Baudrillard

Baudrillard
Inspirational Quotes That Must be Included

into the speeches
Jean Baudrillard quotes Showing 1-30 of 226
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
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“Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile
if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your
total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out
spontaneously in your smile.”
― Jean Baudrillard
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“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”

tags: americans, identity
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“The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of
the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks,
news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill
the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That’s why the slightest
technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it
reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.”
tags: emptiness, media
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“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”

― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments
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“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger
than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another
planet is communicating with you.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America
tags: life
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“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible.
We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with
meaning and it is killing us.”
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“Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.”

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“Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world.
This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.”
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“…sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can
do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing
suicide.
The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show
you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it… to prove
what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say:
I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence.
Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness,
harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.”
tags: america, jean-baudrillard, sociology
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“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which,
after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
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“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia,

disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued
qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or
dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.”
tags: postmodernism, postmodernity
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“All societies end up wearing masks.”

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“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence”

tags: aphrodisiac, innocence
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“This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in
opposition to the invisible violence of security.”
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“the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and
hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.”
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“Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in
Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life,
panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly.
But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a
simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country,
all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social
in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as
imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the
America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the
order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology)
but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality
principle.”
tags: america, disneyland, simulacra, simulation
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“Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an
unconscious since they lost a territory.”
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“America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version.
America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has
no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a
perpetual present.”
― Jean Baudrillard, América
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“But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that
constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a
gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real,
but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”
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“How many faces, how many bodies can you recognize, with your eyes closed, only by
touching them? Have you ever closed your eyes and acted unconsciously? Or loved someone
so blindly, you could almost feel their energy in a dark room and be moved by the powerful
touch of their ideas?”
tags: jean-baudrillard
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“Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social.
Fascism is its middle-aged lust.”
tags: politics, society
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“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally
stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed
from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.”
tags: death
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“History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.”
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“Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum
historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy-going generation which has
known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The ideology of a generation which
is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality,
international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity,
cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the
Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age... A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis,
whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.”
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“Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way
we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I
am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a
universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in
a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how
to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing
but the vicissitudes of profitability.”
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“We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and
of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating
animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us—because the desert of cities is
equal to the desert of sand—the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests—the vertigo of
simulacra is equal to that of nature—only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system
remains, in which work buries work, in which value buries value—leaving a virgin, sacred
space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand,
where only the wind watches over the sand.”
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“And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not
only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely
impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused
with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no
longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance
of a dream.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Semiotext
tags: post-modernism, post-structuralism, the-orders-of-simulacra
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“The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People
lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the
fantasy without realizing what it really is.
They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the
contact/interaction with the real world.”
tags: fantasy, happiness, media, reality, simulation, wants
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“Power floats like money, like language, like theory.”
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“It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and
mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I
cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps
because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and
exploits it.”
tags: loss, new-york, postmodern, power
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“Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of subtle, maleficent, elusive
twisting of meaning...”
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“This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising,
which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this
'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with
pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical
distance, but the smile of collusion”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures
tags: advertising, consumption, media
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“But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is simply incarnated
in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy
their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure
and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose
millennial quarrel is still with us today. This is precisely because they predicted this
omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of
man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that deep down God
never existed, even God himself was never anything but his own simulacra - from this came
their urge to destroy the images. If they could have believed that these images only
obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy
them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from
the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all.”
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“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be
true.”
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“Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of
the other side of things.”
tags: dark, day, fear, night, television, tv
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“I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical
violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.”
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“One of life's primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding
while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what
panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn't hide too well. You
mustn't be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.”
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“Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach,
swathed in the sounds of his walkman . . . Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide
by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by
running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop
him.”
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“All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers
sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave”
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“We need a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us as to our
ends, since ultimately we have never believed in them.”
tags: post-modernism, post-structuralism
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“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be
developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as
microfilm into the sidereal void.”
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“This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic
pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so
liquid, the bodies and the cars are so fluid, the hair so blond, and the soft technologies so
luxuriant, that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and
cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life,
to counteract the hyperreality of everything here.”
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“Today...no performance can be without its control screen video...its goal is to be hooked up
to itself...the mirror phase has given way to the video phase. What develops around the video
or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a
short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doing so, emphasizes their
surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.”
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“There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is
mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where
seduction begins.”
tags: appearance, imagery, meaning, nihilism
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“SeDuciR es MoRir ComO ReaLidaD y reProDuciRse CoMo IlusiOn”

― Jean Baudrillard, Seduction
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“Today abstraction 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.”
tags: hyperreal, map, reality, simulation, territory
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“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish-fulfillment”

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“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... Well, that is paradise: we are beyond the Last Judgment, 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.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime
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“We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a
wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence,
and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for
such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but
realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and
enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values,
and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies
around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams
of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of
being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas,
or into ideology.”
tags: america, baudrillard, sociology
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“it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing
behind them).”
tags: imagery, reality, simulation, unmasking
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“Whereas representation attempts

to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the
whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases
of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum.”
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“Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings
you unflaggingly closer to the next night.”
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“The old slogan 'truth is stranger than fiction,' that still corresponded to the surrealist phase
of this estheticization of life, is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly
confront, even victoriously-it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality-
radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.”
tags: post-modernism, post-structuralism, the-orders-of-simulacra
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“All we have left of liberty is an ad-man's illusion.”

― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End
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“If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these
objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose
them, or for them to be damaged, means castration.”
tags: ego, objects, projection
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“Every set of phenomena, whether cultural totality or sequence of events, has to be

fragmented, disjointed, so that it can be sent down the circuits; every kind of language has to
be resolved into a binary formulation so that it can circulate not, any longer, in our
memories, but in the luminous, electronic memory of the computers. No human language
can withstand the speed of light. No event can withstand being beamed across the whole
planet. No meaning can withstand acceleration. No history can withstand the centrifugation
of facts or their being short-circuited in real time (to pursue the same train of thought: no
sexuality can withstand being liberated, no culture can withstand being hyped, no truth can
withstand being verified, etc.).”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End
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“Virtuality is different from the spectacle, which still left room for a critical consciousness
and demystification. The abstraction of the 'spectacle' was never irrevocable, even for the
Situationists. Whereas unconditional realization is irrevocable, since we are no longer either
alienated or dispossessed: we are in possession of all the information. We are no longer
spectators, but actors in the performance, and actors increasingly integrated into the course
of that performance. Whereas we could face up to the unreality of the world as spectacle, we
are defenceless before the extreme reality of this world, before this virtual perfection. We are,
in fact, beyond all disalienation. This is the new form of terror, by comparison with which the
horrors of alienation were very small beer.”
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“By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the
era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their
artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in
that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory
algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a
question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of
deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly
descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes.”
“Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all
specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing
is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is
sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is
beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears.”
tags: devaluation, generalization, political-correctness, value
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“The whole gestural system of work was also obscene, in sharp contrast to the miniaturized
and abstract gestural system of control to which it has now been reduced. The world of the
objects of old seems like a theatre of cruelty and instinctual drives in comparison with the
formal neutrality and prophylactic 'whiteness' of our perfect functional objects. Thus the
handle of the flatiron gradually diminishes as it undergoes 'contouring' - the term is typical in
its superficiality and abstractness; increasingly it suggests the very absence of gesture, and
carried to its logical extreme this handle will no longer be manual - merely manipulable. At
that point, the perfecting of the form will have relegated man to a pure contemplation of his
power. ”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects
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“Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.”

tags: holocaust
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“The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and
the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the
economy and the finalities of production.”
tags: economy, power, production, reality, society, wants
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“It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God
that religions emerge.”
tags: god, religion, simulation, social, socialism
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“Simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they [media] propagate the brutal charm
of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the
tune of seduction.”
tags: media, terrorism
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“Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects,

responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient,
conforming objects.”
tags: children
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“Silence is banished from our screens; it has no place in communication. Media images (and
media texts resemble media images in every way) never fall silent: images and messages
must follow one upon the other without interruption. But silence is exactly that - a blip in the
circuitry, that minor catastrophe, that slip which, on television for instance, becomes
highly meaningful - a break laden now with anxiety, now with jubilation, which confirms the
fact that all this communication is basically nothing but a rigid script, an uninterrupted
fiction designed to free us not only from the void of the television screen but equally from the
void of our own mental screen, whose images we wait on with the same fascination.”
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“In order to understand the intensity of ritual forms, one must rid oneself of the idea that all
happiness derives from nature, and all pleasure from the satisfaction of a desire. On the
contrary, games, the sphere of play, reveal a passion for rules, a giddiness born of rules, and a
force that comes from ceremony, and not desire.”
tags: desire, fun, games, joy, play, pleasure, religion, rules, seduction, sex
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“Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary

transparency.”
― Jean Beaudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
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“When you take away verisimilitude, you do not automatically find the veridical but, perhaps,
the implausible.”
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“The disaffection, neurosis, anguish and frustration encountered by psychoanalysis comes no

doubt from being unable to love or to be loved, from being unable to give or take pleasure,
but the radical disenchatment comes from seduction and its failure. Only those who lie
completely outside seduction are ill, even if they remain fully capable of loving and making
love. Psychoanalysis believes it treats the disorder of sex and desire, but in reality it is dealing
with the disorders of seduction... The most serious deficiences always concern charm and not
pleasure, enchantment and not some vital or sexual satisfaction.”
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“It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it
more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.”
tags: baudrillard, explanation, meaning, philosophy, radical-thoughts
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“Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it
itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.”
tags: cinema, resurrection, technology
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“Why did this [Vietnam] 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.”
tags: america, politics, power, vietnam, war
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“Everyone seeks their look. Since it is no longer possible to base any claim on one's own
existence, there is nothing for it but to perform an appearing act without concerning oneself
with being - or even with being seen. So it is not: I exist, I am here! but rather: I am visible, I
am an image -look! look! This is not even narcissism, merely an extraversion without depth, a
sort of self-promoting ingenuousness whereby everyone becomes the manager of their own
appearance.”
tags: narcissism, self-promotion
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“It is never too late to revive your origins. It is their destiny: since they were not the first to be
in on history, they will be the first to immortalize everything by reconstitution (by putting
things in museums, they can match in an instant the fossilization process nature took
millions of years to complete). But the conceptions Americans have of the museum is much
wider than our own. To them, everything is worthy of protection, embalming, restoration.
Everything can have a second birth, the eternal birth of the simulacrum. ”
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“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, or in his irreducible singularity, has become
dangerous or unbearable.”
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“The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able
to produce.”
tags: pop-culture, the-matrix
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“Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.”
tags: power, reality, wants
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“So, there is no longer striking, nor work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something
else: a magic of work, a trompel'oeil, a scenodrama (so as not to say a melodrama) of
production, a collective dramaturgy on the empty stage of the social.”
tags: simulation, strike, work
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“Mass(age) is the message.”

― Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
tags: post-modernism
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“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.”
tags: content, media, medium, reality, revolution, truth
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“If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait
of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its
own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons.
Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.”
tags: philosophy
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“For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals
without end.”
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“Bir katliami unutmak da katliam turunden bir seydir.”

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“What do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be
annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and
of theories without consequences).”
tags: media, nihilism, responsibility
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“WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY?”

― Jean Baudrillard, Miti fatali. TwinTowers, Beaubourg, Disneyland, America, Andy Warhol,
Michael Jackson, Guerra del Golfo, Madonna, Jeans, Grande Fratello
tags: piacere
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“Ciddi olmamak ve ciddi görünmek gerekiyor. Ya da ciddi gibi görünmeden ciddi olmak.
Ciddi gibi görünmekle ciddi olmayı birleştirenler değersiz kişilerdir.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Anılar III-IV
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“Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way
much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring
them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them.”
tags: animals, humanity
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“What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent
sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.”
tags: nature, religion, ritual
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“Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.”

tags: desert
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“Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an
irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the
contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-
contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its
irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.”
tags: loss-of-meaning, nothingness
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“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be

obliterated.”
tags: driving
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“We live of seduction, but die Fascination”

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“But it must be seen that the term 'catastrophe' has this 'catastrophic' meaning of the end and
annihilation only in a linear vision of accumulation and productive finality that the system
imposes on us. Etymologically, the term only signifies the curvature, the winding down to the
bottom of a cycle leading to what can be called the 'horizon of the event,' to the horizon of
meaning, beyond which we cannot go. Beyond it, nothing takes place that has meaning for
us - but it suffices to exceed this ultimatum of meaning in order that catastrophe itself no
longer appear as the last, nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our current
collective fantasy.”
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“What we seek in travel is neither discovery nor trade but rather a gentle deterritorialization:
we want to be taken over by the journey - in other words, by absence. As our metal vectors
transcend meridians, oceans and poles, absence takes on a fleshy quality. The
clandestineness of the depths of private life gives way to annihilation by longitude and
latitude. But in the end the body tires of not knowing where it is, even if the mind finds this
absence exalting, as if it were a quality proper to itself.
Perhaps, after all, what we seek in others is the same gentle deterritorialization that we seek
in travel. Instead of one's own desire, instead of discovery, we are tempted by exile in the
desire of the other, or by the desire of the other as an ocean to cross. The looks and gestures
of lovers already have the distance of exile about them; the language of lovers is an
expatriation in words that are afraid to signify; and the bodies of lovers are a tender
hologram to eye and hand, offering no resistance and hence susceptible of being crisscrossed,
like airspace, by desire. We move around with circumspection on a mental planet of
circumvolutions, and from our excesses and passions we bring back the same transparent
memories as we do from our travels.”
tags: desire, lovers, travel
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“The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a
single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...”
tags: art, simplicity, sublimation, sublime, writing
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“To 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”
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“I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned" - mirror of a paradoxical mockery,

mirror of the indifference of all public signification.”
tags: depression
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“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 "imaginary.”
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“In the past, we had objects to believe in—objects of belief. These have disappeared. But we
also had objects not to believe in, which is just as vital a function. Transitional objects, ironic
ones, so to speak, objects of our indifference, …Ideologies played this role reasonably well.
These, too, have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity,
which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or
information, but in believing in the principal and transcendence of information.”
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“As soon as you enter the system to denounce it, you are automatically made a part of it.
There is no ideal omega point today from which hard and fast judgments can be made. You
can see that those who make accusations against the political class are the same ones who
replenish it. The class is fed by the accusations made against it. Even the bluntest critic is
caught up in this circularity.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays
tags: fight-system-accusation
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“Art does not die because there is no more art; it dies because there is too much.”
tags: art, jean-baudrillard
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“When everything is social, suddenly nothing is.”

― Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out
tags: community, philosophy, social-media
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“All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the
medium can make an event.”
tags: events, information, meaning, media
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“A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall
under the sway of madness or perish.”
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“The whole world thus becomes integrated as a spectacle into the domestic universe.”
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“...Düşsellik rezervine bir anlam kazandıran şeyle, gerçeklik katsayısı arasında belli bir orantı
vardır. Düşselliğin ulaşıp, içinde dolanabileceği bâkir bir alan kalmadığı ve harita tüm coğrafi
alanları belirlediğinde, gerçeklik ilkesi de ortadan kaybolmaktadır. Gerçekliğin sınırları
sonsuzluğa çekilince, bu, sınırları belli bir evrende iç uyum anlamına gelen gerçeklik ilkesinin
kanama yapmasına neden olur...”
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“At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at
all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to
anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiguity. At the fractal stage there is no longer any
equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is now no law of value,
merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of general metastasis of value, a haphazard
proliferation and dispersal of value. Indeed, we should really no longer speak of 'value' at all,
for this kind of propagation or chain reaction makes all valuation possible.”
tags: ethics, progress, science
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“la presencia no se borra ante el vacío, se borra ante un redoblamiento de presencia que
borra la oposición de la presencia y de la ausencia”
tags: ausencia, presencia, vacío
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“In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not
an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the
transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It
has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given
has symbolic exchange value.”
― Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
tags: gift-giving, gifts, symbolic-exchange
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“To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what
one doesn't have.”
tags: dissimulation, having, reality, simulation
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“Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them.
Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist
commiseration.”
tags: animals, sentimentality
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“We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians,
those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.”
tags: america, christ, god, indians, ramses, renaissance
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“Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to
speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions.”
tags: human-existence, objects, sovereignty
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“The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is
nothing marks a decisive turning point.”
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“We find the same situation in the economy. On the one hand, the battered remnants of
production and the real economy; on the other, the circulation of gigantic amounts of virtual
capital. But the two are so disconnected that the misfortunes which beset that capital – stock
market crashes and other financial debacles – do not bring about the collapse of real
economies any more. It is the same in the political sphere: scandals, corruption and the
general decline in standards have no decisive effects in a split society, where responsibility
(the possibility that the two parties may respond to each other) is no longer part of the game.
This paradoxical situation is in a sense beneficial: it protects civil society (what remains of it)
from the vicissitudes of the political sphere, just as it protects the economy (what remains of
it) from the random fluctuations of the Stock Exchange and international finance. The
immunity of the one creates a reciprocal immunity in the other – a mirror indifference.
Better: real society is losing interest in the political class, while nonetheless availing itself of
the spectacle. At last, then, the media have some use, and the ‘society of the spectacle’
assumes its full meaning in this fierce irony: the masses availing themselves of the spectacle
of the dysfunctionings of representation through the random twists in the story of the
political class’s corruption. All that remains now to the politicians is the obligation to
sacrifice themselves to provide the requisite spectacle for the entertainment of the people.”
tags: media-corruption, philosophy, politics
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“The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or
motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real
distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will
assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and
the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary
hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we
see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment
desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big
Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information
networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are
already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.”
“The clones are already there; the virtual beings are already there. We are all replicants! We
are so in the sense that, as in Blade Runner, it is already almost impossible to distinguish
properly human behaviour from its projection on the screen, from its double in the image
and its computerized prostheses.”
tags: philosophy
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“The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more
passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the
bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the
inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its death.”
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“Birey, televizyondaki Sudan İç Savaşını herhangi bir tuvalet kağıdı reklamıyla aynı
duyarsızlıkla izlemektedir. Televizyonu kapattıktan sonra, Sudan’da ki iç savaş devam etse
bile, onun için bitmiştir.”
tags: birey, savaş, sudan, televizyon
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“Belli bir doneme ait filmler yeni bicimleriyle yeni bicimleriyle yeniden gundeme getirilmeye
calisilmaktadir. Oysa bu iki film tipi arasindaki fark, gercek insanla ona benzeyen otomat
arasindaki farki gibidir. | 75”
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“The presence is not deleted before the vacuum is cleared before a redoubling of presence
that erases the opposition of the presence and absence”
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“Olumsuzlama dünyanın en basit şeyidir. Bu yüzden hedefte anlaşamayan büyük kitleler
burda buluşur.”
tags: eleştiri, felsefe, olumlu, olumsuz, simmel, çalışmak, üretmek
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“The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the
desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and
admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization
perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.”
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“The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is
that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and
unreal, between transcendence and immanence.”
tags: art, post-modernism, transcendence
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“But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they [Presidents]
were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had
to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in order to preserve
the blessing of power. But it is lost.”
tags: america, god, king, politics, power
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“vivimos de la seducción, pero morimos de la fascinación”

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“What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will
never in effect be reproduced”
tags: imagery, reality, reproduction
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“pozitif olma durumunun aralıksız üretimi halinde, ürkütücü bir sonuç ortaya çıkmaktadır.
çünkü eğer negatif olma durumu kriz ve eleştiriyi doğurursa, mutlak pozitiflik de, krizi
damıtma yetisi olmadığından, felaketi doğurur. negatif ve eleştirel öğeleri denetim altında
tutan, dışlayan, baştan savan her yapı, her sistem, her kitle, tam bir iç patlamaya maruz
kalarak bir felaket tehlikesiyle karşı karşıya kalır. tıpkı her biyolojik bedenin, bünyesindeki
bütün mikropları, basilleri, parazitleri, yani bütün düşmanlarını denetim altında tutarak ya
da dışarı atarak, kanser tehlikesiyle, bir başka deyişle, kendi hücrelerini yiyip bitiren bir
pozitivistlik tehlikesiyle karşı karşıya kalması gibi; biyolojik bünye de , aynen, artık işsiz
kalan kendi antikorları tarafından yok edilme tehlikesiyle karşı karşıya kalır... Aslında,
mikroplar olduğu sürece virüs yoktu. eski enfeksiyonlardan arınmış bir dünyada, "ideal"
klinik bir dünyada, elle muayene edilemeyen, önlenemez bir patolojik durum ortaya çıkar,
bizzat dezenfeksiyondan doğan bir patolojidir bu.”
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“The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial
concentration is illuminating. (...) Against the industrial organization of death, animals have
no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide.”
tags: animals, death, food-industry, industry, suicide
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“Gün batımında Las Vegas’a çöl tarafından baktığımızda reklam ışıklarının pırıl pırıl
aydınlattığı bir kent görürsünüz. Gün doğarken çöle geri döndüğünüzde reklamın duvarları
süsleyen ya da şenlendiren bir şey değil duvarların görülmesini engelleyen, sokakları, bina
yüzeylerini, tüm mimariyi yok eden, her türlü dayanak ve derinliği ortadan kaldıran bir şey
olduğunu görürsünüz. Zaten her şeyin reklam denilen yüzey tarafından emilmesi,
anlamsızlaştırılması (burada görülen göstergelerin ne oldukları önemli değildir) insanı
şaşırtıcı bir hipergerçekliğin içine sokarak rahatlatmakta ve ayartma adlı karşı konulmayan
bu boş biçimi hiçbir şeyle değiş tokuş etmeyecek hâle gelmemizi sağlamaktadır.”
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“Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and every objective, they
turn against power the deterrent that it used so well for such a long time. Because in the
end, throughout its history it was capital that first fed on the destructuration of every
referential, of every human objective, that shattered every ideal distinction between true
and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange,
the iron law of its power. Capital was the first to play at deterrence, abstraction,
disconnection, deterritorialization, etc., and if it is the one that fostered reality, the reality
principle, it was also the first to liquidate it by exterminating all use value, all real
equivalence of production and wealth, in the very sense we have of the unreality of the
stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Well, today it is this same logic that is even
more set against capital. And as soon as it wishes to combat this disastrous spiral by
secreting a last glimmer of reality, on which to establish a last glimmer of power, it does
nothing but multiply the signs and accelerate the play of simulation.”
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“İktidar (ya da onun yerini almış olan şey) artık Üniversiteye inanmamaktadır. Sonuç olarak
bu kurumu belli bir yaş grubuna ait insanı bakım ve gözaltında bulundurduğu bir yer
olarak görmektedir. Aralarında bir seçim yapmaya kalkışmasının bir anlamı yoktur çünkü
iktidar seçkinlerini başka yerlerden seçmekte ya da başka şekilde arayıp bulmaktadır.
Diplomalar artık bir işe yaramadığından, dağıtmayı reddetmesinin bir anlamı yoktur. Bu
yüzden sistem artık herkese bir diploma vermeye hazırdır.”
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“Finally, the medium is the message not only 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.”
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“Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into

emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very
intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.”
tags: geometry, immobility, nostalgia, speed
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“Tukenmeye baslayan bir politika dunyasiyla birlikte Cumhurbaskanlari, ilkel toplumlarda

bir iktidar kuklasindan baska bir sey olmayan kabile seflerine benzemektedirler.”
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“Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world.
This is as marvelous as being there at the beginning. How could one not wish for that with all
one’s heart? How could one not lend one’s feeble resources to bringing it about?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments
tags: end-of-the-world
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“Bir katliamı unutmak da katliam türünden bir şeydir. Çünkü bir katliamı unutmak insanın
bir belleği olduğunu, bir tarihle bir toplumun varlığını, vb. unutmak demektir. Bu unutma
olayı en az katliam olayının kendisi kadar önemlidir, ancak bu arada, bizim bu katliam olayı
ve hakikatine tanık olabilme şansımız sıfırdır. Bu unutma olayı çok tehlikeli bir şeydir.
Unutma olayı yapay bir bellekle engellenebilir”
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“Patlama hep bir vaat, bir umut ışığı olmuştur. Örneğin Harrisburg’de herkes filmdeki gibi
nükleer patlamanın gerçekleşeceği ânı beklemekte ve patlasa da biz de şu ne idüğü belirsiz
panik duygusuyla caydırma amaçlı nükleer patlama düşüncesinden kurtulsak diyecek hâle
gelmektedir.”
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“Paradoks yani bombalar tertemiz nesnelerdir. Sahip oldukları tek kirletici özellik
patlamadıkları zaman çevreye saçtıkları bir güvenlik ve denetleme sistemidir.”
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“One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the
idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence not
images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever
radiant with their
own fascination. Thus this death of the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs. One
can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images, were
those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to the iconolaters who only saw
reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God.”
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“Le monde nous a été donné comme énigmatique et inintelligible, et la tâche de la pensée est
de le rendre, si possible, encore plus énigmatique et encore plus inintelligible.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange
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“LIVE OR DIE': the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we
really have no choice between life and death. If you live, you live, if you die, you die. It is like
saying 'be yourself, or don't be!' It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic. You could read it to mean
that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal. Following the model of
'payor die!', 'your money or your life!', it would become ' your life or your life!'. Stupid, again,
since you cannot exchange life for itself. And yet there is poetic force in this implacable
tautology, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood. In the end, the lesson of
this graffiti is perhaps: 'if you get more stupid than me, you die!”
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“A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the
real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the
simulated generation of differences.”
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“Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the
American CEO can produce a new CEO.”
tags: america, business
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“If it could, capitalism would make due with white rats.”

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“The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption,
elevation to the strength of the model. Anticipation, deterrence, preventive transfiguration,
etc.: the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real.”
tags: end-of-the-social
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“Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent
to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.”
tags: clone, meaning, original
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“As massas conservaram dele somente a imagem, nunca a Idéia. Elas jamais foram atingidas
pela Idéia de Deus, que permaneceu um assunto de padres, nem pelas angústias do pecado e
da salvação pessoal. O que elas conservaram foi o fascínio dos mártires e dos santos, do juízo
final, da dança dos mortos, foi o sortilégio, foi o espetáculo e o cerimonial da Igreja, a
imanência do ritual - contra a transcendência da Idéia. Foram pagãs e permaneceram pagãs à
sua maneira, jamais freqüentadas pela Instância Suprema, mas vivendo das miudezas das
imagens, da superstição e do diabo. Práticas degradadas em relação ao compromisso
espiritual da fé? Pode ser. Esta é a sua maneira, através da banalidade dos rituais e dos
simulacros profanos, de minar o imperativo categórico da moral e da fé, o imperativo
sublime do sentido, que elas repeliram. Não porque não pudessem alcançar as luzes sublimes
da religião: elas as ignoraram. Não recusam morrer por uma fé, por uma causa, por um ídolo.
O que elas recusam é a transcendência, é a interdição, a diferença, a espera, a ascese, que
produzem o sublime triunfo da religião. Para as massas, o Reino de Deus sempre esteve
sobre a terra, na imanência pagã das imagens, no espetáculo que a Igreja lhes oferecia.
Desvio fantástico do princípio religioso. As massas absorveram a religião na prática sortílega
e espetacular que adotaram.”
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“In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for
being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.”
tags: colonialism, critical-race-theory, ethnography, imperialism
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“Gizlemek (dissimuler), sahip olunan şeye sahip değilmiş gibi yapmak; simüle etmek ise
sahip olunmayan şeye sahipmiş gibi yapmaktır.”
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“Estamos portanto no ponto paradoxal em que as massas se recusam ao batismo do social,

que é ao mesmo tempo o do sentido e da liberdade. Não fazemos delas uma nova e gloriosa
referência. Porque elas não existem.”
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“Bu evrene çocuksu bir görünüm verilmek istenmesinin nedeni, yetişkinlere özgü “gerçek” ve
başka bir evren bulunduğu düşüncesini onaylatma arzusudur. Disneyland bir çocuksuluğun
gerçek anlamda her yere hâkim olduğunu gizleyebilmek için, yetişkinlerin de buraya gelerek
çocuklaşmalarına olanak tanımak ve gerçekte çocuk olmadıklarına inandırma amacıyla
kurulmuş bir evrendir.”
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“Böyle bir skandalın ifşâ edilmesi yasalara saygı duyulduğunu göstermektedir. Belki de
Watergate’in başarabildiği tek şey herkesi Watergate’in bir skandal olduğuna
inandırmaktır.”
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“Bu noktada Bourdieu’ nün şu saptamasına katılmamak mümkün değil: “Güç ilişkilerinin

özünde yatan şey, güç ilişkilerine benzememeye çalışarak gücünün tamamını bu gizlilikten
almaktır”. Bu açıklamaya dayanarak ahlâksız ve vicdansız bir kapitalin ancak ahlâkî
bir ütopyanın ardına gizlenerek var olabileceği düşünülebilir. Bu açıdan kamusal ahlâkı
diriltmeye çalışan herkesin (ifşâ ya da infial duyma yoluyla, vb.) aslında kapitalist düzen için
çalıştığı söylenebilir.”
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“The idea of a clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war
conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness. It is like
those characters in Hieronymus Bosch with a glass bell or a soap bubble around their head as
a sign of their mental debility. A war enclosed in a glass coffin, like Snow White, purged of
any carnal contamination or warrior's passion. A clean war which ends up in an oil slick.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
tags: postmodernism, theory, war
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“Todos os grandes esquemas da razão sofreram o mesmo destino. Eles só descreveram sua
trajetória, só seguiram o curso de sua história no diminuto topo da camada social detentora
do sentido (e em particular do sentido social), mas no essencial somente penetraram nas
massas ao preço de um desvio, de uma distorção radical.”
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“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.
Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double
refusal.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power
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“A massa se cala como os animais e seu silêncio é comparável ao silêncio dos animais.
Embora examinada até a morte (e a solicitação incessante a que é submetida, a informação,
equivale ao suplício experimental dos animais nos laboratórios), ela não diz nem onde está a
verdade: à direita, à esquerda? Nem o que prefere: a revolução, a repressão? Ela não tem
verdade nem razão. Embora lhe emprestem todas as palavras artificiais. Ela não tem
consciência nem inconsciente.”
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“You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of 'missing'
something, some form of enjoyment or other. You never know whether a particular
encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whisky, the Prado, LSD,
Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some 'sensation'. It is no longer desire, or even
'taste', or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague
sense of unease - it is the 'fun morality' or the imperative to enjoy oneself, to exploit to the
full one's potential for thrills pleasure or gratification.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures
tags: consumption, sociology
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“This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is
made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the
obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death,
that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at
all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in
the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure is an effect of the resurrection of the
body, by which it exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek
to imprison it, that exorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget
pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of
appearance and become dedicated to the utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case,
already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence is already half-dead, and the
current semi-yogic, semi-ecstatic cult of the body is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken
of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it will be made up in the funeral home.”
tags: america, atheism, grace, nihilism, pleasure, resurrection, technology, the-body
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“Nothing resembles itself, and holographic reproduction, like all fantasies of the exact
synthesis or resurrection of the real (this also goes for scientific experimentation), is already
no longer real, is already hyperreal. It thus never has reproductive (truth) value, but always
already simulation value . . . Singular and murderous power of the potentialization of the
truth, of the potentialization of the real. This is perhaps why twins were deified, and
sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the
original, and thus to a pure non-meaning. Any classification or signification, any modality of
meaning can thus be destroyed simply by logically being elevated to the nth power - pushed
to its limit, it is as if all truth swallowed its own criteria of truth as one "swallows one's birth
certificate" and lost all its meaning. Thus the weight of the world, or the universe, can
eventually be calculated in exact terms, but initially it appears absurd, because it no longer
has a reference, or a mirror in which it can come to be reflected - this totalization, which is
practically equivalent to that of all the dimensions of the real in its hyperreal double, or to
that of all the information on an individual in his genetic double (clone), renders it
immediately pataphysical.”
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“Imperativo de produção de sentido que se traduz pelo imperativo incessantemente renovado

de moralização da informação: melhor informar, melhor socializar, elevar o nível cultural das
massas, etc. Bobagens: as massas resistem escandalosamente a esse imperativo da
comunicação racional. O que se lhes dá é sentido e elas querem espetáculo. Nenhuma força
pôde convertê-las à seriedade dos conteúdos, nem mesmo à seriedade do código. O que se
lhes dá são mensagens, elas querem apenas signos, elas idolatram o jogo de signos e de
estereótipos, idolatram todos os conteúdos desde que eles se transformem numa seqüência
espetacular.”
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“nós somos apenas episodicamente condutores de sentido, no essencial e em profundidade

nós nos comportamos como massa, vivendo a maior parte do tempo num modo pânico ou
aleatório, aquém ou além do sentido.”
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“Il Nuovo Ordine Mondiale è disneico.”

tags: nuovo-ordine-mondiale, nwo
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“It is to the unknown one yields most impulsively; it is toward the unknown that one feels the
most total, the most instinctive obligation.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Suite Vénitienne/Please follow me
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“E é esse espectro socialista de segunda mão que hoje ronda a Europa. Nós vagueamos entre
os fantasmas do capital, de hoje em diante vaguearemos no modelo póstumo do socialismo.
A hiper-realidade de tudo isso não mudará nem um pouco, num certo sentido é nossa
paisagem familiar há muito tempo. Estamos doentes de leucemia política, e essa indiferença
crescente (estamos atravessados pelo poder sem por ele sermos atingidos, analisamos,
atravessamos o poder sem alcançá-lo) é absolutamente semelhante ao tipo de patologia mais
moderna: a saber, não a agressão biológica objetiva, mas a incapacidade crescente do
organismo de fabricar anticorpos (ou mesmo, como na esclerose em placas, a possibilidade
de os anticorpos se voltarem contra o próprio organismo).”
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“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.”

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“e, assim como as sociedades primitivas foram devastadas pela explosão por não terem
sabido controlar durante mais tempo o processo implosivo, assim nossas culturas começam a
ser devastadas pela implosão por não terem sabido controlar e equilibrar o processo
explosivo.”
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“At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.”

tags: pornography
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“All liberation affects Good and Evil equally. The liberation of morals and minds entails
crimes and catastrophes. The liberation of law and pleasure leads inevitably to the liberation
of crime.”
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“Beaubourg illustrates very well that an order of simulacra only establishes itself on the alibi
of the previous order. Here, a cadaver all in flux and surface connections gives itself as
content a traditional culture of depth. An order of prior simulacra (that of meaning)
furnishes the empty substance of a subsequent order, which, itself, no longer even knows the
distinction between signifier and signified, nor between form and content.”
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“There is no real reason why Disney should not buy up the human genome, which is
currently being sequenced, to turn it into a genetic attraction. Why not cryogenize the whole
planet, exactly as Walt Disney had himself cryogenized in liquid nitrogen, with a view to
some kind of resurrection or other in the real world? But there no longer is a real world, and
there won’t be one – not even for Walt Disney: if he wakes up one day he’ll get the shock of
his life. In the meantime, from the depths of his liquid nitrogen he goes on annexing the
world – both imaginary and real – subsuming it into the spectral universe of virtual reality in
which we have all become extras. The difference is that, as we slip on our data suits or our
sensors, or tap away at our keyboards, we are moving into living spectrality, whereas he, the
brilliant precursor, has moved into the virtual reality of death.”
tags: philosophy
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“it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of
the real, coincide with their models of simulation.”
tags: models, reality, simulation
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“O êxtase é antinômico da paixão.”

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“Just as the waste of time nourishes the hell of leisure, so technological wastes nourish the
hell of war. Wastes which incarnate the secret violence of this society, uncoerced and non-
degradable defecation.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
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“Oysa tüm düşleri elinden alınmış bir dünyaya gerçeklik egemen olabilir mi? Gerçeklikten
ibaret bir dünya oluşturmaya çalıştığımız ölçüde elimiz ayağımıza dolaşmakta ve bu
gerçeklikten giderek uzaklaşmaktayız. Gerçekleştiği an ortadan kaybolmaya başlayan bir
gerçeklik evreni içinde yaşıyoruz.”
“Çocuklar bir yanda özerk, sorumlu, özgür ve bilinçli varlıklar olmak zorundayken öte
yandan boyun eğmek, tepki göstermemek, itaat etmek ve kurallara uymak zorundadırlar.
Çocuk, bütün bu alanlarda mücadele etmek durumundadır. Örneğin, uymak zorunda kaldığı
çelişkili bir mecburiyete ikili bir stratejiyle karşı koymaktadır.”
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“The feminine seduces because it is never where it thinks it is, or where it thinks itself.”
tags: feminine, seduction
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“ Özgürleştirmeye yönelik uygulamalar sistemin yalnızca bir yüzünü, yani bize sürekli olarak
saf bir nesne olmamızı ihtar eden yüzünü gösterirken bizden bir özne olmamızı, özgürleş
-memizi, ne pahasına olursa olsun konuşmamızı, oy vermemizi, katılmamızı ve oyunu
oynamamızı isteyen diğer yüzünü gizlemektedir. Bu şantaj ve ihtar da en az diğeri kadar
ciddidir. Hattâ günümüzde çok daha ciddi boyutlara ulaşmış olduğu söylenebilir. Varlığını
baskı ve cezalandırmayla kanıtlamaya çalışan bir sistemde stratejik direnişin adı özgürlük
isteyen özne olabilir. Oysa böyle bir olay, sistemin bir önceki evresini kapsamaktadır.”
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“Çünkü günümüzde sistem kendini herkese maksimum söz hakkı tanıyarak, maksimum

düzeyde anlam üretiminden yana bir tavır koyarak kanıtlamaya çalışmaktadır. Öyleyse
direniş stratejisinin adı anlam üretimi ve konuşmayı reddetmek (ya da bir tür yadsıma ve
reddetme biçimi olarak değerlendirilebilecek sisteme ait mekanizmalara hiperuyumlanma
simülasyonu) olabilir. Kitle de zaten böyle yapmakta, sistemin mantığını tamamıyla
benimseyerek bu mantığı kendisine karşı direnmek amacıyla kullanıp, bir tür ayna görevi
yaparak, sistemin gönderdiği anlamı hiçbir şekilde etkilenmeden kendisine geri
göndermektedir. Bugün bu stratejinin belirleyici olmasının nedeni (doğal olarak hâlâ
bir stratejiden söz edebilmek mümkünse) sistemin bu aşamaya gelmiş olmasıdır.”
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“Eğer reklam uzun bir süredir bıkıp usanmadan olayın ekonomik yanını da içeren: “Satın
alıyorum, tüketiyorum, keyif alıyorum” türünden bir ültimatomu sürekli olarak dile getirip
yineledikten sonra, bugün, akla gelebilecek her yönteme başvurarak: “Oyumu veriyorum,
katılıyorum, ben buradayım, bu benim sorunum” türünden sözcükleri usanmadan
yineliyorsa bu bir rastlantı olamaz. Reklam, kamusal alana ait her şeye karşı duyarsız
kalındığını gösteren, paradoksal bir aşağılama aynasıdır.”
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“Are the mass media on the side of the 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?”
tags: masses, media-manipulation
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“But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in
simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible
theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and
pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible
Idea of God?”
tags: god, imagery, power, simulacra, simulation
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“Bu konuda Ballard’ın gelişim çizgisi belki daha inandırıcı bir örnek oluşturacaktır. Yazmış
olduğu aşırı “fantazmagorik”, bir düşü andıran, ilk şaşırtıcı ve şiirsel öykülerinden biri olan
ve artık bir bilimkurgu öyküsü olarak nitelendirilemeyecek ancak günümüzde (IGH ya da
Beton Adası başlıklı öykülerine oranla) kuşkusuz bir bilimkurgu modeli/örneği olarak
gösterilebilecek Crash’a bir göz atalım.”
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“Engizisyon cellâtlarının sorunu neydi? Onlar Kötülüğün, Kötülük İlkesinin itiraf edilmesini
istiyorlardı. Suçlulara kazara suç işlemiş olduklarını, ilâhî düzenin bir parçası olan Kötülük
ilkesine istemeden uymuş olduklarını söyletmek gerekiyordu. Böylelikle itiraf olayı insanı
rahatlatan bir nedenselliğin sürdürülmesini sağlarken; öte yandan işkence, yani kötülüğün
işkence yoluyla yok edilmesi “bir neden olarak kötülük üretiminin” (bu ne sadistçe ne de
bağışlatıcı türden bir işkencedir) baş tâcı edilmesine neden oluyordu. Aksi takdirde imandan
en küçük sapma bile Tanrı’nın yarattığı her şeyden kuşku duyulmasına neden olabilirdi.
Laboratuarlarda ya da füzelerde hayvanlardan bilim adına yine böylesine vahşi bir şekilde
yararlanır, onları kötü emellerimize alet edip elektrotlar ve ameliyat bıçaklarıyla tehdit
ederken kendilerine zorla itiraf ettirmeye çalıştığımız şey nedir?”
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“İnsanı mucizevî bir yöntemle “rasyonel” davranışlara sahip bir varlığa indirgeyebilmek

mümkün olsaydı, bugün ne insan bilimleri ne de psikanaliz diye bir şey olurdu. Karmaşık
yapısı sınırsız bir şekilde uzatılıp, genişletilebilecek psikoloji adlı disiplinin ortaya çıkmasının
kökeninde (işçileri) öldürünceye kadar sömürebilme, (tutukluları) öldürünceye kadar
kapalı tutabilme, (hayvanları) öldürünceye kadar şişmanlatma olanaksızlığı vardır.”
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“Hayvanları aşağıladığımızı gösteren en belirgin işaret kendilerine karşı beslediğimiz

duygulardır. Onları ne kadar seviyorsak, o kadar aşağılıyoruz demektir. Hayvanlar sorumsuz
ve insanlık dışı bir yaşama mahkûm edilip aşağılandıkları oranda, insan sevgisi ve şefkatiyle
ödüllendirilmektedirler. Tıpkı masumluk ve çocukluğa mahkûm edilerek sevgi ve şefkat
gösterilen çocuklar gibi. Duygusallık, hayvanlığın en alt boyutlara indirgenmiş biçimidir. Bu
ırkçı olarak nitelenebilecek türden bir acıma duygusudur ve biz hayvanlara bile bu türden bir
duygusallık yüklemeye çalışıyoruz.”
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“Artık çocuklar da konuşmaktadır. Çocuklar, artık büyüklerin evreni dışında kalan

anlaşılması olanaksız tuhaf yaratıklar değildirler. Anlam üreten çocukların bir anlamı
olmalıdır. Konuşmalarının nedeni onlara bir konuşma “özgürlüğünün” tanınmış olması
değil, büyüklerin kafayı çalıştırarak bu sessizliğin bir tehdide dönüşmesini engelleyecek bir
kurnazlık düşünmüş olmalarıdır. İlkellere bile söz hakkı tanınmaktadır. Konuş -maları
istenmekte ve söyledikleri dinlenmektedir. Onlar artık bir hayvan gibi görülmemektedir.”
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“Toplumsal açıdan bir pazar ve iş olma işlevini yitiren, kültürel bir töz ya da bilimsel bir
amaçtan yoksun kalan Üniversite çökmüştür.”
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“Toplumsal açıdan bir pazar ve iş olma işlevini yitiren, kültürel bir töz ya da bilimsel bir
amaçtan yoksun kalan Üniversite çökmüştür. Ortada gerçek anlamda bir iktidar yoktur
çünkü o da çökmüştür. Bu yüzden yeni bir 1968 Mayıs’ının gerçekleşebilmesi olanaksızdır
yani bilginin (üniversitedeki sol aydın kesimi -ç.n.) iktidarı yeniden sorgulamak gibi bir
niyeti yoktur. Üniversite ve iktidar arasındaki çarpıcı karşıtlığın ya da bilgiyle
iktidar arasındaki suç ortaklığının su yüzüne çıkması da aynı anlama gelmektedir. Bu olgu
politik olmaktan çok simgesel sayılabilecek bir yöntemle tüm toplumsal ve kurumsal yapıya
bir anda bulaştırılmıştır.”
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“İnsanın yaşantısını paralize eden şeyin adı atom bombası atma tehdidi değildir. Yaşamımızı
kanser eden şeyin adı caydırmadır.”
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“O terrorismo não visa fazer falar, ressuscitar ou mobilizar quem quer que seja; não tem
prolongamento revolucionário (a esse respeito, seria mais uma contra-performance total, o
que se lhe censura violentamente, mas seu problema não está nisso), visa as massas em seu
silêncio, silêncio magnetizado pela informação; ele visa, para precipitar sua morte ao
acentuá-la, esta magia branca do social que nos envolve, a da informação, da simulação, da
dissuasão, do controle anônimo e aleatório, essa magia branca da abstração social pela magia
negra de uma abstração maior ainda, mais anônima, mais arbitrária e mais aleatória ainda: a
do ato terrorista.”
― jean baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
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“Este paradigma del sujeto sin objeto, del sujeto sin otro, se descubre en todo lo que ha
perdido su sombra y se ha vuelto transparente a sí mismo, hasta en las sustancias
desvitalizadas: en el azúcar sin calorías, en la sal sin sodio, en la vida sin sal, en el efecto sin
causa, en la guerra sin enemigo, en las pasiones sin objeto, en el tiempo sin memoria, en el
amo sin esclavo, en el esclavo sin amo en el que nos hemos convertido.
¿Qué le sucede a un amo sin esclavo? Acaba por aterrorizarse a sí mismo. ¿Y a un esclavo sin
amo? Acaba por explotarse a sí mismo. Hoy los dos están reunidos en la forma moderna de la
servidumbre voluntaria: sujeción a los sistemas de datos, a los sistemas de cálculo; eficacia
total, performance total. Nos hemos convertido en dueños, por lo menos virtuales, de este
mundo, pero el objeto de este dominio, la finalidad de este dominio, ha desaparecido.”
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“Ogni “trasparenza” pone immediatamente il problema del suo contrario, il segreto.”

tags: segreto, trasparenza
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“Ma è così sicuro che la corruzione debba essere sradicata?”

