilisation, a sign that reads in English “Dadiwan Site in Qin’an County Believed to Start the Chinese Civilization” in Chinese language simply reads “Civilization begins – Qin’an Dadiwan” (文明肇启).

kind of slippage between these terms appears throughout Expo 2010 and makes Chinese
civilisation appear coterminous with civilisation as such. an This exhuming of “Chinese civilisation” functioned as a cover for a simulation of the second phase, as

ideological tool that served to make the “5000 years of uninterrupted Chinese civilisation ”
appear real. This uninterrupted history of harmony is part of the shift in legitimisation of CCP
rule from socialism to nationalism and “Chinese characteristics” ( Cheung, 2012; Billioud, 2011). Most importantly, however, this exhumation took pride
of place because of a dream, “behind this defunct power that it tries to annex, of an order that would have had nothing to do with it, and it dreams of it because it exterminated it by exhuming it as its own past” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 10). IR scholars are

performing this same exhuming ritual when we dream of the emerging “Chinese school” of IR theory as a radical alternative to “the West”.111 The fascination with this Chinese school
resembles that which Baudrillard describes of Renaissance Christians with American Indians. At
the beginning of the Christian colonising movement existed an instance of bewilderment at “the
very possibility of escaping the universal law of the Gospel ” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 10). In this 111 This “West”, on my understanding, is not real in the first
place and the breakdown of any hard line between inside and outside makes such radical dichotomization fall apart. - 160 - bewilderment we could either admit to the lack of universality of the Law, or exterminate the evidence to the contrary. The conversion or

This tactic of discovery and conversion as a

simple discovery of these different beings is usually enough, for the Renaissance Christians as for scholars of IR, to slowly exterminate them.

form of violent extermination of others has been acknowledged elsewhere in IR scholarship (Inayatullah

and it remains a tactic in PRC policy towards its “internal others” in areas like Tibet and
and Blaney, 2004)

Xinjiang. Chinese policy towards its ethnic minorities is presented as proof of the superiority of
112

Chinese civilisation: it produces more ethnics than the ethnics themselves were able to do –
since the PRC state provides modern healthcare and “scientific development” and exempts
ethnic minorities from the one child policy. Moreover the PRC state produces more ethnic
ethnics than they themselves had mustered. This promotion of Chinese ethnic minorities through their regional pavilions lies at the heart of Expo 2010, a base
from which the Chinese national pavilion rises. Everywhere, the ethnic is exotically reproduced, recycled and rescreened. Everywhere happy, colourful and anachronistic “ethnics” sing, dance and rejoice in the greatness of the motherland, as in the Xinjiang pavilion

As described
(“a harmonious place”). This overproduction is a means of destruction, a “promotion” and “rescue” which forms another step to their symbolic extermination. Nonetheless, the Expo is highly self-aware in its use of time.

above, it frequently uses clocks, hourglasses and pendula to mark the countdown to horror
scenarios of planetary destruction in order to drum home its purported message of “Better city,
Better life”. In places it moreover explicitly favours “recycling” over “linearity”. 112 This is particularly the case in current PRC
policy towards the Western “Autonomous Regions” of Tibet and Xinjiang where “splittism” is considered a challenge to the integrity of the PRC state (Barabantseva, 2011). - 161 - Figure 6: “A linear model will result in excessive pollution and waste” (Source: Astrid
Nordin) The theme pavilion City4being uses similar metaphors to Baudrillard to conceive of time, that of biological life cycles, metabolism, circulation and recycling. These are said to be key to the proper functioning of the system. This pavilion is evocatively

It is explicit about its rejection of linear models

constructed as a sewerage system interspersed with circulating billboard messages of interconnection. , as in a pair of diagrammatical

“A cyclical model will feature greater recycling and less

signs of which the first reads “A linear model will result in excessive pollution and waste”, and the second reads

waste”. [h]istory will not

Figure 7: “A cyclical model will feature greater recycling and less waste” (Source: Astrid Nordin) In this way Expo 2010, like Baudrillard, engages directly with claims to the end of history:

come to an end – since the leftovers, all the leftovers – the Church, communism, ethnic groups,
conflicts, ideologies – are indefinitely recyclable … History has only wrenched itself from cyclical
time to fall into the order of the recyclable (Coulter, 2004). Through these examples we can see the world/fair engaged in different phases of simulation, which can be understood as

In places, the world/fair appears unreflexive , as attempting to

dissimulating something, but also as dissimulating that there is nothing.

reinstate the reality of its teleological progress. In other aspects, however, its reflexive hyper-
aware recycling seems to show how “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own
pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 6). Not only, then, can the world no longer be
represented by the fair, but more importantly it can no longer be fairly re-presented, it can no
longer be made present in time and space as some full or complete presence. As such, it is not enough to remain within a simple

we need to take the next step and start analyzing China’s mega events
framework of representation and ideology in our analyses thereof, but

also as simulacra. The world/fair is simultaneously nowhere and now here. The world/fair is
recycled. To be screened, or who is the fair- the Having asked in previous sections where and when the fair is I turn to the question of who is the fair. What happens to subjectivity in

interactive technologies of the world/fair in an order of recycling, the technologies that - I argue that

make us simultaneously subjects and objects make the distinction between subject and object
untenable with the effect of making these categories unworkable. It is clear that our embodiment matters in the world fair as it differentiates
between ways of being in the world/fair along lines of class, race, gender and so on. At the Shanghai Expo, where well over 90% of visitors were Chinese, the ability to identify me as a fair-skinned visitor from the outside made me an immediate part of the exhibited
exotica (my being fair made me the fair, so to speak. And simultaneously the reverse was true, my fairness positioned me as though outside the fair, observing it/them). But Expo 2010 goes much further in making us part of the fair, through the layers of interactive
technologies by which the fair itself emerges. In the first instance, we are an active part of this emergence, we can plan, steer and shape the world/fair, we are the subjects of its emergence. Visitors are often asked to actively participate in Expo 2010. Indeed,
interactivity is a key feature of many pavilions and different layers of the world/fair, and one pavilion is expressly dedicated to displaying it. Here, photographs from Expo 2010 and its preparation, submitted via the Expo 2010 website, are circulated on screens.
Participants can also send “blessings and wishes for Expo 2010” from various websites and have them screened in the pavilion, surrounded by cards with wishes and blessings written by its visitors. In a “wishing tree” we are encouraged to write wishes on colourful
paper, fold it into airplanes and throw it into an artificial tree. In parallel, the Online Expo 2010 has many venues where one’s avatar can leave wishes, such as the Vanke pavilion or the Expo4dream4home discussed above. On a multimedia display stand visitors to
Expo 2010 can arrange various building models and simultaneously a 3D image of its layout will appear on a background wall, surrounded by previous “excellent works”. In this way, a sign for the multimedia display tells us, “You could become one of the designers of
a future city”. In Shanghai’s own pavilion at Expo 2010 the “Shanghai forever” image wall, consisting of revolving triangles and more than 15000 photographs featuring Shanghai, is a product of “mass participation and joint creation” (公众参与，共同创作) intended

Images of images are everywhere and

to expound the “design conception of ‘New horizons forever’” (or in Chinese “Shanghai eternally marches towards a new horizon”, 上海永远迈向新天地).

we can be their creators. Nonetheless, in subjecting the world/fair to our gaze and our actions,
we are simultaneously subjected by it. Our bodies are not only in the world/fair, they are the
world fair, as the fair is our bodies, simultaneously watching and watched, displaying and
displayed. Often our recognition as participants rests on our willingness to take on specific subject positions – tellingly, the English title of the pavilion for popular participation is “Citizens’ initiative pavilion”, interpellating us as citizens of the
mapped state system on display. It is through such citizenship that we are allowed recognition in the world/fair. Indeed, the different layers of simulacra share citizenship regimes as a key feature, invoked through the passport. At previous world fairs, at the Shanghai
Expo, and at the online version of Expo 2010 we can have a passport in which we collect “visa stamps” from the pavilions visited. At points, we have to actively change ourselves to make us acceptable as subjects in order to have our fair share. Passing through the
world/fair we are screened and tested. This screening echoes for the subject/object dichotomy (the who) the collapse we saw in previous sections of the here/there (the where) and the now/then (the when). As Richard Lane has observed with regards to Baudrillard:
there is an interpenetration of the screen metaphor with the notion of everything being on the surface here, including the ‘friendly’ surveillance which simultaneously shows the people under surveillance on television screens, which leads to a collapsing of
perspectival space (the removal of the ‘gap’ or distance both spatially and temporally between the viewer and the viewed) (Lane, 2000: 42). Here interpenetration is total, including of architectural and geographical space. The layers of simulacra cannot be separated.
All of Expo 2010, the Shanghai Expo and its virtual replica, Shanghai, China, all of the world/fair are indistinguishable “as a total functional screen of activities” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 76). In this way all of the world/fair operates through screening, in every sense of
the word. The example above of the excluded travel guide moreover exemplifies how our participation in the citizenship regimes of the world/fair is conditional – she was stopped at the border because she had not paid the fare. Indeed, the world/fair is most helpful
in persuading us that we can (and should) adjust our selves to pass its screening. In a book dedicated to Expo etiquette prospective visitors to the world/fair are most helpfully taught how to modify their behaviour and their bodies (Xu Bo, 2009). Chinese readers can
learn amongst other things how to greet, walk, shake hands, sit, queue and care for their personal hygiene in a polite manner. They can read about how to go to karaoke, drink coffee with foreigners and host them in their home according to global decorum. In an
appendix we find a taxonomy of etiquette, outlining customs country by country, from the US to Egypt (2009: 147-71). One drawn image, for example, shows one man (who we can assume, from the big nose in profile, is a Westerner) who sits nicely at his table with
one glass and one plate on which he is attacking a square (perhaps a piece of toast) with his knife and fork. He looks with bewilderment and a hint of fear at another man or boy who smiles a big smile as he carries his second plate to the table, where he has already
assembled two glasses, various fruits and one more plate overflowing with food (in the mish-mash of which we can identify various fruits, a whole fish, a crab and some shrimp). The picture’s caption instructs its Chinese readers the civilised manner of partaking of
the fare of the fair through a rhyming slogan: “big eyes, small stomach, cannot finish the delicious fare” (yan4da4duzi4xiao,4meiwei4chi4bu4liao 眼大肚子小， 美味吃不了) (2009: 62). The concluding chapter of the book, on “how to be a refined and well mannered
Expo person”, clearly conceives of such politeness in terms of the return to an original state. We are encouraged to “utilize the Shanghai Expo as a historical turning point, to make - 166 - every one of us change into politely speaking Expo people” and after being told
about “the Expo’s demand on the etiquette of the people of the host country” to “through the Expo make elegant etiquette return to China” (2009: 141-6, emphasis added). Thus, being a civilised citizen of the world/fair is not about being more like somebody else,

moving through the world/fair our bodies are more explicitly hi-
but about being more like your self; it is a question of recycling. At other points,

jacked by screening, made to do things potentially against our will proliferated, (and indeed through or in advance thereof),

taken apart. The Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region case for example shows visitors’ images captured and repeatedly displayed on screens. As citizens of the world/fair our bodies are captured and displayed as copy upon copy throughout Expo
2010, media and academic work, including this thesis. Figure 8: Screened in Ningxia autonomous region case (Source: Astrid Nordin) This hijacking technology is not simply in the hands of states. Siemens powerfully commoditised Chinese cultural heritage and the
Chinese national modernisation project in its Tianxia4yi4jia pavilion discussed above. To English language audiences the pavilion was marketed through the name We4are4the4world, a name which aptly brings out the recycling nature of the fair through reviving

which also showcases the ambiguity of the question “who is the world/fair”. The
Michael Jackson’s old hit song, but

“we” is ambiguous and inside the pavilion the capacity in which “we” become the world/fair is
telling – as described above, our faces pass through a computer program and are recycled on screen as avatars, transformed, singing along with the Expo 2010 theme tune. Our avatars in the virtual version of Expo 2010 are, to some extent at least, a

Our
consequence of our volition and choice, albeit screened and monitored with a mandatory Chinese ID number registration. In Siemens’ corporate version of “All- under-heaven” we are the world/fair without being told in what our stardom will consist.

avatars are exposed as pre-programmed, as playing a pre-scribed role, and this play has only
one script, one where we all sing along with the Chinese tune . From these examples we can see two kinds of technologies operating in the world/fair: ones
that represent the world and ones that operate through simulation, “provoking a reflexive awareness of artificiality and simulacra”: [t]he first of these conceives of technology as enabler, and is the concept that lies behind the notion of the Expo as a technology of
nationhood. Technology enables a perspective that can produce wholeness from fragmentation. Expo enables the appearance of the world as a whole, through the revelation of the fragments that are cut from it and the apparent celebration of their differences

Expo 2010’s use of interactive technologies moved away from “representations” of the
(Harvey, 1996: 123).

world as we know it to be. It celebrated instead the possibility of producing a simulated world,
copies of copies (dis)interested in an original: a world of images more real than the real, a
fascination with the hyper-real, pretensions to realities that were never there in the first place
or at least not in such perfect form, concrete manifestations of abstract possibilities [that]
produce the essence of life itself as outcome not origin w]e (Harvey, 1996: 123). The examples discussed here reaffirm a rather sinister side to simulation: “[

are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous,

information system – from all work to all play, a deadly game ” (Haraway, 1991: 161). Through these technologies of the world/fair, not only our concepts of
spatiality and temporality, but also our notions of subject and object, are displaced. Being in a simulacral world/fair is simulacral being. As such, we need to move beyond analyses of Chinese “mega events” through concepts of simple representation and reality, and

We are copies of copies without original, simulacral avatars in virtual

work to understand how they operate through simulation and simulacra.

hyper-reality. The Expo is us: our bodies, our dreams, our future.

Their harmonious conception of Chinese rise to the global stage is nothing but
the integration of China into the Westphalian order of integral reality – you
should be skeptical of academic claims of this nature as they circulate
academia.
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin [Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster
University], “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of
Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages
135-149)

China’s rise is commonly described in terms of inevitable destiny because of history .

We have seen how

Meanwhile, the PRC leadership is strictly managing the imagined form and significance of such a rise . Since

2008 China has placed new focus on using mega events to shape the expectations of domestic and

international audiences, and thus to shape the future. Such mega events included the 2008 Olympic games, the
2009 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, as well as Expo 2010 Shanghai China. Expo
2010 was seen as an expression of and tool for the building of harmonious world by Chinese
academics (for example Zou Keyuan, 2011: 11). Yan Xuetong’s Ancient4 Chinese4Thought4was adorned with an image of the Chinese national pavilion at the Expo on its book cover. The
Expo was also associated with harmony by the party- state . Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao stuck
closely to the official articulation of “harmonious world” when he described the Shanghai Expo
as: an encyclopedia lying open on the land and a magnificent painting showcasing the
integration and harmony of diverse cultures … The World Expo is a vivid demonstration of the
diversity of human civilizations. The Shanghai Expo has offered a broad stage for inter-cultural
exchanges and integration, reminding us that we live in a divers and colorful world (Wen Jiabao, 2010a). He
continued to argue that the Expo had fully demonstrated harmony to be the common aspiration of mankind,

and that the Expo was above national, ethnic and religious boundaries. This, to Premier Wen, was why “[i]t is important that
countries … work together to build a harmonious world of lasting peace and common prosperity” (Wen Jiabao, 2010a). The Expo was made possible by China ’s

economic rise, but was also part of establishing the story of such a rise as true, and of narrating
a future where China rises to be the benevolent leader of a new harmonious world order. In this chapter
I examine the way ideas of China’s role as leader of a harmonious world proliferated at Expo 2010. I go about this examination
in two parts. In the first part I trace the two cosmologies that I outlined in the academic literatures in the previous chapter, “unit- based” and “holistic” spatial imaginaries. I continue to argue, now in the context of
Expo 2010, that the two cosmologies are not mutually exclusive. I show how they are deployed at the Expo in ways that reinforce one another by ordering spatial difference through teleological time. The two
cosmologies are worked out in conjunction with one another at Expo 2010, in ways that support a particular discourse on China and the world, prescriptive of a particular future where China leads a new

the Expo worldview portrays itself as “from the

harmonious world order. Like some of the academic literatures examined in the previous chapter,

world” or “from everywhere”, yet insists on “specifically Chinese” terms and experience, and on
the singular China’s Future as the (harmonious) world’s Future. On this view, there is only one
Future, and it does not welcome contestation. Having recognised this effect of harmony at the Expo, I argue in the second part that we need to
move beyond the reading of mega events as simple representation and ideology and read it also
as simulation and simulacra. Reading the Chinese world fair as a simulacrum of world order can
provide different ways of relating “the West” to its “other country” China. I examine this relation through asking what it
means to be the fair: Where is the world fair- When is the world fair- Who is the world fair- Reading the

world/fair as simulacrum disrupts the fair’s notions of inside and outside, now and then, subject
and object to the point where these terms are no longer workable. What we end up with is not the many turning into the one, with
the convergence of others into the self. Instead, what remains is a fragmented plethora of truth, not the unreal but the hyper-real. My reading of Expo 2010 as simulacra examines some of the distinctions implied
in the where,4when4and4who4of the world/fair, and shows that we may be better off not taking our distinctions so seriously. THE TWO COSMOLOGIES AND HARMONY AT EXPO 2010 Expo 2010 took place in the

Expo 2010 has been read in

tradition of scientific and industrial world fairs following on from the Great4Exhibition4of4Industries4of4All4Nations that was held in London in 1851.

China to symbolise the greatness and international significance of China – indeed, it was the
largest, most expensive, and most visited of its kind (Barboza, 2010; Xinhua, 2010d; 2010e). The 73 million visitors who passed through the Expo in
Shanghai during the six months it was officially open as world fair would be even greater if one counted the subsequent visitors attracted to the site’s permanent monuments (the Chinese national pavilion for
example has been turned into a permanent museum) and to the online version of Expo 2010, where one’s avatar can stroll through a virtual 3D replica of the site, visit pavilions and partake in numerous

Unit-based spatial imaginaries are immediately obvious at the Expo.

exhibitions as well as interact with other visitors.

