Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 11:52:43 -0800
From: Kenneth Rufo <k.rufo-AT-home.net>
Subject: Re: baudrillard & the Gulf War




Robert Enriquez wrote:
> How can you possibly expect Americans to see any of our military
> action as anything more than,"that action we are taking in X country"?  Soul
> searching in America; let me tell you, if it can't be had a the local
> Starbucks then popular America is probably not interested.  Long live
> Baudrillardian philosophy and American strip malls.

I agree with Robert.  The problem with the moralist critique of
Baudrillard is not that its incorrect, just that (as much as I and
others might wish otherwise), it's not particularly useful.  The
mediation that encapsulated the gulf war, that made it possible for "The
Crisis in the Gulf" to occur without ever (literally) "taking place",
has long since supplanted substantive, formative debate by the "American
conscience".  There might have been a point (certainly Dewey saw one)
when collective deliberation over action and consequences, over good and
bad, might have been more than a 48 second human interest story and a
call to tune in at 11, but sad as I think it is, my American life tells
me that it simply isn't so today.  People are indeed more interested in
Cruise and Kidman's split than the truth of the Gulf War (much less the
truth of how often we still bomb Iraq, how we keep baby food and blood
supplies from entering the country because of dual-use technology
sanctions).  We might debate seriously how well Baudrillard theorizes
any means of redemption, but his is still the most cogent analysis of
the American situation that I have come across.  I won't speak to his
applicability elsewhere (I've never lived there), but he rings
discordantly true in my Yankee ears.

At the same point, I think it a mistake to dismiss Baudrillard as merely
a theorist of simulation, who understands not of suffering, of the
reality of suffering.  Those that read _The Gulf War Did Not Take Place_
in that manner are, imho, doing themselves a disservice, somewhat like
extracting the supply car from the much longer train of thought. 
Baudrillard's more recent work reflects a particular ethical awareness
and appreciation for the problematic of alterity within the confines of
media.  I think Charles Levin offers a particularly useful heuristic in
this regard in his 1996 work on Baudrillard.  More recent Baudrillard
texts ("No Reprieve for Sarajevo" and _The Vital Illusion_) deal with
these issues explicitly.

One might contend, like I often do, that alterity needs as much thought
and protection as any other endangered species, perhaps moreso given how
close it seems to extinction.  Take America and Americans for example. 
To me, the American conscience, in its atomist, individualist bent, is
all about externalization.  We know there might be environmental
consequences, but they aren't our responsibility to deal with.  Why
should we pay higher gas prices when we can drill Alaskan oil?  Why
should our cost of living be higher?  We know that racism exists, but
that doesn't mean that we need to take on additional compromises like
affirmative action.  Americans don't believe they are ultimately
responsible for these costs, even should these costs exist, and they
structure their business and their government accordingly (take Putnam's
_Bowling Alone_ as a interesting read on this dynamic). 
Response-ability is by necessity a personal and risky undertaking; it
places us in dialogue and obligation to some outside force.  Better to
obliterate and implode that outside by bloating it; everything and
everyone (even me) is only outside, and so there is no inside, no
internal with which we need reconcile the external.  Instead, everything
remains blissfully external: I want entertainment fed to me through a
tube (coaxial cable), and I want get rich stock information sent to me
like a message from God through invisible, electromagnetic waves.  There
can be no encounter with the external, with alterity, because everything
has already been produced (even me) as an externality.  The revenge of
the object, as Baudrillard glibly describes it.  Even if Americans did
learn of the "truth" of the Gulf War and its aftermath, it would be just
the truth of some other television show, just another example of how bad
it is outside the city on the hill.  The idea that we might respond,
that some version of "we" or "I" might even be culpable, is something
that I'm not sure the silent majority would or could ever display the
capacity for.  Even Baudrillard has stuggled with this totalization
(witness the shift in resistance strategy: from symbolic exchange to
seduction to fatal strategy to pataphysics to fatal theory -
theorization to the death).  Point being, complain about the truth of
suffering in the Gulf all you want, but in the end Robert is more
correct than he might dream: Baudrillard's philosophy will live on, not
just along with the American Stip Mall, but in it--in every pressing of
_The Matrix_, in the cutting edge denim of the Gap and the happy,
retroactively tax-relieved consumerism of Bush, Jr.

Kenneth Rufo
Doctoral Student
Department of Speech Communication
University of Georgia