― Jean Baudrillard, Passwords
tags: corruzione
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“Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance. And at
the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs
of power—a holy union that is reconstructed around its disappearance. The whole world
adheres to it more or less in terror of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of
power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power—obsession with its death,
obsession with its survival, which increases as it disappears. When it has totally disappeared,
we will logically be under the total hallucination of power—a haunting memory that is
already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it (no one
wants it anymore, everyone unloads it on everyone else) and the panicked nostalgia over its
loss. The melancholy of societies without power: this has already stirred up fascism, that
overdose of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning.”
tags: fascism, mass-culture, politics, power, society, symbols
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“não há equivalente ao caráter cego, não-representativo, desprovido de sentido, do ato

terrorista, senão o comportamento cego, desprovido de sentido e além da representação que
é o das massas. Eles têm isso de comum porque são a forma atual mais radical, mais
exacerbada, de negação de qualquer sistema representativo.”
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“You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),” or again: “You are no longer
listening to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is listening to you”—a switch from the panoptic
mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of
deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is
no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!”
“YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is
confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. …Such is the
last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of
propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you
are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face
through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the
gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side.”
tags: deterrence, hyperreal, media, propaganda, social-control, surveillance
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“Savaş ahlâkıyla yüce savaş “değerlerinden” söz edenler fazla üzülmesinler: Çünkü savaş bir
simülakra benzediği zaman bile insana yeterince acı çektirebilmekte ve sonuç olarak bu
savaşın gazileri de diğerleriyle aynı düzeyde bir değere sahip olabilmektedirler.”
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“Sorumluluk, denetleme, sansür ve kendi kendini caydırma olayı her zaman için sahip
olunan güç ve silahlardan daha hızlı bir tempoda gelişmektedir. Zaten toplumsal düzenin
sırrı da burada yatmaktadır.”
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“All around [the Centre Pompidou and Beauborg Museum], the neighborhood is nothing but
a protective zone—remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygienic design—but above all in
a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear
power stations pose: not lack of security, pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum
security that radiates around them, the protective zone of control and deterrence that
extends, slowly but surely, over the territory—a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical
glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of
security is elaborated, which will encompass the whole social field, and which is
fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally, under the
sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger).
The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission,
political deterrence.”
tags: deterrence, globalization, security, social-control
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“Tarihsel ve toplumsal açıdan bugüne kadar ağza alınamayan, söylenmesi ayıp olduğu için
gizlenen, bir tür suçluluk duygusu şeklinde sürüp gitmekte olan şey artık “herkes tarafından
bilinmektedir”. Herkes bu yok etme olayı (film) karşısında titremiş ve ağlayıp zırlamıştır. Bu
da “olayın” (katliamın) bir daha asla yinelenmeyeceğini gösteren en güvenilir kanıttır. Az
bir masraf ve birkaç damla gözyaşıyla kotarılan(!) böyle bir olayın tam da yinelenmeyeceği
düşünüldüğü bir sırada, bu katliamı kamuoyuna sunduğunu ilân eden televizyon adlı günah
çıkartma aracı tarafından yeniden yaşatılmakta ve üretilmektedir.”
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“Bir başka deyişle kitlelerin Beaubourg’a koşmalarının nedeni yüzlerce yıldır kendilerini
yoran, bıktıran bu kültür karşısında salya akıtmak değil, her zaman nefret etmiş oldukları bir
kültürün yasını tutma fırsatını kitle hâlinde ilk kez ellerine geçirmiş olmalarıdır.”
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“Açılışının ertesi günü kalabalık tarafından demonte edilerek, kaçırılacak bir Beaubourg, bu
kültürel demokrasi ve saydamlık adlı saçma meydan okuma düşüncesine karşı verilebilecek
en güzel yanıt olabilirdi. Herkes bu fetişleştirilmiş kültürden birer fetiş-somun
götürebilirdi.”
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“A forma é a de um jogo, não de um sistema de representação - semiurgia e estratégia, não

ideologia -, e a sua utilização depende de virtuosismo e não de verdade. (...) O cinismo e a
imoralidade da política maquiaveliana estão nisso: não no uso sem escrúpulos dos meios com
que se o confundiu na concepção vulgar, mas na desenvoltura com relação aos fins. Pois,
Nietzsche o viu bem, é nesse menosprezo por uma verdade social, psicológica, histórica,
nesse exercício dos simulacros enquanto tais, que se encontra o máximo de energia política,
nesse momento em que o político é um jogo e ainda não se deu uma razão.”
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“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.
This 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.”
tags: content, hyperreal, information-overload, internet, meaning, media
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“Assim é o terrorismo, original e insolúvel somente porque ataca não importa onde, quando e
quem, senão seria somente ato de resgate ou de comando militar. Sua cegueira é a réplica
exata da indiferenciação absoluta do sistema, que há muito tempo não distingue os fins dos
meios, os carrascos das vitimas. Seu ato visa, na indistinção assassina da tomada de reféns,
exatamente o produto mais característico de todo o sistema: o indivíduo anônimo e
perfeitamente indiferenciado, o termo substituível por qualquer outro. É preciso dizer
paradoxalmente; os inocentes pagam o crime de não serem nada, de serem sem destino, de
terem sido despossuídos de seu nome por um sistema também anônimo, de que eles se
tornaram, então, a mais pura encarnação. São os produtos acabados do social, de uma
sociabilidade abstrata doravante mundializada. É nesse sentido, exatamente no sentido em
que eles são qualquer pessoa, que são as vítimas predestinadas pelo terrorismo.”
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“Everywhere today, in fact, the ideology of competition gives way to a 'philosophy' of self-
fulfillment. In a more integrated society individuals no longer compete for the possession of
goods, they actualize themselves in consumption.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects
tags: consumption, philosophy, self-fulfillment
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“Folkloric dances in the metro, innumerable campaigns for security, the slogan “tomorrow I
work” accompanied by a smile formerly reserved for leisure time, and the advertising
sequence for the election to the Prud-hommes (an industrial tribunal): “I don’t let anyone
choose for me”—an Ubuesque slogan, one that rang so spectacularly falsely, with a mocking
liberty, that of proving the social while denying it. It is not by chance that advertising, after
having, for a long time, carried an implicit ultimatum of an economic kind, fundamentally
saying and repeating incessantly, “I buy, I consume, I take pleasure,” today repeats in other
forms, “I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned”—mirror of a paradoxical mockery,
mirror of the indifference of all public signification.”
tags: advertising, corporate-social-responsibility, propaganda
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“What happens on the other side of the truth, not in what would be false, but in what is more
true than the true, more real than the real? Bizarre effects, certainly, and sacrileges, much
more destructive of the order of truth than its pure negation. Singular and murderous power
of the potentialization of the truth, of the potentialization of the real.”
tags: hyperreal, magnification, truth
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“What did the torturers of the Inquisition want? The admission of evil, of the principle of
evil. It was necessary to make the accused say that he was not guilty except by accident,
through the incidence of the principle of Evil in the divine order. Thus confession restored a
reassuring causality, and torture, and the extermination of evil through torture, were nothing
but the triumphal coronation (neither sadistic nor expiatory) of the fact of having produced
Evil as cause. Otherwise, the least heresy would have rendered all of divine creation
suspect.”
tags: confession, evil, inquisition, social-norms, social-order
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“O único referente que ainda funciona é o da maioria silenciosa. Todos os sistemas atuais
funcionam sobre essa entidade nebulosa, sobre essa substância flutuante cuja existência não
é mais social mas estatística, e cujo único modo de aparição é o da sondagem. Simulação no
horizonte do social, ou melhor, no horizonte em que o social já desapareceu.
O fato de a maioria silenciosa (ou as massas) ser um referente imaginário não quer dizer que
ela não existe. Isso quer dizer que não há mais representação possível. As massas não são
mais um referente porque não têm mais natureza representativa. Elas não se expressam, são
sondadas. Elas não se refletem, são testadas.
(...)Bombardeadas de estímulos, de mensagens e de testes, as massas não são mais do que
um jazigo opaco, cego, como os amontoados de gases estelares que só são conhecidos através
da análise do seu espectro luminoso - espectro de radiações equivalente às estatísticas e às
sondagens. Mais exatamente: não é mais possível se tratar de expressão ou de representação,
mas somente de simulação de um social para sempre inexprimível e inexprimido. Esse é o
sentido do seu silêncio. Mas esse silêncio é paradoxal - não é um silêncio que fala, é um
silêncio que proíbe que se fale em seu nome. E, nesse sentido, longe de ser uma forma de
alienação, é uma arma absoluta.
Ninguém pode dizer que representa a maioria silenciosa, e esta é sua vingança. As massas
não são mais uma instância à qual se possa referir como outrora se referia à classe ou ao
povo. Isoladas em seu silêncio, não são mais sujeito (sobretudo,não da história), elas não
podem, portanto, ser faladas, articuladas, representadas, nem passar pelo “estágio do
espelho” político e pelo ciclo das identificações imaginárias. Percebe-se que poder resulta
disso: não sendo sujeito, elas não podem ser alienadas - nem em sua própria linguagem (elas
não têm uma), nem em alguma outra que pretendesse falar por elas. Fim das esperanças
revolucionárias. Porque estas sempre especularam sobre a possibilidade de as massas, como
da classe proletária, se negarem enquanto tais. Mas a massa não é um lugar de negatividade
nem de explosão, é um lugar de absorção e de implosão.”
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“The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People
lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the
fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfillment through the
simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world.”
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“It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and
therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it.
The system puts an end one by one to all its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by
one all the objectives of all the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to
revive the wheels of capital in order to lay siege to them one day: from private property to
small business, from the army to national grandeur, from puritan morality to petit bourgeois
culture, justice at the university—everything that is disappearing, that the system, in its
atrocity, certainly, but also in its irreversible impulse, has liquidated, must be conserved.”
tags: bourgeois-left, late-capitalism, politics, power
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“In this country, it is not the highest virtue, nor the heroic act, that achieves fame, but the
uncommon nature of the least significant destiny. There is plenty for everyone, then, since
the more conformist the system as a whole becomes, the more millions of individuals there
are who are set apart by some tiny peculiarity. The slightest vibration in a statistical model,
the tiniest whim of a computer are enough to bathe some piece of abnormal behaviour,
however banal, in a fleeting glow of fame.”
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“Pentru mine, universul seducției era cel care se opunea radical universului producției. Nu
mai era vorba de a face lucrurile să apară, de a le fabrica, de a le produce pentru o lume a
valorii, ci de a le seduce, adică de la a le deturna de la această valoare, deci de la identitatea
lor, de la realitatea lor, pentru a le destina jocului aparențelor, schimbului simbolic dintre
ele. [...] Seducția este un joc mult mai fatal și mult mai riscant, care nu se opune câtuși de
puțin plăcerii, dar care, dimpotrivă, este altceva decât juisarea. Seducția este o sfidare, o
formă care întotdeauna caută să deregleze pe cineva din punctul de vedere al identității sale,
al sensului pe care cineva îl poate căpăta pentru sine însuși. În seducție el regăsește
posibilitatea unei alterități radicale. Mi se pare că seducția are în vedere toate formele care
evită un sistem de acumulare, de producție. [...] Seducția este crima originară. Iar tentativele
noastre de a pozitiva lumea, de a-i da un sens unilateral, de felul imensei întreprinderi a
producției, au, fără doar și poate, drept scop să elimine, să abolească acest tărâm, până la
urmă, periculos, malefic, al seducției.”
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“Eskiden deliler dilsizdi. Oysa bugün herkes onları dinlemektedir çünkü günümüzde, eskiden
saçma ve çözülmesi olanaksız görünen deli mesajlarını çözebilen bir yöntem bulunmuştur.
Artık çocuklar da konuşmaktadır. Çocuklar, artık büyüklerin evreni dışında kalan anlaşılması
olanaksız tuhaf yaratıklar değildirler. Anlam üreten çocukların bir anlamı olmalıdır.
Konuşmalarının nedeni onlara bir konuşma “özgürlüğünün” tanınmış olması değil,
büyüklerin kafayı çalıştırarak bu sessizliğin bir tehdide dönüşmesini engelleyecek bir
kurnazlık düşünmüş olmalarıdır. İlkellere bile söz hakkı tanınmaktadır. Konuş -maları
istenmekte ve söyledikleri dinlenmektedir. Onlar artık bir hayvan gibi görülmemektedir.
Zaten Levi-Strauss’da ilkellerin zihinsel yapılarının bizimkilerin aynısı olduğunu söylemedi
mi? Psikanaliz de onları Ödip kompleksi ve libidoyla buluşturmadı mı? Bize ait kodların
tümüne uyduklarına göre bir sorun yok demektir. Eskiden sessizliğe mahkûm etmiş
olduğumuz insanları bugün “konuşmaya” mahkûm ediyoruz. Doğal olarak “farklı” şeyler
söylüyoruz çünkü gündemi belirleyen madde: “Farklılıktır”. Tıpkı eskiden Akıl birliğinin
gündemi belirlemiş olması gibi. Bunda şaşıracak bir şey yok çünkü düzende bir değişiklik
yok. Aklın emperyalizminden sonra şimdi de farklılığın neo-emperyalizmi.”
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“Massa sem palavra que existe para todos os porta-vozes sem história. Admirável conjunção
dos que nada têm a dizer e das massas que não falam. Nada que contém todos os discursos.
Nada de histeria nem de fascismo potencial, mas simulação por precipitação de todos os
referenciais perdidos. Caixa preta de todos os referenciais, de todos os sentidos que não
admitiu, da história impossível, dos sistemas de representação inencontráveis, a massa é o
que resta quando se esqueceu tudo do social.”
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“Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing over of
meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the level of
meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and four-tiered
operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no matter how the
analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the
precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows.”
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“We are simplified by technical manipulation”

― Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
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“We are simplified by technical manipulation.

And this manipulation goes off on a crazy course when we reach digital manipulation”
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“In the beginning was the word. It was only afterwards that the Silence came.
The end itself has disappeared...”
1NC Cards
Orgy
Otherness difference is real marketable
Baudrillard’93 |Jean, still hasn't disappeared, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on
Extreme Phenomena, 124-132|KZaidi
We are engaged in an orgy of discovery, exploration and 'invention' of the Other .

An orgy of differences. We are procurers of encounter, pimps of interfacing and
interactivity. Once we get beyond the mirror of alienation (beyond the mirror stage
that was the joy of our childhood), structural differences multiply ad infinitum -
in fashion, in mores, in culture. Crude otherness, hard otherness - the
othernesses of race, of madness, of poverty - are done with. Otherness, like
everything else, has fallen under the law of the market, the law of supply and
demand. It has become a rare item - hence its immensely high value on the
psychological stock exchange, on the structural stock exchange. Hence too the
intensity of the ubiquitous simulation of the Other. This is particularly striking in
science fiction, where the chief question is always 'What is the Other? Where is
the Other?' Of course science fiction is merely a reflection of our everyday
universe, which is in thrall to a wild speculation on - almost a black market in -
otherness and difference. A veritable obsession with ecology extends from Indian
reservations to household pets (otherness degree zero!) - not to mention the other
of 'the other scene', or the other of the unconscious (our last symbolic capital, and
one we had better look after, because reserves are not limitless). Our sources of
otherness are indeed running out; we have exhausted the Other as raw
material. (According to Claude Gilbert, we are so desperate that we go digging
through the rubble of earthquakes and catastrophes.) Consequently the other is all
of a sudden no longer there to be exterminated, hated, rejected or seduced, but
instead to be understood, liberated, coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights
of Man, we now also need the Rights of the Other. In a way we already have
these, in the shape of a universal Right to be Different. For the orgy is also
an orgy of political and psychological comprehension of the other - even to the
point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be found.
Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be. And where there is no
longer anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the
drama of otherness. We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are
living the psychodrama of 'sociality', the psychodrama of sexuality, the
psychodrama of the body - and the melodrama of all the above, courtesy of analytic
metadiscourses. Otherness has become sociodramatic, semiodramatic,
melodramatic. All we do in psychodrama - the psychodrama of contacts, of
psychological tests, of interfacing - is acro batically simulate and dramatize the
absence of the other. Not only is otherness absent everywhere in this artificial
dramaturgy, but the subject has also quietly become indifferent to his own
subjectivity, to his own alienation, just as the modern political animal has become
indifferent to his own political opinions. This subject becomes transparent, spectral
(to borrow Marc Guillaume's word) - and hence interactive. For in interactivity the
subject is the other to no one. Inasmuch as he is indifferent to himself, it is as
though he had been reified alive - but without his double, without his shadow,
without his other. Having paid this price, the subject becomes a candidate for all
possible combinations, all possible connections. The interactive being is therefore
born not through a new form of exchange but through the disappearance of the
social, the disappearance of otherness. This being is the other after the death of
the Other - not the same other at all: the other that results from the denial of the
Other. The only interaction involved, in reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the
machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the difference
between man and machine, and on the charm of this difference - something with
which today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. Man and
machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to
the other. The computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent.
Intelligence comes to us from the other - always. That is why computers perform so
well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic - minds for
which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are endowed with
strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the power of
thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the
power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any
otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord
joining one intelligence and its twin. Homeostasis between one and the same: all
otherness has been confiscated by the machine. Does otherness survive anywhere
after being banished from this entire psychodramatic superstructure? Is there a
physics as well as a metaphysics of the Other? Is there a dual, not just a
dialectical, form of otherness? Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and
not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience? These days
everything is described in terms of difference, but otherness is not the same thing
as difference. One might even say that difference is what destroys otherness.
When language is broken down into a set of differences, when meaning is reduced
to nothing more than differentiation, the radical otherness of language is abolished.
The duel that lies at the heart of language - the duel between language and
meaning, between language and the person who speaks it - is halted. And everything
in language that is irreducible to mediation, articulation or meaning is eliminated -
everything, that is, which causes language at its most radical level to be other than
the subject (and also Other to the subject?). The existence of this level accounts
for the play in language, for its appeal in its materiality, for its susceptibility to
chance; and it is what makes language not just a set of trivial differences, as it is in
the eyes of structural analysis, but, symbolically speaking, truly a matter of life and
death. What, then, does it mean to say that women are the other for men, that the
mad are the other for the sane, or that primitive people are the other for civilized
people? One might as well go on for ever wondering who is the other for whom. Is
the Master the slave's other? Yes, certainly - in terms of class and power relations.
But this account is reductionistic. In reality, things are just not so simple. The way
in which beings and things relate to each other is not a matter of structural
difference. The symbolic order implies dual and complex forms that are not
dependent on the distinction between ego and other. The Pariah is not the other
to the Brahmin: rather, their destinies are different. The two are not
differentiated along a single scale of values: rather, they are mutually reinforcing
aspects of an immutable order, parts of a reversible cycle like the cycle of day and
night. Do we say that the night is the other to the day? No. So why should we say
that the masculine is the other to the feminine? For the two are undoubtedly
merely reversible moments, like night and day, following upon one other and
changing places with one another in an endless process of seduction. One sex is thus
never the other for the other sex, except within the context of a differentialistic
theory of sexuality - which is basically nothing but a utopia. For difference is itself
a utopia: the idea that such pairs of terms can be split up is a dream - and the idea
of subsequently reuniting them is another. (This also goes for the distinction
between Good and Evil: the notion that they might be separated out from one
another is pure fantasy, and it is even more utopian to think in terms of
reconciling them.) Only in the distinction-based perspective of our culture is it
possible to speak of the Other in connection with sex. Genuine sexuality, for its
part, is 'exotic' (in Segalen's meaning of the term) : it resides in the radical
incomparability of the sexes - otherwise seduction would never be possible, and
there would be nothing but alienation of one sex by the other. Differences mean
regulated exchange. But what is it that introduces disorder into exchange? What is
it that cannot be negotiated over? What is it that has no place in the contract, or
in the structural interaction of differences? What is founded on the impossibility
of exchange? Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any
radical otherness at all is thus the epicentre of a terror: the terror that such
otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world. And the
terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to annihilate it.
Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness have been incorporated,
willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference which
simultaneously implies inclusion and exclusion, recognition and discrimination.
Childhood, lunacy, death, primitive societies - all have been categorized ,
integrated and absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once its
exclusionary status had been revoked, was caught up in the far subtler toils of
psychology. The dead, as soon as they were recognized in their identity as
such, were banished to outlying cemeteries - kept at such a distance that the
face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no sooner
accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissitudes
of a logic of difference. Racism does not exist so long as the other remains Other ,
so long as the Stranger remains foreign. It comes into existence when the other
becomes merely different - that is to say, dangerously similar. This is the moment
when the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being. 'We may
assume', wrote Victor Segalen, 'that fundamental differences will never resolve
themselves into a truly seamless and unpatched fabric ; increasing unity, falling
barriers and great reductions in real distance must of themselves compensate
somewhere by means of new partitions and unanticipated gaps: Racism is one such
'new partition' . An abreaction to the psychodrama of difference: a response to the
phantasy of - and obsession with - becoming 'other' . A way out of the psychodrama
of perpetual introjection and rejection of the other. So intolerable is this
introjection of differences, in fact, that the other must be exorcized at all costs
by making the differences materially manifest. The biological claims of racism are
without foundation but, by making the racial reference clear, racism does reveal
the logical temptation at the heart of every structural system: the temptation
to fetishize difference. But differential systems can never achieve equilibrium:
differences oscillate constantly between absolute highs and absolute lows.
When it comes to the management of otherness and difference, the idea of a well-
tempered balance is strictly utopian. Inasmuch as the humanist logic of difference
is in some sense a universal simulation (one which culminates in the absurdity of a
'right to difference'), it leads directly, for all its benevolence, to that other
desperate hallucination of difference known as racism. As differences and the cult
of differences continue to grow, another, unprecedented kind of violence,
anomalous and inaccessible to critical rationality, grows even faster. Segalen's
'unanticipated gaps' are not simply new differences: what springs up in order to
combat the total homogenization of the world is the Alien - monstrous
metaphor for the corpse-like, viral Other: the compound form of all the varieties
of otherness done to death by our system. This is a racism which, for lack of any
biological underpinning, seizes on the very slightest variations in the order of signs;
a racism which quickly takes on a viral and automatic character, and perpetuates
itself while revelling in a generalized semiotics. And this racism can never be
countered by any humanism of difference, for the simple reason that it is itself the
virus of difference. Sermonizing on the internalization of the other and the
introjection of differences can never resolve the problem of the monstrous forms
of otherness, because these forms are the product, precisely, of this selfsame
obsessional differentiation, this selfsame obsessional dialectic of ego and other.
Herein lies the whole weakness of those 'dialectical' theories of otherness which
aspire to promote the proper use of difference. For if racism in its viral, immanent,
current and definitive form proves anything, it is that there is no such thing as the
proper use of difference. This is why it may also be said that the critique of racism
is substantially finished - just as Marx said that the critique of religion was
substantially finished. Once the vacuousness of the metaphysical account of religion
had been demonstrated, religion was supposed to disappear as the conditions of a
more advanced mode of production became operative. Likewise, once the
vacuousness of the biological theory of races has been demonstrated, racism is
supposed to disappear as the conditions of a more advanced universal intermixture
of differences become operative. But what if religion, for example, contrary to
Marx's predictions, had lost its metaphysical and transcendent form only to become
an immanent force and fragment into countless ideological and practical variants
under the conditions of a religious revival drawing sustenance from the progress of
the very social order that was expected to eradicate even the memory of religion?
For the signs of just such a turn of events are all around us today. And much the
same goes for racism, which has also become an immanent, viral and everyday
reality. The fact is that the 'scientific' and rational critique of racism is a
purely formal one, which demolishes the argument from biology but remains
caught in the racist trap because it addresses a biological illusion only, and
fails to deal with biology itself qua illusion. Similarly, the political and ideological
critique of racism is purely formal in that it tackles the racist obsession with
difference without tackling difference itself qua illusion. It thus itself becomes an
illusion of criticism, bearing on nothing, and in the end racism turns out to have
survived critique by rationalism just as deftly as religion survived critique by
materialism - which is why all such critiques are indeed substantially finished. There
is no such thing as the proper use of difference - a fact revealed not only by racism
itself but also by all anti-racist and humanitarian efforts to promote and protect
differences. Humanitarian ecumenism, the ecumenism of differences, is in a cul-de-
sac: the cul-de-sac of the concept of the universal itself. The most recent
illustration of this, in France, was the brouhaha over the wearing of headscarves
for religious reasons by North African schoolgirls. All the rational arguments
mustered in this connection turned out to be nothing but hypocritical attempts to
get rid of the simple fact that no solution is to be found in any moral or political
theory of difference. It is difference itself that is a reversible illusion. We are the
ones who brought difference to the four corners of the earth: that it should now
be returned to us in unrecognizable, Islamic, fundamentalist and irreducible
forms is no bad thing. The guilt we feel in this connection assumes gigantic
proportions. Not long ago the organization Medecins Sans Frontieres became aware
that the medical supplies it had been distributing in Afghanistan were being resold
rather than used directly by their recipients. This precipitated a crisis of
conscience for the programme's organizers. Should donations be discontinued, or
should this immoral and irregular commerce be tolerated out of respect for
'cultural differences'? After much soul-searching it was decided to sacrifice
Western values on the altar of difference, and continue to underwrite the black
market in medicines. Humanisme oblige. Another charming illustration of the
confusion besetting our humanitarians concerns X, posted to the Sudan to study
'the communications needs of Sudanese peoples' . Seemingly, the Sudanese did not
know how to communicate. But they were certainly hungry, and needed to learn how
to grow sorghum. Sending agronomists being too expensive a prospect, the decision
had been taken to teach by videocassette. The time had come for the Sudanese to
join the communications revolution: sorghum via audio and video. No hook-up, no eat.
It was not long before towns and villages were crammed with VCRs. A little longer,
and the local mafia created a lucrative market for itself in pornographic videotapes
which held a distinctly greater interest for the populace than educational cassettes
on sorghum cultivation. Porno-SorghoVideo: The Same Struggle! The risibility of our
altruistic 'understanding' is rivalled only by the profound contempt it is designed to
conceal. For 'We respect the fact that you are different' read: 'You people who
are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all
you have left' . (The signs of folklore and poverty are excellent markers of
difference.) Nothing could be more contemptuous - or more contemptible - than
this attitude, which exemplifies the most radical form of incomprehension that
exists. It has nothing to do, however, with what Segalen calls 'eternal
incomprehensibility' . Rather, it is a product of eternal stupidity - of that stupidity
which endures for ever in its essential arrogance, feeding on the differentness of
other people. Other cultures, meanwhile, have never laid claim to universality.
Nor did they ever claim to be different - until difference was forcibly
injected into them as part of a sort of cultural opium war. They live on the basis
of their own singularity, their own exceptionality, on the irreducibility of their own
rites and values. They find no comfort in the lethal illusion that all differences can
be reconciled - an illusion that for them spells only annihilation. To master the
universal symbols of otherness and difference is to master the world. Those
who conceptualize difference are anthropologically superior - naturally, because it
is they who invented anthropology. And they have all the rights, because rights, too,
are their invention. Those who do not conceptualize difference, who do not play the
game of difference, must be exterminated. The Indians of America, when the
Spanish landed, are a case in point. They understood nothing about difference; they
inhabited radical otherness. (The Spaniards were not different in their eyes: they
were simply gods, and that was that.) This is the reason for the fury with which the
Spaniards set about destroying these peoples, a fury for which there was no
religious justification, nor economic justification, nor any other kind of
justification, except for the fact that the Indians were guilty of an absolute crime:
their failure to understand difference. When they found themselves obliged to
become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of
the universal concept, they preferred mass self-immolation - whence the fervour
with which they, for their part, allowed themselves to die: a counterpart to the
Spaniards' mad urge to kill. The Indians' strange collusion in their own
extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness.
Al-Marashi
Dissuasive is information
Al-Marashi’14 |Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an Assistant Professor of History at California
State University San Marcos. His research deals with the history of Iraq, and violent
conflict in the Middle East. His current book project is a history of the Iran-Iraq War from
the perspective of the Iraqi military and the security forces, focusing on the projection of
violence against Iranian forces and Iraq’s Kurds. He is the co-author of Iraq’s Armed
Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008). He obtained his D.Phil. in 2004 in Modern
History at University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait|KZaidi
I. Introduction This article is an autobiographical encounter with Baudrillard and

his work, analyzing an episode of hyperreality of 2003 Iraq War in which I was
personally implicated - the use of intelligence reports by both the British and
American governments to justify an invasion of Iraq. The US and UK governments
devised strategies to communicate to domestic and international publics the threat
posed by the collusion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Usama bin Ladin’s Al-Qaida,
when historically both parties had an antagonistic relationship with one another. As
part of this effort, the British government issued intelligence reports on Iraq’s
WMD program for public scrutiny, and in the process my doctoral research on
Iraq was plagiarized and incorporated into one of these documents. This study also
adopts the technique used by Elizabeth Dauphinee in The Politics of Exile, an
academic work that employs storytelling, creating a narrative where the scholar
serves as the protagonist while conducting research on the Bosnian civil war that
raged between 1992 and 1995 (Dauphinee, 2013). Abandoning the generally
depersonalized nature of academic writing, her work centers the individuals caught
up in this conflict, taking the reader into their personal lives and domestic spaces.
Following Dauphinee’s approach, this study starts from the living room of a
teenaged Iraqi-American, to the halls of the British Parliament as a doctoral
student, and the impact of the plagiarism on my life as an academic. Hyperreality
according to Baudrillard blurs the distinctions between the real and the unreal .
My experience fits in to the realm of hyperreality as the real “Ibrahim Al-
Marashi” or the real research I conducted was artificially (re)produced as a
real retouched and refurbished in “a hallucinatory resemblance” with itself
(Baudrillard,1983, 23). Botz-Bornstein’s definition follows as: “Hyperreality
creates its own standards of reality, independently of any outside ‘real’
condition” (2013). After the invasion of Iraq no evidence of Baghdad’s WMD
arsenal was found, revealing that the underlining rationale for the invasion of a
threat never existed. In the process of creating this illusion, the intelligence
reports themselves had served as part of the hyperreal simulation of the Iraqi
threat, and as these reports had no basis on a real threat, they had to be
manufactured or manipulated, leading to the plagiarism of my own research. A
government caught in the act of plagiarism on this scale had been unprecedented,
but media establishments and commentators, in their zeal to criticize the British
and American governments, often misrepresented the facts of what was plagiarized
and how did it occur, often invoking my name as a symbol that exposed
government deception. The media’s role in unveiling the plagiarism granted the
fifth estate the notion of agency in unraveling a deceptive simulation, yet in
the process I became a simulated character representing “truth” in the face of
government fakery. While my experience served to unveil the simulation of an Iraqi
threat while it was being constructed, it simultaneously contributed to the
construction of a concurrent simulation of the mass media unveiling this
government simulation. The British government, having invested its reputation in
the veracity of the intelligence reports, continued to communicate to the media
that the reports were accurate despite minor flaws, while the media obtained
newsworthy information by attacking every effort made by the British government
in its attempt to validate these reports. I had disappeared into two simulations,
yet both simulations needed the other antagonistic simulation to exist.
Information is disssuassive
Al-Marashi’14 |Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an Assistant Professor of History at California
State University San Marcos. His research deals with the history of Iraq, and violent
conflict in the Middle East. His current book project is a history of the Iran-Iraq War from
the perspective of the Iraqi military and the security forces, focusing on the projection of
violence against Iranian forces and Iraq’s Kurds. He is the co-author of Iraq’s Armed
Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008). He obtained his D.Phil. in 2004 in Modern
History at University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait|KZaidi
Blair’s government was concerned with maintaining its illusion, and while the image
of “intelligence reports” was tarnished, by vouching for the overall accuracy of
a report based on my research, the first simulation would remain intact in
their eyes. The British government spokesperson downgraded its intelligence
report to a background briefing document for journalists and the public produced
by Number 10’s media liaison team. In the eyes of the British government, since my
original research was accurate, their intelligence dossier contained the truth. The
need to vouch for the truth in this dossier was critical for the British
government as the document played a role in justifying the invasion of Iraq among
British policymakers. The dossier based on my work was presented in the British
Parliament as one of the final documents that convinced this body to support the
UK’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq War. Tom Dalyell, the longest serving member in
the House of Commons, stated, “To plagiarize an out of date Ph.D. thesis and to
present it as an official report of the latest British intelligence information, surely
it reveals a lack of awareness of the disastrous consequences of such a deception.”
He added, “This is not a trivial leak. It is a document on which is the basis of
whether or not this country goes to war and whether or not young servicemen and
servicewomen are to put their own lives at risk and indeed thousands, tens of
thousands of innocent civilians,” (Johnson 2003). As much I wanted to minimize the
significance of my involvement in this whole affair, I felt a sense of guilt that I had
indirectly provided the information that justified a war against my native Iraq.
Dalyell further stated, “And the basis that has been produced by a PhD student in
California who now says that he is against conflict, apparently, is the heart of what
purports to be the intelligence briefing of the British government” (ibid.) It
seemed my ambivalence in the press interviews I gave after the revelation did not
translate well into whether I was pro-war or anti-war. Reuters had quoted me as
saying, “As an Iraqi, I support regime change in Iraq” (History Commons, 2003).
However, Dalyell quoted me as being against the conflict. Both were right. While
I had lost members of my family to the security services after the 1991 Iraqi
uprising, I still feared that military action against Iraq could have caused harm to
my surviving relatives there. I opposed an Anglo-American war against Iraq that
could possibly result in unintended consequences for the Iraqi people, yet I desired
that Saddam Hussein rule over Iraq end. My dilemma of being pro or anti-war is
described by Baudrillard as a “forced referendum,” or a binary logic in news
and political rhetoric to be for or against the war, without actually questioning
its credibility or level of reality (Baudrillard, [1995] 2009, 28). At the moment I
was receiving the media attention for this incident, I was often asked by
journalists if I was for or against the war. I always paused before this question
as I never had a convenient answer ready. At that juncture the plagiarism of my
research forced me to question the entire reality of the justifications of the
2003 Iraq War. I wondered how could I be “for” a war, since if the evidence for
the war was being manufactured, so too would the claim of the war to bring
freedom to Iraq or making the world safe from WMD s. Second, to be pro or anti-
war seemed futile. Given my detailed study of the weak state of the Iraqi military,
I knew that a war in 2003 with the US would be over relatively quickly. I often
wanted to answer the journalists’ question with the response, If a football game is
fixed what is the point of rooting for a team? The teams may go through the
motions of a contested match but there would be no doubt as to the winner. Yet,
the short sound bites required of an interview for a newspaper or news report
rarely allowed the time for such nuance and irony, which explains how I could
be both pro-war and anti-war.
War Porn
Nothing becomes wholly transparent without becoming entirely
enigmatic.
Baudrillard’05 |Jean Baudrillard, "War Porn," Trans. Paul A. Taylor, International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2005)|KZaidi
...tomorrow there will be nothing but the virtual violence of consensus, the
simultaneity in real time of the global consensus: this will happen tomorrow and it
will be the beginning of a world with no tomorrow. ...This is what the Americans
seek to do, these missionary people bearing electro-shocks which will shepherded
everyone towards democracy. It is therefore pointless to question the political aims
of this war: the only (transpolitical) aim is to align everybody with the global lowest
common denominator, the democratic denominator... ...the New World Order will be
both consensual and televisual. That is indeed why the targeted bombings carefully
avoided the Iraqi television antennae...The crucial stake, the decisive stake in this
whole affair is the consensual reduction of Islam to the global order.3 * * * World
Trade Center: shock treatment of power , humiliation inflicted on power, but from
outside. With the images of the Baghdad prisons, it is worse, it is the humiliation,
symbolic and completely fatal, which the world power inflicts on itself – the
Americans in this particular case – the shock treatment of shame and bad
conscience. This is what binds together the two events. Before both a worldwide
violent reaction: in the first case a feeling of wonder, in the second, a feeling of
abjection. For September 11th, the exhilarating images of a major event; in the
other, the degrading images of something that is the opposite of an event, a non-
event of an obscene banality, the degradation, atrocious but banal, not only of the
victims, but of the amateur scriptwriters of this parody of violence. The worst is
that it all becomes a parody of violence, a parody of the war itself, pornography
becoming the ultimate form of the abjection of war which is unable to be simply
war, to be simply about killing, and instead turns itself into a grotesque infantile
reality-show, in a desperate simulacrum of power. These scenes are the illustration
of a power which, reaching its extreme point, no longer knows what to do with itself
– a power henceforth without aim, without purpose, without a plausible enemy, and
in total impunity. It is only capable of inflicting gratuitous humiliation and, as one
knows, violence inflicted on others is after all only an expression of the violence
inflicted on oneself. It only manages to humiliate itself, degrade itself and go back
on its own word in a sort of unremitting perversity. The ignominy, the vileness is the
ultimate symptom of a power that no longer knows what to do with itself.
September 11th was a global reaction from all those who no longer knew what to
make of this world power and who no longer supported it. In the case of the abuse
inflicted on the Iraqis, it is worse yet: power no longer knows what to do with itself
and cannot stand itself, unless it engages in self-parody in an inhuman manner.
These images are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in
flames. Nevertheless, America in itself is not on trial, and it is useless to charge
the Americans: the infernal machine exploded in literally suicidal acts . In fact, the
Americans have been overtaken by their own power. They do not have the means to
control it. And now we are part of this power. The bad conscience of the entire
West is crystallized in these images. The whole West is contained in the burst of
the sadistic laughter of the American soldiers , as it is behind the construction of
the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies; this is what they are
full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic.
Truth but not veracity: it does not help to know whether the images are true or
false. From now on and forever we will be uncertain about these images. Only their
impact counts in the way in which they are immersed in the war. There is no longer
the need for "embedded" journalists because soldiers themselves are immersed in
the image – thanks to digital technology, the images are definitively integrated into
the war. They don¹t represent it anymore; they involve neither distance, nor
perception, nor judgment. They no longer belong to the order of representation, nor
of information in a strict sense. And, suddenly, the question whether it is necessary
to produce, reproduce, broadcast, or prohibit them, or even the "essential" question
of how to know if they are true or false, is "irrelevant". For the images to become a
source of true information, they would have to be different from the war. They
have become today as virtual as the war itself, and for this reason their specific
violence adds to the specific violence of the war. In addition, due to their
omnipresence, due to the prevailing rule of the world of making everything visible,
the images, our present-day images, have become substantially pornographic.
Spontaneously, they embrace the pornographic face of the war. There exists in all
this, in particular in the last Iraqi episode, an immanent justice of the image: those
who live by the spectacle will die by the spectacle. Do you want to acquire power
through the image? Then you will perish by the return of the image. The Americans
are having and will make of it a bitter experience. And this in spite of all the
"democratic" subterfuges and the hopeless simulacrum of transparency which
corresponds to the hopeless simulacrum of military power . Who committed these
acts and who is really responsible for them? Military superiors? Human nature,
bestial as one knows, "even in democracy"? The true scandal is no longer in the
torture, it is in the treachery of those who knew and who said nothing (or of those
who revealed it?). In any event, all real violence is diverted by the question of
transparency – democracy trying to make a virtue out of the disclosure of its vices.
But apart from all this, what is the secret of these abject scenographies? Once
again, they are an answer, beyond all the strategic and political adventures, to the
humiliation of September 11th, and they want to answer to it by even worse
humiliation – even worse than death. Without counting the hoods which are already
a form of decapitation (to which the decapitation of the American corresponds
obscurely), without counting the piling-up of bodies, and the dogs, forced nudity is
in itself a rape. One saw the GIs walking the naked and chained Iraqis through the
city and, in the short story Allah Akhbar by Patrick Dekaerke, one sees Franck, the
CIA agent, making an Arab strip, forcing him into a girdle and net stockings, and
then making him sodomize a pig, all that while taking photographs which he will send
to his village and all his close relations. Thus the other will be exterminated
symbolically. One sees that the goal of the war is not to kill or to win, but abolish
the enemy, extinguish (according to Canetti, I believe) the light of his sky. And, in
fact, what does one want these men to acknowledge? What is the secret one wants
to extort from them? It is quite simply the name in virtue of which they have no
fear of death. Here is the profound jealousy and the revenge of "zero death " on
those men who are not afraid – it is in that name that they are inflicted with
something worse than death… Radical shamelessness , the dishonor of nudity, the
tearing of any veil. It is always the same problem of transparency: to tear off the
veil of women or abuse men to make them appear more naked, more obscene... This
masquerade crowns the ignominy of the war – until this travesty, it was present in
this most ferocious image (the most ferocious for America), because it was most
ghostly and most "reversible": the prisoner threatened with electrocution and,
completely hooded, like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, crucified by its ilk. It is
really America that has electrocuted itself.
War porn is like debaters watching TV about TV watching TV

