From: CTheory Editors [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 20 May 2003 18:22
To: ctheory
Subject: Article 129 - The Violence of the Global
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 26, NOS 1-2
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Article 129 03/05/20 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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The Violence of the Global [1]
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~Jean Baudrillard~
(Translated by Francois Debrix)
Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of
anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary
partner of globalization. To identify its main features, it is
necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly
of its relationship to the singular and the universal.
The analogy between the terms "global"[2] and "universal" is
misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty,
culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about
technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization
appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be
on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value
system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was
unmatched by any other culture. Any culture that becomes universal
loses its singularity and dies. That's what happened to all those
cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also
true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally
valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of
their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because
we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values.
And this is a much more ugly death.
We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become
universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a
quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a
downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the
Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and
forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by
default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the
most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human
rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality
their weakest expression.
Universalization is vanishing because of globalization. The
globalization of exchanges puts an end to the universalization of
values. This marks the triumph of a uniform thought [3] over a
universal one. What is globalized is first and foremost the market,
the profusion of exchanges and of all sorts of products, the
perpetual flow of money. Culturally, globalization gives way to a
promiscuity of signs and values, to a form of pornography in fact.
Indeed, the global spread of everything and nothing through networks
is pornographic. No need for sexual obscenity anymore. All you have
is a global interactive copulation. And, as a result of all this,
there is no longer any difference between the global and the
universal. The universal has become globalized, and human rights
circulate exactly like any other global product (oil or capital for
example).
The passage from the universal to the global has given rise to a
constant homogenization, but also to an endless fragmentation.
Dislocation, not localization, has replaced centralization.
Excentricism, not decentralization, has taken over where
concentration once stood. Similarly, discrimination and exclusion are
not just accidental consequences of globalization, but rather
globalization's own logical outcomes. In fact, the presence of
globalization makes us wonder whether universalization has not
already been destroyed by its own critical mass. It also makes us
wonder whether universality and modernity ever existed outside of
some official discourses or some popular moral sentiments. For us
today, the mirror of our modern universalization has been broken. But
this may actually be an opportunity. In the fragments of this broken
mirror, all sorts of singularities reappear. Those singularities we
thought were endangered are surviving, and those we thought were lost
are revived.
As universal values lose their authority and legitimacy, things
become more radical. When universal beliefs were introduced as the
only possible culturally mediating values, it was fairly easy for
such beliefs to incorporate singularities as modes of differentiation
in a universal culture that claimed to champion difference. But they
cannot do it anymore because the triumphant spread of globalization
has eradicated all forms of differentiation and all the universal
values that used to advocate difference. In so doing, globalization
has given rise to a perfectly indifferent culture. From the moment
when the universal disappeared, an omnipotent global techno-structure
has been left alone to dominate. But this techno-structure now has to
confront new singularities that, without the presence of
universalization to cradle them, are able to freely and savagely
expand.
History gave universalization its chance. Today though, faced with a
global order without any alternative on the one hand and with
drifting insurrectionary singularities on the other, the concepts of
liberty, democracy, and human rights look awful. They remain as the
ghosts of universalization past. Universalization used to promote a
culture characterized by the concepts of transcendence, subjectivity,
conceptualization, reality, and representation. By contrast, today's
virtual global culture has replaced universal concepts with screens,
networks, immanence, numbers, and a space-time continuum without any
depth.[4] In the universal, there was still room for a natural
reference to the world, the body, or the past. There was a sort of
dialectical tension or critical movement that found its materiality
in historical and revolutionary violence. But the expulsion of this
critical negativity opened the door to another form of violence, the
violence of the global. This new violence is characterized by the
supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization,
integral circulation, and the equivalence of all exchanges.
Additionally, the violence of the global puts an end to the social
role of the intellectual (an idea tied to the Enlightenment and
universalization), but also to the role of the activist whose fate
used to be tied to the ideas of critical opposition and historical
violence.
Is globalization fatal? Sometimes cultures other than ours were able
to escape the fatality of the indifferent exchange. Today though,
where is the critical point between the universal and the global?
Have we reached the point of no return? What vertigo pushes the world
to erase the Idea? And what is that other vertigo that, at the same
time, seems to force people to unconditionally want to realize the
Idea?
The universal was an Idea. But when it became realized in the global,
it disappeared as an Idea, it committed suicide, and it vanished as
an end in itself. Since humanity is now its own immanence, after
taking over the place left by a dead God, the human has become the
only mode of reference and it is sovereign. But this humanity no
longer has any finality. Free from its former enemies, humanity now
has to create enemies from within, which in fact produces a wide
variety of inhuman metastases.
This is precisely where the violence of the global comes from. It is
the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and
singularity, including of course death as the ultimate form of
singularity. It is the violence of a society where conflict is
forbidden, where death is not allowed. It is a violence that, in a
sense, puts an end to violence itself, and strives to establish a
world where anything related to the natural must disappear (whether
it is in the body, sex, birth, or death). Better than a global
violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence
is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, proceeds by chain reaction,
and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our
capacities to resist.
