USFSP DEBATE/ ADA Nationals Baudrillard Critiques The

Critiques

The Catastrophe Fix

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Catastrophe Fix 2NC Overview

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Catastrophe Fix 2NR Overview

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Disaster Porn

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Disaster Porn Overview

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Commodification of Suffering

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We Search for Images

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Nuclear Hyperreality

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Nuclear Hyperreality 2NC Overview

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Nuclear Hyperreality 2NR Overview

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Proliferation Stops War

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Proliferation Stops War Overview

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Illusion of War

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Illusion of War Overview

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Biosphere 2

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Biosphere 2(NC) Overview

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Biosphere 2(NR) Overview

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Maleficent Ecology

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Maleficent Ecology 2NC Overview

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Maleficent Ecology 2NR Overview

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Maleficent v. Deep Ecology 1AR

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Sentimentality to Animals

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Sentimentality to Animals Overview

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Global v. Universal

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Global v. Universal 2NC Overview

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Global v. Universal 2NR Overview

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Globalization of Violence

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Globalization of Violence Overview

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Spirit of Terrorism

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Spirit of Terrorism Overview

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Infection of Democracy

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Culture Crash

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Culture Crash Overview

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Counter-Kritiks

Shadow-Boxing the System

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Shadow-Boxing Overview

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Strategic Passivity

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Strategic Passivity Overview

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Infinite Remainder

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Feminist Plastic Surgery

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Feminist Plastic Surgery Overview

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Implosion of the State

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Imperialism as Anti-Imperialism

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Viral Communism

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Power Lashing Out

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Power Lash Out Overview

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The Debt

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Debt Overview

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Simulation of Politics

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Media Information Sucks

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Banishing the Right

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Banishing the Right Overview

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Disney World

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Radical Thought Alternative

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2NC Answers

Our Framework

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Framework Overview

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Aff Doesn’t Get to Pick Framework

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A2: Perm

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A2: Postmodernism is Bad

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A2: We Still Solve!

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A2: Need a Textual Alternative

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Affirmative Answers

A2: Disaster Porn

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Must Engage System

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Alternative Fails

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The Catastrophe Fix

The images of catastrophe and destruction they present are like a drug, used by the first world nations to feed off the suffering of the rest of the world. Their efforts to solve these problems are coproductive with the disasters themselves, and this constant search for new spectacle will lead to the destruction of the human species as the ultimate reality TV show.

Baudrillard in 94 [Jean, “The Illusion of the End” p. 66-71]

We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' [['autre monde]. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental

exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history.

The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental

Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them

- is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it

(which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of

Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the

Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty.

Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal

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USFSP DEBATE/ ADA N ATIONALS

B AUDRILLARD suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely.

In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the

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B AUDRILLARD human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy – by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race.

No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since their drama has now been overtaken by that of the overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of congestion, saturation, super abundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the drama of the excess of means over ends – calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and poverty. That is where the most imminent danger of catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out of emptiness. Artificial catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress much more quickly than natural ones. The underdeveloped are still at the primary stage of the natural, unforeseeable catastrophe. We are already at the second stage, that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is our pursuit of the means for averting natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us there. Because it is unable to escape it, humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because it cannot accept being confronted with an end which is uncertain or governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species.


B AUDRILLARD

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Catastrophe Fix 2NC Overview

Why is reality television so popular? People don’t like to exist in their own lives

– the vicarious experience of other’s problems is one of the great joys of the modern age. Extend our Baudrillard 94 evidence.

Baudrillard says that images of destruction, catastrophe and disaster are exaggerated by the media and used to give pleasure to those in the first world at the expense of everyone else. As a society, we export death and import back its image, drawing satisfaction from the exploitation of other people and cultures and our efforts to solve the problems that we actually enjoy so much.

The affirmative is a perfect example of this process – their harms detail disaster in the status quo which they provide a simulated solution to through fiat, all in an effort to make themselves feel powerful in this exchange of suffering.

Their supposed solution is a part of this process – they will never actually fix all the problems they claim, because then they would be left without a source of enjoyment. Even if their solution does work, it will have the side effect of creating more suffering to continue the cycle. A perfect example of this is Iraq

– we get all worked up over what a terrible person Saddam is and the damage he could cause, so we go remove him to improve the situation, but now there’s been an explosion of porn, drugs and violence in Iraq after the invasion so we can continue to consume the images of disorder and trouble and justify even more interventions, which makes their harms are inevitable.

Also, this quest for more sources of suffering is a constantly expanding process.

Once we run fix some problems, we have to generate more to keep the images flowing, encouraging artificial tragedies to replace natural ones. This mindset ends in human extinction as the ultimate spectacle.

If you buy into this system of representation by giving them the ballot, you’re helping the cycle of catastrophe to continue. Instead, strategic indifference is required. Don’t acknowledge their images. When there is no more demand for suffering, the supply will decrease as well, making the problems obsolete.

Note that we don’t ask you to ignore suffering in the real world – Baudrillard has no problem with helping people out. It’s only in the context of this debate round and the illusion of fiat, which has no relevance to the real world, that you should refuse to be moved by images of catastrophe. Also, we can advocate

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B AUDRILLARD the plan as a good idea minus the images they present – the affirmative can’t sever out of the discourse they already used, but we can advocate the rest of the plan as a good idea and get the same advantages.

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B AUDRILLARD

Catastrophe Fix 2NR Overview

Extend the Baudrillard 94 evidence. They miss some key points from my last overview, so extend:

First, their harms are exaggerated by the media to get a response from the people, so their harms are either completely false or at best not as bad as they claim.

Second, their claims of disaster going on in the status quo are part of a process where we use the suffering of the rest of the world for our own vicarious enjoyment. Because they require this suffering to feel powerful by supposedly solving it, their plan is masking the problem at best, while perpetuating the exchange of pain and death that makes all their harms possible.

Third, if they do solve their harms, they will require new catastrophes to keep getting their fix, so solving the case requires the creation of a new area of disaster to be acted upon, which makes the case harms self-replicating.

Fourth, this constant search for new sources of suffering terminates in human extinction as an artificial catastrophe and the ultimate spectacle. That’s an immediate reason to reject the affirmative.

Fifth, the only way out is strategic indifference and refusing to be moved by their images of disaster. Giving them the ballot acknowledges the harms and lets the cycle continue – only by not giving them recognition can we escape.

This is particularly applicable to debate, which is exclusively simulation, so you can still authentically help people in the real world, just don’t buy their images in here.

Sixth, you can still get all the advantages of their case with a negative ballot.

Removing the demand for catastrophe decreases the supply as well, and more importantly, you can advocate the plan without advocating the images by going negative – they’re stuck with their discourse, but we can say plan itself is a good idea, even if the justifications for it aren’t. That’s an easy negative ballot right there, even if the 3 case turns above weren’t.

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B AUDRILLARD

Disaster Porn

Death and disaster are employed by the media to shock and titillate the viewer, which turns the event itself into a form of mass entertainment that loses any reference to the real world but must constantly be given credibility by new images of destruction.


In the case of the Romanian revolution, it was the faking of the dead in Timisoara which aroused a kind of moral indignation and raised the problem of the scandal of 'disinformation' or, rather, of information itself as scandal.

It was not the dead that were the scandal, but the corpses being pressed into appearing before the television cameras, as in the past dead souls were pressed into appearance in the register of deaths. It was their being taken hostage, as it were, and our being held hostage too, as mystified TV viewers. Being blackmailed by violence and death, especially in a noble and revolutionary cause, was felt to be worse than the violence itself, was felt to be a parody of history.

All the media live off the presumption of catastrophe and of the succulent imminence of

death. A photo in Liberation, for example, shows us a convoy of refugees 'which, some time after this shot was taken, was to be attacked by the Iraqi army'. Anticipation of effects, morbid simulation, emotional blackmail. It was the same on CNN with the arrival of the Scuds.

Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the virtual, that hysteria of the virtual

- not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as real to be consumed as unreal.

In the past, to show something up as a fake, we said: 'It's just play-acting', 'It's all romance!',

'It's put on for the cameras!'. This time, with Romania and the Gulf War, we were able to say,

'It's just TV!'

Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative, and hence without negativity and without reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to events. At a stroke, the contagion of images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering produces information as catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image?

However this may be, that image raises the problem of its indifference to the world, and thus of our indifference to it - which is a political problem. When television becomes the strategic space of the event, it sets itself up as a deadly self-reference, it becomes a bachelor machine. The real object is wiped out by news – not merely alienated, but abolished. All that remains of it are traces on a monitoring screen.

Many Romanian eyewitness accounts speak of being dispossessed of the event in this way, deprived of the lived experience they have of it by being submerged in the media network, by being placed under house arrest in front of their television screens. Spectators then become exoterics of the screen, living their revolution as an exoticism of images, themselves exogenous, touristic spectators of a virtual history. From the moment the studio becomes the strategic centre, and the screen the only site of appearance, everyone wants to be on it at

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B AUDRILLARD all costs, or else gathers in the street in the glare of the cameras, and these, indeed, actually film one another. The street becomes an extension of the studio,

<<continued>>

Disaster Porn

<<Baudrillard 94 continued>> that is, of the non-site of the event, of the virtual site of the event. The street itself becomes a virtual space. Site of the definitive confusion of masses and medium, of the real-time confusion of act and sign.

There is no will to communicate in all this. The only irresistible drive is to occupy this non-site, this empty space of representation which is the screen. Representation (political representation too) is currently a trough of depression - meteorological depression - which the media fill up with their turbulences, with the same consequences as occur when any kind of space is suddenly depressurized. The highest pressure of news corresponds to the lowest pressure of events and reality [Ie reel].

The same unrealism in the Ceausescu trial. It is not the judicial procedure itself which is scandalous but the video tape, unacceptable as the only, bloodless trace of a bloody event. In the eyes of the whole world, this will remain an event forever suspect, for the sole reason of its - strangely obscene - scenic abduction. This hidden jury, its voice striking out against the accused, these defendants we are forced to see even though they are virtually dead, these dead prisoners shot a second time to meet the needs of news. One might even wonder whether the actors in this staged event were not deliberately trying to make themselves seem suspect in the eyes of world opinion, as though playing at sabotaging their image. At the same time, the Ceausescu trial was pulled off perfectly as a video production, betraying a sharp sense of the image function, the blackmail-function, the deterrence- function. Deep down, the intuitive grasp of these things has grown more sophisticated over there, in the shadow of dictatorship, than it has with us. We have nothing to teach them. For, if the Romanians themselves got high on this media speculation which served them as a revolutionary aphrodisiac, they also dragged all the Western media into the same news demagogy. By manipulating themselves, they caused us spontaneously to swallow their fiction. We bear the same responsibility as they do.

Or, rather, there is no responsibility anywhere. The question of responsibility cannot even be raised. It is the evil genius of news which promotes such staging.

When information gets mixed in with its source, then, as with sound waves, you get a feedback effect - an effect of interference and uncertainty. When demand is maximal (and everywhere today the demand for events is maximal), it short-circuits the initial situation and produces an uncontrollable response effect. That is, ultimately, why we do the Romanians an injustice when we accuse them of manipulation and bad faith. No one is responsible. It is all an effect of the infernal cycle of credibility. The actors and the media sensed obscurely that the events in Eastern Europe had to be given credibility, that that revolution had to be lent credibility by an extra dose of dead bodies. And the media themselves had to be lent credibility by the reference to the people. Leading to a vicious circle of credibility, the result of which is the decredibilizing of the revolution and the events themselves. The logical

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B AUDRILLARD sequence of news and history turns back against itself, bringing, in its cyclical movement, a kind of deflation of historical consciousness.

The Americans did just the same in the Gulf War. By the excessive nature of their deployment and stagecraft, by putting their power and news control so extravagantly to the test, they decredibilized both war and news. They were the Ubus of their wn power, just as the

Romanians were the Ubus of their own mpotence. Excess itself engenders the parody which invalidates the facts. And, just as the principle of economics is wrecked by financial speculation, so the principle of politics [Ie politique] and history is wrecked by media speculation.

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B AUDRILLARD

Disaster Porn Overview

Extend our Baudrillard 94 evidence. Here’s the argument.

The media transforms real events, death, destruction, etc. into the unreal, as part of your TV screen and newspaper, images to be consumed by masses of people. This devalues the event, because it is reduced to a spectator sport instead of a unique occurrence. Their plan is a perfect example of this – they outline all sorts of terrible problems in the status quo in an effort to get you, the judge, to believe them as the “real.” Their playing the role of the media implicates them in the production of the real to be consumed as unreal.

This process creates the information itself as the catastrophe, and devalues the lives of those who are actually dying due to the harms they outline. Also, the demand for death to lend credibility to their political program of choice leads to an increase in its supply – the more destruction people want to see, the more will be provided, guaranteeing their harms will be reproduced far into the future as a result of the destructive images they present.

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B AUDRILLARD

Commodification of Suffering

Bereft of values, our society demands images of suffering from others to replenish our moral sentiment. We exchange our pity for their pain, in a process that guarantees the suffering must continue.

Baudrillard in 94 [Jean, September 28, "No Reprieve For Sarejevo"]

The problem lies indeed in the nature of our reality. We have got only one, and it must be preserved. Even if it is by the use of the most heinous of all paroles: "One must do something.

One cannot remain idle." Yet, to do something for the sole reason that one cannot do nothing never has been a valid principle for action, nor for liberty. At the most it is an excuse for one's own powerlessness and a token of self-pity. The people of Sarajevo are not bothered by such questions. Being where they are, they are in the absolute need to do what they do, to do the right thing. They harbour no illusion about the outcome and do not indulge in self-pity. This is what it means to be really existing, to exist within reality. And this reality has nothing to do with the so-called objective reality of their plight, which should not exist, and which we do so much deplore. This reality exits as such - it is the stark reality of action and destiny.

This is why they are alive, while we are dead. This is why we feel the need to salvage the reality of war in our own eyes and to impose this reality (to be pitiable) upon those who suffer from it, but do not really believe in it, despite the fact they are in the midst of war and utter distress. Susan Sontag herself confesses in her diaries that the Bosnians do not really believe in the suffering which surrounds them. They end up finding the whole situation unreal, senseless, and unexplainable. It is hell, but hell of what may be termed a hyperreal kind, made even more hyperreal by the harassment of the media and the humanitarian agencies, because it renders the attitude of the world towards them even less unfathomable. Thus, they live in a kind of ghost-like war - which is fortunate, because otherwise, they would never have been able to stand up to it. These are not my words, by the way: they say it so. But then Susan

Sontag, hailing herself from New York, must know better than them what reality is, since she has chosen them to incarnate it. Or maybe it is simply because reality is what she, and with her all the Western world, is lacking the most. To reconstitute reality, one needs to head to where blood flows. All these "corridors", opened by us to funnel our foodstuffs and our

"culture" are in fact our lifelines along which we suck their moral strength and the energy of their distress. Yet another unequal exchange. And to those who have found in a radical delusion of reality (and this includes the belief in political rationality, which supposedly rules us, and which very much constitutes the principle of European reality) a kind of alternative courage, that is to survive a senseless situation, to these people Susan Sontag comes to convince them of the "reality" of their suffering, by making something cultural and something theatrical out of it, so that it can be useful as a referent within the theatre of western values, including "solidarity". But Susan Sontag herself is not the issue. She is merely a societal instance of what has become the general situation whereby toothless intellectuals swap their distress with the misery of the poor, both of them sustaining each other, both of them locked in a

perverse agreement. This parallels the way the political class and civil society are

<<continued>>

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B AUDRILLARD

Commodification of Suffering

<<Baudrillard 98 continued>> swapping their respective misery: one throwing up corruption and scandals, the other its purposeless convulsions and its inertia. Thus, not so long ago, one could witness Bourdieu and

Abbe Pierre offering themselves as televisual slaughtering lambs trading with each other pathetic language and sociological garble about poverty.

Our whole society is thus on its way towards "commiseration" in the most literal sense of the word (under the cloak of ecumenical bathos). It looks like as if we are in the midst of an immense feeling of guilt, shared by intellectuals and politicians alike, and which is linked to the end of history and the downfall of values. Then, it has become necessary to replenish the pond of values, the pond of references, and to do so by using that smallest common denominator which is the suffering of the world, and in doing so, replenishing our game reserves with artificial fowls. "At the moment, it has become impossible to show anything else than suffering in the news broadcasts on television", reports David Schneidermann. Ours is a victim-society. I gather that society is merely expressing its own disappointment and longing for an impossible violence against itself. Everywhere, a New Intellectual Order is following on the heels of the New World Order. Everywhere, we see distress, misery and suffering becoming the basic stuff of the primitive scene. The status of victimhood, paired with human rights is the sole funeral ideology. Those who do not directly exploit it do it by proxy - there is no dearth of mediators who take some surplus value of financial or symbolic nature along the way. Loss and suffering, just like the global debt, are negotiable and for sale on the speculative market, that is, the intellectual-political market - which is in no way undermining the military-industrial complex of old & sinister days.

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B AUDRILLARD

We Search for Images

Members of our culture are in constant search of new global, hyperreal images as a way to escape the body and satisfy the bored eye.

Kroker in 2002 [Arthur, March 20, editor of Ctheory.net “We Look for Images”]

A story of body invasion? Not really. Contemporary society is no longer the culture of the disembodied eye. Today, we play out the drama of our private existence along and within the iris of the image-machine that we once dismissed as somehow external to human ambitions. Our fate, our most singular fate, is to experience the fatal destiny of the image as both goal and precondition of human culture. As goal, the power of the image inheres in the fact that contemporary culture is driven forward by the will to image as its most pervasive form of nihilism. As precondition, we are possessed individuals because we are fully possessed by the enigmatic dreams of impossible images.

That we are possessed by the power of the image with such finality has the curious repercussion of driving the image-machine mad. The matrix of image-creation as its evolves from analog to digital and now to the biogenetic struggles to keep pace with the capricious tastes and fast-bored appetites of human flesh as an image-machine. It is the age of the

bored eye: the eye which flits from situation to situation, from scene to scene, from image to image, from ad to ad, with a restlessness and high-pitched consumptive appetite that can

never really ever be fully satisfied. The bored eye is a natural nihilist. It knows only the pleasure of the boredom of creation as well as the boredom of abandonment. It never remains still. It is in perpetual motion. It demands novelty. It loves junk images. It turns recombinant when fed straight narratives. It has ocular appetites that demand satisfaction.

But it can never be fully sated because the bored eye is the empty eye. That is its secret passion, and the source of its endless seduction.

The bored eye is the real power of the image. It takes full possession of the housing of the body. It is the nerve center of flesh made image. It is the connective tissue between the planetary ocular strategies of the image-matrix and the solitude of the human body. The bored eye is bored with its (bodily) self. That is why it is always dissatisfied. It needs to blast out of the solitude of its birth-place in the human cranium in order to ride the electronic currents of the global eye. No longer satisfied with simply observing the power of the image, the bored eye now demands to be the power of the image. Which is why, of course, the archival history of twentieth-century photography can now be safely interned. At dusk, the eye of the image takes flight in the restless form of the bored eye forever revolving and twisting and circulating in an image-matrix of which it is both the petulant consumer and unsatisfied author.

Ironically, the bored eye has itself now become both precondition and goal for the despotic image. Which is why images can now be so powerful precisely because they are caught in a fatal miasma of powerlessness before the ocular deficit disorder of the bored eye. The despotic image may demand attention as its precondition for existence, but the bored eye is seductive because of its refusal to provide any sign of lasting interest. A love affair turned sour. With this predictable result-the increasing ressentiment of the digital image: "Analog is having a burial and digital is dancing on its grave."

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Nuclear Hyperreality

A. The scenario for nuclear escalation and war they imagine will always be prevented by deterrence. However, the fear of nuclear war is used to justify a state security apparatus that freezes the social and maintains a system of perfect control.

Baudrillard in 81 [Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation” p. 32-35]

The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear. However, the balance of terror is never anything but the spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. Nuclear suspension only serves to seal the trivialized system of deterrence that is at the heart of the media, of the violence without consequences that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory apparatus of all the choices that are made for us. The most insignificant of our behaviors is regulated by neutralized, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those that regulate the "strategy of games" (but the true equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that variable of simulation which makes of the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a simulacrum that dominates everything and reduces all "ground-level" events to being nothing but ephemeral scenarios, transforming the life left us into survival, into a stake without stakes not even into a life insurance policy: into a policy that already has no value).

It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives, it is deterrence that gives them leukemia. And this deterrence comes from that fact that even the real atomic clash is precluded-precluded like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs. The whole world pretends to believe in the reality of this threat (this is understandable on the part of the military, the gravity of their exercise and the discourse of their "strategy" are at stake), but it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes. The whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction.

Deterrence precludes war-the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an adversary nor a strategy-it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes. Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take place. The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity), for installing a universal security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question, except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war, when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance.

Deterrence is not a strategy, it circulates and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations suffice to control all global exchanges. Thus the money of destruction (without any reference to real destruction, any more than floating capital has a real referent of production) that circulates in nuclear orbit suffices to control all the violence and potential conflicts around the world.

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B AUDRILLARD

What is hatched in the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal, "objective," threat, and thanks to Damocles' nuclear sword, is the perfection of the best system of control

<<continued>>


<<Baudrillard 81 continued>> that has ever existed. And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this hypermodel of security. The same goes for peaceful nuclear power stations. Pacification does not distinguish between the civil and the military: everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated, everywhere the notion of security becomes omnipotent, everywhere where the norm replaces the old arsenal of laws and violence

(including war), it is the system of deterrence that grows, and around it grows the historical, social, and political desert. A gigantic involution that makes every conflict, every finality, every confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts, neutralizes, freezes them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be deployed according to its own logic because it risks annihilation. No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a

puerile game given over to the military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain.

The "space race" played exactly the same role as nuclear escalation. This is why the space program was so easily able to replace it in the 1960s (Kennedy/Khrushchev), or to develop concurrently as a form of "peaceful coexistence." Because what, ultimately, is the function of the space program, of the conquest of the moon, of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of satellization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo? Programmed microcosm, where nothing can be left to chance. Trajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment-nothing can be left to contingencies, this is the total universe of the norm-the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law. A universe purged of all threat of meaning, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness-it is this very perfection that is fascinating.

The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to the event of landing on the moon or of sending a man into space (this would be, rather, the fulfillment of an earlier dream), rather, we are dumb-founded by the perfection of the programming and the technical manipulation, by the immanent wonder of the programmed un- folding of events.

Fascination with the maximal norm and the mastery of probability. Vertigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but without fear or drive. Because if the law, with its aura of transgression, if order, with its aura of violence, still taps a perverse imaginary, the norm fixes, fascinates, stupefies, and makes every imaginary involute. One no longer fantasizes about the minutiae of a program. Just watching it produces vertigo. The vertigo of a world without flaws.

Now, it is the same model of programmatic infallibility, of maximum security and deterrence that today controls the spread of the social. There lies the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social. Here as well, nothing will be left to chance, moreover this is the essence of socialization, which began centuries ago, but which has now entered its accelerated phase, toward a limit that one

17


B AUDRILLARD believed would be explosive (revolution), but which for the moment is translated by an inverse, implosive, irreversible process: the generalized deterrence of chance, of accident, of transversality, of finality; of contradiction, rupture, or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm, doomed to the descriptive transparency of mechanisms of information. In fact, the spatial and nuclear models do not have their own ends: neither the discovery of the moon, nor military and strategic superiority. Their truth is to be the models of simulation, the model vectors of a system of planetary control (where even the super- powers of this scenario are not free-the whole world is satellized).

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B AUDRILLARD


B. The true damage of nuclear weapons is not the war that could result, but in the fear and mental destruction that fear of them demands. Instead of trying to avoid the catastrophe, we need to embrace its simulation and break the mental chains of deterrence.

Baudrillard in 81 [Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation” p. 55-57]

Because an explosion is always a promise, it is our hope: note how much, in the film as in

Harrisburg, the whole world waits for something to blow up, for destruction to announce itself and remove us from this unnameable panic, from this panic of deterrence that it exercises in the invisible form of the nuclear. That the "heart" of the reactor at last reveals its hot power of destruction, that it reassures us about the presence of energy; albeit catastrophic, and bestows its spectacle on us. Because unhappiness is when there is no nuclear spectacle, no spectacle of nuclear energy in itself (Hiroshima is over), and it is for that reason that it is rejected-it would be perfectly accepted if it lent itself to spectacle as previous forms of energy did. Parousia of catastrophe: substantial food for our messianic libido.