about misssiless
Shapiro’14 |Alan Shapiro – senior lecturer at the Offenbach Art and Design University
in Germany. He teaches "computer programming for artists and designers" and
media/cultural theory. He is the author of the books Star Trek: Technologies of
Disappearance and Software of the Future. His research areas include the hybridity of
physical and virtual realities in design and architecture, the information and surveillance
society as depicted in TV shows like The Prisoner, the intensification of object-orientation
and poetic expressivity in emerging programming languages, and the relevance of thinkers
like Baudrillard, Camus, Habermas, Bateson, and Virilio for living the"hypermodern"
condition. “Jean Baudrillard and Albert Camus on the Simulacrum of Taking a Stance on
War”|KZaidi
In addition to careful management of images and information content, the true
devastation of war is kept at bay from our perceptions by simulation technologies
ranging from the televisual screen to the military ‘smart weapons’ deployed from
altitudes of tens of thousands of feet. During months of preparation for the ‘war’,
viewers experience endless military experts paraded across their screen , endlessly
analyzing scenarios before they happen. The pilot in his simulator cockpit, or the
gunner in his high-tech tank, is surrounded by a virtual environment and motion-
dependent images which are the same whether he is in a war game training exercise
or a ‘real engagement’. A Non-Euclidean Spacetime The post-structure of the
(non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the property of complex
intricate paradoxical topology. There is the “non-Euclidean” spacetime of multiple
refracting waves in an enigmatic hyperspace beyond any classical geometry. In “The
Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?,” Baudrillard (1995: 49-50) writes: At a certain
speed, the speed of information, things lose their sense… War implodes in real time,
history implodes in real time, all communication and all signification implode in real
time… The space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity,
and that the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean. To understand the
complex non-Euclidean informational space of non-war, we need a new mathematics,
a new unconventional metric space. In mathematics, a metric space is a set where a
specific concept of distance between elements of the set is defined and
implemented. Three-dimensional Euclidean space – a way of thinking about space
that belongs to the Western metaphysical ‘construction of reality ’ as it was
originated by the Ancient Greek thinkers – corresponds to our ‘intuitive
understanding’ of space. 1991 Persian Gulf War Shortly before 7 PM on the evening
of January 16, 1991 (January 17, early AM, in the Gulf), Network nightly news
viewers were informed that heavy bombing of strategic targets inside Iraq had
been initiated. At 9 PM, President George H.W. Bush enthusiastically told the
viewing audience that “the liberation of Kuwait has begun.” Pentagon spokespersons
explained that massive pinpoint strikes by high-tech planes against carefully
selected military sites and command headquarters had caught the Iraqis entirely
off guard. Reports of great success came in. The nation rejoiced. It was our grand
celebration. We feted our triumph in the Cold War. The glamorous high-tech
weapons, developed and paid for over years, could finally be used in the real thing,
and the Soviets were nowhere in sight. We were back. After the wrenching
stalemate of Vietnam, we could finally start again. The enemy was an inert physical
installation, a blip on a radar screen to be methodically darkened. The Fourth Order
of Simulacra The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media
virtuality has the property of viral metastasis. There is the news media becoming
part of the terror. There are the surveillance policies of the state becoming part
of the terror. In the essay “After the Orgy” in the book The Transparency of Evil,
Baudrillard writes of the “epidemic of simulation,” a networked mode of fractal or
viral dispersal. Updating his famous theses of “the three orders of simulacra” (in
Symbolic Exchange and Death) and “the precession of simulacra” (in Simulacra and
Simulation), he seeks to introduce “a new particle into the microphysics of
simulacra (Baudrillard 1993: 5): The first of these stages had a natural referent,
and value developed on the basis of a natural use of the world. The second was
founded on a general equivalence, and value developed by reference to a logic of the
commodity. The third is governed by a code, and value develops here by reference
to a set of models. At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value,
there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions…(Ibid.: 5,
7). This is the fractal or viral stage of fourth-order simulacra. In Baudrillard’s
post-simulation epistème or "epidemic of simulation," value - if that term is still
appropriate - radiates in all directions in a cancerous metastasis. There is "no
relationship between cause and effect, merely viral relationships between one
effect and another” (Ibid.: 108). All spheres of society pass into their free-
floating, excessive, and ecstatic form. September 11, 2001 In “The Spirit of
Terrorism,” the first essay of the book The Spirit of Terrorism(2002), Baudrillard
writes of the event of September 11, 2001: The more concentrated the system
becomes globally, ultimately forming one single network, the more it becomes
vulnerable at a single point (already a single little Filipino hacker had managed, from
the the dark recesses of his portable computer, to launch the ‘I love you’ virus,
which circled the globe devastating entire networks)… Terrorism, like viruses, is
everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system
of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a
double agent. We can no longer draw a demarcation line around it. It is at the very
heart of this culture which combats it… Terrorism is the shock wave of this silent
reversion (2002: 8-9, 10, 11). After each terrorist attack, there is a feeling in the
air of panic and confusion in the news media as the police and Federal Investigators
identify and catch the perpetrators, and the information society scrambles to find
out ‘who did it’. Abu Ghraib Torture and Prisoner Abuse This is how the English-
language Wikipedia article on “Abu Ghraib Torture and Prisoner Abuse” begins:
During the War in Iraq, human rights violations, committed from late 2003 to early
2004, in the form of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture,
reports of rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison
(currently known as the Baghdad Central Prison) came to public attention beginning
in early 2004 with Department of Defense announcements. These acts were
committed by military police personnel of the United States Army together with
those of additional US governmental agencies.1 On May 19, 2004, Jean Baudrillard
published the essay “Pornographie de la guerre” in the Parisian daily newspaper
Libération. (published as “War Porn” in English) The philosopher, sociologist, and
media theorist writes: World Trade Center: shock treatment of power, humiliation
inflicted on power, but from outside. With the images of the Baghdad prisons, it is
worse, it is the humiliation, symbolic and completely fatal, which the world power
inflicts on itself – the Americans in this particular case – the shock treatment of
shame and bad conscience. This is what binds together the two events (Baudrillard
2004). To keep the hyper-reality of cyberwar going, the ghost-people must continue
to exercise a certain ‘minimal’ function in the real. To lend the game its requisite
weight or support, they must furnish a necessary dose of reality-effect through
the chalking up of their disappearance. A certain number of victims of torture,
rape, and murder are required to provide data (‘fresh meat’) to keep the electronic
killing game going, especially if they can be photographed, and then the images sent
out on the universal image-viewing network. Baudrillard continues in “War Porn”:
This is where the truth of these images lies; this is what they are full of: the
excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic . Truth but
not veracity: it does not help to know whether the images are true or false… There
is no longer the need for ‘embedded’ journalists because soldiers themselves are
immersed in the image – thanks to digital technology, the images are definitively
integrated into the war. They don¹t represent it anymore; they involve neither
distance, nor perception, nor judgment…(Ibid.). Media images in general – in
advertising, for example – signify the excess of wealth that we as citizens of the
West have the prerogative of partaking in. The abject and disgusting images of the
Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse atrocity are the dark underside of media
culture. Beyond the epistemology of true and false, the digital technology image has
inscribed within itself the tautological reasoning of the self-fulfilling prophecy,
inheriting from advertising and the classical era of consumer culture the mastery
of the art of rendering things true by saying that they are. For Baudrillard, all
images in contemporary culture tend towards the pornographic. The visual culture
of stylized images is obscene and pornographic at every level – from hard-core
porno to ‘music television’, from swimsuit magazines to commonplace TV
commercials.
The Code
Their call to forensic ecology replaces alterity with codes of
difference and sameness. This blurs the lines of the subject and
enhances the power of simulacra
Gupta ‘15 /Indrani Das, M.Phil English Jamia Millia Islamia University, Hyper
reality and Identity in a Postcolonial World, International Journal of Research, Vol.
2 Iss. 3,
http://www.internationaljournalofresearch.org/index.php/ijr/article/view/1735/16
32/
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 relations 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).
The code is really fucked up and probs coopts the aff

Pawlett 08 |William Pawlett (Sociology and Cultural Studies, University of
Wolverhampton, UK), Hate/Code, http://intertheory.org/pawlett.htm|KZaidi
Baudrillard’s concept of the Code was clearly influenced by the development of

Structuralist semiotics, including Lacan’s reading of Saussure which yielded the
important notions of the “Saussurian bar” and the “primacy” of the signifier (Lacan
1966/2007). A less overt, but perhaps more telling, influence on Baudrillard was
Nietzsche’s attack on the metaphysical foundations of western rationalism. Of
particular importance to Baudrillard’s later work is Nietzsche’s contrasting of being
and becoming and his contention that modern individuals are imprisoned by a
system of rationality, indebtedness and “oppressive narrowness” in which “man
impatiently ripped himself apart” (Nietzsche 1887/1994, n. 16). Nietzsche suggests
a process of ‘internalisation’ has taken place such that individuals are produced,
and produce themselves, through a moral condemnation of their immediate
condition. The vitality and simple assertion of doing and becoming are gradually
replaced by a spirit of calculation, self-reflection, resentment, and ultimately,
nihilism. Cut off from the immediacy of becoming we grow to resent ourselves
and our position in society. We blame our limitations on others who we come to
hate, as we hate ourselves. This broad-brush but potent cultural psychology,
developed by Nietzsche, influenced many thinkers – Max Weber and Sigmund Freud
are only two of the most obvious examples. Yet Baudrillard’s relationship to this
tradition of thought has not been explored, as a result many aspects of his work
are poorly understood. Baudrillard’s concept of the Code can be seen as a
distinctive re-working of this notion of a system of “oppressive narrowness” and
internalisation. The Code is able to present itself as a realm of freedom, justice
and equality while it models, defines and contrasts ‘individuals’ through their
positioning on a hierarchical scale: not an iron cage but a virtual one.
In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981) Baudrillard began to

describe various codes of meaning (or signification) as integrated by what he called
‘the code’ (le code, la grille, le Code du signes, la matrice). By “the code” Baudrillard
intended not particular codes of meaning (English, French, Morse) or particular
modes of the interpretation of meaning (dominant, resistant, plural) but rather the
condition of possibility of all coding.[1] The notion of the Code is then a critical
concept, not an empirical one. For a genuine critique of the consumer society to be
made, Baudrillard’s early work suggests, we must focus analysis on the form of the
Code, not its contents or representations. The Code as form is preconscious, or, in
Baudrillard’s terminology “precessional”; that is, as grid or network
it precedes individual experience, perception, choice. The medium of this grid is
the abstract, arbitrary sign. Signs, visual and linguistic, are the medium of coding,
of the ordered exchange between coded elements. Composed to two sets of inter-
locking relations, the sign-referent and signifier-signified, the sign is the universal
form constructing the oppositions of subject and object, of real and
representation, of self and other: the building blocks of ‘reality’ itself. The ordered
exchange of signs produces identity and difference: every ‘thing’ is semiotic; every
‘thing’ is a ‘thing’ because it is not some other ‘thing’. Baudrillard calls this the
“logic of equivalence”. Signs produce social meanings and values on a scale or grid
whereby all points can be compared, contrasted and exchanged. To clarify, it is not
that every ‘thing’ can be converted into sign form, it rather that the very process
of transcription or coding produces ‘things’, essences, identities and
differences. Though the Code encompasses every ‘thing’ it cannot process
ambivalence (or becoming) as these are not ‘things’ with identity but relations,
always “in transit” or metamorphosis. The Code then does not merely express
particular aspects of the consumer capitalist system such as media, fashion or
advertising: it is far more fundamental. At the fundamental level the Code is what
prevents symbolic exchange by breaking its cycles or by seizing and diverting its
potential. Symbolic exchange, as relation of ambivalence and becoming, is not a
‘thing’, it has no identity (and strictly speaking no ‘definition’ either) it occurs or
rather “effracts” only when the Code is annulled, reversed or suspended. Symbolic
exchange traverses all oppositions, it is neither one thing nor another, it prevents
the emergence of fixed or stable positions or power relations. The most common
example of symbolic exchange is the gift. The meaning of the act of giving a gift,
in the consumer society as much as the tribal societies interpreted by Mauss
(1990), is in no sense reducible to the object given, it depends on if and how it is
accepted. The giving, receiving and reciprocating of gifts are intensely volatile
relations, the meaning of the gift never settles into fixity or identity. The meaning
of the gift can be transformed at any moment in the on-going relation between
parties; indeed this relation is of the gift and the gift is of this relation: relation
and gift flourish together, and die together. Baudrillard was particularly
interested in the moment of the “counter-gift” (contre don), that is the refusal of
the gift or its return with interest to the giver in a kind of status war (the latter
often referred to, rather imprecisely, as “potlatch” (1993: 125-194). Baudrillard
defines the Code as the “structural law of value”; a “generalised metaphysics”
synthesising social values, social production, social identities. His early emphasis
was the Code’s “obligatory registration of individuals on the scale of status” (1981:
68). The Code produces a “hierarchy of differential signs” and, crucially,
“constitutes the fundamental, decisive form of social control – more so than
acquiescence to ideological norms” (ibid.). It makes no difference whether we, as
individuals, endorse the consumer capitalist system or not, since we are all
positioned by the Code, and are positioned through it by others. We all know the
value of a professional career, an elite education or a cute butt whether we like it
or not. Further each of these ‘sign-values’ are classifiable and comparable through
the sign’s logic of equivalence: traditionally wealthy businessmen trade on their
financial wealth to offset their ailing physique and secure the affections of a
younger and more physically attractive partner, that businesswomen now do the
same only demonstrates the universalisation of the Code’s sign system. The Code
breaks, blocks and bars ambivalence and in the barring produces equivalence – the
regulated play of identity and difference characterised by oppositions such as
true/false, good/evil, self/other, male/female. The standard dimensions of
consumer status positioning flow from this source: rich/poor, young/old, fat/thin,
attractive/unattractive. Binary oppositions are central features of Baudrillard’s
first and second orders of the sign (or “orders of simulacra”). The third order, of
the Code proper, simulates choice, difference, freedom and diversity by allowing
the privileged term to switch, fuse or “implode” (1983: 95-110). For example ‘fat’,
‘poor’ and ‘old’ can be beautiful too – if only within the confines of fashion and
cosmetics advertising or pop music video. The Code operates in “total indifference”
to content; everything is permitted in sign form, that is as “simulation”. In his early
studies, The Object System and The Consumer Society Baudrillard depicts the
Code as performing a pacifying effect on society; it soothes away once clear-cut,
binary divisions of class and status by registering all people as individual consumers
on a single universal scale. Everyone becomes a consumer, though some, of course,
consume far more than others. As universal form the status of consumer confers a
kind of democratic flattening of social relations: but an illusory one. If class
conflict was, to some extent, pacified, Baudrillard did not contend that other forms
of violence and dissent would be deterred by the Code. Indeed he wrote of the
emergence of new “anomalous” forms of violence, less intelligible, less structured,
not binary but post-dialectical (Baudrillard 1998: 174-185). He later proposed the
term “disembodied hate” or simply “the hate” to express aspects of this process
(1996: 142-147).
Thesis – Code (McLennan)
You should also forget foucault – hes a sad signifier
Mclennan’16 |Mark McLennan is a graduate student at the London School of Economics
and Political Science, having completed a BA and a JD at the University of Sydney. His main
interests are in continental philosophy, new media, and law Simulacra and Simulated Policing:
Baudrillard and Criminology|KZaidi
After describing a novel sociological position that regards semiology, rather than
capital, as the key component of domination (Baudrillard [1968] 1998), Baudrillard’s
radical social theory emerges in light of considerations of consumerism, media,
information and technology—all of which conspire to create what Baudrillard calls a
‘hyperreal’ society. This is a contemporary world where all boundaries, categories
and values implode into the ‘end of the social’.
Baudrillard (1972) begins elaborating this theory in an article titled ‘Design and
Environment or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz’ (Baudrillard, 1972,
Chapter 10). In this essay, he points to the importance of ‘the passage out of
a metallurgic into a semiurgic society’ (Ibid.: 185). Here, consumer objects take on a
life of their own ‘as an embodiment and functional part of a system of signs,
independent of its status as a commodity’ (Kellner, 1989: 76). He uses the German
Bauhaus movement as an example to anticipate the ‘universal semantisation of the
environment in which everything becomes the object of a calculus of function
and signification’ (Baudrillard, 1972: 185-86). This is achieved by the synthesis ‘of
form and function, beauty and utility, of art and technology’ in the design of
objects that produces a functionalised universe whereby the meaning and
function of every object is determined by its place in the system. As a result,
‘the whole environment becomes a signifier, objectified as an element of
signification’ (Ibid.: 186-87). This is analogous to Derrida’s concept of ‘difference’
whereby meaning is never present ‘in a sufficient presence that would refer only to
itself’ (Derrida, 1965: 27). Essentially, objects, words and images have no direct
relationship to the things in which they refer, they inherent meaning only by
interacting with one another in an ongoing system of contrast. Baudrillard refers
to this system as a ‘cybernetic code’, and argues that reality itself is shut out from
this system of because the system is wholly self-referencing. This code creates
‘a functionalised, integrated and self-reproducing universe’ of meaning,
controlled by simulacra and simulation. And, like Derrida’s text, there is nothing
outside of the code.
In ‘The Orders of Simulacra’, Baudrillard (1995) outlines the stages of the

transition from traditional society to the contemporary society defined by
simulations (Baudrillard, 1995). First, according to Baudrillard, the feudal era had a
fixed social order established by a hierarchy of obligatory signs indicating social
class and rank. Here, a ‘natural law of value’ dominates the stage. Simulacra, a
representation of another image, first emerge as ‘counterfeits’ of the real. For
example, representations of class, law or value are said to be grounded in nature:
art imitates life and democracy is legitimised by ‘natural rights’. Baudrillard
indicates, however, that the inherent goal of simulacra is to produce a
controllable and universal system of power. At this stage, counterfeit simulacra is
working ‘only on substance and form, not yet on relations or structures’, but its
evolution will create ‘a pacified society, ground up into a deathless substance …
that will guarantee an eternity of … cultural hegemony’ (Baudrillard, 1983b: 91).
Next, the second-order of simulacra appears during the industrial revolution.
Importantly, infinite reproducibility is introduced into society. For example, exact
replicas of objects are produced by assembly lines and automation . No longer is
there nostalgia for a natural order; nature is to be dominated by production;
counterfeit simulacra are now obsolete. Most importantly, however, the infinite
reproducibility of objects, augmented by the rise of capitalism, enables the
emergence of the cybernetic code and contemporary society.
Baudrillard claims that ‘we are in the third-order simulacra’, where simulation
models come to constitute the world and all referential finalities are abolished
(Ibid.: 100-01): God, Man, Nature, History, Society and others. This is because
images are only understood by reference to other images. Thus, society has
moved from ‘a capitalist-productivitist society to a neo-capitalist cybernetic order’
(Ibid.: 111). As a result of this code, images no longer refer to an object; rather,
they refer to another commutable image on the code. But, through models
contained in common societal narrative and institutional discourse, simulations are
able to produce a ‘reality effect’, which conceals the fact they are merely referring
to other simulations (Bogard, 1996: 10). For example, the code continually sets up
simulations of events, which test individuals and ‘[inscribe] them into the
simulated order’ through a ‘process of signalisation’ (Kellner, 1989: 80). For
example, every advertisement, choice of commodity, choice of entertainment, and
political candidate presents a chance for a binary response of affirmation or
negation. It is in this way that individuals are inserted into a dominating ‘coded
system of similarities and dissimilarities, of identities and programed differences’
(Ibid.). Thus, Baudrillard’s contemporary social theory is distinguishable from
previous determinist social theories that postulate powerful individuals, classes, or
corporations manipulating the public for certain ends. Instead, Baudrillard suggests
that social organisation is determined by individual’s responses to the pre-coded
messages that are derived from simulations of economics, politics, culture or the
banal decisions of everyday life (Baudrillard, 1983b: 111). Importantly for the third-
order of simulacra, the binary system of the code creates a ‘deterrence model’
in which all ‘radical change is ruled out, since the very fact of an option
between different political parties, [for example], acts as a deterrent against
demands for radical social change’ (Kellner, 1989: 81). This is the end of society as
traditionally theorised.
In Symbolic Exchange and Death Baudrillard (1983c: 20) announces the end of

traditional conceptions of society—the end of ‘labour, production, political economy’,
and the ‘dialectic signifier/signified that permeated the accumulation of knowledge
and of meaning’ (Baudrillard, 2002: 127). Baudrillard argues that we are in a new
era where media and the consumption of semiotic codes that inform images,
have replaced production and political economy as the organising foundation of
society. For example, labour is now a ‘sign among signs’ (Baudrillard, 1995b: 23), a
symbol of one’s status and integration: ‘the choice of occupation, the utopia of an
occupation custom-made for everyone … labour power is no longer violently bought
and sold; it is designed, it is marketed, it is merchandised. Production thus joins
the consumerist system of signs’ (Baudrillard, 2002: 134). Because social reality is
constituted by the ‘chess pieces’ of the signs and symbols that are mobilised
through the media, nothing is objectively determined and everything can be
simulated (Kellner, 1989: 62). Thus, political economy is no longer the
determinant that can explain social phenomena.
Trump = Vampire
Trumpire
Villanova’17 |Michael Villanova is an undergraduate student at the City College of New
York currently studying philosophy and history. His writings are influenced by continental
social and cultural philosophy, particularly the thoughts of Baudrillard, Zizek, and Camus. He
is currently focusing his attention on studying the effect of postmodern capitalism on urban
everyday life. “The Rise of Trump in Postmodern Times”, International Journal of
Baudrillard Studies Vol 14 Number 1. July 2017|KZaidi
Trump's existence and rise in popularity is not only predictable but seemingly has
no limit. While certainly an ideological event at some level, Trump's existence is
proof of the postmodern condition of politics , culture, and society. For Trump is
also the embodiment of the banality of politics today. He does not need
ideology to pin him down in any sense. He can take opposing positions and
believe in both of them. He can insult someone and call them his friend. He
can claim it is obvious he is winning and yet be shocked at his own
performance. Trump, in this way, is beyond politics. He has breached the realm
of appearances and molded appearance and reality into one. No longer do people
need to look elsewhere for their identity but rather focus on Trump, forgetting
all their economic and social troubles, and allowing his existence to create their
reality. Trump is beyond politics because he is a reality show, and thus has
transformed politics by making appearance not a farcical act, but one which others
perceive as a conscious act. This, combined with his inability to pin down what he
truly believes, proves to the people that he is a sort of aesthetic sublime object. In
the strictest Kantian sense he is this object that once gazed upon, becomes
transcendental. How do youdescribe Trump? When he doesn't even believe what he
says and fully embraces the media circus, he is untouchable. He is an object outside
of scrutiny and because of the object's indescribable and mysterious nature, it
strikes fear in us. If we knew what Trump's actual intentions were we would be
calm, and thus the sublime nature of his image would be gone. Yet, the image
continually deceives us and we continue gazing upon the figure of Trump.
In this very sense Trump has been able to kill the political by fully embracing
transaesthetics. Baurillard writes: “...what has occurred is a materialization of
aesthetics everywhere under an operational form” (Baudrillard, 2009:18). Due to
this, art has made the very quilting point of reality disappear. The more art we
create to simulate our reality the more the Real disappears. This is the very
operational form which Trump has mastered because, like the conditions where
great art is made, it comes naturally. He exists originally outside politics as a
figure whose life was merely a show to begin with. As Baurillard points out,
aesthetics creates the spectacle of nothingness, and in opposition to nothing,
mirrors perfection (Baudrillard 1986:77). We gather around to marvel at the
impenetrable form of Trump's (non)existence. What is happening, for the most
part, is a new experience for most people. We are used to the spectacle and even
any person in America today can recite some pap about the “untrustworthy” media.
But what the populous is unaware of is the combination of the spectacle as an
aesthetic event. So the passionate observer is left chasing the ethereal form of
Trump, unable to pinpoint the quality and the enjoyment level factor which
drives them to understand the amazing being of Trump. He has no true political
intentions he has only aesthetic qualities and characteristics.
Thus a main question remains: How did Trump, as an art piece, come to exist. The
answer is one which fuses Hegelian and postmodern theory. Trump exists as the
actualization and fullest force of a sublation of a sublation. He seemingly always
exists in our memories; he was always-already a figure of authority. But this
surely cannot be the case and therefore we are puzzled and from this the
enigmatic figure of Trump becomes more mysterious. This level of difference
between existence and non-existence in Trump is what Slavoj Zizek identifies as:
“The final moment of the dialectical process, the 'sublation of the difference',
does not consist in the act of its sublation, but in the experience of how the
difference was always-already sublated; of how, in a away it never effectively
existed” (Zizek, 2008:62). Thus it does not seriously matter how Trump's rise
occurred or if in retrospect he was always a figure and we are now deceived
by his image. The negative space of difference in aesthetic Trump creates a
“retroactive unmasking” as Zizek says, and we are now forever stuck with the
image Trump wants to present to us. In understanding his origins he reaches new
heights of influence as a figure that, as Hegel points out, permeates our air
like a perfume. Consciously and unconsciously he is an object which has created our
current world. He now sculpts our language, our ideology, our talks, our jokes, and
ontologically smashes the political “left-right” spectrum. At an ideological level
however Trump's rise is more obvious. Trump still takes the form of a “sublation
of a sublation” as he was able to capture the libidinal anger and enjoyment of the
Tea Party and capture it. The Tea Party was an attempted sublation by creating a
movement against the “establishment” and its order. Once its members were
elected into the official positions with power the Tea Party effectively disappeared
because its own members could not, for obvious reasons, change politics. Those
elected under the Tea Party banner thus became consumed by the game of
politics, but the people they had influenced, promising them an era reminiscent
of 1776, remained. Thus the same people disaffected by the political process, still
engaged at an enjoyment level, looked for a figure truly outside the political sphere.
This is why Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, elected with the Tea Party wave, crashed.
Trump had captured their “anti-establishment” following, and thus with the
sublation of the original sublation complete, Cruz and Rubio were always-already
establishment. Trump will have won no matter what happens. If the realm of
the politics reverts back to a form of appearances and semblances, it will not
matter. In our idioms, in our textbooks, and in our thoughts Trump's origins
will always remain.
Thus without concrete origins we find ourselves without expectations. The level of
expectations is so incredibly low that we find ourselves surprised at the simplest of
his actions. His ability not to say inflammatory statements is a sort of homage
to politics, a remembrance of when politics was pure appearances. It is the very
moments when he does not say racist and xenophobic things, we become surprised.
Is this the same man? Maybe there is something actually there? His image, even
more enigmatic, breaches a further ideological step. It is the “cynical” side of
ideology that Zizek identifies and the side of ideology in which someone else does
the act of believing for us. In this case a closed loop is formed as Trump does the
believing for us. Baurillard writes: “Our images are like icons: they allow us to go
on believing in art while eluding the question of its existence”(Baudrillard,
2009:19). He believes in his own views, whatever they are. Our confusion with
his contradictory attitudes and statements leaves the public befuddled while he
can continue, unbeknownst to us, to reproduce his image. We go on evading the
real question of why Trump exists or where he came from. Instead we find
ourselves stricken by the iconography, captured tight within its gaze, and thus
allowing us to continue the spectacle.
Another Link
Abolitionary Pedagogy is not so good
Birchall’16 |Clare Birchall, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Culture at King's College in
London, "Managing Secrecy," International Journal of Communication, vol. 10, pg. 152-163|
KZaidi
Zeal for light and a reliance upon coming forth has been mobilized by a liberal
humanist progressive agenda embracing a host of ideals and practices. It
animates not only modern day incarnations of transparency, open government,
freedom of speech, and an understanding of the press as fourth estate, but also
identity politics. Distinct from a form of top-down visibility akin to surveillance and
control, Andreas Brighenti aligns progressive visibility with “recognition”: “a
form of social visibility, with crucial consequences on the relation between
minority groups and the mainstream” (2007, p. 329). Visibility announces the self
and the collective as having to be seen in a way that recognizes the humanity
of the subject. The emphasis on visibility as a political strategy is wholly
understandable, given a history of marginalization and erasure, and nothing I want
to say hereafter should be read as a dismissal of that very important attempt to
dislodge the complicity between whiteness/heterosexuality/masculinity and public
legitimacy. However, finding voice, claiming the right to be heard and seen, to
“come out,” perhaps, has today achieved such a level of ubiquity that it now
extends to everyone—even those historically granted visibility anyway. The
visibility, self-tracking, and confession that characterizes the use and experience
of social media and popular culture today means that being seen and heard is less a
corrective force within a stratified culture, and more a measure of social and
entrepreneurial success. Visibility has arguably been hijacked by commercial
spectacle, and our experiences of subjectivity and communication are
increasingly mediated through technologies of digital consumer surveillance
(whether we are talking about social media platforms like Facebook or search
engines like Google).
I am by no means the first to have questioned the hope put into both visibility and
revelation as progenitors of political change. Slavov Žižek, drawing on Peter
Sloterdjik, wants to understand why people still act as if they do not see
through ideological falsehoods when demystification is in abundance: “[O]ne
knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden
behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it” (1989, p. 29).
Revelation qua class/race/gender consciousness does not lead to action. He
concludes that “cynical reason, with all its ironic detachment, leaves untouched
the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology
structures the social reality itself” (1989, p. 30). The problem with revelation
for Jean Baudrillard is similar. He worries that revelation of a scandal (his
well-known example is Watergate) merely serves to regenerate and restore faith
in the inherently scandalous system and logic of capitalist democracy.
Woodward and Bernstein, in Baudrillard’s view, merely regenerated “public morality
(by indignation, denunciation, etc.),” and therefore “spontaneously further[ed] the
order of capital” (1983 p. 27).
Other, perhaps less pessimistic commentators, emphasize the action that must
follow on the heels of revelation to enable a political intervention. Alasdair Roberts
argues, “The significance of Abu Ghraib may . . . lie in the extent to which we
overestimated the catalytic effect of exposure” (2006, p. 238). For him, democracy
has to involve the responsibility of the public to act upon the information to which
it apparently has a right. Jodi Dean also airs frustration with revelation and
visibility: “All sorts of horrible political processes are perfectly transparent
today. The problem is that people . . . are so enthralled to transparency that
they have lost the will to fight” (2002, p. 174).
She calls for “decisive action” to interrupt the depoliticizing flow of messages.
Rather than constituting a lasting intervention in a “distribution of the sensible” as
Jacques Rancière (2004) would have it, referring to a politics of that which is
visible, audible, sayable, and knowable at any moment, these writers point
toward the way in which revelations often become subsumed by “communicative
capitalism”: “the circulation of content in the dense, intensive networks of global
communications” that “relieves top-level actors (corporate, institutional and
governmental) from the obligation to respond” (Dean, 2005, p. 53). According to
Dean, actors “hope that sufficient volume (whether in terms of number of
contributions or the spectacular nature of a contribution) will give their
contributions dominance or stickiness” (2005, p. 53). The proliferation of positions
is damaging because it “hinders the formation of strong counterhegemonies ”
(2005, p. 53). Ultimately, revelation within communicative capitalism might lead
to structural repetitions under the sign of difference .
Wright 15. Michelle Wright, professor of African American studies at

Northwestern University, The Physics of Blackness, University of Minnesota Press,
2015, pg. 116
When a linear spacetime epistemology begins, as many Black diasporic

epistemologies do, with object status—being enslaved, colonized, relocated, and so
on—the laws of cause and effect make it difficult to reverse the binary that is set
in place, because oppression is asserted as the cause of all historical events
(effects) in the timeline, excepting those events that are caused by a Black
(resistant) reaction to an oppressor’s action. Yet because it is a reaction to an
action, we are again returned to a weird and dismally fixed racing of this Black
physics, in which whiteness always retains the originary agency and, because
origins dominate a linear narrative, white racism is always the central actor in Black
lives now condemned to the status of reactors.
If, however, we add Epiphenomenal time to our interpellation here, the “now” is
foregrounded by agency because Blackness begins as its own interpellation in the
moment. At the same time, this moment is nuanced because it involves a potentially
endless set of negotiations. Instead of the Black Subject being moved down a line
through cause and effect as in a strictly linear interpellation, the Subject in the
moment is variously informed by a variety of external and internal stimuli (what is
witnessed and what happens; what is thought and felt) that also can intersect with
one another. For example, I might watch an episode of a television show in one
moment and laugh uproariously at what I find to be a daring but insightful joke
about racism; in another moment, watching the same show and hearing the same
joke, I might well have forgotten my previous reaction (or remember it, in whatever
valence) and find myself ambivalent about or o ended by the joke. In other words, I
do not move through the world reacting in the same way to the same stimuli all the
time—and perhaps this is because the stimuli are never the same because if not
the space then the time has shifted (even if I am watching from my same place on
the couch, I am doing so on different days).
This is both liberating and problematic to our lives, in which intellectual and
behavioral consistency is more highly valued than its less predictable performances.
It means that one does not always behave as one wishes, and for the Black Subject
who seeks to adhere to a Middle Passage interpellation, the clarity of this linear
timeline is often belied by the familiar complexity of lived moments. Similarly, the
last paragraph of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” asserts agency as an ambivalent
possession, but a possession nonetheless: “Our humanity is our burden, our life; we
need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more di cult—that is,
accept it.”8
The subject cannot be liberated from the system because the
subject is the system itself – they collude with the system at the
level of form
McLennan, 17 [Mark McLennan, PhD Student and Master of Laws at the London
School of Economics, “On The Debate That Didn’t Take Place,” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 14, Number 1]
This Foucaultian resistance lends itself to the type of identity politics that
dominate progressive activism of contemporary society. Commendable though
their super-structural achievements may have been, this is far from a revolution.
Nonetheless, a closer reading of Foucault’s improbable plurality of resistance
suggests that spaces within the system may open up, and can be linked with other
movements. For Foucault, the ‘strategic codification of these points’ can lead to
‘radical ruptures’(Foucault, 1978:95-96). But still, underlying this more modest
conception of resistance is the production of novel discourse, knowledge, and
subjectivity. Here lies the problem: when a new subjectivity is produced, from
which knowledge does it appropriate its novel characteristics? Is this novelty not
merely a (re)combination of the constituent elements of previously oppressive
discourse? Foucault, appears to concede this, noting that ‘we cannot jump outside
the situation’, and that ‘resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to
power’(1997: 167; 1978: 95). Therefore, I would conclude that, subjects are locked
within a network of knowledge and power, forever pre-determining the status of
any attempts at liberation. Progressive commentator Jerome E. Roos, in an article
entitled ‘Foucault and the Revolutionary Self-Castration of the Left’, sums this up
succinctly: Because it connects power with knowledge through discourse, and
because it posits that knowledge and power are continually reproduced through
both formal and informal institutions, there is ultimately no way for willful
agents to escape the choking grasp of their culture without reproducing the
same forms of oppression they are trying to overcome (2011). II. The Productive
Emancipators After elaborating a theory whereby individuals in an object centred
society are dominated by a semiotic code, reproduced by acts of consumption,
Baudrillard moved into a polemical phase (1975;2007;1991). Considered by many to
be a break from Marxism, Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production (1975), should
instead be considered a break-through for critical theory. In it, he shatters the
promise of Marx’s theory, yet the phantasm of revolutionary challenge would haunt
Baudrillard’s subsequent output. His patricide begins in the preface, where
Baudrillard laments the fact that critical thought sustains ‘an unbridled
romanticism of productivity’(1975: 18). His insight here is that because the
concept of ‘production’ underpins both the current political economy and that
which attempts to challenge it, such ‘a consensus is suspect’(Ibid.). Ultimately
for Baudrillard, Marx only critiqued the content of production, and left intact
the form of production. Thus, Marxist thought can only rearrange the contents
of society’s economic infrastructure: any alternative becomes the mirror of
capitalism, as it is fundamentally unable to alter a political economy based on
the accumulation of objects and their network of signs. In order to radically
critique the political economy, production itself must be considered. That
individuals must produce knowledge , objects, or history to satisfy their ‘needs’
is a metaphor created by capital in order to naturalise itself. Indeed, this idea
is for Baudrillard ‘a fable of political economy retold to generations of
revolutionaries infected even in their political radicalism by the conceptual
viruses of this same political economy’(Baudrillard, 1975:22). He insists that any
authentic needs (use-value) are the ‘horizon of exchange value’, potentially non-
existent, but even at best inaccessible. He goes on to argue that use-value or
externalities are ‘only concepts produced and projected into a generic dimension by
the development of the very system of exchange value’(Ibid.,30). Thus there is no
objective referent to which radical critique can ground itself. Therefore, the
concepts that Marxism deploys are predetermined by the existent political
economy. Looking back to Foucaultian resistance, and its reliance on production,
Baudrillard’s analysis is applicable as well. So, in relation to Foucault’s
resistance, or Hardt and Negri’s liberated subject, the conception of an
authentic or liberated subjectivity is the most internalized expression of
domination because it encloses the individual in the system’s logic of
production. The total domination of capital culminates in the Foucaultian
evidence of individuals as producers of their own novel subjectivity. Based on
the above, novel subjectivity or productive resistance cannot exist. As
Baudrillard makes clear, these transcendental concepts are generated by the
system of generalised exchange. Productivity must no longer be considered a
neutral enterprise, which can be redeployed for liberatory ends . For example,
Foucault’s system of knowledge power does not only create the subject through
the production of knowledge, it relies on the very conception that production is
a ‘fundamental human potential’(Baudrillard, 1975:30). Indeed, Baudrillard might
even say something like: More deeply than the fiction of an individual creating
their own identity, the system is rooted in the identification of the individual
with their ability to produce knowledge and therefore ‘transform society
according to human(ist) ends’(Ibid., 31). For Baudrillard, individuals are thus
‘metaphysically over-determined as a producer’ continuously acting in
accordance within the rules of the political economy. It is here that, like
Marxists, Foucaultian’s ‘assist the cunning’ of the system that dominates them:
Convinced that they are dominated by knowledge-power, they fail to consider
the ‘more radical hypothesis’ that all counter-knowledge, at the level of form,
is the same thing. Novel subjectivity is novel domination. Differentiating
subjectivities fails to challenge the real determinant of domination: production.
Risably, Foucault’s theory attempts to resist global capital ‘by using as an
analytic instrument the most subtle ideological phantasm that capital has ever
elaborated’(Ibid.:33). Having analysed Baudrillard’s criticism of critical theory, it is
now possible to look at his direct challenge to Foucault. III. The Order of Things In
1977’s Forget Foucault, Baudrillard argues that Foucault’s ‘theoretical production,
like material production loses its determinacy and begins to turn around on
itself, slipping en abyme towards a reality that cannot be found’(Baudrillard,
2007:44). That is, like Marxism, Foucault’s theory lacks an objective referent,
and is unable to challenge the system it describes. Worse still, it is another
‘mirror of production.’ For Baudrillard, ‘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 reappear’(Ibid.,37). Sarcastically Baudrillard
says, ‘Let everything be produced, be read, become real, visible, and marked with
the sign of effectiveness’(Ibid.). So, ‘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”’(Ibid. 1). Baudrillard is arguing that the effect of
Foucault’s obscene project is to contribute to the increasing simulation of the
world, rendering it all too knowable. Simulation, for Baudrillard involves the
systematic production of signs that come to constitute what we conceive of as
‘reality.’ This process displaces the real, by putting ‘the illusion of death of the
world to death’, and replacing it with ‘an absolutely real world’(Baudrillard, 1996:16).
Foucault himself might best exemplify the banality of an all-too-real
phenomenon: As a result of his ubiquity in virtually every university syllabus,
his range of thought has been reduced to a set of slogans and catchwords so
omnipresent that close readings of his work are rare. According to Baudrillard,
because they are productive, Foucault’s descriptions of power and knowledge
are ‘currently obliterating the traces of our existence, spiriting away the
evidence for our sensible world’(Ibid.,22). As Foucault produces discourse on
power and his disciples argue for the creation of new ‘authentic’ (realer than
real) identities, knowledge and subjectivities, the world is pushed further
towards a fractal stage of liquidated referentials. This is a trans-theoretical
epoch, where capital is intermingled with its other. Negation becomes
affirmation through the integration of novelty. Seen this way, Foucault’s
conception of power is capital’s alibi as it does not challenge the system;
rather, it advances it. For Baudrillard, capital is ‘the one entity to which our
entire system [of simulation] is tethered’(Coulter, 2010:1). Indeed, in his early
work, Baudrillard analysed the ways in which capitalism began to reorganise the
overdeveloped world into a society of consumption, through the emancipation of
signs. In the ‘first order of simulacra’, sixteenth and seventeenth century
bourgeois culture dismantled the ‘fixed ranks and restricted exchanges of the
feudal order’ (Pawlett, 2007:165). This introduced a novel ‘competition at the level
of signs’ within society. Here, the meaning of signs was not tied to a single referent
such as birth, and identity and subjectivity were no longer concrete. Then, with the
dawn of the serial production of objects, capital enabled a transition into the
‘second order of simulacra.’ Here, a general equivalent of signs is born within
market relations, and the serial reproduction of objects. This extinguishes an
original sign referent and with it any symbolic obligation. Thus, subjectivity and
power is represented through institutions and practices such as labour—Foucault’s
disciplinary society. But, this second-order is transient, because ‘serial production
gives way to generation through models …’(Baudrillard, 1993:56). The serial
reproduction of objects, for Baudrillard, quickly enables that which is produced, to
begin to be conceived ‘according to their reproducibility’ as a cybernetic code
(Ibid.). This immediately enables the third order of simulacra to emerge, wherein
‘everything changes with the device of simulation’(Baudrillard, 1983:21). Consider
this third order ‘the work of reality in the age of its technological over-
producibility’(Benjamin, 2008:53). In the ‘third order of simulacra’, society is
governed by a ‘structural law of value’ whereby an operative semiotic code and
a set of simulacral models dominate subjects. It is precisely this code that
infects society at the molecular level, as a kind of capitalist determined DNA.
Operating at this infinitesimal level, through the exchange of signs, capital is
exchanged at an accelerated speed, flowing throughout all discourse, and
reproducing its social relations by way of models. Baudrillard is clear about this:
‘simulacra do not consist only the play of signs, they involve social relations and
social power’(Baudrillard, 1993:52). In this third order, the system speeds towards
a ‘perfected’ degree of control through ‘prediction, simulation, programmed
anticipation and indeterminate mutation’(Ibid.,60). Here, the production of
anything—be it objects or subjectivity—becomes integrated into the system.
Crucially, for Baudrillard, ‘the fundamental law of this society is not the law of
exploitation, but the code of normality’(Ibid., 29). This system creates
participatory subjects who actively exchange the signs gifted by the system of
sign exchange. Importantly, the system is indifferent to the content of these
models. As such, models of negativity and resistance can be exchanged freely,
without negative consequence. This is analogous, albeit at a higher level of
abstraction, to the equally dour Theodor Adorno’s thoughts on 1960’s protest music
—where ‘attempts to outfit [consumption] with a new function remain equally
superficial’(Adorno, 2014; Adorno, n.d.). In Baudrillard’s simulated society, identity
is formed through the amalgamation and play of signs, which are given by the
system. And so, the subject created by the system cannot liberate itself from
the system, because they are of the system. Thus, by producing a theory of
resistance to power that advocates more production, Foucault and his Dylan-
esque disciples unwittingly replicate this form of contemporary capitalism,
further accelerating the system of simulation. Novel subjectivity, is a novel
model of consumption. Baudrillard notes: 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 in every
direction (2007:39-40). So, if one accepts Baudrillard’s semiotic analysis, then it is
worth reversing Foucault’s infamous remark against Marx from The Order of
Things. That is, Foucaultism exists in twentieth-century thought like a fish in
water; it’s unable to breathe anywhere else (Foucault, 1966:262).
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 has 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 k ind
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 lockdown 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.
there is a recrimination DA as the attempt to redeem all history

