<cough>
seriously, though, and leaving aside baudrillard's status as essentially [sic] a wannabe bataille, i actually enjoyed his inversion of the "cultural envy" thesis we've heard hacks like friedman bandy about:
"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."
i don't know that that virtuosic little maneuver was worth the rest of the article, or that it was especially enlightening, but it was kind of spiffy -- which i suppose is what postmodernism is (supposed to be) all about, anyway . . .
j
On Thursday, November 14, 2002, at 06:47 PM, Liza Featherstone wrote:
> At an (admittedly) quick glance, looks to be the stupidest
> terrorism-related
> waste of ink I've ever seen. And it's a competitive field. Has this
> guy ever
> written anything worth reading?
>
>> 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
>