But that is precisely what will never happen. What will happen will never again be the explosion, but the implosion. No more energy in its spectacular and pathetic form-all the romanticism of the explosion, which had so much charm, being at the same time that of revolution-but the cold energy of the simulacrum and of its distillation in homeopathic doses in the cold systems of information.

What else do the media dream of besides creating the event simply by their presence?

Everyone decries it, but everyone is secretly fascinated by this eventuality. Such is the logic of simulacra, it is no longer that of divine predestination, it is that of the precession of models, but it is just as inexorable. And it is because of this that events no longer have meaning: it is not that they are insignificant in themselves, it is that they were preceded by the model, with which their processes only coincided. Thus it would have been marvelous to repeat the script for The China Syndrome at Fessenheim, during the visit offered to the journalists by the EDF

(French Electric Company), to repeat on this occasion the accident linked to the magic eye, to the provocative presence of the media. Alas, nothing happened. And on the other hand yes! so powerful is the logic of simulacra: a week after, the unions discovered fissures in the reactors. Miracle of contagions, miracle of analogic chain reactions.

Thus, the essence of the film is not in any respect the Watergate' effect in the person of Jane

Fonda, not in any respect TV as a means of exposing nuclear vices, but on the contrary TV as the twin orbit and twin chain reaction of the nuclear one. Besides, just at the end-and there the film is unrelenting in regard to its own argument-when Jane Fonda makes the truth explode directly (maximum Watergate effect), her image is juxtaposed with what will inexorably follow it and efface it on the screen: a commercial of some kind. The Network effect goes far beyond the Watergate effect and spreads mysteriously into the Harrisburg effect, that is to say not into the nuclear threat, but into the simulation of nuclear catastrophe.

So, it is simulation that is effective, never the real. The simulation of nuclear catastrophe is the strategic result of this generic and universal undertaking of deterrence: accustoming the people to the ideology and the discipline of absolute security-to the metaphysics of fission and fissure. To this end the fissure must be a fiction. A real catastrophe would delay things, it

19


B AUDRILLARD would constitute a retrograde incident, of the explosive kind (without changing the course of things: did Hiroshima perceptibly delay, deter, the universal process of deterrence?).

<<continued>>


<<Baudrillard 81 continued>>

In the film, also, real fusion would be a bad argument: the film would regress to the level of a disaster movie-weak by definition, because it means returning things to their pure event. The

China Syndrome, itself, finds its strength in filtering catastrophe, in the distillation of the nuclear specter through the omnipresent hertzian relays of information. It teaches us (once again without meaning to) that nuclear catastrophe does not occur; is not meant to happen, in the real either, any more than the atomic clash was at the dawning of the cold war. The equilibrium of terror rests on the eternal deferral of the atomic clash. The atom and the nuclear are made to be disseminated for deterrent ends, the power of catastrophe must, instead of stupidly exploding, be disseminated in homeopathic, molecular doses, in the continuous reservoirs of information. Therein lies the true contamination: never biological and radioactive, but, rather, a mental destructuration through a mental strategy of catastrophe.

If one looks carefully, the film introduces us to this mental strategy, and in going further, it even delivers a lesson diametrically opposed to that of Watergate: if every strategy today is that of mental terror and of deterrence tied to the suspension and the eternal simulation of catastrophe, then the only means of mitigating this scenario would be to make the catastrophe arrive, to produce or to reproduce a real catastrophe. To which Nature is at times given: in its inspired moments, it is God who through his cataclysms unknots the equilibrium of terror in which humans are imprisoned. Closer to us, this is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security. Besides, therein lies terrorism's ambiguity.

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B AUDRILLARD

Nuclear Hyperreality 2NC Overview

Extend our two cards from Baudrillard 81. Here’s the argument.

Nuclear war is and always will be an act of the imagination, because deterrence prevents escalation from occurring in the real world, and systems of nuclear lockdown and control will always proceed faster than their explosive potential. The effects of nuclear weapons are instead seen on the social plane, through the imagination of their use. The constant nuclear threat is used to freeze social action, because elites will be able to prevent change by claiming it will always risk nuclear war, just like debaters always try to link the case to a nuclear war scenario and cause it to be rejected, which means their plan will always be rejected in the real world. The images of nuclear war they create are part of the problem: as long as people keep imagining nuclear scenarios and threats and being afraid of them, this state-sponsored security and deterrence system can continue forever.

The constant, systemic violence of the deterrence system is the only true impact of nuclear weapons. It places people in a constant mindset of fear and devalues human life, because anything can be justified in order to avoid the atomic clash, so all their harms are inevitable. An empirical example of this is North Korea – Bush identifies them as the axis of evil and tells us we need to be afraid of their nuclear weapons, and uses this to justify violations of civil liberties, acts of war against other states, and ends up causing North Korea to become a nuclear threat when they weren’t in the first place.

The only way to break this cycle is to stop fearing the bomb – trying to delay nuclear war allows the systems that justify it to keep working. Instead, we must embrace the simulation of nuclear annihilation, bring the noise, and hug the bomb. Allow their harms to occur as a way to break the chains of mental deterrence, and laugh at nuclear war to delegitimize the systems that make it possible. Note that this doesn’t mean we advocate nuclear war occurring in the real world, but in the simulated plane of fiat, which we all know has no relation to reality, you should treat the threat of nuclear war not as something to be afraid of, but something with liberating potential from the mindset of nuclear freeze and deterrence.

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B AUDRILLARD

Nuclear Hyperreality 2NR Overview

Extend our A and B cards from Baudrillard in 81. They miss some key points in the last overview, so extend:

First, nuclear war won’t happen, because deterrence works, and systems of control always proceed faster than the explosive use of the weapons. That means their harms will never be true in the real world.

Second, images and fear of nuclear war that they present have negative effects: states use the population’s fear of nuclear war to freeze the social and deny change, like debaters outweighing everything with an absurd scenario and a Schell card, which will prevent the plan from actually being passed, turning their solvency.

Third, fear of nuclear war devalues human life and makes their impacts inevitable, because it’s manipulated by politicians to justify bad things, like

Bush did by demonizing North Korea and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, which turns their impacts.

Fourth, the only way out is to allow the simulation of their harms to occur in the debate round – even though what we do in this round has no impact on the real world, refusing to be swayed by fear of nuclear war into giving them the ballot helps break the mindset of deterrence that justifies all these bad things.

Embrace the explosion and challenge the system with a ballot for our side.

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B AUDRILLARD

Proliferation Stops War

Possession of nuclear weapons freezes societies and makes war impossible.


This is why nuclear proliferation does not increase the risk of either an atomic clash or an accident-save in the interval when the "young" powers could be tempted to make a nondeterrent, "real" use of it (as the Americans did in Hiroshima-but precisely only they had a right to this "use value" of the bomb, all of those who have acquired it since will be deterred from using it by the very fact of possessing it). Entry into the atomic club, so prettily named, very quickly effaces (as unionization does in the working world) any inclination toward violent intervention. Responsibility; control, censure, self-deterrence always grow more rapidly than the forces or the weapons at our disposal: this is the secret of the social order. Thus the very possibility of paralyzing a whole country by flicking a switch makes it so that the electrical engineers will never use this weapon: the whole myth of the total and revolutionary strike crumbles at the very moment when the means are available-but alas precisely because those means are available. Therein lies the whole process of deterrence. It is thus perfectly probable that one day we will see nuclear powers export atomic reactors, weapons, and bombs to every latitude. Control by threat will be replaced by the more effective strategy of pacification through the bomb and through the possession of the bomb. The "little" powers, believing that they are buying their independent striking force, will buy the virus of deterrence, of their own deterrence. The same goes for the atomic reactors that we have already sent them: so many neutron bombs knocking out all historical virulence, all risk of explosion. In this sense, the nuclear everywhere inaugurates an accelerated process of implosion, it freezes everything around it, it absorbs all living energy.

The nuclear is at once the culminating point of available energy and the maximization of energy control systems. Lockdown and control increase in direct proportion to (and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of the modem revolution. It is still the absolute paradox of the nuclear. Energies freeze in their own fire, they deter themselves. One can no longer imagine what project, what power, what strategy, what subject could exist behind this enclosure, this vast saturation of a system by its own forces, now neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, nonexplosive-except for the possibility of an explosion toward the cente1; of an implosion where all these energies would be abolished in a catastrophic process (in the literal sense, that is to say in the sense of a reversion of the whole cycle toward a minimal point, of a reversion of energies toward a minimal threshold).

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B AUDRILLARD

Proliferation Stops War Overview

Extend Baudrillard 81, proliferation stops war. Here’s how.

As soon as countries acquire nuclear weapons, they are given a sense of power and responsibility which leads to a reciprocal increase in restraint when using those weapons, due to international norms and deterrence theory. No state is exempt from this, in fact, if we were to give nuclear weapons to every country in the world, it could prevent war forever. The more nuclear armaments a country has, the more power it has over its people and its weapons, which guarantees a war will never occur.

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B AUDRILLARD

Illusion of War

War in the modern era exists more in the image of it being fought than in reality; wars are conducted via public opinion polls, the media, and so on, with military action just as an afterthought. To avoid war, we must oppose its simulation – to give it authority through images is to make it real.


America conducted the Gulf War as though it were a nuclear conflict, and thus, ultimately, as a substitute for a Third World War which did not take place. An atomic war without the atom, but analogous in its impact, instantaneousness, non-confrontation and convulsive effect. The first strike is the last. That, at least, is how the nuclear shoot-out was supposed to be, but neither of the two adversaries ever risked it, perhaps because, deep down, they neither of them believed in it. The nuclear shoot-out, the game of deterrence, was a scenario, just made credible by the calculated threat of the balance of terror. When the prospect of an atomic clash disappeared once and for all, when it got lost in space with Star

Wars, it had to be tested in simulated form, in a miniature war-game where the possibility of annihilating the enemy could be checked out. But, symptomatically, care was taken not to go that far: Saddam, who will, in the end, have been nothing but that fairground dummy you shoot at from point-blank range, had to be saved. It was just a second-hand scenario.

So this military 'orgy' wasn't an orgy at all. It was an orgy of simulation, the simulation of an orgy. A German word sums all this up very well: Schwindel, which means both giddiness and swindle, loss of consciousness and mystification.

The Americans fought the same war in respect of world opinion -via the media, censorship,

CNN, etc. - as they fought on the battlefield. They used the same 'fuel air' explosives in the media, where they draw all the oxygen out of public opinion. The amnesia about it is, in itself, a confirmation of the unreality of this war. Overexposed to the media, underexposed to memory. Built-in obsolescence, as with any consumer article. . . Forgetting is built into the event itself in the profusion of information and details, just as obsolescence is built into the object in the profusion of useless accessories.

If you take one-thousandth of what you see on the TV news to heart, you're done for. But television protects us from this. Its immunizing, prophylactic use protects us from an unbearable responsibility. Its effect and its images self-destruct in the mind.

So is this the zero degree of communication? Certainly, it is: people fear communication like the plague. There was no exulting after the Gulf War either (and yet, it was a victory, wasn't it?). There was, rather, a flight into amnesia and hypocrisy. A botched operation, even in surgical terms: its labours produced nothing, even the two hundred thousand dead produced nothing, apart from that marvellous miscarriage, the New World Order. It was a war without results, but not without an aftermath. Once past the dilemma of the reality/unreality of the war, we are back in the pure and simple reality of political ignominy, in the most odious Realpolitik: the Shi'ites, the Kurds, the calculated survival of Saddam ... Here, the most fervent defenders of the war's reality end up conceding that perhaps nothing has in fact happened. But they prejudge this from the absence of an outcome; they do not judge the event itself. Which shows them to be just as much engaged in Realpolitik as anyone else.

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<<continued>>

B AUDRILLARD

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B AUDRILLARD

Illusion of War


The question is not whether one is for or against war, but whether one is for or against the

reality of war. Analysis must not be sacrificed to the expression of anger. It has to be directed in its entirety against reality, against manifestness - here against the manifest reality of this war. The Stoics contest the very self-evidence of pain, when the body's confusion is at its height. Here, we must contest the very self-evidence of war, when the confusion of the real is at its height. We must hit out at the weak point of reality. It's too late afterwards: you're stuck with the 'acts of violence', stuck in realist abjection.

In a little time, as we get some distance from it, or even now, with a little imagination, it will be possible to read La guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu * as a science-fiction novel, as the anticipation, right in the thick of things, of the event as a fictional scenario - something into which it will surely be turned later. Like Borges' chronicling of cultures which never existed. By making transparent the non-event of the war, you give it force in the imagination - somewhere other than in the 'real time' of news where it simply peters out. You give force to the illusion of war, rather than become an accesssory to its false reality. Anyhow, the book has fallen - quite logically - into the same black hole as the war. It has faded as quickly as the event whose absence it denounced. It was a successful non-event, like the Agency, like appearing on television. All this is as it should have been since it dealt with something which did not take place.

It was the simulacrum of Helen that was at the heart of the Trojan War. The Egyptian priests had held on to the original (we do not know what became of it) when she set out again with

Paris for Troy. But, even without the magic of the priests, Helen was in any case merely a simulacrum, since the universal form of beauty is as unreal as gold, the universal form of all commodities. Every universal form is a simulacrum, since it is the simultaneous equivalent of all the others - something it is impossible for any real being to be.

There are many analogies between the Trojan and Gulf wars. Before the expedition,

Menelaus called all the warriors of the Greek world to arms, just as Bush did with all the nations of the 'free world'. The incubation period of the war was very long (seven years in the case of Troy, seven months for the Gulf War) and the final phase was very rapid in both cases. The Greek victory was won at great cost to the victors, whom the gods punished relentlessly (the murder of Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra, Orestes, etc.). What will be the fate of the 'victors' of the Gulf War? Admittedly, this time the war did not take place. This difference leaves the Americans some hope, the gods having no real cause to avenge themselves.

If the Helen of the Trojan War was a simulacrum, what was the Gulf War's Helen? Where was there simulacrum here, except in the simulacrum of war itself?

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Illusion of War Overview

Extend Baudrillard 94. Here’s the argument.

The scenario they present is a description of real world events, a simulation of reality. They accept war as real through the authority of its image. War in the modern era is fought in the arena of representation before it becomes reality – for war to occur, governments depend on public recognition of its existence, so enough public opinion can be generated for war’s reality to proceed. Their scenario, which gives the illusion of war, aids the recreation of war in the real world, which turns all their impacts. Refusing to buy their image of war helps prevent it from actually happening outside the round, so don’t aid their representations of war with the support of your ballot.

2

ND

Overview

Extend the Baudrillard 94 card, and these points from the last overview –

First, their disadvantage is a simulation of reality based on images of war, which may or may not be true, so all their scenario claims are inherently unreliable and there’s only a slight chance they’ll occur.

Second, images of war are what allows actual war to occur, because political actors looking to justify a policy of war need the public to recognize the images in order to justify them. Their scenario makes it more likely an actual war could be carried out.

Third, refusing to buy into their illusion of war helps escape the system.

Challenging the representations of war make it less likely an actual war will be carried out, so vote for us to help solve all their impacts in the real world.

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Biosphere 2

A. They treat the natural world as an experiment to be managed, a sphere in which human life must be preserved eternally, which paradoxically removes the value of life itself. We need the accident and randomness of the natural world to smash their simplified construction in order to escape.


The finest example of what the human species is capable of inflicting upon itself is Biosphere

2 - the first zoological gardens of the species, to which human beings come to watch themselves survive, as once they went to watch apes copulate. Outside Tucson, in Arizona, right in the middle of the desert, a geodesic glass and metal structure accommodating all the planet's climates in miniature, where eight human beings (four men and four women, of course) are to live self-sufficiently, in a closed circuit, for two years, in order - since we are not able to change our lives - to explore the conditions for our survival. A minimal representation of the species in an experimental situation, in a kind of spaceship allegory. As a museum mock-up of the future, but of an unpredictable future - a century hence, a thousand years, millions. . . who knows? - it forms a pendant to the Desert Museum some sixty miles away, which retraces the geological and animal history of two hundred million years. The point of convergence between the two being the idea of the conservation and optimal management of residues - of the relics of the past for the Desert Museum, the anticipated relics of the future for Biosphere 2 - not to mention the magical desert site which allows the problem of survival to be examined, both that of nature and that of the species with equal rigour.

Such a very American hallucination this ocean, this savannah, this desert, this virgin forest reconstituted in miniature, vitrified beneath their experimental bubble. In the true spirit of

Disneyland's attractions, Biosphere 2 is not an experiment, but an experimental attraction.

The most amazing thing is that they have reconstituted a fragment of artificial desert right in the middle of the natural desert (a bit like reconstituting Hollywood in Disneyworld). Only in this artificial desert there are neither scorpions nor Indians to be exterminated; there are only extraterrestrials trained to survive in the very place where they destroyed another, far better adapted race, leaving it no chance. The whole humanist ideology - ecological, climatic, micro-cosmic and biogenetic - is summed up here, but this is of no importance. Only the sidereal, transparent form of the edifice means anything - but what? Difficult to say. As ever, absolute space inspires engineers, gives meaning to a project which has none, except the mad desire for a miniaturization of the human species, with a view perhaps to a future race and its emergence, of which we still dream. . .

The artificial promiscuity of climates has its counterpart in the artificial immunity of the space: the elimination of all spontaneous generation (of germs, viruses, microbes), the automatic purification of the water, the air, the physical atmosphere (and the mental atmosphere too, purified by science). The elimination of all sexual reproduction: it is forbidden to reproduce in

Biosphere 2; even contamination from life [Ie vivant] is dangerous; sexuality may spoil the experiment. Sexual difference functions only as a formal, statistical variable (the same number of women as men; if anyone drops out, a person of the same sex is substituted).

Everything here is designed with a brain-like abstraction. Biosphere 2 is to Biosphere 1 (the

30


B AUDRILLARD whole of our planet and the cosmos) what the brain is to the human being in general: the synthesis in miniature of all its possible functions and operations: the desert lobe, the virgin forest lobe, the nourishing agriculture

<<continued>>

Biosphere 2

<<Baudrillard 94 continued>> lobe, the residential lobe, all carefully distinct and placed side by side, according to the analytical imperative. All of this in reality entirely outdated with respect to what we now know about the brain - its plasticity, its elasticity, the reversible sequencing of all its operations.

There is, then, behind this archaic model, beneath its futuristic exterior, a gigantic hypothetical error, a fierce idealization doomed to failure.

In fact, the 'truth' of the operation lies elsewhere, and you sense this when you return from

Biosphere 2 to 'real' America, as you do when you emerge from Disneyland into real life: the fact is that the imaginary, or experimental, model is in no way different from the real functioning of this society. Just as the whole of America is built in the image of Disneyland, so the whole of

American society is carrying on - in real time and out in the open - the same experiment as

Biosphere 2 which is therefore only falsely experimental, just as Disneyland is only falsely imaginary. The recycling of all substances, the integration of flows and circuits, non-pollution, artificial immunity, ecological balancing, controlled abstinence, restrained jouissance but, also, the right of all species to survival and conservation - and not just plant and animal species, but also social ones. All categories formally brought under the one umbrella of the law - this latter setting its seal on the ending of natural selection.

It is generally thought that the obsession with survival is a logical consequence of life and the right to life. But, most of the time, the two things are contradictory. Life is not a question of rights, and what follows on from life is not survival, which is artificial, but death. It is only by paying the price of a failure to live, a failure to take pleasure, a failure to die that man is assured of survival. At least in present conditions, which the Biosphere principle perpetuates.

This micro-universe seeks to exorcize catastrophe by making an artificial synthesis of all the elements of catastrophe. From the perspective of survival, of recycling and feedback, of stabilization and metastabilization, the elements of life are sacrificed to those of survival

(elimination of germs, of evil, of sex). Real life, which surely, after all, has the right to disappear (or might there be a paradoxical limit to human rights?), is sacrificed to artificial survival. The real planet, presumed condemned, is sacrificed in advance to its miniaturized, air-conditioned clone (have no fear, all the earth's climates are air-conditioned here) which is designed to vanquish death by total simulation. In days gone by it was the dead who were embalmed for eternity; today, it is the living we embalm alive in a state of survival. Must this be our hope? Having lost our metaphysical utopias, do we have to build this prophylactic one?

What, then, is this species endowed with the insane pretension to survive - not to transcend itself by virtue of its natural intelligence, but to survive physically, biologically, by virtue of its artificial intelligence? Is there a species destined to escape natural selection, natural disappearance - in a word, death? What cosmic cussedness might give rise to such a turnabout? What vital reaction might produce the idea of survival at any cost? What metaphysical anomaly might grant the right not to disappear - logical counterpart of the remarkable good fortune of having

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B AUDRILLARD appeared? There is a kind of aberration in the attempt to eternalize the species - not to immortalize it in its actions, but to eternalize it in this face-lifted coma, in the glass coffin of

Biosphere 2.

We may, nonetheless, take the view that this experiment, like any attempt to achieve artificial survival or artificial paradise, is illusory, not from any technical shortcomings, but in its very principle. In spite of itself, it is threatened by the same accidents as real life. Fortunately.

Let us hope that the random universe outside smashes this glass coffin. Any accident will do if it rescues us from a scientific euphoria sustained by drip-feed.

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Biosphere 2(NC) Overview

Extend the Baudrillard 94 evidence. This is the argument –

Biosphere 2 is the second version of the world, described and controlled by scientific processes. Everything there is logical and coherent, as opposed to

Biosphere 1, which is the natural world as we know it wild. The affirmative is an example of human action based on Biosphere. Their harms and solvency evidence display nature as a machine to be fixed, not as a unique process of its own.

This scientific mindset will inevitably fail – Biosphere 1, which is the reality, does not relate at all to the experimental world of the plan. Natural chaos and chance occurrences will cause their simplified view of the world to fail when it is applied, which turns case.

Additionally, their focus on human survival within this perfectly managed experiment displays a mindset that in order to survive, people must be constantly monitored by science, so that to live one must not live naturally.

This makes human life meaningless and dehumanized to scientific processes, which is the greatest impact.

The alternative is to allow their harms to occur within the simulated fiat world of the debate round. What we do here does not correspond with what happens in the real world, so they can’t claim any impact from their imagined case.

The discourse we use in the debate round is more important and should be considered first. Vote negative and let nature to smash the glass coffin of their experimental project.

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Biosphere 2(NR) Overview

Extend our Baudrillard 94 evidence. They miss some key analysis from the last overview, so extend these points:

First, their plan depends on a scientific and artificial vision of the natural world that can be acted upon like an experiment with their plan. That’s one link.

Second, their effort to preserve the existence of human life displays a mindset of scientific examination of human life in order to preserve it, like living in the

Truman Show, where every action is controlled by the operation of the experiment. That mindset destroys the value of human life and must be onface rejected.

Third, scientific abstractions of nature fail, because the randomness of the natural world is never fully accounted for by the theories of their plan. That means their solvency will inevitably fail, turning case.

Fourth, the way out is to allow the simulation of their harms to occur within the context of the debate round, which has no relation to reality but is the perfect forum to oppose this destructive mindset. Allowing their harms to occur breaks nature out of the scientific prison.


B AUDRILLARD

Maleficent Ecology

Granting subjectivity and rights to nature is handing it a poisoned chalice, entering it into a competition it can never effectively play, which inevitably results in disaster, and the more we are reconciled with nature, the less we can be reconciled with ourselves, resulting in mass extermination through nuclear or biological means.


Hence the recent proposal, following this same logic, from the moment it achieved the status of virtual waste-product, to accord nature international recognition of its rights, to elevate it to the status of a subject in law. Thus the 'contrat nature/"" amounts to a definitive recognition of nature as waste. Just as, in bygone days, the recognition of the rights of the unfortunate meant not their emancipation as citizens, but their liberation as the unfortunate.

It is always the same with rights: the right to water, the right to air, the right to existence, etc. It is when all these fine things have disappeared that the law arrives to grant their disappearance official recognition. The law is like religious faith. If God exists, there is no need to believe in Him. If people do believe in Him, this is because the self-evidence of his existence has passed away.

Thus, when people obtain the right to life, the fact is that they are no longer able to live.

When nature is recognized as a subject in law, as it is by Michel Serres, we have objectified it to death, and this ecological cover merely asserts our right to go on doing so.

All this has been brought about by the highly dubious way in which the concept of nature has evolved. What was initially matter became energy. The modern discovery of nature consists in its liberation as energy and in a mechanical transformation of the world. After having first been matter, and then energy, nature is today becoming an interactive subject.

