POMO NC

Off
The Metropolis is a storm that constantly erodes individuals, creating the
conditions for structural violence. Capitalism puts a price-tag on expression and
creates spaces for encounters that are inevitably violent as a result of hierarchies
and division. Using the negativity from those bad encounters can inspire the
search for a better alternative that overcomes the false hope narrative of
capitalism
Culp 16 (Andrew Culp (2016) Confronting connectivity: feminist challenges to the metropolis,
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 13:2, 166-183, DOI:
10.1080/14791420.2015.1108449. Pg. 7-9. Accessed: 7/8/18//) Cut by Village AS

The Metropolis advances connectivity’s liberal principles of communication, language, and

cooperation as their capitalist appropriation is becoming “the life of the city itself .”64 Behind
these disembodied abstractions hides sexual exploitation. Although the Metropolis is networked
and informatized on the computational layer, it operates through the “pharmaco-pornographic ”
soft technologies that initiate cycles of excitation- frustration at the intersection of technologies
of the body (biotechnologies, surgery, pharmaceuticals) and representation (film, television,
new media).65 These technologies commodify labor through a contract of service that gives a
sexual double meaning to the liberal ideals of access, free expression, and transparency —the
pharmacopornographic regime also offers access to bodies, puts a pricetag on sensual
expression, and guarantees ever-more-penetrating forms of exposure. Beyond the
postmodernization of production, Hardt and Negri characterize the Metropolis in two additional
ways, the first of which is that the Metropolis organizes a space of encounter by providing a
shared structure for the interaction and communion of people and perceptions.66 These
encounters are spaces of contingency, and regardless of how space is used to structure these
encounters, their emergent effects remain unpredictable and surprising. As Manfredo Tafuri
argues, because power “speaks many dialects,” then it is “the construction of physical spaces”
that is “certainly the site of ‘battle,’” as it is accessed through the “borders, remains, residues” it
leaves after the “collision” of the encounter.67 Also striking about these encounters is that they
organize “brief metropolitan contacts” rather than “frequent and prolonged association.”68
However aleatory and brief, encounters contribute to the third dimension of the Metropolis:
material histories, which pathologically prevent good encounters through their hierarchies,
divisions, and polarizations that “bombards you” with negative encounters.69 These hierarchies
and divisions are the marks of colonial relations, racism, patriarchy, and other exploitation that
flow through the veins of the Metropolis and pour out onto its streets, and the pathology often
runs so deep that Hardt and Negri declare: “the Metropolis is a jungle, and the form of the
common and encounter it presents are ones you should run from!”70 What if the Metropolis is
not a jungle, however, but a storm “that does not confront us like a subject, facing us, but like
an environment that is hostile to us?”71 The pornographic transparency of connectivity denudes
subjects by exposing them to the dangerous forces of the outside. Imagining the Metropolis as a
storm matches the reality of its harshly gendered landscape of fear and violence , one that
restricts women’s access to resources, inhibits their ability to find dignified work, and delivers
the daily assaults of catcalls and other violences.72 The term risks naturalizing the[ir] oppression
that women face, a concern reflected in the adage, “everybody complains about the weather,
but nobody does anything about it!” 73 Yet the traditional depiction of crime as the occasional
result of bad actors is not sufficient. The metaphor of the storm powerfully signals the structural
conditions of ongoing urban hostility as a space of bad encounters and fraught material
histories. The ecological dimension of the metaphor thus strengthens the links between the city
and earlier feminist methods for studying structural violence not isolated to a single
individual.74 Innumerable feminist collectives have used the city as an object of inquiry, many
taking cues from Italian feminism and the feminist social center movement, such as
Madridbased Precarias a la Deriva, which “wanders” the city to find the “fragmented, informal,
invisible work that we do,”75 Pittsburgh’s SubRosa, which uses “site-u-ational” art that “centers
on the uses and implications of biotechnology as it applies to sexual difference, race, and
transnational labor conditions,”76 and Feel Tank Chicago, which works to “depathologize
negative affects so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action.”77 What
these feminist media projects reveal is the unavoidable commonality between women who
weather the daily assault of patriarchy like a bad storm, which is a consequence of the gendered
way in which the Metropolis is embodied and experienced. Such negative encounters stick to
bodies as frustrations and feelings and is later channeled into grief, outrage, or simply suffered
in seclusion.78 Most sober-minded critics find the uglier of our shared feelings unfit for
something as noble as liberation, which may be why so few political projects outwardly declare
that they draw their strength from envy, irritation, paranoia, and anxiety. Sianne Ngai argues
that although these negative affects are weaker than “grander passions” and thus lack an
orientation powerful enough to form clear political motivations, the unsuitability of weakly
intentional feelings “amplifies their power to diagnose situations,” and those “situations marked
by blocked or thwarted actions in particular.”79 From this perspective, ugly feelings provide
epistemological access to the bad encounters organized by the Metropolis— especially th ose
that are cruel replacements meant to inspire only enough optimism to discourage the search for
a better alternative.80 Ugly feelings may be not just the result of bad encounters, then, but a
form of resistance enfolded by the body that can be used as a public resource.

