me and jean
purple
purple wrote:
> http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=385
>
> 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.
terrorism = AP
globalization = AM
> 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.
singular = AP
universal = visual and kinetic space
> The analogy between the terms "global" [2] and
> "universal" is misleading. Universalization
> has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and
> democracy.
visual and kinetic space
> By contrast, globalization is
> about technology, the market, tourism, and
> information.
four kinds of phatic communion
> 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.
cloning ESP
> 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.
the prevalent use of the slang variants on the tactile "fuck this, fuck
that", etc.
> 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.
voluntary ESP
> Those singularities we thought were endangered are
> surviving, and those we thought were
> lost are revived.
voluntary ESP = AP
> In so doing, globalization has
> given rise to a perfectly indifferent culture.
AM
> 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.
baroque spirals of AP
> 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.
visual space
> By contrast, today's virtual global culture has
> replaced universal concepts with screens,
> networks, immanence, numbers,
7,22,18,14,8
> This new violence is
> characterized by the supremacy of technical
> efficiency and positivity, total organization,
> integral circulation, and the equivalence of all
> exchanges.
phatic communion
> 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?
west goes east
> And what is that other vertigo that,
> at the same time, seems to force
> people to unconditionally want to realize the
Idea?
east goes west
> Free from
> its former enemies, humanity now has to create
> enemies from within, which in fact produces
> a wide variety of inhuman metastases.
baroque spirals of old AP
> 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.
AM
> 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.
new AP is ground
> 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.
new AP
> 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.
old/new AP
> 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.
new "media"
> 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.
AM versus AP
> The establishment of a global system is the result
> of an intense jealousy. It is the jealousy
> of an indifferent and low-definition culture
tactile AM
> 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.
abuse value of old "media"
> 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.
first nature and second nature merge
> 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.
end of "matchable" information, old science
> 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.
pentadic "fate"
> Only an analysis that emphasizes the logic of
> symbolic obligation can make sense of this
> confrontation between the global and the singular.
Menippean memes are all that's left
> 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.
There is only one person in the world and it can't find the OTHER, a
gift.
Bob Dobbs