It is ceasing to be an object, but this is bringing it all the more surely into the circuit of

subjection. A dramatic paradox, and one which also affects human beings: we are much more compromised when we cease to be objects and become subjects. This is a trick that was pulled on us long ago, in the name of absolute liberation. Let's not pull the same one on nature. For the ultimate danger is that, in an interactivity built up into a total system of communication, there is no other; there are only subjects - and, very soon, only subjects without objects. All our problems today as civilized beings originate here: not in an excess of alienation, but a disappearance of alienation in favour of a maximum transparency between subjects. An unbearable situation, all the more so for the fact that, in foisting on nature the status of a subject in law, we are also foisting on it all the vices of subjectivity, decking it out, in our own image, with a bad conscience, with nostalgia (for a lost object which, in this case, can only be us), with a range of drives - in particular, an impulse for

revenge. The 'balance' we hear so much of in ecology ('out of balance') is not so much that of planetary resources and their exploitation as the metaphysical one between subject and object. Now, that metaphysical subject object balance is being upset and the subject, armed as he is with all the technologies of advanced communication (technologies on whose horizon the object has disappeared), is the beneficiary.

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<<continued>>


<<Baudrillard 94 continued 2/3>>

Once that balance is disrupted, it inevitably sparks violent reactions on the part of the object. Just as individuals counter the transparency and virtual responsibility inflicted on them as subjects with unexplainable acts, acts of resistance, failure, delinquency and collective disorder, so nature counters this enforced promotion, this consensual, communicational blackmail, with various forms of behaviour that are radically other, such as catastrophes, upheavals, earthquakes and chaos. It would seem that nature does not really feel a sense of responsibility for itself, nor does it react to our efforts to give it one. We are, admittedly, indulging in" a (bad) ecological conscience and attempting, by this moral violence, to stave off possible violence on nature's part. But if, by offering it the status of subject, we are handing it the same poisoned chalice as we gave to the decolonized nations, we ought not to be surprised if it behaves irrationally merely so as to assert itself as such. Contrary to the underlying Rousseauist ideology, which argues that the profound nature of the liberated subject can only be good and that nature itself, once emancipated, cannot but be endowed with natural equilibrium and all the ecological virtues, there is nothing more ambiguous or perverse than a subject. Now, nature is also germs, viruses, chaos, bacteria and scorpions, significantly eliminated from Biosphere 2 as though they were not meant to exist. Where are the deadly little scorpions, so beautiful and so translucent, which one sees in the Desert Museum not far away, scorpions whose magical sting certainly performs a higher, invisible – but necessary - function within our Biosphere 1: the incarnation of evil, of the venomous evil of chance, the mortal innocence of desire (the desire for death) in the equilibrium of living beings?

What they have forgotten is that what binds living beings together is something other than an ecological, biospherical solidarity, something other than the homeostatic equilibrium of a system: it is the cycle of metamorphoses. Man is also a scorpion, just as the Bororo are araras and, left to himself in an expurgated universe, he becomes, himself, a scorpion.

In short, it is not by expurgating evil that we liberate good. Worse, by liberating good, we also liberate evil. And this is only right: it is the rule of the symbolic game. It is the inseparability of good and evil which constitutes our true equilibrium, our true balance. We ought not to entertain the illusion that we might separate the two, that we might cultivate good and happiness in a pure state and expel evil and sorrow as wastes. That is the terroristic dream of the transparency of good, which very quickly ends in its opposite, the transparency of evil.

We must not reconcile ourselves with nature.

It seems that the more the human race reconciles itself with nature, the less it is reconciled with itself. Above and beyond the violence it inflicts on others, there is a violence specific to the human race in general, a violence of the species against itself in which it treats itself as a residue, as a survivor - even in the present - of a coming catastrophe. As if it too were ready to repent of an evolution which has brought it such privileges and carried it to such extremes.

This is the same conjuncture as the one to which Canetti refers, in which we stepped out of

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B AUDRILLARD history, except that here we have not stepped out of history, but have passed a point beyond which nothing is either human or inhuman any longer and what is at stake, which is even more immense, is the tottering of the species into the void.

It is quite possible that, in this process, the species itself is commencing its own

<<continued>>


<<Baudrillard 94 continued 3/3>> disappearance, either by disenchantment with - or ressentiment towards - itself, or out of a deliberate inclination which leads it here and now to manage that disappearance as its destiny. Surreptitiously, in spite of our superiority (or perhaps because of it), we are carrying over on to our own species the treatment we mete out to the others, all of which are virtually dying out. In an animal milieu which has reached saturation point, species are spontaneously dissuaded from living. The effects produced by the finite nature of the earth, for the first time contrasting violently with the infinity of our development, are such that our species is automatically switching over to collective suicide. Whether by external (nuclear) violence or internal (biological) virulence.

We are subjecting ourselves as a human species to the same experimental pressure as the animal species in our laboratories. Man is without prejudice: he is using himself as a guineapig, just as he is using the rest of the world, animate or inanimate. He is cheerfully gambling with the destiny of his own species as he is with that of all the others. In his blind desire to know more, he is programming his own destruction with the same ease and ferocity as the destruction of the others. He cannot be accused of a superior egoism. He is sacrificing himself, as a species, to an unknown experimental fate, unknown at least as yet to other species, who have experienced only natural fates. And, whereas it seemed that, linked to that natural fate, there was something like an instinct of self-preservation - long the mainstay of a natural philosophy of individuals and groups - this experimental fate to which the human species is condemning itself by unprecedented, artificial means, this scientific prefiguring of its own disappearance, sweeps away all ideas of a self-preservation instinct. The idea is, indeed, no longer discussed in the human sciences (where the focus of attention would seem, rather, to be on the death drive) and this disappearance from the field of thought signals that, beneath a frenzy for ecological conservation which is really more to do with nostalgia and remose, a wholly different tendency has already won out, the sacrificing of the species to boundless experimentation.

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Maleficent Ecology 2NC Overview

Extend the Baudrillard 94 card. Here’s the argument.

Granting rights to nature is an excuse to further exploit it, because the rights are only necessary once destruction is already complete. Claiming to respect nature is just a mask to guarantee its further exploitation. Covering up the small problems allows the larger problems to keep occurring.

This also turns nature into a subject, treating it like an individual we can respect and awe. However, nature is worse off as a subject than an object, because when the subject’s power is increased, it forces violent reactions by the object to maintain the balance – in English, the more we pretend to respect nature, the more it will be necessary to destroy it to preserve our dominance, which turns their arguments.

Additionally, once nature becomes a subject random acts become reasons to take revenge upon it. If there is a natural disaster, for example, nature can be blamed and retribution can be taken because subjects are assumed to be responsible for all their actions. This puts nature into a rigged game, where it is asked to play by rules it cannot follow, and we destroy it for non-compliance.

Also, more understanding of nature trades of with understanding for ourselves, because the concern trades off. Just like the Nazis were all for protecting the environment at the expense of humans, their project to deify nature results in the production of humanity as waste and its complete extermination and mass death through nuclear or biological means, which is a reason to on-face reject their discourse.

Instead of awe, we need to treat nature with disregard and indifference, because granting it awe and respect only makes it that much easier to destroy it.

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Maleficent Ecology 2NR Overview

Extend our Baudrillard 94 evidence, and this analysis from the last overview:

First, respecting nature is a mask for its continued exploitation, because rights are always granted after its too late for them to be useful, which turns their arguments.

Second, treating nature as a subject that can be respected upsets the balance and creates violent reaction by the object to restore it, further entrenching nature’s destruction.

Third, subject’s are assumed to be responsible for their actions, so vengeance can be sought from nature for harm done to humans – if there’s a hurricane, we can go cut down a rain forest to get even (which is just an example, but displays the harm of the mindset).

Fourth, the more we understand nature the less we understand humans.

Respecting nature requires the production of humanity as a waste product to be exterminated, culminating in genocide and mass death, which is a reason to reject their mindset.

Fifth, instead of treating nature with awe and respect, we should display indifference, which solves all the harms created by calling nature a subject.

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Maleficent v. Deep Ecology 1AR

Extend Baudrillard 94. His argument is that when they grant rights and respect to nature, it provides a mask for more domination, and only happens when it’s too late to prevent human influence, so the critique can never solve. Also, treating nature as a subject increases our domination of it because it is seen as a subject to be controlled. This causes more violence against nature, and also demands human retribution for natural occurrences, putting nature into a rigged game and turning their alternative. Finally, more understanding of nature trades off with respect for our own species, which results in treating humanity as a waste that must be disposed of, which justifies any atrocity and is an on-face reason to reject the critique. Our advocacy, which treats nature with indifference instead of awe, solves the impacts of their critique and allows the case solvency as well.

And, kicking it now won’t get them out of it – our argument is not just against their advocacy, it’s against the discourse and images they use to support it.

Even if they drop the advocacy, they can’t take back what they say. That’s best for debate because it requires them to defend all the justifications to their arguments so we can have deeper and more informed clash. That means that if they don’t answer this turn, they lose the round.

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Sentimentality to Animals

Sentimentality towards animals degrades their status and places them even farther below humans, as not even deserving our respect, justifying experimentation and destruction.


In particular, our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. It is proportional to this disdain. It is in proportion to being relegated to irresponsibility, to the inhuman, that the animal becomes worthy of the human ritual of affection and protection, just as the child does in direct proportion to being relegated to a status of innocence and childishness. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration, in which we ridiculously cloak animals to the point of rendering them sentimental themselves.

Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts. And even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished them in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are, we who are filled with horror at this practice. 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. We no longer sacrifice them, we no longer punish them, and we are proud of it, but it is simply that we have domesticated them, worse: that we have made of them a racially inferior world, no longer even worthy of our justice, but only of our affection and social charity, no longer worthy of punishment and of death, but only of experimentation and extermination like meat from the butchery.

It is the reabsorption of all violence in regard to them that today forms the monstrosity of beasts. The violence of sacrifice, which is one of "intimacy" (Bataille), has been succeeded by the sentimental or experimental violence that is one of distance. Monstrosity has changed in meaning. The original monstrosity of the beast, object of terror and fascination, but never negative, always ambivalent, object of exchange also and of metaphor, in sacrifice, in mythology, in the heraldic bestiary, and even in our dreams and our phantasms-this monstrosity, rich in every threat and every metamorphosis, one that is secretly resolved in the living culture of men, and that is a form of alliance, has been exchanged for a spectacular monstrosity: that of King Kong wrenched from his jungle and transformed into a music-hall star. Formerly, the cultural hero annihilated the beast, the dragon, the monster-and from the spilt blood plants, men, culture were born; today, it is the beast King Kong who comes to sack our industrial metropolises, who comes to liberate us from our culture, a culture dead from having purged itself of all real monstrosity and from having broken its pact with it (which was expressed in the film by the primitive gift of the woman). The profound seduction of the film comes from this inversion of meaning: all inhumanity has gone over to the side of men, all humanity has gone over to the side of captive bestiality, and to the respective seduction of man and of beast, monstrous seduction of one order by the other, the human and the bestial. Kong dies for having renewed, through seduction, this possibility of the metamorphosis of one reign into another, this incestuous promiscuity between beasts and men (though one that is never realized, except in a symbolic and ritual mode).

In the end, the progression that the beast followed is not different form that of madness and childhood, of sex or negritude. A logic of exclusion, of reclusion, of discrimination and necessarily; in return, a logic of reversion, reversible violence that makes it so that all of society finally aligns itself on the axioms of madness, of childhood, of sexuality; and of inferior races (purged, it must be said, of the radical interrogation to which, from the very heart of their exclusion, they lent importance). The convergence of processes of civilization is astounding. Animals, like the dead, and so many others, have followed this uninterrupted process of annexation through extermination, which consists of liquidation, then of making

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B AUDRILLARD the extinct species speak , of making them present the confession of their disappearance. Making animals speak, as one has made the insane, children, sex (Foucault) speak. This is even deluded in regard to animals, whose principle of uncertainty; which they have caused to weigh on men since the rupture in their alliance with men, resides in the fact that they do not speak.

Sentimentality to Animals Overview

Extend our Baudrillard 81 card. Here’s the argument.

Treating animals with care and being sentimental about their feelings is a degradation of their status. Their discourse treats animals as children that have to be protected by the wise humans, and imparts sentimental feelings on them that are just an illusion. Instead of being worthy of respect, this reduces animals to merely the subjects of domestication and experimentation, where they can be destroyed in our endless quest for knowledge, which turns their arguments.


B AUDRILLARD

Global v. Universal

Globalization, which claims to bring all together actually fragments and destroys universal values like freedom and democracy in order to better assimilate the world. The result of this process is a gigantic clash between the globalized world order and the fragments that emerge, a world war over global values.

Baudrillard in 96 [Jean, March 16, “The Global and the Universal”]

Globalisation and universality are not equivalent terms; in fact they could be considered to mutually exclude one another. Globalisation pertains to techniques, the market, tourism, information. Universality pertains to values, human rights, freedoms, culture, democracy.

Globalisation seems to be irreversible, the universal on the other hand appears to be almost an endangered species. At least in so far as it constitutes a system of values for Western modernity with no counterpart in any other culture. No word for a value system which claims to speak with a single voice for all cultures and their difference, but which, paradoxically, does not think of itself as relative and sees itself quite ingenuously as the ultimate transcendent goal of all the others. We do not imagine for one moment that the universal might refer only to localised Western thought, a product that is specific to the West, which, original though it may be, is in the final analysis, every bit as difficult to export as any other local product. Yet that is exactly how the Japanese see the universal, as something specifically Western, and far from adopting this abstract concept, they take what for us is universal and, in a curious reversal, make it relative and incorporate it into their own singularity.

Any culture worthy of the name loses itself in the universal. Any culture that makes itself universal loses its singularity and, gradually dies. This is the case for the cultures we have destroyed by assimilating them by force, but it is also the case for our own, in its claim to be universal. The difference is that the others have died of their singularity and that is a noble death whereas we are dying from the loss of all singularity, from the extermination of our values, and that is not a noble death.

We think that the destiny of any single value is its elevation to the universal without taking heed of the mortal danger that this promotion represents. Rather than an elevation, it is a reduction or shall we say an elevation to a degree zero of value. At the time of the

Enlightenment, universalisation was a top down affair, in a process of continuous advancement. Today, it is bottom up and involves a neutralisation of values as a result of their proliferation and their endless dispersal. And so it is for human rights, for democracy, etc., they expand according to the law of the lowest common denominator, to a point of maximum entropy. The Xerox degree of value. In fact, the universal perishes with globalisation.

When the dynamic of the universal as transcendence, as ideal, and as utopia becomes a reality, it ceases to exist as transcendence, as ideal, as utopia. The gobalisation of exchange puts an end to the universality of values. It is the triumph of monothought over universal thought.

What is globalised is first of all the market, the promiscuity of exchange of anything and everything, the perpetual movement of money. Culturally speaking, this is the anything goes promiscuity of the signifier and of values; in other words, pornography. The endless stream flooding the net with anything and everything, this is pornography. No need for

<<continued>>


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<<Baudrillard 96 continued 2/3>> sexual indecency, the simple existence of this interactive copulation is all it takes. At theend of this process, there is no longer any difference between the global and the universal. The universal is itself globalised, democracy, human rights circulate in exactly the same way, through exactly the same channels as any global product: like oil or capital.

What happens with the passage from the universal to the global is at once a homogenisation and an infinite fragmenting of the system. The global interconnection of networks is doubled by a dislocation of the fragments moving further and further apart from each other - like a sky rocket that explodes and shatters at its highest point then scatters in a thousand fragments. What takes the place the central is not the local, it's the dis-located. What takes the place of the cencentric is not the de-centered but the offcenter. Disintegration of the universal. Virtual totalitarianism:

"www:// ization of the world" and fragmentation.

Globalisation is both homogenisation and increasing discrimination. Marginalisation and exclusion, are no accident: they are in the very logic of globalisation which, unlike the universal, breaks apart the existing structures, all the better to assimilate them. On every level the gaps grow wider, become irreversible. A little like the universe where the galaxies are moving away from one another at such prodigious speeds. If this is the case, one might well ask whether the universal hasn't already succumbed under the weight of its own critical mass, whether it ever had any real existence other than in official discourse and moral codes. In any event, for us, the mirror of the universal is shattered (one could even see it as a kind of mirror stage of humanity).

But this is perhaps a good thing because, in the fragments of this shattered mirror of the universal, all singularities reemerge. Those that we believed threatened are surviving; those we believed had disappeared are coming back to life. Japan, once again, is a remarkable case in point. Japan, better than any other country, has made a success of globalisation (technical, economic, financial) without going through the phase of the universal (the succession of middle-class ideologies and forms of political organisation) and without losing anything of its singularity, despite what is said to the contrary. One could even say that it is precisely because Japan was never lumbered with the concept of the universal that it succeeded so well technically and globally, by bringing together the singular (the power of tradition) and the global (the power of the virtual, that is, the internet revolution ).

Behind the increasingly fierce resistance to globalisation, social and political resistance which can seem like an archaic refusal of modernity at all costs, one cannot but read a reaction against the domination of the universal, a kind of painful revisionism in respect to the achievements of modernity, and in respect to the idea of progress and of History, a rejection not only of the (in)famous global techno-structure, but of the underlying monoculturalism, the mental structure that places all cultures, from every continent under the one sign of the universal. This resurgence, or, one might even say, this

"insurrection" of singularity can take on violent, anomalous, irrational forms from the perspective of (socalled) "enlightened" thought; ethnic, religious, linguistic, but also on an individual level, forms of neurosis and personality disorder. But it would be a monumental error (the same error which can be seen in the moralistic orchestration of political correctness common to all power structures and the majority of "intellectuals") to write off these movements of revolt as populist, archaic, or even terrorist.

Every event that makes its mark in the world today, does so in

<<continued>>

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<<Baudrillard 96 continued 3/3>> reaction to this abstract universality (including the antagonism of Islam towards Western values - it is because Islam is the most violent critic of this Western globalisation that Islam is public enemy number one today). If we refuse to understand this, we will exhaust ourselves in an endless contest between a universal thought sure of its power and sure of its rightness, and an ever increasing number of irreducible singularities. Even in our societies, which are thoroughly acculturated to the universal, it is clear that nothing that has been sacrificed to this concept has truly disappeared. It has simply gone underground. And what is being played out in reverse today is an entire history supposedly progressivist, an entire evolutionism cristallised around its ultimate end, which, moreover, has been completely lost sight of in the meantime. Today this utopia is dislocated, and its dislocation at the deepest levels is proceeding even faster than its imposition by force.

What we are dealing with here is a complex three level process: the globalisation of exchange, the universality of values and the singularity of forms (languages, cultures, individuals, character types, but also chance, accident etc.- everything the universal is bound to reject as exception or anomaly). But, the situation is changing and is becoming more and more extreme as universal values lose their authority and legitimacy. As long as they were accepted as mediating values, they succeeded (more or less) in integrating singularities as differences within a universal culture of difference. But today they are no longer able to do so because globalisation triumphant is razing to the ground every difference and every value, generating a perfectly indifferent (non)culture. And all that is left, once the universal is gone, is the all-mighty global techno-structure on the one hand and singularities abandoned to their own wild devices on the other.

The universal has had its day in history. But today, caught between a monolithic global order, an unconditional globalisation, and the stubborn insurrection of singularities erratic, concepts of freedom, democracy and human rights pale into insignificance, mere ghosts of a lost universal. And it is difficult to imagine that they could be reborn from their ashes by the mere

play of the political - which is caught up in the same process of deregulation and whose foundations are almost as flimsy as those of moral and intellectual authority.

But the die has not yet been cast, even if for universal values, all bets are definitely off The stakes have risen and globalisation is by no means a sure winner. Everywhere its dissolving and homogenising force is being challenged by emerging forces heterogeneous in nature, which are not only different but antagonistic and irreducible.

What may emerge, out of the shattering of the global system, are singularities. Now, these singularities are neither negative nor positive. They are not an alternative to global order, they are on a different scale. They are not subject to value judgements; so they can be either the best or the worst. Their one absolute saving grace is to allow us to break out of the straitjacket of totality.

They cannot be federated in a single historical move. They are the despair of every would-be dominant monothought. But they are not a monocounterthought. They invent their own rules of the game, and their most likely fate is the fate of heresies: to be eradicated by global orthodoxy.

This is what the Fourth World War will be about, and it will be the only truly world war, since its stakes are globalisation itself. Culture itself started off as a singularity. That is, an incomparable, irreducible, inexchangeable form. Then came the concept of universal culture. Then the current globalisation of a culture which had become a global product. I would like to talk a little more about this "fate of culture" which poses for each of us, within the context of the global, the problem of cultural identity.

Global v. Universal 2NC Overview

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The affirmative attempts to expand values like democracy, human rights, etc. to a global level. However, any culture whose values are expanded loses its uniqueness and the values become useless – democracy and human rights are reduced to the lowest common denominator so they can be more easily expanded through the global market.

In practical terms, this means the values they promote become tools of exploitation and never accomplish the goals they set for them. A perfect example: Iraq. Intended to be a watershed event in the democratic revolution, democracy and freedom in Iraq are no longer the great values they once were, but led to social fragmentation, instability and an explosion of porn and drugs. The commercialization of democracy has destroyed its human value; the expansion the plan supports will result in the same unintended consequences that ultimately make the values meaningless. At this point, no political action is sufficient to redeem democracy’s value, because it will have been infinite degraded by its spread.

Additionally, in order to better expand values, existing cultures must be destroyed and assimilated so that our idea of democracy can be superimposed on them, and groups that disagree are excluded from the global order. The destruction of culture causes their most violent elements to re-form and oppose the global spread of values – we see this in the form of socalled terrorism, which will be a never-ending cycle of violence as long as the project continues.

Finally, the elements cast out of the global democratic order will band together to oppose it, resulting in the next world war as a result of globalization of values.

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Global v. Universal 2NR Overview

They miss key analysis in the last speech, so extend the Baudrillard 96 card and these points from the overview:

First, the expansion of democracy over the globe requires that it be reduced to a lowest common denominator level so that it can be transmitted easily; democratic principles that disagree with the rules of the global market will be cast aside, which means the spread of democracy they create will become a tool for further exploitation of cultures that accept it.

Second, the devaluation of democracy makes it bad for societies that accept it, like happened in Iraq, where freedom has turned society over to porn, drugs and instability. Democracy as it is spread is never as good as the original version and the more it is spread the less valuable it is, which turns their impacts.

Third, note that all their evidence about democracy being good is wrong, because it doesn’t assume the devalued form, and political efforts to revive these universal values after they have expanded are useless, because they are permanently disfigured by the global spread. Once this has happened, it’s irreversible.

Fourth, in order to expand our values other cultures have to be destroyed and assimilated, and the parts that won’t be assimilated are excluded. This results in internal violence through what is labeled as terrorism, and eventually a clash between the global democratic society and the fragments that have been cast out in the next world war, which is far worse than the small scale violence that occurs occasionally between isolated cultures.

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Globalization of Violence

Globalization and the spread of Western values is like a virus – it requires constant expansion as part of its existence. Any disagreement with democratic values is classified as a crime against the global order, and justifies the forcible assimilation of all cultures into the global norm. This universalization of values creates terrorism as its own inescapable symptom.

Baudrillard in 2003 [Jean, May 20, “The Violence of the Global”]

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism.

It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization. To identify its main features, it is necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly of its relationship to the singular and the universal.

The analogy between the terms "global" [2]and "universal" is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was unmatched by any other culture. Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies. That's what happened to all those cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values. And this is a much more ugly death.

We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression.

Universalization is vanishing because of globalization. The globalization of exchanges puts an end to the universalization of values. This marks the triumph of a uniform thought over a universal one. What is globalized is first and foremost the market, the profusion of exchanges and of all sorts of products, the perpetual flow of money. Culturally, globalization gives way to a promiscuity of signs and values, to a form of pornography in fact. Indeed, the global spread of everything and nothing through networks is pornographic. No need for sexual obscenity anymore. All you have is a global interactive copulation. And, as a result of all this, there is no longer any difference between the global and the universal. The universal has become globalized, and human rights circulate exactly like any other global product (oil or capital for example).

The passage from the universal to the global has given rise to a constant homogenization, but also to an endless fragmentation. Dislocation, not localization, has replaced centralization. Excentricism, not decentralization, has taken over where concentration once stood. Similarly, discrimination and exclusion are not just accidental consequences of

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<<continued>>

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<<Baudrillard 2003 continued 2/4>> globalization makes us wonder whether universalization has not already been destroyed by its own critical mass. It also makes us wonder whether universality and modernity ever existed outside of some official discourses or some popular moral sentiments. For us today, the mirror of our modern universalization has been broken. But this may actually be an opportunity. In the fragments of this broken mirror, all sorts of singularities reappear. Those singularities we thought were endangered are surviving, and those we thought were lost are revived.