Space at the Expo is typically imagined in a modernist manner as a flat surface upon which
humans act, as a “stage” or “platform”. As for the unit-based territorialisation of this surface,
the Expo site is organised as an imagined state system, divided into bounded continents of
national pavilions. At the online Expo, we can take guided tours of pavilions and exhibitions and get a virtual passport in which we can collect visa stamps from the various territories visited.
Likewise, at the Expo visitors, who may never have been abroad and may not own a passport in the

outside world, can get a multitude of visa stamps and “play” at being well-travelled. It is an enactment of the
world that pretends such international life is readily available and unrestricted. It draws up borders and barriers in order to let them be

crossed, but by no means erased or blurred. Through turning visa collection into a game, border controls appear innocent at the same time as their
indisputable “natural existence” between states is reinforced. However, it becomes clear that partaking in this game of “open borders” is conditional. At the Expo, I met a young travel guide, who visited the Expo
with 60 tourists from Beijing. While her group went into the Pavilion of Future (subtitled “Dream inspires the future”) and had their pretend passports stamped, she waited ticketless outside, stopped at the border
because she did not have the right papers. Simultaneously, the “external” nation-state system echoed in citizenship regimes inside the Expo when producing a “real” passport meant one could jump pavilion

This way of conceiving of space in terms of bordered units was marked

queues for the pavilion of the country that had issued it.

throughout the Expo. China’s own pavilion of regions was no exception, subdivided into regional
containers of culture – many even look like boxes with essentialised culture exhibited inside, like
the virtual version of the Tibetan pavilion below. Although obviously steeped in a unit-based spatial
imaginary, these bounded units are also enveloped in the holistic celestial order of one-
worldness. The key terms in holistic imaginaries are the “all-encompassing” or “all-inclusive”,
that with “no outside” or “no exception”, “network”, and of course “Tianxia”. The holistic
imagination of everything as always already connected to everything else appears in the room in
Urbanian4Pavilion themed “Connection”(交往). This room is based on the “scientific theory called
six degrees spatial theory”, which states that no two people are separated by more than 6
relationships (Xu Wei, 2010: 27). On the ceiling a film is projected showing selected people ’s
movements on a map. Portraits of people appear in circles connected by lines to more and more
other people/circles until they form a web or network on the round screen, bringing your mind
to the Earth and thus the idea that all people of the world are connected (Xu Wei, 2010: 27).
There is no one outside the network. Moreover, this claim is backed up by science, and thus
requires no further explanation. The Pavilion of City Being describes the city as a living being or organism, focusing on the theme of shengming (生命), meaning life, being or
bios. The holistic imagination implied in this idea of the city as one body or life is clear from slogans such as “city being multiplies endlessly, held together by superseding cycles” and “the unceasing adjustment
between people and city maintains city life harmonious, healthy city life requires our common protection” (Xu Wei, 2010: 40). The Pavilion4of4Urban4Planet moreover draws on a holistic spatial imaginary to tell
us on the “Road of Solutions” how the resolution to the world’s problems can be found: “[t]he seasons change, settlement becomes cities and trading routes develop into a completely4networked4world … Only
with open mind and allWinclusive4view can we bring the hope of sustainable growth to our planet Earth” (emphasis added). These references to the organically connected single organism or body, the web of
connections with no outside and the completely networked world with an all inclusive view all provide the basis of a holistic spatial imaginary. Moreover, the comments above indicate that this holistic imaginary is

From the above we see that imaginations of

taken to demand the harmonious balance of all and “our common protection”. Classification in time and space

China in the world at the Expo draw on both unit-based and holistic notions of space. This instance shows the
two spatial imaginaries coexisting in contemporary China, and so refutes the idea that one would be superseding the other. I next look closer at how they work in tandem at the Expo. Throughout the Expo,

holistic Tianxia concept

classification of space is marked. We have seen it above in the unit-based form of mapping state units, as well as that of regions as containers of culture. The

does not refer to the jigsaw-puzzled space of the unit-based imaginary, but nonetheless
classifies and sequentialises through a centre/periphery , civilised/barbarian divide. Tianxia
ordering is similar to the Expo site centred on the Chinese pavilion. Similarly, the comparison and contrasting of “East” and “West”
is ever present. In a film screened at the Pavilion of City Being we are watched from the screen by “the eyes of Eastern people, the eyes of Western people” (Xu Wei, 2010: 49). Likewise, “Pre- show Hall” in the
Pavilion4of4Footprint shows “ideal cities” as they have been imagined in the East and in the West. Dreaming of a better future is described as universal, or eternal (永恒), but similarities end there and

juxtaposition takes over.The division of space into civilisational/regional/national units is aligned with division
of time into eras, often in its ancient/modern guise. This is where, just as in much academic
discourse, we see evidence of the alignment of dichotomized here/there, modern/ancient and
subject/object (cf. Fabian, 1983). As a number of “developing” countries could not fund their own participation in Expo 2010, Chinese subsidies to these countries ensured there were more state
and organisation pavilions, 246, than at any previous Expo (Xinhua, 2010e). The vastly different budgets and scales meant pavilions gave

the impression of a developmental or aspirational classification, in a visual display of global

inequality. As in global development, China financially supported “less-developed” states in a
way that visually emphasised the impressive scale and central location of the Chinese pavilion
and reaffirmed China as a “helper” and “developer” ahead of the “helped” and “developing”
states at the Expo site periphery, such as the African Joint and Pacific Joint pavilions. This convening of others
differentiated in space through time is crystallised in Urbanian4Pavilion, which shows the morning rituals of families taken to represent five continents. It shows the similarities of getting up, washing, brushing
teeth and so on of people from these different spatial/cultural units. However, the sequentialisation in time is obvious. The man from Rotterdam has an electric toothbrush and the Chinese middleclass office
worker wears new pyjamas in his modern bathroom, whereas the bathroom in Rio de Janeiro looks worn and dirty. In this way spatial difference is aligned in temporal sequence. We all do the same thing; it is just

Spatial division is thus not only conceived as classification of

that some are a bit behind on the road to Modernisation and Development.

space, but also as classification in time. This classification is moreover conceived of in a time that
runs towards a particular end. Clock time running out or towards the future is emphasised at the
Shanghai train station’s Expo clock tower, as well as throughout the Expo itself by feature clocks,
ticking pendula and hourglasses. The intertwining of temporal notions with strong assertions as to what Chinese identity is in world affairs is clear from an introduction to
the Expo on its official website, ringing with familiarity with the official party-line: [w]ith a long civilisation, China favours international exchange and loves world peace. China owes its successful bid for the World
Exposition in 2010 to the international community’s support for and confidence in its reform and opening-up. The Exposition will be the first registered World Exposition in a developing country, which gives
expression to the expectations the world’s people place on China’s future development … We count on the continuing attention, support and participation of all the peace-loving countries (Expo 2010 Shanghai

In this context, depicting China as original confers on it a status as fore-runner of

China, 2008).

developing countries, conveniently forgetting the 1949 Haiti Expo (Expo 2010 Shanghai China,
2006a; Bureau International des Expositions, 2011).4 China’s present and future direction is
frequently depicted in terms of a return to an original or always intended state. The Expo itself is
typically portrayed as the fulfilment (led by the PRC/CCP party-state) of an ancient Chinese
dream. This portrayal appears in articles (Expo 2010 Shanghai China, 2006b), in books such as 1004 years4of4Expo4dream4(百年世博梦)4(Shanghai shibohui shiwu xietiaoju, 2009), and in the World Expo
Museum that looks back at more than 150 years of historical preparation for the Shanghai Expo. Online commentators echo such narratives, and one commentator on the Expo online “Dream Wall” comments
 I believe in China’s actual strength, a country that has 5000 years of civilisation must be able
that “

to produce glory once more” (Expo Shanghai Online, 2010c). Finally, the feature film of the Xinjiang regional pavilion demonstrates how classification of
time and space come together into a particular, goal-oriented progress under PRC leadership :
[Xinjiang is] the communication land of four great civilisations of the world ... It once was the

road of bonze Xuanzang, the silk road, the road of western expedition and the road of eastern
return … The great transformation of 60 years is the evidence of our diligence and intelligence …
Today, the assistance from the motherland also lights up the passion in Xinjiang (Expo Shanghai
Online, 2010g).104 This quote brings together the numerous elements that make possible the problematic imagination of self-other relations that is under discussion in this thesis. A separation
between civilisations is posited. Xinjiang is subsequently conceived of as a place where these separate civilisations meet. Progress is imagined as a return to a state that once was, and that is now returning through
Chinese diligence in its (re)civilising mission. One can only wonder at the irony as the motherland’s assistance “lights up the passion” in Xinjiang after the brutal ethnic clashes in the years running up to the Expo
(Xinhua, 2009d). 104 Bonze Xuan Zang is a Buddhist sage from Chinese literary classic Journey to the West. Metaphors of lines, circles, spirals and pendula may be used to describe this temporality, but may be
misleading as they change significance in their combined use (cf. Gell, 1992). Analogue clock time, for instance, may be circular if used as for example a toy, but indicates linear time flow when allied with other
concepts, such as civilisational progress and development. The point of China’s progress/return (to its rightful place as world leader) is not whether we describe it using the metaphor of the circle or the line. Of

key importance is instead the way it operates through a classification of time and space: and
there is no doubt as to where we are/should be heading. The point is that these temporalities
support each other and lead towards the same ultimate endpoint. The Future is one where
China leads a new harmonious world order Chinese discussions surrounding the Expo typically
conferred on it one central meaning – it was a sign of China’s legitimate rise to world leadership.
Wishes for Chinese superiority similarly appeared in the online Vanke-Pavilion, the corporate pavilion for a large Chinese property developer. One commentator wished that in 2049 “China is in

leading position in the world” (中国处于世界领先) and another exclaimed that by then “China has really changed into a great cultural country, ten thousand countries come to
pay tribute ” (万邦来朝)105 (Expo Shanghai Online, 2010f). A majority of participants in the Expo’s “Dream wall” expressed love for the motherland, the Expo and Shanghai, with one exclaiming, “Go

Expo, China is invincible ” (Go Expo 中国无敌) (Expo Shanghai Online, 2010c). Key to justifying this Chinese world leadership is depicting such a world as “harmonious”, in accordance
with the harmonious world discourse. The Expo is steeped in this language of harmony. China’s national pavilion begins with the film “Harmonious China” (hexie4Zhongguo4 和谐中国) and concludes with telling

us “ the lotus flowers blossom, symbolising the harmonious and glorious future of Chinese cities ”
(Expo Shanghai Online, 2010a). The Xinjiang pavilion is labelled “Xinjiang – a 105 This set formulation is commonly used to indicate great power. - 146 - harmonious land”. We go to the Expo on a harmonious train,
to visit Harmony Tower, and if we hurt ourselves we can have a band-aid from the harmonious first aid kit. Figure 5: Harmonious first aid kit (Source: Astrid Nordin) The language of harmony is also prevalent

among the wishes of Vanke4Pavilion. One participant wishes: 2010: A life at ease A peaceful and stable job Wishing the great
motherland is increasingly thriving and prosperous My family is increasingly harmonious and
happy 2049: There is no war in any corner of the world There is no discrimination Peaceful
getting along and also wish that when we reach that time people from every corner of the world
can all profoundly understand China (Expo Shanghai Online, 2010f). We see here a mixing of
ideas of harmony with notions of a good personal life, a thriving China, and an image of
peacefully connected world citizens who comprehend China. Again, there is an emphasis on
making foreigners understand “China”. A blurb for Pavilion4of4Future’s harmony sculpture similarly personalizes world harmony: “core concept of traditional
Chinese culture: only the harmony of the world and all things constitute the harmony of human’s spirit”. Just as in Zhao’s Tianxia, we require the harmony of all things . There can be no

outside to the system, or it will fail. All things must be incorporated. This, the claim is, is a
distinctly Chinese idea of world order. Throughout all of these imaginings of China in the (harmonious) world, the two spatial imaginaries combine in ways that repeat
the problems outlined with regards to academic discourse, making difficult the imagination of others as coeval. The unit- based spatial imaginary provides a

condition of possibility of Chinese particularism. Throughout the Chinese pavilions at the Expo,
China is the very origin of civilisation and of the world – it is where the first fire burnt, the first
bird flew, and the superior values of Confucian harmony originated. The holistic spatial imaginary becomes key to imagining the
need for spreading this civilisation, and for the Chinese civilising mission we currently observe around the world (Nyíri, 2006). The holistic idea of space is core to

construing the rise of China to leadership of a harmonious world as peaceful and beneficial to
all. In actuality, there is no outside, everything is always already connected to everything else,
and the view of the Chinese party elite is a “view from nowhere”, or a view “from the world”. Many
of these themes are echoed through non-Chinese pavilions at the Expo, including the two spatial imaginaries, the goal-oriented notion of time, East-West juxtaposition and a reliance on blurry notions of

many foreign states, organisations and enterprises used the Expo to exhibit their
civilisation. Notably,

willingness to buy into the Chinese discourse on harmonious world , allowing it prominence of
place in the way they name, speak of and write of their own pavilions. “Harmony” in particular is
given legitimacy through frequent use in foreign pavilions, such as “Harmonious relations”
(Pacific joint pavilion), “Feel the harmony” (Austria), “Harmony of the heart, harmony of the
skills” (Japan), and so on. While some academic analyses of Chinese foreign policy argue that the PRC is being “socialised” into values and norms of “international society” (Johnston,
2008), the Expo showed the opposite: “outsiders” competing to be most attentive to and accommodating of China’s purported self- image. Non-Chinese corporate pavilions

too helped reinforce and legitimate this particular version of “harmony” with reference to
Chinese history. One example was the pavilion called “Tianxia yi4jia” (天下一家): “Tianxia one family”. This pavilion was German
multinational Siemens’ corporate pavilion, showcasing its technology through the aspirational middle class future of interactive games and wine coolers that will apparently be available to Chinese people in 2015.

As in a miracle of scientific development our faces

Entering Siemens’ harmonious and commercialised rendition of Tianxia we are photographed.

appear on a film screen at the exit, manipulated to sing together in harmony with the Expo
theme tune. The simulation is explained at a sign at the pavillion entrance: [a]fter scanning and capturing the user’s
facial features, the image will be recorded and transformed into an avatar allowing users to feel
as if they are starring in a pre-programmed movie or video … How will this technology better our
lives- Provides an entertaining experience for people to play a role in a movie or become a
“star”. Everyone has the chance to stand in the spotlight. China’s Future, in this commercialised
version as in its official one, provides the time and space for us all to be stars in the spotlight . It is
worth recalling here the organisers’ own reading where the Expo took place because of “the international community’s support for and confidence in [China’s] reform and opening-up”, expressing “the
expectations the world’s people place on China’s future development” with China sternly counting on “the continuing attention, support and participation of all the peace-loving countries” (Expo 2010 Shanghai
China, 2008). In this version of the Future World we are allowed into the spotlight on the condition that we become avatars that sing simultaneously in one voice to the Chinese melody. Foreclosing futures at Expo
2010 In this part of the chapter I have argued that the holistic and unit-based cosmologies, or spatial imaginaries, were prominent at Expo 2010, aligning classified units of time/space in sequence. They are
simultaneously deployed in ways that support a particular discourse on China and the World, prescriptive of a particular future where China leads a new harmonious world order. World fairs were from the outset
an exercise where self/other relations were heavily tinted by imperialism (Rydell, 1984). Today, although the specific selves and others reproduced by the Expo may be somewhat different their fundamental
manoeuvre is the same. The articulation of time/space with the narrative of harmony is problematic, again and despite itself, because it marginalises concepts of coeval multiplicities and difference. Others are not

Just like Zhao’s Tianxia, the Expo worldview portrays itself as “from the world”
properly different, they are just behind.

or “from everywhere”, yet insists on “specifically Chinese” terms and experience. This is
reinforced as the Expo shows an already nationalistic domestic audience a China that rightfully
rises to the place of world leader and the folly of anyone imagining that such a rise would be less
than beneficial to all. This is buttressed by readings of foreign involvement and investment in
the Expo as endorsements of the Chinese model for its rise, and is taken as a showcase for how
harmonious the world is under Chinese leadership. The Expo worldview portrays itself as “from the world”, yet insists on the singular China’s Future as
the (Harmonious) World’s Future. On this view, there is only one Future, and it does not welcome contestation. I propose that we can refuse scripting our songs in the pre-programmed manner suggested by
predominant imaginings at the Expo. It can indeed be possible to meet the challenge of coeval multiplicities that time and space should present us with. In the next section I begin to unsettle the dominant
rendition of time, space and China in the world by way of reading it through the work of Jean Baudrillard.

Debate is disappearing in the proliferation of harmony – the holistic

spacitalization of the globe produces a domesticticated form of difference that
eliminates the possibility for the truly Other– harmony is not meaningless, but
imbued with “hyper-meaning” – more meaningful than meaningful, which
paradoxically makes harmony terminate only its own disappearance – we
should engage in onco-operative logic to make possible coeval multiplicies that
undermine the perfectibility of debate in a process that pushes through to its
disappearance – this is the only political act left – bet on the form of 恶搞 (Ègǎo)
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin [Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster
University], “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of
Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages
214-231)
 Thinking about multiplicity has remained a key conundrum for
Conclusion: Futures of harmony and coeval multiplicities

those who want to think about global politics as truly political. One attempt at managing and grappling with the
opportunities and challenges that multiplicity presents us with from “beyond the European imperium” has been recent Chinese thinking about harmony and the concept of

This thesis is to be read in the context of recently undertaken

“harmonious world” (Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004: ix).

efforts to understand this and other normative challenges to the way we imagine the times,
spaces and differences of the contemporary world. Its prime task has been to scrutinise the way
assumptions about time, space and multiplicity play out in this challenge to what is perceived as
Western ways of imagining world order. With such a challenge in mind, this thesis has embarked on a disruptive reading of the multiplicity
problematique in the “harmonious world” concept. THE CONTINUED PROLIFERATION OF HARMONY Before moving on to discuss the findings of this thesis and their implications

The term “harmonious world” has been written into

for thinking multiplicity, what for the immediate future of harmonious world-

the CCP constitution and numerous official strategy documents. Foreign envoys to the PRC have
been taken on Confucius-themed trips by the Chinese state, accompanied by a number of the
academic promoters of harmonious world through whom the envoys “acquired a deeper
understanding of China’s traditional cultural philosophy such as ‘seeking for harmony but not
uniformity’, ‘living in harmony with all other nations’” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC, 2011a). The PRC
establishment has also urged other countries to be harmonious, recently for example in relation
to Vietnam (Xinhua, 2012d), the Maldives (Xinhua, 2012a) and India (Xinhua, 2012b). “Harmonious world” has moreover been well received by a
number of foreign dignitaries, and spread into their own language use. Leaders who have recently used it in ways that resonate with the sinister side we have seen to harmony
include Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad (CNTV, 2012). At the same time, it has not been given positive play only by alleged “rogues” of the international arena, but by more
widely accepted players such as Kevin Rudd, Australia’s former minister of foreign affairs. He confidently declared, in a speech given to the Asia Society in New York in 2012:

UN
“there is something in China’s concept of a ‘harmonious world’; which the US, the rest of the region and the rest of the world can work with” (Rudd, 2012).

officials, such as Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, have also promoted harmony in official settings
(Xinhua, 2012c). Such endorsement has been played up by Chinese officials, for example Li Baodong, Chinese permanent representative to the UN, who refers to “the spirit of

“Harmonious world”
cultural diversity and harmony in the world advocated by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the United Nations” (Xinhua, 2012e).

and the traditional strategic culture with which it has been associated, then, has not only been
deeply entrenched in PRC policy documents, but has also been given positive play by other
influential individuals and organisations. This supports Joseph Cheng’s recent expectation that it will remain a major element of Chinaʼs public
diplomacy in the foreseeable future: “[a]s China pursues an increasingly ambitious role in regional leadership and

international institution-building, its publicity work on building a ʻharmonious worldʼ will likely
be stepped up” (Cheng, 2012: 183). As explained at the outset of this thesis, every generation of Chinese leadership has used tifa to stamp their mark on Chinese
politics. Xi Jinping, who is expected to take over leadership after Hu Jintao in 2012, is not known as a great friend of Hu (he was not Hu’s preferred candidate for succession). We
can therefore expect that Xi will introduce other tifa during his time in leadership, and some may expect a decline of “harmonious world” after he comes to power.