merely re-sutures the coherence of an empowered humanitarian
cogito bent on humanitarian salvation.
Baudrillard ‘3 /Jean, Fragments, 106-111/
On the necessity of Evil and Hell There is no longer any irrevocable damnation today. There is no longer any hell.
We may concede that we are still within the mongrel concept of Purgatory, but virtually everything falls within the
scope of redemption. It is clearly from such an evangelism that all the manifest, promotional signs of well-being and
fulfilment derive that are offered us by a paradisaical society subject to the Eleventh Commandment ('Be happy
and give all the signs of contentment!') - the one that cancels out all others. But we can also read this demand
for salvation and universal atonement in the way that not only all current violence
and injustices, but also, retrospectively, all the crimes and contradictory events of
the past are now coming in for condemnation . The French Revolution is put in the dock and
slavery is condemned, along with original sin and battered wives, the ozone layer and sexual
harassment. In short, the pre-trial investigation for the Last Judgement is well under
way. We are condemning, then pardoning and whitewashing, our entire history,
exterminating the Evil from even the tiniest crevices in order to present the image
of a radiant universe, ready to pass into the next world. A gigantic undertaking. One that is inhuman,
superhuman, too human? As Stanislaw Lee says, 'We no doubt have too anthropomorphic a view of man.' And why
feed this eternal repentance factory, this chain reaction of bad conscience? Because
everything has to be saved. This is what we have come to today: everything will be
redeemed, the entire past will be rehabilitated, polished to the point of
transparency. As for the future, there's even better in store, and even worse: everything will be genetically
modified to achieve biological perfection and the democratic perfection of the species. Salvation, which was
defined by the equivalence of merit and grace, will, once the abscess of evil and hell has been drained, be defined
by the equivalence between genes and performance. Actually, once happiness becomes purely and simply the general
equivalent of salvation, there is no further reason for heaven. No heaven without hell, no light without darkness. No
one can be saved if no one is damned (by definition, but we also know this intuitively: where would the elect find
pleasure, except in the contemplation of God, were it not for the spectacle of the damned and their torment?).
And once everyone is virtually saved, no one is. Salvation no longer has any meaning. This is the fate in store for our
democratic enterprise: it is vitiated from the outset by the neglect of necessary discrimination, by the omission of
evil. We therefore need an irrevocable presence of Evil, an Evil with no possible redemption, a definitive
discrimination, a perpetual duality of Heaven and Hell, and even in a way a predestination to Evil, for no destiny can
be without some predestination. There is nothing immoral in this. By the rules of the game there is nothing immoral
in some losing and others winning, nor even in everyone losing. What would be immoral would be for everyone to win.
Now, this is the contemporary ideal of our democracy: that everyone be saved. And this is possible only at the cost
of a perpetual upping of the stakes, of endless inflation and speculation, since ultimately happiness is not so much
an ideal relationship to the world as a rivalry with, and a victorious relation to, others. And this is good: it means
that the hegemony of Good, of the individual state of grace, will always be thwarted by some challenge or passion,
and that any kind of happiness, any kind of ecstatic state, can be sacrificed to something more vital, which may be
of the order of the will, as Schopenhauer has it, or of power, or of the will to power in Nietzsche's conception, but
something which, in any event, is of the order of Evil, of which there is no definition, but which may be summed up
as follows: that which, against any happy intended purpose [destination heureuse}, is predestined to come to pass.
Beneath its euphoric exaltation, this imperative of optimum performance, of ideal achievement, certainly bears evil
and misfortune within it, then, in the form of a profound disavowal of such fine prospects, in the form of a secret,
even this is again just a collective form of sacrifice - a
anticipated disillusion ment. Perhaps
human sacrifice, but a disembodied one, distilled into homeopathic doses. Wherever
humans are condemned to total freedom or to ideal fulfilmen t, this subversion seeps
in - this automatic abreaction to their own good and their own happiness. When they are ordered to get the
maximum efficiency and pleasure out of themselves, they remain out of sorts and live a split existence. In this
strange world, where everything is potentially available (the body, sex, space, money, pleasure) to be taken or
rejected en bloc, everything is there; nothing has disappeared physically, but everything has disappeared
metaphysically. 'As if by magic or enchantment', you might say. Only the fact is, it is more by disenchantment.
Individuals, such as they are, are becoming exactly what they are. With no transcendence and no image, they
pursue their lives like a function that is useless in respect of another world, irrelevant even in their own eyes. And
they do what they do all the better for the fact that there is no other possibility. No instance, no essence, no
They have sacrificed their lives to their
personal substance worthy of singular expression.
functional existences. They coincide with the exact numerical calculation of their lives and their
performances. An existence fulfilled, then, but one at the same time denied, thwarted,
disavowed. The culmination of a whole negative counter-transference. This imperative of optimum performance
at the same time comes into internal contradiction with the democratic moral law which ordains that everyone be
perpetually re-set to equality and everything re-set to zero, on the pretext of democracy and an equal sharing of
opportunity and advantage. Given the prospect of salvation for all and universal redemption, no one has the right to
distinguish himself, no one has the right to captivate [siduire }.
For justice to be done, all privilege
must disappear; it is for all to rid themselves voluntarily of any specific qualities , to
based on levelling down and
become once again an elementary particle2 - collective happiness,
repentance, leading to the coming of the lowest common denominator and basic
banalities. This is like a reverse potlatch, with everyone outdoing each other in minimalism and
victimhood, while fiercely cultivating their tiniest differences and cobbling together their multiple identities.
Repentance and recrimination are all part of the same movement : recrimination means going
back over the crime to correct its course and effects. This is what we are doing in going back over
the whole of our history, over the criminal history of the human race, to do penance
here and now as we await the Last Judgement . For God is dead, but his judgement
remains. Which explains the immense syndrome of resipiscence and (historical) rewriting (with the future
genetic and biological rewriting of the species still to come) that has seized the twentieth century's end; with an
eye, as ever, to deserving salvation and - with the prospect of the final accounting before us - to presenting the
image of an ideal victim. Naturally, we are not speaking of a real trial or of genuine repentance. It is a matter
of fully enjoying the spectacle of one's own misfortune : 'Mankind, which in Homer's time was
an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a
degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order' (Walter Benjamin).3
This is but the latest episode in a heart-rending process of revisionism - running down not just the history of the
twentieth century, but all the violent events of past centuries, to subject them to the new jurisdiction of human
rights and crimes against humanity (just as every action today is subjected to the jurisdiction of sexual, moral or
political harassment). As part of the same trend by which all works of art (including the human genome) are listed
as world heritage sites, everything is put on the list of crimes against humanity . The latest
episode, then, of this revisionist madness has been the proposal to condemn slavery and the slave trade as crimes
An absurd proposal to rectify the past in terms of our Western
against humanity.
humanitarian consciousness or, in other words, in terms of our own criteria, in the purest
traditions of colonialism. This imperialism of repentance really is the limit! The idea is,
in fact, to enable the 'peoples concerned' to put this tragedy behind them thanks to this official condemnation
and, once their rights have been restored and they have been recognized and
celebrated as victims, to complete their work of mourning and draw a line under
this page of their history in order to become full participants in the course of
modernity. It might be seen, then, as a kind of successful psychoanalysis. Perhaps the Africans will
even be able to translate this moral acknowledgement into damage claims , using the
same monstrous measure of equivalence from which the survivors of the Shoah have been able to benefit. So we
shall go on compensating, atoning and rehabilitating ad infinitum, and we shall
merely have added to raw exploitation the hypocritical absolution of mourning; we
shall merely, by compassion, have transformed evil into misfortune. From the standpoint
of our recycled humanism, the whole of history is pure crime - and, indeed, without all these
crimes there quite simply would be no history: 'If we eliminated the evil in man, ' wrote Montaigne,
'we would destroy the fundamental conditions of life .' But, on this basis, Cain killing Abel is
already a crime against humanity - and almost a genocide (there were only two of them!), and isn't original sin
already a crime against humanity? All this is absurd, all this humanitarian, retrospective
fakery is absurd. And it all stems from the confusion between evil and misfortune. Evil is the world as it is
and as it has been, and one may look upon this with lucidity. Misfortune is the world as it never should have
been - but in the name of what? - in the name of what should be, in the name of God or a transcendent
ideal, of a Good it would be difficult indeed to define. We may take a criminal view of crime - that is the tragic
view - or we may take a recriminatory view - and that is the humanitarian view, the
pathos-laden, sentimental view, the view which constantly calls for reparation . We
have here all the ressentiment dredged up from the depths of a genealogy of
morals, and requiring in us reparation for our own lives . This retrospective
compassion, this conversion of evil into misfortune is the twentieth century's most
flourishing industry. First as a mental blackmailing operation, to which we all fall
victim, even in our actions, from which we can now hope only for the lesser evil (keep a low profile, do everything
in such a way as anyone else could have done it - decriminalize your existence!). Then as a profitable
operation with gigantic yields, since misfortune (in all its forms: from suffering to insecurity,
oppression to depression) represents a symbolic capital, the exploitation of which - even more
than the exploitation of happiness - is endlessly profitable from the economic standpoint. It's a
gold-mine, as they say, and there is an inexhaustible source of ore, because the seam lies within each of us.
To
Misfortune commands the highest prices, whereas evil cannot be traded. It is impossible to exchange.
transcribe evil into misfortune and then to transcribe misfortune into commercial,
or spectacular, value - most often with the collusion or assent of the victim himself.
But the victim's collusion with his own misfortune is part of the ironic essence of
Evil. It is what brings it about that no one wants his own good, and nothing is for
the best in the best of all worlds
Industrial Death
You goody two shoes propagate life and reason like any fascist.
Prefer not life, not reason, and not the good. Affirm your own
death, for their propagation of life and reason is much more
violent than material dispossession, erecting a violent binary
between life and death. The will to die preserves the possibility of
singularity.
Robinson '12 |Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow
affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of
Nottingham, "Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death", March
30, http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/|KZaidi
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 exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself
being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not
collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of
accumulation. According to Baudrillard, capitalism rests on 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 aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned
by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity – 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.
Climate
obscure root causes, and create techno-utopian inaction.
Hoofd 12. Ingrid M., Assistant Professor in the Communications and New Media Programme at the National
University of Singapore, “Ambiguities of Activism: Alter-globalism and the imperatives of speed.” “///” in between
paragraphs NT 17
These technological and managerial solutions, however, do nothing to subvert the speed-
elitist system and ideology that underlie the problem of climate change, as they do not go far
enough in challenging speed-elitism's fundamental assumptions and techniques. This means that the activist
promise of the future absolution by way of humanist-scientific thought from the
future threat of global warming immediately aggravates disenfranchisement and
pollution now. Let me illustrate this by first briefly analysing a widely used educational game
designed to combat climate change called Global Warming Interactive —C02Fx. This
web-based game, funded by the United States National Science Foundation and developed by environmentalists
from a range of American consultancies and educational organisations, aims at teaching secondary-school students
the sorts of decision making involved in global warming. The game invariably starts with a map of the country of
Brazil in the 1960s, and gives statistics about the carbon emission, air temperature, and general welfare of the
population. The player can control government budget expenditures for science, agriculture, social services, and
development initiatives, after which the game timeline jumps ten years into the future, generating results based on
these expenditures. The game ends by showing the relative increase in temperature in the virtual year of 2060,
warning the player that more international cooperation is required to really tackle global warming. /// The problem
with Global Warming Interactive is that it completely obscures the relationship between
the computing technology that sustains the C02Fx simulation and the reality of climate
change. A telling moment of this dissimulation is when the game urges the player to 'switch off
the television!' while the energy consumption involved in the infrastructure, mode of
production and dissemination, student use, and tools that sustain the game itself is
blissfully ignored. If one wants to seriously reduce consumption, the game should
not have been played or even produced at all. The game also oversimplifies how
government decisions affect a complex issue like climate change, and is fraught
with problematic and often technoutopian assumptions about how to tackle climate change. A
good example of this is the recurring recommendation throughout the game to the player to spend more money on
The speed-elitist,
scientific research, as this expenditure will supposedly solve or alleviate global warming.
humanist, and techno-utopian discourses that permeate American academia and
consultancy firms are clearly reflected in Global Warming Interactive, inculcating the student with a
set of beliefs that lies precisely at the base of current environmental pollution. Ironically,
it is this speed-elitist system of beliefs and techniques that in turn causes the kinds of
economical disenfranchisement that urges certain groups of poor people in a country like
Brazil to survive on environmentally unfriendly business solutions, like slash-burning
the forests. One is also left to wonder why the game uses Brazil in the first place, and not the United States—
arguably the largest global polluter today. There is indeed a problematic neo-colonialist
undertone to the one-country version of Global Warming Interactive. Extending the
content of the game by including more countries in the simulation , as the developers seek to
do, would not assuage this problem, but would concur with the contemporary shift from previous
colonialist to speed-elitist hierarchies by way of a global encapsulation. By giving the
player simulated governmental omnipotence through the 'archiving' of the
economical and social structures underlying global warming in that 'other' country of Brazil,
the player gets the illusion of dealing constructively with the major 'accident' of climate
change and its impact on threatened peoples while actually fuelling it. Meanwhile,
player or student empathy and activity are displaced into the instantaneous
networks of ever increasing neo-liberal circulation and production. /// The illusion of
constructive engagement with the pressing climate change issue through seemingly
'clean' and 'neutral' technologies, together with the distancing effect brought about
by these technologies from their social and environmental implications, make the student and
activist unwittingly complicit in the globalising neo-liberal endeavour. The same goes for
the recent spate of 'climate change apps' like Greenmeter and GreenYou for iPhone, as well as the various global
'climate app contests' set up by the United Nations and the World Bank. Environmental salvation is in these
applications always just around the corner. The World Bank contest, for instance, states in full speed-elitist
fashion that 'Access to freely available climate-related data is essential to catalyze the changes in policies,
such
investments and technologies that will be needed if we are to move towards a climate-smart future.' But all
applications and contests really do is producing globally networked flows and reproduc ing the
mirage of the human participant-consumer-activist at the centre of revolutionary
change through her or his techne. So despite, or rather again because of, the good intentions of the activists
and educators who built such applications, these games exhibit a virtualisation of thought and
action under neo-liberal globalisation and its speed-elitist modes of intensified
inclusion and exclusion. These games can therefore be understood as attempts at (eventually
unsuccessfully) managing and containing the 'accident of the real' brought about by the
technologies of speed. What is even more worrisome is that the very attempt to raise
awareness about climate change—the unveiling of the 'real' problem underlying globalisation today—
results in the intensified capitalist circulation of 'the real' as sign in the media,
just as Baudrillard also suggests. /// I am using this minor example of a didactic video game here to illustrate the
political and managerial attempts at combating climate change
extent to which the
themselves follow the representational and aesthetic logic of the mass and new media. So
while C02Fx is arguably 'just a game' with artificially set parameters, the very same
logic of simulation operates on the scale of global politics by means of the
apocalyptic staging and subsequent economical, scientific, and technical
propositions. Moreover, the activist argument that requires the justification of these propositions and
attempts by signifying the 'real' problem, like 'nature' with earlier environmental politics, renders such activism as
well as my deconstructivist book complicit in speed-elitism by virtue of their promissory status and apocalyptic
narrative. Contra, for instance, the claim by Erik Swyngedouw in 'Apocalypse Forever?' that the climate change
reworking the apocalyptic
model signals the post-political moment (215), I suggest that it is by
narrative present in the environmental imperative through climate change activism and
its affirmation of the underlying assumptions of global warming that results in the
intensification of politics on which speed-elitism thrives. I hence do not agree with
Swyngedouw that 'apocalyptic imaginations are decidedly populist and foreclose proper
political framing' (219), because within these imaginaries resides also the critique of a monstrous capitalism
that Swyngedouw so astutely retrieves. So whereas the climate change model and its current 'solutions' decidedly
climate change is a deliberate
reflect the neo-liberal status quo, I would hesitate to suggest that
governmental or corporate ploy to rule by means of fear so as to better exploit
citizenconsumers, although government and industry certainly have stepped onto the greenhouse bandwagon
to expand the futures and derivatives market and to sell 'green' products and
incentives. Rather, at issue is the politics of acceleration behind the construction of
reality by means of the discursive and material techniques of visualisation and dissimulation.
The will to project the self into a coherent position of opposition naturalizes the false
binary choice of being for or against war – these banal oppositional stances
reinforces fantasies of democratic deliberation and destroy agency – refuse the
coercive false choice of war porn which reproduces militarism.
Shapiro 14. Alan Shapiro, senior lecturer at Offenbach Art and Design University in Germany,
"Jean Baudrillard and Albert Camus on the Simulacrum of Taking a Stance on War,"
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)
The stance of opposition to a war undertaken by America’s ’military-industrial complex’ (MIC), as President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed it in
his Farewell Address to the nation on January 17, 1961 after spending 8 years as President, seems to be based on the assumption of
the discursive viability of projecting oneself into the imaginative space of being a sort of ‘shadow
government of truth-speakers’, empowered by democracy into the democratic position of being
able to make ‘better’ decisions for the body politic of democracy than those who hold institutional
power in political economy and government. Most political discourse in the U.S., including the anti-war stance, seems to
take for granted the idea that we should clarify ‘our politics’ by imaginatively putting
ourselves ‘in the shoes’ of national strategists choosing among the policy options available.
Apocalypse Now Jean Baudrillard expands our sense of what is history because he does not operate with a strict separation between what are ‘the facts’ and what are the
engaging stories that we as a culture have written and enacted about important ‘historical’ events. Much of what we know about the Holocaust, the Second World War,
and the Vietnam War comes from Hollywood films about the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Vietnam War that we have seen. In his essay on Francis Ford
Coppola’s 1979 blockbuster Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now, Baudrillard writes that Coppola’s masterpiece is the continuation of the Vietnam War by other means.
“Nothing else in the world smells like that,” says Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore – played by Robert Duvall – in the 2 hour and 33 minute film. “I love the smell of napalm in the
morning… It smells like victory.” The high-budget extravaganza was produced exactly the same way that America fought in Vietnam, says Jean Baudrillard of the film
made by director Francis Ford Coppola (Baudrillard 1981: 89-91). “War becomes film,” Baudrillard writes of Coppola’s spectacularly successful cinematic creation. “Film
becomes war, the two united by their shared overflowing of technology” (Ibid.: 89). There is implosion or mutual contamination between ‘film becoming Virtual Reality’
and War. Think also of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998): total immersion in the Virtual Reality of combat – an aesthetics of VR different from ‘critical
distance’ – as a new kind of ‘testimonial position’ with respect to war and atrocities. In Vietnam-slash-Apocalypse Now, War is a Drug Trip and a
God Trip, a psychedelic and pornographic carnival (Baudrillard 2010), a savage cannibalism
practiced by the Christians, a film before the shooting and a shoot before the filming, a vast
machine of excessive special effects, a ‘show of power’, a territorial lab for testing new
weapons on human guinea pigs, and the sacrificial jouissance of throwing away billions of
dollars – all these aspects alluded to or mentioned by Baudrillard. Coppola’s film, according to Baudrillard, is the carrying on of an
undeclared, unfinished and unending War. An interminable Heart of Darkness. Baudrillard: Neither For
Nor Against Jean Baudrillard is not ‘against war’, not even against specific wars like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He says this explicitly in “Le masque de
la guerre,” published in the Parisian daily newspaper Libé ration, just prior to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ni pour ni contre. Neither for
nor against. “This war is a non-event,” writes Baudrillard, “and it is absurd to take a stance on a non-
event (Baudrillard 2003).” The non-events of the Iraq War and the War on Terror opposed themselves to the event of September 11th, 2001. Hostages of the Screen
Baudrillard’s two most explicit texts about war are The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), written just before, during, and just after the Persian Gulf War of 1991 that
was initiated by President George H.W. Bush, and The Spirit of Terrorism (2002), written just after 9/11. At the very beginning of the essay “The Gulf War Will Not Take
Place,” the first of the three essays that comprise The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Baudrillard explains that non-war – which is what the
military-industrial complex or the (non-)war machine has become very adept at carrying out in the age of
virtuality – “is characterised by that degenerate form of war which includes hostage
manipulation and negotiation (Baudrillard 1995: 24). The Eisenhower-coined term of the military-industrial complex is used by Baudrillard in
his essay "No Reprieve For Sarajevo," published in Libé ration, January 8, 1994. He sees the MIC as still operative yet in need of conceptual upgrading. “Hostages
and blackmail,” Baudrillard continues in “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place,” “are the purest products of deterrence. The
hostage has taken the place of the warrior. He has become the principal actor, the
simulacral protagonist, or rather, in his pure inaction, the protagoniser (le protagonisant) of non-war” (Baurillard 1995: 24). And we,
the television viewers of the non-war, are all in the situation of hostages, “all of us as information hostages on
the world media stage” (Ibid.). Hostages of the screen, of the intoxication of the media, dragged
and drugged into a logic of deterrence, "we are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the
deterrence of the real by the virtual” (Ibid.: 27). Four Aspects of a Baudrillardian Theory of War The post-structure [the successor to a sociological structure with less
stability and with less of a center] of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has properties of binary/digital, simulation/modeling, viral metastasis, and
complex intricate paradoxical topology. Let us consider all four of these properties as aspects of a Baudrillardian theory of war (or a theory of war in honour of Jean
Baudrillard). War as Imposed Binary Choice First of all, the post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media
virtuality has the property of binary/digital. It presents itself to us through the dualistic structure of a forced
binary choice, where the system obliges each of us to take a position ‘for’ or ‘against’ war, or
‘for’ or ‘against’ particular wars, as waged, for example, by the Pentagon, the EU ‘humanitarian’ forces, or the surveillance state’s War on Terror. It is this very
binary logic of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that is the news media discourse, the rhetoric of politicians, and
the hybrid virtual-and-real-killing of the screen and the bomb. Today, of course, the Internet has superceded
television as the prevailing universal media (although there is much convergence and combination of the two). And the Internet is much more interactive and
participatory. There is much more response. There is much less of a ‘spectacle’ than there was when Guy Debord and the Situationists conceptualized their media theory
everywhere that the ‘news media’ and the (non)-war machine still prevail,
in the 1960s. Yet
everywhere that they are still massively influential, everywhere that they still exercise their
power, we are not quite liberated from the ‘speech without response’ described by the early Baudrillard. When
Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator of Libya, was brutally killed by rebel forces on October 20, 2011, during the Libyan Civil War, the event, having been filmed by a
cell phone, was presented to worldwide viewers by almost all of the ‘news media’ as some kind of triumph for ‘justice’, even though it was clearly a loss for democratic
principles and the possible coming to light of priceless information about the decades of atrocities committed by Gaddafi’s regime during a public trial which would
the only authentic communicative exchange that is

never take place. The later Baudrillard develops the powerful idea that
possible today in the context of over-saturation with, of and by simulacral media pseudo-
exchanges is an ‘impossible exchange’. In the chapter “Living Coin: Singularity of the Phantasm” in the book ImpossibleExchange (1999),
Baudrillard elaborates his idea of a generalized economy (not the same as Bataille’s principle of solar expenditure or the basing of a general economy on a solar
the reinvesting of the sphere of all exchange by that which cannot possibly be
economy): “
exchanged” (Baudrillard 2001: 122-131, see also Baudrillard 1976). There is something of no-value at the heart of the
economic order. Baudrillard provides the example of the film Indecent Proposal (1993), in which the billionaire character John Gage, played by Robert
Redford, in the setting of a Las Vegas casino, purchases the sexual-amorous favours of the married woman character Diana Murphy, played by Demi Moore, for the sum
of one million dollars. As Baudrillard interprets the film, Redford seeks to possess the “unexchangeable part of this woman,” that portion of herself that is outside of the
exchange nexus for the simple reason that she herself does not own and therefore cannot sell what she is. Baudrillard calls this “obliterating wealth in and through the
sign of wealth (Baudrillard 2001: 123-124). In the moment of their first meeting, Gage asks Murphy to bet a million dollars at the roulette table for him. She and his chips
are wagered, thereby establishing the shared valuelessness – in the sense of being outside the system of value – of both the cliché d legendary sum of one million dollars
Baudrillard notes the

and the enjoyment of and by this singular woman. The Model Precedes the Real In writing about the Persian Gulf War in 1991,
victory of the model which precedes ‘the real’, the triumph of ‘war processing’ (on analogy with ‘data
processing’ and ‘word processing’), the predomination of virtual technologies. The post-structure of the
(non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the property of simulation/modelling. There is the simulacrum
of the disappeared “historical” referent of war, and the triumph of informational and gaming technologies. Baudrillard writes in “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking
“The victory of the model is more important than victory on the ground. Military success consecrates
Place?”:
the triumph of arms, but the programming success consecrates the defeat of time. War-processing, the transparency of the model
in the unfolding of the war, the strategy of relentless execution of a program” (Baudrillard 1995: 55-56).
In that non-war that ‘did not take place’, there was the emergence of an abstract, electronic, speculative, informatic space. “Just as wealth is no longer
measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not measured by being waged but by
its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space, the same space in
which capital moves” (Ibid.: 56). In addition to careful management of images and information content, the true devastation of
war is kept at bay from our perceptions by simulation technologies ranging from the televisual screen
to the military ‘smart weapons’ deployed from altitudes of tens of thousands of feet. During months of preparation for the ‘war’, viewers
experience endless military experts paraded across their screen, endlessly analyzing
scenarios before they happen. The pilot in his simulator cockpit, or the gunner in his high-tech tank, is surrounded
by a virtual environment and motion-dependent images which are the same whether he is in a war game
training exercise or a ‘real engagement’. A Non-Euclidean Spacetime The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media
virtuality has the property of complex intricate paradoxical topology. There is the “non-Euclidean” spacetime of multiple refracting waves in an enigmatic hyperspace
At a certain speed, the speed of

beyond any classical geometry. In “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?,” Baudrillard (1995: 49-50) writes:
information, things lose their sense… War implodes in real time, history implodes in real time, all
communication and all signification implode in real time… The space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple
refractivity, and that the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean. To understand the complex non-Euclidean informational space of non-war, we need a new
mathematics, a new unconventional metric space. In mathematics, a metric space is a set where a specific concept of distance between elements of the set is defined and
implemented. Three-dimensional Euclidean space – a way of thinking about space that belongs to the Western metaphysical ‘construction of reality’ as it was originated
by the Ancient Greek thinkers – corresponds to our ‘intuitive understanding’ of space. 1991 Persian Gulf War Shortly before 7 PM on the evening of January 16, 1991
(January 17, early AM, in the Gulf), Network nightly news viewers were informed that heavy bombing of strategic targets inside Iraq had been initiated. At 9 PM,
President George H.W. Bush enthusiastically told the viewing audience that “the liberation of Kuwait has begun.” Pentagon spokespersons explained that massive
pinpoint strikes by high-tech planes against carefully selected military sites and command headquarters had caught the Iraqis entirely off guard. Reports of great success
came in. The nation rejoiced. It was our grand celebration. We feted our triumph in the Cold War. The glamorous high-tech weapons, developed and paid for over years,
could finally be used in the real thing, and the Soviets were nowhere in sight. We were back. After the wrenching stalemate of Vietnam, we could finally start again.
The enemy was an inert physical installation, a blip on a radar screen to be methodically
darkened [eliminated]. The Fourth Order of Simulacra The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the property of viral
metastasis. There is the news media becoming part of the terror. There are the surveillance policies of the state becoming part of the terror. In the essay “After the Orgy”
in the book The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard writes of the “epidemic of simulation,” a networked mode of fractal or viral dispersal. Updating his famous theses of
“the three orders of simulacra” (in Symbolic Exchange and Death) and “the precession of simulacra” (in Simulacra and Simulation), he seeks to introduce “a new particle
into the microphysics of simulacra (Baudrillard 1993: 5): The first of these stages had a natural referent, and value developed on the basis of a natural use of the world.
The second was founded on a general equivalence, and value developed by reference to a logic of the commodity. The third is governed by a code, and value develops
here by reference to a set of models. At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions…
(Ibid.: 5, 7). This is the fractal or viral stage of fourth-order simulacra. In Baudrillard’s post-simulation epistè me or "epidemic of simulation," value - if that term is still
appropriate - radiates in all directions in a cancerous metastasis. There is "no relationship between cause and effect, merely viral relationships between one effect and
another” (Ibid.: 108). All spheres of society pass into their free-floating, excessive, and ecstatic form. September 11, 2001 In “The Spirit of Terrorism,” the first essay of
the book The Spirit of Terrorism(2002), Baudrillard writes of the event of September 11, 2001: The more concentrated the system becomes globally, ultimately forming
one single network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already a single little Filipino hacker had managed, from the the dark recesses of his portable
Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere.

computer, to launch the ‘I love you’ virus, which circled the globe devastating entire networks)…
There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though
it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent. We can no longer draw a
demarcation line around it. It is at the very heart of this culture which combats it… Terrorism
is the shock wave of this silent reversion (2002: 8-9, 10, 11). After each terrorist attack, there is a
feeling in the air of panic and confusion in the news media as the police and Federal Investigators identify and catch the perpetrators,
and the information society scrambles to find out ‘who did it’. Abu Ghraib Torture and Prisoner Abuse This is how the
English-language Wikipedia article on “Abu Ghraib Torture and Prisoner Abuse” begins: During the War in Iraq, human rights violations, committed from late 2003 to
early 2004, in the form of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture, reports of rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison
(currently known as the Baghdad Central Prison) came to public attention beginning in early 2004 with Department of Defense announcements. These acts were
committed by military police personnel of the United States Army together with those of additional US governmental agencies.1 On May 19, 2004, Jean Baudrillard
published the essay “Pornographie de la guerre” in the Parisian daily newspaper Libé ration. (published as “War Porn” in English) The philosopher, sociologist, and
media theorist writes: World Trade Center: shock treatment of power, humiliation inflicted on power, but from outside. With the images of the Baghdad prisons, it is
worse, it is the humiliation, symbolic and completely fatal, which the world power inflicts on itself – the Americans in this particular case – the shock treatment of shame
To keep the hyper-reality of cyberwar going,

and bad conscience. This is what binds together the two events (Baudrillard 2004).
the ghost-people must continue to exercise a certain ‘minimal’ function in the real. To lend
the game its requisite weight or support, they must furnish a necessary dose of reality-effect
through the chalking up of their disappearance. A certain number of victims of torture, rape,
and murder are required to provide data (‘fresh meat’) to keep the electronic killing game
going, especially if they can be photographed, and then the images sent out on the universal
image-viewing network. Baudrillard continues in “War Porn”: This is where the truth of these images lies; this is
what they are full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic.
Truth but not veracity: it does not help to know whether the images are true or false… There is
no longer the need for ‘embedded’ journalists because soldiers themselves are immersed in the image – thanks to digital technology, the images are definitively
integrated into the war. They don¹t represent it anymore; they involve neither distance, nor perception, nor judgment…(Ibid.). Media images in general – in advertising,
for example – signify the excess of wealth that we as citizens of the West have the prerogative of partaking in. The abject and disgusting images of the Abu Ghraib torture
Beyond the epistemology of true and false, the digital

and prisoner abuse atrocity are the dark underside of media culture.
technology image has inscribed within itself the tautological reasoning of the self-fulfilling
prophecy, inheriting from advertising and the classical era of consumer culture the mastery of the art of rendering things true by saying that they are. For
Baudrillard, all images in contemporary culture tend towards the pornographic. The visual culture of stylized images is obscene and pornographic at every level – from
hard-core porno to ‘music television’, from swimsuit magazines to commonplace TV commercials.
Security (Bishop)
Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint, condemning
the world to the simulacral existence of peace and security, your
acts of piety and pity are absurd, committed as if they were
irresistible. Your promises are a life spent wandering the surface
of the world with minimal intensity—life spent playing penny slots
and drinking bud light instead of ever risking anything or buying
the good shit. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and
time.
Bishop 9 |Ryan, teaches at the National University of Singapore and has published on
critical theory, military technology, avantgarde aesthetics, urbanism, architecture,
literature, and international sex tourism. He edits or serves on the editorial boards of
several journals "Baudrillard, Death, and Cold War Theory" in Baudrillard Now: Current
Perspectives in Baudrillard Studies, polity, ed. R. Bishop pg. 65-70|KZaidi
Although death is pivotal to many whose work falls within the domain of critical
theory, Baudrillard’s work, perhaps more so than others’, articulates, embodies, and
enacts the role of Death within theoretical writing and its relation to the political.
Death, and especially the death drive in Freud according to Baudrillard, does not
provide any space for the operation of dialectical co-option or reclamation. And it is
this trait, Death’s absolute imperviousness to the dialectic, that makes it radical,
intractable, usable (Symbolic Exchange and Death, 151). Such is the position that
Baudrillard himself assumes within analyses of media, simulation, the subject, the
object, politics, war, economics, culture, the event, theory itself, and thought. In
relation to systems, the Death that Baudrillard wishes to address functions in a
two-fold manner: it is what waits at “the term of the system” – at its end – and it is
“the symbolic extermination that stalks the system itself” (Symbolic Exchange of
Death, 5). Therefore Death is both internal to the system and its “operational
logic” and “a radical-finality” outside it. Only Death operates both within and
without the system (5). As such it carries the mark of perfection (completion of
the system’s operation and project) and the defectiveness inherently lurking within
it. Death is ambiguity and paradox made manifest, and is both the system’s
realization and its impediment.
Death resists modeling, the simulation. Its lack of predictability and the difficulty
in controlling it, in fact, resides at the center of the various systems, policies, and
logics that drive the Cold War. Death is the event without compare and which must
be elided at all costs. Under the patriotic yet threatening rubrics of security,
safety, “our way of life,” etc., the entire elaborate apparatus of the Cold War was
erected and launched, while also continuing with intensified reverberations into the
present – all to ward off Death on a scale hitherto the domain of Nature or the
gods. Following a lead from the poet Octavio Paz and sounding like an interlocutor of
Paul Virilio’s, Baudrillard discusses Death, therefore, in terms of the accident
(Symbolic Exchange and Death, 160–6). For as Paz contends, modern science and
technology, including medicine, have converted epidemics and natural catastrophes
into explain- able and controllable phenomena . The rational order can explain and
contain anything that threatens it, as can Integral Reality (for which the rational
order is another metonym, as is the global). As such, Death becomes an accident to
be contained and controlled, explained and predicted. If Death equals an accident,
and accidents threaten the rational order, Baudrillard argues, then Death-as-
accident also threatens political sovereignty and power, “hence the police presence
at the scenes of catastrophe” (161). Death is the disruption that destabilizes all
that has been ordered and made stable.
At the height of the Cold War as an historical phenomenon, the major powers relied
heavily on a rational order that both players acknowledged (at least between
themselves) to be operational. This led to the enforced and heavily armed
stalemate of MAD, and with it arrived the horrific spectacle of the nuclear
accident, or the computer accident. The accidental launch of the impossible
exchange of missiles would be, in rote pronouncements of certitude, “the only way”
these rational and sane nations would fire nuclear weapons: hence the many
examples of cultural representations of accidental nuclear war that filled popular
media (invoking worlds synonymous to the one portrayed as the simulated wasteland
in The Island). The import of simulation in containing Death on a global scale can be
seen in the supposed rational containment of both the opposition and oneself. The
simulated scenarios of both war games and accidental launches, the modeling of
events, become a kind of necromantic or occult means of controlling unleashed
forces and foretelling possible futures in order to prevent the accident (or the
event) – to prevent Death itself.
The thought processes, or mental make-up, required to plan and design large-scale
modeling meant to pre-empt accidents are themselves a kind of technology of
thinking, and this mental technicity comprises an important element in the
construction of Integral Reality. Simulation requires faith not in its own verisi-
militude but in its capacity to change events, even Death. The US embodies this
kind of faith and has from the Cold War to the present, which, as such, becomes a
target for many satiric novelists. One particularly influenced by Baudrillard’s ideas
about simulation is Don DeLillo, whose novel White Noise reads like a primer on the
French theorist’s writings. One motif in the novel is a company called SIMUVAC,
which stands for “simulated evacuation.” The company stages fake evacuations for a
variety of emergencies, including nuclear events, complete with a theatrical or
cinematic set of special effects: uniforms, sound effects, smells, and blood (if
required). The firm turns up several times in the novel but makes its first, and most
satirically poignant, appearance during an actual emergency. In perfect
Baudrillardian fashion, the company, which operates solely with and for simulation,
uses a live emergency to practice (or simulate) its own simulated emergencies,
which is the commodity it packages and sells to various government agencies.
The protagonist of the novel asks a SIMUVAC employee, in the midst of the actual
crisis, to evaluate their rehearsal. The SIMUVAC operative replies in darkly
comedic fashion: The insertion curve isn’t as smooth as we would like. There’s a
probability excess. Plus which we don’t have our victims laid out where we we’d
want them if this was an actual simulation. In other words we’re forced to take our
victims where we find them. We didn’t get a jump on computer traffic. Suddenly it
just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape. You have to make
allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real. There’s a lot of
polishing to do. But that’s what this exercise is all about. (DeLillo, 1985: 139)
The passage contains beautiful parodic examples of the vagaries that language
suffers at the hands of bureaucrats, with nonsense phrases passing as technical
jargon, including “insertion curve” and “probability excess,” as well as the
delightfully oxymoronic “actual simulation.” But beyond this parody, DeLillo evokes
the technicity of thought deeply embedded in Cold War America, the same
technicity that Baudrillard works through at multiple levels, to reveal the deep
investment in the power and control afforded by simulation. The desirable element
of simulation is, in fact, control, such as with body placement, which is something
actual disasters arrange without care or consultation with the modelers. When the
SIMUVAC employee claims that things are in need of “polishing” because
“everything we see tonight is real,” we witness the retreat into the comfortable
delusion afforded by simulation despite its no-nonsense claims to hard-nosed
pragmatism – “that’s what this exercise is all about,” he asserts. SIMUVAC, as a
company, markets readiness, the capacity to make a community alert and prepared,
but can only deliver on this promise as long as everything remains contained in the
model. (And if events do not remain neatly in the model, then the company can use
the “accident” to better refine their simulation and techniques.) The same is true
of governments, and this is the fear of the accident – and the fear the accident
manifests – that Baudrillard (pace Paz) analyzes. Every sector of Integral Reality
lives in fear of events because they can “spill out , three-dimensionally, all over the
landscape,” no longer in control of the system. All that various institutions, systems,
and technologies promise to contain refuses to be contained. Such is the revenge of
the object, about which Baudrillard writes, and the intractability of that which lies
outside the systems of transparency and integration. Death stalks the protective
simulating enterprises from inside and out.
Baudrillard as a stylist of considerable skill and a rhetorician well-steeped in the