As universal values lose their authority and legitimacy, things become more radical. When universal beliefs were introduced as the only possible culturally mediating values, it was fairly easy for such beliefs to incorporate singularities as modes of differentiation in a universal culture that claimed to champion difference. But they cannot do it anymore because the triumphant spread of globalization has eradicated all forms of differentiation and all the universal values that used to advocate difference. In so doing, globalization has given rise to a perfectly indifferent culture. From the moment when the universal disappeared, an omnipotent global techno-structure has been left alone to dominate. But this technostructure now has to confront new singularities that, without the presence of universalization to cradle them, are able to freely and savagely expand.

History gave universalization its chance. Today though, faced with a global order without any alternative on the one hand and with drifting insurrectionary singularities on the other, the concepts of liberty, democracy, and human rights look awful. They remain as the ghosts of universalization past. Universalization used to promote a culture characterized by the concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, conceptualization, reality, and representation. By contrast, today's virtual global culture has replaced universal concepts with screens, networks, immanence, numbers, and a space-time continuum without any depth. In the universal, there was still room for a natural reference to the world, the body, or the past.

There was a sort of dialectical tension or critical movement that found its materiality in historical and revolutionary violence. But the expulsion of this critical negativity opened the door to another form of violence, the violence of the global. This new violence is characterized by the supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization, integral circulation, and the equivalence of all exchanges. Additionally, the violence of the global puts an end to the social role of the intellectual (an idea tied to the Enlightenment and universalization), but also to the role of the activist whose fate used to be tied to the ideas of critical opposition and historical violence.

Is globalization fatal? Sometimes cultures other than ours were able to escape the fatality of the indifferent exchange. Today though, where is the critical point between the universal and the global? Have we reached the point of no return? What vertigo pushes the world to erase the Idea? And what is that other vertigo that, at the same time, seems to force people to unconditionally want to realize the Idea?

The universal was an Idea. But when it became realized in the global, it disappeared as an

Idea, it committed suicide, and it vanished as an end in itself. Since humanity is now its own immanence, after taking over the place left by a dead God, the human has become the only mode of reference and it is sovereign. But this humanity no longer has any finality. Free from its former enemies, humanity now has to create enemies from within, which in fact

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USFSP DEBATE/ ADA N ATIONALS produces a wide variety of inhuman metastases.

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This is precisely where the violence of the global comes from. It is the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. It is the violence of a society where conflict is forbidden, where death is not allowed. It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself, and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear (whether it is in the body, sex, birth, or death). Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence.

This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, proceeds by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist.

But the game is not over yet. Globalization has not completely won. Against such a dissolving and homogenizing power, heterogeneous forces -- not just different but clearly antagonistic ones -- are rising everywhere. Behind the increasingly strong reactions to globalization, and the social and political forms of resistance to the global, we find more than simply nostalgic expressions of negation. We find instead a crushing revisionism vis-à-vis modernity and progress, a rejection not only of the global techno-structure, but also of the mental system of globalization, which assumes a principle of equivalence between all cultures. This kind of reaction can take some violent, abnormal, and irrational aspects, at least they can be perceived as violent, abnormal, and irrational from the perspective of our traditional enlightened ways of thinking. This reaction can take collective ethnic, religious, and linguistic forms. But it can also take the form of individual emotional outbursts or neuroses even. In any case, it would be a mistake to berate those reactions as simply populist, archaic, or even terrorist. Everything that has the quality of event these days is engaged against the abstract universality of the global, and this also includes Islam's own opposition to Western values (it is because Islam is the most forceful contestation of those values that it is today considered to be the West's number one enemy).

Who can defeat the global system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow down global deregulation. This movement's political impact may well be important. But its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement's opposition is nothing more than an internal matter that the dominant system can easily keep under control. Positive alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic order.

They do not abide by value judgments or political realities. They can be the best or the worst.

They cannot be "regularized" by means of a collective historical action. They defeat any uniquely dominant thought. Yet they do not present themselves as a unique counterthought. Simply, they create their own game and impose their own rules. Not all singularities are violent. Some linguistic, artistic, corporeal, or cultural singularities are quite subtle. But others, like terrorism, can be violent. The singularity of terrorism avenges the singularities of those cultures that paid the price of the imposition of a unique global power with their own

extinction.

We are really not talking about a "clash of civilizations" here, but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity. From the perspective of global power (as fundamentalist in its beliefs as any religious orthodoxy),

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<<continued>>


<<Baudrillard 2003 continued 4/4>> any mode of difference and singularity is heresy. Singular forces only have the choice of joining the global system (by will or by force) or perishing. The mission of the West (or rather the former West, since it lost its own values a long time ago) is to use all available means to subjugate every culture to the brutal principle of cultural equivalence. Once a culture has lost its values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. Beyond their political or economic objectives, wars such as the one in Afghanistan aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the territories. The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both geographically and mentally.

The establishment of a global system is the result of an intense jealousy. It is the jealousy of an indifferent and low-definition culture against cultures with higher definition, of a disenchanted and de-intensified system against high intensity cultural environments, and of a de-sacralized society against sacrificial forms. According to this dominant system, any reactionary form is virtually terrorist. (According to this logic we could even say that natural catastrophes are forms of terrorism too. Major technological accidents, like Chernobyl, are both a terrorist act and a natural disaster. The toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India, another technological accident, could also have been a terrorist act. Any plane crash could be claimed by any terrorist group too. The dominant characteristic of irrational events is that they can be imputed to anybody or given any motivation. To some extent, anything we can think of can be criminal, even a cold front or an earthquake. This is not new. In the 1923

Tokyo earthquake, thousands of Koreans were killed because they were thought to be responsible for the disaster. In an intensely integrated system like ours, everything can have a similar effect of destabilization. Everything drives toward the failure of a system that claims to be infallible. From our point of view, caught as we are inside the rational and programmatic controls of this system, we could even think that the worst catastrophe is actually the infallibility of the system itself.) Look at Afghanistan. The fact that, inside this country alone, all recognized forms of "democratic" freedoms and expressions -- from music and television to the ability to see a woman's face -- were forbidden, and the possibility that such a country could take the totally opposite path of what we call civilization (no matter what religious principles it invoked), were not acceptable for the "free" world. The universal dimension of modernity cannot be refused. From the perspective of the West, of its consensual model, and of its unique way of thinking, it is a crime not to perceive modernity as the obvious source of the Good or as the natural ideal of humankind. It is also a crime when the universality of our values and our practices are found suspect by some individuals who, when they reveal their doubts, are immediately pegged as fanatics.

Only an analysis that emphasizes the logic of symbolic obligation can make sense of this confrontation between the global and the singular. To understand the hatred of the rest of the world against the West, perspectives must be reversed. The hatred of non-Western people is not based on the fact that the West stole everything from them and never gave

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B AUDRILLARD anything back. Rather, it is based on the fact that they received everything, but were never allowed to give anything back. This hatred is not caused by dispossession or exploitation, but rather by humiliation. And this is precisely the kind of hatred that explains the September 11 terrorist attacks. These were acts of humiliation responding to another humiliation.

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Globalization of Violence Overview

Extend our Baudrillard 2003 evidence. Here’s the argument.

There is an inherent contradiction between globalization and universal values like human rights. Globalization is about the expansion of capitalism, while universal rights are oppressed by the capitalistic order. Their attempts to expand democracy and human rights throughout the global system puts these universal values on the market like any other commodity in the capitalist order and destroys their universal value; democracy and human rights stop being so good when they’re commercialized.

Additionally, globalization of values demands that they constantly expand, even to cultures that do not want or need them. This creates an area of exclusion within the supposedly all-encompassing global order, where those inside who dissent become the enemy instead of the one outside. They think they are creating universal peace through the spread of democracy, when in fact they are ensuring the war will be internalized and permanent as a result of exclusion.

This effort to destroy violence in fact creates its own violence, where any moral opposition to the dominant order becomes a crime that demands a military response, and anyone who does not agree with the global order must be destroyed. This leads to the destruction of all other cultures in the constant search for the ideal of globalization.

Within this system, opposition is inevitable, because destruction of culture sparks violent responses. Additionally, the more the order is globalized the easier it is to attack from within, and all dissent is organized to bring down this new world order, resulting in what we call terrorism. The impact is neverending internal violence and death.


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Spirit of Terrorism

Terrorism is not located in one particular country or group – its a consequence of the new global order, which creates constant internal violence. Their supposed solution plays into the mindset that justifies terrorist acts.

Baudrillard in 2003 [Jean, October, “The Mind of Terrorism”]

All the speeches and commentaries made since September 11 betray a gigantic post-traumatic abreaction both to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. The moral condemnation anti the sacred union against terrorism are directly proportional to the prodigious jubilation felt at having seen this global superpower destroyed, because it was this insufferable superpower that gave rise both to the violence now spreading throughout the world and to the terrorist imagination that (without our knowing it) dwells within us all.

That the entire world without exception had dreamed of this event, that nobody could help but dream the destruction of so powerful a hegemon-this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West, and yet it is a fact nonetheless, a fact that resists the emotional violence of all the rhetoric conspiring to erase it.

In the end, it was they who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take this fact into account, the vent loses all symbolic dimension; it becomes s a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics that we need only repress. But we know well that such is not tie case. Without our profound complicity the event would not have reverberated so forcefully, and in their strategic symbolism the terrorists knew they could count on this unconfessable complicity.

It goes well beyond the hatred that the desolate and the exploited-those who ended up on the wrong side of the new world order-feel toward the dominant global power. This malicious desire resides n the hearts of even those who've shared in the spoils. The allergy to absolute order, to absolute power, is universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center were, precisely because of their ideaticality, the perfect incarnation of this absolute order.

Countless disaster films have borne witness to these fantasies, and the universal appeal of the images shows just how close the fantasies always are to being acted out: the closer the entire system gets to perfection or to omnipotence, the stronger the urge to destroy it grows.

When the world has been so thoroughly monopolized, when power has been so formidably consolidated by the technocratic machine and the dogma of globalization, what means of turning the tables remains besides terrorism? In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the game is ferocious. Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a generalized system of exchange. All those singularities (species, individuals, cultures) that have been sacrificed to the interests of a global system of commerce avenge themselves by turning the tables with terrorism.

Terror against terror-this is no longer an ideological notion. We have gone well beyond ideology and politics,

The energy that nourishes terror, no ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic one, can explain. The terrorists are not aiming simply to transform the world. Like the heretics of previous times, they aim to radicalize the world through sacrifice, whereas the system aims to convert: it into money through force.

Terrorists, like viruses, are everywhere. There is no longer a boundary that can hem terrorism in; it is at the heart of the very culture it's fighting with, and the visible fracture (and the hatred) that pits the exploited and underdeveloped nations of the world against the West masks the dominant system's internal fractures. It is as if every means of domination secreted its own antidote. Against this almost automatic from of resistance to its power, the system can do nothing. Terrorism is the shock wave of this silent resistance.

It is a mistake, then, to characterize this as a clash of civilizations or of religions. It goes well beyond

Islam aria' America, on which one aright be tempted to concentrate in order to create the illusion of a confrontation resolvable by force. There is a fundamental antagonism at work. but it transcends the

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triumphant globalization at war with itself.

<<continued>>

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Spirit of Terrorism


In this sense, it is accurate to speak of this as a world war-no: the third but the fourth-and the only one that is truly global, since what's at stake is globalization itself. The first put an end to European supremacy and to the era of colonialism; the second put an end to Nazism; and the third to

Communism. Each one brought us progressively closer to the single world order of today, which is now nearing its end, everywhere opposed, everywhere grappling with hostile forces. This is a war of fractal complexity, waged worldwide against rebellious singularities that, in the manner of antibodies, mount a resistance in every cell. These confrontations are so imperceptible that it is occasionally necessary to resuscitate the idea of war by staging spectacular scenes such as those in the Persian Gulf and now in

Afghanistan. But World War IV happens elsewhere too. It haunts all expressions of world order, all forms of hegemonic domination-if Islam were dominating the world, terrorism would rise up against Islam.

The globe itself is resistant to globalization.

Terrorism is immoral. The occurrence at the World Trade Center, this symbolic act of defiance, is immoral, but it was in response to globalization, which is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil. The crucial point lies in precisely the opposite direction from the Enlightenment philosophy of Good and Evil. We naively believe in the progress of Good, that its ascendance in all domains (science, technology, democracy, human rights) corresponds to the defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that

Good and Evil increase in power at the same time -and in the same way. The triumph of one does not result in the obliteration of the ether; to the contrary. We tend to regard Evil, metaphysically, as an accidental smudge, but this axiom is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, or vice versa; they are at once irreducible, the one and the other, and inextricably linked. In the end, Good cannot vanquish

Evil except by denying to be Good, since, in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of proportional violence.

In the traditional universe, there remained a balance of Good and Evil, a dialectical relationship that guaranteed, for better or worse, the tension and equilibrium of the moral universe. This balance was lost as soon as there was a total extrapolation of Good-the hegemony of the positive over every form of negativity. From that moment, the equilibrium was broken, and Evil returned to an invisible autonomy, increasing exponentially.

Relatively speaking, this is a bit like what happened to the political order after Communism disappeared and neoliberal forces triumphed worldwide. It was then that a phantom enemy arose, percolating throughout the planet, rising up through all the cracks in power. Islam. But Islam. is merely the crystallized form of this antagonism. The antagonism is everywhere, and it is in each of us. Hence, terror against terror. But it is asymmetrical terror, and it is this asymmetry that leaves the absolute global power disarmed. It can do nothing but strike at its own rationale for the balance of power, without being able to compete on the playing field of symbolic defiance and of death, having deleted that playing field from its own culture.

Until now, this integrating power had succeeded in absorbing and reabsorbing every attack, every negativity, and in doing so created a thoroughly hopeless situation (not only for the wretched o' the earth but also for the privileged and well-to-do in their radical comfort). But the terrorists have started using their own deaths offensively and effectively, based on a strategic intuition, a sense of their adversary's immense fragility, of the system's quasi-perfection, of the explosion that would erupt at the slightest spark. They succeeded in turning their deaths into an ultimate weapon against a system devoted to the ideal of zero losses. Any system of zero losses is a zero-sum game. And all methods of deterrence and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counteroffensive weapon. (" Who cares about the American bombing! Our men are as eager to die as the Americans are eager to live!") Thus the imbalance of more than 3,000 deaths inflicted in one fell swoop against a system of zero losses. Here, everything depends upon death, not only upon the brutal

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Spirit of Terrorism Overview


Their arguments assume terrorists are a definite group of people, existing in some other country, who we can deter and deal with as the world’s superpower. This vision is inaccurate – terrorism isn’t out there, it is within the global order, as an inevitable sideeffect of advancing globalization, so they can never solve the impacts they claim.

Also, the overarching power of a single country and its policies is what gives the motive to destroy it – whether or not they want to admit it, everyone wants to see the American superpower humbled. The plan asserts US influence to try to curb this violence, but ironically makes it more likely it will occur, because the more the US stretches out to control the world the more the world will backlash against it. That’s a turn.


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Infection of Democracy

As democracy spreads and repression is removed, the forces that created the oppression do not go away, rather they infect the whole of democracy. The more democracy spreads, the less value it has.


However this may be, what is going to come of this transfusion of Good and Evil, beyond the dusting off of liberties and the realignment of democratic facades, remains a mystery. For Evil is not simply the repressed. If it were only that, it would be sufficient merely to lift the repression weighing upon it, to

'liberate' it, as is being done everywhere (in particular in the East where the barrier of Evil has been broken down). But we are soon going to see that Evil is something different, that it easily outlasts all liberation and that, in dismantling the visible Evil empire, the deeper form of maleficence is simultaneously being liberated. Evil takes advantage of transparency (glasnost) and becomes the transparence of things themselves. Evil was visible, opaque, localized in the territories of the East. We have exorcized it, liberated it, liquidated it . But has it, for all that, ceased to be Evil? Not at all: it has become fluid, liquid, interstitial, viral. That is the transparence of Evil. It is not that it is transparent [est transparent] in the sense that you might see through it. It is, rather, that it shows though [transparait] in all things when they lose their image, their mirror, their reflection, their shadow, when they no longer offer any substance, distance or resistance, when they become both immanent and elusive from an excess of fluidity and luminosity.

So long as Evil was opaque, obscene, oblique, obscure, there was still a transcendence of Evil and it could be held at a distance. It has now become immanent and interstitial (in the West, it is assuming, in particular, the form of terrorism as a filterable virus. Political terrorism, but also all the other forms of virulence - biological, sexual, media-based or electronic). With the events in Eastern Europe, this theme is given striking illustration, and Evil is entering upon a phase of definitive dissemination. Shattered, destabilized communism will pass into the veins of the West in metabolic, surreptitious form, and destabilize it in its turn. This will no longer be the violence of the Idea, but the virus of de-immunization. A communism which dissolves itself is a successful communism.

One of the consequences of this East-West transfusion is the elimination of the renegades who functioned as an umbilical cord between the two blocs, condemned on the one side, feted on the other, but complicit with both.

By way of dissidents – the political avant-garde of the Eastern bloc countries and refuge of the Western intellectual avant-garde - East and West carried on a kind of dialogue of the deaf throughout all the years of the armsrace. Some among the dissidents have analysed the ambiguity of this situation. Including Sakharov himself.

But Sakharov is dead. He died, significantly, when dissidence, victorious, no longer had any meaning. Dissidents cannot bear a thaw. They have to die, or else become president (Walesa, Havel) in a sort of bitter revenge which, at any event, marks their death as dissidents. They lived in the silent cinema of the political; the 'talkie' era kills them off.

They whose strength was in silence (or censorship) are condemned to speak and be devoured by speech. When the

Eastern bloc societies catch up with their dissidents and absorb them, it is the end of modernity, as it is when Western society catches up with and absorbs its avant-gardes. In the East and the West, the Idea is finished. The organic consensus marks the dawning of post-modem societies, non-conflictual and at one with themselves. The collapse of the

Wall is the visible outward manifestation of an invisible event which has affected all these societies for at least twenty years: the collapse of the division or split internal to each of them, of the conflictual structure which came about with the upheavals and revolutions of the modem era. The Western intellectuals who embodied that split, that internal division of societies and minds, are themselves fated to disappear like the silent movie actors.

As for those who were pro-dissident in the West, the fine-spirited sympathizers, what is to become of their solidarity? They too are condemned. They spoke for others. Will they now have the courage to shut up? They will not, and are already running off to the scene of the crime, to the Berlin Wall, for that was indeed the site of the crime and the sacrifice. The point when the Wall comes down marks the end of their careers. There is no longer any abominable Other (the communists), no longer any adorable Other (the dissidents).

What of Zinoviev? What of his cynical, merrily nihilistic and paradoxical line (Cioran: history is dying for want of paradoxes)? The paradox of communism, in Zinoviev's view, is that of being at one and the same time an outdated solution, an end of history, the Evil empire and the definitive solution because it has experienced the worst, as the West has not done, and has drawn the consequences from it. It is therefore a solution from after the catastrophe (whatever it

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<<continued>>

Infection of Democracy

<<Baudrillard 94 continued>> put to the test by the reunification of the two worlds. For the human and ideological failure of communism by no means compromises its potency and virulence as an anthropological model. It is a kind of gigantic snare of the social and the political spheres, which might be said to have succeeded, even if it destroys itself - particularly if it destroys itself - in a kind of strategie du pire which would be imposed on everyone as the last immune defence, man being taken in hand, on a universal scale, to protect him from himself. On the opposite side, there is only the transparency of democracy, incapable of containing the radiation of

Evil.

There is, moreover, a paradox of Western societies opposite and equivalent to that of communism: though they present all the signs of more developed and open societies, at the same time they have one eye on the past as though it were a void they have created behind them, while absorbing the future. It is like the story of the lorry and the hole: some workers dig a hole and load it on to a lorry, but when they hit a bump in the road the hole falls off and, reversing, the lorry falls into the hole. We are the lorry and the hole: we are weighed down by a hole in our memories, weighed down by the retrospective emptiness of our history, to the point that our societies do not even know whether they are heading towards the future. They are riding the surf of their present, problematic wealth. Beneath their apparent mobility and acceleration, they have come to a stop in their hearts and their aims. That is, indeed, why they are accelerating, but they are doing so out of inertia.

The encounter between this type of society with maximum mobility but immobility in its heart and the

Eastern bloc societies which are petrified on the outside but in no way inert in their inward core should be highly dramatic or. totally ambiguous. Like blood transfusions today, the transfusion of Good and Evil presents many dangers. There is a risk we shall pass all our germs on to them, and they might give us all of theirs (this is how contacts between dissimilar cultures or races go). First of all, there will be seventy years of

'backwardness' to make up, but are we so sure things are going to happen that way? Instead of the Eastern bloc countries accelerating towards modern democracy, perhaps we are going to drift in the other direction, moving back beyond democracy and falling into the hole of the past. It would be the opposite of

Orwell's prediction (strangely, he has not been mentioned of late, though the collapse of Big Brother ought to have been celebrated for the record, if only for the irony of the date Orwell set for the onset of totalitarianism which turned out to be roughly that of its collapse). Even more ironic is the fact that we are not at all threatened by the totalitarian (Stalinist) rewriting of the past, but the democratic rewriting of history: the very images of Stalin and Lenin swept away, streets and cities renamed, statues scattered, soon none of all that will have existed. Yet another ruse of history - not the last but, as ever, the best.

Democratic rewriting. The scenario is off to a good start. Everyone is having a clear-out. All the dictatorships are being wound up and sold off cheap, before the end of the century if possible

(before Christmas for Eastern Europe so that everything can shine bright in a new Nativity). Splendid emulation, as stupendous as the tolerance which has reigned over it all so far. Everyone equally committed to the liquidation! Eliminating the planet's black spots as one might eliminate traffic accident blackspots, as we might eliminate spots from a face: cosmetic surgery elevated to the level of the political, and to Olympic performance levels.

Of course, this great democratic rally is not believable for an instant. Not that there is any

Machiavellian strategy going on, but it's too good to be true. There is something suspect about the sudden consensus. The disappearance, as if by magic, of all contradiction is more than suspect

(China has temporarily relapsed, and what remains of world communism is merely a theme park. With a little imagination, Cuba could be joined up with Disneyworld, which is not far away, as part of a world heritage centre). Something tells us that what we have here is not a historical evolution, but an

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epidemic of consensus, an epidemic of democratic values - in other words, this is a viral effect, a triumphant effect of fashion. If democratic values spread so easily, by a capillary or communicatingvessels effect, then they must have liquefied, they must now be worthless. Throughout the modern age they were held dear and dearly bought. Today, they are being sold off at a discount and we are watching a Dutch auction of democratic values which looks very much like uncontrolled speculation.

Which makes it highly probable that, as might be the case with financial speculation, these same values may crash.

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Culture Crash

Culture is like the economic system. Overproduction of culture goes beyond people’s ability to consume it, leading a complete crash in all cultural signs and a destruction of what they try to protect.

Baudrillard in 96 [Jean, March 16, “The Global and the Universal”]

Culture is a form of glory - it implies notion of sovereignty. Identity is a poor value: there is always something vain and useless about demanding identity. It is an aftereffect of the colonisation of mental space and the failure of its decolonisation. Culture is a symbolic pact.

Once it solidifies as a heritage, as power, as appropriation, as identity, once it becomes signature, that is, a material image of this power, it is all over. Finished. We could repeat what

Hannah Arendt said of power: "What saps and ends up killing political communities", she said,

"is the loss of power and ultimate powerlessness. But power (and culture) cannot be stockpiled and kept for emergencies, like instruments of violence: it exists only as act. Power which does not become action disappears and history demonstrates with a host of examples that the greatest material riches cannot not make up for such a loss."

That is what culture is, in its highly singular and original form. Let us now look at what it has become at the global level.

Culture (understood as cultural production and consumption) is a mirror of material production. And material production, since the 1929 Crash, has been in a state of overproduction, or in a state of threatening overproduction. Already in 1929, growth was giving way to excessive or "over-growth". And ever since, this "overgrowth" (and not growth) has kept our societies in a state of increasingly acute economic crisis - interrupted, on by wars and the economic recovery that destruction carries within it, all of this being only cure for excess growth. We can say then that the fundamental catastrophe remains the excessive growth that globalisation continues to intensify. The other antidote to exponential growth, besides wars, is the Stock Market Crash (but the latter would appear to be less and less effective, since it is now only virtual and involves only speculative capital.