However, Xi has also made use of the language of harmony in the run-up to his take-over, for
example when he headed a large Central Government delegation to the Tibet Autonomous
Region Between 17 and 22 July 2011, for events to mark the 60th Anniversary of what the party-
state calls the “peaceful liberation of Tibet”.155 Moreover, he was responsible for the inauguration ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics,
where harmony played a central role. For these reasons, it seems reasonable to expect that Hu’s stepping down from the presidency is not the last we will hear of harmonious

world in Chinese policy or academic discourse (see Nordin, 2011: 17). The cat-and-mouse game with online dissidents also
continues. A search for banned terms on Sina Weibo on 2 November 2011 showed the term “蟹农场” (xienongchang) to be censored. The term
refers to a series of political cartoons with the English name “Hexie farm”. This “hexie” refers to the double meaning of harmony

and rivercrabs, with the Chinese title using the term for “crab” (xie 蟹) in this formulation. The
cartoons focus on censorship and violent promotion of harmonious policies and have become
widespread amongst other things through the China Digital Times project (Hernandez, 2011; Hexie Farm, 2011).
New puns are constantly created, then censored, giving rise to further new terms. The rivercrabs
have now morphed into new humorous “national treasure” words that are deployed in egao
culture online. One such replacement word for harmony/rivercrabs is shuichan ( 水产), meaning
“aquatic product”. Another is the evocative near-homonym hēxiě or hēxuè (喝血), which means to “drink blood”, an expression particularly popular in Taiwan.
Through such terms, harmony/rivercrabs continue to morph, metastasise and proliferate. In my
examination of what “harmonious world” does in terms of imagining time space and multiplicity, I set out in
this thesis to answer three sub-questions. I will now return to each of these questions in turn, and will make three key claims with regards to the doings of harmony. 155 For
examples of Xi promoting harmony during the celebration, see the full text (Xi Jinping, 2011a: 2, 3, 4) or a full length CCTV recording (Xi Jinping, 2011b: 12:27, 24:06, 33:24) of his
speech at the anniversary ceremony . Xi’s speech was also preceded by others stressing civilizational harmony (wenming4hexie 文明和谐), and followed by a parade displaying
ethnic harmony and unity under the theme “building harmony”, as can be seen in additional CCTV recordings of the ceremony. The broadcast ends by an assertion of the
expected harmonious life of ethnic unity under the central government (CCTV, 2011: 19:19, 20:20, 138:50, 147:14). - 217 - “HARMONIOUS WORLD” REPEATS AN
ALLOCHRONISING LOGIC The first question I asked in the introduction to this thesis was: what are the assumptions behind and political consequences of different ways of
articulating “harmonious world”, particularly in terms of ordering time and space- With regards to this question, this thesis has found that much of the official and academic
discourse on harmonious world deploys terms drawn from ancient Chinese thought. We have seen particular emphasis on concepts drawn from pre-Qin texts, such as “All-under

heaven” (Tianxia4 天下), “the kingly way” (wangdao4 王道), “the hegemonic way” (badao 霸道), “harmonism” (hehe4zhuyi4 和合主义), and so on. Yet, in the texts I have
examined on “harmonious world”, these terms are aligned with concepts of traditional
“Western” IR and fall back on the spatial categories of traditional IR theories. Through these
spatial categories, the debates reflect different ways of imagining the space of a harmonious
world. Some articulations rely on a unit-based political cosmology, including civilizations, regions
and most of all bounded states. Others are based in holistic assumptions, deploying IR-terms
such as “network space”, holistic globalisation (specifically quanqiu4yitihua4 全球一体化) and an understanding of
Tianxia that similarly conceives of a space where everything is already connected to everything
else. Both of these ways of imagining space, however, marry their spatialisations with
conventional notions of modernization and progress, or “turning the bad into the good”, that
imply a linear or teleological time. Such imaginations organise difference in epochs, and binaries such as advanced/behind, modern/traditional,
developed/developing and bad/good. Through these concepts multiplicity is aligned in a historical queue with

Chinese elites at the head. I have shown these terms and spatio-temporal imaginings to
reappear in party-state documents, academic writing and the visualisations of harmonious
world at Expo In all these contexts, I have shown some of the things “harmonious world” does at the level of ideology, as a second order simulacrum. At this level,
the key “doing” of harmonious world in the contexts I examined is the allochronic organisation of time, space and multiplicity. This is politically problematic because it reduces
not only the challenge, but the opportunity that time and space could and should present us with: coeval multiplicities. This thesis thus presents a rebuttal of claims that
“harmonious world” and associated concepts such as “All-under-heaven” and “the kingly way” present a better alternative to more conventional ideas of world order.

Despite claims to the contrary, they fail to escape the problematic organisation of difference
that they criticise in “Western thought”. Through examining the unit-based and holistic political cosmologies in academic discourse and at Expo
2010 I have moreover contributed to a rebuttal of the idea that these two imaginaries are mutually exclusive with one replacing the other. I have shown instead that they are
both deployed together in contemporary China in ways that, although in certain tension, are mutually supportive in underpinning an allochronic world imaginary.

Therefore, although there is some tension between different terms and spatialisations used to
articulate harmonious world, the diversity of accounts is undermined in that they all fall back on
allochronising assumptions. In that sense, what they all do is produce a domesticated form of
difference that denies an open future. Through these findings this thesis intervenes in two fields. For students of China and its foreign policy, it
provides a rebuttal of some important claims by Chinese scholars and policy makers. The most important implication is that scholars must stop treating China as the “other
country”. China is not “behind” as some infant being socialised, as Johnston and others would have it. Nor is it a radical other to “the West” that naturally escapes the problems
of allochronic thought, as in Chinese exceptionalist narratives. For scholars interested in time, space and multiplicity in IR, and in the allochrony problematique in particular,

this thesis provides a detailed study of a concept from China, a context that has hitherto
received less attention in these debates than it merits. For these debates, it cautions against the
allure of China as an Other or alternative that escapes the traps of allochronic thinking.
HARMONISATION WILL NOT TAKE PLACE The second question I asked in the introduction to this thesis was: what is the overall effect of the proliferation of “harmony” in
contemporary Chinese society- After officially launching “harmonious world” in 2005, the PRC party-state has continued spurring the concept’s proliferation in Chinese and

Through the studies of this thesis we have seen “harmonious world” amass so
international contexts.

much meaning that the possibility of using it as a meaningful concept has disappeared. Its
meaning has been shown to designate total co-operation, total subjugation, total respect for
difference, total control, totally moral leadership, and so on. Where other scholars have tried to
find out its true meaning, I have shown instead how the illusion of this possibility has
disappeared – not into meaninglessness, but into what we may by Baudrillardean analogy think
of as transparent or obscene “hyper-meaning”, the more meaningful than the meaningful. As an
effect of this mass proliferation the term has become overripe and collapsed under the weight
of its own meaning to the point where it can no longer function as an ideal. The fantasy and the
reality of harmonious world have collapsed into one another and the seduction of the concept
has been lost. The proliferation of harmony has made it disappear as an imagined metaphysical
possibility. Harmonization has not taken place, is not taking place and will not take place. This effect of
the proliferation of harmony, as a third order simulacrum of simulation rather than second order ideology, is a key finding. Some scholars have called for caution with regards to
the oppressive, homogenising and depoliticising aspect of Chinese harmonization. In the context of its “hyper- meaning”, resistance to harmony and harmonious world must be

The threat posed by proliferating harmonisation is not only the policing of

thought of differently.

boundaries that I describe on the level of ideology: cracking down on dissidents, blocking words
online, preventing people from tweeting. Indeed, we might want to reflect on why many of us
are so obsessed with condemning the limitation of communication: will the revolution really be
tweeted- Instead, a more spectacular threat to harmony comes from the excess of
communicating harmony itself, which destroys the illusion of the real in the harmony concept.
In that sense the mass- communication of harmony is dangerous on a larger metaphysical plane.
The CCP is working towards a controlled hierarchical harmony, but it becomes something completely different. They are the ones robbing harmony of its illusion. Baudrillard
writes concerning the Gulf War – which he famously declared was not taking place – that it is stupid to be for or against the war if you do not for one moment question its

Therefore, those who promote the truth of it as a war and historical

credibility or level of reality (Baudrillard, 1991).

event are the warmongers, the accomplices (Baudrillard, 1991; Merrin, 1994: 440). On the same logic, it is
misplaced to be for or against harmony. We have seen various aspects of the “hyper- meaning”
of harmony and harmonisation (total co-operation, total subjugation, total respect for difference, totally moral leadership, total control). None
of these things are taking place in contemporary China or its relations to the world. If something
is taking place, it is not harmony or harmonisation. My task here has not been to promote or oppose this term, but rather to question
its credibility and indeed level of reality. This insight and its implications for resistance is a key contribution of this thesis to both of the fields in which I intervene. Moreover,
through reading “harmonious world” in terms of both its doing and its undoing this thesis suggests a novel way in which scholars of Chinese international relations may study
foreign policy concepts in general and Chinese set phrases in particular. It thus contributes to the literatures on “doing things with words” in Chinese politics through
emphasising ways of examining the undoings that doings necessarily imply. It moreover contributes to literatures on time, space and multiplicity in IR through showing how the
thought of Derrida and Baudrillard may help us shake up the manner in which questions of multiplicity and politics can be formulated, and foreign policy concepts can be studied

in terms of excess. That harmony is not taking place, I stress once more, does not mean it does not have
effects. Two academic commentators claim with regards to its policy formulation that “it is implicit that a harmonious world is one where supposed ‘heresies’ are tolerated”
(Guo Sujian and Blanchard, 2008b: 4). Based on the finding that harmonious world repeats an allochronising logic, I am less certain that such tolerance is implied in - 221 -

Relegating “heresies” (or “others”) to a different time from our own means denying
harmonious world.

them coevalness in the here-now. The implication in the texts I have examined is that “they” will
eventually come around to seeing the world as “we” do, which in turn has depoliticising
effects.THERE IS AN APORIA AT THE HEART OF HARMONIOUS WORLD AND COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES The third and final question I asked in the introduction to this thesis
was: are there contradictions in or between different articulations of “harmonious world”- How are these made visible- I have argued above that the diversity of more or less
official accounts of a harmonious world is undermined in that they all fall back on allochronising assumptions. However, I have also shown how official language migrates and
morphs in different contexts through which “harmonious world” is undone – resisted, deconstructed and changed – by its very own logic. A reading of China’s mega events as
simulacra of both the second and third order (ideology and simulation) has revealed how notions of inside/outside, now/then and subject/object come apart. Moreover,
dissident play with the concept of harmony makes visible certain contradictions, both between different articulations of harmonious world and within the concept itself. I began
this thesis by outlining the two contradictory imperatives of multiplicity, the threat and the promise of difference. Throughout the examination of harmonious world, this term

Harmony must by definition be universal, but its

has revealed itself as mirroring the aporetic imperatives of coeval multiplicity.

universalisation by definition makes harmony impossible. Bart Rockman has suggested that harmony may be a “necessary glue
without which neither a society nor a polity are sustainable”, but that “complete social harmony is ultimately suffocating and illiberal” (Rockman, 2010: 207). Jacob Torfing has

post-political vision of politics and

also taken issue with predominant understandings of harmony in Southeast Asia that he argues present a “

governance that tends to eliminate power and antagonism ” (Torfing, 2010: 257). Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe, he
understands such a post-political vision as both theoretically unsustainable and politically
dangerous. It is theoretically unsustainable because power and antagonism are inevitable
features of the political dimensions of politics, as I have described the political (cf. Baudrillard, 1990 [1983]: 162,
182). Therefore politics: cannot be reduced to a question of translating diverging interests into effective

[win-win] policy solutions, since that can be done in an entirely de- politicized fashion, for
example, by applying a particular decision-making rule, relying on a certain rationality or
appealing to a set of undisputed virtues and values. Of course, politics always invokes particular
rules, rationalities and values, but the political dimension of politics is precisely what escapes all
this (Torfing, 2010: 257-8). Politics, then, unavoidably involves a choice that means eliminating alternative
options. Moreover, although we base our decisions on reasons and may have strong motivations
for choosing what we choose, we will never be able to provide an ultimate ground for any given
choice – in Derridean terms, such grounds will always be indefinitely deferred. Therefore, “the ultimate
decision will have to rely on a skilful combination of rhetorical strategies and the use of force ”
(Torfing, 2010: 258). The acts of exclusion that politics necessarily entails will produce antagonism

between those who identify with the included options and those who do not. For this reason,
the attempt by the promoters of harmony to dissociate harmonious politics from the exercise of
power, force and the production of antagonism, claiming a harmony where everyone wins and
no-one looses, is bound to fail. Moreover, the post-political vision of politics and harmony is
politically dangerous because its denial of antagonism will tend to alienate those excluded from
consideration – those who count as “no-one” when everyone wins and no-one loses. This, Torfing writes,
will tend to displace antagonistic struggles from the realm of the political to the realm of morals, “where conflicts are based on non-negotiable values and the manifestation of

Such non- negotiable values would be the opposite of the co-operative

‘authentic’ identities” (Torfing, 2010: 258).

harmony sought. To both Rockman and Torfing, then, complete or perfect harmony will defeat
harmony and create disharmony. We have seen how numerous scholars argue that in order to imagine harmony, we need to imagine heterogeneity
and multiplicity. We can now add that the allochronic organisation of difference eliminates the multiplicity in the here-now that is a prerequisite for harmony. In order to
imagine heterogeneity and multiplicity we need to delineate here and there, now and then in the fathomable aspect of différance that enables us to think spacing between

to imagine multiplicity we need borders and boundaries, or else

multiple trajectories à la Massey. In other words, in order

all we have is the unitary One. Such is language. Rockman goes on to argue that although homogeneity of ascriptive identities like
ethnicity, language or religion may enhance harmony, the more important factor for constructing

harmony is “the capacity to assimilate, absorb and integrate perspectives to a common ground
for accommodation of diversity” (Rockman, 2010: 207). But the point is that the idea of a “common ground”
can only be built on exclusion, that such assimilation, absorption and integration is what reduces
the otherness of the Other to only fathomable, definable and co-operative difference. To Baudrillard, it is
the modern West’s refusal of such alterity that spawns nostalgia for the Other, who is now
always already domesticated, a mass version of what we saw in presentations of “ethnics” at
Expo 2010 (Baudrillard, 1990 [1987]: 145, 165). We have seen the same refusal of alterity in Chinese discourses
on harmonious world, with its focus on proper understanding and the insistence on difference in
order to make the world “colourful”. It is the same nostalgia and exhuming ritual that IR scholars
perform when dreaming of an emerging “Chinese school” of IR theory as a radical alternative to
“the West”. Despite this nostalgia, we must not try to “foster” difference. It is counterproductive to call for “respecting the
difference” of “marginalized groups”, as this relies on a presumption that they need to have an
Identity and makes the marginal valued as such, thus leaving the marginal where they are, “in
place”. Difference must therefore be rejected, to some extent at least, in favour of greater
otherness or alterity: “otherness [l’altérité] is not the same thing as difference. One might even say that difference is what
destroys otherness” (Baudrillard, 1993 [1990]: 127, 131). Thus “the other must stay Other, separate, perhaps
difficult to understand, uncontrollable ” (Hegarty, 2004: 118). In this way, Baudrillard advocates more “exoticism”, an interest in the other as
Other, and as beyond assimilation into “proper understanding” in the present. To Hutchings this absence of a “proper understanding” of the other in the present is no doubt

the
disappointing, because other times are indeed identified with an unpresentable supplement and thus with that which cannot be known, but only hoped for. But

Other can only remain Other insofar as we resist the urge to attempt such assimilation. The
alternative would be to fall back into “the One” and loose sight of the possibility of harmony and
coeval multiplicities. What we have, then, is an aporia at the heart of both coeval multiplicities
and of harmonious world, despite attempts to conceal it. I have aimed through this thesis to question little by little the attempts
at harmonious organisation of time and space as belonging to the sovereign that this concealment has implied. I have examined different strategies of reading and using
“harmony” in ways that reveal the excluded other of Hu’s harmony – discord and competition – to be always already there within the political and linguistic system of harmony

the harmonious system is not based on co-operation or non co-operation, but

itself. I have argued that

works according to an onco-operative logic: the quasi-suicidal logic of cancer and the
(auto)immune. Ultimately, the aim and most important contribution of this thesis has been to bring
the onco-operative uncertainty of the political back into the harmonious world concept in order
to elucidate the negotiation of danger and necessity of multiplicity. (IM)POSSIBLE COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES;
(IM)POSSIBLE HARMONY With regards to the main question of this thesis, I thus make three interrelated claims about what “harmonious world” does. First, it

repeats the allochronising logic that we recognise from “Western” discourses. Second, it disappears as an imagined metaphysical

possibility as an effect of its excessive proliferation . Third, when the aporia at the heart of the
harmony concept is recognised, it allows for a re- politicisation of “harmonious world” and
China’s role in world politics. I have argued that these findings make an important contribution to both scholars of Chinese international politics and to
theorists of time, space and multiplicity in IR. But where does this leave us- A key effect of the onco-operative logic that I have

identified in “harmonious world” is undecidability. Harmony, as simulation, is paradoxically both

totalising and violent, and impossible (cf. Grace, 2003). To begin, its fetishised perfectability is constantly
undermined: [t]he perfect crime would be to build a world-machine without defect, and to leave
it without traces. But it never succeeds. We leave traces everywhere – viruses, lapses, germs,
catastrophes – signs of defect, or imperfection (Baudrillard, 1997: 24). Moreover, contemplating the illusion of
the real reveals the object as neither the static, subordinated other of the subject, nor the
simulated project of an idealist order: the object that is neither one thing nor the other is
fundamentally illusory (Grace, 2003). In Baudrillard’s terms: [i]llusion is simply the fact that nothing is itself,
nothing means what it appears to mean. There is a kind of inner absence of everything to itself.
That is illusion. It is where we can never get hold of things as they are, where we can never
know the truth about objects, or the other (Baudrillard in Baudrillard and Butler, 1997: 49). Undecidables, then, cannot be reduced to
opposition but reside within opposition, in Derrida’s words “resisting and disorganising it, without4ever4constituting a third term” and thus without becoming dialectical

Such undecidables exist neither simply inside metaphysical discourse

(Derrida, 1987 [1972]: 43, emphasis in original).

and its constitutive binaries, nor simply outside them. They work, instead, on their margins and
limits, disrupting and displacing them, as we have seen rivercrabs do. This makes them
“[n]either/nor, that is, simultaneously, either/or ” (Derrida, 1987 [1972]: 43, emphasis in original). We can add to the previous discussion
about the times and spaces of undecidable harmony, and the potential I have located in it for thinking coeval multiplicities, through drawing on Derrida ’s discussion of auto-
immunity in relation to the term renvoyer, which means re-sending, sending away, sending back (to the source) and/or sending on (Haddad, 2004: 37). Derrida explains that the
autoimmune process: consists always in a renvoi, a referral or deferral, a sending or putting off. The figure of the renvoi belongs to the schema of space and time, to what I had
thematized with such insistence long ago under the name spacing as the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space. The values of the trace or of the renvoi, like

Thus, in onco-operative harmony the

those of différance, are inseparable from it (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 35, emphasis in original).