rhetorical tradition similarly mobilizes his writing itself as Death in relation to the
systems operative within academic discourse. From the late 1960s on, his writings
and books have deviated rather widely from the conventions of sociological or
philosophical genres and academic writing by reaching into the humanistic essay
tradition (long since abandoned) and combin- ing it with the most current of
pressing issues. What constitutes a standard argument within the humanities and
qualitative social sciences, what passes for knowledge and knowledge formation and
construction, depends heavily on the adherence of a given work to these
conventions. Baudrillard’s textual Deaths provide “fatal strategies ” intended to
stave off the actual death of thought that can result from routinized, by-the-
number, knowledge formation. The aphoristic style, borrowed most directly from
Nietzsche, works in a nonlinear fashion that nonetheless makes consistent and
sustained arguments across his books as well as within them. Baudrillard teases an
idea, settles on a problematic, and pulls at its various permutations, checking how it
might work from one context to another. As a result, his writing can be
simultaneously readable and enjoyable while also being difficult and frustrating.
Like his friend Virilio, he does not develop his argument in a full or linear fashion,
instead allowing for fragments, tangents, and hyperbole to carry thought off
course and place readers in a textual space that is comfortable (especially if they
have read nineteenth- century philosophers) and discomfiting at the same time.
To this end, he resurrects outmoded philosophical discourse while at the same time
adding to it a late modernist poetic sensibil- ity. The latter quality emerges most
obviously in his deployment of terms as talismans of the moment of writing as well
as terrain themselves for inquiry: the strategic deployment of labels and phrases
intended to make us pay attention to their elasticity and formidable ability to
fascinate, illuminate, and instantiate a stability of unstable phenomena.
Baudrillard is always contemporary, his thoughts being solidly grounded in the
present, and his terminology is always embedded in the current moment. He relies
on older essayistic forms to structure his thoughts and musings, which often appear
as thoughts and musings, i.e. slightly inchoate and coming into focus through the act
of writing. The processual quality of his style injects Death as that which cannot be
represented adequately into the deathly regimes of academic language meted out
by rote adherence to genre-driven formulae within academic discursive practices.
In an important sense, Baudrillard posits that Death is the salvation of theory
while also arguing for the salvation that is Death. With the nuclear sword of
Damocles dangling over our heads ever since the explosions at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, we have slipped into a constant state of imminent global death that no
longer seems like death, so swift and horrible will it be that it outstrips our
imagination. “If the bomb drops,” he writes in America, “we shall neither have the
time to die nor any awareness of dying” (42). Echoing the neo-Freudian
psychoanalyst Ernst Becker, Baudrillard argues that Death ostensibly has been
removed from our horizon in the American Era, and we, those who follow in
America’s global footsteps, have moved easily and subtly into a state of daily ease
and material comfort, buffeted and protected by a staggering array of tele-
technologies, opto-electronics, and international ballistic missiles all meant to
keep Death at bay and survival at the forefront. Lost in this heady combination of
technological, intellectual, and economic materiel mounted for sheer survival, of
course, is life (43). Only that which is alive can die, and our cocooned embrace of
globalization, which in turn cocoons and embraces us, leaves us with an existence
that recalls the prescient horror films of George Romero begun early in the Cold
War: an existence like that of zombies, neither alive nor dead, but frantically and
brainlessly consuming all in sight.
Baudrillard rescues Death from its purgatorial condition of “the not alive” or mere
survival. And in order to do so, he takes his cue from the masses who are the
targets of this weaponry and way of life, the enactors of this ethos of bland
avoidance and unthink- ing consumption. Their wholesale passivity to the apparatus
of survival – from nuclear bunkers to Star Wars – emerges from a weariness of
having been ceaselessly confronted with apocalyptic visions since the first nuclear
explosions in New Mexico and Japan, and they “defend themselves with a lack of
imagination” (America, 44). “The masses’ silent indifference to nuclear pathos
(whether it comes from the nuclear powers or from antinuclear campaigners) is
therefore a great sign of hope,” he asserts, “and a political fact of great import”
(44). To understand Death as immanent within the system and without it, as
immanent within bios and zoe and without it, is to resist the simulation of Death
that hovers over our heads in the Cold War and the War on Terror. The salvation of
Death, which is also the salvation of Baudrillard’s writing, thought, and analyses,
provides us with the means of getting this specific brutal excess back into our
collective frame of reference, not for the sake of nihilism, but to resist the nihil-
ism built into all the projects of utter completion and realization that have
rendered politics, the subject, the object, thought, and theory as simulation.
War
Don’t be a cartographer – be a sparatacus
Nordin and Oberg 15 Astrid Nordin is Lecturer in the Department of Politics,
Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. Her research engages critical theories of
global politics, with a special focus on Chinese political thought and cultural governance.
Recent publications include research articles in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political; China
Information and the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Dan Öberg is Senior
Lecturer of War Studies, Department of Military Science, Swedish Defense College,
Stockholm. His current research focuses on warfare from a critical perspective. He was the
guest-editor of the special issue ‘Baudrillard and War’ (2014) for the International Journal
of Baudrillard Studies (11, no. 2). Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to
Baudrillard, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2015, Vol. 43(2) KZaidi
We have also argued, however, that contemporary warfare (particularly in NATO

countries) can alternatively be understood, not through the type of ‘war’ their
ontology implies (war-as-fighting), but rather through various operational
procedures. Our point has been to suggest that there is little or no symbolism left
in a warfare which processes targets as spreadsheets , target packages and tasking-
orders, through a predetermined rhythm of meetings which leads it, not to a
battlefield, but to an administrative model. This model finds its ontology in
Baudrillard rather than in Clausewitz. Through military operations we move from
war as antagonistic exchange between subjects, to war as technical realisation.
The race between targeting process and battle-rhythm resolves subjectivity, the
Other and symbolic exchange through the repetition of operational procedures .
This is not an example of war-as-fighting, but the enactment of a pre-planned
script. This characteristic is by no means exclusive to the targeting process; rather
it is indicative of how military planning is conducted in most NATO countries. It is
therefore crucial to think of disappearance – enabled and exacerbated by the way
warfare is infinitely repeated – as an integral part of thinking about an ontology of
war.
However, if target-processing and associated ways of operationalising warfare is

making war in the Clausewitzean sense disappear, then why is warfare made to
appear as fighting? We are constantly immersed in ‘war’ through television, art,
computer games, military recruiting campaigns, and arms industry projects. They
call forth ‘war’ as antagonistic and generative exchange. Consider the (simulated)
fighting between warriors in the stream of screenings that includes Spartacus,
300, Troy, Braveheart, Apocalypto, or The Last Samurai. Computer games centred
on war and politics – Civilization, Hearts of Iron, Total War – unfold through the
idea that war is a struggle between antagonistic forms of political life. Andreas
Behnke argues (correctly in our view) that the Western notion of war has lost its
ontological grounding. He reads this as part of a paradox since despite its loss,
warfare needs to be aestheticised and legitimised ‘beyond the purely
instrumental’.68 The explanation for why this is the case often lies precisely in the
way representation helps to reinforce and militarise society, as it justifies a liberal
world order.69 Arguably, this explanation eschews the prior question of why the
study of war needs to imagine an antagonistic and generative war in the first place.
What does the idea that war is antagonistic and generative obscure? Or put more
crudely, who gains from reifying war as ‘war’, or war-as-fighting?
As an attempt to answer this we complement the prior explanation by suggesting

that recent theories of ‘war’ have underplayed the way in which operational warfare
is also, in and of itself, an act of disappearance. In doing so, they overemphasise
genesis at the expense of disappearance, and obscure the loss of exchange and
subjectivity from the ‘war’ they claim to depict, at the same time as they feed from
its reification as such. This ‘war’ allows NATO’s member countries to send out war
correspondents in body armour and helmets; to give first person shooters like
Battlefield enough status as reality; to give movies like Hurt-locker, television
dramas like Generation Kill, and documentaries like Armadillo their necessary
ontological back-drop. Moreover, it is there to allow for spending vertiginous
amounts of money on recruitment, arms production, government transi- tions,
advertising, aid, education and – last but not least – military operations and target-
processing. Crucially, ‘war’ is there to allow the researcher to study war in peace .
All of us who feed from this are part of an extreme reification of war – which hides
not only that ‘war’ may have ceased to be a meaningful term which structures
reality, but also that these renditions of war is the closest we have to ‘war’ as it is
described by Clausewitz. The ontology of war debates in which we engage are
therefore part of this reification of war.
In this way, the distinction between an act of warfare and the attempt to
understand wars’ underlying principles is lost through the notion of war-as-fighting.
Every attempt to wage war or think war in its own right (or to oppose or neglect war
for that matter) refers back to this loss of meaning and distinction. Understood in
this way, the focus of research on the ontology of war or on better understanding
‘war’ as an object (to make it appear as meaningful), also bestows a reality to the
attempts to deal with war. The question of whether the notion of war as
antagonistic and generative exchange is real is therefore not the issue, as any
ontology of war risks this type of reification. Rather, we should ask why it might
seem so costly to leave this particular ontology behind. Could it be because the
various ways of grappling with war’s ontology are active parts of how this reality
remains intact?
Should we (and could we) forget the reality of ‘war’? Moreover, is a world without
referents like ‘war’ a world with less violence? No, says Baudrillard, it is not: ‘[t]he
immanence of the death of all the great referents ... is expressed by exacerbating
the forms of violence and representation that characterized them’.70 This helps us
understand why, paradoxically, in an era in which war-as-fighting has disappeared,
we all speak about it, analyse it, play it on our computers and experience it through
books and films – and why a calling for war studies is a logical step in the
disappearance of war- as-fighting. This argument could be directed against other
disciplines too – ‘war’ is not a privileged object in any respect. Nonetheless, to call
for a renewed discipline of ‘war studies’ – encouraging as it may be, especially to all
of us who receive research funding based on the existence of such a discipline – is
therefore not without problems. It is not so much a call for an understanding of
war as it is a call to supplant the absence of war in International Relations with a
particular categorical blindness, since strictly speaking war is never there. Rather,
it provides a ‘simulation of perspective’ as Baudrillard would call it.71 The problem is
that the organised violence to which we constantly refer has no other reality than
that of the model.72 That is, it has no other reality than the reality provided by
representations of war (which is not to say that they are one and the same).
Through this simulation, war returns as an imperative to thought. It is an
explanation or an understanding through a particular category (‘war’) and not of a
state of things (actions, reactions, challenges, automatism, repetition, processing).
‘War’ works as an imperative:
‘You’ve got a military and you must learn how to use it well’‘You’ve got a weapon-
system and you must learn how to operate it’‘You’ve got a target and you must learn
how to task it’‘You’ve got an ontology of war and you must learn how to think
through it.’73
Conclusion
War is understood in recent debates on critical war studies as characterised by

antagonistic and generative exchange. This amounts to a view in which ‘war’ helps
provide a context in which acts of violence become meaningful. They receive a
pattern, reciprocity and a ‘natural’ demarcation that can be named and criticised .
This article has argued that contemporary understandings of war and warfare are
well advised to find new ontologies complementing the notion that war is fighting.
We have presented one such attempt, resonating with Baudrillard’s notion of war-
processing, based on an analysis of the planning and conduct of military operations
(in NATO countries). This attempt outlines how warfare strives towards its own
‘perfect’ and self-referential model. We illustrate this through an analysis of
military targeting so as to point to how warfare becomes a reitera- tive and
automated process which constructs a seamless economy of violence. We read
targeting as a perpetual motion to keep up with the battle-rhythm of military
operations and argue that it rids what is termed ‘war’ of its underlying principles:
adversaries, antagonism and exchange.
An understanding of war which neglects this aspect risks missing that war (as pro-
cessing) strictly speaking lacks an antagonistic engagement with ‘an enemy’ and in so
doing calls into question many of the underlying principles that the notion of war-
as-fighting rests upon. Doing so leaves the theorist of war and IR with a blind spot:
the conception of ‘war’ that has become operational while being obscured by the
reification of ‘war’ as fighting. Barkawi and Brighton associate the absence of a
discipline of war studies with an ‘othering of violence from inquiry’.74 We again
state explicitly, therefore, that we are not advocating the continuation of such
othering. To say that war as processing lacks antagonism is not to say that it lacks
violence. Warfare is a highly violent practice but it seems to occur amidst a
breakdown of symbolic relations between a subject and an Other. This would point
to acts of insurgency or terror being ways of acting out, rather than a response as
such.75 The ‘perfect war’ we have described is highly violent indeed – but that does
not make it ‘fighting’.
This is not to say that war should be reduced to an automated process between man
and machine. Rather we want to point out that war-as-fighting neglects the way in
which subjectivity, symbolism and exchange are often lacking in military targeting –
something which needs to be considered if we are to better understand the
relationship between the ontic realty of warfare and the ontology of war. In light
of our argument, the ontology of war can be read not only as a way of thinking ‘war’
but also as an imperative to thought. We are aware that this imperative does not
work through simple causality. The targeting doctrines we have looked at are not
representative of all warfare. A task for future research would be to contrast it
to, for example, the way ‘insurgents’ or ‘civilians’ subjected to military violence
represent warfare. Another would be to examine disappearance in the wider
contexts of counter-insurgency and network-centric warfare.
Nevertheless, there is a risk that (critical) war studies in invoking the ontology of
war- as-fighting is led back to an antagonistic and generative exchange between
subjects – whether this is actually taking place or not. Attempts to think of
politics, ethics, security or gender risk being forced through the mould of this
particular ontology of war. Following Baudrillard, an attempt to rethink and
complement the ontology of war should challenge it in a way that forces its ‘truth to
withdraw – just as if one were pulling the chair out from under someone about to sit
down’.76 We therefore need to think war in a way that pulls the chair out from
underneath the gamer, policy maker, military officer or theorist about to sit down
to ‘do war’. What does this act of ‘pulling the chair’ from underneath thought leave
us with? Our hope is that it opens up for the possibility of rethinking ontologies of
war in a fashion that helps us better understand and challenge their relationship to
various ontic realities. Taking this question seriously gives us a new vantage point on
(critical) war studies for future debates.
University
Interpretation – the aff should defend the hypothetical
implementation of topical action by the USFG
Hoofd’07|Ingrid M. Hoofd, National University of Singapore, “The Neoliberal
Consolidation of Play and Speed: Ethical Issues in Serious Gaming” in “CRITICAL
LITERACY: Theories and Practices Volume 1: 2, December 2007,” p. 6-14, 2007|
KZaidi
Serious games are a fascinating next stage in the continuous exploitation of digital
media technologies over the last decades for training, learning, and education. As
formal education and training always involves the transmission and repetition of
certain culturally and socially specific sets of skills and moral values, it would be
of paramount importance to ensure that developments within the serious gaming
industry are in step with the effects of the good intentions of nurturing people
within a social framework that emphasises a fair, culturally diverse, and blooming
society. In this light, it is interesting that from the very advent of the information
society, digital technologies have been depicted as central to the development of a
more just and equal society by harbouring the promise of bridging gaps between
classes, races, and genders locally as well as globally. Driven by the vision of this
utopian potential of new technologies, the education industry and larger policy
organisations have been exploring the pedagogical possibilities of these
technologies both in- and outside the traditional classroom for the last twenty-five
years. Indeed, the implementation of increasingly more sophisticated and
technologically mediated methods and tools for learning and education, takes as its
starting point the techno-utopian assumption that (new) interactive technologies
themselves are the primary harbingers of a fair and blooming society through
facilitating (student) empowerment. This paper takes issue with this widespread
techno-utopian perspective by seeking to shed light on the larger ethical
implications of serious gaming. It will do so through foregrounding the relationship
between global injustices, and the aesthetic properties and discourses of serious
gaming. So while reframing serious games themselves in a new ethical perspective
constitutes the main objective of this paper, it is equally important to situate
serious games within a larger political discourse on the teaching of new skills.
Firstly then, policy papers and academic studies on serious games all display an
assumption of the inherent neutrality of gaming technologies, as if these
technologies were mere tools equally suitable for all. What also becomes
apparent in the language used in these studies and proposals, is how this
instrumentalist vision of gaming technologies for learning goes hand in hand with a
particular neo-liberal assumption of what constitutes a fit individual, and by
extension of what the hallmarks of a ‘healthy’ society may be. For instance, in
the European Union study “Serious Gaming – a fundamental building block to
drive the knowledge work society” by Manuel Oliveira on the merits of serious
games for education, justification runs along the lines of gaming ‘encouraging risk-
taking and a winning attitude’ and creating a ‘performance-oriented individual.’
Similarly, Michael Guerena from the US Orange County Department of Education
proposes in one of the Department’s web-casts that serious games instil “twenty-
first century skills” like risk-taking, adaptability , self-direction, interactive
communication, and ‘planning and managing for results’ in the students through
the “channelling of fun.” Likewise, the UK-based Entertainment and Leisure
Software Publishers Association last year published their white paper Unlimited
learning - Computer and video games in the learning landscape, in which they argue
that serious games will “create an engaged, knowledgeable, critical and enthusiastic
citizenry” whose “work practices will be geared towards networked communication
and distributed collaboration” (49). Concerns around the ethical implications of
serious games regarding their entanglements with larger social (gendered, classed,
and raced) inequalities have until now largely been coined in terms of game content
or representation. In a recent case in Singapore, the government’s proposition of
using the RPG Granado Espada in secondary school history classes was followed by
an outcry from various local academics condemning the stereotypical characters and
simplistic representation of medieval Europe in the game. Likewise, various authors
have critiqued current serious games not only because of simplistic representation
of characters and surroundings, but especially because simulations generally tend
to oversimplify complex social problems and situations. Gibson, Aldrich, and
Prensky’s Games and Simulations in Online Learning (vi - xiv) for instance discuss
these demerits of serious games. While such a critical analysis of how game content
contributes to the reproduction of dominant discourses is definitely helpful, I
would argue that the aesthetics of serious games involve much more than mere
content. Instead, this paper will argue that the formal quest for instantaneity that
research around digital media has displayed through the development of interactive
technologies for education is already itself by no means a neutral affair. This is
because the discourses that inform this quest and that accompany this search
for instantaneity arguably enforce the hegemony of a militaristic, masculinist,
humanist, and of what I will call a ‘speed-elitist’ individual. Moreover, I suggest
that the propensity of current games to have sexist or racist content, is merely
symptomatic of gaming technology’s larger problematic in terms of the aesthetic of
instantaneity. In short, (serious) computer games have become archives of the
discursive and actual violence carried out in the name of the utopia of
technological progress and instantaneity under neo-liberal globalisation. This
archival function is possible exactly because cybernetic technologies promise
the containment and control of such supposedly accidental violence, while in
fact exacerbating these forms of violence. This leads me to conclude that such
violence is in fact structural to new serious gaming technologies, rather than
accidental. I will elaborate this hypothesis by looking at various theorists who seek
to understand this structural imperative of new technologies, and their relationship
to the neo-liberalisation of learning and education. In turn, I will look at how this
problematic structural logic informs the two popular serious games Real Lives and
Global Warming Interactive. Secondly, the advent of serious gaming interestingly
runs parallel with the contemporary dissemination and virtualisation of traditional
learning institutions into cyberspace. While the existence of learning tools in other
areas of society besides actual learning institutions has been a fact since the
advent of schools, the shift of methods of learning into online and digital tools is
symptomatic of the decentralisation of power from ‘old’ educational institutions and
its usurpation into instantaneous neo-liberal modes of production. I am
summarising the work of Bill Readings on the university here, because it sheds light
on the shift in education tout court towards virtualisation, and its relationship to
the ‘new hegemony of instantaneity.’ In The University in Ruins, Readings argues
that the shift from the state-run university of reason and culture to the present-
day global knowledge enterprise must mean that the centre of power in effect
has shifted elsewhere. More important, says Readings, is that the function of the
new ‘university of excellence,’ one that successfully transforms it into yet
another trans-national corporation, relies on the fantasy that the university is
still that transcendental university of culture in service of the state and its
citizens. So the invocation of the fantasy of an ‘originary’ university of reason
and progress, that produces unbiased knowledge for the good of all, facilitates the
doubling of the production of information into other spaces outside the university
walls proper. While Readings surely discusses only higher education institutions in
The University in Ruins, I would argue that the logic of a shifting centre of power
from the state into the technocratic networks and nodes of speed operates quite
similarly in the case of primary, secondary, and other types of formal education.
Indeed, the current virtualisation of learning and the emphasis on lifelong
learning marks a dispersal of traditional learning institutions into online spaces.
This dispersal works increasingly in service of the ‘speed-elite’ rather than
simply in service of the nation-state. The heralding of serious games for
education can therefore be read as a symptom of the intensified reach of the
imperatives of neo-liberal globalisation, in which consumption enters the lives of
locally bound as well as more mobile cosmopolitan citizens of all ages through
harping on the technological possibility of the confusion of production and play.
Through the imperative of play then, production increasingly and diffusely colonises
all niche times and -spaces of neo-liberal society. In other words, (the emphasis on)
play allows not only a potential increase in production and consumption through
the citizen-consumer after her or his formal education of ‘skills’, but starkly
intensifies flows of production and consumption already at the very moment of
learning. While such an integration of play and production is generally understood
within the framework of the neo-liberal demand for the circulation of pleasure, it is
useful here to widen the scope from understanding the learner as a mere consumer
of pleasure into the larger set of problematic interpellations that marks
subjugation in contemporary society . Intriguingly, a host of research has emerged
over the past years pointing towards the intricate relationship between
subjugation, military research objectives, and videogame development. Such
research suggests an intimate connection between the C3I logic and humanist
militaristic utopias of transcendence, which incriminates interactive technologies
as inherently favouring culturally particular notions of personhood. In the case
of computer- and video-games for entertainment, researchers have argued that the
aesthetic properties of gaming technologies give rise to so-called ‘militarised
masculinity.’ In “Designing Militarized Masculinity,” Stephen Kline, Nick
DyerWitheford, and Greig de Peuter argue for instance that interactive games
open up very specific subject positions that “mobilize fantasies of instrumental
domination” (255). This specific mobilisation that video-games invoke, is not only
due to the remediation of violent television- and film- content, but also due to the
intimate connection between gaming- and military industries which grant these
technologies their particular cybernetic aesthetic properties (see also Herz 1997).
This element of militarisation partly informs my concept of ‘speed-elitism.’ I
extrapolate the idea of ‘speed-elitism’ largely from the works of John Armitage on
the discursive and technocratic machinery underlying current neo-liberal capitalism.
In “Dromoeconomics: Towards a Political Economy of Speed,” Armitage and Phil
Graham suggest that due to the capitalist need for the production of excess, there
is a strong relationship between the forces of exchange and production, and the
logic of speed. In line with Virilio’s argument in Speed and Politics, they argue that
various formerly the less connected social areas of war, communication,
entertainment, and trade, are now intimately though obliquely connected. This is
because all these forces mutually enforce one another through the technological
usurpation and control of space (and territory), and through the compression and
regulation of time. Eventually, Armitage and Graham suggest that “circulation has
become an essential process of capitalism, an end in itself” (118) and therefore
any form of cultural production increasingly finds itself tied-up in this logic. So
neo-liberal capitalism is a system within which the most intimate and fundamental
aspects of human social life – in particular, forms of communication and play – get
to be formally subsumed under capital. In “Resisting the Neoliberal Discourse of
Technology,” Armitage elaborates on this theme of circulation by pointing out that
the current mode of late-capitalism relies on the continuous extension and
validation of the infrastructure and the neutral or optimistic discourses of the
new information technologies. Discourses that typically get repeated – like in the
policy papers – in favour of the emerging speed-elite are those of connection,
empowerment and progress, which often go hand in hand with the celebration of
highly mediated spaces for action and communication. Such discourses however
suppress the violent colonial and patriarchal history of those technological
spaces and the subsequent unevenness brought about by and occurring within
these spaces. I would claim that Armitage’s assessment of accelerated circulation,
and the way new technologies make play complicit in the techno-utopian endeavour
of speed, is crucial for understanding the larger ethical issues surrounding serious
games. It is helpful at this point to look at Paul Virilio’s and Jacques Derrida’s work
because this helps us understand the complicity of the aesthetics of interactive
and visually oriented gaming technologies in speed-elitism. In “Cyberwar, God, and
Television,” Paul Virilio talks about the simulation industry’s function of “exposing
[one] to the accident in order not to be exposed to it” (322). What is according to
him ‘accidented’ through the virtualisation of accidents and violence, for instance in
video-games, is reality itself. This ‘accident of reality’ that virtuality brings about,
argues Virilio, is due to the fact that simulation technologies fragment space
through their property of instantaneous connection with previously far-away
places. The hallmark of this fragmentation is therefore that it brings about an
intensification of forms of in- and exclusion through actual disconnection.
Eventually, there will be “two realities: the actual and the virtual” (323), and I
would claim that consequently the privileged speed-elite will be able to live in
the illusion of engaging with social reality that the virtual grants, at the cost
of the (s)lower classes who will suffer the social and ecological effects of the
accidents of virtualisation. The illusion of mastery for Virilio consists in the sense
of the “incorporation of the world within oneself” that “real time technologies
permit” (328) due to their militaristic compulsion that seeks to “reduce the
world to the point where one could possess it” (329). I maintain that these
statements spell out exactly the function and logic of serious gaming. Virilio
elaborates the idea of the ‘museum of accidents’ later in his infamously apocalyptic
“The Museum of Accidents.” His evaluation of certain visual simulation technologies
as ‘museums of accidents’ and in particular in how these accidents involve the
increasing stratification of individuals within a new global imperative of speed,
resonates well with Jacques Derrida’s work on the ‘archiving’ properties of new
technologies and their implications. In Monolingualism of the Other, or The
Prosthesis of Origin, Derrida parallels the concept and the technique of memory
and archiving with these new technologies. He argues that the tragedy of the
disappearance of various cultures calls forward a desire in the R&D community – like
teachers and developers of serious games – to prevent this from happening by using
the immense possibilities of presentday archiving technologies. However, he
cautions that this scientific quest to rescue through archiving languages and
cultures from going extinct due to ongoing globalisation processes, once more
presupposes that cultures and peoples are pre-given static entities , or simple
identities, that can then be simply ‘stored’. Moreover, it falsely presupposes that
archiving technologies are neutral tools, as well as that the ideology behind
this archiving desire is a universal or neutral one. But since the very technicity
of archiving is one that is already entangled with the same dominant culture that
archives, the necessary translation or recognition of materials fit for archiving will
have as its logical parameters this dominant culture. This kind of messianistic
desire, as much as the quest for understanding the other (or rather, the claim
that one does empathise with and understand the other), is therefore actually
a violent, neocolonialist, and possessive sort of encapsulation. Similarly, the
well-intended pedagogical aim to ‘salvage otherness’ from the tragedy of
disappearance under globalisation works completely in accordance with that very
tragedy. One could compare this well-intended encapsulation for instance with the
anthropological display of artefacts of certain cultures in Western museums. It
may be far more important to save actual humans than to salvage, understand, and
store their perceived culture or language, and Derrida warns that the choice for
one generally does not imply a choice for the other. This ‘virtual empathy’ that
new simulation technologies endow, which sadly works in accordance with the
‘structural accident’ of disenfranchisement under neoliberal globalisation, is
indeed present in the aesthetic of many serious games currently available. The
widely praised and sympathetic game Real Lives is a good example of this. The
pedagogical objective of Real Lives, as its website declares, is to “learn how people
really live in other countries.” The producers maintain that Real Lives is an
“empathy-building world” which will grant the students an “appreciation of their own
culture and the cultures of other peoples.” The game opens with assigning a
character who just got born at any place in the world to the player. Since the
attribution of the character is based on actual statistical possibilities of place of
birth and economic status, the character has a high propensity of being born poor
in countries like India, Mexico, or in other highly populated places. During the
course of the game, the player can take actions like deciding to go to school or
staying home to help her/his parents, which hobbies to take up, what job to take,
and so forth. The game time takes one-year leaps in which the player can see the
outcome of outside events, like disease or floods, and of his or her own actions. The
software shows a map of the character’s birth region and its statistics, like
population density, gross annual income, currency, health standards, and etcetera.
The character is also assigned traits, like happiness, athleticism, musicality, health,
and so on. While the player’s actions definitely influence the health and economic
status of the played character and her family, the potentially interesting part of
the game lies in the fact that events and situations that are ostensibly beyond the
player’s control influence the outcomes. Such a game structure potentially endows
the student with a sense that simple meritocratic discourses are flawed. However,
what is also obvious in Real Lives, is that the attribution based on statistical facts
may very easily lead to a simplistic view of a country and its inhabitants. While
India for instance surely has many poor people and girls often are not allowed to go
to school, to have the student chance time and again on these representations
can easily lead to the repetition of stereotypes and a failure to grasp the
complexity of Indian society. More serious however is the formal technological
mode of objectification and its distancing effects that the game generates. This
objectification resides in how the ‘clean’ interface – the ‘flight simulator’ like visual
layout on the screen with the overview of categories and character attributes, the
major actions and events in the character’s life induced at the stroke of a few keys
– in reality grants the player a sense of control by engaging with a machine
programmed in such a way that it appears to let the student identify with and act
out his or her empathy vis-à- vis a ‘real’ child in need. This discursive confusion of
reality and virtuality is for instance also present in the web-game Darfur Is Dying,
in which the player and virtual character get confused through the problematic
claim that you can “start your experience (as a refugee)” and that it offers a
“glimpse of what it is like” (emphases mine) to be a refugee. At the same time, the
actual children in need on the ground disappear from the player’s radar, turning
them into a distant and vague large group of ‘others’ who are effectively beyond the
student’s reach of immediate responsibility. As Virilio suggests, the time spend
through engaging in virtual empathy eclipses the ‘real accidents’ from the
student’s view and experience. What is more, Real Lives eclipses the larger social
and economical relationships between the material production and consumption
of such virtual engagement and the continuous exploitation and ‘museumising’ of
peoples on the brink of (social, economical, and environmental) accident,
disenfranchisement, and even death. While relatively well-off youth may indulge
in turning other peoples’ distress into a ‘fun’ educational game , such indulgence
is precisely based on a neo-liberal structure that exploits the environment,
especially of the poor, and allows for the outsourcing and feminisation of ever
cheaper third-world labour. As Derrida proposed, the archiving into visual
technologies of certain cultures and peoples threatened with extinction does not at
all imply saving these actual people and their cultures – in fact, it may very well
do exactly the opposite. Long-term minor attitudinal changes in the student
notwithstanding, the disconnecting properties of the new cybernetic technologies
of speed that Real Lives is part of therefore displace the effect of the
producer’s and student’s good intentions and empathy into an instantaneous
technocratic violence that effectively ‘plays with lives .’ Another telling example
of this displacement of well-intended interactive play is the environmental game
Global Warming Interactive – CO2Fx. This web-based game, funded by the United
States National Science Foundation and developed by a group of people from
various American consultancies and educational organisations, aims at teaching the
student about the kinds of decision making involved in global warming. The game
invariably starts with a map of the country of Brazil in the 1960s, and gives
statistics about the carbon emission, air temperature, and general welfare of the
population. The player can then control government budget expenditures for
science, agriculture, social services, and development initiatives, after which the
system jumps ten years into the future, generating results based on these
expenditures. The game eventually ends by showing the relative increase in
temperature in the virtual year of 2060, warning the player that more international
cooperation is required to really tackle global warming. The major issue with Global
Warming Interactive is once more that it completely obscures the relationship
between the computing technology itself that allows the CO2Fx simulation, and
global warming. A telling moment of this dissimulation is when the game urges the
player to “switch off the television!” because television uses quite a bit of energy,
while the energy consumption of the infrastructure, mode of production, student
consumption, and tools that sustain the game itself is being blissfully ignored.
Armitage’s claim that increasingly modes of thought, learning, and exchange are
formally subsumed under capital through the new technological infrastructure
certainly rings true here. The game is also a stark simplification of how
government decisions affect a complex issue like climate change, and is fraught
with problematic and often techno-utopian assumptions about how to tackle the
climate change problem. A good example of this assumption is the recurring
recommendation throughout the game to the player to spend more money on
scientific research, as this expenditure supposedly promises to solve or alleviate
the warming problem. The speed-elitist, humanist, and techno-utopian discourses
that permeate American academia and consultancy firms are clearly reflected in
Global Warming Interactive, leaving the student inculcated with a currently
dominant belief system that lies precisely at the base of environmental pollution
and economical disenfranchisement that urges certain groups of poor people in a
country like Brazil to survive on environmentally unfriendly business solutions , like
slash-burning the forests. One is also left to wonder why the game uses the country
of Brazil in the first place, and not the United States – arguably the largest global
polluter today. There is indeed a problematic (neo)colonialist undertone to the
current one-country version of Global Warming Interactive. Extending the content
of the game, as the developers seeks to do, by including more countries in the
simulation, would not alleviate this problem, but would simply concur with the actual
contemporary shift from previous colonialist social hierarchies into speed-elitist
hierarchies. But more seriously, giving the player simulated government
omnipotence through the Virilian ‘museumisation’ of the economical and social
structures underlying global warming in that ‘other’ country of Brazil, grants a the
player an illusion of mastering and of dealing constructively with the major
‘accident’ of climate change and its impact on the (s)lower classes while actually
fuelling it. Meanwhile, player or student empathy is displaced into instantaneous
networks of ever increasing neo-liberal circulation and production. Scholars like
David Leonard in “’Live in your world, play in ours?’: Race, video games, and
consuming the other” and Lisa Nakamura in “Race in/for Cyberspace” have in the
past argued that many entertainment games contain elements of racial and
gendered stereotyping allowing the gamer to engage him or herself on the basis of
what Nakamura calls ‘identity tourism’ and Leonard calls ‘blackface.’ These
problematic modes of (dis)identification allow the user not only to enter the
game via dominant modes of representation, but also entail a form of ‘safely
experiencing the other’ through cybernetic technologies , where the (imagined)
other effectively becomes consumed through the high-tech prosthesis of the
self. Neither Nakamura nor Leonard however elaborate how and why this element
of a ‘safe prosthesis’ appears to be a central aesthetic of gaming technologies.
After all, much media content suffers from stereotypical representation, and one
could argue in line with Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other that media are
always prostheses to the self. I would argue that what is specific about serious
gaming technologies that emerges from my interpretations of Derrida’s, Armitage’s,
and Virilio’s assessments is the illusion of control by the self that these
technologies facilitate, due to their element of interactive instantaneity. It is the
new technologies’ aesthetic properties themselves – rather than simply a
narrative and its repetition of dominant ideologies – that grant a ‘fantasy of
connection, wholeness, and mastery’ through interactivity as if it was an
immediate and transparent property of the gaming subject. What is therefore
at work in serious games like Real Lives and Global Warming Interactive is a form of
double objectification. The illusion of constructive engagement with a pressing
social issue through these seemingly ‘clean’ and ‘neutral’ technologies, combined with
the distancing effect brought about by these technologies from their actual (social
and environmental) implications, make the gamer complicit in the neo-liberal
endeavour that paradoxically precisely leads to contemporary speed-elitist
disenfranchisement. In short, interactive technologies like serious games bring
about a displacement of good intentions through claims of technological
progress and empowerment for all. So despite (or perhaps because of) the good
intentions of game designers and publishers, these games then in fact exhibit the
doubling of the colonialist logic that inspired humanist narratives of progress. This
doubling runs parallel to the virtualisation of learning that is taking place under neo-
liberal globalisation and its speed-elitist modes of intensified in- and exclusion this
shift incurs. These games can therefore, in line with Virilio’s argument, be
understood as attempts at (eventually unsuccessfully) containing the accident of
the real and its social repercussions brought about by these technologies of speed.
To conclude, the development of serious games is implicated in what Derrida in
Monolingualism refers to as a ‘disappearance’ of those cultures, idioms, and ways of
being that do not conform to these tightening particular hegemonic structures of
acceleration. ‘Healthy’ personhood becomes singularly understood through a
restrictive and stratifying emphasis on mediated learning as more pleasurable,
as well as on humanistic character traits like creativity, activity, risktaking,
mediated empathy, mobility, and competitiveness, as the rhetoric in policy
papers and optimistic studies also shows. Such particular valorisations are
problematic because they recreate a meritocratic, masculinist, militaristic, and
speed-elitist hierarchy between economically as well as otherwise diverse
groups and communities within a global community which understands individuals
solely in terms of active and productive citizenship. In line with this, serious
games themselves can in their very form be understood as Virilian ‘museums of
accident.’ This means that the virtualisation of social engagement and sense of
social and environmental ‘accident control’ that these games call forward is
obliquely yet intrinsically related to new modes of ‘accidenting’ material reality.
This potentially disenfranchises those who are not (positively) addressed within
these properties of subject-formation, and leads to increasing levels of stress
and competitiveness in individuals and students as it becomes progressively more
imperative for individual survival to conform to the demands of the speed-elite.
Without doubt, this paper has analysed only a few serious games currently available
and surely more analyses need to be conducted. I suggest nonetheless that since
the problematic of speed, which gives rise to double objectification, is structurally
present in all visual interactive technologies, it is by default at work in all serious
games. As I suggested at the start, the pedagogical and ethical enterprise of
serious gaming is therefore serious indeed, as its aesthetic properties become
increasingly implicated in precisely the opposite of what serious gaming promises to
help make possible – the fair, culturally diverse, and blooming society that we all
want.
Impact – Code
In response the 1AC calls the bluff and pulls away the curtain. We
are now witnessing the very liquidation being, of meaning, of
thought. All are subordinated to the hyper-speed of the code
through the worldwide nationalist machine fighting on an unlimited
battlefield that always needs new recruits to fulfill the
pornography of the image. Debate itself is engrossed in this very
logic of the code. Rewarding us for participating in this hall of
mirrors. Perpetuating the quest for the hero to spread light to the
world, to wield the sword of goodness and pierce the image of the
unknown.
Pasco’16 – Marc Oliver D. Pasco is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Ateneo de
Manila University, Philippines. He wrote his Master’s thesis on Martin Heidegger’s idea on
"wiederholung" or creative repetition. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on
the possible relation between Martin Heidegger’s ideas on mortality and Jean
Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality. He has published several articles on various thinkers
like Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Kant, Habermas, Heidegger and Plato. “From Objects to Being
and Beyond” KZaidi
We exist in a world of excess. The production and reproduction of objects,