The same diagnosis could be made of culture, and the other Crash threatening us is that of cultural overproduction. The powers that be would have us believe that in the cultural market place, unlike in the commodity marketplace, demand still exceeds supply and will continue to do so for a good while yet. The people supposedly have an insatiable hunger for cultural goods. And so we get a guaranteed boom in all cultural "values or securities". In fact, this is not at all the case. In the cultural economy of the average citizen (if such a thing exists), there is a noticeable surplus of supply over demand. It is like/just the same as at the supermarket. The illimited promotion of cultural products already far exceeds human capacity to absorb them. The average person no longer even has the time to consume his own cultural products, let alone those of others. The public does its best: people run round from one exhibition to another, from one film festival to another but their capacity or cultural labour is stretched to the limit. What results from this is an original form of cultural alienation, not due to lack or deprivation, but to surplus and saturation. In this

<<continued>>

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Culture Crash

<<Baudrillard 96 continued>> new context, the degree of cultural alienation, that is of being held hostage by culture (by its ads., its media, its institutions) comes close to the degree of voluntary submission in politics.

The public supposedly wants even more of this culture; one can never have too much of it.

Well that is a colossal illusion and error of perspective. The same is said about information too: one can never have too much of it. Always more information. Always more transparency

And we can see the effects that are as murderous as they are contradictory. But in the case of culture, the situation is even more serious. For, either culture is a singular language, the idiom of a particular group or society and in that case it has its own finality, and is not at all infinitely expandable (its promotion and its proliferation on the contrary signify its death); it is like natural languages, both open to an infinite internal complexity and strictly limited in their structure and constitutive elements - if this were not so, they would not be languages.

Well, either culture is a singularity of this kind, or else it is what it has become: a market with all the effects of artificial shortage, spiraling values and speculation. And, as soon as one tends to confuse these exponential market factors with irresistible cultural progress, what looms on the horizon is the same reversal as occurred in the 1929 crisis in material production: overproduction, priority of supply over demand, the end of `natural' assumptions about an economy that had become speculative, virtual and completely cut off from real wealth and real economic requirements. This is exactly what lies in wait for culture and a cultural market turned speculative. And there could very easily be like Black Thursday on Wall Street in 1929, a Black Sunday of culture.

The expansion of cultural production far surpasses the expansion of material production, and the result is cultural bottlenecks that are even more monstrous than blockages in the economy or our constantly paralysed traffic systems. For, in the open field of communication, anyone can produce gestures, texts, colours, signs and meanings, spontaneously and indefinitely in a kind of uninterrupted interchange. Anyone can stage his or her own performance, unfortunately in total indifference to the other, or with only a token superficial consent and in a certain sense this is unavoidable for how can these countless productions be adequately provided for? And if, to a certain extent, we have managed to, ward off economic crisis by opening cultural markets (particularly in France, where it is actually obvious that culture is a political instrument) who will save us from cultural overproduction when this market, in its turn, is saturated? Perhaps we will have to undertake a massive destruction of cultural values to save the stock market value of the sign, the stock market value of the cultural artifact, just as they once burned coffee in the furnaces of steam engine locomotives so as to to save the world price of coffee.

Already most non-material goods are meeting the same fate as material goods: forced production, forced advertising, accelerated recycling, built-in obsolescence. Art becomes ephemeral, not so as to express the ephemeral nature of life, but to adapt to the transience of the market. Rather than decadent, art is now degradable in line with the biodegradability of the physical world. Such is the fate of our cultural signs, be the disinvested or of transvestite nature, they are part of the pure and simple discount of degradable products.

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Culture Crash Overview


The collection of world cultures is like a giant economy, and it operates on the same principles. People can only deal with so much culture; limited amounts of it can be consumed. Culture is already being overproduced, and everyone is already being overwhelmed with cultural artifacts and practices. Their effort to preserve a particular culture aids in this market saturation of culture.

Like any other market, when something is in too great of supply, its value drops, so the more culture there is, the less people value it, and it stops having any real-life application – in practical terms, people stop having time to deal with all the different practices of culture out there, so they stop caring about any of them, which turns their impacts.

Also, this overproduction will result in a complete crash of all culture, like the

Great Depression of the 30s. This means the destruction of everything they try to protect, because it lacks any value and people abandon culture entirely, so not only the culture they protect is lost but all other ones too, as cultures become another minimum value commodity to be used and cast away.

2

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Overview

They drop some key analysis on this argument, so extend the Baudrillard 96 evidence and these points from the overview:

First, culture is like an economic product, and its already overproduced. They protect culture, so there’s more of it and the value of it drops, so all the good stuff they claim to save by protecting culture is no longer there, because culture is no longer valued by people.

Second, this leads to the destruction of all culture, a worldwide rejection of all cultural products as useless. That’s bigger than anything they can claim to solve for, and is a terminal impact that outweighs anything they can claim.

Third, its crucial to allow some culture to be destroyed in order to save the whole – only by letting the supply drop so the value of it can increase will

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B AUDRILLARD culture retain any meaning. Allow their impacts to happen to avoid the crash of culture.


B AUDRILLARD

Shadow-Boxing the System

Radical opposition to the system affirms its existence. Opposing discourses allow the system to simulate its own death and delay its collapse.


Conjunction of the system and of its extreme alternative like the two sides of a curved mirror, a "vicious" curvature of a political space that is henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from the right to the left, a torsion that is like that of the evil spirit of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface: transfinite? And is it not the same for desire and the libidinal space? Conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. Conjunction of desire and the law, the final pleasure as the metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so widely the order of the day): only capital takes pleasure, said Lyotard, before thinking that we now take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze, an enigmatic reversal that brings desire "revolutionary in itself, and as if involuntarily, wanting what it wants," to desire its own repression and to invest in paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion that returns this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, the historical revolution. All the referentials combine their discourses in a circular, Mobian compulsion. Not so long ago, sex and work were fiercely opposed terms; today both are dissolved in the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history derived its power from violently opposing itself to that of nature, the discourse of desire to that of power-today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.

It would take too long to traverse the entire range of the operational negativity of all those scenarios of deterrence, which, like Watergate, try to regenerate a moribund principle through simulated scandal, phantasm, and murder-a sort of hormonal treatment through negativity and crisis. It is always a question of moving the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal, proving the law through transgression, proving work through striking, proving the system through crisis, and capital through revolution, as it is elsewhere (the

Tasaday) of proving ethnology through the dispossession of its object-without taking into account: the proof of theater through antitheater; the proof of art through antiart; the proof of pedagogy through antipedagogy; the proof of psychiatry through antipsychiatry, etc.

Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form. All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by

simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy Such was the case with some American presidents: the Kennedys were murdered because they still had a political dimension. The others, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, only had the right to phantom attempts, to simulated murders.

But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they 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.

To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis, negativity; and antipower: this is the only solution-alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to

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B AUDRILLARD break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and of its fundamental nonexistence, of its already seen and of its already dead.

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Shadow-Boxing Overview


No system can exist without it’s opposite, because it’s impossible to know who we are without a reference to who we aren’t. We couldn’t be Americans if there wasn’t a rest of the world that wasn’t American. Mindsets and social systems are the same way – they require opposition and resistance to their world-views in order to give identity and meaning to their own existence. The other team thinks they are participating in radical opposition to the system by opposing it through their discourse, but their opposition to it only proves and reinforces the system. Their transgression is an exception to the rule that proves the rule itself true, a small violation from the norm that makes really escaping the system impossible. The crisis of opposition is what the system requires to sustain itself, so rather than opposing, we have to be passive within the system and allow its processes to implode and bring it down through our inaction, because if the system is no longer refreshed through new opposition, it cannot continue to exist.

2

ND

Overview

Extend the Baudrillard 81 evidence. They concede some crucial arguments in our last overview, so extend these points:

First, identity and ideology are defined by an other mindset that opposes it, because without a contrast, it’s impossible to know what it would be. This is the most crucial point – once they’ve conceded this, is gives us the warrant to all our impacts that turn their discourse.

Second, their opposition to the system is like the exception that proves the rule

– the little resistances only show that the structure is that much more dominant.

The more the system is opposed, the more dominant its identity becomes, because there is more of an “other” discourse to demonstrate what the dominant one isn’t. Opposition to the system merely proves the system.

Third, the only way out is to remain passive within the system, and deny it the enemy it needs to reconstruct itself. When there is no other, there is no centered identity either, and the system disintegrates on its own. Only by not

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USFSP DEBATE/ ADA N ATIONALS acting against it is this possible.

B AUDRILLARD


B AUDRILLARD

Strategic Passivity

Speaking out and raising awareness is playing into the hands of the system they criticize, because it is intended to maximize speech without creating change. Instead, we need to engage the system through passive resistance, not active opposition.


With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind – exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute them selves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy; To the demand of being an object he opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately, and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy: Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive-just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning-precisely the practices of the masses-that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game-a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word-or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non- reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to re-turning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails.

To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.

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Strategic Passivity Overview

They think they’re resisting the system by speaking out against it, but extend

Baudrillard 81 who says it just ain’t so. Their efforts to make their voices heard, raise consciousness and so on, are not responsive, because the system is already configured to absorb this type of protest – if speaking out could change the system it’d be illegal. Also, speaking out and engaging the system is supporting its call for participation and involvement. They think they’re revolutionary, but in fact, they’re further granting the hegemony of the system that they criticize.

Instead of speaking out, we need to embrace the opposite strategy, which is passivity and indifference to the system. When it is no longer recognized, it can no longer resist – ironically, our political project, which ignores what they critique, is more effectively political than theirs.

2

Nd

Overview

They miss some key points to our argument, so extend the Baudrillard 81 evidence and this analysis from the overview:

First, their speech act is useless because the system absorbs protest without changing. If speaking out worked, the system wouldn’t exist, because lots have spoken out before. Theirs won’t make any difference, so they do nothing.

Second, their speech act goes in the direction of the system, because it demands this form of engagement with it. Even if they disagree, this disagreement keeps the dominant discourse on center stage and unconsciously recognizes its dominance, which is a turn because they make what they criticize more powerful.

Third, instead of speaking out, the correct strategy is strategic passivity, refusing to engage in criticism outside the system and instead using its own object practices against it by not participating in it at all. Don’t enter the rigged game – instead, refuse to play at all.

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B AUDRILLARD

Infinite Remainder

Society is defined by its outsiders – it’s impossible to have an identity without an other. Their attempt to bring the excluded into the center of society destroys the other and makes all of society the outsider, collapsing the entire social realm.


Thus the remainder refers to much more than a clear division in two localized terms, to a turning and reversible structure, an always imminent structure of reversion, in which one never knows which is the remainder of the other: In no other structure can one create this reversion, or this mise-en-abyme: the masculine is not the feminine of the feminine, the normal is not the crazy of the crazy; the right is not the left of the left, etc. Perhaps only in the mirror can the question be posed: which, the real or the image, is the reflection of the other? In this sense one can speak of the remainder as a mirror, or of the mirror of the remainder. It is that in both cases the line of structural demarcation, the line of the sharing of meaning, has become a wavering one, it is that meaning (most literally: the possibility of going from one point to another according to a vector determined by the respective position of the terms) no longer exists. There is no longer a respective position-the real disappearing to make room for an image, more real than the real, and conversely-the remainder disappearing from the assigned location to resurface inside out, in what it was the remainder of, etc.

The same is true of the social. Who can say if the remainder of the social is the residue of the nonsocialized, or if it is not the social itself that is the remainder, the gigantic waste product. . . of what else? Of a process, which even if it were to completely disappear and had no name except the social would nevertheless only be its remainder. The residue can be completely at the level of the real. When a system has absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothing remains, the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder.

Witness the "Society" column of Le Monde, in which paradoxically; only immigrants, delinquents, women, etc. appear- everything that has not been socialized, "social" cases analogous to pathological cases. Pockets to be reabsorbed, segments that the "social" isolates as it grows.

Designated as "residual" at the horizon of the social, they enter its jurisdiction in this way and are destined to find their place in an enlarged sociality. It is for this remainder that the social machine is recharged and finds new energy; But what happens when everything is sponged up, when everything is socialized? Then the machine stops, the dynamic is reversed, and it is the whole social system that becomes residue. As the social in its progression eliminates all the residue, it itself becomes residual. In designating residual categories as "Society," the social designates itself as a remainder: The impossibility of determining what is the remainder of the other characterizes the phase of simulation and the death throes of distinctive systems, a phase when everything becomes a remainder and a residual. Inversely; the disappearance of the fatidic and structural slash that isolated the rest of ? ? ? and that now permits each term to be the remainder of the other term characterizes a phase of reversibility during which there is

"virtually" no more remainder: The two propositions are simultaneously "true" and are not mutually exclusive.

They are themselves reversible. Another aspect as surprising as the absence of an opposing term: the remainder makes you laugh. Any discussion on this theme unleashes the same language games, the same ambiguity, and the same obscenity as do discussions of sex or death. Sex and death are the great themes recognized for unleashing ambivalence and laughter. But the remainder is the third, and perhaps the only one, the two others amounting to this as to the very figure of reversibility. For why does one laugh? One only laughs at the reversibility of things, and sex and death are eminently reversible figures. It is because the stake is always reversible between masculine and feminine, between life and death, that one laughs at sex and death. How much more, then, at the remainder, which does not even have an opposing term, which by itself traverses the whole cycle, and runs infinitely after its own slash, after its own double, like Peter

Schlemihl after his shadow? The remainder is obscene, because it is reversible and is exchanged for itself. It

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<<continued>>

Infinite Remainder


Today, the remainder has become the weighty term. It is on the remainder that a new intelligibility is founded. End of a certain logic of distinctive oppositions, in which the weak term played the role of the residual term. Today, everything is inverted. Psychoanalysis itself is the first great theorization of residues (lapses, dreams, etc.). It is no longer a political economy of production that directs us, but an economic politics of reproduction, of recycling-ecology and pollution-a political economy of the remainder. All normality sees itself today in the light of madness, which was nothing but its insignificant remainder. Privilege of all the remainders, in all domains, of the not-said, the feminine, the crazy; the marginal, of excrement and waste in art, etc. But this is still nothing but a sort of inversion of the structure, of the return of the repressed as a powerful moment, of the return of the remainder as surplus of meaning, as excess (but excess is not formally different from the remainder, and the problem of the squandering of excess in Bataille is not different from that of the reabsorption of remainders in a political economy of calculation and penury: only the philosophies are different), of a higher order of meaning starting with the remainder. The secret of all the "liberations" that play on the hidden energies on the other side of the slash.

Now we are faced with a much more original situation: not that of the pure and simple inversion and promotion of remainders, but that of an instability in every structure and every opposition that makes it so that there is no longer even a remainder; due to the fact that the remainder is everywhere, and by playing with the slash, it annuls itself as such. It is not when one has taken everything away that nothing is left, rather, nothing is left when things are unceasingly shifted and addition itself no longer has any meaning. Birth is residual if it is not symbolically revisited through initiation.

Death is residual if it is not resolved in mourning, in the collective celebration of mourning.

Value is residual if it is not reibsorbed and volitalized in the cycle of exchanges.

Sexuality is residual once it becomes the production of sexual relations.

The social itself is residual once it becomes a production of social relations."

All of the real is residual, and everything that is residual is destined to repeat itself indefinitely in phantasms.

All accumulation is nothing but a remainder, and the accumulation of remainders, in the sense that it is a rupture of alliance, and in the linear infinity of accumulation and calculation, in the linear infinity of production, compensates for the energy and value that used to be accomplished in the cycle of alliance. Now, what traverses a cycle is completely realized, whereas in the dimension of the infinite, everything that is below the line of the infinite, below the line of eternity (this stockpile of time that itself is also, as with any stockpile, a rupture of alliances), all of that is nothing but the remainder.

Accumulation is nothing but the remainder, and repression is nothing but its inverse and asymmetrical form. It is on the stockpile of repressed affects and representations that our new alliance is based.

But when everything is repressed, nothing is anymore. We are not far from this absolute point of repression where the stockpiles are themselves undone, where the stockpiles of phantasms collapse.

The whole imaginary of the stockpile, of energy, and of what remains of it, comes to us from repression. When repression reaches a point of critical saturation where its presence is put in question, then energy will no longer be available to be liberated, spent, economized, produced: it is the concept of energy itself that will be volatilized of its own accord. Today the remainder, the energies left us, the restitution and the conservation of remainders, is the crucial problem of humanity. It is

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B AUDRILLARD insoluble in and of itself. All new freed or spent energy will leave a new remainder. All desire, all libidinal energy, will produce a new repression. What is surprising in this, given that energy itself is not conceived except in the movement that stockpiles and liberates it, that represses it and "produces" it, that is to say in the figure of the remainder and its double?


B AUDRILLARD

Feminist Plastic Surgery

The move to reconcile the sexes seeks to destroy difference, but in the absence of difference, the other is reconstructed in the form of the self – women become reflections of men, which further entrenches patriarchal power structures and maintains a form of solipsist alienation far worse than simple gender oppression.

Baudrillard in 95 [Jean, November 22, “Plastic Surgery for the Other”]

Starting with modernity, we have entered an era of production of the Other. It is no longer a question of killing, of devouring or seducing the Other, of facing him, of competing with him, of loving or hating the Other. It is first of all a matter of producing the Other. The Other is no longer an object of passion but an object of production. Maybe it is because the Other, in his radical otherness [alterite], or in his irreducible singularity, has become dangerous or unbearable. And so, we have to conjure up his seduction. Or perhaps, more simply, otherness and dual relationships gradually disappear with the rise of individual values and with the destruction of the symbolic ones. In any case, otherness [alterite] is lacking and, since we cannot experience otherness as destiny, one must produce the other as difference.

And this is a concern just as much for the body as it is for sex, or for social relationships. In order to escape the world as destiny, the body as destiny, sex (and the other sex) as destiny, the production of the other as difference is invented. This is what happens with sexual difference. Each sex has its own anatomical and psychological characteristics, its own desire with all the insoluble events that emerge from that, including an ideology of sex and desire, and a utopia of sexual difference based on law and nature. None of this has any meaning

[sens] whatsoever in seduction where it is not a question of desire but of a play [jeu] with desire, and where it is not a question of equality between different sexes or of an alienation of one by the other since this play [jeu] implies a perfect reciprocity of each partner (not difference or alienation, but alterity/otherness [alterite] or complicity). Seduction is nothing less than hysterical, since no sex projects its sexuality onto the other. Distances are set. And otherness [alterite] is left untouched. This is the very condition of this greater illusion, of this play with desire.

What is produced with the romantic turn, at the turn of the 19th century, is on the contrary the putting into play of a masculine hysteria and, with it, of a change in sexual paradigms that once again must be reinserted in the more general and universal context of a change in the paradigms of otherness.

During this hysterical phase, it is to a certain extent the femininity of men that is projected onto women and that shape them as ideal figures of likeness [ressemblance]. Romantic love is no longer about winning over a woman's heart, or about seducing her. It is rather a matter of creating her from inside [de l'interieur], of inventing her, either as a realized utopia (an idealized woman), or as a "femme fatale", a star, which is yet another hysterical and supernatural metaphor. This is the entire work of the romantic Eros: he is the one who has invented such an ideal harmony, such a love fusion, almost an incestuous form, between twin beings (woman as a projected resurrection of the same, and woman who takes her supernatural shape only as an ideal of the same), an artifact from now on destined to love, that is to say destined to a pathos of ideal likeness [ressemblance] of

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<<Baudrillard 95 continued 2/3>> beings and sexes, a pathetic confusion that replaces the dual otherness [alterite] of seduction. The entire erotic machinery changes meaning/direction [sens] because the erotic attraction that once came from otherness [alterite], from the strangeness of the Other, now shifts to the side of the Same, to the side of similarity and likeness [ressemblance]. Autoeroticism? Incest? No, but rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same that eyes the other, that invests and alienates himself in the other. But the other is never more than the ephemeral form of a difference that draws me closer to the I [me rapproche de moi]. It is also the reason why, with romantic love and all its current by-products, sexuality draws nearer to death: it is because sexuality is getting closer to incest and to its own destiny, even if it is banalized (for it is no longer a question of a mythical or tragic incest; with modern erotism we are only dealing with a diverted form of incest, that of the projection of the same into the image of the other, which is the same thing as a confusion and a corruption of all the images).

Finally, it is the invention of a femininity which renders women superfluous, the invention of a difference which is nothing more than a diverted copulation with one's double. In the final analysis [au fond], any encounter with otherness [alterite] is made impossible (by the way, it would be interesting to know whether there has ever been a hysterical counterpart to this phenomenon from the feminine side in the construction of virile and phallic mythologies.

Feminism is in fact an example of hystericization of the masculine by women, a hysterical projection of their masculinity which follows exactly the hysterical projection by men of their femininity in the mythical image of a woman).

But there still remains a dissymmetry in this forced allocation to difference.

And this is why I was saying, in a paradoxical way, that men are more different from women than actually women are from men. This means that, in the context of sexual difference, men are above all different whereas there is some remnant of radical otherness within women, a radical otherness of women which precedes the degraded status of [masculine] difference.

In short, in this extrapolation process of the Same in the production of the Other, in this hysterical invention of the sexual other as a twin brother or sister (if the issue of twinning is so up-to-date, it is because it reflects this very mode of libidinal cloning), there is a progressive assimilation of the sexes which goes from difference to a lesser difference, and from there to a visual inversion and nondifferentiation of the sexes which, in the last analysis, turns the sexual function into something totally useless. In the cloning process, useless sexual beings will be reproduced. They are useless since sexuality is no longer necessary to their reproduction.

The real woman seems to disappear in that hysterical invention of femininity (but she has many more ways to resist that), in that invention of sexual difference whereby the masculine side is from the beginning the privileged pole and through which all the ideological and feminist struggles will be doomed to reconstruct either that very privilege or that unreconciled difference. But, at the same, the so-called masculine desire also becomes, through the same invention, completely problematic since it is no longer able to project in an other its own image, and thus to become purely speculative. All this nonsense about the phallus and the sexual privilege of masculinity must also be re- examined. There is a sort of transcending justice in this process of sexual non-differentiation, a justice which drives both sexes to inexorably culminate in total non-differentiation where they lose their singularity and their otherness [alterite].

This is the era of Transsexualism where all the struggles linked to sexual Difference are perpetuated well after any real sexuality or any type of real

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<<continued>>



This (successful?) merger of a masculinely projected hysteria onto femininity is renewed by every individual (man or woman) on their own bodies. An identification and an appropriation of the body as if it was a projection of the self, of a self no longer seen as otherness or destiny. In the facial traits, in sex, in illnesses, in death, identity is constantly "altered." There is nothing you can do about it: that's destiny. But it is precisely that which must be exorcized at any cost through an identification with the body, through an individual appropriation of the body, of your desire, of your look, of your image: plastic surgery all over the place. If the body is no longer a place of otherness [alterite], a dual relationship, but is rather a locus of identification, we then must reconcile to it, we must repair it, perfect it, make it an ideal object. Everyone uses their body like man uses woman in the projective mode of identification described before. The body is invested as a fetish, and is used as a fetish in a desperate attempt at identifying oneself. The body becomes the object of an autistic cult and of a quasi-incestuous manipulation. And it is the likeness [ressemblance] of the body with its model which then becomes a source of eroticism and of "white" [fake, virgin, neutral,...] self-seduction to the extent that this likeness virtually excludes the Other and is the best way to exclude a seduction which would emerge from somewhere else.

Many more things partake of that production of the Other, of that hysterical and speculative production: like racism, for instance, with its development throughout modernity and with its current outbursts. Logically, racism should have diminished thanks to Enlightenment's progress. But, the more we know that a genetic theory of race is unfounded, the more racism is reinforced. It is because racism is an artificial construction of the Other based on an erosion of cultural singularities (of their otherness between one another) and on an acceptance of a fetishistic system of difference. As long as there is otherness [alterite], strangeness, and dual relationships (event violent ones), there is properly speaking no such thing as racism. This was more or less the case until the 18th century, as anthropological reports indicate. Once such a "natural" relationship is lost, one enters an exponential relationship with an artificial Other. And nothing in our culture allows racism to be curbed since our entire cultural movement goes in the same direction [sens] which is that of a frenzied differential construction of the Other and of a perpetual extrapolation of the Same through the Other. An autistic culture which takes the shape of a fake altruism.

Everyone talks about alienation. But the worst alienation is not to be dispossessed by the other but to be dispossessed of the other, that is to say to have to produce the other in his absence, and thus to be continuously referred back to oneself and to one's image. If we are today condemned to our own image (condemned to cultivate our body, our look, our identity, and our desire), this is not because of an alienation, but because of the end of alienation and because of the virtual disappearance of the other, which is a much worse fatality. In fact, the paradoxical limit of alienation is to take oneself as a focal point [comme point de mire], as an object of care, of desire, of suffering, and of communication . This final short-circuiting of the other opens up an era of transparency. Plastic surgery [la chirurgie esthetique] becomes universal. That surgery of the faces and bodies is only the symptom of a more radical one: that of otherness and destiny.