(auto)immune topology in space demands that harmony be sent off elsewhere, excluded,
rejected. It must be expelled under the pretext of protecting it, precisely by rejecting or sending
off to the outside the disharmonious elements inside it (cf. Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 35-6). As we have seen, such exiling
does not take place only in democracy , as Derrida implied, but also in harmony. It is the expulsion of internal ills that has been
promoted by Hu’s harmony and by both Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and biomedical approaches to cancer. It has been criticised by theorists of time and space such as
Fabian, Inayatullah and Blaney, Massey and Hutchings. Moreover, “since the renvoi operates in time as well, autoimmunity also calls for putting4off [renvoyer] until later

elections and the advent of democracy” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 36). So too does it postpone the coming of harmony. Here,
truly “harmonious” behaviour by the sovereign is postponed until later, until more harmonious
times. China needs to become strong first, be in control of harmony on the inside first, use hard
power first. This renvoi reinforces my claim that there is no essence to harmony, no self with which harmony can be self-same. To paraphrase Derrida, this double
renvoi (sending off – or to – the other and putting off, adjournment) is an autoimmune fatality or necessity. It is inscribed directly in harmony,

directly in or right onto the concept of a harmony without concept, directly in a harmony devoid
of self-sameness. It is a harmony of which the concept remains free, out of gear, free-wheeling,
in the free play of its indetermination. It is inscribed directly in this thing or this cause that,
precisely under the name of harmony, is never properly what it is, never itself. For what is
lacking in harmony is proper meaning, the very meaning of the selfsame, the it-self, the properly
selfsame of the it-self. It defines harmony, and the very ideal of harmony, by this lack - 227 - of the proper and of the selfsame (cf. Derrida, 2003b: 61; 2005
 The onco-operative Chinese
[2003]-a: 36-7). Again, in a slightly different sense, harmony has not taken place, is not taking place and will not take place.

system is not only a process by which harmony attacks a part of itself . This renvoi, moreover, consists in a deferral or
referral to the other: as the undeniable, and I underscore undeniable, experience of the alterity of the other, of heterogeneity, of the singular, the not-same, the different, the
dissymmetric, the heteronomous (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 38, emphasis in original). By undeniable, here, Derrida also means that it is only deniable. The only way that it is
possible to protect meaning is through a sending-off (renvoi) by way of denial. Harmony is differantial in both senses of différance. It is différance,4renvoi, and spacing. This is
why spacing, “the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space” is so important. (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 38). Harmony, like democracy, is what it is only in the
différance by which it defers itself and differs from itself. Harmony can never achieve the indivisibility that it claims as its prerequisite. To the extent that it tries to do so, it must
enforce its law with violence (disharmony). In this sense, it is impossible. But, the perceptive reader may ask, do the traces and cracks that make harmony come apart not also
appear in the argument of this thesis- Could the same not be said about the argument that harmony is impossible- Indeed. A successful failure. And the same is true for “coeval
multiplicities”. This thesis has questioned whether it is possible to imagine harmonious world in a way that allows for coeval multiplicities. The temptation set up by this question

However, the undoing of “harmonious world” I

is to answer in terms of the dichotomy it implies: it is either possible, or impossible.

have examined exposes the need to think otherwise about the dichotomy of
possibility/impossibility and to displace it. Following Derrida, both “harmonious world” and “coeval multiplicity” are
best conceived as both possible and impossible, never simply one or the other. Any harmonious
or coeval relation to otherness is also always a disharmonious and - 228 - allochronising relation.
This deconstructive undecidability, as I have argued, is not negative (as Massey would have it). That harmony or coeval
multiplicities are not simply4possible is not an excuse to treat them as simply4impossible. The aim of reading deconstruction or reversibility throughout this thesis has been to

reveal the contradictions and complexity that reside within what we try to enact and make possible. The purpose has been to show that the
post-political articulations of “harmonious world” do not hold up, and to bring the political back
into the harmony concept. COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES AND HARMONY TO COME I have argued that harmonious world will not take
place, I have argued against its possibility, I have used it against itself, and written an entire thesis with the express strategy to make it disappear. Are scholars
then to resolutely reject harmony and harmonious world as viable concepts in IR- Are students
to retreat back to the comfortable concepts and language that have a more established history
in IR literatures- Although it may appear paradoxical, I want to answer these questions with a resolute “no”.
Again: that harmony or coeval multiplicities are not simply possible is not an excuse to treat
them as simply impossible. It calls, instead, for the opposite of abandoning harmony and coeval
multiplicities. The point that harmonious world is not uniquely liberating, but repeats the
politically problematic and allochronising logic of more established writing in what is referred to
as “Western tradition”, simply means that it cannot escape the restraints and problems
recognisable in other terms. Therefore, retreating to other (old, comfortable) terms is not a
solution. There are, however, some good reasons to continue discussing harmony and
harmonious world as important concepts of IR. First, although harmony has disappeared its
proliferation has not. As explained above, I believe that harmonious world will remain a key concept to Chinese politics for some time yet. This in
itself means we should keep engaging it. Second, I use it in acknowledgement of a tradition and aspiration to a way of doing things differently.
Derrida’s “democracy to come” is chosen in acknowledgement of his debt to a historical and intellectual heritage. As he claims in an interview concerning autoimmunity: [o]f all
the names grouped a bit too quickly under the category ‘political regimes’ (and I do not believe that ‘democracy’ ultimately designates a ‘political regime’), the inherited concept
of democracy is the only one that welcomes the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself (Derrida, 2003a: 121). I have
shown that Derrida’s claim that “democracy would be the name of the only ‘regime’ that presupposes its own perfectibility” is highly questionable (Derrida, 2003a: 121). There
seems to be little impetus to call the processes and ideas that I have examined “democracy” (despite the CCP leadership’s insistence that China is democratic). Yet, they operate
on the same (auto)immune or onco-operative logic that Derrida takes as giving “democracy” its future, its “to come”. I have argued that “harmony” is onco-operative in a similar
manner, and its legacy should be recognised. Third, I want to retain the term “harmony” because of its universalist implications (cf. Pin-Fat, 2010: 119-20). Its universal claim

Despite
that all conceivable elements of a situation need to be in harmony for the situation to be harmonious conjures up the question of exclusions and exceptions.

itself, it invites questions about what or who has been excluded, why and on what grounds. I
therefore take it as an invitation to question and challenge the reality, precisely, of the divisions
that deployments of harmony have made visible to us. In the party-state ’s version of harmony,
China’s future is an active programme, but importantly this future is described through the
oxymoron of “inevitable choice” (State Council of the PRC, 2005b), legitimised as rational due to the application
of China’s “scientific outlook on development” and prescriptive of a future where China will
always stand for “fairness and justice” (Hu Jintao, 2007). I have questioned such prescriptive narratives, in order to open up to the undecidability
of an unimaginable future for harmonious world. The reason that I have kept insisting on such openness

(autoimmunity, undecidability, the Other, and so on) is because it makes the political, and
indeed any futures at all, imaginable (albeit in ways I shall qualify below). To Derrida “[a] foreseen event is already present, already presentable; it
 “[w]ithout the absolute singularity
has already arrived or happened and is thus neutralized in its irruption” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-b: 143). Therefore,

of the incalculable and the exceptional, no thing and no one, nothing other and thus nothing,
arrives or happens” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-b: 148, emphasis in original). And again, “[w]ithout autoimmunity, with absolute
immunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive; we would no longer wait, await or expect, no
longer expect one another, or expect any event ” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-b: 152, see also 157). This is why Derrida insists on the future “to
come” (avenir/à4venir). In accordance with my argument for (im)possible coeval multiplicities, this places focus on what comes, rather than that which begins from the self or
the One. Chinese language has the same connotations of the future as that which comes, where the character lai 来, meaning precisely “to come”, is part of the term for future,
weilai 未来. This places it in a chain of meanings of the “to come” as “future” (weilai4 未来 or jianglai4 将来), “return” (huilai4 回来), and “originally” (yuanlai4 原来). This
echoes with the spectral temporality discussed in this thesis, where the future is to come as a return of the other that is also its (non)origin. As we have seen weilai, the future,

Through these ways of rethinking

was itself harmonised in conjunction with Ai Weiwei’s detention, making it deferred in more than one sense.

harmony, we see how the undecidability at work in the very concepts of harmony and coeval
multiplicities leaves open the chance (or threat) of a future, for both the terms themselves and
for responsibility and singular decisions to be taken beyond masterful sovereignty. This future is
not just in the future, something we can hope for, but it imposes itself with absolute urgency in
the form (or form-beyond-form) that the imperative of harmony takes here and now. Because
of its onco-operative (im)possible character, “harmony” is structurally open to the other – an
other that does not await us as the unified ideal of a programmable or predictable future, but
that presses upon us (with all the force of its self-difference) in the “here-now” (cf. Wortham, 2010: 131-2;
Derrida, 1994). My point of retaining the (im)possibility of a harmony to come is partly about retaining

the term “harmony”, but it is also about opening up to the possibility of its continued
destruction. By opening itself up to the other, harmony threatens to further destroy itself, but
also gives it the chance to receive the other – in the here-now, in coeval multiplicity. The point
of the “to come” is a future that cannot be identified in advance, since it would break with all
the old names. Without countries, civilizations, progress, we may ask whether it would still make
sense to speak of harmonious world under that name, or indeed of coeval multiplicities in world
politics. As a term, then, “harmony” is not sacred, neither is “coeval multiplicity”. Some other context, some
day, may demand that we use a different word in other sentences (cf. Derrida, 2002: 181). Just as the PRC state (or indeed any state)

works on an onco-operative logic, so too does language attempt to remain immune to anything
that may threaten its logical syntax. This is a necessity for language to make sense. The definition of a term, by
definition, is a border and immune protection from what it is not, but we can read its
simultaneous auto-immunity through reading deconstruction. Therefore, at the same time as
the future is unpredictable, it is at work today, in onco-operative harmony and coeval
multiplicities: it is what is coming, what is happening. The responsibility for what remains to be
decided or done cannot consist in following rules, rites or proper conduct of harmony, nor in a
prescriptive theory for how to think and write coeval multiplicities, but must remain within the
realm of the political.
 2NC China Simulacra Link
That which represents modernity is the absorption of China into Western
epistemic modalities, wherein China is no longer an other but a simulacral
realization provoked by China’s integration into the world/fair. The simulacrum
now formulates the hyperreal world permeating all of modernity, every crack,
every slit, and every crevice- this excessive seepage of information reverses
meaning. We inhabit a world devoid of meaning through our investment in the
China’s “mega events”, it’s preferable to live in a world with no meaning where
the simulacral is ultimately apparent.
Nordin 12. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster
University, PhD in Chinese International Politics, “Taking Baudrillard to the Fair: Exhibiting China in the World at the
Shanghai Expo”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 37, Number 2, May 2012, pg. 106-120

This article has asked what it means to be fair. I have argued that the fair is not a fake copy of a
“real” world, but that as simulation it marks the breakdown of the distinctions of the copy from
the original, of the fair from the world. The world/fair is everything and nothing, simultaneously
nowhere and now here. I have shown that the world/fair works through recycling, revival, and
reuse that, as a rem(a)inder, is not new. I have further argued that being in the world fair turns
us all into simulacral avatars without original, circulated in virtual hyperreality. All these claims
have serious consequences for the study of China in the world. My reading here shows the
problem of thinking of China as the “other country.”66 Baudrillardian simulacra have come to
symbolize postmodernity, continental philosophy, late capitalism, and an American way of life.
All of these terms imply a where, when, and who. A key finding of this article is that the implied
answers to those questions are not as straightforward as may at first glance appear. Reading
Expo 2010 as simulacra shows that we cannot locate “China” as an other, in another place and
another time, than that of our purported late capitalism or postmodern condition. Importantly,
though, through Baudrillard’s simulacra we can see how this is not a case of “catching up,” of
those behind (finally) becoming like us. The point is not that “the others” have now become “the
same,” so that we can happily apply our “Western theories” and ignore difference. The point is,
rather, that reading the world/fair as simulation messes with its notions of inside and outside,
now and then, subject and object to the point where these terms are no longer workable. What
we end up with is not the many turning into the one, with the convergence of others into the
self. Instead, what remains is a fragmented plethora of truth, not the unreal but the hyperreal.
The effect is our own disappearance. The object becomes us, sees us. We see ourselves through
the Expo. The Expo is us. My reading here of Expo 2010 as simulacra has examined some of the
distinctions implied in the where, when, and who of the world/fair and shows that we may be
better off not taking our distinctions so seriously. But of course, the study of the world/fair is
serious. We all want to base our work on fair ground, but what happens to fair descriptions
when that ground has turned out to be a fairground? In the simulacral world/fair, can we still
retain strategy? Already in his earlier work, Baudrillard had come to the conclusion that in a
“hyperrealist” system, “[s]trictly speaking, nothing remains for us to base anything on. ” In a
hyperreal world of simulacra, the weight of information makes modernity (and its space) fall
apart. This has shattering implications for meaning: “where we think that information produces
meaning, the opposite occurs.”68 Meaning, truth and the real are reversed, that is, they are
divested of any universal meaning, which restricts them to local, partial objects.69 In this age of
simulation, we have surpassed old versions of uncertainty and made our problem permanent.
Recycling and simulation, with what they do to reality, to time and space, demand something
from us: we no longer have the choice of advancing, of preserving in the present destruction, or
of retreating—but only of facing up to this radical illusion. In this manner, the uncertainty of the
simulated world/fair is not necessarily a cause for pessimism. Coulter has claimed, “Baudrillard
has long found a radically uncertain and ultimately unknowable world a far more comfortable
place to live than one which is predictable. Baudrillard lives, as well as do [sic], in a world in a
permanent state of reversibility, and he prefers it to a world that is accomplished. ” I agree with
Coulters sentiment, but think we are better off thinking of Baudrillard’s (and our) being in this
recycled world as profoundly uncomfortable. The question posed is most pertinent to the way
we think about the world and our role in worlding: Does the world have to have meaning, then?
That is the real problem. If we could accept this meaninglessness of the world, then we could
play with forms, appearances and our impulses, without worrying about their ultimate
destination . . . Do we absolutely have to choose between meaning and non-meaning? But the
point is precisely that we do not want to. The absence of meaning is no doubt intolerable, but it
would be just as intolerable to see the world assume a definitive meaning. This implosion or
disappearance of meaning, truth and the real, however, does not mean we cannot have
strategy: “Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource we have left us. ”74 The strategy
Baudrillard has developed is a “fatal strategy,” one that values uncertainty and where, in
contrast to banal theory, the subject is no longer under any illusion of being more cunning than
the object.75 In contrast to the teleological narratives on China in the world—in common
approaches of IR theory, in the PRC government ’s rendition of China’s inevitable rise to world
leadership, and in the conceptualizations of time and space at Expo 2010—the world described
by Baudrillard is not determined. In this world, “everything is antagonistic” rather than
harmonious and good will not necessarily triumph over evil. The strategy, then, is not for theory
like in Enlightenment thought to reflect the real but instead to work as a challenge. The
world/fair is not compatible with the “real” that is imposed upon it. Importantly though: “the
function of theory is certainly not to reconcile it, but on the contrary, to seduce, to wrest things
from their condition, to force them into an overexistence which is incompatible with that of the
real.”77 The purpose then of theory is to s(t)imulate the (im)possible in the world/fair. My hope
with this article is to take one small step in such a direction and provoke us into thinking of
China’s “mega events” beyond representation, reality, and ideology—to think of them in terms
of simulacra.
 2NC Consumption
Dying to achieve immortality, the affirmative attempts to rid uncertainty
through consumption and materialism that leads to disenchantment with life.
This loss of wonder is the twilight of society, constructing the ultimate sacrifice
of thinking and knowledge.
Wiltgen 05. James Wiltgen, Professor at the University of California, PhD from UCLA in Latin American Studies,
“Consumption in the Age of Information”, Bloomsbury Academic, pg. 103-107

How to address the question of uncertainty becomes one of the most pressing issues of the contemporary moment, not in
order to "overcome" it, but to create new ways to think about both the ancient and current strands, a type of genealogy if you will
(Baudrillard, 1993:43). Hannah Arendt has argued, in The Human Condition, that uncertainty
stems from a "difficulty to
believe in reality," and one of the key symptoms of this transition begins with Hobbes and his introduction of the essential
facets of "making and reckoning," where "only what I am going to make will be real" (Arendt, 1958: 300).5 Arguably the determining
factor here, according to Arendt, occurred with the shift from an ancient belief of immortality, a sense that in spite of the most
lacerating of tragedies to befall individuals, families and city-states, there existed a strong perception of continuity, that humans
would always be in the world, to a sense of eternity, which Arendt dates most resolutely from the Fall of the Roman Empire
(Arendt, 1958: 20). 6 In the modern age, the shift solidifies with three events: the discovery of the "New World" circa 1500, the
Protestant Reformation, and the invention of the telescope and a new science to accompany it. A defining moment for this
emergence then, comes with Descartes and his dubito ergo sum, where doubt of reality becomes the defining relationship between
the subject and the world, where the certitude salutis, or the certainty of knowing if one can attain salvation has been broken, where un
Dieu cache produces two nightmares for the French thinker: either the reality of this life may be a dream, or a Dieu trompeur, an evil
spirit, "willfully and spitefully betrays man"(Arendt, 1958:276—9).The pagan "belief" in the immortality of life would be replaced,
then, by the Christian "belief" in the immortality of the individual, but in the modern age even this would be "lost," replaced by
what many observes deem a vast and terrifying vacuum, a void almost completely empty, conceptualized in physics by the Big Bang
and further exacerbated by recent "discoveries" that the universe is now flying apart at ever greater speeds. Following this
analysis, the primary explanation of the organization of both the macro-level as well as the microlevel will be a need, the most
abstract of need, to fill the vacuum left by the oblivion, or withdrawal, or disappearance of a former organizing center. Of course, one
can detect the outlines of both Nietzsche and Heidegger, among others, where they link the emergence of nihilism with the
trajectory of Western thought and culture. A pervasive new strain of thinking has emerged from a variety of earlier strands, and as
Arendt argues, "man can know only what he makes" and the famous homo faber takes center stage, as "man carries certainty of
himself within himself". However, this formulation folds in upon itself, as the set of forces creating "homo faber" have now mutated,
"redrawing" the measure, and contributing dramatically to uncertainty (Arendt, 1958: 279, 298). The form of measure has
been set adrift, and the human now seems to be part of a vast "experiment" about which only tendencies can be discerned — as
Leonard Cohen notes, "Though all the maps of blood and flesh are posted on the door, there's no one who has told us yet what
Boogie Street is for" (2001). Arendt acknowledges this shift, this pervasiveness of doubt and uncertainty on the part of the human
condition, and a "new zeal for making good in this life emerges," where "man can know only what he makes himself" (Arendt, 1958:
276, 293). The implications for consumption would seem quite clear in this analysis, as humans have been thrust back
upon themselves, and the only reality possible in this scenario involves a radical and perhaps reactionary materialism, a
passive/aggressive type of hedonism based upon production and consumption as the only
criteria for "being alive." Or, as Arendt says, "the moderns needed the calculus of pleasure or the puritan moral
bookkeeping of merits and transgressions to arrive at some illusory mathematical certainty of happiness or salvation" (1958:
310). Baudrillard, in his later works, takes an even more "apocalyptic" stance to these shifts, asserting that the most pressing
philosophical problem, uncertainty, has been generated because the contemporary world has
extinguished its double, and there is no longer anything for which the world can be exchanged
(Baudrillard, 2001: 3). The planet has entered what he calls the "ontological night," where la pensee unique or the
concept of the "good," seeks to extinguish its opposite, but the good in this case seems to be at the "control of a suicide
machine" (2001: 98, 15, 37,99). Due to this pervasive malaise, which might, if at all possible, be attributed to a certain "blind
consumption ... we are building a perfect clone," a "virtual technological artifact, so that the
world can be exchanged for its artificial double" (200IL 99, 14, 28). He also argues that
humankind, "in its blind will for greater knowledge ... is sacrificing itself to an experimental
destiny unknown to other species ... in order to construct his immortal double" (2001: 33). This points
to gathering forces of a "final solution" where the good has completely triumphed, the culmination of modernity's destruction of the
world’s double, so an artificial world may be put in its place, perhaps without leaving any traces. Consumption,
in this very
bleak landscape, furthers the construction of this artificial double, perhaps in order to pull up
the ladder Wittgenstein speaks of, disappearing into another dimension, leaving this world and
its "reality" behind. For Baudrillard, then, the absolute catastrophe would be for the total
transparency of all data, a shimmering flash of everything in the now, initiating an implosion on
the order of a second Big Bang. All this may seem somewhat hyperbolic, but then again cranial liposuction should, at
certain levels, be taken quite seriously. One possible response to this crisis of uncertainty would be to rethink the notion of wonder,
what the Greeks referred to as thawnazein, that which depended, as has already been noted, on a sense of the "immortality" of the
ancient world, or in another context, the "rational cosmos" of the pagans (Arendt, 1958: 233; Gillespie, 1995: 12). If one
grants this argument for a moment, then what, if anything, might once again structure such a belief in the continuity of life?
Jane Bennett, in her book The Enchantment of Modern Life, lays out a number of arguments that have been made for the
"disenchantment" of modern life, a loss of the sense of wonder , beginning with Max Weber and continuing
through a number of thinkers, including Hans Blumenberg; in place of disenchantment, she argues for a new form of "ataraxy", a
new type of thinking the cosmos as Lucretius might have it — as a poetics to Venus, as a celestial harmony of the infinite swerve of atoms
in the unfathomable expanse of the void. This intellectual maneuvering requires what might be called, in another context, a
"leap," to think what Bennett calls "primordial harmony" (Bennett, 2001: 48, 140, 169). A way to transvalue Arendt s
concept of "eternity," "repeating" it as a pagan belief in the continuity of existence, a way to "overcome" the pervasive and
pernicious effects of ressentiment, and provide belief in this world. This would entail
"an enchanted materiality,"
dependent on the primacy of connectivity over the encounter with the other, composed of the
"primordially hybridized nature of everything " (Bennett,200I: II, 80, 88). As politics, Bennett then calls for a
much more careful analysis of all "goods" and their production/consumption, answering the questions what labor, what
material, what profits, and what forces are involved; the stress here falls on what she labels, via William Connolly, as "inclusionary
goods." Primordial harmony becomes the ontological basis of her approach, but the pivotal concept remains that of "shared
materiality" as it provides the conceptual matrix to transvalue the entire structure of modernity and capitalism — the new
assemblage would begin from a sense of a profound commonality, where all of existence encompasses the same molecular and
material basis. Interconnectivity then would take precedence over alterity; affectivity would be the basis of an ethical/aesthetic
approach to plentitude, and a cultivated sense of "generosity" would provide the abiding manifestation of this new sense of
wonder. Bennett uses the work of Deleuze and Guattari as key thinkers in this reformulation, focusing on their sense of the
positivity and affirmation of the world, as well as their call for the formation of a "new earth." Before addressing these issues, it
will be necessary to take another look at the contemporary forces of capitalism.
 2NC Death
The notion of the irreversibility of death reduces our existence to merely an
object or machine, which either functions or doesn’t. This binary opposition
between life and death objectifies the body, which always takes revenge on the
subject by dying—and thus the quest for life has killed us all. Only a symbolic
exchange with death can achieve a reversibility.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society Baudrillard
Jean. Sage Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 158-160

