Jean Baudrillard and his "War Porn" actuality
Death cults in the middle east, with the US (and it's allies) committed in a bombing campaign against them, all to be viewed on Twitter and Facebook posts. A steady stream of photo and video uploads from both sides. Virtual reality now inter-fused with brutality and carnage. This is Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.
"The 1981 volume Simulacra and Simulation (the book that later
appeared in The Matrix) gained a wide audience, and Baudrillard soon
found himself a globetrotting academic superstar, discoursing on his
themes of "seduction" (the term that escapes the binary opposition of
"production" and "destruction") and "hyper-reality" (the simulated realm
that is "more real than the real"). In 1986 he moved from Nanterre,
which had, he lamented, become "normalised", to the university of
Paris-IX Dauphine.
Baudrillard characterised the 1990s, with its
wishful illusions about the "end of history", as a "stagnant" period in
which events were on strike. Eventually the strike was broken by the
attacks on the US of September 11 2001. Baudrillard called it "the
ultimate event, the mother of all events".
"It is the terrorist model," he wrote, "to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess."
Subsequently,
for Baudrillard, there was no longer any need for the media to
virtualise events, as in the first Gulf war, since the war's
participants had thoroughly internalised the rules of simulation. His
2004 essay, War Porn, observed how the photographs from Abu Ghraib
enacted scenes of fetishistic pornography, concluding: "It is really
America that has electrocuted itself."
Baudrillard took to calling
his works "theory fictions": because the present is always more
fantastical than the most lurid science fiction, "theory" must compete
with it on an imaginative level. So Baudrillard offered himself as an
extrapolator, a canary in the cultural coalmine. "My work is
paradoxical," he explained. "It's surrealist like fiction." He found a
sympathetic soul in the novelist JG Ballard, who called him "the most
important French thinker of the last 20 years". (In 1974, Baudrillard
had hailed Ballard's Crash as "the first great novel of the universe of
simulation".)"
Baudrillard's swipe at America via it's reliance on pushbutton warfare and rehearsed (simulated) environments for the promotion of virtual reality killing grounds, is now being duplicated and reinforced by the 'terrorist cults' as they too become absorbed into his Simulacra. Which would mean, by Baudrillard's definition, that if reality now longer has an excessive force (that was once the primitive terrorist) - and the terrorist is now duplicating his own mirrored destruction (as an upload) i.e image/footage of a brutal act of beheading, to then be reflected back with footage of a laser guided bomb from a US warplane. Which are both seen (from dual perspectives) a form of vengeance. Then this is not America electrocuting itself, but a gray area between Baudrillard's steps to the completeness of the Simulacrum and reality devouring it's self within the virtual world.
Conclusion:
"The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical
thinking that confuses message and messenger: if you speak of the
simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of
war, then you are in league with it and have no regard for the hundreds
of thousands of dead ... it is not we, the messengers of the simulacrum,
who have plunged things into this discredit, it is the system itself
that has fomented this uncertainty that affects everything today." Jean Baudrillard
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