I don’t mean this in the Baudrillardian sense; although Iraq post-2003 exemplifies Baudrillard’s ideas more even than the first Gulf War did. Where that war presented us with a mediated war in the sense that the war as it was constructed for Westerners (missile cameras on “smart bombs,” “eyewitness” reports from journalists in neighboring countries) wasn’t what was really happening, in Iraq right now what is really happening is already mediated, whether that be embedded journalists following soldiers through the streets, or the filming of torture in Abu Ghraib.
But, as I say, I mean this in a simpler sense: there is no Iraq war, because what is happening in Iraq isn’t a war. Orin Hatch was on C-SPAN the other day, telling us that if American troops left Iraq, “the enemy” would “win.” But who exactly is the enemy at this point? And what would it mean for them to be defeated, for America to win? America is not fighting against some discrete entity that could be defeated, its target is the entire population of Iraq, and it is fighting not to achieve anything but simply to remain where it is. What’s happening in Iraq is an occupation of a curiously pure sort: not a war of conquest, like Vietnam, or a conventional sort of imperialism, because there’s no ability, and as far as I can tell, no desire, to produce a stable puppet regime. What the ideologues tell us is that we must “stay the course”: a course to a destination now so perpetually deferred as to be no destination at all, just a course that stretches onwards forever.
And here, I suppose, the Baudrillardian point returns. If this is not a war at all, but something incessantly presented as one, an image-war producing image-corpses that are no less dead than real ones, how do we oppose it?
dejan, 10:19 am, March 25, 2007
And here, I suppose, the Baudrillardian point returns. If this is not a war at all, but something incessantly presented as one, an image-war producing image-corpses that are no less dead than real ones, how do we oppose it?
By dropping the Baudrillardian simulacrum and the accompanying Zizekian decline of symbolic efficacy, acknowledging that the war IS real, because it involves real deaths, material damages and real blood, and then demonstrating persistently and blocking America until the government decides to withdraw troops and answer to the american public as to why they’re stealing money from the tax-payers and spending it on pointless wars which solodify their power. In other words: by realizing that the Baudrillardian simularcum generates non-dissent. That the very act of contemplating the problem in self-reflexive Baudrillardian terms creates unnecessary confusion.
It’s just like acknowledging that although it SEEMS like Christina Aguillera’s clip is a parody of propaganda, it is in fact propaganda.
voyou, 10:59 am, March 25, 2007
I agree with your that the Baudrillardian simulacrum creates non-dissent – but not in the sense that people read Baudrillard, decide the war isn’t real, and stop dissenting. Rather, what seems to be the problem is that the conditions Baudrillard describes produce non-dissent. Consider the overwhelming opposition to the war in the US, and the accompanying lack of a significant anti-war movement; I don’t think this is because 60% of the US population have been reading Baudrillard. It seems to me the first step in producing an effective anti-war movement would be to understand why opposition to the war to date has been so ineffective, and Baudrillard may be useful in that diagnosis.
dejan, 12:55 pm, March 25, 2007
Good point – so what is your opinion in that sense, why has the opposition been so ineffective?
I’m dubious as to the idea that Baudrillard’s simulacrum can be given ontological status (as something that existed, so that Baudrillard described it). What if it was PRODUCED, and by ”it” I don’t mean just Baudrillard but a whole string of leftist PoMo products (including the media) that once used to serve some kind of a subversive purpose, but were then appropriated by capitalism and turned into propagandistic machines, Purloined Letters, now being used to obfuscate (empirical) reality by all the talk of the Real?
voyou, 1:11 pm, March 25, 2007
I don’t know – I’ve been trying to think about other possible forms of anti-war activity, and hopefully I’ll post something about it soonish.
Your point about the potential repurposing of Buadrillard towards the ends of capitalism is a good one, too. Yes, he isn’t just describing some objective condition, more like trying to characterize contemporary capitalism in certain ways to allow for (summon up?) certain possibilities of resistance. Maybe those particular possibilities are no longer available. I don’t think, though, that just rejecting Baudrillard and insisting again on emphasizing reality is going to be enough to produce a post-Baudrillard politics (if I can put it that way); see k-punk on capitalist realism for some reasons why.
dejan, 1:42 pm, March 25, 2007
Oh I was not insisting on the reality, I was actually thinking that embracing Baudrillard’s simulacrum inevitably ends in reality (not the Real mind you) in the same way psychosis is ultimately material. Being unable to symbolize, the psychotic lives in the material/literal. When the simulation collapses, as it inevitably does, what you get is war, blood, wildness, all things material.
have their complement in a positive Real, an event completely inconceivable in the current situation, but which will break in and re-define everything.
I wonder if the event he is describing hypothetically should not be precisely a new awareness of Americans that organized political activity actually does accomplish something.
steff, 3:47 pm, March 25, 2007
Alexander Kluge in his <i>the devil’s blind spot</i> names one of the central issues about the Iraq war: it’s not so much that the war “is not taking place” as that the “enemy” has never been identified. Following the work of a much lauded West Point Academy dissertation, Kluge suggests that a war without a clearly identified enemy can’t be won, or led, so to speak.
voyou, 4:08 pm, March 25, 2007
I think that’s right, steff – and I wonder if the failure to identify an enemy isn’t intentional.
steff, 5:28 pm, March 26, 2007
I guess that suggestion depends on whether you see (even more) sinister machinations at work in the planning for the war, or just gross incompetence. I think the former is more tempting, the latter more likely, irrespective of what cheney and his henchmen were plotting in a musky basement bunker. The impression I’m getting is that this war got out of hand on the level of PR for the administration. Now they’re engaged in symbolic gap plugging. Kluge even claims that they were outwitted by an enemy who knew where the war was to be won: on the level of the symbolic.
Anyhoo, I’d be curious what advantages an intentional failure to identify would have been calculated by the planners?
dejan, 6:54 pm, March 26, 2007
Steff, I guess you and Voyou are both American, so maybe you can explain to me in Holland, to what extent is the war discussed as having underlying motives – for example, geopolitical ones, such as oil?
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