The irreversibility of biological death, its objective and punctual character, is a modern fact of science. It is specific
to our culture. Every other culture says that death begins before death, that life goes on after life, and

that it is impossible to distinguish life from death. Against the representation which sees in one the term of the other, we
must try to see the radical indeterminacy of life and death, and the impossibility of their autonomy in the symbolic
order. Death is not a due payment [échéance], it is a nuance of life; or, life is a nuance of death. But our modern idea of death is

controlled by a very different system of representations: that of the machine and the function. A machine
either works or it does not. Thus the biological machine is either dead or alive. The symbolic order is ignorant of this digital
abstraction. And even biology acknowledges that we start dying at birth, but this remains with the category of a functional definition. 25 It is quite
another thing to say that death articulates life, is exchanged with life and is the apogee of life: for then it becomes absurd to make life a process which
expires with death, and more absurd still to make death equivalent to a deficit and, an accelerated repayment. Neither life nor death can
any longer be assigned a given end: there is therefore no punctuality nor any possible definition
of death. We are living entirely within evolutionist thought, which states that we go from life to death: this is the illusion of the subject that
sustains both biology and metaphysics (biology wishes to reverse metaphysics, but merely prolongs it). But there is no longer even a

subject who dies at a given moment. It is more real to say that whole parts of 'ourselves' (of our
bodies, our language) fall from life to death, while the living are subjected to the work of
mourning. In this way, a few of the living manage to forget them gradually, as God managed to forget the drowned girl who was carried away by
the stream of water in Brecht's song: Und es geschah, dass Gott sie allm ählich vergass, zuerst das Gesicht, dann die Hände, und zuletzt das Haar . . . [It
happened (very slowly) that it gently slid from God's thoughts: First her face, then her hands, and right at the end her hair.] ['The Drowned Girl' in
Bertolt Brecht: Poems and Songs, ed and tr. John Willett, London: Methuen, 1990, p. 14] The
subject's identity is continually
falling apart, falling into God's forgetting. But this death is not at all biological. At one pole, biochemistry, asexual protozoa
are not affected by death, they divide and branch out (nor is the genetic code, for its part, ever affected by death: it is transmitted unchanged beyond
individual fates). At
the other, symbolic, pole, death and nothingness no longer exist, since in the
symbolic, life and death are reversible. Only in the infinitesimal space of the individual
conscious subject does death take on an irreversible meaning. Even here, death is not an event,
but a myth experienced as anticipation. The subject needs a myth of its end, as of its origin, to
form its identity. In reality, the subject is never there : like the face, the hands and the hair, and even before no doubt,
it is always already somewhere else, trapped in a senseless distribution, an endless cycle impelled by death.
This death, everywhere in life, must be conjured up and localised in a precise point of time and a precise place: the body. In biological death,

death and the body neutralise instead of stimulating each other. The mindbody duality is
biology's fundamental presupposition. In a certain sense, this duality is death itself, since it objectifies
the body as residual, as a bad object which takes its revenge by dying. It is according to the mind that the
body becomes the brute, objective fact, fated for sex, anguish and death. It is according to the mind, this imaginary schizz, that the body becomes the
'reality' that exists only in being condemned to death. Therefore
the mortal body is no more 'real' than the immortal
soul: both result simultaneously from the same abstraction, and with them the two great complementary
metaphysics: the idealism of the soul (with all its moral metamorphoses) and the 'materialist' idealism of the
body, prolonged in biology. Biology lives on as much by the separation of mind and body as from any other
Christian or Cartesian metaphysics, but it no longer declares this. The mind or soul is not mentioned any more: as an ideal

principle, it has entirely passed into the moral discipline of science; into the legitimating principle of

technical operations on the real and on the world; into the principles of an 'objective'
materialism. In the Middle Ages, those who practised the discourse of the mind or soul were closer to the 'bodily signs' (Octavio Paz,
Conjunctions and Disjunctions [tr. Helen Lane, New York: Arcade, 1990] ) than biological science, which, techniques and axioms, has passed entirely
over to the side of the 'non-body'. The
Accident and the Catastrophe There is a paradox of modern bourgeois
rationality concerning death. To conceive of it as natural, profane and irreversible constitutes
the sign of the 'Enlightenment' and Reason, but enters into sharp contradiction with the
principles of bourgeois rationality, with its individual values, the unlimited progress of science,
and its mastery of nature in all things. Death, neutralised as a 'natural fact', gradually becomes a
scandal.

Death occurs through seduction and indecipherable complicity. In our fleeing

from death by endlessly resolving constructed threats, we inevitably run
towards it. As Baudrillard’s tale suggests, wherever we go, we will always find
Samarkand.
Baudrillard 03. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Death in Samarkand Translated by Brian Singer 2003
http://insomnia.ac/essays/death_in_samarkand/

Consider the story of the

An ellipsis of the sign, an eclipse of meaning: an illusion. The mortal distraction that a single sign can cause instantaneously.

soldier who meets Death at a crossing in the marketplace , and believes he saw him make a menacing gesture in his direction.
He rushes to the king's palace and asks the king for his best horse in order that he might flee
during the night far from Death, as far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace and reproaches him for
having frightened one of his best servants. But Death, astonished, replies: "I didn't mean to frighten him. It was just that I

was surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow, in Samarkand."
Yes, one runs towards one's fate all the more surely by seeking to escape it. Yes, everyone seeks
his own death, and the failed acts are the most successful. Yes, signs follow an unconscious course. But all this concerns the truth of the rendez-vous in Samarkand;
it does not account for the seduction of the story, which is in no way an apologue of truth. What is astounding about the story is that this seemingly

inevitable rendez-vous need not have taken place. There is nothing to suggest that the soldier would have been in Samarkand without
this chance encounter, and without the ill-luck of Death's naive gesture, which acted in spite of itself as a gesture of seduction. Had Death been content to call the soldier back to

The gesture does not appear to be part of a strategy, nor even an

order, the story would lose its charm. Everything here is hinged on a single, involuntary sign.

appears as something that moves laterally, as a sign

unconscious ruse; yet it takes on the unexpected depth of seduction, that is, it

that, unbeknownst to the protagonists (including Death, as well as the soldier), advances a deadly command, an aleatory sign behind which another
conjunction, marvelous or disastrous, is being enacted. A conjunction that gives the sign's trajectory all the characteristics of a witticism. No one in the story has anything to

Behind the apparent liberty of the two central

reproach himself with - or else the king who lent his horse, is as guilty as anyone else. No.

characters (Death was free to make his gesture, the soldier to flee), they were both following a
rule of which neither were aware. The rule of this game, which, like every fundamental rule,
must remain secret, is that death is not a brute event, but only occurs through seduction, that is,
by way of an instantaneous, indecipherable complicity, by a sign or signs that will not be
deciphered in time. Death is a rendez-vous, not an objective destiny. Death cannot fail to go since he is this
rendez-vous, that is, the allusive conjunction of signs and rules which make up the game. At the same time,
Death is an innocent player in the game. This is what gives the story its secret irony, whose resolution appears as a stroke of wit [trait d'esprit], and provides us with such
sublime pleasure - and distinguishes it from a moral fable or a vulgar tale about the death instinct. The spiritual character [trait spirituel] of the story extends the spirited
character [trait d'espritgestuel] of Death's gesture, and the two seductions, that of Death and of the story, fuse together. Death's astonishment is delightful, an astonishment at
the frivolity of an arrangement where things proceed by chance: "But this soldier should have known that he was expected in Samarkand tomorrow, and taken his time to get

there..." HoweverDeath shows only surprise, as if his existence did not depend as much as the soldier's
on the fact that they were to meet in Samarkand. Death lets things happen, and it is his
casualness that makes him appealing - this is why the soldier hastens to join him. None of this involves the
unconscious, metaphysics or psychology. Or even strategy. Death has no plan. He restores chance with a chance gesture;

this is how he works, yet everything still gets done. There is nothing that cannot not be done,
yet everything still preserves the lightness of chance, of a furtive gesture, an accidental
encounter or an illegible sign. That's how it is with seduction... Moreover, the soldier went to meet
death because he gave meaning to a meaningless gesture which did not even concern him. He
took personally something that was not addressed to him, as one might mistake for oneself a smile meant for someone else. The height of seduction is to be without seduction.
The man seduced is caught in spite of himself in a web of stray signs. And it is because the sign has been turned from its meaning or "seduced", that the story itself is seductive.

It is when signs are seduced that they become seductive. Only signs without referents, empty,
senseless, absurd and elliptical signs, absorb us.
 2NC Death – Political Framing
Life only exists in exchanges with death but their rejection of death undergirds oppressive
economies based on equilibrium and eliminating differences. Our injection of death into this
economy serves as a paroxysm of superabundance which dismantles this political economy in a
festival of eroticism and symbolic challenge, which reverses the economies based on production
and utility.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 154-156

Despite its radicality, the psychoanalytic vision of death remains an insufficient vision: the
pulsions are constrained by repetition, its perspective bears on a final equilibrium within the
inorganic continuum, eliminating differences and intensities following an involution towards the
lowest point; an entropy of death, pulsional conservatism, equilibrium in the absence of
Nirvana. This theory manifests certain affinities with Malthusian political economy, the objective
of which is to protect oneself against death. For political economy only exists by default: death is
its blind spot, the absence haunting all its calculations. And the absence of death alone permits
the exchange of values and the play of equivalences. An infinitesimal injection of death would
immediately create such excess and ambivalence that the play of value would completely
collapse. Political economy is an economy of death, because it economises on death and buries
it under its discourse. The death drive falls into the opposite category: it is the discourse of
death as the insurmountable finality. This discourse is oppositional but complementary, for if
political economy is indeed Nirvana (the infinite accumulation and reproduction of dead
value), then the death drive denounces its truth, at the same time as subjecting it to absolute
derision. It does this, however, in the terms of the system itself, by idealising death as a drive (as
an objective finality). As such, the death drive is the current system's most radical negative, but
even it simply holds up a mirror to the funereal imaginary of political economy.

Instead of establishing death as the regulator of tensions and an equilibrium function, as the
economy of the pulsion, Bataille introduces it in the opposite sense, as the paroxysm of
exchanges, superabundance and excess. Death as excess, always already there, proves that life
is only defective when death has taken it hostage, that life only exists in bursts and in
exchanges with death, if it is not condemned to the discontinuity of value and therefore to
absolute deficit. 'To will that there be life only is to make sure that there is only death.' The
idea that death is not at all a breakdown of life, that it is willed by life itself, and that the delirial
(economic) phantasm of eliminating it is equivalent to implanting it in the heart of life itself this
time as an endless mournful nothingness. Biologically, '[t]he idea of a world where human life
might be artificially prolonged has a nightmare quality about it' (G. Bataille, Eroticism [2nd edn,
tr. M. Dalwood, London: Marion Boyars, 1987], p. 101), but symbolically above all; and here the
nightmare is no longer a simple possibility, but the reality we live at every instant: death
(excess, ambivalence, gift, sacrifice, expenditure and the paroxysm), and so real life is absent
from it. We renounce dying and accumulate instead of losing ourselves:
Not only do we renounce death, but also we let our desire, which is really the desire to die, lay
hold of its object and we keep it while we live on. We enrich our life instead of losing it.
(Eroticism, p. 142) Here, luxury and prodigality predominate over functional calculation, just as
death predominates over life as the unilateral finality of production and accumulation: On a
comprehensive view, human life strives towards prodigality to the point of anguish, to the point
where the anguish becomes unbearable. The rest is mere moralising chatter. . . . A febrile unrest
within us asks death to wreak its havoc at our expense. (ibid., p. 60)

Death and sexuality, instead of confronting each other as antagonistic principles (Freud), are
exchanged in the same cycle, in the same cyclical revolution of continuity. Death is not the
'price' of sexuality the sort of equivalence one finds in every theory of complex living beings (the
infusorium is itself immortal and asexual) nor is sexuality a simple detour on the way to death,
as in Civilisation and its Discontents: they exchange their energies and excite each other. Neither
has its own specific economy: life and death only fall under the sway of a single economy if they
are separated; once they are mixed, they pass beyond economics altogether, into festivity and
loss (eroticism according to Bataille): [W]e can no longer differentiate between sexuality and
death [, which] are simply the culminating points of the festival nature celebrates, with the
inexhaustible multitude of living beings, both of them signifying the boundless wastage of
nature's resources as opposed to the urge to live on characteristic of every living creature.
(Eroticism, p. 61)

This festivity takes place because it reinstates the cycle where penury imposes the linear
economy of duration, because it reinstates a cyclical revolution of life and death where Freud
augurs no other issue than the repetitive involution of death. In Bataille, then, there is a vision
of death as a principle of excess and an anti-economy. Hence the metaphor of luxury and the
luxurious character of death. Only sumptuous and useless expenditure has meaning; the
economy has no meaning, it is only a residue that has been made into the law of life, whereas
wealth lies in the luxurious exchange of death: sacrifice, the 'accursed share', escaping
investment and equivalence, can only be annihilated. If life is only a need to survive at any cost,
then annihilation is a priceless luxury. In a system where life is ruled by value and utility, death
becomes a useless luxury, and the only alternative.

In Bataille, this luxurious conjunction of sex and death figures under the sign of continuity, in
opposition to the discontinuous economy of individual existences. Finality belongs in the
discontinuous order, where discontinuous beings secrete finality, all sorts of finalities, which
amount to only one: their own death. We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in
isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity.
(Eroticism, p. 15)

Death itself is without finalities; in eroticism, the finality of the individual being is put back into
question: What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its
practitioners . . . ? The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of
the participants as they are in their normal lives. (ibid., p. 17)

Erotic nakedness is equal to death insofar as it inaugurates a state of communication, loss of

identity and fusion. The fascination of the dissolution of constituted forms: such is Eros (pace
Freud, for whom Eros binds energies, federates them into ever larger unities). In death, as in
Eros, it is a matter of introducing all possible continuity into discontinuity, a game of complete
continuity. It is in this sense that 'death, the rupture of the discontinuous individualities to which
we cleave in terror, stands there before us more real than life itself' (ibid., p. 19). Freud says
exactly the same thing, but by default. It is no longer a question of the same death. What Freud
missed was not seeing the curvature of life in death, he missed its vertigo and its excess, its
reversal of the entire economy of life, making it, in the form of a final pulsion, into a belated
equation of life. Freud stated life's final economy under the sign of repetition and missed its
paroxysm. Death is neither resolution nor involution, but a reversal and a symbolic challenge.

Power is born from the prohibition of death and repressive socialization of life. The Aff’s attempt
to take death hostage by suspending exchange between life and death undergirds the instituted
division that lays the foundation for all other forms of oppression and exclusion.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 129-131

The emergence of survival can therefore be analysed as the fundamental operation in the birth of
power. Not only because this set-up will permit the necessity of the sacrifice of this life and the threat of
recompense in the next (this is exactly the priest-caste's strategy), but more profoundly by instituting the prohibition of
death and, at the same time, the agency that oversees this prohibition of death: power. Shattering the
union of the living and the dead, and slapping a prohibition on death and the dead: the primary source of social control. Power is
possible only if death is no longer free, only if the dead are put under surveillance, in
anticipation of the future confinement of life in its entirety. This is the fundamental Law, and power is the
guardian at the gates of this Law. It is not the repression of unconscious pulsions, libido, or whatever other energy that is
fundamental, and it is not anthropological; itis the repression of death, the social repression of death in
the sense that this is what facilitates the shift towards the repressive socialisation of life.
Historically, we know that sacerdotal power is based on a monopoly over death and exclusive control
over relations with the dead. 4 The dead are the first restricted area, the exchange of whom is restored by an obligatory
mediation by the priests. Power is established on death's borders. It will subsequently be sustained by further
separations (the soul and the body, the male and the female, good and evil, etc.) that have
infinite ramifications, but the principal separation is between life and death. 5 When the French say
that power 'holds the bar',6 it is no metaphor: it is the bar between life and death, the decree that
suspends exchange between life and death , the tollgate and border control between the two banks. This is
precisely the way in which power will later be instituted between the subject separated from
its body, between the individual separated from its social body, between man separated from
his labour: the agency of mediation and representation flourishes in this rupture. We must take note, however, that the
archetype of this operation is the separation between a group and its dead, or between each of
us today and our own deaths. Every form of power will have something of this smell about it, because it is on the
manipulation and administration of death that power, in the final analysis, is based. All the agencies of repression and
control are installed in this divided space , in the suspense between a life and its proper end, that is, in the
production of a literally fantastic and artificial temporality (since at every instant every life has
its proper death there already, that is to say, in this same instant lies the finality it attains) . The first
abstract social time is installed in this rupture of the indivisible unity of life and death (well before abstract social labour time!). All
the future forms of alienation that Marx denounces, the separations and abstractions of
political economy, take root in this separation of death. The economic operation consists in
life taking death hostage. This is a residual life which can from now on be read in the
operational terms of calculation and value. For example, in Chamisso's The Man who Lost his Shadow, Peter
Schlemil becomes a rich and powerful capitalist once his shadow has been lost (once death is taken hostage: the pact with the Devil
is only ever a political-economic pact). Life given over to death: the very operation of the symbolic.
 2NC Deterrence
Entrenched in unipolarity, the threat of US nuclear weapons
foreshadows a precarious tempest. The imperial aggression stems from
17th century mercantilism, the need to control resources, markets, and
reduce humans to gears in an economic machine. This consumption is
the self-implosive model beckoning for disastrous collapse.
Wiltgen 05. James Wiltgen, Professor at the University of California, PhD from UCLA in Latin American
Studies, “Consumption in the Age of Information”, Bloomsbury Academic, pg. 110-112

