Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Thu 23 Jul 2009 09:15 AM PDT
Translated by François 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-Ã -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: Galilée, 2002), pp. 63-83.
[2] "Mondial" is the French term for "global" in the original text.
[3] "Pensée unique" in French.
[4] "Espace-temps sans dimension" in French.
[5] "Contre cette universalité abstraite" in French.
[6] "On ne peut pas les fédérer 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.
François
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)
The Violence of the Global [1]
Jean Baudrillard
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