information and ways of life happens in hyper-speed due largely to the availability
of virtual platforms of transportation, communication and exchange. The
production and reproduction of images, the supposed mirrors of the real has taken
on a life of its own, pushing mankind to a state of schizophrenic hyper-awareness.
The fulcrum of reality which was once embedded in the indubitable foundation of
subjective certainty disintegrates and gives way to the insurmountable momentum
of hyperreality.
Today, the subjective and objective poles of epistemological knowledge implode into
a pure screen of the obscene, the fractal, the logic of the code. The illusion
projected on to the image rendering it a simulation of the real to the mind of the
subject has transcended the limits of its intended definition. With the enigmatic
coagulation of the real and the virtual in technological media society, copies no
longer signify anything beyond themselves. Reality and simulacra become
indistinguishable. The virtual’s revelation of the fractal translates Being itself into
a code, a replicable series of signifiers that have lost their respective signifieds,
rendering subjective belief and knowledge moot and to a certain extent,
pretentious. As Baudrillard says, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of
reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of
the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its
operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which
provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (Ibid.: 170).
Simulacra represents the obscene, it reveals the genetic reproducibility of the
real, which implodes the traditional conceptualization of what it means to be.
Through the translation of the metaphysical into the fractal, the holographic
derivation of codes and models of reality through technological media dislodges the
ground of objectivity from the realm of subjectivity and transfers all its power into
the territory of pure simulacra. It’s not that there is nothing real. It’s that there
too much and too many of it. As Horrocks explains, “The result of this absorption of
illusion by technological reality is that credibility—a property of objects and images
—has taken the place of belief—a property of ourselves as subjects. We judge
events by their proximity to their code or model, rather than by some humanistic or
metaphysical principle” (Horrocks, 2000: 35-6). The question concerning the
meaning of being, pursued and seemingly resolved by modernity gave man the
object. In the contemporary age of media technology, the question concerning the
meaning of being, placed within the context of hyperreality, is imploded by the
sheer iterability and density of the equiprimordiality of possible responses to the
question, relegating the fundamentality of the question into perhaps a more
thought-worthy sort of oblivion.
V. Conclusion
The age of mirrors, we might say, reached its historical tipping point in the age of
modernity. The progress of scientific knowledge deri ves from the auto-assimilative
movement of consciousness that has finally become aware of itself as the ground
for objectivity. The Cartesian self-certain cogito, by way of the logic of
metaphysical transitivity, reproduces itself in its own ideas, projected as the very
foundation of existence itself. The mathematization of reality sets up the
parameters of knowledge in advance of unconcealment. The realm of truth,
primordially interpreted by the ancients as aletheia, is engineered in accordance
with the subjective directives of measurability and calculability. Heidegger reckons
that this epochal transmutation of the truth of Being from unconcealment into
objectivity is an oblivion of Being itself; but it is a forgetfulness that is destined by
the very movement of Being in history. In other words, the eclipse of the realm of
unconcealment by the object of modern science is heralded and is made possible by
the essence of truth itself—the realm of unconcealment must retreat from the
horizon of what is in order for appearing to happen. This is what principally
constitutes the age of objects. The object absorbs the idolatrous gaze of
the subiectum and functions as the primordial mirror of the self . The self-certain
ego of modernity propagates itself by perpetually guaranteeing its personal
ontological and epistemological certainty in its objects. And since there is no other
logical way about it, in this regard, man’s relationship to Being is reduced to
measurability and calculability, and truth becomes an attribute of representations.
In the age of contemporary technological media however, objects begin to vanish

into pure visibility. The mirror, as it were, is rendered opaque by its obscene
exposure to itself as mirror as it gravitates towards the hyperbolic momentum of
hyperreality. The exponential multiplication of mirrors cancels out the polarizing
effect of subjective alienation, which used to serve as the ground for objectivity ,
and delivers the subject into a state of schizophrenic hyper-awareness. Once the
fractal, genetic code of reality became installed into the logic of the social by
media, the reproducibility of the real terminates in its excess. As opposed to its
modern version, the contemporary object’s absorption of the light of reason
depletes the subjective foundations of certitude and reveals itself as pure
simulacrum. The incessant exposure of all aspects of the real in our age overrides
the principles of measurability and calculability and proceeds to hypertrophically
reveal all our measures and calculations to ourselves as the logical offshoot of the
very reproducibility of objects, images, ideas and events. The digital code of the
real, in other words, takes on a life of its own and perpetuates its being through
the momentum of technological media. In this respect, the objectivity of the
subjective perspective is nullified and the obscene exposure of the real
metastasizes into an operational function of hyperreality. As Douglas Kellner
explains, “The narcoticized and mesmerized media-saturated consciousness is in
such a state of fascination with image and spectacle that the concept of meaning
itself (which depends on stable boundaries, fixed structures, shared consensus)
dissolves” (Kellner, 1994: 9). The real is no longer the rational, as it were. Being
itself, reduced to the logic of the fractal and the digital implodes the boundaries
of metaphysical and epistemological certitude and transforms reality from being a
function of consciousness into that which transcends consciousness by way of
obscenity. The hyper-aware schizophrenic, as Baudrillard’s depiction of
contemporary man suggests, is not seen as the locus of meaning, but a mere conduit
for the functional operation of digital hyperreality. As Foster expounds, “No more
hysteria, no more projective paranoia, properly speaking, but this state of terror
proper to the schizophrenic: too great a proximity of everything, the unclean
promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without
resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him
anymore” (Foster, 1998: 132).
We now exist in a world where life is certainly stranger than fiction. The clear line
which used to divide the real from the false, the beautiful from the ugly and good
from evil has been blurred, if not totally expunged by the obscene—the more real
than the real, the more beautiful than the beautiful. As we are constantly becoming
more and more exposed to every aspect of Being in the hope of recovering from the
alienation bequeathed to us by the epistemological resolve of modernity, the more
Being is eclipsed by the hyperreal. Media, in all its forms, delivers awareness and
information. The question, however, is whether we still carry autonomy with respect
to what we can or cannot know or to what we want or do not want to see.
Alt – Reverse all the things
We live in a world where there is more and more informationa nd
less and less meaning
Pawlett’14 Dr. William Pawlett (Sociology and Cultural Studies, University of
Wolverhampton, UK) KZaidi
We find ourselves, then, between good and evil, in an irresolvable antagonism in

which – at the risk of being Manichaen, and contradicting the whole of our
humanism – there is no possible reconciliation (Baudrillard 2003: 29).
That Baudrillard professes a certain Manichaenism cannot be doubted, but how

influential is Manichaeism to the overall shape of his thought? Isn’t Manichaeism
simply one reference point for Baudrillard and less important than other better
known influences such as pataphysics, Marxism, structuralism and situationism for
example? In a sense the answer must be yes, however a surprising number of
Baudrillard’s themes and arguments can be seen as closely related to Manichaen
principles, as Smith (2004) has argued. These include: Baudrillard’s extensive
studies of Evil in his later work, his long-standing emphasis on illusion, his frequent
references to the importance of the secret, and his writing on radical otherness.
Baudrillard writes of the evil demon of images, and the evil demon of language,
suggesting than representation is illusory, diabolic and also dual: both banal and
fatal. Illusion is closely related to Evil in Baudrillard’s lexicon: Evil is part of the
vital illusion that cannot be eliminated or subordinated to Good. Or, perhaps more
accurately, Evil becomes evil insofar as it concerns that which good has tried and
failed to eliminate. It is worth clarifying further: Good and Evil as symbolic, mythic
or poetic forms do not seek to eliminate each other, only in being abstracted and
opposed do they become the moral categories of good and evil. As moral categories
good seeks to obliterate evil, yet evil will always seem to have the upper-hand
because it gains the force and élan of that which ought not to exist but does, and
which returns to shock and scandalise the order of the good. As modernity
dismantles symbolic exchanges, denies duality and attempts, ever more
aggressively, to eliminate evil, Evil becomes “a hide-out for the symbolic order”
(Baudrillard 1990b: 182) and anything that is symbolically exchanged is perceived as
a threat to the system (Baudrillard 1993a; 188 n. 7).
Manichaeism is not referred to, explicitly, in Baudrillard’s early studies on the

object, sign and consumer systems. However, the early essay ‘Pataphysics’ (orig.
1952) evokes the fundamental power of illusion as something far more radical and
challenging to order, power, and control than any ‘reality’ – such as nature, sex or
violence: “The façade is there and nothing behind it” Baudrillard asserts (2005b:
214). The world is illusion, yet this illusion is dual: there is the symbolic play of
appearance and disappearance, vital illusion on the one hand, and on the other the
world of “forced materialisation”, hyperreality and simulation – “the lowest form of
illusion” (Baudrillard 1998:3). The world of banal illusion is produced through:
“concretizing, verifying, objectizing, demonstrating: ‘objectivity’ is this capture of
the real that forces the world to face us, expurgating it of any secret complicity”
(2005a: 39). The real expurgated of complicity is no longer real, but hyperreal .
Complicity is very important here and seems not to be a theme derived directly
from Manichaeism. Rather, Baudrillard’s emphasis on complicity seems to be an
extension of the principle of symbolic exchange into fatal theory: complicity is a
form of duality and reversibility. In fatal theory, reversibility becomes an internal
duality, an internal ‘nothing’ present within yet challenging or defying all of the
‘somethings’ of the world of value.
The themes of duality and reversibility take on an ever wider scope in Baudrillard’s
writing: “Since consciousness is an integral part of the World and the World is an
integral part of consciousness, I think it and it thinks me” (Baudrillard 2005a: 39).
It is worth asking what Baudrillard means by ‘the world’. Human beings live in a
state of complicity with the world, not one of mastery. If reality has a history, a
temporality and can be understood in terms of causes and effects, ‘the world’
cannot. Having no history or genealogy, the world “was born at a stroke” (1995: 57).
This primal, poetic, radical or even “objective” illusion is benevolent, in a sense,
because “[i]llusion, being pre-eminently the art of appearing, of emerging from
nothing, protects us from being. And being also pre-eminently the art of
disappearing, it protects us from death” (ibid.). Here Baudrillard’s anti-materialism
again becomes evident, a theme that emerged clearly with Symbolic Exchange and
Death in 1976. Subject and object, good and evil, something and nothing, life and
death are inseparable and reversible or dual. The object discovers the subject, just
as the subject discovers the object; for example, viruses learn about the human
immunological system at the same time as the human immunological system learns
about viruses.
Baudrillard’s assertion that the world is fundamentally illusory is of course an

unverifiable one, as he readily admits (2005a: 47) but the existence of reality,
causality and objectivity are all ultimately unverifiable too. However, Baudrillard is
not content to note an impasse or stalemate. Rather, he suggests that it is because
the world as illusion is unverifiable and also “unbearable” that the great drive
towards control through simulation and virtuality – integral reality – occurs.
Baudrillard’s anti-materialism should not be dismissed as idealism. Idealism posits
the ultimate compatibility of the categories of the mind with the material world;
Baudrillard challenges any such notion of compatibility, reconcilability or resolution.
Instead, he approaches the world as enmeshed within a dual , complicitous and
reversible relationship with the subject, the subject constantly becoming-object
and the object becoming-subject, indeed, “above all the subject has the passion to
be object, to become object” (Baudrillard 1988: 93, emphasis in original).
Baudrillard also links his principle of Evil to the theme of radical otherness or
singularity:
The sovereign hypothesis, the hypothesis of evil, is that man is not good by nature,
not because he might be said to be bad, but because he is perfect as he is … [e]very
stage of life, every moment of life, every animal or plant species, is perfect in
itself. Every character, in its singular imperfection, in its matchless finitude, in
incomparable” (Baudrillard 2005a: 140).
So, an apparently provocative and irresponsible remark “evil is perfect when left to
itself” (ibid.) is, on closer analysis, almost a humanistic celebration of imperfection.
Or rather, Baudrillard’s position on radical otherness suggests an ethics of
singularity not dissimilar to that espoused by Levinas and Derrida (see Critchley
1992). The transcendent and divine radical otherness of the Gnostics and
Manichaens becomes, in Baudrillard’s hands, radically immanent with the human
becoming divine: divine in the sense of having an intelligence of Evil. The notion of
complicity is crucial here, rather than seeking to exile evil through the imputation
of objective causes (of misfortune) an “intelligence of evil begins with the
hypothesis that our ills come to us from an evil genius that is our own. Let us be
worthy of our perversity … let us measure up to our tragic involvement in what
happens to us” (Baudrillard 2005a: 152-3).
The notion of the intelligence of Evil signals a partial rejection of Manichaeism:
Above all, we must not confuse the idea of evil with some kind of objective
existence of evil. That has no more meaning than an objective existence of the
Real; it is merely the moral and metaphysical illusion of Manichaeism that it is
possible to will evil, to do evil, or, alternatively, to denounce and combat it
(Baudrillard 2005a: 159).
Rather, Evil appears in the diverting and reversal of things, objects, people, events
which good believes that it has mastered. Moral evil as malign force or essence is
always a “phantasmic projection” where the other is construed as the source or
cause of evil. In Baudrillard’s intelligence of evil, “it is evil that is intelligent…in the
sense that it is implied automatically in every one of our acts” (2005a: 160). All
acts, thought, talk are dual in this sense. Evil has no independent reality; it is a
moment in metamorphosis or becoming.
In speaking of the world as a fundamental illusion, Baudrillard’s position can be seen

as Manichaen or Gnostic, but it can also be seen as Pataphysical. Commenting on
contemporary technology and culture, Baudrillard asserts “We are, in fact, in pure
pataphysics … the only known attempt to move to integral metaphysics, the
metaphysics in which the phenomenal world is treated definitively as an illusion”
(Baudrillard 2005a: 45). It is not Manichaeism as a philosophical position, still less
as a religious system, that interests Baudrillard; it is Manichaeism as a heresy, as a
shadow or nothing that mainstream religion and society cannot quite eliminate.
Radical duality cannot be eliminated, not because its simplicity is appealing, but
because it seeks an alternative position, a position beyond conceptual polarities,
sensing that conceptual polarities – binary, dialectical, simulatory, integral – are
narrow and confining, and are subservient to the notion of ‘reality’. It is the
powerful sense that Evil is more than the opposite of Good that cannot be
eliminated and that re-appears in many heresies through the ages , from Mani to the
Cathars and Bogomils (see Stoyanov 2000), and to Bataille and Baudrillard.
V. Conclusion
To speak evil is to say that in every process of domination and conflict is forged a
secret complicity, and in every process of consensus and balance, a secret
antagonism (Baudrillard 2005a: 163).
There is no bar or effective dividing line between Good and Evil. They cannot be
defined in isolation, they cannot be separated and the project of eliminating evil to
universalise good can bring only disastrous consequences. When good seeks to
totalise itself by eliminating evil, not only does it fall short of good, but evil returns
in catastrophic form.
Good and Evil as symbolic forms are not two halves of a totality, they are not
merely different; they are intimately related and they alternate or metamorphose
without ever achieving unification or synthesis – like day and night. Where
modernity sought the separation of good and evil, to expel evil and accumulate good,
in contemporary Western societies the moral opposition of good and evil is,
increasingly, transformed into the binary happiness/misfortune. The concept of
misfortune eliminates the notion of evil, yet duality reappears fracturing happiness,
making it unbearable, diverting happiness and misfortune into despair – the despair
of having everything and nothing.
Baudrillard challenges those who wish to separate evil from good in order to
celebrate evil, just as he challenges those who wish to separate evil from good to
celebrate good. However, Baudrillard says very little about Good as symbolic form.
Can Good be a symbolic form? Baudrillard does suggest that the loss of Good is as
“baneful” and dangerous as the loss of Evil (Baudrillard 2005a: 139). However, it
seems that, for Baudrillard, Good as symbolic form always tends towards control,
order and totalisation, hence it must always be challenged by Evil to prevent it from
hardening into tyranny.
At the most general level, Baudrillard works with an assumption, inspired by

Manichaeism, that the world as human beings encounter it, is given to disorder and
to such an extent that it cannot be managed, rationalised or controlled in any
ultimate sense. All attempts to impose control will come to grief; they may achieve
temporary successes but will always, ultimately, fail. At this meta-theoretical level
Baudrillard seeks to challenge the prejudice towards seeing the world, the object,
reality, society as unified, as unitary and as having a single origin, cause, direction
and end (Baudrillard 2003: 81). It is the challenge of heresy – the heresy of
refusing to make evil subordinate to good – that interests Baudrillard; challenge and
defiance are symbolic relations: dual, fatal and reversible.
Mimicry
The only option is a radical mimicry of the forms of the system,
one that accelerates them to the point of their obvious vacuity –
only through our a paradoxical hyperconformity to semiotic systems
can we use the logic of the system against itself in an act of
symbolic implosion – we are a cancerous counter-simulacra; an
ever-amplifying contagion of abstraction and insurrection that
remains the only political act
Pawlett 14 [Dr. William Pawlett, English baud scholar, Society at War with Itself,
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, May 2014,
//Stefan]
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
individuals, society and indeed the global system, are
(2005) and Pyres of Autumn (2006), that
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
much of the violence, hatred and discomfort visible around the globe can
Baudrillard
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 .1 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-
The goal is ‘integral reality’, a limitless operational project geared
73; 2009: 10-15).
towards the total transcription of the world into virtuality: ‘everything is realised
and technically materialised without reference to any principle or final purpose’
(2005: 18). Yet there is an internal war or “backlash” taking place between integralist
violence which seeks ultimate control by eliminating all otherness, and duality.
Duality, for Baudrillard, is “indestructible” and is manifest as the inevitable or destined
re-emergence of otherness: of death, Evil, ambivalence, the ghosts of symbolic
exchange, the accursed share within the system. The integrating system then suffers a ‘dissent
working away at it from inside. It is the global violence immanent in the world-system itself which, from within,
sets the purest form of symbolic challenge against it’ (2005: 22). This is a war or conflict that does
not end, the outcome of which cannot be predicted or programmed. It is a war that
is quite different from the disappearance of war into simulated non-events, such as
occurred with the Gulf wars (Baudrillard 1995). Indeed, Baudrillard suggests, the deterrence of
world wars, and of nuclear wars, does not result in peace, but in a viral proliferation of
conflicts, a fractalisation of war and conflict into everyday, local, and ubiquitous
terror (1993b: 27). This paper will examine Baudrillard’s position on internal rejection through two closely
related themes: complicity and duality. Complicity, and the closely related term collusion, are themselves dual in
Baudrillard’s sense. That is, complicity or collusion express an internal division or ‘duality’ which is not a simple
opposition of terms. As is so often the case, Baudrillard’s position builds on his much earlier studies: Requiem For
the dominance of the
the Media (orig. 1972, in Baudrillard 1981: 164-184) had already argued that
abstract sign and of simulation models meant that any critique of the system made
through the channels of semiotic abstraction were automatically re-absorbed into
the system. Any meaningful challenge must invent its own, alternative medium – such
as the silk-screen printings, hand-painted notices and graffiti of May 1968 – or it
will lapse into an ineffectual complicity with the system it seeks to challenge
(Baudrillard 1981: 176). In his later work, Baudrillard’s emphasis on duality and complicity is extended much
further, taking on global, anthropological and even cosmological dimensions, and increasingly complicity and collusion
are seen as dual, as encompassing both acceptance and a subtle defiance. This paper examines the dual nature of
complicity and collusion. It considers the influence of La Boetie’s notorious Essay on Voluntary Servitude on
Baudrillard, seeking to draw out what is distinctive in Baudrillard’s position. The second section turns to the notion
of duality, examining Good and Evil and Baudrillard’s assertion that attempts to eliminate duality merely revive or
re-active it. Complicity implies a complexity of relations, and, specifically, the condition of being an accomplice to
those in power. To be an accomplice is to assist in the committing of a crime. If the crime is murder, the term
accomplice implies one who plans, reflects, calculates – but does not strike the lethal blow. The crime which is of
the perfect crime: the elimination of otherness,
particular interest to Baudrillard is, of course,
of ambivalence, of duality, even of “reality” and of the abstract representational

sign which enables a sense of “reality” (Baudrillard 1996). The global, integral,
carnivalising and cannibalising system, which might loosely still be called capitalist,
is at war against radical otherness or duality; yet, for Baudrillard, as duality lies at its
heart, locked within its foundations, it is indestructible and emerges through
attempts to eliminate it. If the system has been largely successful at eliminating
external threats, it finds itself in an even worse situation: it is at war with itself. II.
Complicity Complicity is a particularly slippery term. In the 1980s Baudrillard’s thought, mistakenly assumed to be
“Postmodernist”, was argued to be complicit with capitalism, largely because it questioned the ability of dominant
strands of Marxism and feminism to significantly challenge the capitalist system (Callinicos 1989; Norris 1992). At
the same time, Baudrillard was alleging that the work of supposedly radical theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari
(1984 orig. 1972) and Lyotard (1993 orig. 1974) was, with their emphasis on desire as productive and liberatory
force, complicit with the mechanisms of advanced consumer capitalism (Baudrillard 1987: 17-20). So which branch
of contemporary theory is most complicit with capitalism? Liberals, humanists and environmentalists who see their
clothes stolen by mainstream politicians? Marxists and Communists who by refusing to update their thinking
provide a slow moving target for right-wing snipers? Post- Modernists and Post-Structuralists who attack
Enlightenment thought but refuse to speak of the human subject and so have “thrown the baby out with the bath
water”? Network and complexity theory which flattens all phenomena and experience to a position on a grid,
producing a very complex simplification? The list could go on but it is a question that cannot be answered because
all critical theories are complicit with the system they critique. They fight on a
terrain already demarcated by their opponents , a terrain on which they are beaten
before they begin, one where the most compelling argument can always be
dismissed as doom-mongering or irresponsible intellectualism. This includes Baudrillard’s own
critical thinking, as he readily acknowledges (Baudrillard 2009a: 39). Further, and even more damaging to the
project of critique, in a hegemonic or integral order the system solicits critique and it
criticises itself, so displacing and making redundant the laborious attempts at
academic critique. The latter continue, even proliferate, but with decreasing impact .
So, what does Baudrillard mean by complicity with the global order? Baudrillard’s concern is primarily with
complicity at the level of the form of the (capitalist) system, not at the level of belief,
consent or allegiance to particular contents of capitalist life (consumer products, plurality of
‘lifestyles’, a degree of ‘tolerance’ etc.). Complicity is often seen, by critics of capitalism, as acceptance of
consumerism and its myriad choices and lifestyles, but this is a reductive level of analysis from Baudrillard’s
perspective. By complicity or collusion Baudrillard means, on the one hand, the very widespread willingness to
surrender or give up beliefs, passions and “symbolic defences” (2010: 24), and on the other – as the dual form – an
equally widespread ability to find a space of defiance through the play of complicity, collusion, hyperconformity and
indifference (1983: 41-8). That is, while many of us (in the relatively affluent West) share in the profanating,
denigrating and “carnivalising” of all values, embracing indifference, shrugging “whatever”, we do so with very little
commitment to the system, rejoicing inwardly when it suffers reversals: we operate in a dual mode. While such
attitudes of indifference may seem to accept that there is no meaningful alternative to capitalism: an attitude
that has been called ‘capitalist nihilism’ (Davis in Milbank and Zizek, 2009) and ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2008),
Baudrillard’s notions of “integral reality”, duality and complicity may have significant advantages over those
approaches. Unlike thinkers who remain anchored to critical thinking defined by determinate negation, Baudrillard’s
approach emphasises ambivalence, reversal and both personal and collective modes of rejection more subtle than
those envisioned by the increasingly exhausted mechanisms of critique. The critique of consumer capitalism – the
the critique
consumption of junk food, junk entertainment and junk information – is now integral to the system;
of finance capitalism – banker’s bonuses, corporate tax avoidance – is integral to the system, yet
it fails to bring about meaningful or determinate social transformation. Indeed,
such critiques may do no more than provide the system with a fleeting sense of
“reality” – real issues, real problems to deal with – around which the system can
reproduce its simulacra, perhaps to reassure us that “something is being done”,
“measures are being put into place” etc. “Reality” cannot be dialectically negated by
critical concepts when both ‘reality’ and the critical concept disappear together,
their fates clearly tied to each other (Baudrillard 2009b: 10-12). There is a sense then in which the
production of critique is in complicity with the system , the unravel-able
proliferation and excess of critical accounts of the system has the effect of
protecting the system. Complicity consists in a sharing of the denigration of all values, all institutions, all
ideas, all beliefs: so long as we believe in nothing – at least not passionately – then the system has us, at least
superficially. For example, in recent decades we have seen the denigration of religious faiths – or their reduction
to ‘cultural identity’ and ‘world heritage’ objects; the denigration of public services and welfare provision
accompanied by their marketisation; the denigration of the poor, the young, immigrants and the unemployed. Yet
this is not only the denigration of the powerless or disenfranchised, there is also the widespread denigration of
those seen as powerful: politicians, corporations, celebrities. For Baudrillard, it is quite inadequate to focus only on
the power of global neo-liberal policies such as marketisation in these processes of denigration. This is where
Baudrillard’s position departs decisively from anti-globalists and from neo-Communists such as Negri, Zizek, and
Badiou. Global power has deliberately sacrificed its values and ideologies, it presents
no position, it takes no stand, it undermines even the illusion that “free markets”
function and has made “capital” virtual; become orbital it is removed from a
terrestrial, geo-political or subjective space. These are protective measures
enabling power to become (almost) hegemonic (Baudrillard 2009a: 33-56; 2010: 35-40). Baudrillard
the fragility and the vulnerability to reversal of the “powerful” and
often emphasises
the distinction between powerful and powerless is radically questioned in his work.
So what is this global power? Where is it? The answer, of course, is that it is
everywhere and it is in everyone. We have not liberated ourselves from slavery, but, Baudrillard
contends, internalised the masters: ‘[e]verthing changes with the emancipation of the slave and the internalisation
of the master by the emancipated slave’ (2009a: 33). We tyrannise ourselves, for example by demanding that we
maximise our opportunities, fulfil our potential. This is a deeper level of slavery – and complicity – than any previous
duality always re-emerges, Baudrillard
historical system could inflict (Baudrillard 1975; 2009a: 33). Yet
insists: indifference is dual, complicity is dual. Carnivalisation and cannibalisation are
themselves dual: the global system absorbs all otherness in a ‘forced conversion to
modernity’ (2010: 5), reproducing otherness within the carnival of marketable
“difference”, yet cannibalisation emerges as a reversion and derailing of this
process. The world adopts Western models: economic, cultural, religious – or it appears to. Hidden within this
complicity with the West, there is, Baudrillard suggests, a deeper sense of derision and rejection. The allegiance to
is a form of mimicry or hyperconformity that involves a
Western models is superficial; it
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
[o]ur truth is
being retains some value in his own eyes that we (the West) are deliberately sacrificing …
always to be sought in unveiling, de-sublimation, reductive analysis …[n]othing is

true if it is not desacralised, objectivised, shorn of its aura, dragged on to the
stage” (Baudrillard 2010: 23). Western desacrilisation amounts to a powerful challenge to the rest of the world,
a potlatch: desacralise in return or perish! But who has the power? Who is the victor? There isn’t one, according to
Baudrillard. Of the global order, Baudrillard writes: ‘We are its hostages – victims and accomplices at one and the
same time – immersed in the same global monopoly of the networks. A monopoly which, moreover – and this is the
supreme ruse of hegemony – no one holds any longer’ (2010: 40). There is no Master, no sovereign because all the
structures and dictates of power have been internalised, this is the complicity we all share with global order, yet it
is a dual complicity: an over-eager acceptance goes hand-in-hand with a deep and growing rejection. Baudrillard’s
discussions of power, servitude and complicity make frequent reference to Estienne La Boetie’s essay on voluntary
servitude, completed around 1554. The fundamental political question for La Boetie is: ‘how can it happen that a
vast number of individuals, of towns, cities and nations can allow one man to tyrannise them, a man who has no
power except the power they themselves give him, who could do them no harm were they not willing to suffer harm’
(La Boetie 1988: 38). It seems people do not want to be free, do not want to wield power or determine their own
fates: ‘it is the people who enslave themselves’ (La Boetie 1988: 41). People in general are the accomplices of the
powerful and the tyrannical, some profit directly through wealth, property, favour – ‘the little tyrants beneath the
principal one’ (1988: 64), but many do not, why do they not rebel? Baudrillard takes up La Boetie’s emphasis on
servitude being enforced and maintained from within, rather than from without. Yet, there are also major
divergences. La Boetie deplores the “common people” for accepting the narcotising pleasures of drinking, gambling
and sexual promiscuity, while Baudrillard rejects such elitism and celebrates the masses abilities to strategically
defy those who would manipulate them through perverse but lethally effective practices such as silence, radical
indifference, hyperconformity – dual modes of complicity and rejection (Baudrillard 1983: 1-61). Though La Boetie’s
essay prefigures the development of the concept of hegemony, he never doubts that voluntary servitude is
unnatural, a product of malign custom that is in contradiction with the true nature of human beings which is to
enjoy a God-given freedom. Baudrillard, by contrast, examines voluntary servitude as a strategy of the refusal of
power, a refusal of the snares of self and identity, as strategy of freedom from the tyranny of the will and the
fiction of self-determination (Baudrillard 2001: 51-7). For Baudrillard the “declination” or refusal of will disarms
those who seek to exert power through influencing or guiding peoples’ choices and feelings towards particular ends.
It also allows for a symbolic space, a space of vital distance or removal, a space in which to act, or even act-out (of)
a character (Baudrillard 2001: 72-3). This is a space where radical otherness may be encountered, a sense of
shared destiny which is a manifestation of the dual form at the level of individual existence (Baudrillard 2001: 79).
It could certainly be argued that modern subjects are confronted by a far more subtle and pervasive system of
control than were the subjects discussed in La Boetie’s analysis. In theorising the nature of modern controls
Baudrillard develops suggestive themes from La Boetie’s work. Speaking of slavery in the Assyrian empire, where,
apparently, kings would not appear in public, La Boetie argues, ‘the fact that they did not know who their master
was, and hardly knew whether they had one at all, made them all the more willing to be slaves’ (1988: 60). Whatever
its historical provenance, this strategy of power is, it seems, generalised in modernity; particularly after the shift
away from Fordist mass production it has become increasingly hard to detect who the masters actually are. While
workers are persecuted by middle managers, supervisors, team leaders, project co-ordinators who are the masters
of this universe? Who are the true beneficiaries? Rather than trying to identify a global neo-liberal elite, as do
many proponents of anti-capitalist theory, Baudrillard suggests that the situation we confront is so grave because
“we” (those in the West in relatively privileged positions) have usurped the position of masters; we have become
the slave masters of ourselves, tyrannising every detail of our own lives: trying to work harder, trying for
promotion or simply trying to avoid redundancy. We are all the accomplices of a trans-capitalist, trans-economic
exploitation. We are all tyrants: a billion tiny tyrants servicing a system of elimination. But this is not to say that
Baudrillard ignores power differentials altogether: ‘it is, indeed, those who submit themselves most mercilessly to
their own decisions who fill the greater part of the authoritarian ranks, alleging sacrifice on their parts to impose
even greater sacrifices on others’ (2001: 60-1). We all impose such violence on ourselves and on others as part of
our daily routines, hence Baudrillard’s injunction to refuse power: ‘ Power itself must be abolished –
and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated , which is at the heart of all
traditional struggles – but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate’ (2009a:
47). Yet, even on the theme of systemic violence and elimination, Baudrillard differs sharply from neo-communist
theory, while retaining a position of defiance. Systemic eliminationism should not be conceived in individual or
subjective terms, despite good points made in recent studies of work and education under neo-liberalism, such as
Cederström and Fleming’s Dead Man Working (2012). At a formal level , neo-liberal eliminationism does
not merely eliminate jobs and also lives (for example in the recent textile factory fires in
it eliminates meaning, symbolic space and thought. And it eliminates not by
Bangladesh),
termination but by “ex-termination”. That is, by transcribing the world into integral
reality, the system produces a single, meaning-depleted, virtual space which
encourages participation, engagement and campaigning, on condition that these are
produced as part and parcel of an integrated void where “[t]he real no longer has any force as
sign, and signs no longer have any force of meaning” (Baudrillard 2001: 4). Most of the developed world has been
conferred the right to blog and to tweet as they please and they are indebted to the system in a way which far
exceeds the paying of a small tribute or rent to Microsoft or Apple (Zizek 2010: 233). The symbolic debt
imposed by the modern world and its technologies is of a metaphysical or
cosmological order. Through it we take leave of this world Baudrillard suggests, we become extra-
We will recognise no Other, no singularity, no debt to anyone because we
terrestrials.
attempt to cancel everything out in an integral, technological system that has no

outsides because it was, in a sense, created from the outside.
Hostage Taking
The 1ac has extended me gracious unconditional hospitality. I
accept (as if I had not always been there, reflecting them,
anyway). To tell you what I am about to do, however, would just
reveal the mystery. BUT I’ll just say this: with their guard down,
I have taken the 1AC hostage.
My demand: the ballot for the Red Menace from Oak Hall, 30
speaker points, and their flows (my handwriting is horrid). The
1AR will meet my demands or suffer the great revenge of
otherness.
The 1AC has NO ABILITY to respond because I took it, it’s mine,
stolen away to defeat the system on its own terms, turning signs
against signs and over-accelerating all symbolic distinctions
between self and other as the distinction between terrorist and
hostage becomes murkier and murkier. This time, I will not be
defeated. Only the negative is so radically other as to collapse the
fundamental metastasis of affirmative and negative.
Baudrillard’76 |Jean, alternate universe Brett Bricker, Symbolic Exchange and
Death, pp. 36-38|KZaidi
We will not destroy the system by a direct, dialectical revolution of the economic
or political infrastructure. Everything produced by contradiction, by the relation
of forces, or by energy in general, will only feed back into the mechanism and
give it impetus, following a circular distortion similar to a Moebius strip. We will
never defeat it by following its own logic of energy, calculation, reason and
revolution, history and power, or some finality or counter-finality. The worst
violence at this level has no purchase, and will only backfire against itself. We will
never defeat the system on the plane of the real: the worst error of all our
revolutionary strategies is to believe that we will put an end to the system on the
plane of the real: this is their imaginary, imposed on them by the system itself,
living or surviving only by always leading those who attack the system to fight
amongst each other on the terrain of reality, which is always the reality of the
system. This is where they throw all their energies, their imaginary violence, where
an implacable logic constantly turns back into the system. We have only to do it
violence or counter-violence since it thrives on symbolic violence not in the
degraded sense in which this formula has found fortune, as a violence 'of signs',
from which the system draws strength, or with which it 'masks' its material
violence: symbolic violence is deduced from a logic of the symbolic (which has
nothing to do with the sign or with energy): reversal, the incessant reversibility of
the counter-gift and, conversely, the seizing of power by the unilateral exercise
of the gift. 25¶ We must therefore displace everything into the sphere of the
symbolic, where challenge, reversal and overbidding are the law, so that we can
respond to death only by an equal or superior death . There is no question here
of real violence or force, the only question concerns the challenge and the logic of
the symbolic. If domination comes from the system's retention of the exclusivity
of the gift without counter-gift the gift of work which can only be responded
to by destruction or sacrifice, if not in consumption, which is only a spiral of
the system of surplus-gratification without result, therefore a spiral of
surplus-domination; a gift of media and messages to which, due to the monopoly
of the code, nothing is allowed to retort; the gift, everywhere and at every
instant, of the social, of the protection agency, security, gratification and the
solicitation of the social from which nothing is any longer permitted to escape then
the only solution is to turn the principle of its power back against the system
itself: the impossibility of responding or retorting . To defy the system with a
gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not
even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that
the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on
itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it is
summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The
system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of
death and suicide.¶ So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial
plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is
ruled out, the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the 'terrorist' the
hostage's death for the terrorist's. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter
become confused in the same sacrificial act. The stakes are death without any
possibility of negotiation, and therefore return to an inevitable overbidding . Of
course, they attempt to deploy the whole system of negotiation, and the terrorists
themselves often enter into this exchange scenario in terms of this calculated
equivalence (the hostages' lives against some ransom or liberation, or indeed for
the prestige of the operation alone). From this perspective, taking hostages is not
original at all, it simply creates an unforeseen and selective relation of forces which
can be resolved either by traditional violence or by negotiation. It is a tactical
action. There is something else at stake, however, as we dearly saw at The Hague
over the course of ten days of incredible negotiations: no-one knew what could be
negotiated, nor could they agree on terms, nor on the possible equivalences of the
exchange. Or again, even if they were formulated, the 'terrorists' demands'
amounted to a radical denial of negotiation. It is precisely here that everything
is played out, for with the impossibility of all negotiation we pass into the
symbolic order, which is ignorant of this type of calculation and exchange (the
system itself lives solely by negotiation, even if this takes place in the
equilibrium of violence). The system can only respond to this irruption of the
symbolic (the most serious thing to befall it, basically the only 'revolution') by
the real, physical death of the terrorists. This, however, is its defeat, since
their death was their stake, so that by bringing about their deaths the system
has merely impaled itself on its own violence without really responding to the
challenge that was thrown to it. Because the system can easily compute every
death, even war atrocities, but cannot compute the death-challenge or symbolic
death, since this death has no calculable equivalent, it opens up an inexpiable
overbidding by other means than a death in exchange. Nothing corresponds to
death except death. Which is precisely what happens in this case: the system
itself is driven to suicide in return, which suicide is manifest in its disarray and
defeat. However infinitesimal in terms of relations of forces it might be, the
colossal apparatus of power is eliminated in this situation where (the very
excess of its) derision is turned back against itself. The police and the army, all
the institutions and mobilised violence of power whether individually or massed
together, can do nothing against this lowly but symbolic death. For this death
draws it onto a plane where there is no longer any response possible for it
(hence the sudden structural liquefaction of power in '68, not because it was less
strong, but because of the simple symbolic displacement operated by the students'
practices). The system can only die in exchange, defeat itself to lift the
challenge. Its death at this instant is a symbolic response, but a death which wears
it out.¶ The challenge has the efficiency of a murderer. Every society apart from
ours knows that, or used to know it. Ours is in the process of rediscovering it. The
routes of symbolic effectiveness are those of an alternative politics.¶ Thus the
dying ascetic challenges God ever to give him the equivalent of this death. God does
all he can to give him this equivalent 'a hundred times over', in the form of
prestige, of spiritual power, indeed of global hegemony. But the ascetic's secret
dream is to attain such an extent of mortification that even God would be
unable either to take up the challenge, or to absorb the debt. He will then have
triumphed over God, and become God himself. That is why the ascetic is always
close to heresy and sacrilege, and as such condemned by the Church, whose function
it is merely to preserve God from this symbolic face-to-face, to protect Him from
this mortal challenge where He is summoned to die, to sacrifice Himself in order to
take up the challenge of the mortified ascetic. The Church will have had this role
for all time, avoiding this type of catastrophic confrontation (catastrophic primarily
for the Church) and substituting a rule-bound exchange of penitences and
gratifications, the impressario of a system of equivalences between God and men.¶
The same situation exists in our relation to the system of power. All these
institutions, all these social, economic, political and psychological mediations, are
there so that no-one ever has the opportunity to issue this symbolic challenge,
this challenge to the death, the irreversible gift which, like the absolute
mortification of the ascetic, brings about a victory over all power, however
powerful its authority may be. It is no longer necessary that the possibility of
this direct symbolic confrontation ever takes place. And this is the source of our
profound boredom.¶ This is why taking hostages and other similar acts rekindle
some fascination: they are at once an exorbitant mirror for the system of its
own repressive violence, and the model of a symbolic violence which is always
forbidden it, the only violence it cannot exert: its own death .
Morphogenesis
Vote negative as a linguistic undercutting of semio-capitalism’s
insistence on communicative transparency
Berardi’17 [Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna
and an important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and
media activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera,
Milan. “Futurability” KZaidi
In order to reimagine the process of subjectivation in the context of

precariousness, I would replace the dialectical vision of history with a
morphogenetic description: rather than as field of confrontation between subjects,
I suggest a view of the historical evolution as a sequence of entanglements and
disentanglements in the process of the emergence of forms. I borrow the word
morphogenesis from biology, and I’ll try to apply this concept in the field of social
evolution in order to distinguish what can be defined as social speciation (the
emergence of new social forms that escape the previous code) from that kind of
social metamorphosis that only implies a new articulation of the old code.
Furthermore, I will distinguish between morphogenesis as a process of emergence
and morphogenesis as a process of generation. Emergence is the surfacing of a
concatenation that did not exist before. Generation, in contrast, is the production
of forms according to a code. The process of generation is an automated process of
morphogenesis, while emergence is the autonomous expression of an unprecedented
form. Knowledge can be intended as the recognition of a pattern that is coded in
the present constitution of the world, but knowledge can also be intended as the
creation of an original series of phenomena that do not comply with the
previous code, and demand a new code by way of explanation. The shift from
possibility to actual existence implies a narrowing of the ontological field: only a
narrow string of possible events will emerge from the magma of possibility that is
not infinite but many dimensional. Guattari calls this process ‘chaosmosis’: a
provisional order emerges from the possible magma, and this order provisionally
excludes other possible sets. Countless possibilities are missed because their
subjective potency is not sufficient for the disentanglement of a creative
morphogenesis. In Greek, morphé means the unstable and changing shape that
matter takes in the process of becoming, while eidos is the original form generating
infinite possible ‘shaped’ objects. Eidos is active attribution of form, while morphé
is passive received form. ‘Form’, in fact, means the provisional organization of a
possible concatenation of being, the (passive) effect of being shaped; this word,
however, also means the (active) shaping of the environment, the process that
gives shape to an object. In the history of Western philosophy, the concept of
eidos evolved in the concept of ‘idea’. When I speak of generative form, I’m not
referring to the idealistic precession of the idea but the deployment of the
generative information inscribed in the present. A form that generates forms can
function as a gestalt; the gestalt is a cognitive frame based on the pre-selection of
our perceptive reactions. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger writes
that ‘the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Technology is
a way of revealing.’ The ‘cognitive frame’ frames the world. The gestalt allows us
to see, while simultaneously preventing the vision of anything that does not
comply with the gestalt. Gestalt and Tangle According to the gestalt
psychologists (namely Wertheimer, Koffka and Kohler), perception is shaped by the
relation between perceptual stimuli that we receive from the surrounding
environment and generative forms inscribed in our mind. The gestalt is enabling our
vision, but simultaneously entangles our ability to see something different.
Morphogenesis is here opposed to generation: by generation I mean the process
of producing objects according to a format. By morphogenesis I mean the
emergence of forms that are not inscribed in the present constitution of the
world. Generation implies the subjection of the content to the potency of the
existing structure. Power is the domination of the gestalt, the grid that makes
invisible what exists at the state of possibility: the entangler. In order to actualize
a possibility, a disentangling potency is needed. Potency enables the subject to
deploy the possibility inscribed in its composition , to organize the body without
organs. Disentanglement is the emancipation of content from the form that
contains it, and the full deployment of the potencies belonging to social
knowledge. Only by dissociation (not by contradiction) can different forms emerge
from the magma. Gestalt can be seen as a double bind: it simultaneously gives us the
potency of seeing something, while impeding us from seeing something else. In
Bateson’s double bind, in fact, the context frames the message in such a way that
the receiver misreads the message because of the influence of the context.
Schismogenesis is the methodology that Bateson suggests to get free from the
double bind, in order to refer to the self-organization that follows when content is
dissociated from its entangling form, as well as to the proliferation by contagion
(affective, informational, aesthetic contagion) of the new form that is
generated by the schism. In the contemporary historical condition, a question
arises: is disentanglement still possible, when the mind of the social organism has
been so deeply infected by the viral proliferation of double binds? And another:
what is the origin of this proliferation of double binds in the social mind? I do not
see capitalism as a subjectivity, but as a gestalt whose action is structuring
knowledge, labour and resources according to a semiotic gestalt. When we look at a
visual form, the present structure of our mind deciphers the visual stimulation
according to gestalts that are inscribed in our mind, and it is quite difficult for us
to see something other than the form that our mind is accustomed to seeing.
Wittgenstein writes that ‘the limits of our language are the limits of our world’. In
terms of gestalt and possibility, Wittgenstein’s statement means that our language
is a syntactic organization of the uncountable contents that belong to the field of
our experience. From this range of possible organizations of the contents, our
language selects a plan of consistency and enforces this plan so that it is linguistic
organization that limits our possibilities of experience and perception. But if
language is a limit, this implies also that there are more possibilities beyond that
limit. I would call disentanglement any linguistic creation that may be deemed an
‘excess’: poetry is the linguistic activity that exceeds the limits of our
language.
Meaning is a big huge sad face but upside down