During the latter stages of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union effectively took the entire planet hostage, in
the sense that questions of war and peace made by those two countries had the distinct possibility of ending global life as it
has been commonly conceived. Indeed, after the advent of the hydrogen bomb, nuclear submarines, and MIRVed missiles,
the destructive capacity of the two countries reached almost "mythical" proportions,
producing what Helen Caldicott has called "nuclear madness" (2002), and Robert Jay Lifton
has cited as a type of idolatry for what only god or the gods could do in the past, namely
destroy the world (1987: 25). With the end of the Cold War, the United States emerged as
the only "superpower," a "hyperpower" consolidating the destructive power of the world's
most advanced war machine, and, responding to Nietzsche's question about who would have the will to become
lords of the earth by responding: only those who would be willing to destroy it. In an intriguing twist on the course of
theoretical formulations, the attempt by poststructuralism to undermine binary formations has, in a certain sense, come to
pass — the "binary" division of the Cold War has been dissolved, but now the situation seems poised between a return to a
type of unipolar formation, what Baudrillard called lepensee unique, or the advent of something more significantly dispersed and
multiple. Strangely, large factions across the political spectrum remain nostalgic for the previous
era of "stability," also known by the acronym MAD, mutually assured destruction. There is little doubt,
however, that we have moved into another phase and another moment of dangerous intensity, where the
stakes for global life continue to sway in the balance. What has become abundantly clear involves the
triumph of the US growth model, based on a neo-liberal approach, which seeks to marketize as much of the
worlds economy as necessary, with the exception of those areas the hegemonic powers
deem crucial to exempt from those forces.9This dense and complex series of formations, or
capitalism in another virulent manifestation, has been characterized by Deleuze and
Guattari as "the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety," where "capitalism's
supreme goal is to produce lack," what they call "antiproduction" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 225, 235). Two
clarifications — first, cynicism corresponds to the notion used here of monetarism, an objectifying and
quantifying of all existence, while the strange piety reverberates with a notion of "sadism," where the
ressentiment produced by the "disappearance" of God, coupled with sexual, digital, and bio technological
mutations, drives capitalism, and where powerful tendencies within the system qua system
would rather "will nothingness than will nothing at all."10 Second, the production of lack has been set by
the system itself, and the psychodynamics of the individual and the family have been generated from the macro-level,
not the other way around. While one might grant complex feedback loops between the macro and the micro, the
determining forces in this analysis stem from the aggregate level of capitalism itself. This lack induced by
capitalism has produced a "quasi-infinite debt," where debt becomes the debt of existence,
of life itself; however, it is important to note that there exist several types of debt, but the analysis here concerns the
overarching one crystallized by relations of exchange, distilled and distorted by capitalism itself. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983:
197). A
new system of domination emerges, one generated by the mechanisms of the market
and ressentiment, where confinement and discipline no longer form the key organizing principles of society, but debt,
and where humans have begun the shift from individuals to "dividuals." In this society of control, digital and biotechnological
modulations produce continuous vibrations, oscillating
the human condition between forces of
enslavement and what might be termed "other potentialities" (Deleuze, 1995: 178-82). The American model,
then, bases itself on a type of passive forgetting, which constantly configures the past into a
self-justifying archive for the future expansion and manipulations of capitalism .11 Again, this
approach can be understood as the culmination of a long term dynamic, or as William Spanos argues, "the Occident has been
essentially imperial since its origin in late Greek and especially Roman Antiquity" (Spanos, 1999:3—5). Aggressive
control of
resources, the installation of market relations via debt, a political leadership offering
"certainty," and the reduction of humans to cogs in a global matrix provide key elements of this
model — the crucial question becomes: can it sustain itself, or has the model created an architecture of production and
consumption which the planet and its resources cannot continue to supply? As one response, Heidegger might be
paraphrased here, that "only a (technologically-beneficent) God can save us now." Obviously, these questions are far too dense
to unravel here, but certain trends can be discerned. This situation will not be "solved" if American power goes into
decline, as so many predict, because the basic tendencies have such tremendous resonance throughout the globe, with China
and India being key examples in the processes of globalization. In Bataille s terms, the American-inspired variant of capitalism has
perfected a restricted economy, and rather than expending some of the excess of energy in "profitless operations," they
consume extensively, a type of reactive destruction, bent on a repetition for the sake of
repetition, a repetition of the same, as the principle means of overcoming existential and
political uncertainty (Bataille, 1988: 25).u What, indeed, is to be done?
 2NC Economizing Death
In the economic organization, death has been converted to wage, labor, and
production. By removing death from our collective futures, the Aff has removed
all of us from the circulation of symbolic goods, and have perpetuated the
symbolic extermination of objects. We should embrace death – be ready to die
– and refuse to be put to the slow death of labor.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 38-43

Other societies have known multiple stakes: over birth and kinship, the soul and the body, the true and the
false, reality and appearance. Political economy has reduced them to just one: production. But then the
stakes were large, the violence extreme and hopes too high. Today this is over. The system has rid production of all real
stakes. A more radical truth is dawning, however, and the system's victory allows us to glimpse this fundamental stake. It is even
retrospectively becoming possible to analyse the whole of political economy as having nothing
to do with production, as having stakes of life and death. A symbolic stake. Every stake is symbolic.
There have only ever been symbolic stakes. This dimension is etched everywhere into the structural law of value, everywhere
immanent in the code. Labour power is instituted on death. A man must die to become labour power.
He converts this death into a wage. But the economic violence capital inflicted on him in the
equivalence of the wage and labour power is nothing next to the symbolic violence inflicted on
him by his definition as a productive force. Faking this equivalence is nothing next to the equivalence, qua signs, of
wages and death. The very possibility of quantitative equivalence presupposes death. The equivalence of wages and
labour power presupposes the death of the worker, while that of any commodity and any other
presupposes the symbolic extermination of objects. Death makes the calculation of
equivalence, and regulation by indifference, possible in general. This death is not violent and physical, it
is the indifferent consumption of life and death, the mutual neutralisation of life and death in
sur-vival, or death deferred. Labour is slow death. This is generally understood in the sense of physical
exhaustion. But it must be understood in another sense. Labour is not opposed, like a sort of death, to the 'fulfilment of life', which
is the idealist view; labour
is opposed as a slow death to a violent death. That is the symbolic reality. Labour
is opposed as deferred death to the immediate death of sacrifice. Against every pious and 'revolutionary'
view of the 'labour (or culture) is the opposite of life' type, we must maintain that the only alternative to labour is not free time, or
non-labour, it is sacrifice. All
this becomes clear in the genealogy of the slave . First, the prisoner of war
is purely and simply put to death (one does him an honour in this way). Then he is 'spared' [épargné] and
conserved [conservé] (=servus), under the category of spoils of war and a prestige good: he becomes a slave and passes into
sumptuary domesticity. It is only later that he passes into servile labour. However, he is no longer a
'labourer', since labour only appears in the phase of the serf or the emancipated slave, finally
relieved of the mortgage of being put to death. Why is he freed? Precisely in order to work. Labour therefore
everywhere draws its inspiration from deferred death. It comes from deferred death. Slow or violent, immediate or
deferred, the scansion of death is decisive: it is what radically distinguishes two types of
organisation, the economic and the sacrificial. We live irreversibly in the first of these, which has inexorably taken
root in the différance of death. The scenario has never changed. Whoever works has not been put to death, he is refused this
honour. And labour is first of all the sign of being judged worthy only of life. Does capital exploit the workers
to death? Paradoxically, the worst it inflicts on them is refusing them death. It is by
deferring their death that they are
made into slaves and condemned to the indefinite abjection of a life of labour. The substance of labour
and exploitation is indifferent in this symbolic relation. The power of the master always primarily derives from
this suspension of death. Power is therefore never, contrary to what we might imagine, the power of putting to death,
but exactly the opposite, that of allowing to live a life that the slave lacks the power to give. The master
confiscates the death of the other while retaining the right to risk his own. The slave is refused this, and is condemned to a life
without return, and therefore without possible expiation. By removing death, the master removes the slave
from the circulation of symbolic goods. This is the violence the master does to the slave, condemning him to labour
power. There lies the secret of power (in the dialectic of the master and the slave, Hegel also derives the domination of the master
from the deferred threat of death hanging over the slave). Labour, production and exploitation would only be one of the possible
avatars of this power structure, which is a structure of death. This changes every revolutionary perspective on the abolition of
power. If power is death deferred, it will not be removed insofar as the suspension of this death
will not be removed. And if power, of which this is always and everywhere the definition, resides in the act of
giving without being given, it is clear that the power the master has to unilaterally grant life
will only be abolished if this life can be given to him in a non-deferred death. There is no other
alternative; you will never abolish this power by staying alive, since there will have been no reversal of what has been given. Only
the surrender of this life, retaliating against a deferred death with an immediate death,
constitutes a radical response, and the only possibility of abolishing power. No revolutionary
strategy can begin without the slave putting his own death back at stake, since this is what the master
puts off in the différance from which he profits by securing his power. Refuse to be put to death, refuse to live in the mortal reprieve
of power, refuse the duty of this life and never be quits with living, in effect be under obligation to settle this long-term credit
through the slow death of labour, since this slow death does not alter the future of this abject dimension, in the fatality of power.
Violent death changes everything, slow death changes nothing, for there is a rhythm, a scansion
necessary to symbolic exchange: something has to be given in the same movement and following the same rhythm,
otherwise there is no reciprocity and it is quite simply not given. The strategy of the system of
power is to displace the time of the exchange, substituting continuity and mortal linearity for
the immediate retaliation of death. It is thus futile for the slave (the worker) to give little by
little, in infinitesimal doses, to the rope of labour on which he is hung to death, to give his life to the master or to capital, for this
'sacrifice' in small doses is no longer a sacrifice it doesn't touch the most important thing, the
différance of death, and merely distils a process whose structure remains the same.
 2NC Form First
The affirmative labors under the myth of the subject – a myth spun by
consumerism. Their focus on the content of the system rather than its form
forecloses true liberation.
Robinson 12 “Critique of Alienation” (Andrew, political theorist, author, and activist based in
the UK.)//pday

There is also a new kind of imaginary “subject” or self generated by consumerism.  Consumer
society portrays all its objects for sale as carefully formulated for an impersonal “you” to
whom they are addressed.  It is a kind of myth which presents consumption as common sense,
consuming the spectacle of consumption itself.  Without the myth of consumption, it would not
exist as an integrative social function.  It would simply be a set of differentiated needs and
desires.  The word ‘consumption’ actually expresses a restructuring of social ideology.  It is not
in fact a victory of objects, or of earthly pleasures.   Rather, it is a set of reified social and
productive relations and forces.  In this world, revolutions are replaced by fashion cycles. 
Even the retraining of workers is little more than a fashion cycle.   It’s a way of imposing “low-
intensity” constraints and a threat of exclusion so as to ensure conformity.

Baudrillard is highly critical of the view that consumerism amounts to liberation.  It is true that
certain older regimes of authoritarianism have decayed.  But the new regime is also a system
of control.  Repression persists, but it moves sideways.  The image of a sterile, hygienic body
and fear of contamination establishes an inner control which removes desire from the body. 
The ranking of bodies in terms of status leads to a re-racialisation.  Puritanism becomes mixed-
up with hedonism in this ranking process.  The body as locus of desire remains censored and
silenced, even when it appears to undergo hedonistic release.  Sexuality is expressed in
consumption so it can’t disrupt the status quo.  What is now censored is the symbolic structure
and the possibility of deep meaning.  Living representations are turned into empty signs. 
Because of this change, the old resistances to repression no longer work.

Similarly, groups supposedly liberated – such as women, black people, and young people – are
denied the effects of liberation by being re-encoded in terms of myths.  Once labelled as
irresponsible, people’s liberation is attached to a coded meaning which demands and bars
responsibility and social power.  Real liberation is avoided by giving people an image of
themselves to consume – women are given the image of Woman, the young an image of
Youth, technological change by Technology (gadgets), and so on.  Liberation is thus nullified,
and re-encoded as a role and as narcissism.   Concrete gains for liberation movements are side-
effects of this immense strategic operation to disempower oppressed groups through their
reduction to a function or role.  We are drip-fed little bits of democracy and progress to
ensure the system’s survival.  They operate as its alibis.  Even if income equality is
encouraged, the system can survive by moving inequality elsewhere , to status, style, power
and so on.
At this point in his work, Baudrillard still believes in desire, happiness, the real, history and so
on.  He sees them as alienated in the system’s insistence on artificial, simulated and
quantitative versions of them.  The system only knows about its own survival.  It doesn’t
understand the social or individual forces which operate inside it.  Hence, changing its
contents never changes how it works.  The system tries to conjure away the real and history
with signs representing them – replacing them with the truer than true and so on.  Simulations
are objects which offer many signs of being real, when in fact they are not.
 2NC Futurism
The dominant ideology promotes a brighter future, a utopian future, but
the future is dead. The future is sacrificed amidst war, environmental
degredation, poverty, mass slavery, and racism that results in
something worse than extinction, loss of the future.
Bifo 11. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, “After the Future”, AK Press, pg. 17-19

In this book, I want to reconsider the cultural history of the century from this point of view: themythology of the
future. The future is not an obvious concept, but a cultural construction and
projection. For the people of the Middle Ages, living in the sphere of a theological culture, perfection was placed in the
past, in the time when God created the universe and humankind. Therefore, historical existence takes the
shape of the Fall, the abandonment and forgetting of original perfection and unity.
The rise of the myth of the future is rooted in modern capitalism, / in the experience
of expansion of the economy and knowledge. The idea that the future will be better
than the present is not a natural idea, but the imaginary effect of the peculiarity of
the bourgeois production model. Since its beginning, since the discovery of the new continent and the
rewriting of the maps of the world , modernity has been de fined by an amplification of the very
limits of the world, and the peculiarity of capitalist economy resides exactly in the
accumulation of the surplus value that results in the constant enhancement of the
spheres of material goods and knowledge. In the second part of the nineteenth century, and in the first
part of the twentieth, the myth of the future reached its peak, becoming something more
than an implicit belief: it was a true faith, based on the concept of "progress," the
ideological translation of the reality of economic growth. Political action was
reframed in the light of this faith in a progressive future. Liberalism and social
democracy, nationalism and communism, and anarchism itself, all the different
families of modern political theory share a common certainty: notwithstanding the
darkness of the present, the future will be bright. In this book I will try to develop the idea that the
future is over. As you know, this isn't a new idea. Born with punk, the slow cancellation of the future got underway in the
1970s and 1980s. Now those bizarre predictions have become true. The idea that the future has
disappeared is, of course, rather whimsical—since, as I write these lines, the future hasn't stopped
unfolding. But when I say "future," I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking,
rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of
progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long
period of modern civilization, reaching a peak in the years after the Second World
War. Those expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever
progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegelo-Marxist mythology
of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois
mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic
mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge; and so on. My
generation grew up at the peak of this mythological tempor-alization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it,
and look at reality without this kind of cultural lens. I'll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how
evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. These trends seem to be pointing toward the dissipation of
the legacy of civilization, based on the philosophy of universal rights. The
right to life, to equal
opportunities for all human beings, is daily denied and trampled on in the global
landscape, and Europe is no exception. The first decade of the new century has marked the
obliteration of the right to life for a growing number of people, even though
economic growth has enhanced the amount of available wealth and widened the
consumption of goods. A growing number of people are forced to leave their villages
and towns because of war, environmental waste, and famine. They are rejected,
marginalized, and simultaneously subjected to a new form of slave exploitation. The
massive internment of migrant workers in detention centers disseminated all over
the European territory dispels the illusion that the "camp" has been wiped out
from the world. Authoritarian racism is everywhere, in the security laws passed by
European parliaments, in the aggressiveness of the European white majority, but also
in the ethnicization of social conflicts and in Islamist fundamentalism. The future
that my generation was expecting was based on the unspoken confidence that
human beings will never again be treated as Jews were treated during their German
nightmare. This assumption is proving to be misleading. I want to rewind the past
evolution of the future in order to understand when and why it was trampled and
drowned.
 2NC Identity
Your project of identity replicates the semiotic exchanges of culture
invest into the information accumulation that sustains capitalism inside
the realm of production. Identities fall into the trap of proliferating of
points of aggression culminating in an acceleration of semiotic
exchanges.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 121-125

Identity is not naturally ascribed; it is a cultural product: it is the effect of the

hypostatization (fi xation and naturalization) of the cultural difference, of the psychological, social
and linguistic particularity. Identity is continuity and confi rmation of the place and of the
role of a speaker in the cycle of communication . In order to be understood, one must play one’s role
in the game, and this role is surreptitiously identifi ed as a mark of belonging. But identity is
continually searching for its roots, and the place from whence the enunciation comes is
often mistaken as one of natural origins: primeval and therefore undeniably true. The community,
which is a place of communication (a place of exchange of signs conventionally charged of meaning), is
mistaken as a natural place of belonging, and transformed into the primeval source of
meaning. The temporary and transitional convention that gives meaning to signs is strengthened and transformed into the
natural mark or motivated relation between sign and meaning . Identity may be seen as the hardening of the
inner map of orientation. Identity is the opposite of style, which is singularity and
consciousness of the singularity, a map of orientation fl exible and adaptable, retroactively
changing. Style never has a normative feature, nor implies any kind of interdiction and punishment. Identity is a limitation
(unconsciously realized) upon the possibility of comprehension and interaction. It is a useful limitation, of course,
but it is dangerous to mistake it as a condition of authenticity and primeval belonging . It is
the condition of mutual aggressiveness, of racism and violence, and fascism. Identity is based on
a hypertrophic sense of the root, and it leads to the reclamation of belonging as criterion of
truth and of selection. Identity is the perceptual and conceptual device that gives us the
possibility of knowledge, but sometimes we mistake this knowledge for a re-cognition. So we
are led to believe that which we already know, that we possess a map thanks to our belonging. This can be useful sometimes,
but it is dangerous to mistake our cultural map for the inner territory of belonging. Without a map, one gets lost, but getting
lost is the beginning of the process of knowledge; it is the premise for creating any map. In
their book Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Resolution, the psychoanalysts Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch
write that the repeated application of the same solution in drastically different conditions is a
neurotic attitude which leads to pathological situations. Observed within the context of the
current global dynamic of deterritorialization–re-territorialization, such neuroticism
emerges as a constitutive component of today’s world order. On the one hand, globalization
and the acceleration of cultural and economic exchanges have increased the need for the fl
exible adaptation of conceptual and linguistic maps. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, the
deterritorialization that globalization entails hugely intensifi es the need for an identitarian
shelter, the need for the confi rmation of belonging. Here lies the identitarian trap which is
leading the world towards the proliferation of points of identitarian aggressiveness: the return
of concepts such as the homeland, religion and family as aggressive forms of reassurance and
self-confi rmation. We can also read this dynamic in terms of technomutation and ethno-mutation. On the one hand,
information technology has provoked the acceleration and intensifi cation of semiotic
exchanges, and on the other hand, the displacement of people and massive waves of economic and
political migration have provoked an unprecedented change in the ethnic landscape of the
territories, with all the concomitant cultural contamination and intermixing. In conditions of competition, these
processes tend to excite the need for identitarian belonging, and to give way to identitarian
aggressiveness. According to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , universal history can be viewed
as a process of deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is the passage from a space whose
code is known to a new space, where that code loses its meaning, so that things become
unrecognizable for anyone attempting to use the code that was produced by the previous
territory. The history of capitalism is continuously producing effects of deterritorialization.
At the outset, capitalism destroyed the old relation between the individual and both the
agricultural territory and the family. Subsequently, it jeopardized the national borders and
created a global space of exchange and communication . Currently, it is jeopardizing the very
relation between money and production, and opening the way to a new form of immaterial
semiotization. As capitalism destroys all forms of identifi cation, it frees the individuals from
the limitations of identity, but simultaneously it provokes a sense of displacement, a sort of
opacity that is attributable to the loss of previous meanings and emotional roots. As a result,
capitalism ultimately provokes a need for reterritorialization, and a continual return of the
past in the shape of national identities, ethnic identities, sexual identities, and so on. Modern
history is a process of forgetting that provokes an effect of anguish and that forces people to
desperately hold onto some kind of memory. But memory has faded, together with the
dissolution of the past, such that people have to invent a new set of memories . Like the character
Rachel in the 1982 neo-noir sci-fi fi lm Blade Runner, people create their own memories, putting together
pieces of old texts, of faded images, of words whose meaning is lost.
 2NC Non-War Impact
Despite this alliance, China is consumed by a spectacle of non-war, positing
itself as the peaceful antithesis of American hegemonic warmongering. The
new China is founded upon Tianxia, peaceful development in unity under
heaven. This violent inclusion, assimilation, and homogenization eliminates the
possibility for the unknown unknown. China’s neighbors are constantly
threatened by this non-war while it simultaneously papers over atrocities
within China’s own borders.
Nordin 14 (Dr. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
Religion at Lancaster University, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars,” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue: Baudrillard and War, May,
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-norden.html)//AG