The frustrations of capitalism create a shared anxiety – a collection of negative

affects. The Metropolis forces individuals to confine their depression; rather, we
should embrace our negativity into modes of political depression that identify the
violence of the Metropolis: sexism, racism, and environmental degradation.
Political Depression opens up new paths to politics that challenge deeper
blockages in the system: the interiority of the subject.
Culp 16 (Andrew Culp (2016) Confronting connectivity: feminist challenges to the metropolis,
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 13:2, 166-183, DOI:
10.1080/14791420.2015.1108449. Pg. 7-9. Accessed: 7/8/18//) Cut by Village AS
Art and media projects fruitfully demonstrate the diagnostic potential of negative affects in an
urban context. The feminist project Public Feelings responds to the urban experience of
depression with scholarship, art, and media objects. After decades of a political work on queer
activism, the AIDS crisis, antiracist advocacy, electoral campaigns, and antiwar mobilizations,
these feminists undertook a program of diagnosis and selfcare. The positive valence of a
depressive attitude seemed lost, as all that seemed possible was full-blown depression.
Recognizing collective burnout, they questioned dominant diagnostic paradigms, which look for
causes in neurochemical imbalances or damaged psyches. Hardly convinced by solely clinical
explanations for their shared anxiety, exhaustion, incredulity, split focus, and numbness, they
began investigating how the already-alienated life in the Metropolis was compounded by the
trauma of national crises, beginning with 9/11 and continuing with the war in Iraq, the Bush
reelection, and Hurricane Katrina.81 This is not to say that they find psychiatry or psychoanalysis
wrong or counterproductive, but these feminists were determined to turn feelings into
collective forces against the Metropolis; and from that struggle, Feel Tank Chicago was born.
Feel Tank Chicago seeks access to political life through the affective register. The project names
their malaise “political depression,” which they define as “the sense that customary forms of
political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer working either to
change the world or to make us feel better .”82 To further their investigation, Feel Tank holds
conferences, exhibitions, and International Days of the Depressed. As a camp celebration of
depression, they dress in bathrobes and protest with banners, signs, stickers, and chants
emblazoned with slogans diagnosing the environment of hostility produced in the Metropolis:
“Depressed? It Might Be Political”; “Exhausted? It Might Be Politics”; or just “I Feel Lost.”83
Contrary to cynical ideology’s denunciation of those who are apathetic as complicit with the
status quo, political depression identifies the Metropolis and not selfishness or individual illness
as the cause of apathy. Causes for this suffering are numerous and easy to identify—the racism
of white supremacy, the exploitation of global capitalism, the sexism of patriarchy, the
degradation of the environment, and the violence of heteronormativity to name a few —while
the course for their abolition is not readily apparent. Political depression thus demonstrates
how the Metropolis spreads depression under the beating sun of exposure, causing subjects to
seek the internal refuge of social isolation. The group has found a less restricted route through
the Metropolis as a “feel” tank, which works to turn private feelings into a public resource for
political action. And to this end, Feel Tank operates in the nexus of activism, academia, and art.
Such an approach reveals different paths to politics, animated by perspectives that still imagine
alternatives to the Metropolis and are careful to avoid those channels long mastered by
exploitation. By making depression political, many of the Feel Tank projects challenge[s] a
deeper and more pervasive blockage: the interiority of the subject. With its attention to the
affective dimension of politics, Feel Tank upsets the Lockean notion of a dark room of the self.
Affects point to a circuit of power whereby external forces impress themselves on the biological
imperatives of bodies, which makes emotion an emergent quality of the COMMUNICATION AND
CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 9 Downloaded by [Andrew Culp] at 17:17 03 December 2015
interrelational exteriority that constitutes the Metropolis even if a necessary biological
component exists in the body.84 And although a certain body may be predisposed to
depression, its affective cause emerges as a political event in the life of the Metropolis.
Identifying such a cause may be difficult, as depression often arises due to something as diffuse
as bad weather or accumulative time spent in an adverse environment, but it is in this sense
that patriarchy appears as a storm or a desert. It can therefore be said that affect not only
demands that the emotions of subjects count as politics but also demands a political account of
emotion exterior to subjects; as Ann Cvetkovich writes, politicizing feelings requires “the same
historicization that is central to Foucauldian and other social constructionist approaches to
sexuality” because “Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis applies as much to affect as
sexuality, warranting a skeptical approach to claims for interiority or emotional expression as
the truth of the self.”