What is the solution? Well, there is none to this erotic movement of an entire culture, none to such a fascination, to such an abyss of denial of the other, of denial of strangeness and negativity. There is none to that foreclosing of evil and to that reconciliation around the

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Same and his proliferated expressions: incest, autism, twinning, cloning. We can only remember that seduction lies in not reconciling with the Other and in salvaging the strangeness of the Other. We must not be reconciled with our own bodies or with our selves.

We must not be reconciled with the Other. We must not be reconciled with nature. We must not be reconciled with femininity (and that goes for women too). The secret to a strange attraction lies here.

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Feminist Plastic Surgery Overview



B AUDRILLARD

Implosion of the State

The idea of the state vanishing through revolution and people refusing to accept it is just a pipe-dream – it doesn’t fit the modern era. Rather, the state will implode through overrregulation, like a system with too much feedback – the plan’s action is a step in this direction.


Beaubourg cannot even burn, everything is foreseen. Fire, explosion, destruction are no longer the imaginary alternative to this type of building. It is implosion that is the form of abolishing the "quaternary" world, both cybernetic and combinatory. Subversion, violent destruction is what corresponds to a mode of production. To a universe of networks, of combinatory theory, and of flow correspond reversal and implosion.

The same for institutions, the state, power, etc. The dream of seeing all that explode by dint of contradictions is precisely nothing but a dream. What is produced in reality is that the institutions implode of themselves, by dint of ramifications, feedback, overdeveloped control circuits. Power implodes, this is its current mode of disappearance.

Such is the case for the city. Fires, war, plague, revolutions, criminal marginality, catastrophes: the whole problematic of the anticity, of the negativity internal or external to the city, has some archaic relation to its true mode of annihilation. Even the scenario of the underground city-the Chinese version of the burial of structures-is naive. The city does not repeat itself any longer according to a schema of reproduction still dependent on the general schema of production, or according to a schema of resemblance still dependent on a schema of representation. (That is how one still restored after the Second World War.) The city no longer revives, even deep down-it is remade starting from a sort of genetic code that makes it possible to repeat it indefinitely starting with an accumulated cybernetic memory. Gone even the Borgesian utopia, of the map coextensive with the territory and doubling it in its entirety: today the simulacrum no longer goes by way of the double and of duplication, but by way of genetic miniaturization. End of representation and implosion, there also, of the whole space in an infinitesimal memory; which forgets nothing, and which belongs to no one. Simulation of an immanent, increasingly dense, irreversible order, one that is potentially saturated and that will never again witness the liberating explosion.

We were a culture of liberating violence (rationality). Whether it be that of capital, of the liberation of productive forces, of the irreversible extension of the field of reason and of the field of value, of the conquered and colonized space including the universal-whether it be that of the revolution, which anticipates the future forms of the social and of the energy of the social-the schema is the same: that of an expanding sphere, whether through slow or violent phases, that of a liberated energy-the imaginary of radiation.

The violence that accompanies it is that of a wider world: it is that of production. This violence is dialectical, energetic, cathartic. It is the one we have learned to analyze and that is familiar to us: that which traces the paths of the social and which leads to the saturation of the whole field of the social. It is a violence that is determined, analytical, liberating.

A whole other violence appears today, which we no longer know how to analyze, because it escapes the traditional schema of explosive violence: implosive violence that no longer results from the extension of a system, but from its saturation and its retraction, as is the case

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<<continued>>

Implosion of the State

<<Baudrillard 81 continued>> the state of an overregulated system, a network (of knowledge, information, power) that is overencumbered, and of a hypertrophic control investing all the interstitial pathways. This violence is unintelligible to us because our whole imaginary has as its axis the logic of expanding systems. It is indecipherable because undetermined. Perhaps it no longer even comes from the schema of indeterminacy. Because the aleatory models that have taken over from classical models of determination and causality are not fundamentally different.

They translate the passage of defined systems of expansion to systems of production and expansion on all levels-in a star or in a rhizome, it doesn't matter-all the philosophies of the release of energy, of the irradiation of intensities and of the molecularization of desire go in the same direction, that of a saturation as far as the interstitial and the infinity of networks.

The difference from the molar to the molecular is only a modulation, the last perhaps, in the fundamental energetic process of expanding systems.

Something else if we move from a millennial phase of the liberation and disconnection of energies to a phase of implosion, after a kind of maximum radiation (see Bataille's concepts of loss and expenditure in this sense, and the solar myth of an inexhaustible radiation, on which he founds his sumptuary anthropology: it is the last explosive and radiating myth of our philosophy, the last fire of artifice of a fundamentally general economy, but this no longer has any meaning for us), to a phase of the reversion of the social-gigantic reversion of a field once the point of saturation is reached. The stellar systems also do not cease to exist once their radiating energy is dissipated: they implode according to a process that is at first slow, and then progressively accelerates-they contract at a fabulous speed, and become involutive systems, which absorb all the surrounding energies, so that they become black holes where the world as we know it, as radiation and indefinite energy potential, is

abolished.


B AUDRILLARD

Imperialism as Anti-Imperialism

The West thinks it is assimilating and dominating other cultures, when in fact the inclusion of those cultures is what makes their destruction impossible, and ultimately leads to the death of the West’s dominance through internal collapse.


It might seem that the flow of wealth and abundance moving from West to East wins out over the opposite flow. But what flows from West to East is chiefly the illusion of victory. What is moving in the other direction is more subtle and more deadly: the virus of weakness, the multiple forms of disaffection, the end of all democratic illusions. In short, nothing is decided and no one can say who will win, who will be first to destabilize the other, the rich, businesslike countries or those trained by Marxism in abulia and corruption? Slackness or efficiency?

Fatal apathy or high performance levels? The captive hell of paradise or the captive paradise of hell? The two worlds now stand opposed not with weapons or ideas, but mentally in the artificial promiscuity of the New World Order. This is where the transparence of Evil begins. This is where we shall see, once all the conditions for order are fulfilled, how irresistible is disorder; once all the conditions for Good are fulfilled, how irresistible is Evil, how it circulates in the same arterial system as Good and feeds off it, in all innocence, in all perversity. It is

Dracula against Snow White (the Dracula myth is gathering strength all around as the

Faustian and Promethean myths fade). We have a good idea who is going to suck the other's blood once their glass coffins are broken open. It is in Germany that these two worlds are telescoped together, with Berlin as the epicentre, since there, paradoxically, it is from reunification that the antagonism arises. It is not the confrontation but the rapprochement of two worlds which produces violence and the clash of mentalities. The historical failure of the one, when faced with the dazzling success of the other, may turn to defiance, and those very people who eyed the wealth enviously when it was still forbidden may very well turn their backs entirely on the Western model merely to remain consistent with themselves. In the course of their misfortunes, the people of Eastern Europe have certainly acquired an opinion on history and its perverse effects. Against all theoretical predictions, out of the two opposed worlds of Capital and Labour, it is that of Labour they have seen collapse. Logically, they must have drawn from this a lesson of non-labour and collective irresponsibility. However this may be, it will certainly not be easy to convert them to the liberal cult of performance.

This is how the reversal of Western values begins. Not merely by the infiltration into the metropolitan heartland of a Fourth World which, unlike the Third, has no other territory than the one it destabilizes from within, but also by the osmosis of an Eastern European world which is decomposing, and making of that decomposition if not a strategy then at least a trap, a decoy, a politique du pire. Now, we know that one of the characteristics of the West, represented to perfection by the Americans in the recent Gulf War, is a tendency to shoot at decoys.

The drip-feeding of Western values behind the Iron Curtain gives way today to the percolation, the surreptitious infiltration of the impotence, slackness, technological, economic and demographic ill-will of another world", that was long considered residual, backward, under-developed and which is rising up today as a fully fledged protagonist, an equal protagonist and perhaps even a superior one to the extent that its

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<<continued>>

Imperialism as Anti-Imperialism

<<Baudrillard 94 continued>> potential of impotence is superior to our potential of potency. Now, contrary to the apparent facts which suggest that all cultures are penetrable by the West - that is, corruptible by the universal - it is the West which is eminently penetrable. The other cultures (including those of

Eastern Europe), even when they give the impression of selling themselves, of prostituting themselves to material goods or Western ideologies, in fact remain impenetrable behind the mask of prostitution. They can be wiped out physically and morally, but not penetrated. This alienness is linked to their complicity with themselves. The West, for its part, is alien to itself, and anyone can just walk right in.

The logic of this challenge is alien to that of the economic and liberal New World Order. In the order of power and wealth, one desires the death of the other so as to take his place. By contrast, what these refractory, incompatible cultures want, what they demand, is not to take the place but to see the death of the West, even at the risk of dying themselves. The

West, naive as ever, believes it is resented for its power and wealth and, even more naively, believes in the compatibility of all cultures. But even when the 'others' seem to be demanding their share of the cake, this is still an allegorical way of desiring its death.

The West is discovering the Eastern bloc countries, weak and drained, as once it discovered the survivors of the concentration camps. The danger is to feed them too quickly, since this kills them. But, in any case, whether or not they are saved, they live in another space - shattered by catastrophe. They will never come back into ours. Certainly, we shall do all we can to wipe this past from their memories. But in vain. It is they, by contrast, who will suck us into their empty space, just as the dead and the survivors of the camps have sucked our last vague desires for culture, law and morality into the empty space and impotent memory of extermination. The attraction of the void is irresistible. The 'victory' of the West is not unlike a depressurizing of the West in the void of communism, in the void of history.

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Viral Communism

Communism’s collapse has caused it to integrate into the West and infect it with its own values. The combination of communism and capital gains the benefits of both and ultimately achieves the goal of the communist revolution.


It is clear that the ultimate deterrence has come from the East -no longer that of the balance of terror, which, for forty years, prevented the event of atomic war from coming about, but of the imbalance of terror, which prevents the confrontation itself from coming about.

Deterrence by self-dissolution, demolition, de-escalation, unilateral disarmament, autodestabilization which completely destabilizes the opponent - a strategy of weakness, an unexpected, unpredictable strategy even for the protagonists themselves, but all the more effective for that. A strategy of disappearance, dispersion, dissemination, contamination, virulence by fragmentation. For not only are the weapons, hardware and brains of the former

USSR going to turn up allover the world, but the model of disintegration is going to radiate out also, more effective than a thousand atom bombs. Integral, totalitarian communism could be sealed up and neutralized. Disintegrated communism becomes viral; it becomes capable of passing through its own wall and infecting the whole world, not by ideology or by its model of functioning, but by its model of dysfunctioning and of sudden, violent destructuring.

Certainly, we might ask whether this is still communism? Whatever the answer, it is exerting an influence over the world which it could never muster by arms or by thought, an influence over the whole world by the event of its disappearance. In that sense, it might be said that it is triumphant, since perfect communism, the fully realized communism, like the fully realized utopia, is the one which has disappeared. In that sense, too, the consequences of communism's sudden self-dissolution are perhaps even more incalculable than those of its appearance at the dawn of this century. Not through ideology, but through the auto-da-fe of its own principles, the unconditional acting out of capitulation. In terms of ideas, it had opened up a monolithic, totalitarian path; with its inverted acting out, it opens up the path of dislocation for all structures and empires. The East will have victoriously countered capital with capitulation.

It is Chernobyl that will turn out to have been the real starting point in this involuntary, but brilliant strategic inversion which has destabilized the very concept of relations of force, creating out of this a strategy of relations of weakness and completely changing the rules of the game. Up to that point, things were frozen: no military, offensive acting-out was possible.

Everything culminated in Star Wars, an impossible scenario: orbital bombs are virtual; they do not explode. The only true bomb explodes - or implodes - on the spot, by superfusion:

Chernobyl, an accidental acting-out. It was the Eastern bloc that exploded that bomb in its own heart and it was that bomb which, in the form of the first atomic cloud, crossed the Wall and frontiers without encountering any opposition, inaugurating the fusion between the two worlds by radioactive infiltration. So the initial explosion of the New World Order will indeed have come from the East, and the contamination has passed from East to West. After

Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall no longer exists. Symbolically, it is therefore nuclear fusion, after all, which presides over the political, transpolitical confusion of the blocs. By the suicidal accident of Chernobyl, the former USSR both admits its impotence, its weakness, and at the

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<<continued>>

Viral Communism

<<Baudrillard 94 continued>> the world of capital itself. Up to now, communism had sought out the weakest link in the capitalist chain. Suddenly, it discovered that it was the weakest link and, by destroying itself, by cracking up almost accidentally, it sent the other world hurtling to its doom, forced it to deny itself as enemy, contaminated its defences, exported its own economic and political suicide. The captive hell of communism found itself liberated. From this point on, the barrier separating hell from heaven is liquidated. And in this case, of course, the liquefaction is general, and hell always submerges heaven.

Solzhenitsyn writes (against Sakharov and his idea of having the two hostile blocs converge so as to unite their mutual qualities): 'What can come of two societies afflicted with such redhibitory vices when they come closer together and are transformed by the contact between them? A society twice as immoral.' The dream of plurality is indeed precisely this: differences are to be exchanged as positive qualities. Whereas what always wins out in the exchange of differences, in dialogue, is the exchange and addition of negative qualities.

Fusion always turns into confusion - contact into contamination. We have an example of this today with AIDS and the fatal potentiality threatening every sexual encounter. But the same goes for computers: maximum interconnectedness brings maximum vulnerability of all networks (the trend now is towards stand-alone computers; it seems in fact that networks transmit viruses even faster than information). Genetic confusion runs in this same direction. It is one of the aspects of the principle of Evil that it always proceeds more quickly than Good.

So Solzhenitsyn, for his part objecting to this immoral confusion, is right and Sakharov wrong.

But we have nothing against vice and immorality. If they have to be increased in the confusion of the two worlds, then perhaps that is better, all in all, than the austere, puritanical order of deterrence and the balance of terror. Why not a world society which is entirely corrupt, a single empire which is the empire of confusion, a New World Disorder which combines the filterable viruses of communism with the discreet charm of the rights of man and nature?

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Power Lashing Out

As power is criticized and disappears, it seeks even harder to reaffirm its existence and delay its death – this overfascination with power in societies that are losing it results in fascism.


As long as the historical threat came at it from the real, power played at deterrence and simulation, disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs. Today when the danger comes at it from simulation (that of being dissolved in the play of signs), power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, and political stakes. For power, it is a question of life and death. But it is too late.

Whence the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of values and commodities, that of the belle epoque of political economy, has for a long time had no specific meaning. What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it. That is why today this "material" production is that of the hyperreal itself. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is no longer anything but its scaled-down refraction (thus hyperrealists fix a real from which all meaning and charm, all depth and energy of representation have vanished in a hallucinatory resemblance). Thus everywhere the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself.

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.

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Power Lash Out Overview

Extend Baudrillard 81. He argues that their criticism causes more problems than it solves – they try to resist power influencing our lives, but this is the exact cycle power requires in order to exist, by granting the fear of its collapse that requires its continued existence. Their resistance is coproductive with the structures they try to criticize, and their actions are already coopted by the system, so it will never solve anything. Also, as the grip of power is weakened, it responds by tightening its grip, leading to fascism, which turns all their impacts.


B AUDRILLARD

The Debt

The U.S. debt has entered the realm of the virtual, absent any real signifier. The debt will never be paid, and the only danger is from allowing it to reenter the real, which would bring the world of signs crashing down around us.

Baudrillard in 96 [Jean, November 16, "Global Debt and Parallel Universe"]

In fact, the debt will never be paid. No debt will ever be paid. The final counts will never take place. If time is counted [si le temps nous est compte], the missing money is beyond counting [au-dela de toute comptabilite]. The United States is already virtually unable to pay, but this will have no consequence whatsoever. There will be no judgment day for this virtual bankruptcy. It is simple enough to enter an exponential or virtual mode to become free of any responsibility, since there is no reference anymore, no referential world to serve as a measuring norm.

The disappearance of the referential universe is a brand new phenomenon. When one looks at the billboard on Broadway, with its flying figures, one has the impression that the debt takes off to reach the stratosphere. This is simply the figure in light years of a galaxy that vanishes in the cosmos. The speed of liberation of the debt is just like one of earth's satellites. That's exactly what it is: the debt circulates on its own orbit, with its own trajectory made up of capital, which, from now on, is free of any economic contingency and moves about in a parallel universe (the acceleration of capital has exonerated money of its involvements with the everyday universe of production, value and utility). It is not even an orbital universe: it is rather ex-orbital, ex-centered, ex-centric, with only a very faint probability that, one day, it might rejoin ours. That's why no debt will ever be paid. At most, it can be bought over at a bargain price to later be placed back on a debt market (public debt, national debt, global debt) where it will have become a currency of exchange. Since there is no likely settlement date, the debt has an incalculable [inestimable] value. As long as it hangs like that over our heads with no reference whatsoever, it also serves as our only guarantee against time. Unlike the countdown which signifies the end of time, an indefinitely deferred debt is the guarantee that even time is inexhaustible... And we really need a virtual time insurance since our future is about to dissipate in real time.

Clearing the debt, settling the accounts, cancelling the payments by the Third World... Don't even think about it! We only live because of this unbalance, of the proliferation and the promise of infinity created by the debt. The global or planetary debt has, of course, no meaning in the classical terms of stock or credit. But it acts as our true collective credit line, a symbolic credit system whereby people, corporations, nations are attached to one another by default. People are tied to each other (this goes for the banks too) by means of their virtual bankruptcy, just as accomplices are tied by their crime.

Everyone is certain to exist for the other in the shadow of an unamendable and insolvable debt for, as of today, the total amount of the global debt is much larger than the total amount of available capital. Thus, the debt no longer has any meaning but to unite all civilized beings to a same destiny served on credit. A similar thing takes place with nuclear weapons whose global capacity is much bigger than what is needed to destroy the entire planet. Yet, it remains as a way of uniting all of humankind to a same destiny marked by threat and deterrence.

At least, it is easier now to understand why the Americans are so eager to advertise their domestic debt in such a spectacular manner. The Times Square initiative is designed to make the state feel guilty about the way it runs the country, and intended to warn the citizens about the imminent collapse of the financial and public spheres. But, of course, the exorbitant figure deprives the billboard of any meaning (even figures have lost their credit line). In fact, this is nothing more than a gigantic advertising campaign and, by the way, this is why the neon "billboard" is made to look like a triumphant stock exchange quotation that has gone over the

<<continued>>

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The Debt

<<Baudrillard 96 continued>> top. And people stare at it, fascinated by the spectacle of a world performance (in the meantime, people rarely look at the numerical time clock at Beaubourg to witness the gradual ending of this century). People are collectively in the same situation as that Russian test pilot who, until the very last second, was able to see his airplane drop and crash on the video system of his Tupolev jet. Did he have the ultimate reflex to look at the image before dying? He could have imagined his last living moments in virtual reality. Did the image survive the pilot, even for a tenth of a second, or vice versa? Does virtual reality live on after the catastrophe of the real world?

Our true artificial satellites are the global debt, the flows of capital, and the nuclear loads that circle around the earth in an orbital dance. As pure artifacts, with a sidereal velocity and an instantaneous capacity of reversal, they have found their true place. This place is even more extraordinary than the

Stock Exchange, banks, or nuclear stockpiles: it is that of the orbit, where they rise and set like artificial suns.

Some of the most recent of these exponentially developing parallel worlds are the Internet and the many worldwide webs of information. Each day, in real time, the irresistible growth (or outgrowth perhaps) of information could be measured there, with numbers representing the millions of people and the billions of operations that they cover. Information now expands to such an extent that it no longer has anything to do with gaining knowledge. Information's immense potential will never be redeemed and it will never be able to achieve its finality. It's just like the debt. Information is just as insolvable as the debt and we'll never be able to get rid of it. Collecting data, accumulating and transporting information all over the world are the same thing as compiling an unpayable debt. And here too, since proliferating information is larger than the needs and capacities of any individual, and of the human species in general, it has no other meaning but that of binding humankind to a destiny of cerebral automation and mental underdevelopment. It is clear that if a small dose of information reduces ignorance, a massive dose of artificial intelligence can only reinforce the belief that our natural intelligence is deficient. The worst thing that can happen to an individual is to know too much and, thus, to fall beyond knowledge. It is exactly the same thing with responsibility and emotional capacity. The perpetual intimation of the media in terms of violence, suffering, and catastrophe, far from exalting some sort of collective solidarity, only demonstrates our real impotence and drives us to panic and resentment.

Caught in their autonomous and exponential logic, all these parallel worlds are like time bombs. It is more obvious with nuclear weapons, but it is also true of the debt and capital flows. The smallest intrusion of these worlds into ours, the least noticeable encounter between their orbits and ours, would immediately disrupt the fragile equilibrium of our exchanges and economies. This would (or will) be the same with the total liberation of information, which could transform us into free radicals desperately searching for our molecules in a scanty cyberspace.

Reason would probably insist that we include these worlds into our homogeneous universe: nuclear weapons would have a peaceful use, all the debts would be erased, all the flows of capital would be reinvested in terms of social well-being, and information would contribute to knowledge. This is, no doubt, a dangerous utopia. Let these worlds remain parallel to ours, let their threats hang up in the air: their ex-centricity is what protects us. For, no matter how parallel and ex-centric they may be, they are in fact ours. We are the ones who created them and placed them beyond our reach, as an ersatz of transcendence. We are the ones who placed them on their orbits as some sort of catastrophic imaginaries. And it is perhaps better this way. Our society was once solidified by a utopia of progress. It now exists because of a catastrophic imaginary.

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Debt Overview

Extend the Baudrillard 96 card. He says that the US deficit doesn’t matter anymore – it has no relation to reality, it’s just a really big hypothetical number that is already impossible to repay. The debt exists in a parallel universe, separate and above the world we actually live in, and it ties all the people and countries in the world together through their mutual debt. In this formulation is harmless.

Their disad scenario is what makes the debt dangerous. When they treat the debt as something real that we need to worry about, it unbalances all the forms of exchange based on it. As long as the threat hangs in the air, it draws us to together – once it’s drawn back down, it pushes everyone apart as repayment is demanded. That’s what causes their impact evidence to come true, not an excessive amount of money owed by the government, turning their whole scenario.


B AUDRILLARD

Simulation of Politics

The media creates the political world and actors in an abstract world of hyperreality with no relation to actual reality. Rather than the events creating the images of them, the images create the events.

Baudrillard in 98 [Jean, September 23, "In the Shadow of the Millennium"]

We know the analysis that Marx gave of Napoleon III, the "smaller" Napoleon, as a grotesque duplicate of the first Napoleon. He is like a parody, a degraded incident compared with the original. History uses this technique of the duplicate to go forward whereas in fact it is going backward. History reproducing itself becomes farce. And we could add: Farce reproducing itself becomes history. The current period offers multiple examples of this degraded and exhausted duplication of the first events of modernity. As such, the current era could indeed be called "postmodern." It is "postmodern" in the sense that its condition is that of a simulation or spectrality of events whose only stage is the news media. The postmodern events are like secondary products. They are the events of a history which can no longer renew itself, an unreal history, in which actors are nothing more than extras. The war in Bosnia gave us a dramatic example of such a condition. It was no longer an event. It was rather the symbol of history's own impotence. It was a stasis, a "strike of events," as Macedonio Fernandez put it.

What does the metaphor of the "strike of events" mean? It means that history's workforce has been forced out of work. But it also means that a work of mourning begins, and often that the work of the news media takes over. The media have to take over and make the event, just as capital takes over to produce labor. This is a paradoxical reversal of all our classical perspectives. According to this new configuration, when labor is the product of capital, the very act of working loses its meaning (and the chance it may have had to upset capital's order). Similarly, the event produced by the media no longer has any historical significance.

It no longer conveys any form of political resolution. The only resolution that is left is the visual resolution of the media. The event becomes virtual. Everywhere, virtuality (the mediatic hyper-space with its multiple interfaces) eradicates what we could call, if it still meant anything at all, the real movement of history.

At this point, we enter the domain of the transpolitical or the transhistorical. It is a domain where events no longer take place in reality because of their own production and deployment in 'real time.' They can simply be captured transpolitically. As transpolitical events, they are lost in a vacuum of information. The informational domain is a space where, after all the events have been emptied of their substance, an artificial gravity is restored, and the events are sent back into orbit where they can be seen in real time. Or, to put it differently, after losing their historical vitality, the events can now be rebroadcast on the transpolitical stage of the news media. It is the same thing as what happens in making a movie. If history is a movie (which indeed it has become through its immediate retroprojection), the 'truth' in the news media is nothing more than the post-synchronizing, the dubbing, and the sub-titling of the film.