(ii). Contemporary PRC rhetoric on pre-modern Chinese thought on war In

contemporary China, the official rhetoric on war
focuses on pre-emption and the claim that China will never be a ‘hegemonic’ or warmongering
power – unlike the US. In this rhetoric, the Chinese war is by nature a non-war. Official
documents emerging in the last decade repeatedly stress that China is by nature peaceful, which
is why nobody needs to worry about its rise. In the 2005 government whitepaper China’s Peaceful Development Road, for
example, we are told that: [i]t is an inevitable choice based on China’s historical and cultural tradition that China persists unswervingly in taking the
road of peaceful development. The Chinese nation has always been a peace-loving one. Chinese culture is a pacific culture. The spirit of the Chinese
people has always featured their longing for peace and pursuit of harmony (State Council of the PRC 2005b). The whitepaper (and numerous

other official
and unofficial publications) posit an essentialised Chinese culture of peacefulness as
prior to any Chinese relations with the world. This rhetoric of an inherently non-bellicose
Chinese way has also echoed in Chinese academic debates, where Chinese pre-modern philosophy has come back in
fashion as a (selectively sampled) source of inspiration. The claims and logics that have come out of these debates are varied. One significant grouping
of Chinese academics directly follow the government line and claim that ‘choosing “peaceful rise” is on the one hand China’s voluntary action, on the
other hand it is an inevitable choice’ (Liu Jianfei 2006: 38). That peacefulness and harmony is something that ‘Chinese people’ have always valued is an
implication, and often explicitly stated ‘fact’ in these literatures. Zhan Yunling, for example, claims that ‘from ancient times until today, China has
possessed traditional thought and a culture of seeking harmony’ (Zhang Yunling 2008: 4). This claim to natural harmony is mutually supportive of the
claim that ‘the Chinese nation’ has always been a peaceful nation, to authors such as Liu Jianfei (2006), or Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli (2006). A

related set of commentators further stress the significance of militarily non-violent means to
China getting its (naturally peaceful) way in international relations. For example, Ding Sheng draws on the Sunzi
quote mentioned above: ‘to subjugate the enemy’s army without doing battle is the highest of excellence’ (Ding Sheng 2008: 197). This line of

argument typically sees what some would call ‘soft power tools’ as a way of getting others to become more like yourself
without any need for outright ‘war’ or other forms of physical violence. In a discussion of the official government rhetoric of ‘harmonious world’ under
former president Hu Jintao, Shi Zhongwen accordingly stresses that the doctrine opposes going to extremes, and therefore contradicts what Shi calls
‘the philosophy of struggle’ (Shi Zhongwen 2008: 40, where ‘struggle’ implies Marxist ideology). Qin Zhiyong similarly argues that China needs to steer
away from collisions and embrace the aim of ‘merging different cultures’ (Qin Zhiyong 2008: 73). At
the same time, few Chinese
academics question the direction of the ‘merging of cultures’ discussed above – clearly it is other
cultures that should merge into China ’s peaceful one. In a common line of thought that draws
on the historical concept of Tianxia, or ‘All-under-heaven’, it is argued that the Chinese
leadership can thus bring about a harmonious world through ‘voluntary submission [by others]
rather than force’ simply through its superior morality and exemplary behaviour (Yan Xuetong 2008: 159).
On this logic, the leadership will never need to use violence, because everybody will see its
magnanimity and will want to emulate its behaviour (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34. See Callahan 2008: 755 for a discussion).
Much of these debates have come to pivot around this concept of Tianxia, an imaginary of the world
that builds on a holistic notion of space, without radical self-other distinction or bordered
difference. To some thinkers, this imagination is based on a notion of globalisation (for example Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli 2006: 59) or
networked space (Ni Shixiong and Qian Xuming 2008: 124) where everything is always already connected to everything else in a borderless world. In
these accounts, Tianxia thinking is ‘completely different from Western civilisation, since Chinese civilisation insists on its own subjectivity, and
possesses inclusivity’ (Zhou Jianming and Jiao Shixin 2008: 28). Despite this apparent binary, it is claimed that Tianxiaism involves an identification with
all of humankind, where there is no differentiation or distinction between people (Li Baojun and Li Zhiyong 2008: 82). A thinker whose deployment of
the Tianxia concept has been particularly influential is Zhao Tingyang, who proposes the concept as a Chinese and better way of imagining world order
(Zhao Tingyang 2005; 2006), where ‘better’ means better than the ‘Western’ inter-state system to which Tianxia is portrayed as the good opposite. In
opposition to this ‘Western system’, he argues that Tianxia can offer ‘a view from nowhere’ or a view ‘from the world’, where ‘[w]orld-ness cannot be
reduced to internationality, for it is of the wholeness or totality rather than the between-ness’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 39). However, as
a
consequence of a prioritisation of order over the preservation of alterity, ‘any inconsistency or
contradiction in the system will be a disaster’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). As a corollary of this prioritisation, Zhao comes to
insist on the homogeneity of his all-inclusive space, which aims at the uniformity of society (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33, emphasis in original) where ‘all
political levels … should be essentially homogenous or homological so as to create a harmonious system’ (2006: 33). The aim of the Tianxia system is
thus to achieve one single homogeneous and uniform space. Clearly, for such homogeneity to be born from a
heterogeneous world, someone must change. Zhao argues that: one of the principles of Chinese political philosophy is said
‘to turn the enemy into a friend’, and it would lose its meaning if it were not to remove conflicts and pacify social problems – in a word, to ‘transform’
(化) the bad into the good (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34). Moreover, this conversion to a single ‘good’ homogeneity should happen through ‘volontariness’
rather than through expansive colonialism: ‘an empire of All-under-Heaven could only be an exemplar passively in situ, rather than positively become
missionary’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 36, emphasis in original). However,
when we are given clues as to how this idea of
the ‘good’ to which everyone should conform would be determined, Zhao ’s idea of self-other
relations seems to rely on the possibility of some Archimedean point from which to judge this
good, and/or the complete eradication of any otherness, so that the one space that exists is
completely the space of self (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). Thus, Zhao confesses that ‘[t]he unspoken theory is that
most people do not really know what is best for them, but that the elite do, so the elite ought
genuinely to decide for the people’ (2006: 32). As explained by William A. Callahan: By thinking through the world with a view from
everywhere, Zhao argues that we can have a ‘complete and perfect’ understanding of problems and solutions that is ‘all-inclusive’. With this all-
inclusive notion of Tianxia, there is literally ‘no outside’.… Since all places and all problems are domestic, Zhao says that ‘this model guarantees the a
priori completeness of the world’ (Callahan 2007: 7). This
‘complete and perfect’ understanding is hence attainable
only to an elite, who will achieve homogeneity (convert others into self) through example.
Eventually, then, there will be no other, the ‘many’ will have been transformed into ‘the one’
(Zhao Tingyang 2005: 13, see also 2006). It is through this transformation and submission to the
ruling elite that the prevention of war is imagined. If Baudrillard had engaged with these contemporary Chinese
redeployments of pre-modern thought on war (which, to my knowledge, he never did), I think he would have recognised many of the themes that
interested him in Western approaches to the first Gulf war. Most
strikingly, this is a way of talking about war that
writes out war from its story. Like deterrence, it is an imagination of war that approaches it via
prevention and pre-emption. What is more, we recognise an obsession with the self-image of
the self to itself – in this case, a Chinese, undemocratic self rather than a Western, democratic
one. In this Chinese war, like in the Persian Gulf of which Baudrillard wrote, there is no space for an Other that is
Other. In the Tianxia imaginary, Others can only be imagined as something that will eventually
assimilate into The System and become part of the Self, as the Self strives for all-inclusive
perfection. There is no meeting with an Other in any form. Encounter only happens once the
Other becomes like the Self, is assimilated into the One, and hence there is no encounter at all
(for an analysis that reads Baudrillard and Tianxia to this effect in a Chinese non-war context, see Nordin 2012). (iii). Contemporary Chinese war and its
the war that we are waiting for here in the Chinese case is
various modes As was the case with the first Gulf War,

thus a non-war. If by war we mean some form of (symbolic) exchange or some clash of forms,
agons, or forces (as we tend to do even in the current ‘cutting edge research’ in ‘critical war studies’, see Nordin and Öberg 2013) – we
cannot expect it to take place. In China, we see not only a participation in the Western system of
(non)war through the war on terror, but also another system that precisely denies space for
imagining an other as Other, which in turn makes the idea of exchange impossible. In this sense,
the Ancient Chinese approach to war through the Tianxia concept – at least as it is reflected by current
Chinese thinkers like Zhao Tingyang and Yan Xuetong – is not a Clausewitzean war continuing politics by other
means, but precisely a continuation of the absence of politics by other means. It arguably shares this
aspect with both the first and the second Gulf Wars. This, however, is certainly not to say that there are not those

who fear a Chinese war or that we have no reason to fear it. In various guises, the war that is
imagined through a Clausewitzean ontology of agonistic and reciprocal exchange returns and is
reified also in China. It is not uncommon for authors discussing the Chinese traditions of thinking war that I describe above to begin their
discussion by explicitly drawing on Clausewitz and take his war as their point of departure (for example Liu Tiewa 2014). For several Chinese writers, it

is clear that this building of a ‘harmonious world’ is directed against others whose influence
should be ‘smashed’ (Fang Xiaojiao 2008: 68). From this line of thinkers, the call to build a harmonious world has
also been used to argue for increased Chinese military capacity, including its naval power (Deng Li 2009).
Although Chinese policy documents stress that violence or threat of violence should be avoided,
they similarly appear to leave room for means that would traditionally be understood as both
‘hard’ and ‘soft’ in Joseph Nye’s dichotomisation (See for example State Council of the PRC 2005a). Indeed, many of
Chinas neighbours have voiced concern with growing Chinese military capacity over the last few
years, and a Chinese non-war is no less frightening to its neighbours than a war – be it labelled
‘just’ or ‘unjust’, ‘real’ or ‘virtual’. This Chinese war – past, present and future – is acted out in
various different modes. Violent war is reified through the spectacle of computer games, art,
online memes, cartoons and not least dramas on film and television (Diamant 2011, 433). The Chinese
state claims success in all of its wars, and simultaneously claims that it has never behaved
aggressively beyond its borders (which is also, of course, a convenient way of glossing over all
the violence perpetrated by the Chinese state within those borders, the violence with which
they are upheld and with which they were established in the first place, and the clear
contradiction between the state’s fixation on territorial integrity and its borderless and holistic
Tianxia rhetoric). Popular cultural renditions of war paint a more varied picture, but all contribute to a
reification of war. Recent Chinese productions that reify war on the screen through what we
may call ‘war porn’ are numerous – indeed, it has been claimed that China produces what is probably the
highest number of dramas set in wartime in the world (Diamant 2011: 433). One example accessible to a non-Chinese
audience is Feng Xiaogang’s Assembly (Jijiehao 集结号) from 2007, which recreates horrifically violent and ‘realistic’

battle scenes from the Civil War between Guomindang nationalists and Communist troops. The
Second Sino-Japanese war is another popular setting for these reifications of war, providing the backdrop for another
large budget film by Feng Xiaogang, the 2012 Back to 1942 (Yijiusier 一九四二), and international star-director Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War
(Jinling shisan chai 金陵十三钗). Another example is Lu Chuan’s City of Life
and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing! 南京！南京！) which became a box
office hit in China in 2009, but was
criticized for its portrayal of a Japanese soldier as a fully formed and
sympathetic person in its narration of the Nanjing massacre. Off screen China has, in the reform era since Mao’s death, seen
a new and related wave of commemorations of the Civil and Anti-Japanese wars in museums
throughout China, which play a central role in national education campaigns to ‘never forget
national humiliation’. Examples that house both permanent exhibitions and temporary special exhibits commemorating particular war
events include the Rape of Nanjing Memorial/Nanjing Massacre museum in Nanjing; the Military Museum, the Museum of Revolutionary History and
the Memorial Museum of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance to Japan in and outside Beijing; and the September 18th Incident Memorial and
Museum of the Manchurian Crisis in Shenyang, to name but a few (these museums and their exhibits of war have been studied for example by Mitter
these museums include vivid reconstructions, often as waxworks with
2000, 2003 and Waldron 1996). Many of

sound and motion, of horrific battlefield scenes for its audience to consume. Reifications of war on
screen and in museums moreover tie in with a ‘new remembering’ by academic and popular publications

since the late 1980s, which commemorates and fetishizes China ’s past experiences of war as
well as projects that experience into the present and the future through the ever-present
rhetoric of ‘National Humiliation’ (guochi.For articles tracing this ‘new remembering’, see Coble 2007 and Mitter 2003). Masses
of propaganda are devoted to the commemoration of the Anti-Japanese war, particularly relating to various
Campaigns to Support the People’s Liberation Army and Military Dependents, and in annually recurring celebrations of the Spring Festival, the
Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, Army Day and the ‘National Humiliation Day’ which has received much academic attention in
recent years (Callahan 2004, 2009; Wang Zheng 2008). Much of the state-led reification of war, and particularly its treatment in
academic publications and governmental speeches, has centred on the ‘numbers game’ of
claiming high death tolls and economic costs of the battle histories of the Anti-Japanese war,
rather than fore-fronting the all-too-human element that may be found in for example memoir
literature (Coble 2007, 406). Accordingly, other scholars have argued – and I agree with them here – that ‘[a]lthough Chinese
movies and television often feature military-related themes, it is rare to find frank and
politicized depictions of China’s military conflicts’ (Diamant 2011: 431). As in the Tianxia narrative
discussed above, politics is paradoxically eradicated from these versions of war, together with
an other understood as a human other. However, the literatures critiquing this de-politicization typically criticise the intellectual
elites in various cultural and propaganda offices for producing an ‘artificial rendering of China’s wars’ denying veterans an ‘authentic military voice’
(Diamant 2011: 431, 461). My point here is different. It
is not a question of creating an image of false
representation, or what we may call a third order simulation, a masking of the reality of war. Rather, the
point is that reality and illusion can no longer be distinguished, but have collapsed into one
another. There is no longer a ‘real’ war behind these narratives which can be uncovered (cf. Nordin
2012). Through these other modes, the Chinese non-war is reified as war. Like the Gulf War of which Baudrillard

wrote, it appears seamless, yet is riddled with contradictions. If what took place in the Persian Gulf was the spectacle of

war, what is taking place in contemporary China is perhaps better understood as the spectacle of non-war. Like

the spectacle of war it has a range of strategic and political purposes for everyone involved. Like the pre-emptive

narratives of Tianxia, the reifications of war that hark back to a Clausewitzean ontology relay a
war that is scripted or coded in advance, disallowing alterity. And to those who fear the
possibility of the Chinese war, we might indeed see reasons to fear, but also provide a reminder
that it is stupid to be for or against this war, if we do no for a moment question its probability,
credibility or level of reality.

What emerges is not silence but an understanding that there exist the very
same Systems of assimilation which are not merely an extension of American
capitalism and democracy, and should not be essentialized into Alterity. The
same critical lens should be applied to people designated as radical Others
simply due to their geographic location.
Nordin 14 (Dr. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
Religion at Lancaster University, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars,” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue: Baudrillard and War, May,
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-norden.html)//AG

IV. Baudrillard’s war and others’ wars in China and Asia As shown at the outset of this article, Baudrillard
advocates an interest in
the other as Other, but is unclear about how this feeds in to knowledge about that other. What form can our ‘interest’
take, if we disallow the attempt to gain knowledge? We return, then, to the question of how we as scholars may approach
Others’ wars, as they are thought, operationalised and simulated in other places. What I think
emerges from the above is an understanding that ‘the global’, as we may understand it through Baudrillard, is precisely global.
Systems that try to assimilate anything and everything into their own programmes exist in
different forms in different places, including in Asia. To essentialize these systems into one great
mysterious unit of imagined Alterity would ironically be a way to deny such alterity by fetishizing
it and reducing it to an Identity of Otherness. From Baudrillard's notion that every system contains the seed of its own demise
stems his suspicion of centralized systems and the pretence to holistic unity . These systems, of which the

American-led war on terror is one example and Zhao's Sinocentric Tianxia is another, always claim
to do good and attempt to assimilate everything and anything into their system, striving towards
perfection. Asia offers no respite from this logic. Clearly, They grapple with the same problems
as We do, and can offer no greener grass where the scholar can comfortably stretch out assured
at having escaped the confines of The System. In this way, perhaps China’s wars can indicate to us that the logics of
Baudrillard’s globality does not only have to be understood in the narrow sense of an operational system of total trade, but that its logic is
recognisable also in other systems – systems that are not just some extension of Western capitalism
and attempts at democracy, but that have their roots in other philosophical traditions. Moreover, as
Baudrillard tells us, these systems are always susceptible to challenge by singularities of culture, that

which is excluded and condemned by the system because it tries to stand outside it – the Other
that does not want to be turned into self, the barbarian that does not want to be civilized, or
what Baudrillard himself calls ‘the other who will not be mothered ’, whose call to arms is ‘fuck
your mother’ (Baudrillard 2006, see also Nordin 2013; forthcoming 2014). Baudrillard reads a clear antagonism as existing between the global
and the singular (Baudrillard 2006, 2002 [2000], 155-6). To him, ‘foreignness is eternal’ (Baudrillard 1993 [1990]), or as Coulter writes: ‘Just as all those
cultural singularities will never merge into one global monoculture, people remain radically other to each other’ (Coulter 2004). This alterity or radical
otherness, then, is there whether the theorist recognises it or not. Of course, an argument could be made that all
attempts at
understanding, studying or explaining something is a violent act that reduces its purported
object to a knowable unit and denies its alterity. That argument would have a point – after all, speaking is an act
of violence and there are numerous problems with the scholarly endeavour to make visible, to
communicate and to reveal things as though they were not hyper-visible already. If, however,
we decide that we will choose to commit this violence of speaking (rather than, say, choose a lifetime of silence or
expressing ourselves only through the means of interpretative dance), there seems to be no reason for remaining silent

on swathes of people we have chosen to designate as radical Others because of their

geographical location. That is to say, there are no reasons except ones based on the imposition of an artificial
a priori Identity as Other, for the purposes of exclusion, which again is surely intolerably patronising. Perhaps we can
draw on Baudrillard not so much to remind ourselves only of the alterity of exotic Others elsewhere, but to remind ourselves of the Other in the Self.
Perhaps the most crucial thing is to remember, with Coulter I think, that it is not those other (Asian, foreign) Others and Their wars that are radically
other to Us and Our wars, but people that are radically other to each other – and we who are radically other to ourselves, despite and through all our
attempts to knowledge.
 2NC Simulation
Simulation bad
Gerofsky 10 “The impossibility of ‘real-life’ word problems (according to Bakhtin, Lacan, Zizek
and Baudrillard)” (Susan, Simon Fraser University, 2000, PhD, Curriculum Theory)//pday

Baudrillard's ideas about representing ‘reality’ are discussed primarily in relation to his concept
of simulations and simulacra in postmodern society, and in his concept of the impossibility of
exchange in our contemporary world (and thence, the impossibility of equivalence or
representation). Much of Baudrillard's work is focused on the idea of absence, particularly the
absence of a referent for signs and the absence of a transcendent reality to ground claims of
truth and validity. Both these absences are important in our consideration of reality and
mathematical word problems, since these problems consist of words and stories often taken to
refer to ‘real-life situations’, and since their use in mathematics education is often legitimized by
claims to validity in the realm of a greater reality.