Systemic forces of capitalism, racism, and sexism cause feelings of burnout and
depression that have historically killed movements in the 60s and 70s. Thus the
alternative is to embrace our negativity into an intellectual project that acts as
the starting point for theoretical insight. We are the project of Political
Depression.
Cvetkovich 12 (Ann Cvetkovich, Depression is ordinary: Public feelings and Saidiya Hartman’s
Lose Your Mother. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1464700112442641. 8/21/12. Accessed:
7/8/18//) Cut by Village AS

What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism,

genocide, slavery, exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives,
rather than to biochemical imbalances? This article takes that premise seriously, but in so doing
has to depart from much of the literature on depression, both medical and historical, which,
often without acknowledging it directly, tends to presume a white and middle-class subject for
whom feeling bad is frequently a mystery because it does not seem to fit a life in which privilege
and comfort make things seem fine on the surface. Although for those whose troubles are more
obvious, depression might be expected, they are not often the direct subjects of the books and
articles in the mainstream press. To track their experiences, we might have to follow the textual
traces that include the quotation above, in which Cornel West, as performed by Anna Deavere
Smith in the stage version of Twilight: Los Angeles, invokes in an almost offhand, but
nonetheless chilling, way an emotional colour line that separates black sadness from white
sadness. In the space of a few sentences, he opens up the chasm of (mis)understanding that
would make any white person humble about presuming to understand black sadness, and he
offers, almost in passing, a beautiful diagnosis of white depression as a cultural rather than
medical predicament. By linking it to the failure of the American dream, he suggests that
sadness comes when the belief that one should be happy or protected turns out to be wrong
and a privileged form of hopefulness that has so often been entirely foreclosed for black people
is punctured. My interest in the links between racism and depression is part of a larger project
that thinks about depression as a cultural and social phenomenon rather than a medical one
(Cvetkovich, 2012). That inquiry has emerged from my collective work over the last decade with
Public Feelings, a group of scholars interested in exploring everyday feelings as an entry point on
to political life. Central to the work of Public Feelings has been the concept of political
depression developed by Chicago’s Feel Tank, inspired not only by the politics of the Bush
presidency and 9/11, but by AIDS activist burnout and the long-term backlash against social
movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including feminism.1 The Public Feelings project asks how
the systemic forces of capitalism, racism, and sexism make us feel, and it is curious to work with
despair, burnout, hopelessness, and depression rather than dismissing these ostensibly negative
affects as debilitating liabilities or shameful failures. The Public Feelings project can be seen as
one form of what is being called the affective turn in cultural criticism, which has not only made
emotions, feelings, and affect (and their differences) the object of scholarly inquiry but also
inspired new ways of doing criticism (Clough, 2007; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). One reason
why the affective turn does not seem particularly new to me is because the Public Feelings
project represents the outcome of many years of engagement with the shifting fortunes of the
feminist mantra that ‘the personal is the political’, as it has shaped theoretical and political
practices and their relation to everyday life. Many of our members are part of a generation that
was schooled in the feminist theory of the 1980s, which emerged in universities that were no
longer connected to a strong movement-based feminism and hence was more focused on
specifically academic questions and institutional change. Moreover, we were taught to be
suspicious of essentialisms, including those associated with affect, such as the idea that women
are naturally more emotional than men or that emotional expression is inevitably liberatory.
Feelings were nevertheless at the heart of this theoretically informed scholarship, including
projects on emotional genres, such as the gothic, the sentimental, the sensational, and the
melodramatic, and sophisticated accounts of the history of emotions , the relation between
private and public spheres, and the construction of interiority, subjectivity, embodiment, and
intimate life.2 Feminist cultural critique was also careful to scrutinise overly simplistic models of
gender identity and the way that the privileges of class, race, or other categories complicate
personalist stories of oppression or require that they be carefully situated. At the same time, the
personal voice has persisted as an important part of feminist scholarship, enabled, if not also
encouraged, by theory’s demand that intellectual claims be grounded in necessarily partial and
local positionalities. The Public Feelings project builds on these lessons and strategies in an
effort to bring emotional sensibilities to bear on intellectual projects and to continue to think
about how these projects can further political ones as well. As we have learned to think both
more modestly and more widely about what counts as politics so that it includes, for example,
cultural activism, academic institutions, and everyday and domestic life, it has become
important to take seriously the institutions where we live (as opposed to always feeling like
politics is somewhere else out there) and to include institutional life in our approaches to
intellectual problems. At this point, theory and affect are not polarised or at odds with one
another, and Public Feelings operates from the conviction that affective investment can be a
starting point for theoretical insight and that theoretical insight does not deaden or flatten
affective experience or investment.
There are two modes of resistance – “temporary autonomous zones” and
“zones of offensive opacity” – the former is the 1AC – momentary acts protest
until the police shuts it down. We affirm the latter, a constant refusal of the war
machines of the world itself that creates lines of active escape that refuse ALL
engagement with the state.
Culp 16 (Andrew Culp, Visiting Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication at the
University of Texas, Dallas Dark Deleuze, University of Minnesota Press, p.22-24, Accessed:
7/9/18//) Cut by Village AS