But the game is not over yet. Globalization has not completely won.
Against such a dissolving and homogenizing power, heterogeneous
forces -- not just different but clearly antagonistic ones -- are
rising everywhere. Behind the increasingly strong reactions to
globalization, and the social and political forms of resistance to
the global, we find more than simply nostalgic expressions of
negation. We find instead a crushing revisionism vis-a-vis
modernity and progress, a rejection not only of the global
techno-structure, but also of the mental system of globalization,
which assumes a principle of equivalence between all cultures. This
kind of reaction can take some violent, abnormal, and irrational
aspects, at least they can be perceived as violent, abnormal, and
irrational from the perspective of our traditional enlightened ways
of thinking. This reaction can take collective ethnic, religious, and
linguistic forms. But it can also take the form of individual
emotional outbursts or neuroses even. In any case, it would be a
mistake to berate those reactions as simply populist, archaic, or
even terrorist. Everything that has the quality of event these days
is engaged against the abstract universality of the global,[5] and
this also includes Islam's own opposition to Western values (it is
because Islam is the most forceful contestation of those values that
it is today considered to be the West's number one enemy).
Who can defeat the global system? Certainly not the
anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow down
global deregulation. This movement's political impact may well be
important. But its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement's
opposition is nothing more than an internal matter that the dominant
system can easily keep under control. Positive alternatives cannot
defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither
positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They
represent a different symbolic order. They do not abide by value
judgments or political realities. They can be the best or the worst.
They cannot be "regularized" by means of a collective historical
action.[6] They defeat any uniquely dominant thought. Yet they do
not present themselves as a unique counter-thought. Simply, they
create their own game and impose their own rules. Not all
singularities are violent. Some linguistic, artistic, corporeal, or
cultural singularities are quite subtle. But others, like terrorism,
can be violent. The singularity of terrorism avenges the
singularities of those cultures that paid the price of the imposition
of a unique global power with their own extinction.
We are really not talking about a "clash of civilizations" here, but
instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an
undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in
whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity. From the
perspective of global power (as fundamentalist in its beliefs as any
religious orthodoxy), any mode of difference and singularity is
heresy. Singular forces only have the choice of joining the global
system (by will or by force) or perishing. The mission of the West
(or rather the former West, since it lost its own values a long time
ago) is to use all available means to subjugate every culture to the
brutal principle of cultural equivalence. Once a culture has lost its
values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. Beyond
their political or economic objectives, wars such as the one in
Afghanistan [7] aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the
territories. The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to
colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both
geographically and mentally.
The establishment of a global system is the result of an intense
jealousy. It is the jealousy of an indifferent and low-definition
culture against cultures with higher definition, of a disenchanted
and de-intensified system against high intensity cultural
environments, and of a de-sacralized society against sacrificial
forms. According to this dominant system, any reactionary form is
virtually terrorist. (According to this logic we could even say that
natural catastrophes are forms of terrorism too. Major technological
accidents, like Chernobyl, are both a terrorist act and a natural
disaster. The toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India, another technological
accident, could also have been a terrorist act. Any plane crash could
be claimed by any terrorist group too. The dominant characteristic of
irrational events is that they can be imputed to anybody or given any
motivation. To some extent, anything we can think of can be criminal,
even a cold front or an earthquake. This is not new. In the 1923
Tokyo earthquake, thousands of Koreans were killed because they were
thought to be responsible for the disaster. In an intensely
integrated system like ours, everything can have a similar effect of
destabilization. Everything drives toward the failure of a system
that claims to be infallible. From our point of view, caught as we
are inside the rational and programmatic controls of this system, we
could even think that the worst catastrophe is actually the
infallibility of the system itself.) Look at Afghanistan. The fact
that, inside this country alone, all recognized forms of "democratic"
freedoms and expressions -- from music and television to the ability
to see a woman's face -- were forbidden, and the possibility that
such a country could take the totally opposite path of what we call
civilization (no matter what religious principles it invoked), were
not acceptable for the "free" world. The universal dimension of
modernity cannot be refused. From the perspective of the West, of its
consensual model, and of its unique way of thinking, it is a crime
not to perceive modernity as the obvious source of the Good or as the
natural ideal of humankind. It is also a crime when the universality
of our values and our practices are found suspect by some individuals
who, when they reveal their doubts, are immediately pegged as
fanatics.
Only an analysis that emphasizes the logic of symbolic obligation can
make sense of this confrontation between the global and the singular.
To understand the hatred of the rest of the world against the West,
perspectives must be reversed. The hatred of non-Western people is
not based on the fact that the West stole everything from them and
never gave anything back. Rather, it is based on the fact that they
received everything, but were never allowed to give anything back.
