> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 19:34:00 -0500
> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
> Subject: Baudrillard "weighs" in
>
> Le Monde diplomatique - November 2002
>
> TERRORISM IS SOCIETY'S CONDEMNATION OF ITSELF
>
> The despair of having everything
> _______________________________________________________
>
> The West's mission is to make the world's wealth of cultures
> interchangeable, and to subordinate them within the global
> order. Our culture, which is bereft of values, revenges
> itself upon the values of other cultures.
>
> by JEAN BAUDRILLARD *
> _______________________________________________________
>
> IS globalisation inevitable? What fervour propels the
> world to embrace such an abstract idea? And what force
> drives us to make that idea a reality so unconditionally?
>
> The universal used to be an idea. Yet when an idea is
> actually realised globally, it commits suicide. With
> humankind as the sole authority of note, occupying the
> empty space left by a dead God, the human species now
> rules unchallenged, though it no longer has any
> overarching goal. Since humanity's enemies have all fled,
> it must generate foes from within its own ranks, while
> showing symptoms of inhumanity.
>
> Hence the violence associated with globalisation, with a
> system that wants to eliminate any manifestation of
> negativity and singularity (including the ultimate
> expression of singularity, death). This is the violence
> of a society in which we are almost forbidden to engage
> in conflict. This violence, in a way, marks an end to
> violence itself, because it yearns for a world free from
> any natural order that might govern the human body or
> sexuality, life or death. It might be more accurate to
> use the word virulence, rather than violence. This
> violence has viral force: it spreads by contagion and
> chain reactions. It gradually destroys our immunity and
> ability to resist.
>
> Globalisation's triumph is not certain yet, though. Faced
> with its homogenising and destabilising effects, hostile
> forces are arising everywhere. But anti-globalisation's
> ever-sharper manifestations - including social and
> political resistance - should be seen as more than just
> outmoded forms of rejection. They are part of an
> agonising revision that focuses on the achievements of
> modernity and "progress", a process that rejects both the
> globalised techno-structure and an ideology that wants to
> make all cultures interchangeable.
>
> Anti-globalisation actions may be violent, abnormal or
> irrational, at least as judged by our enlightened
> philosophy. They may be collective, bringing together
> different ethnic, religious and linguistic groups, or
> they may be individual, including maladjustment and
> neurosis. It would be wrong to denounce
> anti-globalisation forces as populist, antiquated or
> terrorist. Every current event - including Islamic
> hostility to the West - happens in opposition to the
> abstraction that is the concept of universality. Islam is
> now public enemy number one because it has shown the most
> vehement opposition to Western values.
>
> Who or what can thwart the global system? Surely not
> anti-globalisation forces, whose only aim is to slow the
> pace of deregulation; their political influence may be
> considerable but their symbolic impact is nil. The
> protestors' violence is merely another event within the
> system that the system will absorb - while remaining in
> control of the game.
>
> Singularities [unique or unusual identities or
> approaches] could be used to baffle the system. Being
> neither positive nor negative, they do not represent
> alternatives; they are wild cards outside the system.
> They cannot be evaluated by value judgments or through
> principles of political reality; they can correspond to
> either the best or the worst. They are obstacles to
> one-track thinking and dominant modes of thought,
> although they are not the only kind of contrary approach.
> They make up their own games and play by their own rules.
>
> Singularities are not inherently violent. Some can be
> subtle, unique characteristics of language, art, culture
> or the human body. But violent singularities do exist,
> and terrorism is one of them. Violence revenges all the
> varied cultures that disappeared to prepare for the
> investiture of a single global power. This is not really
> a clash of civilisations. Instead, this anthropological
> conflict pits a monolithic universal culture against all
> manifestations of otherness, wherever they may be found.
>
> Global power - as fundamentalist as any religious
> orthodoxy - sees anything different or unorthodox as
> heretical, and the heretics must be made to assume their
> position within the global order or disappear completely.
> The West's mission (we could call it the "former West"
> since it lost its defining values long ago) is to reduce
> a wealth of separate cultures into being interchangeable,
> of equal weight, by any brutal means possible. A culture
> that is bereft of values revenges itself on the values of
> other cultures. Beyond politics and economics, the
> primary aim of warfare (including the conflict in
> Afghanistan) is to normalise savagery and beat
> territories into alignment. Another objective is to
> diminish any zone of resistance, to colonise and tame any
> terrain, geographical or mental
>
> Furious envy
>
> The rise of the globalised system has been powered by the
> furious envy of an indifferent, low-definition culture
> faced with the reality of high-definition cultures. Envy
> is what disenchanted systems that have lost their
> intensity feel in the presence of high-intensity
> cultures. It is the envy of deconsecrated societies when
> confronted with sacrificial cultures and structures.
>
> The global system assesses any resistance as potentially
> terrorist, as in Afghanistan (1). When a territory bans
> democratic liberties such as music, television or women's
> faces, when nations take courses opposed to what we call
> civilisation, the "free" world sees these events as
> indefensible, regardless of what religious principles may
> be at stake.
>
> So to disavow modernity and its pretensions of
> universality is not allowed. Some resistors reject the
> belief that modernity is a force for good or represents
> the natural ideal of our species; others question the
> universality of our mores and values. Even when the
> resistors are described as "fanatics", their contrariness
> remains criminal, according to the received wisdom of the
> West.
