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COMMENTARY:
Terrorism As a Virus: Baudrillard's Post-2001 Significance
Reassessments of the French philosopher
What he meant about the Gulf War by that title, of course, was that it was so elaborately choreographed for the media, it might as well not have been fought; that the media event "trumped" the actual one. Incidentally, though this was not his main concern, that war was so high-tech (on the winning U.S.-run side) that it wasn't "fought" in old-fashioned terms either. Compare the film "Jarhead," which visualizes Anthony Swofford's memoir of the war: the foot soldiers—actually not that, but trained snipers, whose job is to kill without being seen—never even get to encounter enemy troops except in the form of little shrunken charred remains. And they're never even allowed to fire on enemy officers, computerized search-and-destroy systems being preferred.
To be sure, Baudrillard's main concern was that the September 11 terrorists had created a moment of huge symbolic significance; but he's soon led into tactical observations. Baudrillard isn't particularly adept at political analysis. He had never gotten involved in politics the way so many of his colleagues did in the Sixties. But with September 11, politics and the vision of Baudrillard's philosophy came together, because the currency of terrorism is the manipulation of symbols. Baudrillard's L'Esprit du terrorisme (The Spirit of Terrorism), published in Le Monde shortly after 9/11 and some time later as a small book, is one of the most acute analyses of the events of that day and their implications that we have. This little book—and some follow-up pieces—may ultimately be more important than the French philosopher's implied denunciations of consumer culture and information overload, which arguably are only a more sardonic and downbeat version of Marshall McLuhan and other media critics—because the coolness of Baudrillard's post-9/11 analyses still carries the shock of the new.
What's lacking in Baudrillard's discussion of 9/11, which he extended in Requiem for the Twin Towers, and a further extension, The Violence of the Global, is a practical analysis of the specific details. He remains aloof from politics, or he might have gone to more of an effort to point out how futile and obvious were the Bush administration's unilateral attacks on Afghanistan and then Iraq. His focus had already shifted, it appears, from hypertrophied consumerism to globalization before the Al Qaeda attacks, and he seized upon 9/11 as proof of how the globalization process leads to internal vulnerability and fractionalization. Maybe it's not so clear as he would have us think just how all these economic and political forces are going to sort themselves out. Baudrillard disregards the fact that there are, depending on your politics which is which, "good" and "bad" globalizations that are working simultaneously. His generally apolitical outlook prevents him from observing such nuances. Seeing globalization in commercial media terms made him think it was nothing but homogenization and exploitation. There are obviously strong counter forces using global means such as the Internet to do grassroots organizing for positive change, but that seems to have eluded him.
Baudrillard's metaphor of a virus, however, is very much to the point. It's obvious that there are hundreds if not thousands of Al Qaedas, and that you can't squash the movement by means of individual attacks any more than you can stop a swarm of locusts with a fly swatter. This leads him early in The Spirit of Terrorism to an apocalyptic vision of a suicidal global empire (from the translation of Chris Turner):
Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global profusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent. We can no longer draw a demarcation line around it. It is at the very heart of this culture which combats it, and the visible fracture (and the hatred) that pits the exploited and the underdeveloped globally against the Western world secretly connects with the fracture internal to the dominant system. That system can face down any visible antagonism. But against the other kind, which is viral in structure—as though every machinery of domination secreted its own counterapparatus, the agent of its own disappearance—against that form of almost automatic reversion of its own power, the system can do nothing. And terrorism is the shock wave of this silent reversion.*Along with this powerful idea is the sense he explores that the greater the power the greater the paranoia; and that when an enemy is invisible it comes to seem internalized. Like the far more political and specific analyst Chalmers Johnson in his recent Blowback Trilogy, Baudrillard's provocative essays on 9/11 and its aftermath depict a western empire that may be teetering on the brink of self-destruction.
See especially: Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism. London/New York, Verso (2002), pp. 10-11.
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This story was published on July 3, 2007.