We could also talk about the transeconomic domain. It would be the domain which emerges after classical economics is lost in the empty vortex of stock exchange vacillations

(just as history is lost in the vortex of information). Virtual and speculative economic transactions mark the end of any form of political economy. Traders and

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Simulation of Politics


Golden Boys no longer have anything to do with the logic of production, the market, capitalist profit. Something else is at stake: 'real-time' economics, the instantaneous fluidity of capital, the orbital dance of money. Circulating around itself at an increasingly fast speed, money becomes a strangely magnetic agent. As an uncontrollable chain reaction, it transcends real economics and goes through reality from one end to the other similar to the nuclear reactor in over-drive of China Syndrome which was able to go through the globe from end to end.

In A Critique of Political Economy, Marx states that "mankind only poses problems that it can solve... We notice that a problem arises when the material conditions of its solution already exist or, at least, when they are about to exist." But it is not like this anymore. Our jump into the virtual world unsettles all the material conditions that Marx was talking about, and deprives historical conditions of any dialectical solution. In a sense, the virtual is history's final solution and the end result of real conflicts. Today, this means that humankind (or those who think on its behalf) only comes up with problems when they have already been solved. They have been virtually surpassed, or the system has displaced them by absorbing their occurrence.

But wasn't it already like this in Marx's time? The emergence of the notions of class and struggle, the birth of a historical conscience: aren't these indicative of the moment when humankind ceased to be violent and irreducible? This is reminiscent of Foucault and his analysis of power. When he starts to analyze power, isn't it already the sign that power no longer has any political meaning, that it has lost its object? When ethnology looks at primitive societies, it means that they have already disappeared. Analysis itself is part of the process of disappearance.

Critical consciousness, and perhaps thought in general, are like Kafka's messiah: they always arrive too late, after the fact, at dusk, like the Owl of Minerva. Critical consciousness is nothing more than a retrospective prophecy, reminiscent of Plato's figurines and their shadows on the back wall ( a wall of events) in the cave (here, history's own cave). As

Apollinaire used to say, when people talk about time, it means that it has already vanished.

History does not serve second courses. Only analysis does.

Is there room, then, for another thought, a paradoxical thought, which, unlike what Marx said, would only pose insolvable questions, definitely insolvable problems? Is there a thought whose material conditions of resolution are not already present, and will never be? Who would re-problematize all the already discovered solutions and, in so doing, would keep the world in an enigmatic suspense? Nobody knows. Isn't the risky destiny of thought to finally become the victim of its own prophecy, just as history's fate is to fall for its own trap?


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Media Information Sucks

Increasing information through the media is a destructive process – the images devour the real content and create ambivalence and alienation from actual events.


The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital.

Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social-just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. And for two reasons.

I. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication.

Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the anti theater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that-would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning.

It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process-that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished.

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

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B AUDRILLARD with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses.

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Banishing the Right

Fear and demonization of the “new right” is what gives it its power – the more the right is opposed and scapegoated, the more legitimacy and political authority it gains. Instead of fighting for ideology, we need to realize that the line between right and left is meaningless and unhelpful.

Baudrillard in 97 [Jean, May 7, “A Conjuration of Imbeciles”]

There has been a shattering reformulation. The right used to embody moral values and the left, by contrast, used to represent an antagonistic mode of historical and political exigency.

But today the left is deprived of its political energy. It has become a purely moralistic lawmaking structure, a representative of universal values, a sacred holder of the reign of Virtue, and an incarnation of antiquated values such as Good or Truth. It now acts as a jurisdiction which asks everyone to act responsibly while still granting itself the right to remain

irresponsible. The political illusion of the left (which had remained frozen during twenty years of opposition) turned into a platform of historical morality (and not of historical direction) once it came to power. It then became the holder of a morality of truthfulness, basic rights, and good conscience, having thus reached a zero degree on the political scale and, undoubtedly, the lowest point of the genealogy of morals. Its moralization of all values marked its historical failure (and the failure of thinking in general). Since then, even reality, the principle of reality, has become an act of faith. Try to question the reality of war, for example, and you immediately become a betrayer of moral law.

With the left and the traditional right both deprived of political substance, where has the political gone to? Well, simply, it has moved to the far right. As Bruno Latour so accurately noted the other day in Le Monde, the only political discourse today in France is that of Le

Pen's Front National. All the rest is moral and pedagogic discourse, teachers' lessons and lecturers' tirades, managers' rhetoric and programmers' jargon. By contrast, having given himself to evil and immorality, Le Pen has been able to take over all of the political, the remnant of what has been abandoned or voluntarily rejected by a political ideology of

Good deeds and Enlightenment values. The more he is antagonized by a moral coalition (a sign of political impotence), the more he enjoys the benefits of political immorality, the benefits which come with being the only one on the side of evil. In the past, whenever the traditional right decided to implement an ideology of morality and order, you could always count on the left, always attempting to antagonize those so-called moral values in the name of political claims. But today, the left is experiencing the same condition that once characterized the traditional right. Suddenly responsible for the defense of moral order, the left has no choice but to witness the slippage of abandoned political energies toward political forces which do not hesitate to antagonize its newly created order. Conversely, the left keeps on reactivating the source of evil by continuing to embody the rule of virtue, which of course is nothing more than the rule of supreme hypocrisy.

If Le Pen did not exist, we would have to invent him! Indeed, it is thanks to him that we can get rid of our evil share, of what is the worst part of us. It is as such that we can curse Le Pen. If he were to disappear, however, we would be left begging for pity! We would be left struggling with our own racist, sexist, and nationalist (everyone's fate) viruses. Simply, we would be abandoned to the murderous negativity of society. As such, Le Pen is the perfect

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B AUDRILLARD mirror of the political class which uses him to conjure up its own evils, just as every

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<<Baudrillard 97 continued 2/3>> individual uses the political class to cast away any form of corruption inherent to society

(both are similar types of corrupt and cathartic functions). Trying to put an end to this, trying to purify society and moralize public life, trying to eradicate what claims to embody evil is a complete misunderstanding of the way evil operates, of the way politics itself operates.

Opting for a mode of unilateral denunciation, and ignoring the very principle of reversibility of evil, anti-Le Pen supporters have left him with a monopolistic control over the evil share.

Having thus been cast away, Le Pen can no longer be dislodged. By demonizing him in the name of virtue, the political class simply offers him a most comfortable situation. Le Pen simply has to pick up and recycle the discourse of ambivalence, of denial of evil, and of hypocrisy that his opponents constantly throw at him in the course of their battle for the defense of law or the defense of a good cause. Le Pen's enemies provide him with the energy he needs. Too eager to discredit him, they simply transform his mistakes into (his own) victories. They do not see that good never comes from a purification of evil (evil always retaliates in a forceful way), but rather from a subtle treatment which turns evil against itself.

All this shows us that Le Pen may be the embodiment of worthlessness and idiocy. No doubt!

But he is above all the symptom of his opponents' stupidity. The imbeciles are those who, by denouncing him, blatantly reveal their own impotence and idiocy and glaringly demonstrate how absurd it is to antagonize him face to face. They simply have not understood the rules of evil that his game of musical chairs follow. By continuing to antagonize him, the imbeciles give life to their own ghosts, their negative doubles. This shows, indeed, a terrifying lack of lucidity on their part. But what drives such a perverse effect, the fact that the left remains trapped in a discourse of denunciation whereas Le Pen maintains a privilege of enunciation?

What pushes one to gain all the profits from the crime while the other suffers the negative effects of recrimination? What causes one to "get off" [s'eclatant] with evil when the other gets lost with the victim?

Well, it's quite simple. By incarcerating Le Pen in a ghetto, it is in fact the democratic left which becomes incarcerated and which affirms itself as a discriminatory power. It becomes exiled within its own obsession and automatically grants a privilege of justice to what it demonizes. And, of course, Le Pen never misses an opportunity to claim republican legality and fairness on his behalf. But it is above all on the imaginary but very pregnant figure of the rebel and persecuted soul that he establishes his prestige. Thus, he can enjoy the consequences of both legality and illegality. A victim of ostracism, Le Pen has an incredible freedom of language and can deploy an unmatched arrogance of judgement, something that the left has deprived itself of.

Let's give an example of such a magical thought that today stands in for political thought. Le

Pen is blamed for the sentiment of rejection and exclusion of immigrants in France. But this is just a drop in an ocean of social exclusion that has overwhelmed all of society (recently, exclusion itself, as well as the "social breakdown" that politicians like to mention, were all excluded by the decree signed by the President of the Republic to dissolve the National

Assembly). We are all both responsible and victim at the same time of this inextricable and complex process of exclusion. There is something typically magical in the

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<<Baudrillard 97 continued 3/3>> need to conjure up this virus, which is everywhere to be found (it is a direct function of our social and technical "progress"), and in the desire to exorcise the curse of exclusion (and our impotence by the same token) through the figure of a hated man, institution, or organization, no matter who or what they are. It is as if we were faced with a tumor in need of extraction whereas, in fact, the metastases have already expanded everywhere. The Front National simply follows the course of the social metastases, and is all the more virulent since people think that they have eradicated the disease when, in fact, it has already infected the entire body. Not to mention that this process of magical projection of the Front National takes place along the same lines as this party's own process of demonization of immigrants. One must always be suspicious of the ruse of contamination, a ruse which, by means of the transparency of evil, mutates positivity into negativity, and a demand for liberty into

"democratic despotism." As usual, it is a question of reversibility, of a subtle encirclement of evil whose rational intelligence is never suspected. While modern pathology tells us a lot about the physical body, we do not pay attention to this mode of analysis when it comes to the social body.

To remain within the political, we must step away from ideology and look at things through the lens of social physics. Our democratic society is a stasis. Le Pen is a metastasis. Global society is dying of inertia and immune deficiency. Le Pen is simply the visible transcription of such a viral condition; he is the spectacular projection of the virus. This happens in dreams too. Le Pen is a burlesque, hallucinatory figuration of a latent state, of a silent inertia caused by forced integration and systematic exclusion. Since the hope of finally curing social inequalities has truly disappeared (by and large), it is no surprise if resentment has moved to the level of racial inequality. The failure of the social explains the success of the racial (and of all the other fatal strategies). As such, Le Pen is the only savage analyst in today's society. The fact that he is placed on the far right is merely the sad result of the fact that analysts are no longer to be found on the left or the far left. Judges, intellectuals no longer analyze. Only the immigrants perhaps, as polar opposites, could become analysts too. But they already have been recycled by a good and responsible humanitarian thought. Le Pen is the only one who operates a radical erasure of the so-called distinction between right and left. This is, no doubt, an erasure by default. But the harsh criticism of this conventional distinction which was unleashed in the 1960s (and culminated in 1968) has unfortunately disappeared from the political scene today. Le Pen simply recuperates a de facto situation that the political class refuses to confront (it even uses elections to deny it), but whose extreme consequences will be felt some day. If, one day, political imagination, political will, and political demand hope to rebound, they will have to take into account the radical abolition of the antiquated and artificial distinction between right and left, which, in fact, has been largely damaged and compromised over the past decades, and which only holds today through some sort of complicit corruption on both sides. This distinction is dead in practice but, by means of an incurable revisionism, is constantly reaffirmed. Thus, Le Pen is the only one who makes up the new political scene, as if everyone else had already agreed to destroy what's left of democracy, perhaps to produce the retrospective illusion that it actually used to mean something.

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Banishing the Right Overview

Extend the Baudrillard 97 evidence. Here’s the argument. The classical leftwing of politics has become useless – it tries to defend classical morality, and portrays the right as immoral, a reversal of their classical roles. However, the more the left says the right is immoral, the more power the right gains, because it can utilize it’s outsider status to generate concern and support. For example, if an Aryan parade is shut down, the organizers go claim their freedom of speech has been violated, and so get people who otherwise would disagree with their ideology to support them. Their arguments perpetuate the same problem.

The left also demands the existence of a right, so that we can cast all our fears and social concerns onto it to purge ourselves of them and feel pure and moral in ourselves. Scapegoating the right gives it more power, because it can use its immoral status to gain a sort of demonic appeal, and if the right were ever destroyed we would have to recreate it to avoid facing our own political demons. Their effort to avoid the rise of the new right ends up just giving it more power and ensuring it will continue to dominate.

The way out is to recognize that the division between left and right has become fundamentally meaningless and impairs our understanding politics.

Reject the artificial distinction they draw in order to solve the impacts they claim.

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Disney World

The real is being replaced by the hyperreal, a giant metaphorical Disney

World, where images replace reality and become eternal and infinitely repeating in the virtual universe, where the real has become a spectacle, but instead of being outside looking in, we are the spectacle, constant participants in a reality show of violence.

Baudrillard in 96 [ Jean, March 4, "Disneyworld Company"]

But the Disney enterprise goes beyond the imaginary. Disney, the precursor, the grand initiator of the imaginary as virtual reality, is now in the process of capturing all the real world to integrate it into its synthetic universe, in the form of a vast "reality show" where reality itself becomes a spectacle [vient se donner en spectacle], where the real becomes a theme park. The transfusion of the real is like a blood transfusion, except that here it is a transfusion of real blood into the exsanguine universe of virtuality. After the prostitution of the imaginary, here is now the hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified version.

At Disney World in Orlando, they are even building an identical replica of the Los Angeles

Disneyland, as a sort of historical attraction to the second degree, a simulacrum to the second power. It is the same thing that CNN did with the Gulf War: a prototypical event which did not take place, because it took place in real time, in CNN's instantaneous mode.

Today, Disney could easily revisit the Gulf War as a worldwide show. The Red Army choirs have already celebrated Christmas at Euro Disney. Everything is possible, and everything is recyclable in the polymorphous universe of virtuality. Everything can be bought over. There is no reason why Disney would not take over the human genome, which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic show. In the end [au fond], they would

cryogenize the entire planet, just like Walt Disney himself who decided to be cryogenized in a nitrogen solution, waiting for some kind of resurrection in the real world. But there is no real world anymore, not even for Walt Disney. If one day he wakes up, he'll no doubt have the biggest surprise of his life. Meanwhile, from the bottom of his nitrogen solution he continues to colonize the world - both the imaginary and the real - in the spectral universe of virtual reality, inside which we all have become extras [figurants]. The difference is that when we put on our digital suits, plug in our sensorial captors, or press the keys of our virtual reality arcade, we enter live spectrality whereas Disney, the genial anticipator, has entered the virtual reality of death.

The New World Order is in a Disney mode. But Disney is not alone in this mode of cannibalistic attraction. We saw Benetton with his commercial campaigns, trying to recuperate the human drama of the news (AIDS, Bosnia, poverty, apartheid) by transfusing reality into a New

Mediatic Figuration (a place where suffering and commiseration end in a mode of interactive resonance). The virtual takes over the real as it appears, and then replicates it without any modification [le recrache tel quel], in a pret-a-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion.

If this operation can be so successful in creating a universal fascination with only a tint of moral disapproval, it is because reality itself, the world itself, with its frenzy of cloning has already been transformed into an interactive performance, some kind of Lunapark for ideologies, technologies, works, knowledge, death, and even destruction. All this is likely to be cloned and resurrected in a juvenile museum of Imagination or a virtual museum of

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Information.

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Disney World


Similarly, it is useless to keep searching for computer viruses since we are all caught in a viral chain of networks anyway. Information itself has become viral; perhaps not sexually transmissible yet, but much more powerful through its numerical propagation.

And so it does not take much work for Disney to scoop up reality, such as it is. "Spectacular

Inc.," as Guy Debord would say. But we are no longer in a society of spectacle, which itself has become a spectacular concept. It is no longer the contagion of spectacle that alters reality, but rather the contagion of virtuality that erases the spectacle. Disneyland still belonged to the order of the spectacle and of folklore, with its effects of entertainment

[distraction] and distanciation [distance]. Disney World and its tentacular extension is a generalized metastasis, a cloning of the world and of our mental universe, not in the imaginary but in a viral and virtual mode. We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras [figurants interactifs]; we are the meek lyophilized members of this huge

"reality show." It is no longer a spectacular logic of alienation but a spectral logic of disincarnation; no longer a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion and transubstantiation of all our cells; an enterprise of radical deterrence of the world from the inside and no longer from outside, similar to the quasi-nostalgic universe of capitalistic reality today. Being an extra [figurant] in virtual reality is no longer being an actor or a spectator. It is to be out of the scene [hors-scene], to be obscene.

Disney wins at yet another level. It is not only interested in erasing the real by turning it into a three-dimensional virtual image with no depth, but it also seeks to erase time by synchronizing all the periods, all the cultures, in a single traveling motion, by juxtaposing them in a single scenario. Thus, it marks the beginning of real, punctual and unidimensional time, which is also without depth. No present, no past, no future, but an immediate synchronism of all the places and all the periods in a single atemporal virtuality. Lapse or collapse of time: that's properly speaking what the fourth dimension [la quatrieme dimension] is about. It is the dimension of the virtual, of real time; a dimension which, far from adding to the others, erases them all. And so it has been said that, in a century or in a millennium, gladiator movies will be watched as if they were authentic Roman movies, dating back to the era of the Roman empire, as real documentaries on Ancient Rome; that in the John Paul Getty Museum in

Malibu, a pastiche of a Pompeian villa, will be confused, in an anachronistic manner, with a villa of the third century B.C. (including the pieces inside from Rembrandt, Fra Angelico, everything confused in a single crush of time); that the celebration of the French Revolution in Los Angeles in 1989 will retrospectively be confused with the real revolutionary event.

Disney realizes de facto such an atemporal utopia by producing all the events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, and by inexorably mixing all the sequences as they would or will appear to a different civilization than ours. But it is already ours. It is more and more difficult for us to imagine the real, History, the depth of time, or three-dimensional space, just as before it was difficult, from our real world perspective, to imagine a virtual universe or the fourth dimension [la quatrieme dimension].

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Radical Thought Alternative

The criticism is its own meaning – language will never be a reference to the real. Instead, it should be used to further distance from the real, and return it more disjointed and confused than it is now.

Baudrillard in 95 [ Jean, April 19, "Radical Thought"]

Our point is not to defend radical thought. Any idea that can be defended is presumed guilty. Any idea that does not sustain its own defense deserves to perish. But we have to fight against charges of unreality, lack of responsibility, nihilism, and despair. Radical thought is never depressing. This would be a complete misunderstanding. A moralizing and ideological critique, obsessed by meaning and content, obsessed by a political finality of discourse, never takes into account writing, the act of writing, the poetic, ironic, and allusive form of language, the play with meaning. This critique does not see that the resolution of meaning is right here, in the form itself, in the formal materiality of an expression. As for meaning, it is always unfortunate. Analysis is by its very definition unfortunate since it is born out of a critical disillusion. But language on the contrary is fortunate (happy), even when it designates a world with no illusion, with no hope. This would in fact be here the very definition of radical thought: an intelligence without hope, but a fortunate and happy form. Critics, always being unfortunate (unhappy) in their nature, choose the realm of ideas as their battle field. They do not see that if discourse always tends to produce meaning, language and writing on the contrary are always a matter of illusion. Language and writing are the living illusion of meaning, the resolution of the misfortune of meaning operated through the good fortune of language. This is the only political or transpolitical act that a writer can accomplish.

Everyone has ideas, even more than they need. What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis. Only this witz, this spirituality of language, can justify writing. Not a miserable critical objectivity of ideas. There will never be a solution to the contradiction of ideas, except inside language itself, in the energy and fortune (happiness) of language. So the loneliness and sadness in Edward Hopper's paintings are transfigured by the timeless quality of light, a light which comes from some place else and gives to the whole picture a totally non-figurative meaning, an intensity which renders loneliness unreal. Hopper says: "I do not paint sadness or loneliness; I only seek to paint light on this wall."

In any case, it is better to have a despairing analysis in a happy language than an optimistic analysis in despairingly boring and demoralizingly plain language. Which is too often the case. The formal boredom that is secreted by an idealist thought on values, or by a goaloriented thought on culture, is the secret sign of despair for this thought - not despair with the world, but despair toward its own discourse. This is where the real depressing thought emerges. It emerges with those people who only talk about a transcendence or a transformation of the world, while they are totally unable to transfigure their own language.

Radical thought is in no way different from radical usage of language. This thought is therefore alien to any resolution of the world which would take the direction of an objective reality and of its deciphering. Radical thought does not decipher. It anathematizes and

"anagramatizes" concepts and ideas, exactly what poetic language does with words.

Through its reversible chaining, it simultaneously gives an account of

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Radical Thought Alternative

<<Baudrillard 95 continued>> meaning and of its fundamental illusion. Language gives an account of the very illusion of language as a definite stratagem and through that notes the illusion of the world as an infinite trap, as a seduction of the mind, as a stealing away of all mental capacities. While being a transporter of meaning, language is at the same time a supra-conductor of illusion and of the absence of meaning. Language is only signification's unintentional accomplice.

By its very force, it calls for the spiritual imagination of sounds and rhythms, for the dispersion of meaning in the event of language, similar to the role of the muscles in dance, similar to the role of reproduction in erotic games.

Such a passion for the artificial, a passion for illusion, is the same thing as the seductive joy

(jouissance) to undo a too perfect constellation of meaning. It is also a joy (jouissance) to render transparent the imposture of the world, that is to say the enigmatic function of the world, and its mystification which supposedly is its secret. Doing this while perhaps rendering its imposture transparent: deceiving rather than validating meaning. This passion "wins" in the free and spiritual usage of language, in the spiritual game of writing. And it only disappears when language is used for a limited finality, its most common usage perhaps, that of

communication. No matter what, if language wants to "speak the language" of illusion, it must become a seduction. As for "speaking the language" of the real, it would not know how

to do it (properly speaking) because language is never real. Whenever it appears to be able to designate things, it actually does so by following unreal, elliptic, and ironic paths.

Objectivity and truth are metaphoric in language. Too bad for the apodicticians or the apodidacticians! This is how language is, even unconsciously, the carrier of radical thought, because it always starts from itself, as a trait d'esprit vis-a-vis the world, as an ellipse and a source of pleasure. Even the confusion of languages in the Tower of Babel, a powerful mechanism of illusion for the human race, a source of non-communication and an end to the possibility of a universal language, will have appeared, finally, not as a divine punishment but as a gift from God.

Ciphering, not deciphering. Operating illusions. Being illusion to be event. Turning into an enigma what is clear. Making unintelligible what is far too intelligible. Rendering unreadable the event itself. Working all the events to make them unintelligible. Accentuating the fake transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion, to spread the germs or viruses of a radical illusion, that is to say operating a radical disillusion of the real. A viral and deleterious thought, which corrupts meaning, and is the accomplice of an erotic perception of reality's trouble.

Erasing in oneself any remaining trace of the intellectual plot. Stealing the "reality file" to erase its conclusions. But, in fact, it is reality itself which foments its own contradiction, its own denial, its own loss through our lack of reality. Hence, the internal feeling that all this affair - the world, thought, and language - has emerged from some place else and could disappear as if by magic. The world does not seek to have more existence, nor does it seek to persist in its existence. On the contrary, it is looking for the most spiritual way to escape reality. Through thought, the world is looking for what could lead to its own loss.

The absolute rule, that of symbolic exchange, is to return what you received. Never less, but always more. The absolute rule of thought is to return the world as we received it:

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Our Framework

We realize debate is a game designed to foster argument and education.

However, it’s more important to consider how we’re playing the game than who is winning within it – the imaginary impacts of their case don’t matter until they justify the rhetoric used to justify it. That’s best for debate because:

First, it’s realistic. Fiat doesn’t really exist, the plan won’t be passed at the end of the round regardless of which way you vote. The burden of proof is on them to show that this is uniquely good for debate.

Second, fiat-centered debate encourages ridiculous and anti-educational strategies, like politics disadvantages and the race to the most nuclear war impacts, which have nothing to do with the real world and detracts from focus on the affirmative case, where the most deep and educational clash lies.

Third, speaking in abstraction about what form the world should take through fiat ignores and marginalizes all the people who would be affected.

