[Reader-list] Baudrillard: The Violence of the Global

[Rana Dasgupta]

Cross-posted from Undercurrents list.  A rambling piece with a couple of
useful gems concealed within.

R


The Violence of the Global [1]

Jean Baudrillard

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-à-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)