Filed under: The grim present
One of the recurring arguments of the current age is this: how do you prevent terrorism – via military action or police investigation?
Many Americans are fond — in a distractedly enthusiastic, television and movie viewing sort of way — of military action. Indeed, even the phrase “military action” immediately places in the mind an image of forward movement, of efficiencies, of things getting done. To say that you will handle terrorism through investigation, through quiet infiltration, through arrests and evidence and courts…this seems weak in comparison to helicopter gunships pushing metal into your enemy at supersonic speeds (that enemy, no longer human but dubbed “the terrorists” and sometimes labeled ‘rats’ or ‘cockroaches’ or ‘termites’ and so on).
This fondness for military technique — perhaps it can be described as an instinct — guarantees that terrorist acts inspire spectacular responses which, in turn, produce further impetus for terrorist acts. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, justified by their architects and defenders as quintessential anti-terror actions (for if the military response is the best way forward, full scale invasion — to replace, via “regime change”, your enemy with his “moderate” brothers — is the best example of the best technique, an apotheosis of counter-terror).
And now, let’s reconsider Baudrillard’s essay, “The Spirit of Terrorism” which, as I recall (but memory is faulty), was roundly criticized as “postmodernist” navel gazing when it was released in 2001. Americans in particular, even those who were opposed to military action, dismissed it as missing the point, of minimizing the martyrdom of the 2000 plus who died in the towers, of sympathizing with nihilists who sought to destroy civilization.
To many, Baudrillard played the role of the ultimate (stereotypical) European intellectual: trapped in his thoughts when he should have been feeling more deeply – feeling the loss of the hallowed dead, the perfidy of the means by which they were killed, the special nature of the American loss, the painful struggle ahead.
Baudrillard writes (translation and translation-related comments by Dr. Rachel Bloul):
No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for perverse effects. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the (literally: “rise to power of power”) exacerbates a will to destroy it.
And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: “God cannot declare war on Itself”. Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself.
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It’s easy to be distracted by this line “When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide” and lose the message: the attacks occurred within the system built by the West – it was an attack from within, not without as conventional thought has it. The “kamikazes” were not anti-modern (as was commonly stated at the time) but thoroughly modern. The scope of the attack — Hollywood-esque in scale — and the means were both completely part of modernity.
Baudrillard writes (translation and translation-related comments by Dr. Rachel Bloul):
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 (literally ‘transfer of situation’: am I too influenced by early translation as ‘reversal’?)? 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 (in the text: which cannot be part of the exchange circuit). 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.
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Here Baudrillard is stating something most of us cannot accept, not even as part of an intellectual exercise: that the Western system’s success at achieving power created — via a process as natural as the formation of antibodies in response to foreign bacteria — an anti, a resistance, a pushing against. On the face of it, this seems similar to the mantra loosed upon the world shortly after the towers collapsed – ‘they hate us because of our freedoms’. This has a satisfying ring and absorbs easily into our psyches. But the difference between that incantation and Baudrillard’s description is whereas one presents an image of good against evil (lovers of freedom against against their moral opposites) Baudrillard is making a structural argument – the house has been built this way and has this set of problems because of the way it has been built. The Right explains terrorism as nihilistic evil in bloody motion (’false’ faith against real, ‘primitive’ practices against market advancement), the Left as a criminal response to legitimate grievance (the history of Western colonialism, the CIA engineered overthrow of Mossadeq and so on).
Baudrillard pushes these competing explanations aside and says that what is really at war is the system’s attempt to absorb the whole world through ideology and force (”taking all the cards to itself”) pitted against attempts to reverse this relentless, totalizing effort.
Although our superstructure seems sound, there are weaknesses, which our adversaries have uncovered (and this explains so much of our rage and sense of ennui at how poorly things have gone in Iraq: it began with promises of flawless power and knowledge and descended into a parade of meaningless death, sectarian warfare and endless incompetence).
Baudrillard writes (translation and translation-related comments by Dr. Rachel Bloul):
Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb every crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply hopeless situation (not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and the privileged too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event is that terrorists have finished with empty suicides; they now organize their own death in offensive and efficient ways, according to a strategic intuition, that is the intuition of the immense fragility of their adversary, this system reaching its quasi perfection and thus vulnerable to the least spark. They succeeded in making their own death the absolute arm against a system that feeds off the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero death. Any system of zero death is a zero sum system. And all the means of dissuasion and destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made his death a counter-offensive. “What of American bombings! Our men want to die as much as Americans want to live!” This explains the asymmetry of 7, 000 deaths in one blow against a system of zero death.
Therefore, here, death is the key (to the game) not only the brutal irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the irruption of a more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death – the absolute, no appeal event.
This is the spirit of terrorism.
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