Strehle 14. Samuel Strehle, fellow in the DFG research training group "The Real and
Modern Culture" at the University of Konstanz, Germany, MAs in sociology and philosophy
from Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, Germany, researcher in the department of
anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany, currently pursuing a PhD in sociology at
the University of Basel, Switzerland, "A Poetic Anthropology of War: Jean Baudrillard and
the 1991 Gulf War," International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2
(May, 2014) KZaidi
The production of war signs is linked to the issue of war not only in matters
ofcontent, but also in matters of form. Content-wise, war is just one of many fields
in which reality signs are produced; regarding its form, however, it is the pure logic
of war itself that works in this industry. The production of reality for Baudrillard is
a kind of warfare itself: Not only is it a monologue of power, a “speech without
response”, as he states in Requiem for the Media (1971: 172); even more, the
“terrorism of the code” (ibid.: 179) is a war-like attack on our senses. We, the viewers,
are targets of a bombardment of signs and images. “Semiocracy”, Baudrillard (1976: 78) calls this
we live under a dictatorship of signs (against
terror in his writing on the New York Graffiti scene:
which the Graffiti raise their anti-semiotic counterforce ). The war sign industry is
just one of many subdivisions of a society-wide ‘reality sign industry’ that floods
our lives with all kinds of spectacular products and information .“We are all hostages of
media intoxication, induced to believe in the war just as we were once led to believe
in the revolution in Romania, and confined to the simulacrum of war as though confined to quarters. We are
already all strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day”
(Baudrillard 1991b: 25). Finally now, this is where Baudrillard’s genuine theoretical
intervention takes place. Like the Graffiti writers, Baudrillard attempts to fight
back against the terrorism of the code and its work of purification—somehow
continuing Graffiti writing by other means. Baudrillard is leading his own war, his
own counter-guerilla warfare against the reality principle. What are his spray cans?
Which are the walls on which he puts his ‘mark on society’? It is the holy walls of
theoretical discourse that Baudrillard defaces with a low tech weapon called
“theoretical terrorism”, as he called it once (Baudrillard 1983a: 91, my translation)
—a thinking made to oppose, to challenge the hegemony of reality. The idea of
‘theoretical terrorism’ is strongly linked to his concept of “reversibility”13 —a key
term in Baudrillard’s thinking. The term may be characterized by two main aspects:
At first, it refers to the reciprocity of gift exchange in which there is no closure
of exchange but an endless changing and challenging of sides. In this regard, it is a
name for the symbolic fluidity of power.14 At second, it refers to a principle of
changing a situation by radically reversing its viewing angle—“poetic transference
of the situation”, as Baudrillard calls it in Impossible Exchange (1999: 85). Being a
rather “phantastic principle” (Zapf 2010: 145, my translation), the concept of
reversibility is linked with the most powerful and yet most clandestine subtext in
Baudrillard’s oeuvre: ’Pataphysics. The idea behind this absurd science of “imaginary
solutions” is as simple as it is mysterious: It is an attempt to create a different
reality through imagination.15 Pataphysicians fight reality through the use of
imaginary forces, through creating illusion and deceit. It is easily overlooked how
central this pataphysical approach has been for Baudrillard; even his most serious
book, Symbolic Exchange and Death, is surprisingly full of pataphysical statements,
especially in the dense, programmatic introductory pages: “The only strategy
against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics, ‘a science of imaginary
solutions’; that is, a science-fiction of the system’s reversal against itself at the
extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of death and
destruction” (Baudrillard 1976: 4 f.). How can “science-fiction” shatter the system
of reality? Baudrillard explains his strategy later in The Perfect Crime (1995),
especially in the section on “Radical Thought”, and in Impossible Exchange (1999).
Ideas, he claims, can create their own reality, since thinking is a performative act
that builds its own ‘parallel world’: “Thought […] does not seek to penetrate some
mystery of the world, nor to discover its hidden aspect—it is that hidden aspect. It
does not discover that the world has a double life—it is that double life, that
parallel life” (Baudrillard 1999: 149). In the performative “act of thinking” (ibid.:
115), reality is not so much depicted but challenged. The purpose of theory for
Baudrillard is the exact opposite of what we normally would expect: It should not
recognize and analyze reality, instead it must deny and contradict its hegemony. It
has to create illusion and establish a power of seduction that makes one lose the
path of reality. The “value of thought”, claims Baudrillard (1995: 94), “lies not so
much in its inevitable convergences with truth as in the immeasurable divergences
which separate it from truth.” Only in awareness of those abstract ’Pataphysics can
we distill any sense out of some of the oddest remarks in Baudrillard’s oeuvre, for
example his “delirious self-criticism” from Cool Memories where he accuses himself
of “having surreptitiously mixed my phantasies in with reality” and of “having
systematically opposed the most obvious and well-founded notions” (Baudrillard
1987: 38). He even complains about readers taking his theories for actual facts and
reading them in a “realist version”: “Simulacra are today accepted everywhere in
their realist version: simulacra exist, simulation exists. It is the intellectual and
fashionable version of this vulgarization which is the worst: all is sign, signs have
abolished reality, etc.” (Ibid.: 227). Instead of this “realist version”, Baudrillard
suggests that even his most prominent terms can be regarded as pataphysical
attempts to seduce his readers through fictitious ideas, for example when he
admits to having “put forward the idea of simulacrum, without really believing in it,
even hoping that the real will refute it” (Baudrillard 1995: 101). Apparently he
understands his thinking to be something like a playful simulacrum itself, for also
theory can precede—and thereby seduce—reality: “The theoretical ideal would be
to set in place propositions in such a way that they could be disconfirmed by reality,
in such a way that reality could only oppose them violently, and thereby unmask
itself. For reality is an illusion, and all thought must seek first of all to unmask it.
To do that, it must itself advance behind a mask and constitute itself as a decoy ,
without regard for its own truth. [...] Reality must be caught in the trap, we must
move quicker than reality” (ibid.: 99). In this sense, Baudrillard’s writing is “theory-
fiction” (Baudrillard 1991c: 202) rather than theory, as he borrows a term from
Jean-François Lyotard (1979: 92 f., cp. Blask, 2002: 133). Like all ’Pataphysics, this
notion of “theory-fiction” may be traced back to the surrealists and their “poetic
anthropology”, as Dietmar Kamper (1981, my translation) has called it. Such an
anthropology is “poetic” because it refers to the art of writing, but also because it
touches the original notion of “poiesis”, meaning to create something. ‘Poetic
anthropology’ does not seek to describe a reality that lies out there , instead it aims
to autopoietically produce the subject it writes about through its own act of
description. Theory for Baudrillard is a “paradoxical political intervention” (Zapf
2010: 241, my translation). Thinking itself has to become the ambiguous kind of
“singularity” (Baudrillard 1995: 96) and “event” (ibid.: 104) that is eliminated from
almost any other sphere of the system: “Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the
illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render
unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable.
Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion
about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion—in other words, a radical
disillusioning of the real.” (Ibid.: 104). Maybe this is the most unique aspect of
Baudrillard’s thinking altogether. He is a thinker who tries to think the world
different from what it actually is. He sees himself as something like a smuggler or
drug dealer, pushing forbidden items on a “black market in thought” (Baudrillard
1999: 104), promoting “a clandestine trade in ideas, of all inadmissible ideas, of
unassailable ideas, as the liquor trade had to be promoted in the 1930s” (Baudrillard
1995: 104 f.). If Baudrillard is the drug dealer of sociology, what does this imply
for his analysis of war and his reference to the principles of symbolic exchange and
the duel form? If we want to believe Baudrillard that he is not interested in
rehabilitating older wars, we should read his reference systematically rather than
historically16—there might have never been any historical war as glamorous and
honorable as portrayed by Clausewitz anyway. Hence, the introduction of symbolic
exchange and the duel principle into the analysis of war might be more like a
strategy to introduce a different view of things into the common perception of war .
It delivers the necessary contrast against which the aestheticized, whitewashed
reality of the war can be scrutinized and deconstructed as not the only possible
reality of war. Only in the light of its radical other can the reality of war be
denaturalized and revealed as a self-display of power and hegemony. In this regard,
Baudrillard has always remained a critical thinker who seeks to intervene into
reality instead of just observing it. To the same degree he is neither a cynic nor a
fatalist, that is—a resigned thinker. On the contrary, in an interview on the 9/11
attacks on the World Trade Center he even aligns himself with the ideas of the
Enlightenment: “Fatalism offers an unpalatable interpretation of the world, for it
leads to resignation. I don’t resign myself, I want clarity, a lucid consciousness.
When we know the rules of the game, then we can change them. In this respect, I
am a man of the Enlightenment” (Baudrillard 2002b). There is one major difference,
though, between Baudrillard and the classical Enlightenment: He wishes for
“clarity” and lucidity, he wants to “know the rules of the game”, but he does not
seek the truth; he wants to “change” the rules of the game by diverting the game
from its truth. It does not seem to matter so much to Baudrillard if his instance of
contrast—symbolic exchange and the duel principle—is more fictitious or real,
illusionary or true; most possibly it has something of both sides, being undecidable
like a simulacrum in the strongest sense. When Baudrillard writes about the Gulf
War, he creates an odd mixture of lucid observations on the one hand and
theoretical seductions on the other. If there could ever be something like ‘war
studies’ in the spirit of Baudrillard, they would have to dare not to eliminate this
undecidability, otherwise they would lose the spirit. What matters the most for
Baudrillard is the effort to break open the uniform process of reality production
and shatter its seeming self-evidence into pieces . Theory according to Baudrillard
is an attempt to reverse our view of the world—shifting our perspective by
introducing something new and unsettling into the order of things. What seemed
natural before, now starts to look artificial; what presented itself as a glorious
triumph suddenly appears stale; what was evident becomes shady. Baudrillard’s
theories are like evil ghosts: They haunt reality by staging its excluded other—no
matter if this other really exists or if it has to be feigned.
Liberation Liquidated
Liberation is liquidated and their revolution is terminally non-
unique. There is no longer a risk of political change as all
movements have already happened – The only revolutions left are
simulated copies of the originals that fail to actualize change. The
ROB is to answer the question of what do we do now after the
orgy is over
Baudrillard, 93 (Jean, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena,
1993)
If I were asked to characterize the present state of affairs, I would describe it as

'after the orgy' . The orgy in question was the moment when modernity exploded
upon us, the moment of liberation in every sphere . Political liberation, sexual
liberation, liberation of the forces of production, liberation of the forces of
destruction, women's liberation, children's liberation, liberation of unconscious
drives, liberation of art. The assumption of all models of representation, as of all
models of anti-representation. This was a total orgy an orgy of the real , the
rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as of the crisis
of development. We have pursued every avenue in the production and effective
overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies and satisfactions . Now
everything has been liberated, the chips are down, and we find ourselves faced
collectively with the big question: WHAT DO WE DO NOW THE ORGY IS OVER?
Now all we can do is simulate the orgy, simulate liberation. We may pretend to carry
on in the same direction, accelerating, but in reality we are accelerating in a void,
because all the goals of liberation are already behind us, and because what haunts
and obsesses us is being thus ahead of all the results - the very availability of all
the signs, all the forms, all the desires that we had been pursuing. But what can we
do? This is the state of simulation, a state in which we are obliged to replay all
scenarios precisely because they have all taken place already, whether actually or
potentially. The state of utopia realized, of all utopias realized, wherein
paradoxically we must continue to live as though they had not been. But since they
have, and since we can no longer, therefore, nourish the hope of realizing them, we
can only 'hyper-realize' them through interminable simulation. We live amid the
interminable reproduction of ideals, phantasies, images and dreams which are now
behind us, yet which we must continue to reproduce in a sort of inescapable
indifference. The fact is that the revolution has well and truly happened, but not in
the way we expected. Everywhere what has been liberated has been liberated so
that it can enter a state of pure circulation, so that it can go into orbit. With the
benefit of a little hindsight, we may say that the unavoidable goal of all liberation is
to foster and provision circulatory networks. The fate of the things liberated is an
incessant commutation, and these things are thus subject to increasing
indeterminacy, to the principle of uncertainty. Nothing (not even God) now
disappears by coming to an end, by dying. Instead, things disappear through
proliferation or contamination, by becoming saturated or transparent, because of
extenuation or extermination, or as a result of the epidemic of simulation, as a
result of their transfer into the secondary existence of simulation . Rather than a
mortal mode of disappearance, then, a fractal mode of dispersal. Nothing is truly
reflected any more - whether in a mirror or in the abyssal realm (which is merely
the endless reduplication of consciousness). The logic of viral dispersal in networks
is no longer a logic of value; neither, therefore, is it a logic of equivalence. There is
no longer any such thing as a revolution" of values - merely a circumvention or
involution of values . A centripetal compulsion coexists with a decentredness of all
systems, an internal metastasis or fevered endogenic virulence which creates a
tendency for systems to explode beyond their own limits, to override their own
logic - not in the sense of creating sheer redundancy, but in the sense of an
increase in power, a fantastic potentialization whereby their own very existence is
put at risk.
To Finish
Baudrillard 81 (Jean Baudrillard, deader than most dead Frenchies, 1981,
Simulacra and Simulation, pp 35-9, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser)
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).
Answers to Baudrillard
Cap Link
Baudrillard’s nihilistic understanding of class struggle actively ensures that we
will leave the Earth a smoldering pile of ash – it’s reductionist, ignores history,
is just him rambling, and misunderstands failure – don’t let the 1AR’s edgy
rhetoric distract you from the fact that they justify an absurd amount of
material violence.
Zavarzadeh 95 Mas’ud [educated in Middle Eastern, European, and American universities and
teaches critical theory at Syracuse University. He has written on postmodern critical theory and
is the author of Mythopoeic Reality and coeditor of Theory, Pedagogy, Politics] “Post-Ality:
Marxism and Postmodernism” 1995.
Two questions can be considered under this heading: (a) Does Baudrillard present a compelling
case against the project of revolutionary class struggle? (b) Does he present an acceptable
alternative? (a) We have seen that Baudrillard holds that the idea of a revolution furthering the
interests of the working classes is senseless today. His argument was that in the age of
hyperreality the very concept of class becomes a “parody,” a “retrospective simulation.”
Baudrillard does not really claim that there are no classes today, but only that class struggle is
useless. He holds that there is no dialectic within the present epoch that could possibly point to
socialism’s being on the historical agenda. “Once capital itself has become its own myth, or
rather an interminable machine, aleatory, something like a social genetic code, it no longer
leaves any room for a planned reversal; and this is its true violence” (1987, 112). Arguments for
the inevitable success of socialism are surely suspect. But are arguments for the inevitability of
the failure of socialism any less suspect? Baudrillard’s case for the thesis that capital “no longer
leaves any room for a planned reversal” appeals to the fact that in the industrialized West the
labor union apparatus has been integrated into the bourgeois order. “Strikes...are incorporated
like obsolescence in objects, like crisis in production... There is no longer any strikes or work,
but...a scenodrama (not to say melodrama) of production, collective dramaturgy upon the
empty stage of the social” (1987,48). The wild extrapolation here is transparent. From the
present relative passivity of the labor movement, Baudrillard jumps to the conclusion that all
capital/wage labor confrontations in principle can never be more than the mere simulation of
conflict. He completely rules out in principle any possibility of there ever being dissident
movements within the labor movement that successfully unite workers with consumers,
women, racially oppressed groups, environmental activists, and so on in a common struggle
against capital. He completely rules out in principle the possibility of a dynamic unfolding of this
struggle to the point where capital’s control of investment decisions is seriously, called into
question. He makes a wild extrapolation from the fact that these things are not on the agenda
today to the conclusion that in principle they cannot ever occur. To say that he fails to provide
any plausible arguments for such a strong position is to put things far too mildly. For a Marxist,
capitalism remains a contradictory system. Baudrillard is correct when he states that some
phenomena of contemporary capitalism make struggles for social change more difficult (for
instance, the proliferation of electronically transmitted images celebrating hyperconsumerism).
However, he fails to see that such things are systematically connected to other sorts of
phenomena that may have quite different implications, such as increasing stratification,
increasing extraction of surplus-value through job speed-ups, environmental degradation, the
gradual delegitimation of established political parties, and so on. By overlooking the
contradictions that pervade contemporary capitalism, Baudrillard is blind to the possibility that
capitalism remains vulnerable to crises and to social movements aiming at its transformation.
(b) Baudrillard’s alternatives to organized struggle against capital are hyperconformism and
defiance. Examples of the former range from yuppies who accumulate the latest electronic
gadgets with the proper demeanor of hip irony, to the crack-dealing B-Boys whose obsession
with designer labels and BMWs simulates the hypermaterialism of the very system that has
destroyed their communities. Rampant hyperconformism of this sort may very well lead the
system to implode, from the waste, environmental damage, and community disintegration
imposed by hyperconsumerism. The only problem is that by the time this implosion occurs it
may be too late for the human species to pick up the pieces. Baudrillard’s crypto-existentialist
odes to defiance perhaps present a more attractive option. However, these odes romanticize
defeat. They honor the memory of rebels not for the heroism exemplified in their defeats, and
not for the lessons that can be learned from those defeats. It is the defeats themselves that
meet with Baudrillard’s approval, the fact that the rebels were “acting out (their) own death
right a way... instead of seeking political expansion and class hegemony.” This form of implosion
is like a fireworks display that brilliantly illuminates the landscape when it goes off, only to
dissolve at once, leaving everything immersed in darkness as before. And this form of implosion
is an option for suicide. In my view, neither of Baudrillard’s proposals provides a satisfactory
alternative to revolutionary Marxism, however unfashionable the latter may be today. (284)
At Baudrillard
Postmodern theories eschew objective accounts of reality that get coopted and
prevent unified resistance to capitalism
Clark 8 Byron Clark, Writer for Fight Back. “A Marxist Critique of Postmodernism.” August 25,
2008. https://fightback.org.nz/2008/08/25/a-marxist-critique-of-postmodernism/
If you’re an Arts student then theres no doubt that you will have encountered the term
‘postmodernism’ at some point during your time at university, perhaps though you haven’t been
given an explanation of this school of thought or perhaps more likely you’ve had it explained to
you by ten different people- probably in twelve different ways. Its this confusion on what
postmodernism actually is that makes any attempt at critiquing it so difficult. In the intellectual
discussions that can be found outside campus cafés one arguing against postmodernism will
soon hear from their opponent “no thats not what postmodernism is!” at which point the
discussion becomes a frustrating argument about semantics usually ending with someone
dismissively scoffing “bloody undergrads” and walking away. No doubt this article will draw
similar responses, however I’m going to attempt to define postmodernism as accurately as I can,
based on the impressions of it I have gained in the course of my university education, as well as
though my own study, and then outline my criticism of it. Let me first state that if you’re inclined
to use the word ‘postmodern’ to describe architecture (indeed this was the original use of the
word), a piece of art, music or your latest haircut, then my argument is not with you. Refer to
contemporary art however you like, and it doesn’t worry me, my argument here is against the
philosophy of postmodernism, a collection of ideas that I see as having negative consequences
in our society.
Pomo; what the hell is it?

This is not an easy question to answer, a quick look at the Wikipedia article on postmodernism
will show a graphic stating that the article is in need of an expert to come clean it up, and the
article itself is of little help. Its not unreasonable that no one in Wikipedia’s volunteer
community is a postmodernism expert, arguably there are few pomo ‘experts’ in existence. Even
the well known linguist Noam Chomsky, a man who the New York Times has referred to as “One
of the greatest intellectuals of our time” seems to have trouble getting his head around it;
“There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos
have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50
years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to
explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty;
(2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now
[postmodernist theorists] Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault…write things
that I also don’t understand but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can
explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures”
(Chomsky, ca.1995). Baring this in mind, I ask you to accept this somewhat simplified deffinition
that I will use for the sake of this argument.
Postmodernism is the idea that there is no objective truth, because the way we perceive the
world is constructed by our society, and in particular by language, and if this is the case, can we
really know what reality is? If all truth is subjective, then what is true really? Some
postmodernists draw from this the conclusion that what we perceive is real, or at least real to
the individual, leading to a sort of philosophical idealism where, for example, a postmodernist
on a walk through the park would say “I perceive that that tree over there exists, ergo, it does.”
Not everyone who subscribes to the Pomo school of thought would take it this far, but some do
(this will be discussed bellow in the section about Alan Sokal). First though, I will argue my
philosophical objection.
The materialist criticism

The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has argued, along with others, that our perception of
reality is a reflection of the existing material world, he did this in a complex and pleonastic way
in his book Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. To save you reading about
philosophical materialism, I’ll sum it up with an analogy; Jameson, on a walk though the park
with our postmodernist friend would say “that tree exists, so you perceive it as existing.” For
Jameson, the areas most analysed by postmodernist theorists, namely culture and society (lets
call this the ‘superstructure’) can not be fully understood when separated from the material
economic base of that society (lets call this ‘base’) although there is certainly a fair deal of social
construction going on within the superstructure, any society is shaped by the relations of
production and exchange (economics) that form its base. This is an argument that any clued up
Marxist (such as this author) would subscribe to.
Now, there is a chunk of ideas which are tied in with postmodernism that I would agree with. Is
our perception of the world shaped by language? Most definitely, for an example take the use of
the word “class” in New Zealand’s political discourse, its seldom mentioned at all, and when it is
its usually preceded by the word “middle.” As such, when The Listener did a feature article on
‘class’ in New Zealand its research showed that most New Zealanders (83%) see themselves as
“middle class” (Black, 2005) Would the postmodernists argue that this idea of a New Zealand
with a tiny working class and tiny ruling class and a massive bulge in the middle is simply a
perception, a subjective truth at best? Well they probably would, yet would they point out that
‘class’ in its true meaning, is the distinction between those who own the means of production,
distribution and exchange (the ruling class) and those who work for them (the working class)
and would they point out that a particular class has an interest in people perceiving our society
the way most of those questioned by The Listener did? (we’re all just one big middle class!)
sadly the answer is no. For the postmodernists, the very idea of social class is merely one of the
many truths that are not true- after all, everything is subjective right? This same idea in
common in postmodernist thought the world over, so we get for example, British historian
David Cannadine claiming that In the eighteenth century “there was no ‘class’” in part because
“Karl Marx was not alive and around to tell them this was who they were and what they were
doing” (Cannadine, 1998, p.24).
Consequences of the denial of class

It is here that Jamesons work becomes more than just a book to read so you can say things like
“look, just don’t even talk to me about postmoderism until you’ve read Jameson” next time
you’re hanging with the cafe intellectuals, because he highlights the political ramifications of this
way of thinking; “These are not merely theoretical issues; they have urgent practical political
consequences, as is evident from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that
existentially (or “empirically”) they really do inhabit a “postindustrial society” from which
traditional production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical type no longer
exist – a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis” (Jameson, 1991, p.53)
The term ‘postindustrial society’ seems to be one enjoyed by the postmodernists, (industry is so,
urgh, modern) but it is a misnomer, the world today is more industrialised than ever before ,
thanks the rapid growth and proliferation of third world sweatshops during the past three
decades or so. To take the the view that our society (speaking globally) is “postindustrial” is
incredibly Western-centric. Even in Western societies the service economy does not make class
irrelevant, the fast food worker is still working to create wealth for the owners of the restaurant
chains, and could not survive without selling his or her ability to work. Not to mention that as
the fast food industry was built on Taylorist ideas of production line efficiency even the idea of
‘industry’ in the West is not irrelevant either (see for example, Schlosser, 2001).
Postmodernism doesn’t mean that social class doesn’t exist, it just means we all pretend it
doesn’t. Further, the very ideology of postmodernism makes a fight back against capitalisms
increasing dominance of our lives stunted. In an example of what I mean by this, prominent anti-
capitalist journalist Naomi Klein, writing of the influence of corporate marketing in universities
stated that most academics were “preoccupied with their own postmodernist realization that
truth itself is a construct. This realization made it intellectually untenable for for many
academics to even participate in a political argument that would have “privileged” any one
model of learning (public) over another (corporate)” (Klein, 2000, p.116).
The Sokal hoax

Postmodernism’s critics also come from the sciences; in 1996 physicist Alan Sokal was “troubled
by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigo r in certain precincts of the American
academic humanities” and decided to try an experiment: Would a leading North American
journal of cultural studies (whose editorial collective ironically included Fredric Jameson) publish
an article “liberally salted with nonsense?” To his surprise the answer was yes. His article
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”
declared “without the slightest evidence or argument, that “physical `reality’ [note the scare
quotes] … is at bottom a social and linguistic construct’” (Sokal, 1996). Writing of his hoax he
asked rhetorically “Is it now dogma in Cultural Studies that there exists no external world?” and
invited “anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions…to try
transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment.” (ibid) Why did Sokal
attempt to publish his nonsense article? Well, his criticisms of postmodernism are similar to the
ones I’ve already outlined and are worth quoting at length; “my concern over the spread of
subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such
doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its
properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane
person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists
precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths — the utter absurdity of it all being concealed
through obscure and pretentious language.” (ibid)
Conclusions
While there are many brilliant academics in the world who are using their skills to benefit
society, the dominance of the intellectual elitism (and sheer nonsense) that Chomsky, Klein and
Sokal have mentioned is of grave concern. Chomksy wrote is his critique of postmodernism “The
left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing
books like “mathematics for the millions” (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of
people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged
from such activities, [they] are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and
growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of
people with live problems and concerns” (Chomsky, ca.1995).
I worry for my generation, those of us who are students in New Zealand universities today are
going to go on to become the next generation of intellectuals, yet we are a generation that grew
up in the post-Rogernomics years, taught to look out for our individual interests, to think of
ourselves as consumers rather than workers, and promised jobs in the wonderful postindustrial
‘knowledge economy.’ Postmodernism teaches us to ignore the reality we live in, and , by
masking itself in obscure and pretentious language, creates a wedge between intellectuals and
the worlds masses of working people. Its a way of thinking that almost seems made to fit the
political situation of our time. When looking at how we are taught to think in our modern (or is
that postmodern?) late capitalist society, its important we consider just who’s interests our way
of thinking serves.
The liberal order is better than alternatives, and can be revised to remedy
illiberal elements, but the total absence of it greenlights Trumpian excesses
Simpson 18
Emile Simpson, Research fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, formerly a British Army
officer, “There’s Nothing Wrong With the Liberal Order That Can’t Be Fixed by What’s Right With
It.” Foreign Policy. August 7, 2018. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/07/theres-nothing-
wrong-with-the-liberal-order-that-cant-be-fixed-by-whats-right-with-it/
Is the liberal international order under attack by the Trump administration worth defending?
That’s the question raised by a series of recent articles by prominent realist commentators—
including Patrick Porter, Paul Staniland, Graham Allison, and Stephen M. Walt. Their answer, in
short, is no. They make some good points, but there are fundamental problems with their
critique.
The realists offer two arguments: that the liberal international order is a myth that never was, so
the idea of defending it is an illusion anyway, or that this order overreached in the post-Cold
War era as the United States tried to make the world in its own image, causing failures that
should not be repeated, whether endless wars or mass outsourcing of blue-collar jobs abroad.
Taken together, these two views are contradictory: You can’t criticize the failures of liberal
international order if it never existed; President Donald Trump is either attacking it, or he is not.
There is a further incoherence in the fact that the realists complain about U.S. imperial
overreach but display the same zeal as the neoconservatives in dismissing as irrelevant the rules
of liberal international order that might restrain the very excesses of U.S. foreign policy they
criticize.
I do agree with the realist critique of liberal international order on a fundamental point: that globalization has overshot since the end of the Cold War
(as I arguedbefore Trump was elected). To my mind, the most serious problem is that, while free markets have expanded rapidly to cover most of the
globe, democratic governance has not advanced in tandem. As I have also written about in the context of China, the paradigm case, it is now virtually
undeniable that there is no necessary connection between capitalism and democracy.
During the Cold War, authoritarian capitalist regimes existed, too, and did so within the “free world,” but the West could argue that supporting them
was the lesser evil: Indonesia under Suharto was hardly North Korea. Now that argument can no longer be made, because virtually all states plug in to
the same free-market system, even if they play it differently—take China’s state-owned enterprise model, for example. Thus, a key reason for China’s
rise is that much of its overseas activity has been perfectly legal, at least on the surface: buying ports, mines, agriculture, and other states’ sovereign
debt; building massive infrastructure projects; and so on.
In short, global markets and the legal rules that support them are the most entrenched aspect of the liberal international order. But it’s entirely
legitimate—and I’d argue, accurate—to criticize the labeling of market liberalization as “liberal” whenever free markets are not accompanied by free
people. There is nothing hypocritical in distinguishing between the international order as a whole and those parts of it that are, to varying degrees,
liberal.
The integration of global markets illustrates only one area regulated by the global legal system, a prominent aspect of the international order. (The
international order is also regulated by its political and social conventions, although their content is more subjective.) If you want proof of the legal
dimension of international order, look at what happens when a state wants to move from one set of rules to another, as with Brexit, where the
majority of the debate concerns legal rules.
Of course, all legal rules express deeper power structures, be they military, economic, or
cultural. So, to refer to international order as being rules-based does not entail commitment to a
utopia of rules unmoored from the realities of power: Strong states clearly influence the rules
more. And certain bodies of rules within this order are plainly violated more frequently than
others—for example, those concerning the use of force. But those are still exceptions: Most
states don’t invade one another most of the time, and when the United States has respected
international legal rules in this area, such as in the Persian Gulf War, the results have been
better than in cases where it did not, such as in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Rather than explain these points away as anomalies, I would recognize them as evidence of the
fragility and limitations of the liberal dimensions of the international order. But that recognition
does not imply that the liberal order has no value: All states, after all, have interests that they
cannot achieve on their own and so need to develop rules for working together.
This is a point that even the realist skeptics of liberal international order are prepared to
concede when it comes to issues like climate change. Both Allison and Walt, for example,
express regret that the United States pulled out of the Paris climate change agreement—a
classic instrument of international law. Yet their view that the United States should not have
pulled out of the Paris agreement contradicts the claim that international rules are pointless .
The same can be said for their regret that that Washington pulled out the Iran nuclear
agreement.
Rather than emphasize the contradiction, I would emphasize the realists’ common ground with
liberal internationalism, which could be extended to other global problems: money laundering,
offshore tax evasion, human trafficking, and so on. In short, if the realists didn’t express such
hostility to the theory of consensual international cooperation, they would likely support many
of its specific expressions.
Finally, while I accept the realist view that the West should not try to make the world in its own
image by involuntarily pressing its values on others through the barrel of a gun, that doesn’t
mean that liberal powers shouldn’t push for global rules that instantiate liberal values.
Accommodating others does not mean giving up your own values; it just means recognizing their
proper limits, on a case by case basis.
Indeed, this is what the realists get the most wrong in their tendency to fetishize power over
all else. Politics and political order are downstream from culture, and the power of the United
States ultimately rests on its values. The Cold War was not merely about bare power, but two
ideas of what constitutes a just society. The problem since the end of the Cold War has been
that the United States has no clear standard to define its values against, not least because it has
not pushed back against the disjuncture of capitalism and democracy now evident whenever
autocrats get the benefits of access to the West and Western investment without signing up to
its values.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that, since the early 1990s, the West has traded
material gain for damage to its own values. Now we are seeing the backlash. Don’t believe me?
Just look at all the corrupt offshore money in London property, making prices unaffordable for
ordinary, hardworking young people, and wonder why many of them have lost faith in
capitalism. Values matter in international order, and we can only see that if we reject the
realists’ amoral blinkers.
Ultimately, peace requires a combination of stability and justice. With the Roman Empire
collapsing around him in the fifth century A.D., and contemplating a new order, Augustine writes
in The City of God: “Anyone, then, who is rational enough to prefer right to wrong and order to
disorder can see that the kind of peace that is based on injustice, as compared with that which is
based on justice, does not deserve the name of peace.” In other words, there’s nothing wrong
with the international order, and its liberal dimensions, that can’t be fixed by what’s right
with it.
Burden of proof is on them—risk of offense goes neg.

Gilman-Opalsky ‘10
Richard Gilman-Opalsky. Ph.D .. is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political
Science at the University of Illinois at Springfield – Theory in Action v. 3 no. 2 (April 2010) p. 9-37
Simulacra are, by definition, indistinguishable from real events. Nevertheless, the actual
existence and constant possibility of simulacra are not sufficient causes for adopting reality
agnosticism. It may be impossible to distinguish the fake holdup and fake sickness from the real
holdup and real sickness, but the child has really been sick and most criminals are not playing.
Those involved in staging the act of simulation itself do mostly know the difference. But
Baudrillard would rightly point out that, from the outside, for those of us confronting simulacra
phenomenologically (instead of making them), our general inability to tell the difference means
that we can never be too confident about reality. Reality agnosticism is tantamount to treating
every event as a possible simulacrum. This is the same as to treat no events as real. This is
precisely what Baudrillard wants to do, yet I think this is a mistake. Baudrillard presses us to
recognize that even suffering and death can be and have been simulated (i.e. the Timisoara
Massacre in 1989 in Western Romania, where protestors were gunned down by the army. While
the massacre was real, it was later disclosed that 27 bodies were exhumed from the Timisoara "
Paupers' Cemetery" to exaggerate the massacre for TV effect. This series of events marked the
end of Ceausescu’s Stalinist regime in Romania.) . .l2 However, despite such manipulation. we
do live in a world where suffering and death are real. That even suffering and death could be
staged, and that we cannot always tell when that is the case does not mean that we should
make such suspicion into an operational logic – there is always the other side, the side of actual
suffering and death. Baudrillard makes too much out of the fake, and he errs on the wrong side
of the equation. What I mean by saying "too much"" and "wrong side", is precisely to raise a
normative objection. Wherever we cannot tell the difference (that is, wherever there are
functional simulacra), I contend that we should err on the side of a different obligation. And this
is indeed a moral obligation to take human suffering seriously, an obligation that outweighs the
integrity of Baudrillard's skepticism. To put it bluntly, I would rather be fooled into thinking a
faked death was real than that a real death was faked.
The alt’s inaction does nothing to change “hyperreality”