Nayar in 99 [Jayan, Fall, School of Law, University of Warwick Transnational Law

& Contemporary Problems “Orders of Inhumanity”]

Located within a site of privilege, and charged to reflect upon the grand questions of worldorder and the human condition as the third Christian Millennium dawns, we are tempted to turn the mind to the task of abstract imaginings of "what could be" of our "world," and "how should we organize" our "humanity." Perhaps such contemplations are a necessary antidote to cynicism and skepticism regarding any possibility of human betterment, a necessary revitalization of critical and creative energies to check the complacencies of the state of things as they are. n1 However, imagining [*601] possibilities of abstractions--"world-order,"

"international society," "the global village," "the family of humankind," etc.--does carry with it a risk. The "total" view that is the take-off point for discourses on preferred "world-order" futures risks deflection as the abstracted projections it provokes might entail little consequence for the faces and the names of the humanity on whose behalf we might speak. So, what do we do?

Fourth, our criticism is an attack on the justifications for their fiat impacts, which is like attacking the warrant behind a claim. They can’t say the claim will be true or outweigh until they justify the warrant for it by refuting our criticism.

Fifth, we make teams responsible for their discourse. If fiat impacts could outweigh, there’d be no way to criticize teams for using sexist, racist, or otherwise offensive language because they could claim their nuclear war impacts are more important. As members of the debate community, we have

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Our Framework

Sixth, fiat encourages a spectator mentality where real events become tools in our game of academic debate, which is politically and intellectually unhelpful.

Mitchell in 98 [Gordon R., Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh,

“PEDAGOGICAL POSSIBILITIES FOR ARGUMENTATIVE AGENCY IN ACADEMIC DEBATE”

Argumentation & Advocacy, Vol. 35 Issue 2, p41-60]

While an isolated academic space that affords students an opportunity to learn in a protected environment has significant pedagogical value (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8-9), the notion of the academic debate tournament as a sterile laboratory carries with it some disturbing implications, when the metaphor is extended to its limit. To the extent that the academic space begins to take on characteristics of a laboratory, the barriers demarcating such a space from other spheres of deliberation beyond the school grow taller and less permeable. When such barriers reach insurmountable dimensions, argumentation in the academic setting unfolds on a purely simulated plane, with students practicing critical thinking and advocacy skills in strictly hypothetical thought-spaces. Although they may research and track public argument as it unfolds outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach, students witness argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, with little or no apparent recourse to directly participate or alter the course of events (see Mitchell 1995; 1998).

The sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or misfortune.

Instead of focusing on the visceral negative responses to news accounts of human death and misery, debaters overcome with the competitive zeal of contest round competition show a tendency to concentrate on the meanings that such evidence might hold for the strength of their academic debate arguments. For example, news reports of mass starvation might tidy up the "uniqueness of a disadvantage" or bolster the "inherency of an affirmative case" (in the technical parlance of debate-speak). Murchland categorizes cultivation of this

"spectator" mentality as one of the most politically debilitating failures of contemporary education: "Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to provide the kind of civic forums we need. In fact, one could easily conclude that the principle purposes of our schools is to deprive successor generations of their civic voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the drama of political life" (1991, p. 8).

Lastly, note that our argument is not that fiat impacts shouldn’t be in debate.

Rather, they just need to be evaluated after we discuss the discursive level, so their arguments aren’t offense unless they justify why fiat should be at the same level as the discourse.

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Framework Overview

Here are the key points on the framework debate. Extend the #1: fiat isn’t real. That means the burden of proof is on them to show that it’s a helpful practice for debate. If there’s any doubt in your mind, err negative because our interpretation is more intuitive and applicable.

Our #4 is game over – our critique is an attack on the mindset and images they use to justify their policy impacts, which is like attacking the warrant to the claim on an argument. Of course their case will seem like a good idea if you grant them all the justifications they provide for it. However, once the warrant is removed, the claim is no longer an argument, just like the case is no longer a reason to vote aff. Their theory issues are irrelevant to this, because it doesn’t matter how good fiat is for debate if they can’t defend the mindset that justifies their case.

Also, our evidenced arguments are more important than any theoretical whines they have – fairness ceases to be an issue when we show that their framework is destructive to the activity and the real world.

Extend our #3, the Nayar 99 card. He says that creating the image of an ideal world we can act on, like they do with fiat, ignores the people around us and those who will be impacted by the case. Because their focus is on a distant worldview, they don’t see the people who are being harmed now, which marginalizes any contribution those people might have to the political world. That’s terrible for debate because it encourages an elitist worldview where only the opinions of people in our academic game matter, and is irresponsible to the rest of the world.

Extend our #6, Mitchell 98, which specifically talks about debate and fiat. Mitchell says that fiat creates a spectator mentality where we observe events in the real world without considering our ability to change them, and where tragic events become just another tool in a debate round instead of a reason to go do something about them, which creates political apathy in debaters and destroys any real value to the activity.

Also, this accesses our Baudrillard impacts, because fiat encourages debaters to cheer bad things happening to others for our simulated disads and case arguments. Our collective enjoyment of this suffering guarantees we’ll never do anything to resolve it in their framework, which is a reason to reject it.

Now for the theoretical issues. Extend our #2, fiat requires stupid and annoying strategies like politics where everything ends in nuclear war, so we never talk or learn about the case, where the resolution is actually focused.

Extend #5: if fiat is weighed on the same level as discourse, teams can use terrible rhetoric and claim it doesn’t matter because their case has big impacts, which justifies horrible racist or sexist language that excludes people from the activity.

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Finally, extend the #7. You can still get all the benefits of fiat in debate through our framework, it just comes after the discourse, so none of their offense applies and they lose on our critique.

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Aff Doesn’t Get to Pick Framework

Our interpretation is that the affirmative may present a framework, but then they must defend it. That’s best for debate because:

1.

It’s consistent with other debate practice – the only rule of debate is that there are no rules; teams can argue over whether certain arguments are theoretically legitimate and so on. Teams should be able to argue over what framework is used as well; this constant questioning gives the best depth of argumentation and education.

2.

Their interpretation destroys negative ground – affs could just specify their framework to get out of negative arguments they know their case is vulnerable to (like they just did), which destroys legitimate debate over whether it’s the best policy. For example, an aff could run a framework saying whites are the master race, and a plan to throw all the minorities into the ocean to prevent the fish from starving. The framework would prevent us from making our best arguments against the plan.

3.

The inherent vagueness of frameworks makes this abuse effectively infinite – what exactly is a framework? I don’t know, neither do they, it’s hard to define. That means teams could reinterpret the framework in new ways every round to dodge arguments if we can’t challenge it.

4.

They’re unpredictable for the negative – we don’t know what framework they’ll use and which of our arguments will apply until part way through the 1AC, which makes pre-round prep and disclosure useless, so we can never be prepared.

5.

We increase clash – there’s argument on the framework too, hence more possible clash and education.

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A2: Perm

The perm is literally impossible – radical thought and belief in the illusion of the real cannot be combined with an objective interpretation of the world.

Claiming they go together is a dangerous illusion that destroys both.


In any case, the two orders of thought are irreconcilable. They each follow their own path without blending into one another. At best, they slide on one another, like tectonic plates, and from time to time their collision or their subduction creates fault lines inside which reality is engulfed. Fatality is always at the crossing point of these two lines. Similarly, radical thought is at the violent crossing point of sense and non-sense, of truth and non-truth, of the continuation of the world and the continuation of nothingness.

In contrast to the discourse of reality and rationality, which bets on the fact that there is something (some meaning) rather than nothing, and which, in the last analysis, wants to be built on the preservative notion of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought bets on the illusion of the world. This thought wants to be illusion, restituting non-veracity to the facts, non- signification to the world, and formulating the reverse hypothesis that there may be nothing rather than something, tracking down this nothingness which runs under the apparent continuation of meaning.

The radical prediction is always that of a non-reality of the facts, of an illusion of the factual. It merely starts with the foreboding of this illusion, but never fuses with the objective state of things. Any fusion of this type would be similar to mistaking a messenger for his message, which still today consists in killing the messenger who always brings the bad news (for example, the news that all our values are null, that the real is uncertain, that certain events do not "take place"). Any fusion of the thought (of writing, of language) with the real - a socalled "faithfulness of the real" with a thought that has made the real emerge in all of its configurations - is hallucinatory. It is moreover the result of a total misinterpretation of language, of the fact that language is an illusion in its very movement, that it carries this continuation of emptiness or nothingness at the very core of what it says, and that it is in all its materiality a deconstruction of what it signifies. Just as the photograph (the image) connotes an erasure, the death of what it represents, that which gives the photograph its intensity, what gives intensity to writing, be it the writing of a fiction or the writing of a theoretical fiction, is emptiness, an underlying nothingness, an illusion of meaning, an ironic dimension of language, which is corollary to an ironic dimension of the facts themselves, which are never what they are - in all meanings: they are never more than what they are, and they are always only what they are - a perfect amphiboly. The irony of the facts, in their miserable reality, is precisely that they are only what they are. At least, that is what they are supposed to mean: "the real is the real." But, by this very fact (so to speak), they are necessarily beyond

[truth] because factual existence is impossible: nothing is totally evidentiary without becoming an enigma. Reality, in general, is too evident to be true.

It is this ironic transfiguration through language which constitutes the event of language. And it is on a restitution of this fundamental illusion of the world and language that thought must work, without however taking language in its literality, where the messenger is mistaken for the message, and thus already sacrificed.

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A2: Perm

Any critical argument that is combined with reality is immediately robbed of its critical potential – the events are infinitely adaptable, and cynically morph to support any theory that might challenge them, which destroys the effectiveness of the theory. To be effective, the criticism must remain on the margin.


More subtly, reality also gets its revenge from those who challenge it by, paradoxically, proving that they are right. Whenever any risky idea, any cynical or critical hypothesis proves to be right, it in fact turns out to be a dirty trick. You are fooled and disarmed. Your arguments are lamentably confirmed by a reality without scruples.

So, you may posit the idea of a simulacrum, and yet, secretly, not believe in it, hoping that the real will avenge itself. The theory is then not necessarily convinced of its own validity.

Unfortunately, only those who are reality fanatics react negatively. Reality does not seem to be willing to deny itself, far from it: all simulacra wander freely. Reality today is nothing more than the apocalypse of simulation. Consequently, the reality supporters (who defend reality as if it was a moral value or a virtue) play, so to speak, the part of those who once were called the fanatics of the Apocalypse.

The idea of simulacrum was a conceptual weapon against reality, but it has been stolen. Not that it has been pillaged, vulgarized, or has become common-place(which is true but has no consequence), but because simulacra have been absorbed by reality which has swallowed them and which, from now on, is clad with all the rhetoric of simulation. And to cap it all, simulacra have become reality! Today, simulacra guarantee the continuation of the real. The simulacrum now hides, not the truth, but the fact that there is none, that is to say, the continuation of Nothingness.

This is the very paradox of any thought that reveals the falsehood of the real: when reality

steals your concept and realizes (fulfills) it, and by the same token flies away from any criticism. Events, deprived of any direction, steal any possible meaning. They adapt to the most fantastic hypotheses like natural species and viruses adapt to the most hostile environments. They show an extraordinary mimetic capacity. There has been a reversal here too: it is no longer theories that have to adapt to events, but events that adapt to theories. In any case, they mystify us because a theory that realizes itself is no longer a theory. A realized hypothesis is no longer a hypothesis. It is terrifying to see a hypothesis be realized like this. It is terrifying to suddenly see the idea coincide with reality. This is the agony of the concept. The epiphany of the real is the twilight of the concept.

We have lost the advance that ideas had on the world, that distance that makes an idea stay an idea. Thought must anticipate, be exceptional, and in the margin - the projected shadow of the future events. Yet, today, we are lagging behind the events. They may sometimes give the impression that they regress, that they are not what they should be. In fact, they have passed over us for a long time. The simulated disorder of things has gone faster than us. The effect of reality has disappeared behind the acceleration of things - an anamorphosis of speed. What happens to the heterogeneity of thought in a world that has been converted to the craziest hypotheses and to an artificial delirium? In their accelerated occurrence, the events have in a sense swallowed their own interpretation. Things have

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A2: Perm

A world in which thought and the real can be happily combined no longer exists – in the world of hyperreality, this Enlightenment vision is outdated.


All this defines the insoluble relationship between thought and the real. A certain type of thought is an accomplice of the real. It starts with the hypothesis that there is a real reference to an idea and that there is a possible "ideation" of reality. This is no doubt a comforting perspective, one which is based on meaning and deciphering. This is also a polarity, similar to that used by ready-made dialectical and philosophical solutions. The other thought, on the contrary, is ex-centric from the real. It is an "ex-centering" of the real world and, consequently, it is alien to a dialectic which always plays on adversarial poles. It is even alien to critical thought which always refers to an ideal of the real. To some extent, this thought is not even a denial of the concept of reality. It is an illusion, that is to say a "game" played with desire (which this thought puts "into play"), just like metaphor is a "game" played with truth.

This radical thought comes neither from a philosophical doubt nor from a utopian transference (which always supposes an ideal transformation of the real). Nor does it stem from an ideal transcendence. It is the "putting into play" of this world, the material and immanent illusion of this so-called "real" world - it is a non-critical, non-dialectical thought. So, this thought appears to be coming from somewhere else. In any case, there is an

incompatibility between thought and the real. Between thought and the real, there is no necessary or natural transition. Not an "alternation," not an alternative either: only an "alterity" keeps them under pressure. Only fracture, distance and alienation safeguard the singularity of this thought, the singularity of being a singular event, similar in a sense to the singularity of the world through which it is made into an event.

Things probably did not always happen this way. One may dream of a happy conjunction of idea and reality, in the shadow of the Enlightenment and of modernity, in the heroic ages of critical thought. But that thought, which operated against a form of illusion - superstitious, religious, or ideological - is substantially over. And even if that thought had survived its catastrophic secularization in all the political systems of the 20th century, the ideal and almost necessary relationship between concept and reality would in any case have been destroyed today. That thought disappeared under the pressure of a gigantic simulation, a technical and mental one, under the pressure of a precession of models to the benefit of an autonomy of the virtual, from now on liberated from the real, and of a simultaneous autonomy of the real that today functions for and by itself - motu propio - in a delirious perspective, infinitely selfreferential. Expelled, so to speak, from its own frame, from its own principle, pushed toward its extraneity, the real has become an extreme phenomenon. So, we no longer can think of it as real. But we can think of it as "ex-orbitated," as if it was seen from another world - as an illusion then.

Let's ponder over what could be a stupefying experience: the discovery of another real world, different from ours. Ours, one day, was discovered. The objectivity of this world was discovered, just like

America was discovered, more or less at the same period. But what was discovered can never be created again. That's how reality was discovered, and is still created (or the alternate version: this is how reality was created, which is still being discovered). Why wouldn't there be as many real worlds as there are imaginary ones? Why would there be only one real world? Why such a mode of exception?

In reality, the notion of a real world existing among all other possible worlds is unimaginable. It is unthinkable, except perhaps as a dangerous superstition. We must stay away from that, just

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Thinkers, give it another try!

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A2: Postmodernism is Bad

They’re missing a link – how exactly are we postmodern? We say to reject them, but that doesn’t increase postmodernism in any way.

Second, that doesn’t refute any of the arguments we make. Even if postmodernism as a principle is bad, it doesn’t make the plan a good idea.

Third, their argument is irrelevant unless they claim our discourse has impacts outside of the round, which is a postmodern idea about the impact of discourse, so they’re equally postmodern if their argument has any impact, putting them in a double bind.

Fourth, postmodernism is a response to the current era, not the other way around. It’s impossible to reject postmodernism, they have to engage our critique.

Feldman in 94 [Stephen M. SPRING, Professor of Law, University of Tulsa DIAGNOSING

POWER: POSTMODERNISM IN LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP AND JUDICIAL PRACTICE

Northwestern University Law Review]

Postmodernists, in response to this attack, might insist that they neither colonize nor depoliticize different voice scholarship; rather (as already discussed) postmodern theory both builds upon and supports such scholarship. Indeed (possibly speaking for Schlag), one reason we now question the ability of subjects to choose and pursue normative goals is that different voice scholars have helped reveal that the very concept of the "choosing subject" represents a manifestation of a dominant majority's exercise of power. Of course, some critics of postmodernism, discounting such postmodern responses, might reply that the postmodern emphasis on the antifoundationalist and anti-essentialist play of signifiers inevitably leads to a

"slippery slope of "totalizing critique,' " n268 which leaves no standard for criticizing oppression and domination. To be sure, the problem of justifying critique looms as a crucial difficulty for postmodernists, n269 but postmodernism is not merely some grand theory that we can choose to reject because of some serious weakness. Postmodernism, at a minimum, is a cultural era or tradition that includes or manifests itself in certain types of theory. n270 With this recognition, the problem of critique becomes a challenge that must be confronted, not a defect that somehow justifies the impossible (rejecting the postmodern). n271 [*1105]

Fifth, Baudrillard doesn’t say postmodernism is good, he just presents a way to look at life in a postmodern world. Rejecting his views is like rejecting a path that helps guide us because we don’t like where we are now – their argument is more counter-productive than postmodernism

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A2: We Still Solve!

We have to examine the representations behind their arguments first – the images are used to justify their political cause. Of course if we assume their representations are correct, we’ll come to the conclusion that their cause is a good idea; that’s why they chose the images they did. Ignoring the images means you’re dodging the most crucial question.

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A2: Need a Textual Alternative

That’s ridiculous. Our argument is a criticism of the assumptions and images behind the affirmative’s presentation of their case, not just the plan. They don’t give a text to their assumptions, because they’re found in the evidence. Our alternative is effectively a set of counterassumptions that refute the affirmative, so there’s no way we can give a simple textual alternative, and if they want to know about our assumptions, they can read our evidence, just like we did to find theirs.

Debate centered on assumptions rather than wording of the plan is better because: a.

Focuses on intent, not semantic details – we focus on what the debaters are actually saying, rather than the 5 second sound bite they call the plan, which preserves the value of all the other stuff they say in their speeches. b.

Gives more ground – we can argue about all the assumptions presented, which gives tons of ground to both teams, which is also very predictable, because they should know what their authors are saying and what people say in response. c.

More depth to debate, because instead of focusing on the superficial points, we require debaters to examine all the warrants and basis for their author’s arguments, which gives better understanding and more education.

Second, here’s the textual alternative – don’t vote aff. We’ll defend their advocacy is a bad idea throughout the entire round. They get all the ground for trying to show that it’s a good idea, which is all they need.

Third, there’s no ground loss – any evidence they’ll have against our criticism will be focused on our assumptions, so all their offense still applies. Don’t buy any moving target arguments until you see one in the round, and cross-x will always check back abuse; it’s their fault if they didn’t ask us to clarify what we meant.

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A2: Disaster Porn

Obvious manipulation of the images demystifies news and catastrophe reporting, fostering detachment that is crucial to life in the modern age.

Baudrillard in 94 [Jean, “The Illusion of the End” p. 60-61]

Here, then, is the international consciousness foiled by its own ideal, hoist with its own petard.

The Gulf War merely accentuated the disastrous impression of our having been drawn so far into simulation that the question of truth and reality cannot even be posed, of our having been drawn so far into the 'liberation' of the medium and the image that the question of freedom cannot even be posed. But can news and the media really be put on trial now?

Absolutely not, for the simple reason that the media themselves hold the key to the judicial enquiry. There can be no contesting their innocence since 'disinformation' is always imputed to an accident of news-gathering [information]; the guiding principle itself is never

questioned.

And yet there will, nonetheless, have been a kind of verdict in this Romanian affair, and the artificial heaps of corpses will have been of some use, all the same. One might ask whether the Romanians, by the very excessiveness of this staged event and the simulacrum of their revolution, have not served as demystifiers of news and its guiding principle. For, if the media image has put an end to the credibility of the event, the event will, in its turn, have put an end to the credibility of the image. Never again shall we be able to look at a television picture in good faith, and this is the finest collective demystification we have ever known. The finest revenge over this new arrogant power, this power to blackmail by events. Who can say what responsibility attaches to the televisual production of a false massacre (Timisoara), as compared with the perpetrating of a true massacre? This is another kind of crime against humanity, a hijacking of fantasies, affects and the credulity of hundreds of millions of people by means of television- a crime of blackmail and simulation. What penalty is laid down for such a hijacking?

There is no way to rectify this situation and we must have no illusions: there is no perverse effect, nor even anything scandalous in the 'Timisoara syndrome'. It is simply the (immoral) truth of news, the secret purpose [destination] of which is to deceive us about the real, but also to undeceive us about the real. There is no worse mistake than taking the real for the real and, in that sense, the very excess of media illusion plays a vital disillusioning role. In this way, news could be said to undo its own spell by its effects and the violence of information to be avenged by the repudiation and indifference it engenders. Just as we should be unreservedly thankful for the existence of politicians, who take on themselves the responsibility for that wearisome function, so we should be grateful to the media for existing and taking on themselves the triumphant illusionism of the world of communications, the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the confusion of ideologies, the stereotypes, the spectacle, the banality - soaking up all these things in their operation. While, at the same time, constituting a permanent test of intelligence, for where better than on television can one learn to question every picture, every word, every commentary? Television inculcates indifference, distance, scepticism and unconditional apathy. Through the world's becomingimage, it anaesthetizes the imagination, provokes a sickened abstraction, together with a surge of adrenalin which induces total disillusionment. Television and the media would render reality [Ie reel] dissuasive, were it not already so. And this represents an absolute advance in

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Must Engage System

Even though the system is one of pure simulation, we still need to engage and act within it to avoid the paralytic fascination it forces on our lives.


Attacking representation no longer has much meaning either. One senses quite clearly; for the same reason, that all student conflicts (as is the case, more broadly; on the level of global society) around the representation, the delegation of power are no longer anything but phantom vicissitudes that yet still manage, out of despair, to occupy the forefront of the stage. Through I don't know what Mobius effect, representation itself has also turned in on itself, and the whole logical universe of the political is dissolved at the same time, ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulation, where from the beginning no one is represented nor representative of anything any more, where all that is accumulated is deaccumulated at the same time, where even the axiological, directive, and salvageable phantasm of power has disappeared. A universe that is still incomprehensible, unrecognizable, to us, a universe with a malefic curve that our mental coordinates, which are orthogonal and prepared for the infinite linearity of criticism and history, violently resist. Yet it is there that one must fight, if even fighting has any meaning anymore. We are simulators, we are simulacra

(not in the classical sense of "appearance"), we are concave mirrors radiated by the social, a radiation without a light source, power without origin, without distance, and it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight-without hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination. Because one must not refuse the in tense fascination that emanates from this liquefaction of all power, of all axes of value, of all axiology; politics included. This spectacle, which is at once that of the death throes and the apogee of capital, surpasses by far that of the commodity described by the situationists. This spectacle is our essential force. We are no longer in a relation toward capital of uncertain or victorious forces, but in a political one, that is the phantasm of revolution. We are in a relation of defiance, of seduction, and of death toward this universe that is no longer one, precisely because all axiality that escapes it. The challenge capital directs at us in its delirium-liquidating without shame the law of profit, surplus value, productive finalities, structures of power, and finding at the end of its process the profound immorality (but also the seduction) of primitive rituals of destruction, this very challenge must be raised to an insanely higher level. Capital, like value, is irresponsible, irreversible, ineluctable. Only to value is capital capable of offering a fantastic spectacle of its decomposition only the phantom of value still floats over the desert of the classical structures of capital, just as the phantom of religion floats over a world now long desacralized, just as the phantom of knowledge floats over the university. It is up to us to again become the nomads of this desen, but disengaged from the mechanical illusion of value. 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.

What can one make of all this in the political order? Very little. But we also have to fight against the profound fascination exerted on us by the death throes of capital, against the staging by capital of its own death, when we are really the ones in our final hours. To leave it the initiative of its own death, is to leave it all the privileges of revolution. Surrounded by the simulacrum of value and by the phantom of capital and of power, we are much more disarmed and impotent than when surrounded by the law of value and of the commodity, since the system has revealed itself capable of integrating its own death and since we are relieved of the responsibility for this death, and thus of the stake of our own

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B AUDRILLARD life. This supreme ruse of the system, that of the simulacrum of its death, through which it maintains us in life by having liquidated through absorption all possible negativity, only a superior ruse can stop.

Challenge or imaginary science, only a pataphysics of simulacra can remove us from the system’s strategy of simulation and the impasse of death in which it imprisons us.

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B AUDRILLARD

Alternative Fails

Radical destruction of meaning is already useless – the system is already configured to where the resistance they advocate does nothing.


Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished.

Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic.

Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight. This, only terrorism can do.

It is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master.

The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary. 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 terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.

But such a sentiment is utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality-as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning.

But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.

In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the

Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system.

There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: 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).

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal,

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USFSP DEBATE/ ADA N ATIONALS invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself.

This is where seduction begins.

B AUDRILLARD

Nestle 3 rd world--2AC

Prefer out impacts, we are systemic, structural economic discrimination--lesser worth

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