> didn't Baudriallard deny that the Gukf war really happened,
> it was all TV anyway?
Do you have the passage where he wrote this at hand?
Given the definition of pomo seems increasingly to hinge on whether one thinks the world today is the same as that of the 1930s, here's an excerpt from another pomo -- well, Deleuzian, really, but who on this apparently pomo-infected list knows the difference? -- about Baudrillard's remarks, guaranteed to confuse:
"It is nothing new for the military to justify itself with the claim that is slaughters in the service of life. What is remarkable is the tendency to blur the very boundary between life and death, even between the organic and inorganic -- and with it, the distinctions between war and peace, civilian and combattant. The Gulf War, Baudrillard tells us with characteristic overkill, did not take place. He is obviously not speaking from the obliterated point of view of the estimated 350,000 Iraqis -- two-thirds of whom were civilians -- who died in the live-feed 'spectacle'. He is speaking as a Westerner watching on TV from a safe distance. From that vantage point, it was indeed easy to come away with the impression that Allied forces, self-proclaimed upholders of international law, had taught the 'criminally insane' 'butcher of Baghdad' a lesson he would remember, without shedding real blood. It played in the media as a clean war. Military censorship tightly controlled reporter's access to the front, and for the most part successfully discouraged transmitting images of dead or wounded Americans. Coverage was limited as much as possible to Department of Defense footage of fireworks and hardware, and polished PR performances by baton-wielding top brass supported by the latest in business presentation equipment. It looked from a dstance as though the only combattants were remote controlled ballistic automatons who were not, however, without their social graces. At least on 'our' side American missiles 'serviced' their counterparts...
...We don't have to dwell on this mess, let alone dwell in it. We'll just enjoy the light shows over Baghdad. ... Moral and political reasoning are short-circuited, along with collective memory, by a kind of magical thought by default. The punctual, hierarchical, command-based exercise of power enabled by horizontal mass-media flows of necromantic not-doing. The zen of State slaughter. Legitimate violence is now more ritualistic than reasoned.
The indistinction between life and death brings us back to the starving Somali. The death of the enemy has been visually absented in the theatre of war by the link-up of high-tech imagery and weapons circuitry..."
Brian Massumi, "Requiem for Our Prospective Dead -- Toward a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power" Conference paper. [can't recall the date]
Question: Does Baudrillard mean to confer validity on this perspective from in front of the American TV? I'm not convinced that he does; but I am convinced that his displacement of critique by ironic immersion does not work. Routine references to the phrase "the gulf war did not happen" in discussions, sans deadpan irony, proves that at least.
But the more interesting question about recent wars might be to ask when the last time a military confronted another military. Didn't happen in the NATO bombing; didn't happen in East Timor... Why is that?
Angela