>
> This confrontation can only be understood by considering
> symbolic obligations. To understand the hatred the rest
> of the world feels towards the West, we must reverse our
> perspectives. This is not the hatred felt by people from
> whom we have taken everything and to whom we have given
> nothing back. Rather, it is the hatred felt by those to
> whom we have given everything and who can give nothing in
> return. Their hatred stems from humiliation, not from
> dispossession or exploitation. The attacks of 11
> September were a response to this animus, with one kind
> of humiliation begetting another.
>
> The worst thing that can happen to global power is not
> for it to be attacked or destroyed but for it to be
> humiliated. Global power was humiliated on 11 September
> because the terrorists inflicted an injury that could not
> be inflicted on them in return. Reprisals are only
> physical retaliations, whereas global power had suffered
> a symbolic defeat. War can only respond to the
> terrorists' physical aggression, not to the challenge
> they represent. Their defiance can only be addressed by
> vengefully humiliating the "others" (but surely not by
> crushing them with bombs or by locking them up like dogs
> in detention cells in Guantánamo Bay).
>
> There is a fundamental rule that the basis for all
> domination is a total lack of any counterflow to the
> prevailing power. Bestowing a unilateral gift is a
> powerful act. The "good" empire gives without any
> possibility of a return of gifts. This is almost to
> assume God's place or to take on the role of the master
> who ensures his slaves' safety in exchange for their
> labours. (Since work is not a symbolic compensation, the
> only remaining options for the slaves are revolution and
> death.)
>
> But even God allowed humanity to give him the gift of
> sacrifice. Within the traditional order it was always
> possible to repay God, or nature, or another higher
> authority, by sacrifice. This safeguarded the symbolic
> equilibrium between human beings and everything else.
> Today there is no one left to compensate, to whom we
> might repay our symbolic debt. This is the curse of our
> culture: although giving is not impossible, giving back
> is impossible, because sacrifice has had its importance
> and power taken away, and what remains is a caricature of
> sacrifice (like contemporary ideas of victimisation).
>
> So we find ourselves stuck with always being on the
> receiving end, not from God or nature, but from technical
> mechanisms that provide general exchange and
> gratification. Almost everything is given to us. And we
> are entitled to it all. We are like slaves, bondservants
> whose lives have been spared but who are still bound by
> an intractable debt. At some point, though, that
> fundamental rule always applies and any positive transfer
> will be met with a negative reaction.
>
> This is a violent expression of repressed feeling about
> lives in captivity, about sheltered existences, about, in
> fact, having far too much existence. The return to a more
> primitive condition may take the form of violence
> (including terrorism) or the form of denials
> characterised by powerlessness, self-hatred and remorse,
> negative passions, which are a debased form of the
> payback that it is impossible to make.
> The thing we hate within ourselves, the obscure focus of
> our resentment, is our surfeit of reality: our excessive
> power and comfort, our sense of accomplishment. This is
> the fate that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor had prepared
> for the tamed masses in The Brothers Karamazov ["to
> vanquish freedom and to do so to make men happy"]. It is
> exactly what the terrorists condemn in our culture. Hence
> the endless coverage of - and fascination with -
> terrorism.
>
> Terrorism depends not only on the obvious despair of the
> humiliated, but on the invisible despair of
> globalisation's beneficiaries. It depends on our
> subjugation to the technology integral to our lives, and
> to the crushing effects of virtual reality. We are in
> thrall to networks and programmes, and this dependence
> defines our species, homo sapiens gone global. This
> feeling of invisible despair - our own despair - is
> irreversible because it is the result of the total
> fulfilment of our desires.
>
> If terrorism is really the result of a state of profusion
> without any hope of payback or obligation to sacrifice,
> of the forced resolution of conflicts, then eradicating
> it as if it were an affliction imposed from the outside
> could only be illusory. Terrorism, in its absurdity and
> meaninglessness, is society's verdict on - and
> condemnation of - itself.
> ____________________________________________________
>
> * Philosopher and author of The Spirit of Terrorism and
> Requiem for the Twin Towers (Verso, New York, 2002); The
> Perfect Crime (Verso, 1996) and The Gulf War Did Not Take
> Place (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995). This
> article also appears in Power Inferno, Galilée, Paris ©
> Éditions Galilée
>
> (1) You could say serious natural disasters are a form of
> terrorism since, although they are technically classified
> as accidents (such as Chernobyl), they may resemble
> terrorism. In India, the Bhopal poison gas tragedy
> (technically an accident) could have been terrorism. Any
> terrorist group could claim responsibility for an
> aviation accident. Irrational events can be attributed to
> anyone or anything, so that, at the limit, we could see
> anything as criminal, even cold weather or an earthquake.
> There is nothing new about this: in the aftermath of the
> 1923 Tokyo earthquake, thousands of Koreans were blamed
> and killed. In a system as integrated as our own,
> everything destabilises; everything seeks to undermine a
> system that lays claim to infallibility. Given what we
> are already undergoing because of the system's rational
> grip, we may wonder if the worst catastrophe is the
> infallibility of the system.
>
>
>
> Translated by Luke Sandford