14 November 2001: See complete translation by Rachel Bloul:
http://cryptome.org/baud-terr.htm
10 November 2001
Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 08:33:03 -0000
From: John Armitage <john.armitage@UNN.AC.UK>
Subject: [CSL] Baudrillard on 9/11
To: CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
==============
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Holmes
To: Nettime
Sent: 08/11/01 16:14
Subject: <nettime> Baudrilard: it's an event!
Jean Baudrillard (or one of his simulacra) has published a long text in Le Monde on 9/11. The disappointed situationist and prophet of wars that don't happen has been slapped in the face with an event. He seems perversely to like the taste of it. It's all about the symbolic as an evil inseparable from the good that produces it. Heavy stuff. Alain Minc (you don't even want to know who he is) has already called it "terrorism of the spirit." Since the text is not yet available in English anywhere that Google knows, I'll give you a few peeks inside JB's holy terror show - without even charging a nickel. - BH
Full French text at:
http://www.lemonde.fr/rech_art/0,5987,239354,00.html
By Jean Baudrillard
[excerpts]
"...All the discourses and commentaries betray a gigantic suturing of the event itself, and of the fascination it commands. The moral condemnation, the holy alliance against terrorism are on the scale of the prodigious jubilation at seeing this world superpower destroyed, or better, seeing it somehow destroy itself, in a beautiful suicide. Because with its unbearable power it has fomented this violence pervading the world, along with the terrorist imagination that inhabits all of us, without our knowing.
That we dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception dreamed of it, because no one can fail to dream of the destruction of any power become so hegemonic - that is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience. And yet it's a fact, which can be measured by the pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to cover it up.
To put it in the most extreme terms, they did it, but we wanted it. If that's not taken into account, the event loses all its symbolic dimension, it's a pure accident, a purely arbitrary act, the deadly phantasmagoria of a few fanatics, who can then just be eliminated. But we all know that's not the way it is. Hence the delirous counter-phobia of the exorcism of evil: it's because the evil is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have the resonance that it does, and in their symbolic strategy, the terrorists undoubtedly knew they could count on this inadmissible complicity.
It goes way beyond hatred of the dominant world power by the dispossessed and the exploited, those who have ended up on the wrong side of the world order. This satanic desire is in the hearts even of those who share in the profits. The allergy to any definitive order, to any definitive power, is fortunately universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center, the perfect twins, precisely embodied such a definitive order.
No need for the explanations of a death drive or destructive impulse, nor even for an effect of perversity. It is logical and inexorable that the rise of power to the heights of power exacerbates the will to destroy it. And that power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers fell, you had the feeling that they were answering the suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicide....
...In a sense, it is the entire system whose internal fragility lends a hand to the initial action. The more the system concetrates on a world scale, finally constituting a single network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already a single little Philippino hacker had succeeded, from the depths of his PC, in launching the I Love You virus that circled the world, devastating entire networks). Here, eighteen kamikazees, with the absolute weapon of death multiplied by technological effectiveness, have triggered off a process of global catastrophe.
When the situation is so monopolised by the world power, when you're dealing with this formidable condensation of all the functions of technocratic machinery and one-way thinking, what other path remains open but a terrorist transfer of the situation? The system itself created the objective conditions of this brutal turnabout. By putting all the cards in its own hand, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are savage, because the stakes are savage. To answer a system whose very excess of power raises an insoluble challenge, the terrorists produce a definitive act whose exchange is also impossible. Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity at the heart of a system of generalized exchange. All the singularities (the species, the individuals, the cultures) that have paid with their death for the installation of a world circulation are taking revenge today through this terrorist transfer of the situation.
....The fundamental event is that the terrorists have ceased to commit suicide at a total loss, that they now bring their own death into play in an effective, offensive way, according to a strategic intuition which is simply that of the immense fragility of the adversary, that of a system which has reached near-perfection, and is therefore vulnerable to the slightest spark. They have succeeded in making their own deaths into an absolute weapon against a system that lives on the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero casualties. Every system of zero casualties is a zero-sum game. And all the means of dissuasion and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already made his death into a counter-offensive weapon: "What difference do the American bombings make! Our men have just as much desire to die as the Americans to live!" Hence the non-equivalence of 7,000 deaths inflicted in a single blow to a zero-casualty system.
...Suicidal terrorism was a terrorism of the poor, this is a terrorism of the rich. And that's what makes us so afraid: that they have become rich (that have all the resources of wealth), without ceasing to want to do us in. Of course, according to our value system, they're cheating: bringing your own death into play is not in the rules. But they don't care, and the new rules of the games are no longer ours.
... Everything is in the challenge and the duel, in a dual, personal relation with the adverse power. It is what has humiliated you, it is what must be humiliated. And not simply exterminated. You have to make it lose face. And you never achieve that by pure force and the elimination of the other. He must be targeted and wounded amidst adversity. Beyond the pact that links the terrorists with each other, there is something like a dual pact with the adversary. So it's exactly the contrary of the cowardice they are accused of, and it's exactly the contrary of what the Americans did in the Gulf War, for example (and what they're doing again in Afghanistan): invisible target, operational liquidation.
...The collapse of the World Trade Center is unimaginable, but that doesn't suffice to make it a real event. A surplus of violence does not suffice to open up reality. Because reality is a principle, and that principle is what's lost. Reality and fiction are inextricable, and the fascination of the attack is first that of the image (the jubilatory and catastrophic consequences are themselves largely imaginary).
In this case, then, the real is added to the image as a plus of terror, as an extra frisson. Not only is it terrifying, but what's more, it's real.... So this terrorist violence is not a return of reality's flame, nor of history's. This terrorist violence is not "real." It's worse, in a sense: it's symbolic. Violence in itself can be banal and inoffensive. Only symbolic violence generates singularity. And in this singular event, in this Manhattan disaster film, the two elements of twentieth-century mass fascination meet: the white magic of cinema and the black magic of terrorism. The white light of cinema, and the black light of terrorism.
...There's no solution to this extreme situation, above all not war, which only offers a situation of dij`-vu, with the same deluge of military forces, phantom information, useless pummeling, devious and pathetic discourse, technological deployment and intoxication. In short, like the Gulf war, a non-event, an event that doesn't really take place.
And that's its raison d'etre: replacing a true and formidable, unique and unpredictable event, with a repetitive, deja-vu pseudo-event. The terrorist attack was a precession of the event over all the modes of interpretation, whereas this stupidly military war is, inversely, a precession of the model over the event, a fake wager that doesn't take place. War as the continuation of the absence of politics by other means."
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