“A truly dark path undoes everything that makes up this world. Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal
to “accelerate the process” follows from R. D. Laing’s clinical prescription for more madness in
our “veritable age of Darkness” (AO, 131). He supports the mad in turning “the destruction
wrecked on them” into a force of dissolution against the “alienated starting point” of normality.
This is a method made for breaking with the inside, which “turns in on itself” when “pierced by a
hole, a lake, a flame, a tornado, an explosion,” so that the outside comes flooding in (132). Such
a break can go one of two ways: it can be a breakdown or a breakthrough (239, 132). The best
“breakthrough” is “making a break for it.” Deleuze is fond of repeating Black Panther George
Jackson, who writes from prison that “yes, I can very well escape, but during my escape, I’m
looking for a weapon” (DI, 277). The phrase applies to far more than Jackson’s literal
imprisonment in San Quentin—what he really wanted was liberation from the American
capitalist system of racial oppression, which is truly what killed him during his final escape
attempt (eleven years into his one-year-to-life indefinite sentence for robbing a gas station for
$70). The necessity of weapons should be clear. Even the most terrifying nomadic war machine
is overshadowed by the state, which calls its operations “keeping the peace” (as documented by
Foucault in his “Society Must Be Defended” lectures and beyond). Such violence has renewed
meaning in 2015 as I write in the wake of a white supremacist massacre and as an outcry about
racist police violence has finally started to generalize . Jackson stands as a reminder that a
revolutionary line of flight must remain active; revolution is not a system-effect, though
capitalism as a “system leaking all over the place” establishes the terrain for “revolutionary
escape” (such as a propaganda system that can be infiltrated to attract outside conspirators or a
legal system that provides lawyers who can smuggle subversive objects into controlled spaces)
(DI, 270). The brilliant guerilla Che wrote the steps for one such dance, the minuet: the guerrillas
begin by encircling an advancing column and splitting into a number of “points,” each with
enough distance to avoid themselves being encircled; a couple pairs off and begins their dance
as one of the guerrilla points attacks and draws out the enemy, after which they fall back and a
different point attacks—the goal is not annihilation but to immobilize to the point of fatigue
(Guevara, Guerilla Warfare, 58–59). Escapism is the great betrayer of escape. The former is
simply “withdrawing from the social,” whereas the latter learns to “eat away at [the social] and
penetrate it,” everywhere setting up “charges that will explode what will explore, make fall what
must fall, make escape what must escape” as a “revolutionary force” (AO, 341). The same
distinction also holds between two models of autonomy: temporary autonomous zones and
zones of offensive opacity. Temporary autonomous zones are momentary bursts of
carnivalesque energy that proponent Hakim Bey says “vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk”
when the forces of definition arrive (Temporary Autonomous Zone, 100). Deleuze and Guattari
suggest, contrary to orthodox Marxists, that societies are defined by how they manage their
paths of escape (rather than their modes of production) (TP, 435). As such, “psychotopological”
distance established by temporary autonomous zones does not create a significant enough
rupture to open into anything else and thus collapses escape into escape-ism. Tiqqun’s zones of
offensive opacity are an improvement, as they oppose a wider web of cybernetic governance
without packing maximum intensity into a single moment (Anonymous, “De l’Hypothèse
Cybernétique,” 334–38). Opacity is its first principle, something they learn from the long
tradition of autonomists and anarchists whose most militant factions would refuse all
engagement with parliamentary politics, labor and unions, and news media. Offensive
orientation is its second principle, though tempered by the famous line from The Internationale,
“la crosse en l’air,” with the butts of our guns held high in the air: knowing we can take the fight
to the trenches, or even take power, but refuse it anyway. Tiqqun is well aware of the difficult
history behind the state assassinations of the Black Panther Party and the Red Army Faction, so
they know to resist militarization lest they become an army or be liquidated. The advantage of
this “strategic withdrawal” is autonomy, especially as communism becomes its qualitative guide.
Posing communism as oppositional self-determination, it takes the whole social apparatus of
capture as its contrary—against any temptation to engage the social, for whatever resources
offered, arises a demand to be met by a parallel space of communism. Flows: Interruption, Not
Production The schizo is dead! Long live the schizo! Schizo culture appealed to a society seized
by postwar consumer boredom. “Can’t we produce something other than toasters and cars?
How about free speech, free school, free love, free verse!” It is no exaggeration to say that the
events of May 19 were sparked by a Situationist intolerance for boredom (“boredom is always
counter-revolutionary,” says Guy Debord; “Bad Old Days Will End,” 36). In the time since the
1972 publication of Anti-Oedipus, capitalism has embraced its schizophrenia through
neoliberalism. The schizo has become the paraphilic obsession of Nietzsche’s last man. Its flood
of more and more objects has subjects able to muster less and less desire, as seen in the
Japanese Lost Decade of stagflation, when a torrent of perversions coincided with a suicide
epidemic. The dominant feelings today are probably anxiety or depression (Plan C, “We Are All
Very Anxious”).

