baudrillard’s terror

I was exposed to Baudrillard when I was 20. I hated him. Which is to say, I fought him again and again. How could he be so stubborn! Perhaps it was because I learned more about why he wrote, or perhaps it was because he changed, but his theories of simulation became increasingly more difficult to difuse and began to become a powerful if not overpowering, foil in my work.

There will be much written about his writings from the 70′s and early 80′s. Instead, I think that what I will choose to evoke is the (anti-)Political Badrillard of 2001 and the cultural critic of 1998. Both are writings on the USA as a hegemony, and I would say both speak truth to power.

The following is a an excerpt from a translation from Le Monde from September 11, 2001

When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals
with this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic
machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other
way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the situation?

It is the system itself that has created the objective
conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself,
it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are
ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of
power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a definitive
act that is also unanswerable. Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible
singularity in a generalized exchange system. Any singularity (whether
species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the
setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged
today by this terrorist situational transfer.

Terror against terror – there is no more ideology behind all that. We are
now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an
Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It (energy)
does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its
time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize
(the world) through force.

From Baudrillard’s America

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other — fatal — moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen.