[Nettime-bold] Baudrillard & the Political Economy of Death II

[David Teh <dteh@arthist.usyd.edu.au>]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
*S11 and the Political Economy of Death* [continued]

...

Death and the Other Fight Back

It is important to note that what returns here is not the 'death of the
other', but our own Death, our own Dead, thrust ineffably before us.
This means the actual stench of mortality for New Yorkers; to the rest
of us, the simulated (that is, real) imagery of Death where it is simply

not supposed to appear, unchoreographed.  We note that power
instantaneously deploys the rhetorical armoury of survival and
immortality – as the President heads for his space-pod, these two are
consolidated in the person of the resurgent Nation state and its
'bouncing back' economy.  Symbolically and theatrically, power appears
to pass the reins from the American Economy to the Great Nation.  This
was an unauthorised 'manipulation and administration' of death.  What
was even worse, it was perpetrated by the Other.  It is difficult to say

which is worse – the effacement of the separation between life and
death, or that the power to mediate at this limit was so effortlessly
usurped by the Other.  Were we able to stay within the limits of
Baudrillard's discourse, we might fairly say that the attacks of S11
were the actions of the Savage, showing no respect for the law
separating life from death. (However, 'In whatever field of 'reality',
every separate term for which the other is its imaginary is haunted by
the latter as its own death.')

Baudrillard asserts rather unequivocally that the Imaginary is, for us,
the Real, insofar as these two are the hinged faces of a reversible
coin: a binary structure of inter-reliance between the imaginary and the

real: 'our discourse of reality is in fact the discourse of the
imaginary' (p131), another simulacrum that is true.  The justification
of this claim, part of Baudrillard's wider post-structuralist critique
of psychoanalysis, is complicated and may be left aside for the present
purposes – it will suffice to note that for him, the key to this dual
identity is the power of the (social) symbolic 'act of exchange', a
'social relation which puts an end to the real, which resolved the real,

… puts an end to the opposition between the real and the imaginary.'
(p133)

If we apply this post-Lacanian postulation, and briefly pursue its
implications in the present scenario, a remarkable analog emerges, which

I would argue justifies our trust in this model.  For in the case of the

suicide terrorist, do we not see precisely this collapse – a symbolic
exchange (of his life for that of his victims) collapses the opposition
between the real and the imaginary?  How else can we explain the
peculiar suspension of belief – characterised by the phrase: 'it’s just
like a Hollywood movie' – of those first 18 minutes, those first few
hours?

The key to this is the word 'like', since of course the point of this
statement – 'x is like Hollywood' – is precisely that 'x is not
Hollywood'; which is to say likeness, or identity, is not identicality,
since for x to be like y, x must be different to y.  It has been
observed often enough how the logic of the screen permeates and pervades

the social 'real' in America.  Reality TV was only a late footnote to
this transformation and mediation of all social experience.  The
incredulity of newsreaders and eye-witnesses would suggest then that the

(real) social response was not 'I can’t believe it's Real' but 'I can’t
believe it's not Imaginary (ie, not Hollywood)'.  That is to say, the
viewer can't believe that what they are seeing is not the product of the

American imaginary, that fabricated on the screen.  If screen-mediated
mass-culture can fairly be thought of as America’s Imaginary, then here
was a crucial moment of disruption, an interruption of the flow of the
(commodified) Imaginary, a punctuation of its production by the Real.

Such a disruption cannot fail to be a challenge to power established on
the controlled distribution of death: not only does it inflict a
disorder on 'rational' society, but beyond this, no one can be sure
whether 'the death-drive, primed by the accident or catastrophe, may be
unleashed … and turn against the political order.'(p161)   Maintainting
the assumption of Death's ubiquity in a later text [1], Baudrillard
adduces the notion of a 'slow release', whereby the 'bomb's original
violence'
is ordinarily administered in 'homeopathic doses so as to ward off 'the
catastrophe
[that] will never happen, but only because it already has.'