The Role of the Ballot is to vote for whichever debater best minimizes
oppression. Status quo debate shuts down hard conversations – debaters
create hoops to jump through to avoid engaging in conversations. Challenging it
is our foremost priority. Smith 13
Smith Elijah “A Conversation in Ruins: Race and Black Participation in Lincoln Douglas Debate.” Vbriefly. September 6, 2013

At every tournament you attend this year look around the cafeteria and take note of which
students are not sitting amongst you and your peers. Despite being some of the best and the
brightest in the nation, many students are alienated from and choose to not participate in an
activity I like to think of as homeplace. In addition to the heavy financial burden associated with
national competition, the exclusionary atmosphere of a debate tournament discourages black
students from participating. Widespread awareness of the same lack of participation in policy
debate has led to a growing movement towards alternative styles and methods of engaging the
gatekeepers of the policy community, (Reid-Brinkley 08) while little work has been done to
address or even acknowledge the same concern in Lincoln Douglas debate. Unfortunately
students of color are not only forced to cope with a reality of structural violence outside of
debate, but within an activity they may have joined to escape it in the first place. We are facing
more than a simple trend towards marginalization occurring in Lincoln Douglas, but a culture of
exclusion that locks minority participants out of the ranks of competition. It will be
uncomfortable, it will be hard, and it will require continued effort but the necessary step in
fixing this problem, like all problems, is the community as a whole admitting that such a problem
with many “socially acceptable” choices exists in the first place. Like all systems of social control,
the reality of racism in debate is constituted by the singular choices that institutions, coaches,
and students make on a weekly basis. I have watched countless rounds where competitors
attempt to win by rushing to abstractions to distance the conversation from the material
reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached, who
has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by
“hypothetically” defending my student being lynched at the tournament. Another debate
concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, “just like we did that
guy Troy Davis”. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make
up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard conversations but as someone
who understands that experience, the only constructive strategy is to acknowledge the reality
of the oppressed, engage the discussion from the perspective of authors who are black and
brown, and then find strategies to deal with the issues at hand. It hurts to see competitive
seasons come and go and have high school students and judges spew the same hateful things
you expect to hear at a Klan rally. A student should not, when presenting an advocacy that aligns
them with the oppressed, have to justify why oppression is bad. Debate is not just a game, but a
learning environment with liberatory potential. Even if the form debate gives to a conversation
is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or
Fannie Lou Hamer, that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a
reality that black students cannot escape.
 Case
The constant attempt to pre-empt and end conflict before it starts is going to
fail and creates the reality beyond reality. Everything has happened before it
happens; nuclear war is not a possibility because it have been mapped out into
the system already. Our preemption and deterrence of nuclear war, Ks,
terrorism, good arguments, and war create the silent danger hidden by pseudo-
reality of fiat.
Robinson 12’ “An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard: aleatory power and deterrence” Posted
on Friday, June 8, 2012 By Andrew Robinson https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-
baudrillard-8/

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 object). The double
allows a kind of manipulation or blackmail in which the system takes hostage a 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 tries 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.