The Spirit of Terrorism: And, Requiem for the Twin Towers

The violence of the real, or the reality of violence is the only thing power understands. Confronted with suicides, the system (indeed any system) begins to mimic suicide, ultimately committing itself to its own suicide. I won't pretend to understand all of this great writer's words. Partly because my understanding of French is limited. Partly because I have only read a translation. And lastly because I have been fed oh so many Americanisms. This is a good intro into exploring possible interpretations and misunderstandings embedded in our conceptions of the "World". Reading it has helped me to begin to demystify the political concept of Terrorism, especially its connotations within the virtual world of media discourse. "To the point that the idea of freedom, a new and recent idea, is already fading from minds and mores, and liberal globalization is coming about in precisely the opposite form-a police state globalization, a total control, a terror based on 'law and order' measures. Deregulation ends up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to those of a fundamentalist society." (p.32 from the unrevised edition) I would also recommend "The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomenon" (1993) by Jean Baudrillard.

Well, this is a very short book. If you are not familiar with Baudrillard's academic social theory and philosophical works, much of the commentary may come across as superficial, cynical or just plain odd. The unreferenced paraphrasal of Clauschwitz's formula (earlier inverted by Foucault), the references to 'symbols' and death as 'sacrifice'; none of this will make any sense unless you have read Symbolic Exchange and Death, or Signs and Simulations, and like those english journos who reviewed 'The Gulf War did not take place' with similar ignorance, if you take it only at that level you will miss the whole point, and look like a stupid arse. Sacrifice referes to his thesis in symbolic exchange and death that the only resistance to the 'system' is suicide, building on the third volume of Marx's Capital; so that dead labour now outweighs living labour, we all live in a world of death, the only refusal is to stop the system killin us. As the editor of the edition of 'The Gulf war did not take place' that I read showed; many people criticsed Baudrillard comparing him to a classical 'enlightenment' thinker like Noam Chomsky. But this edition then had a quote by Chomsky in the intro where he said it wasn't a 'war' because that conventionally meant two sides fighting against each other. Similarly, Baudrillard's point that we have all imagined the collapse of american empire; in a couple of different places in his work on US foreign policy Chomsky talks about the war mongers in Vietnam and what they said about the 'VC', hypothesising what they would have done if the VC had launched attacks in downtown New York. Besides which, why should Baudrillard have to explain himself to you in any case? If we can't see through the oxymoronism of a 'War on Terrorism' we deserve to blown up in densely populated city centres like the sheep we are.

Well, this is a very short book. If you arte not familiar with Baudrillard's academic social theory and philosophical works, much of the commentary may come across as superficial, cynical or just plain odd. The unreferenced paraphrasal of Clauschwitz's formula (earlier inverted by Foucault), the references to 'symbols' and death as 'sacrifice'; none of this will make any sense unless you have read Symbolic Exchange and Death, or Signs and Simulations, and like those english journos who reviewed 'The Gulf War did not take place' with similar ignorance, if you take it only at that level you will miss the whole point, and look like a stupid arse. Sacrifice referes to his thesis in symbolic exchange and death that the only resistance to the 'system' is suicide, building on the third volume of Marx's Capital; so that dead labour now outweighs living labour, we all live in a world of death, the only refusal is to stop the system killin us. As the editor of the edition of 'The Gulf war did not take place' that I read showed; many people criticsed Baudrillard comparing him to a classical 'enlightenment' thinker like Noam Chomsky. But this edition then had a quote by Chomsky in the intro where he said it wasn't a 'war' because that conventionally meant two sides fighting against each other. Similarly, Baudrillard's point that we have all imagined the collapse of american empire; in a couple of different places in his work on US foreign policy Chomsky talks about the war mongers in Vietnam and what they said about the 'VC', hypothesising what they would have done if the VC had launched attacks in downtown New York. Besides which, why should Baudrillard have to explain himself to you in any case? If we can't see through the oxymoronism of a 'War on Terrorism' we deserve to blown up in densly populated city centres like the sheep we are.

Jean Baudrillard, perhaps the most aphoristic and clear writing (if not necessarily the most profound) of the postmodernists here wields his phallic pen to cut to the core of the twin tower destruction at the hands of Bin Laden?s terrorists. He argues, straightforwardly and convincingly, that the power of terrorism is not contained by its Islamic wielders, but is also a kind of global self-destruction of the globalized American superpower. Anyone could recognize that media and imagery were at the heart of the terror in Manhattan?-that part of the terror was the effective use, far out of proportion to the expenditure made, of comandeering the media to call attention (e.g., the police prefix date, 911) to itself and the helplessness of a crisis for which there is no effective solution. As Baudrillard points out, calling the suicides "cowards" only underscored the inability to answer this realized desire to humiliate "civilization" (what has become of civilization) on the part of those who were willing to put their own death into play. Baudrillard cites Nietzsche with regard to martyrdom being the enemy of truth but in the same breath demonstrates that the terrorists' goal is not a final solution via biological or nuclear warfare so much as a confrontation, a dual that will make the west lose face. He suggests that WW III indeed already happened: it was the cold war. And that now we are in the midst of WW IV which is an anitbody-like reaction of Orwellian globalization against itself. He identifies terror with evil which he suggests tends to exist precisely in the fading of the boundaries between good and evil. An interesting analysis that never mentions, but links to the concept of "enantiodromia"?-adopting the enemies tactics to defeat them. The Israelis did this in becoming nationalistic and materialistic to adopt a state, and the terrorists do it in using the media and its imagery to stage what amounts to a bad Hollywood movie whose extra horror owes to the fact that the spectacle is real.

Short, easy to understand. Good enough not to miss it, but not good enough to own it. After you read this essay, you will breifly grasp the ideas of why 'fight fire with fire,'which is the current policy on terrorism of the Bush government, will never work to fight against terrorism. Also you may find that collapsed twin towers not only represent the loss of economic Babel tower, but the failure of nostalgic fantasy of globalization in digital-information era. If you have some time, go to local ..., and check out this interesting short essay. You will finish it before you finish Starbucks coffee. =)