Commentators did not know instinctively how to 'mediate' this event –
pausing, stammering, even apologizing(!) – for lacking the language to
domesticate the imagery for the screenic hearth, lacking, for once, the
means to render the Real as Imaginary.  This is basically an industrial
intervention – for this brief hiatus, all (ac)counting stopped.  Work
stopped.  Mediation returned in X hours; advertising returned in X days;

trading resumed in X days.  Economically, though the wider impact
continues, this was but a momentary disruption, the $300 billion
'stimulus' injection, a petty fine.  Strictly speaking, the price
exacted economically by the actual attack was negligible, and the
on-going response (recession, the acceleration of a 'global economic
downturn' already anticipated) is a response to the social, and not the
economic, damage; which explains the obvious framing of the official
response: the imperative to restore a 'confidence lost', since business
and consumer confidence is far more 'material' than production itself
(which these have structurally replaced).  Indeed, this might be the
shred of understanding we sought in the 'unfathomable' act, for all this

demonstrates clearly the wholesale instability and unsustainability of
an economy so reliant on the tenuous, tremulous social.

At any rate, the confusion wrought between the real and the imaginary on

S11 resounded not in the economic, but in the symbolic, whence it
originated.  Even efforts to orchestrate a symbolic defiance (the mayor
of New York's incredible call for Manhattanites to 'return to work'),
the general mobilisation of the consumer ('keep spending' – consumption
revealed here as the production of production), are consumated only in
economic terms.  The patriotic incitement to exchange, to work, with the

proviso that to sell one's shares is an act of treason.  We all saw how
the financial institutions answered this charge.



In the political economy of death, S11 stands as a radical and
triumphant challenge.  Whether it shall stand as an unanswerable one
remains to be seen.  One suspects it might: it was a gift of death to
which noone will dare to respond, because the fact is that noone wants,
or wants to give, a greater death.  Someone certainly delivered this
massive gift of death, and someone will doubtless 'pay' for it, but we
have little cause to believe that these two will be the same.  In the
political economy of death, the individual (and his or her 'identity')
is always insignificant.  And just as no reprisal could possibly answer
this 'gift', so also there is no act by which the terrorists could
better it.  Any further attack could only distract and detract from the
victorious perfection of S11.  So the warnings of Al Qaeda spokesman
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith  (probably dead by now), to stay grounded, are
disingenuous and strategic – as he says himself, 'The news is what you
see, not what you hear.'

How could one possibly make the point made there any better than it has
been made?  The most potent weapon they wield is not murder, but
mortality which, for its 'point' to be made, we must return to the skies

to apprehend.  This talk of 'making a point' directs us once again to
the true meaning of what has been done: S11 was above all an act of
communication, and the very broadest sort of attack – a social attack.
A Crime Against Society, it marked a triumphant, if momentary, return of

Death, its return to communication and to the social, after long decades

of progressively harsher excommunication.

When we say that Death returns, it is also the return of the Other, the
triumphant arrival of a minority to a momentary victory.  The dead,
having been systematically exscribed fom the social group and its
various exchanges of meaning (symbolic exchange, gifts, language,
commodities), loudly proclaim the end of their silence and their exile,
their re-introduction into group (social) exchange.  The return of Death

– of Death as Other – is thus a certain incitement to discourse
(Foucault), it is also to make the Dead speak.  The political economy of

death is thus a discourse – above all, a social discourse, not primarily

economic or material (nor linguistic), but first and foremost a social
exchange.  The proper exchange of all bodies, blood and bones, the
exchange of social meaning, between one another and between groups.  If,

as the anthropologist might insist, one's existence inside or outside a
group is primarily determined by one’s death being related to others
(and to their deaths), then S11 marks the institution of a social
exchange, and thus a political economy, of Death.


david teh
dteh@arthist.usyd.edu.au


notes:
[1] Jean Baudrillard, 'Cool Memories', trans. Turner, London, Verso,
1990.

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