In his essay, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ (Baudrillard, 1988), Baudrillard presents the idea of the
‘precessession of the simulacra’ in our contemporary globalized, networked, digitized society –
the idea that simulations now precede, and in fact supplant reality, existing entirely without any
corresponding or matching referent, and interacting primarily with other simulations:

It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication … it is rather a question of

substituting signs of the real for the real itself … A hyperreal sheltered … from any distinction
between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and
the simulated generation of difference. (p. 170)

Baudrillard's ‘hyperreal’ is best exemplified by the most exuberant excesses of American and
now global culture (Las Vegas, various Disneylands) which establish environments based on
simulated ‘nostalgic’ or ‘historical’ references to a history that has been altered and fictionalized
(namely Main Street USA, or the Luxor Hotel and Casino).

One step beyond simulation, simulacra arrive prior to any referent, create a virtual experience
that is taken as real, and interact with other simulacra and simulations. We are all becoming
casually familiar with simulacra through our interactions on networked social software on the
Internet. We throw sheep at one another on Facebook, participate in the viral proliferation of
video genres on YouTube, and watch our universities use ‘real’ cash to purchase virtual islands
for online campuses on Second Life.

Our postmodern world of networked computers and digital media creates strange and hitherto-
unknown simulacra that have effects beyond the virtual. An article in the Canadian
magazine Walrus (Thompson, 2004) documents some aspects of the economy of virtual worlds
in online fantasy games like EverQuest and Ultima Online.

The Walrus article documents a young economist's discovery of the economic and governmental

systems of an online game, EverQuest (Castronova, 2001). He discovered a strange system
where simulacra (virtual money and virtual goods) were traded for US dollars:
The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players
together created in a single year inside the game … turned out to be $2,266 US per capita. By
World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as
wealthy as Russia. It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even
exist. (Thompson, 2004, p. 41)

Not only are there multi-million dollar businesses that trade in game points, game levels,
avatars, offshore banking and currency trading amongst games, but gaming sweatshops in China
and Mexico have recently been documented. In these sweatshops, hundreds of low-wage
employees are hired to spend long hours and days playing games so that their on-line characters
gain powers, levels, and virtual possessions, which are then sold through brokers to wealthy
buyers.

Real-life wars are fought using video games and virtual environments, to the point where
simulacra may take precedence in creating experiences of war, at least for the privileged:

The US military has already licensed a private chunk of [an online ‘world’ called] There and
created a simulation of the planet on it. The army is currently using the virtual Baghdad
in There as a training space for American soldiers. (Thompson, 2004, p. 47)

For reasons like this one, Baudrillard made the famous, highly controversial statement that the
Gulf War of 1991 had not taken place. Certainly the nature of warfare has changed drastically
when both training and missile launches take place in virtual, video game environments and
when battles are telecast live by satellite on CNN.

Following McLuhan et al. (2005), it could be argued that the world of technology-mediated
simulacra where we now live creates a total service environment that mitigates against a
definable real that can be separated from the virtual; the real and virtue are inextricably
entangled and mutually affecting.

Baudrillard goes beyond technological arguments to an even more fundamental argument for
the impossibility of any representation of the real in any secular society. Using Levi-Strauss and
Marcel Mauss’ anthropological concepts of exchange as a fundamental to the circulation of
commodities in a society, Baudrillard (2001) argues that exchange has become impossible, and
thus ‘reality’ exists only as simulacra:

There is no equivalent of the world. That might even be said to be its definition – or lack of it. No
equivalent, no double, no representation, no mirror  … There is not enough room both for the
world and for its double. So there can be no verifying of the world. That is, indeed, why ‘reality’
is an imposture. Being without possible verification, the world is a fundamental illusion. (p. 3)

Baudrillard's argument deals with the world or universe as a whole, but also with systems within
the world like law, politics, economics, aesthetics, even the field of biology. In any of these
systems, it is possible to pretend to be able to represent reality at the micro level, but at the
macro level, the entire system is without grounding, unless we posit a ‘higher reality’ through
religion or metaphysics (and this is not acceptable in a secular society). Taking politics as an
example, Baudrillard (2001) writes:
Politics is laden with signs and meanings, but seen from the outside it has none. It has nothing to
justify it at a universal level (all attempts to ground politics at a metaphysical or philosophical
level have failed). It absorbs everything which comes into its ambit and converts it into its own
substance, but it is not able to convert itself into – or be reflected in – a higher reality which
would give it meaning. (p. 4)

For ‘politics’, we could substitute ‘mathematics’, since Gödel's Theorem has proved it impossible
to devise a mathematical system that is both consistent and complete; or ‘physics’, since
quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle have placed a radical uncertainty
and inconsistency at the heart of this field and of our ideas of matter itself.

Baudrillard's (2001) concept of impossible exchange leads to a conclusion very much like
Lyotard's assertion that, in our postmodern condition, no grand narratives are possible. Writing
about economics, Baudrillard (2001) says,

That principle [of a grounding of the field in reality and rationality] is valid only within an
artificially bounded sphere. Outside that sphere lies radical uncertainty. And it is this exiled,
foreclosed uncertainty which haunts systems and generates the illusion of the economic, the
political, and so on. It is the failure to understand this which leads systems into incoherence,
hypertrophy and, in some sense, leads them to destroy themselves. For it is from the inside, by
overreaching themselves, that systems make bonfires of their own postulates, and fall into
ruins. (p. 6)

Taking this big, universe-sized idea to our little world of mathematical word problems, there is a
kind of unacceptable hubris in claims that there can be a precise equivalence, a transparent
matching, an exchange between ‘reality’ and these brief, generic pedagogic stories. To claim
that mathematical word problems (or the theorems of physics, or the narratives of history, or
novels in the style of ‘Realism’) have a relationship of identity with reality is to ‘make a bonfire
of our own postulates’. Baudrillard's concept of reality, like Lacan's ‘Real’, cannot be captured in
language or signs of any kind; it cannot be matched up with its equivalent, since it is
constitutionally impossible to have an equivalent for reality. Positivistic science, a universe
completely marked out with the grid lines of Newtonian physics, mathematician and astronomer
Pierre-Simon Laplace's deterministic project to know all present, past and future eventualities
by extrapolation from a complete knowledge of this instant – all of these aspects of the
Modernist projects have been foreclosed by the impossibility of providing a grounding or an
exchange for reality, and we are left with an unresolvable uncertainty, perhaps mystery, at the
heart of things.
 2NC Securitization
Securitization against death is a form of blackmail which dispossess us of our own death in order
that we die the only death the system authorizes—inside a glass sarcophagus. The aff merely
adds more bandages to the sarcophagus and maintains its repressive social control through the
continuous industrial prolongation of life that inevitably culminates in our destruction. To
recognize the radical compatibility of life and death is to refuse such social domestication and
colonization.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society Baudrillard
Jean. Sage Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 177-180

Security is another form of social control, in the form of life blackmailed with the afterlife. It is
universally present for us today, and 'security forces' range from life assurance and social
security to the car seatbelt by way of the state security police force. 39 'Belt up' says an
advertising slogan for seatbelts. Of course, security, like ecology, is an industrial business
extending its cover up to the level of the species: a convertibility of accident, disease and
pollution into capitalist surplus profit is operative everywhere. But this is above all a question of
the worst repression, which consists in dispossessing you of your own death, which everybody
dreams of, as the darkness beneath their instinct of conservation. It is necessary to rob
everyone of the last possibility of giving themselves their own death as the last 'great escape'
from a life laid down by the system. Again, in this symbolic short-circuit, the gift-exchange is
the challenge to oneself and one's own life, and is carried out through death. Not because it
expresses the individual's asocial rebellion (the defection of one or millions of individuals does
not infringe the law of the system at all), but because it carries in it a principle of sociality that
is radically antagonistic to our own social repressive principle. To bury death beneath the
contrary myth of security, it is necessary to exhaust the gift-exchange.

Is it so that men might live that the demand for death must be exhausted? No, but in order that
they die the only death the system authorises: the living are separated from their dead, who no
longer exchange anything but the form of their afterlife, under the sign of comprehensive
insurance. Thus car safety: mummified in his helmet, his seatbelt, all the paraphernalia of
security, wrapped up in the security myth, the driver is nothing but a corpse, closed up in
another, nonmythic, death, as neutral and objective as technology, noiseless and expertly
crafted. Riveted to his machine, glued to the spot in it, he no longer runs the risk of dying, since
he is already dead. This is the secret of security, like a steak under cellophane: to surround you
with a sarcophagus in order to prevent you from dying.40

Our whole technical culture creates an artificial milieu of death. It is not only armaments that
remain the general archetype of material production, but the simplest machine around us
constitutes a horizon of death, a death that will never be resolved because it has crystallised
beyond reach: fixed capital of death, where the living labour of death has frozen over, as the
labour force is frozen in fixed capital and dead labour. In other words, all material production is
merely a gigantic 'character armour' by means of which the species means to keep death at a
respectful distance. Of course, death itself overshadows the species and seals it into the armour
the species thought to protect itself with. Here again, commensurate with an entire civilisation,
we find the image of the automobile-sarcophagus: the protective armour is just death
miniaturised and become a technical extension of your own body. The biologisation of the body
and the technicisation of the environment go hand in hand in the same obsessional neurosis.
The technical environment is our over-production of pollutant, fragile and obsolescent objects.
For production lives, its entire logic and strategy are articulated on fragility and obsolescence.
An economy of stable products and good objects is indispensable: the economy develops only
by exuding danger, pollution, usury, deception and haunting. The economy lives only on the
suspension of death that it maintains throughout material production, and through renewing
the available death stocks, even if it means conjuring it up by a security build up: blackmail
and repression. Death is definitively secularised in material production, where it is reproduced
on a large scale as capital. Even our bodies, which have become biological machinery, are
modelled on this inorganic body, and therefore become, at the same time, a bad object,
condemned to disease, accident and death. Living by the production of death, capital has an
easy time producing security: it's the same thing. Security is the industrial prolongation of
death, just as ecology is the industrial prolongation of pollution. A few more bandages on the
sarcophagus. This is also true of the great institutions that are the glory of our democracy: Social
Security is the social prosthesis of a dead society ('Social Security is death!' May '68), that is to
say, a society already exterminated in all its symbolic wheels, in its deep system of reciprocities
and obligations, which means that neither the concept of security nor that of the 'social' ever
had any meaning. The 'social' begins by taking charge of death. It's the same story as regards
cultures that have been destroyed then revived and protected as folklore (cf. M. de Certeau, 'La
beautédu mort' [in La culture au pluriel, Paris: UGE, 1974]). The same goes for life assurance,
which is the domestic variant of a system which everywhere presupposes death as an axiom.
The social translation of the death of the group each materialising for the other only as social
capital indexed on death.

Death is dissuaded at the price of a continual mortification: such is the paradoxical logic of
security. In a Christian context, ascesis played the same role. The accumulation of suffering and
penitence was able to play the same role as character armour, as a protective sarcophagus
against hell. And our obsessional compulsion for security can be interpreted as a gigantic
collective ascesis, an anticipation of death in life itself: from protection into protection, from
defence to defence, crossing all jurisdictions, institutions and modern material apparatuses, life
is no longer anything but a doleful, defensive book-keeping, locking every risk into its
sarcophagus. Keeping the accounts on survival, instead of the radical compatibility of life and
death. Our system lives off the production of death and pretends to manufacture security. An
about-face? Not at all, just a simple twist in the cycle whose two ends meet. That an automobile
firm remodels itself on the basis of security (like industry on anti-pollution measures) without
altering its range, objectives or products shows that security is only a question of exchanging
terms. Security is only an internal condition of the reproduction of the system when it reaches a
certain level of expansion, just as feedback is only an internal regulating procedure for systems
that have reached a certain point of complexity.

After having exalted production, today we must therefore make security heroic. 'At a time when
anybody at all can be killed driving any car whatsoever, at whatever speed, the true hero is he
who refuses to die' (a Porsche hoarding: 'Let's put an end to a certain glorification of death').
But this is difficult, since people are indifferent to security: they did not want it when Ford and
General Motors proposed it between 1955 and 1960. It had to be imposed in every instance.
Irresponsible and blind? No, this resistance must be added to that which traditional groups
throughout have opposed to 'rational' social progress: vaccination, medicine, job security, a
school education, hygiene, birth control and many other things: Always these resistances have
been broken, and today we can produce a 'natural', 'eternal' and 'spontaneous' state based on
the need for security and all the good things that our civilisation has produced. We have
successfully infected people with the virus of conservation and security, even though they will
have to fight to the death to get it. In fact, it is more complicated, since they are fighting for the
right to security, which is of a profoundly different order. As regards security itself, no-one gives
a damn. They had to be infected over generations for them to end up believing that they
'needed' it, and this success is an essential aspect of 'social' domestication and colonisation.
That entire groups would have preferred to die out rather than see their own structures
annihilated by the terrorist intervention of medicine, reason, science and centralised power this
has been forgotten, swept away under the universal moral law of the 'instinct' of conservation.
However, this resistance always reappears, even if only in the form of the workers' refusal to
apply safety standards in the factories; what do they want out of this, if not to salvage a little bit
of control over their lives, even if they put themselves at risk, or if its price is increasing
exploitation (since they produce at ever greater speed)? These are not 'rational' proletarians.
But they struggle in their own way, and they know that economic exploitation is not as serious
as the 'accursed share', the accursed fragment that above all they must not allow to be taken
from them, the share of symbolic challenge, which is at the same time a challenge to security
and to their own lives. The boss can exploit them to death, but he will only really dominate
them if he manages to make each identify with their own individual interests and become the
accountant and the capitalist of their own lives. He would then genuinely be the Master, and
the worker the slave. As long as the exploited retain the choice of life and death through this
small resistance to security and the moral order, they win on their own, symbolic, ground. The
car driver's resistance to security is of the same order and must be eliminated as immoral: thus
suicide has been prohibited or condemned everywhere because primarily it signifies a challenge
that society cannot reply to, and which therefore ensures the pre-eminence of a single suicide
over the whole social order. Always the accursed share (the fragment that everyone takes from
their own lives so as to challenge the social order; the fragment that everyone takes from their
own body so as to give it; this may even be their own death, on condition that everyone gives it
away), the fragment which is the whole secret of symbolic exchange, because it is given,
received and returned, and cannot therefore be breached by the dominant exchange, remaining
irreducible to its law and fatal to it: its only real adversary, the only one it must exterminate.
 2NC Value to Life Impact
Transparency is impossible, and striving for it kills all value to life.
Han 15 “The Transparency Society” (Byung-Chul, professor of philosophy and cultural studies
at the Universität der Künste Berlin)//pday

Thus, Humboldt also observes of language: [A] thing may spring up in man, for which no
understanding can discover the reason in previous circumstances; and we should . . . violate,
indeed, the historical truth of its emergence and change, if we sought to exclude from it the
possibility of such inexplicable phenomena.4 The ideology of “postprivacy” proves equally naïve.
In the name of transparency, it demands completely surrendering the private sphere, which is
supposed to lead to see-through communication. The view rests on several errors. For one,
human existence is not transparent, even to itself. According to Freud, the ego denies precisely
what the unconscious affirms and desires without reserve. The id remains largely hidden to the
ego. Therefore, a rift runs through the human psyche and prevents the ego from agreeing even
with itself. This fundamental rift renders self-transparency impossible. A rift also gapes between
people. For this reason, interpersonal transparency proves impossible to achieve. It is also not
worth trying to do so. The other’s very lack of transparency is what keeps the relationship alive.
Georg Simmel writes: The mere fact of absolute knowledge, of full psychological exploration,
sobers us even without prior intoxication, paralyzes the vitality of relations. .  . . The fertile depth
of relationships, which senses and honors something more, something final, behind all that is
revealed . . . , simply rewards the sensitivity [Zartheit] and self-control that still respects inner
privacy even in the most intimate, all-consuming relationship which allows the right to secrets to
be preserved.” Compulsive transparency lacks this same “sensitivity”—which simply means
respect for Otherness that can never be completely eliminated. Given the pathos for
transparency that has laid hold of contemporary society, it seems necessary to gain practical
familiarity with the pathos of distance. Distance and shame refuse to be integrated into the
accelerated circulation of capital, information, and communication. In this way, all confidential
spaces for withdrawing are removed in the name of transparency. Light floods them, and they
are then depleted. It only makes the world more shameless and more naked. Autonomy
presumes one person’s freedom not to understand another. Richard Sennett remarks: “Rather
than an equality of understanding, a transparent equality, autonomy means accepting in the
other what you do not understand, an opaque equality. ”6 What is more, a transparent
relationship is a dead one, altogether lacking attraction and vitality. A new Enlightenment is
called for: there are positive, productive spheres of human existence and coexistence that the
compulsion for transparency is simply demolishing. In this sense, Nietzsche writes: “The new
Enlightenment. . . . It is not enough to recognize in what ignorance man and animal lives; you
must also learn to possess the will to ignorance. You must understand that without such
ignorance life itself would be impossible, that under this condition alone does the living preserve
itself and flourish.”7 It has been demonstrated that more information does not necessarily lead
to better decisions.8 Intuition, for example, transcends available data and follows its own logic.
Today the growing, indeed the rampant, mass of information is crippling [eliminating] all higher
judgment. Often less knowledge and information achieves something more. It is not unusual for
the negativity of omitting and forgetting to prove productive. The society of transparency cannot
tolerate a gap [Lücke] in information or of sight. Yet both thinking and inspiration require a
vacuum. Incidentally, the German word for happiness [Glück] derives from this open space; up
until the Late Middle Ages, pronunciation revealed as much [Gelücke]. It follows that a society
that no longer admits the negativity of a gap would be a society without happiness. Love
without something hidden to sight is pornography. And without a gap in knowledge, thinking
degenerates into calculation. The society of positivity has taken leave of both dialectics and
hermeneutics. The dialectic is based on negativity. Thus, Hegel’s “Spirit” does not turn away
from the negative but endures and preserves it within itself. Negativity nourishes the “life of the
mind.” Spirit has “power,” according to Hegel, “only by looking the negative in the face and
tarrying with it.”9 Such lingering yields the “magical power that converts it into being.” In
contrast, whoever “surfs” only for what is positive proves mindless. The Spirit is slow because it
tarries with the negative and works through it. The system of transparency abolishes all
negativity in order to accelerate itself. Tarrying with the negative has given way to racing and
raving in the positive. Nor does the society of positivity tolerate negative feelings. Consequently,
one loses the ability to handle suffering and pain, to give them form. For Nietzsche, the human
soul owes its depth, grandeur, and strength precisely to the time it spends with the negative.
Human spirit is born from pain, too: “That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its
strength, . . . its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting
suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning,
greatness—was it not granted through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?”10
The society of positivity is now in the process of organizing the human psyche in an entirely new
way. In the course of positivization, even love flattens out into an arrangement of pleasant
feelings and states of arousal without complexity or consequence. Alain Badiou’s In Praise of
Love quotes the slogans of the dating service Meetic: “Be in love without falling in love!” Or,
“You don’t have to suffer to be in love!”11 Love undergoes domestication and is positivized as a
formula for consumption and comfort. Even the slightest injury must be avoided. Suffering and
passion are figures of negativity. On the one hand, they are giving way to enjoyment without
negativity. On the other, their place has been taken by psychic disturbances such as exhaustion,
fatigue, and depression—all of which are to be traced back to the excess of positivity. Theory in
the strong sense of the word is a phenomenon of negativity, too. It makes a decision
determining what belongs and what does not. As a mode of highly selective narration, it draws a
line of distinction. On the basis of such negativity, theory is violent. It is “produced to prevent
things . . . from touching” and “to redistinguish what has been confused. ”12 Without the
negativity of distinction, matters proliferate and grow promiscuously. In this respect, theory
borders on the ceremonial, which separates the initiated and the uninitiated. It is mistaken to
assume that the mass of positive data and information—which is assuming untold dimensions
today—has made theory superfluous, that is, that comparing data can replace the use of
models.