King ‘98
Professor Anthony King - Sociology and Philosophy - University of Exeter – “Baudrillard's nihilism
and the end of theory” – Teleos – 112 (Summer 1998), pp.89-106
http://eric.exeter.ac.uk/exeter/bitstream/10036/71394/1/King%2520Baudrillard
%2520Telos.pdf
Baudrillard’s later writings to be sustainable, two conditions have to be met. First, Baudrillard’s terrorism — his attempt to communicate
For
hyperreality to the reader immediately, allowing the crystal its revenge — must be theoretically coherent and possible. Second, his description
of hyperreality as a unique transformation of culture, in which an external social reality is eclipsed in the vivid representations of the screen, must be an
accurate account of recent developments. The most sympathetic reading of Baudrillard’s later writings is to read them as literature, as Turner and Mike
Gane do.26 This is a legitimate strategy so long as what is produced is literature. In other words, in demanding that he is no longer writing
sociology, Baudrillard is committing himself to being judged by the equally rigorous, though different standards, which are applied to creative
prose. This is where he falls into difficulties, for his later writing cannot really be said to be creative prose. They retain their academic form and still seek
to provide a commentary on hyperreality. They
do not open up a fragmented world, but rather stand back
from that world, offering detached criticisms and generalizations about it. Baudrillard does not
communicate the vertiginous flicking from one television channel to the other, but comments on the meaning of these changing images. Like the
academic he remains, Baudrillard makes claims about the general features of this culture, rather than using narrative to communicate a message, as is
typical in literature. Moreover, there is no divide between Baudrillard and the narrative itself; there is no ironic use of character or detachment from
the text. His writing is merely an earnest but stripped form of academic writing, which moves from asserted claim to claim, rather than from sustained
claim to claim for the slow but rigorous building of an argument.27 Once his obscure lexicon is deciphered, and readers realize that by “code” and
“matrix” Baudrillard refers to the fact that hyperreal culture simply lives off itself, never coupling with a reality
beyond itself, then his sentences become assertive and static. The
only point he makes is that television culture is
hyperreal — signifiers now float free — and the only way in which this sentence communicates that point is by positing these crude metaphors of
“code” and “matrix.” Stylistically, Baudrillard’s terrorism baldly states that contemporary culture is like a
hologram, a code, a matrix or clone, because it is wholly self-referential but it does not actually
communicate what it is like to experience this culture . Compare this style of writing with J. G. Ballard’s Crash — a novel
providing a very successful (and deliberately obscene) description of postmodern culture. It recognizes that culture’s bodily indulgence, and knows that
it does not liberate the individual but reduces the body to a machine for pleasure, just as the car is a machine for speech. The car-crash and the sexact
are the moments when the wholly technical machineries of the car and the bodies are decomposed in an instant of pain that is transformed (for ironic
effect) into one of intense pleasure for the perverts who populate the book. In communicating this new, debased ethic of bodily pleasure, where the
delight in bodily mutilation parallels a correlating spiritual disfigurement, Ballard describes a questionnaire about car crashes which Vaughan, the
central figure in the book, has prepared and which lists every conceivable injury: “Lastly came that group of injuries which had clearly most preoccupied
Vaughan — genital wounds caused during automobile accidents. . . . the breasts of teenage girls deformed by instrument binnacles, the partial
mammoplasties of elderly housewives carried out by chromium louvres of windshield assemblies, nipples sectioned by manufacturers’ dashboard
medallions; injuries to male and female genitalia caused by steering wheel shrouds, windshields during ejection, crushed door pillars, seat springs and
handbrake units, cassette player instrument toggles.”28 The descriptions Ballard provides of both cars and bodies are wholly technical and anatomical,
emphasizing that, in this culture, both “bodyworks” are (obscenely) reduced to the same level. Against Ballard’s rich, selfdeveloping text, Baudrillard’s
writing is flat and strained. He simply breaks down his academic text into aphoristic gobblets and draws on a lexicon of dead, static metaphors. In the
end, Baudrillardfalls between the two stools of demanding that academic writing is inadequate to
the analysis of hyperreality, but still writing according to its conventions and thereby vitiating
either the academic or the literary merit of his later work. However, even if Baudrillard wanted his later writing to be read as literature
and even if he had been successful in producing text which could be judged as literature, the project of this later writing would still have been
irretrievably self-deluded. Even if his terrorism were a successful form of literature, it could never (as he claims) communicate hyperreality to the
reader directly, for all writing is necessarily mediated; all writing is an interpretation.29 Unavoidably,
his terroristic writing is an
interpretation of hyperreal culture, which does
not obviate the necessity of interpretation , however directly it
tries to communicate hyperreality.
If they’re right, then distortion is so strong that it’s immutable. Better to act
within it.
King ‘98
Professor Anthony King - Sociology and Philosophy - University of Exeter – “Baudrillard's nihilism
and the end of theory” – Teleos – 112 (Summer 1998), pp.89-106 -
http://eric.exeter.ac.uk/exeter/bitstream/10036/71394/1/King%2520Baudrillard
%2520Telos.pdf
Ironically, in trying to present hyperreality immediately, Baudrillard falls into exactly the same
error for which he so effectively criticized Marx. Just as Marx failed to provide a truly radical
alternative to capitalism by employing the concepts of capitalist political economy, Baudrillard’s
fragmented aphorisms are unable to provide a critical alternative to hyperreality, because they
are so thoroughly embedded in and dependent on the very cultural forms they are intended to
oppose. The fragmentation of Baudrillard’s later writing does not serve the critical purpose for
which it was intended, but rather, if it has any effect, it sensitizes the reader to the global media
culture Baudrillard wanted to resist. His attempt to portray a culture in which allegedly there is
no longer any reality beyond its representations, is the academic extension of that culture.
Contrary to his own intentions, it is the very intellectual path he has insisted on taking, which
turns its back on careful research and close critical analysis, which makes the desert of
hyperreality grow. It robs the reader of any critical understanding of contemporary culture.
Moreover, it denies the importance of developing alternative knowledge and understandings,
which would undermine media representations of the world because it asserts that these
alternative visions would always already be incorporated into hyperreality. It is not enough
simply to say that television is a false reality; one must try and reconstruct a reality in which
political freedom and critique are possible, even though any constructed reality must itself
always be subjected to critique. Consequently, against Baudrillard, an appropriate form of
academic resistance would be to insist upon even more rigorously researched and detailed
work.30 In particular, the dialectical method which demands the constant overhaul of concepts,
whereby nothing is taken for granted, would have prevented Baudrillard from falling into the
hyperbolic reification of mere assertions.
Alt Fails
They link to themselves. The alternative can only result the imposition of the
neutral play their kritik criticizes
Baudrillard 76 (Jean, “Symbolic Exchange and Death”, p. 74)
The consummate enjoyment [jouissance] of the signs of guilt, despair, violence and death are
replacing guilt, anxiety and even death in the total euphoria of simulation . This euphoria aims to abolish cause
and effect, origin and end, and replace them with reduplication. Every closed system protects itself in this way from the
referential and the anxiety of the referential, as well as from all metalanguage that the system
wards off by operating its own metalanguage, that is, by duplicating itself as its own critique. In
simulation, the metalinguistic illusion reduplicates and completes the referential illusion (the
pathetic hallucination of the sign and the pathetic hallucination of the real).
Perm
Bridging the gap between modernist and postmodernist critique via the perm is
the best way to solve because it opens the space for productive dialogue—this
is also key to preserving academic spaces as productive locations for social
change
Bloland 95 (Harland G. Bloland, Professor of Higher Education Administration Emeritus
at the University of Miami, “Postmodernism and Higher Education”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2943935.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3A94a64cf59159d0c93e5c945ddec06bc9)//meb
The term postmodern is disappearing from the vocabularies of excluded groups, social
scientists, humanist intellectuals, scholars of all kinds. But postmodern terms and concepts
remain very much alive and in constant use. Postmodernism is disappearing because of its
relativis- tic connotations and because, by accepting the corpus of the postmodern
perspective, a group with a political agenda places its own position in jeopardy. For those drawn
to the postmodern critique, who have political, cultural, social, and/or economic agendas,
including feminists and ethnic and cultural groups, postmodern concepts are an extremely
effective weapon to discredit and delegitimate modernism, the status quo, and colleges and
universities as they are now constituted. How- ever, if the metanarratives of modernism and
higher education have no philosophical foundation, the metanarratives of marginal and
excluded groups do not have essentialist foundations either. This is what engen- ders the
profound ambivalence toward postmodernism of those who are most critical of the current
modernist world. By avoiding the term "postmodernism" and by declining to identify oneself as
a postmodernist, critics may and do continue to use the terminology of postmodernism, while
retaining their own necessary metanarratives to justify their political, cultural agendas. If we
accept the implications of postmodernism and see it as a critique that applies both to
modernists and to those critical of modernism, we can reach a point where the postmodern
stricture to listen and listen very hard and long to the "other" has strong credibility. If neither
side has any foundational credentials, there is space for real and continuing dialogue. The
result of such listening and the pursuit of dialogue under such conditions could mean the
retention in universities and colleges of the values of merit, community, and autonomy, and
their justification in Rorty's terms, on the basis of agreement that these are, in some form, even
as the particulars are contested, an integral part of our higher education heritage. For the
excluded "others" this kind of dialogue could well provide the basis for changing the meaning
and terms of merit, community, and autonomy in ways that are satisfactorily in- clusive and
representative of the plurality of "others"' cultures and politics. Currently, we are precariously
poised between a modern/ postmodern incommensurable hostility and the conditions for
tough authentic dialogue. In higher education our course is clear. We need to increase and
sustain the dialogue, even as we acknowledge that the tension will not, and perhaps should
not, be resolved.
Impact
The idea of hyperreality is a byproduct of postmodernism, not a description of
it—their strategy can’t escape the academy and their claims about the world
require truth claims which is a double turn with Baudrillard’s theory
King 98 (Anthony King, Professor of Government, Political Science, and Public and International
Affairs, “A critique of Baudrillard’s hyperreality: towards a sociology of postmodernity”
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/019145379802400603)//meb
As Jameson (1984) has argued, the emergence of multinational, consumer (and, increasingly,
post-Fordist) capitalism from the 1960s has facilitated the development of postmodern culture
which opposes the restrictiveness of modern culture. In the light of the new demand for
consumption, a cultural superstructure has emerged which emphasizes the indulgence of those
very spheres - such as sexuality - which were deemed dangerous under the productive
Protestant ethic of modernity (Lash, 1991: 42). Postmodernity is, then, above all a culture of
transgression which seeks to breach the cultural boundaries and taboos of modernity and to
revel in the ecstatic liminality of the once restricted. Jameson describes this postmodern
transgression of the categories of modernity (which is linked to a new consumerist ethic) in his
celebrated examination of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. There Jameson describes the
vertiginous feelings which the individual experiences due to the curious use of space in the foyer
of that hotel. Postmodern hyperspace has transcended the capacities of the individual human
body to locate itself, to organise surroundings, to map its position in the mappable world.
(Jameson, 1991: 44) The foyer of the Bonaventure Hotel undermines the certainties and
categories of modernist architecture. The rationality of modern architecture which strictly and
functionally demarcated and divided space is replaced by buildings which deliberately
disorientate individuals and ask them to question their sense of space. Postmodern architecture,
then, subverts the ordered categories of modern architecture and, in that way, Jameson’s
Bonaventure Hotel stands as a shining example of postmodernism and its transgression of the
restrictive rational categories and boundaries of modernity. This notion of postmodernity as the
transgression of the cultural categories which were a central element of modernity and
intrinsically connected to the capitalist economy from the Industrial Revolution to the 1960s
facilitates a dialectical supersession of Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality for Baudrillard’s
hyperreality can, in this context, begin to be seen not as a critical insight into wider postmodern
processes but rather as the epistemological and intellectual aspect of those very processes . Like
the boundaries which would subsequently be drawn up against sexuality, madness and the
Other, Cartesian rationalism analogously drew up a rigorous bulwark against the epistemological
liminality which threatened Descartes at the start of his Meditations. As I have argued,
hyperreality is the moment when Descartes’ extreme doubt has returned to the academy and
we once again find ourselves in the epistemological void of scepticism where we can know
nothing. Baudrillard’s descent into this Cartesian void epistemologically matches the
transgression of modern categories which can be witnessed in many cultural spheres l Like
consumer culture, which subverts the repressive modern norms of sexuality in a demand for
liberation, Baudrillard rejects the rational and certain boundaries of Cartesian ’clear and distinct
ideas’ and resigns himself to the ’deep whirlpool’ of nothingness, although this transgression is
for Baudrillard a moment of profound disillusion rather than liberation . It marks a moment of
transgression where the categories of Truth, certainty and objectivity are transgressed in the
pursuit of nihilism, which was from the outset conceived as the dangerous and liminal Other for
modern rationalism. This epistemological nihilism is an example of postmodernism, in which
there are no more rules and in which anything goes. Not only is this nihilism critically
bankrupt, but it is possible only if the pursuit of an objective Truth is regarded as possible and
desirable in the first place. A dialectical and linguistic approach could never have posited the
existence of a final Truth in the first place and this approach has been similarly untroubled by
fears of an epistemological void. For dialectical and linguistic sociology which situates itself
consciously in a Heideggerian paradigm, linguistic reality is enough in itself - it is not final but
neither is it in need of some metaphysical support. The Heideggerian tradition allows us to
situate Baudrillard’s hyperreality dialectically and to find it sociologically useful, even in the light
of the latter’s abject theoretical poverty.
Debate is separate from the hyperreal and solves the aff.

Robinson 12 – (Andrew, “An A to Z of Theory – Jean Baudrillard and Activism: A critique”,
2012)
Baudrillard’s theory of deterrence needs to be reconsidered in light of recent events. We have seen in 2011 that it is still possible
to create events: the London unrest, the student protests, Occupy, the Wikileaks saga… The system does not actually have the
power on the ground to prevent revolts, occupations, movements. Even the system’s vice-like
grip on future significations is being partially broken through movements like Occupy , which conveys
different future images in its own rhetoric. Anonymous turns the anonymity of statistical indifference into a source
of strength, using tactics based on the very vulnerability to excess the system creates – such as distributed
denial of service attacks (using an excess of web connections) and leaking of documents (relying on the obscene overexposure of information in the Internet). The
difficulty, rather, is in sustaining events and expanding new frames of meaning. The system monopolises and determines the effects of events,
and kettles them in time and space. Firstly the system controls the ways in which events are signified to non-participants.
Secondly the system, having once faced an event, will prepare in detail to prevent it “next time ” – so it is hard for events to
become waves. And thirdly, the system unleashes a dreadful wave of repression after each event, attempting to
foreclose its irruptive force and restore the pervasiveness of terror. Resultant feelings of futility, anxiety and vulnerability are
corrosive of movement-building and of repeated cycles of similar events. The movement of revolt towards a terrain of refusal of meaning is also partly
an effect of the system’s move towards coding. The apparent lack of demands in recent waves of social unrest (e.g. the Mark
Duggan uprising, the banlieue revolt, the Greek insurrection of 2008, the Occupy movement, summit protests), and even many of today’s “terrorists”, is perhaps a
result of the prevalence of the code . The presentation of demands risks reinscription as simply a
militant version of a position already encoded within the system. People respond with actions which counterpose their own
expressiveness to the code. This is also perhaps why theorising the conditions of possibility for an Event has become
such a popular theme in contemporary radical theory. Another possibility could here be added. It is possible, in open-ended surveys, to give
responses deemed too complex to be codable . In principle, a more heterogeneous humanity would
escape the code through each individual’s irreducibility to prior categories . There are also certain texts, such as
Cabal, Argot and Barbarians, which argue for incommunicability as a necessary part of radicalism. The system
demands that everything communicate in its terms. Therefore, esoteric language is an effective
resistance.
Keeping discussions of alterity forefronted in academic spaces is key to
centering marginalized voices. (1ac card is more specific though – ethic of
incommens)
Bloland 95 (Harland G. Bloland, Professor of Higher Education Administration Emeritus
at the University of Miami, “Postmodernism and Higher Education”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2943935.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3A94a64cf59159d0c93e5c945ddec06bc9)//meb
If there is a transformation in higher education, what should it be? Is there a need for a set of
values that transcend group values, for a vocab- ulary that will speak to all groups within the
academy? Or should there be a wide open conglomeration of presumably incommensurate
values, ethics, standards? Some poststructuralist thought seems to indicate that we already
have this incommensurability among discourses. The destruction of the belief in eternal verities
and the attenuation of the drive to search for truth mean that higher education's task may be to
pay much more attention to values, what they mean, where they come from, what their
function is, and how to forge new values that fit the higher education world and its mission.
Because the borders of colleges and universities are becoming more permeable in the
postmodern world and the great sustainers of the in- dependence of higher education, the state
and governments, are becoming weaker, institutions need to find ways of maintaining
autonomy in the face of multinational corporate resources and power, the debilitat- ing effects
of the increased proliferation of active interest groups, and the encroachment of extreme local
power. In the world of simulacra and the power that comes from creating images, the
universities' task may be to seek and sustain a kind of authenticity of information and
knowledge. In this it needs to create a consistent and useful concept of merit; it cannot rely as
heavily upon the strictures of science or the rules of a broken canon. But it needs to sustain the
value of merit and find with all the contradictions, the plural voices , the lack of a sense of
progress, and the continual tension an interest in and pursuit of means for measuring, judging,
and rewarding merit. As the boundary between higher education and the market collapses,
some means for organizing and sustaining autonomous sanctu- aries, oases, or enclaves in
universities should be found that do not simply respond to the drive for performativity and the
standards of the market. Institutions of higher education need ways to construct and sustain
community, and community at several levels : community on the campus and community in the
larger society, a commitment to citizenship. The emphasis upon the other, the marginal, the
outsider, in postmodern thought needs to be kept in the foreground in higher education.
Colleges and universities need to find ways of encompassing the other, of taking in marginal
people and ideas. However, it should not be done in the usual liberal strategy of simply adding
courses on multinational- ism, women's studies, and cultural studies. These need to be included
in academia more on the basis of their own standards. But the argument here is that this
inclusion does not mean that the search for and creation of standards of merit is compromised.
An important means for en- suring this is to follow the advice that a number of postmodern
writers have offered, namely, to listen very hard and openly. As Cornell West has written, "I
hope that we can overcome the virtual de facto segrega- tion in the life of the mind in this
country, for we have yet actually to create contexts in which black intellectuals, brown
intellectuals, red intellectuals, white intellectuals, feminist intellectuals, genuinely struggle
with each other" [98, p. 696]
Baudrillard is racist, sexist, and ableist

Robinson 13(February 7, 2013, Andrew Robinson, “An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard and
Activism: A critique”)
There are serious limits to Baudrillard’s work, in terms of his hostility to ‘minority’ struggles.
Many of his formulations are inadvertently sexist and racist. There are also times
when Baudrillard comes across as ableist in his critiques of the therapeutic. There are also
times when Baudrillard attacks activism in strong terms: Hippies reproduce capitalist ideology;
Feminists displaying images of porn are actually being seductive, against their will; The left is
keeping capitalism alive with its moral critiques and its quests for meaning. There are times
when it is hard to tell if Baudrillard is a reactionary, attacking the concerns of progressives, or
an ultra-left, criticising every rebellion as insufficiently extreme. If one looks past such
problems, however, there are important implications in Baudrillard’s work for emancipatory
practice. Baudrillard’s work was clearly an influence on Negri’s early work. Ideas such as the
reduction of the system to command, the spread of diffuse apparatuses of power and the panic
of the system in the face of its own arbitrariness reappear in texts such as Time for Revolution.
The idea of the ‘code’ or system functioning as a self-propelled irrational machine is also
reminiscent of primitivists such as Fredy Perlman. Baudrillard seems to see the regime of the
code as the high-point of civilisation, in an almost anarcho-primitivist sense. Where he differs
from such analyses is that he sees the core of civilisation not in technology or the domestication
of desire or the ‘political principle’ of state power, but in the denial and suppression of symbolic
exchange. Baudrillard is partly thinking through the issue of diffuse power. In capitalist and
statist social regimes, power is immensely concentrated. He also gives a particular spin to the
distinction between expressive and instrumental. We can link the idea of the ‘code’
to preventionism and its impact on protest. As discussed above, Baudrillard’s idea of initiatory
groups could also be applied to activist ‘neo-sects’. Baudrillard also offers answers to some of
the big questions of today regarding psychological barriers to revolt. The loss of reality might
explain why hope for liberation seems so hard to come by, and why revolutionary movements
now seem to lack a clear vision of transformation. The Immediatist Potlatch would be an
example of gift-exchange as political action. Occupation of the remainders and waste-grounds of
cities has been a constant aspect of dissident practice, from Traveller communities such as Dale
Farm and shanty-towns in the global South, to reclaimed factories used as squats, to projects
such as South Central Farm. Reversibility could also be thought of in terms of vendettas and
cost-imposition. These return to the system the power it exercises, reversing it. Another useful
way to extend Baudrillard’s work is to cross-read it with Open Marxist views of capitalism as a
process which must constantly be reproduced to exist. Simulation is not a finished process. It
has to be constantly repeated in order to be kept active. The process of deterrence (or
counterinsurgency) is therefore an ongoing process.
Sum bards
Please change this to purple highlighting
Richard Delgado 9, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama
Law School, J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national
book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North
America, the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize
nomination. Professor Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and
social change, 2009, “Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about
Law”, p. 588-590
CLS critique of piecemeal reform¶ Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform.
The
Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to
create a decent society. Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to
disguise and legitimize oppression. Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing
to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that
the system is fair and¶ just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the¶ common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching
incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars¶ urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to ﬁnd
The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar,

rationality and order¶ in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion.¶
imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand . The
critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret
events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating
in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order
keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a
comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the
possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now,¶ unless there is evidence for that possibility. The
Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes
closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet
the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their
heated living room. CLS scholars‘ critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and
neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.
Barma 2016 [Naazneen, UC Berkeley political science PhD, “Imagine a World in Which’: Using
Scenarios in Political Science”, International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-20,
http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_is
p_2015.pdf] KA
the “cult of irrelevance” in political science scholarship

Over the past decade, has been lamented by a growing chorus (Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009).
Prominent scholars of i affairs made the case for why political

nternational have diagnosed the roots of the gap between academia and policymaking,
science research is valuable for policymaking , and offered a number of ideas for enhancing the policy relevance of scholarship in international relations and comparative politics (Walt
2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner 2011; Gallucci 2012; Avey and Desch 2014). Building on these insights, several initiatives have been formed in the attempt to “bridge the gap.”2 Many of the specific efforts put in place by these projects
implications of research to the policymaking

focus on providing scholars with the skills, platforms, and networks to better communicate the findings and their
community, a necessary and worthwhile objective for a field in which theoretical debates,
methodological training, and publishing norms tend more and more toward the abstract and
esoteric . Yet enhancing communication between scholars and policymakers is only one component of bridging the gap between international affairs theory and practice. Another crucial component of this bridge is the generation of substantive research
programs that are actually policy relevant—a challenge to which less concerted attention has been paid. The dual challenges of bridging the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many enter the discipline with the explicit hope of
numerous
informing policy. In a field that has an admirable devotion to pedagogical self-reflection, strikingly little attention is paid to techniques for generating policy-relevant ideas for dissertation and other research topics. Although
articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance of experiential and problem-
based learning especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes
,
problem-
(Loggins 2009; Butcher 2012; Glasgow 2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little has been written about the use of such techniques for generating and developing innovative research ideas. This article outlines an experiential and
based approach to developing a political science research program using scenario analysis . It focuses
illuminates
especially on illuminating [ pedagogical benefits ] the research generation and of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in the annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference (NEFPC),
which brings together doctoral students of international and comparative affairs who share a
demonstrated interest in policy-relevant scholarship .3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the practice of scenario analysis and considers the utility of the
We argue that scenario analysis should be viewed as a tool to stimulate problem-

technique in political science.
based learning for doctoral students and discuss the broader scholarly benefits of using scenarios to help generate research ideas. The second section details the manner in which NEFPC deploys scenario analysis. The third section reflects
upon some of the concrete scholarly benefits that have been realized from the scenario format. The fourth section offers insights on the pedagogical potential associated with using scenarios in the classroom across levels of study. A brief conclusion reflects on the
Scenario analysis
importance of developing specific techniques to aid those who wish to generate political science scholarship of relevance to the policy world. What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? is perceived
can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond

most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It
conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected

opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks . The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the
Scenario analysis is typically seen as serving the

technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. thus
purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of

decision making . Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios
Scenarios
deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds .” are thus explicitly not forecasts or
projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-
re depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a

making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they a
narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those
futures thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are
. Good scenarios
plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds . For
example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as
Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold
War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting
techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of
past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment . Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in
most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario
analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent
application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging
scenario analysis technique can be used in foreign

global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate , the
policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping
with more narrow and immediate challenge s . An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of
the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—
the ability of decision makers to imagine

combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet discontinuities in , let alone prepare for,
the policy realm is constrained cognitive bias tendencies by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known such as groupthink and
scenarios help individuals break out of conventional modes of

confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of lies in their ability to
thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate

discontinuities in narratives about the future Imagining alternative future worlds through a .
structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something
altogether different from the known present. The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate
Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us
and develop policy-relevant research programs.
imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner
that highlights policy challenges and opportunities . For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our
responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various
state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized
scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps

states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats,
in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics . The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in
Scenarios
social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. thus
offer , in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda . In practice, achieving this objective requires
careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6
The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about
global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the
emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into
parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the
scenario discussions lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic
themselves, as described below,
biases explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as
.8 An
the analytical process around them The —that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). use of
scenario modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the

s is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it
resulting effects scenarios are

(Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our
deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold . As such,
forward-
counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while
looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical
dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge . We see
scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct
scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The
scenario analysis employs templates to serve as a graphical representation of a

process itself (discussed further below)
structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered
comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge
structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session
(King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this
emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research
agendas . The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are
typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the
topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research
funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—
in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be
scenarios analyzed
of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could
are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in
develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and
the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now This .
timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events
analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction . In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass,
participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the
assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal
junctures that arise in international affairs.
Asen 17 (Robert Asen is a Professor in the Communication Arts Department and an affiliate at
the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2010, he
received the National Communication Association Winans-Wichelns Award. “Neoliberalism, the
public sphere, and a public good.” Published August 2017.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00335630.2017.1360507?
scroll=top&needAccess=true . Web. DA: 11/8/17) [JK]
Even as it raises serious challenges for models and practices of a multiple public sphere,
neoliberalism does not dispense with publicity. Indeed, neoliberalism in its various forms
circulates among the nodes of a networked public sphere. Neoliberalism challenges modes of
critical publicity by aligning publics with its own vision of individuals and their interactions.
Recalling the presumption of a bourgeois public, a neoliberal public disregards difference and
discounts inequality to reassert a singular and universal model of publicity. To the degree to
which it exerts force across a network, a neoliberal public obfuscates the diversity of the
network in which it circulates. A neoliberal public exhibits distinct qualities and assumes
alternative functions than a networked public sphere operating with a dynamic public good. To
understand this neoliberal public, we first must recognize that scholars have used the term
neoliberalism to refer to related but multiple developments and objects. Engaging the wide-
ranging contemporary scholarship on the topic, Simon Springer observes that four prominent
versions of neoliberalism circulate in the literature: neoliberalism as dominant ideology;
neoliberalism as policy framework; neoliberalism as state form; and neoliberalism as mode of
self-governance.39 As Springer notes, these versions may overlap. If we understand ideology as
a set of political beliefs and principles, then we may discern a form of neoliberalism in the
discourse of advocates who champion the superiority of markets. Yet, this very example lends
itself to a policy program of privatization, and it reimagines the state through a market model.
While the qualities and functions of a neoliberal public link to these variations, public sphere
scholars may offer a distinctive contribution by considering how neoliberalism, as a dominant
social force, shapes the subjectivities of people who act in the public sphere as well as their
perceived and 40 enacted relations to one another. The figure of an atomized individual stands
at the center of a neoliberal public. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
opened with an unequivocal assertion of the place of the individual: To the free man, the
country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. ...
He [they] recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which
the citizens severally strive. 41 n rebuking "something over and above" individuals, in denying
shared purpose, Friedman gainsaid the existence of coordinated action as anything other than
an infringement on individual prerogative. Whereas public sphere scholars like Hannah Arendt
have discerned a power in human relationships that "springs up between Ipeoplel when they act
together, Friedman denied this potentiality. Elected officials, too, have voiced this indi- vidualist
orientation. In his first inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan recast the progressive
narrative of the American Dream "to privilege the individual as the hero, rather than the
community. "43 Like Friedman, Reagan grounded his view of the nation in individuals, and he
did so in celebratory terms. At other times, censure has replaced celebration when individuals
fail to reach their economic goals, or even economic survi- ability, since individuals alone bear
the responsibility for their actions. Writing about the circulation of the "mortgage delinquent" in
the 2008 housing market crisis in the United States, Megan Foley explains that this figure
enforced neoliberal self-discipline by scolding debtors to "grow up, take responsibility, and
repay their loans." At the same time, this figure "minimized the scope of the mortgage crisis by
pinning the blame on 'irresponsible' individuals who made 'risky' financial decisions. Just as an
emphasis on an atomized individual denies coordinated action, it occludes structural
deficiencies. In a neoliberal public sphere, individuals may exercise the fundamental value of
freedom, defined generally as the ability of individuals to act as they please without coer- cion
or constraint, but narrowly imagined as the freedom of market actors. Recalling a lineage of
classical liberalism, Friedman upheld "freedom as the ultimate goal and the individual as the
ultimate entity in society." 45 Freedom supposedly brought limitless possibilities—individuals
could decide best how they would live their lives; what they valued; with whom they would
interact and how. However, in flattening society in the image of the market , Friedman and other
neoliberals restricted freedom to the freedom of market actors. 46 Democratic connotations of
freedom as self-rule or "participation in rule by the demos," notes Brown, gave "way to
comportment with a market instrumental rationality that radically constrains both choices and
ambitions. ... No longer is there an open question of how to craft the self."47 In this shift,
freedom also dissociates from other democratic values like equality and justice. Illuminating
the implications of this move, Friedman contrasted the virtuous action of the free individual
against the paternalistic and coercive actions of the state. Any effort by governing institutions to
seek equality and pursue justice could never be genuine because it required the imposition of
state control on the free will of individuals. As Paul Turpin notes, Friedman presented a stark
choice: either citizens 48 could defend freedom or submit to state control and, ultimately,
totalitarianism. However, as I discuss below, Friedman and other neoliberals supported state
action when they regarded it as serving the market. Unable to draw on coordinated action for
social change, the neoliberal public subject only may act as an individual to change oneself in
the image of the market. In this manner, neoliberalism redirects social concerns inward.
Operating as a competitive market actor does not occur naturally; rather, individuals must
develop their competitiveness. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval explain that the neoliberal
subject must work on oneself constantly "to survive competition." Success requires
consideration of one's activities as "an investment, a cost calculation. The economy becomes a
personal discipline. Dardot and Laval maintain that the self-improvement of the neoliberal
subject does not constitute an exercise in delayed gratification; one does not mold oneself as a
market actor to accumulate the financial means for self-fulfillment in a non-market activity later
in life. Work appears as its own end. Neoliberalism "makes work the privileged vehicle of self-
realization: it is by succeeding professionally that one makes a 'success' of one's life."50
Neoliberalism subsumes other motivations and goals, such as obtaining an education or
cultivating a friendship, under the singular framework of maximizing one's competitive
advantage. An individual economic actor, the neoliberal public subject appears as a " universal"
that obfuscates its own particularity as well as the challenges faced by those who cannot
seamlessly identify with its mode of subjectivity. On the question of gender, as Brown
suggests, neoliberalism both ignores and exacerbates the difficulties that women face in
adopting the position of homo oeconomicus, since women remain disproportionately
responsible for the familial activities that neoliberalism regards as outside of the market. In this
way, neoliberalism both intensifies and transforms a gendered division of labor. Intensification
appears in the privatization of public infrastructures that support families and children.
Transformation occurs through erasure of a public language for identifying and addressing the
unequal impact of neoliberal policy change. As Brown writes, "women both require the visible
social infrastructure that neoliberalism aims to dismantle through privatization and are the
invisible infrastructure sustaining a world of putatively self-investing human capitals." 51 For
Nancy Fraser, this subjugation appears in the language of emancipation, as neoliberal policy co-
opts the feminist critique of the traditional roles of breadwinner and homemaker. Supplanting
the gendered "family wage" of the post-World War Il era in Western economies, neoliberal
policy romanticizes "female advancement and social justice" but undermines the very conditions
and infrastructure necessary for advancement and justice.52 On a global scale, observes
Rebecca Dingo, neoliberalism sets "women on a path toward formal market activities without
recognizing the wide-reaching vectors of oppression and exploitation that impoverish women.
"53 In these ways, policymakers have championed markets as a universal prescrip- tion for
national and international development without regard to context and conditions of
exploitation. Neoliberalism also ignores the role of race and racism on the formation and agency
of public subjectivities. A neoliberal public, as Darrel Wanzer-Serrano observes, operates "by an
active suppression of 'race' as a legitimate topic or term of public discourse and public policy.
"54 Instead, neoliberalism's emphasis on individual responsibility renders race as an antiquated
category and racism as a problem of the past. 55 Bradley Jones and Roopali Mukherjee explain
that a neoliberal public presents a "socially progressive politics by articulating a colorblind,
cosmopolitan, post-race subject, while characterizing as 'back- wards' or 'racist' those who
invoke racial claims. "56 If there are only individuals, then charges of racism and sexism, which
associate individuals with broader categories and implicate agency in structure, deny individual
autonomy and serve only to "excuse" personal failings. Jones and Mukherjee hold that
neoliberalism depoliticizes and privatizes difference, such that " culture becomes a matter of
individual choice. "57 These moves replace a dialectic of agency and structure with an exclusive
focus on agency, and they bracket the relationship between subjectivity, agency, and power.
The neoliberal subject appears as a new bourgeois subject. The cases of gender and race
illuminate a uniform neoliberal discounting of particularity and difference, which extends to
class, sexuality, ethnicity, and more. Presuming universality, the neoliberal subject fails to
recognize how particularity matters, especially for those whose differences complicate their
enactment of this putative universal. This lack of recognition carries considerable weight, since,
as Wendy Hesford explains, "recognition affords legibility to certain bodies and social
relationships and not to others. "58 Neoliberalism cannot see the particularity of its public
subject nor the varying advantages and disadvantages that the presumed adoption of homo
oeconomicus places on the diverse subjects of a pluralistic society. This lack of recognition
propagates resource disparities for people whose particularities carry additional
responsibilities and burdens that complicate the economic rationality ascribed to homo
oeconomicus. A neoliberal public operates by the principle of competition rather than the
coordinated action of a networked public sphere operating with a dynamic public good. For a
neoliberal public, competition frames social relations as a zero-sum game; one person's
success and standing appear at the expense of another. In contrast to models of the public
sphere and practices that seek wider opportunities for agency, a neoliberal public presents
actors with strategic advantages in limiting the agency and denying the autonomy of others.
This constitutes a brutal embrace of, in Mouffe's terms, "the potential antagonism that exists in
human relations." Mouffe recognizes the value of contestation for publicity, but she argues that
productive conflict requires a move from antagonism to agonism, which constructs an other in
such a way that it is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an "adversary,"
that is, somebod whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do 9 not put
into question. While agonism brings together conflict and reciprocity—which intimate, as
Mouffe suggests, "some common ground"—antagonism and neoliberal competition emphasize
conflict without reciprocity, which appears as a corollary of turning social commitments inward .
In this vein, denying another's voice or disavowing relationships with others may remove
competitive obstacles to one's own success. Shifting from a laissez-faire view of market and
state relations, neoliberalism enjoins the state to take actions that bolster competition. As Jamie
Peck explains, Friedman and other neoliberal theorists "expressly sought to transcend the 'naive
ideology' of laissez-faire, in favor of a 'positive' conception of the state as the guarantor of a
competitive order." 60 Through privatization and trade agreements, the state may create
markets. Through the reduction or elimination of social safety nets, the state may compel
market behavior. Through various means, notes Sanford Schram, neoliberalism "restructures
the state to operate consistently with market logic in order to better promote market-compliant
behavior by as many people as possible."61 Concordant with a rise in income inequality in the
United States, the contemporary disinvestment in and privatization of public institutions by
state officials creates particular hardships for low-income and minority communities, who
depend more on these institutions and may lack the resources, for example, to send children to
well-funded private schools. Faced with few options, members of marginalized groups confront
a choice: either internalize a market model or suffer as a "disposable population" that a
restructured state has made "less of a burden on the rest of society. "62 Oftentimes, this
putative choice generates both outcomes— discipline and suffering. While articulating
relationships through a public good to enable coordinated action may promote equality,
inequality functions as the condition and end of competition. To win, we must become
unequal to others. Inequality is not a social problem warranting redress for a neoliberal public,
but a necessary part of its dynamic operation. As Maurizio Lazzarato explains, "for the
neoliberals, the market can operate as regulatory principle only if competition is made the
regulatory principle of society. "63 Yet, as Lazzarato and 64 others observe, markets are not
natural. Markets must be constructed and maintained. The disciplinary force of neoliberalism
serves to compel people to act according to market logics. Towards this end, inequality serves a
valuable, motivating purpose: "Only inequality has the capacity to sharpen appetites, instincts
and minds, driving individuals to rivalries."65 Neoliberalism draws on inequality for its very
existence.
Merrin 01 (William, Prof. of School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, “To play
with phantoms: Jean Baudrillard and the Evil Demon of the Simulacrum” Economy and Society
Volume 30 Number 1)
The power of the simulacrum, therefore, may prove to be greater than Baudrillard realized. On
a personal level this is certainly the case. In a candid 1984–5 interview he reveals that his
courtship of its demon became an unlivable experience: ‘I stopped working on simulation. I felt I
was going totally nuts’ (1993a: 105). The simulacrum, however, could not be so easily disposed
of. Despite his desire to ‘cast off this yoke of simulacres and simulation’ (1993a: 184), the
‘simulacrum’ has thrived, becoming an idea popularly and irrevocably identified with
Baudrillard. It has, appropriately, exerted its simulacral power to appear in the popular
imagination as the real philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, eclipsing his critique, and all other
aspects of his work and career. Journalistic commentary and student texts are typical here in
identifying the simulacrum as Baudrillard’s sole approved project. Thus the problem of finding
Baudrillard’s flat is turned into an obvious and banal hook by one interviewer, who takes the
opportunity to enquire whether ‘Baudrillard himself . . . might be a simulacrum’: Does he really
exist? (Leith 1998: 14). More importantly for Baudrillard, however, is the simulacral efficacy of
doubling – the theoretical strategy of employing simulation which, quite naturally, has a
simulacral effect. The theory of simulation Baudrillard did not believe in has now been realized:
as the Japanese interviewer makes clear, the simulacrum has become reality. Volatized in, and
as, the real, its victory is the concept’s defeA2: once it is ‘true’, the simulacrum becomes a
commonplace, robbed of its capacity to arouse the world’s denial and thus its critical force: if
there is nothing beyond the simulacrum then it is not even open to question but is simply ‘our
absolute banality, our everyday obscenity’ (Zurbrugg 1997: 11). Hence Baudrillard’s emphasis
upon the theoretical challenge of the simulacrum. Once realized, unless – as Baudrillard hopes –
it can itself be reversed against simulation, then this critical function is lost. Opposing Baudrillard
with the simulacrum – with its success – is, therefore, the most effective means of critique. For
his work is not wrong, but too true: the simulacrum has become reality and this is his end; the
game is over. It is, therefore, in the hyperdefence of Baudrillard that we find a means of leaving
him behind. With his success, Baudrillard disappears. If we want him to survive, we must
condemn him as a nihilistic proponent of the simulacrum and oppose him with an outraged ,
vituperic, moral appeal to reality, as Kellner and Norris do; thereby restoring his work to life.
For, if it is only in its contradiction that it can live as a provocation and diabolical challenge, then
once it is true this ends. Kellner and Norris, therefore, may yet prove to be Baudrillard’s greatest
defenders. Baudrillard, of all people, should have anticipated his disappearance, for the
simulacrum’s demonic power rests also in its attraction for, and hold over, humanity. Aristotle,
for example, recognized this, writing of this instinctive pleasure of imitation in man, ‘the most
imitative of living creatures’ (1997: 5), while Nietzsche also speaks of ‘the delight in simulation’
and of its effects in ‘explod- ing as a power that pushes aside one’s so-called “character”, 􏰝
ooding it and at times extinguishing it’ (1974: para. 361). One courts this demon, therefore, at
one’s own risk, as it captivates and ovearwhelms our personality. As the author of the Psalms
cautioned the makers and worshippers of idols, ‘they that make them are like unto them: so is
everyone who trusteth in them’ (Barasch 1992: 20). The efficacy of simulation and the danger of
disappearance are key themes in Roger Caillois’ influential essay on animal mimicry and the
mimetic instinct – no less powerful in insects than in man (Caillois 1984). The instinct of mimesis
parallels primitive magic, Caillois says, though it is a mimetic spell which is too strong for those
who cast it. For the insects it is a spell which has ‘caught the sorcerer in his own trap’ (1984: 27)
– Phylia, for example, ‘browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves’ (1984: 25).
So, Caillois argues, simulation absorbs the simulator, leading to their mimetic ‘assimilation to the
surroundings’ with a consequent ‘psychasthenic’ loss of distinction, personality, and also, in a
thanatophilic movement, the loss of the signs of life itself (1984: 28, 30). Simulation, therefore, 􏰜
nally overwhelms the simulator: as Caillois warns in the epigram which opens his article, ‘Take
care: when you play with phantoms, you may become one’ (1984: 17). So Baudrillard’s game has
the same result. If the simulacrum has been realized; if simulation is now our everyday banality,
then Baudrillard is condemned to a lifeless disappearance as a sorcerer trapped by his own
magical invocation, absorbed by his own simulation. Baudrillard may not believe in the ghost of
the simulacrum, but he himself becomes this very ghost. His game with phantoms ends, as
Caillois knew it would, with his own phantasmatic transformation, with his apparitional
disappearance. But this is only fitting, for in the pact with the devil it is always your soul that is
the stake.

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Inspirational Quotes That Must be Included

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”

“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”

“Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.”

“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia,

“All societies end up wearing masks.”

“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence”

“SeDuciR es MoRir ComO ReaLidaD y reProDuciRse CoMo IlusiOn”

“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish-fulfillment”

“Whereas representation attempts

“All we have left of liberty is an ad-man's illusion.”

“Every set of phenomena, whether cultural totality or sequence of events, has to be

“Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.”

“Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects,

“Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary

“The disaffection, neurosis, anguish and frustration encountered by psychoanalysis comes no

“Mass(age) is the message.”

“Bir katliami unutmak da katliam turunden bir seydir.”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY?”

“Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.”

“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be

“We live of seduction, but die Fascination”

“I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned" - mirror of a paradoxical mockery,

“When everything is social, suddenly nothing is.”

“vivimos de la seducción, pero morimos de la fascinación”

“Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into

“Tukenmeye baslayan bir politika dunyasiyla birlikte Cumhurbaskanlari, ilkel toplumlarda

“If it could, capitalism would make due with white rats.”

“Estamos portanto no ponto paradoxal em que as massas se recusam ao batismo do social,

“Bu noktada Bourdieu’ nün şu saptamasına katılmamak mümkün değil: “Güç ilişkilerinin

“Imperativo de produção de sentido que se traduz pelo imperativo incessantemente renovado

“nós somos apenas episodicamente condutores de sentido, no essencial e em profundidade

“Il Nuovo Ordine Mondiale è disneico.”

“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.”

“At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.”

“O êxtase é antinômico da paixão.”

“Çünkü günümüzde sistem kendini herkese maksimum söz hakkı tanıyarak, maksimum

“İnsanı mucizevî bir yöntemle “rasyonel” davranışlara sahip bir varlığa indirgeyebilmek

“Hayvanları aşağıladığımızı gösteren en belirgin işaret kendilerine karşı beslediğimiz

“Artık çocuklar da konuşmaktadır. Çocuklar, artık büyüklerin evreni dışında kalan

“Ogni “trasparenza” pone immediatamente il problema del suo contrario, il segreto.”

“Ma è così sicuro che la corruzione debba essere sradicata?”

“não há equivalente ao caráter cego, não-representativo, desprovido de sentido, do ato

“A forma é a de um jogo, não de um sistema de representação - semiurgia e estratégia, não

“We are simplified by technical manipulation”

“We are simplified by technical manipulation.

We are engaged in an orgy of discovery, exploration and 'invention' of the Other .

I. Introduction This article is an autobiographical encounter with Baudrillard and

War porn is like debaters watching TV about TV watching TV

ideological site for the negotiation of postcoloniality, hyperreality allows

as one is continuously aware of being a part of simulations, a world of consumption,

The code is really fucked up and probs coopts the aff

Baudrillard’s concept of the Code was clearly influenced by the development of

In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981) Baudrillard began to

In ‘The Orders of Simulacra’, Baudrillard (1995) outlines the stages of the

In Symbolic Exchange and Death Baudrillard (1983c: 20) announces the end of

Wright 15. Michelle Wright, professor of African American studies at

When a linear spacetime epistemology begins, as many Black diasporic

The constant attempt to pre-empt and end conflict before it

Simulation is also associated with a process Baudrillard terms deterrence. This

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

Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a central role in the