This hatred is not caused by dispossession or exploitation, but
rather by humiliation. And this is precisely the kind of hatred that
explains the September 11 terrorist attacks. These were acts of
humiliation responding to another humiliation.
The worst that can happen to global power is not to be attacked or
destroyed, but to suffer a humiliation. Global power was humiliated
on September 11 because the terrorists inflicted something the global
system cannot give back. Military reprisals were only means of
physical response. But, on September 11, global power was
symbolically defeated. War is a response to an aggression, but not to
a symbolic challenge. A symbolic challenge is accepted and removed
when the other is humiliated in return (but this cannot work when the
other is crushed by bombs or locked behind bars in Guantanamo). The
fundamental rule of symbolic obligation stipulates that the basis of
any form of domination is the total absence of any counterpart, of
any return.[8] The unilateral gift is an act of power. And the
Empire of the Good, the violence of the Good, is precisely to be able
to give without any possible return. This is what it means to be in
God's position. Or to be in the position of the Master who allows the
slave to live in exchange for work (but work is not a symbolic
counterpart, and the slave's only response is eventually to either
rebel or die). God used to allow some space for sacrifice. In the
traditional order, it was always possible to give back to God, or to
nature, or to any superior entity by means of sacrifice. That's what
ensured a symbolic equilibrium between beings and things. But today
we no longer have anybody to give back to, to return the symbolic
debt to. This is the curse of our culture. It is not that the gift is
impossible, but rather that the counter-gift is. All sacrificial
forms have been neutralized and removed (what's left instead is a
parody of sacrifice, which is visible in all the contemporary
instances of victimization).
We are thus in the irremediable situation of having to receive,
always to receive, no longer from God or nature, but by means of a
technological mechanism of generalized exchange and common
gratification. Everything is virtually given to us, and, like it or
not, we have gained a right to everything. We are similar to the
slave whose life has been spared but who nonetheless is bound by a
non-repayable debt. This situation can last for a while because it is
the very basis of exchange in this economic order. Still, there
always comes a time when the fundamental rule resurfaces and a
negative return inevitably responds to the positive transfer, when a
violent abreaction to such a captive life, such a protected
existence, and such a saturation of being takes place. This reversion
can take the shape of an open act of violence (such as terrorism),
but also of an impotent surrender (that is more characteristic of our
modernity), of a self-hatred, and of remorse, in other words, of all
those negative passions that are degraded forms of the impossible
counter-gift.
What we hate in ourselves -- the obscure object of our resentment --
is our excess of reality, power, and comfort, our universal
availability, our definite accomplishment, this kind of destiny that
Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor had in store for the domesticated
masses. And this is exactly the part of our culture that the
terrorists find repulsive (which also explains the support they
receive and the fascination they are able to exert). Terrorism's
support is not only based on the despair of those who have been
humiliated and offended. It is also based on the invisible despair of
those whom globalization has privileged, on our own submission to an
omnipotent technology, to a crushing virtual reality, to an empire
of networks and programs that are probably in the process of
redrawing the regressive contours of the entire human species, of a
humanity that has gone "global." (After all, isn't the supremacy of
the human species over the rest of life on earth the mirror image of
the domination of the West over the rest of the world?). This
invisible despair, our invisible despair, is hopeless since it is the
result of the realization of all our desires.
Thus, if terrorism is derived from this excess of reality and from
this reality's impossible exchange, if it is the product of a
profusion without any possible counterpart or return, and if it
emerges from a forced resolution of conflicts, the illusion of
getting rid of it as if it were an objective evil is complete.[9]
For, in its absurdity and non-sense, terrorism is our society's own
judgment and penalty.
Notes:
------
[1] Initially published as "La Violence du Mondial," in Jean
Baudrillard, _Power Inferno_ (Paris: Galilee, 2002), pp. 63-83.
[2] "Mondial" is the French term for "global" in the original text.
[3] "Pensee unique" in French.
[4] "Espace-temps sans dimension" in French.
[5] "Contre cette universalite abstraite" in French.
[6] "On ne peut pas les federer dans une action historique
d'ensemble" in French.
[7] Baudrillard refers here to the US war against Afghanistan in the
Fall of 2001 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
[8] "L'absence de contrepartie" in French.
[9] Emphasis in original text.
--------------------
Jean Baudrillard is an internationally acclaimed theorist whose
writings trace the rise and fall of symbollic exchange in the
contemporary century. In addition to a wide range of highly
influential books from _Seduction_ to _Symbollic Exchange and Death_,
Baudrillard's most recent publications include: _The Vital Illusion_,
_The Spirit of Terrorism_ and _The Singular Objects of Architecture_.
He is a member of the editorial board of CTheory.
Francois Debrix is Assistant Professor of International Relations at
Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He is the
co-editor (with Cynthia Weber) of _Rituals of Mediaton:
International Politics and Social Meaning_. (University of Minnesota
Press, forthcoming August 2003)
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