Contention One is Politics!Welcome to the 2016 Election where Reagan on ‘Roids faces down Drone-Crazed Hilla the HunHi, I’m Bret Baier reporting from the Fox News headquarters. And I’m here to tell you that this ones gonna be close. Hillary only leads by 2 points which makes absolutely any legislative action a potential swing issue. Now, there’s been some recent controversy about whether or not The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic and/or diplomatic engagement with the People’s Republic of China.Now, especially when 62% of America has orientalist depictions of China, this election will all come down to who makes white people feel better about imposing racist policies on this wonderful Asian country!Live from Trump Towers, Eve Peyser tells us about some Breaking News concerning this year’s resolution:(Eve Peyser, contributor for the daily dot, 8-31-15 “Donald Trump and China: a love story ” http://www.dailydot.com/lol/donald-trump-says-china/)//kbuck

He wears a hat that says “ MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN ” but we all know what’s really on Donald

Trump’s mind: China , an old mistress of sorts. “How could I dislike China ?” Donald asks us , trying to

seem casual yet confident. But we know it’s something more. “I love China,” Don pauses. “China all the time .” Corey, his trusty campaign manager , pulls Donald aside after the speech. In a hushed tone, he says,

“Donnie, you’re talking about China too much . ” Donald attempts to feign surprise. He says, almost sexily, “Funny

you say that, I haven’t thought about China in a very long time .” “Cut the shit,” Corey says. This is the tough love Donald needs to win, and he knows this. “But look at what China’s doing,” Donald whines. “I know Donald, I know.”

Donald nuzzles his head into Corey’s chest, weeping softly. They are determined to turn this around. “Karl, take China!” Donald commands. He says this to thousands of fans who watch him stoically, their hearts full of rage and adoration. But he doesn’t

want Karl to take it; he knows this. He wants China all to himself; China may have forgotten Don a long time ago, but Don has never

forgotten China . Not ever. No way . “People say I don’t like China? I love China,” Trump sweetly coos

into the camera. He can’t help himself . “ China ,” he continues , more confidently this time. When he returns home , late at night, drunk off overpriced champagne and regret , full of pizza devoured with a knife and fork,

he switches on China Central Television. His cable bill is out of control , even for a man of his stature, with the

Chinese TV bundle package and the pay-per-view porn, but he can’t get China out of his head. As soon as he hears the first words fall out of the anchor’s mouth, the Mandarin sounding sweet and almost erotic, a

single tear slides down Donald’s cheek. It’s as if he’s been slapped in the face by nostalgia. “China,” he wails. When

Donald is in the shower later that night, he cries and touches himself. “China!” he yells, the sound of his voice shielded

by the sound of running water. “Oh China!” He dries himself off and glances at the answering machine. Ten messages from Corey. He knows what they’re about, but he can’t stand to hear it, not tonight. He checks his cell phone. “New message from Corey <3 Lewandowski” Trump

reluctantly opens the message. Corey writes, “I know you miss China. That’s okay. It’ll be OK, Donald. I love you. Just

don’t forget about your beau, America.” “China,” Donald whispers into the abyss. “China .”

In a fit of rage, Donald has shifted his policy stance just a bit: instead of allowing his emotions to overtake his otherwise rational self, he says that:(Donald Trump, kinda looks like a mr. potato head I had as a kid, https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/us-china-trade-reform)

The Trump Plan Will Strengthen Our Negotiating Position As the world’s most

important economy and consumer of goods, America must always negotiate trade agreements

from strength . Branding China as a currency manipulator and exposing their unfair trade

practices is not enough . In order to further strengthen our negotiating leverage, the

Trump plan will: Lower the corporate tax rate to 15% to unleash American ingenuity here at home and make us more globally competitive. This tax cut puts our rate 10 percentage points below China and 20 points below our current

burdensome rate that pushes companies and jobs offshore. Attack our debt and deficit by vigorously eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the Federal government, ending redundant government programs, and growing the economy to increase tax

revenues. Closing the deficit and reducing our debt will mean China cannot blackmail us with our own Treasury bonds.

Contention Two Is Contention Three Which is also Contention TwoTrump is the paragon of our political. His blatant disregard for others is not simply thematic of American culture, but a phenomenon which proves that we are engulfed in hyperreality. His popularity parallels modern consumer culture which attempts to make all things signify, to make everything mean something when in reality nothing has truly been said. His promise to “make America great again” is desired because people wish for authenticity and meaning. America is kept alive through this empty political rhetoric that means something, and at the same time nothing. Nights 16 (Rob, freelance writer and founder of socialreap.com, 3-16-16, “Donald Trump IS The American Dream: The Hyperreality of The U.S.” https://medium.com/@robnights/donald-trump-is-the-american-dream-the-hyperreality-of-the-us-3de367b9c581#.c6kb9ym2d)//kbuck

You probably saw it not too long ago. As the cheers for Marco Rubio’s appeal to “ start talking again about the issues that matter ” subsided , things took a turn that can only be described as ludicrous. In response to Rubio’s legitimate plea, Donald

Trump assured the audience that despite his paltry hands, “there’s no problem” with the size of his Woody womb pecker. When a potential presidential candidate responds to petitions to have a serious “policy debate” by talking about the scope of his genitalia, something fundamental has gone wrong . But

when this political mockery happens repeatedly, is it time to admit that the spectator sport of politics has gone too far? It is Trump’s grotesque disregard of anything substantial, or true, that contorts these nominations into a slapstick political burlesque show. Yet it is through this disregard of grave topics and veracity that his misanthropic, racist visions become glaring . But still, the number of Trump supporters continues to grow.

What if this increasing support isn’t  — as we may hope — a reversible brainwashing of the citizenry? What if we are not witnessing the United States being led to destruction under false pretenses? What if, instead, we are seeing a mirror held up to the cultural ideals, and the current social reality, of the World’s most powerful country? In Simulacra and Simulation , French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard coined the term “hyperreality”. A hyperreality occurs when there is confusion between something’s appearance, and its reality. Take Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the UK. This weekly get-together of politicians appears to be the holding to account of the

British government. In reality, it’s a futile sparring match in rhetoric and point scoring. As political theorist Carl Schmitt would explain, this show is mere spectacle, whereas the real dealings go on behind closed doors. The appearance differs from the reality. But Donald Trump is a more interesting example. He could easily fit into what Baudrillard calls “second order simulacrum”. This is where the appearance (a harebrained bigot’s rise to power) actually reflects the truth of the society from which he came. Through this reflection, we can study the current reality of that society, and understand it in a variety of ways. Firstly, we could understand Trump’s popularity as a parallel to the inherent populism in the US. Reality TV, consumer culture, and celebrity culture embed themselves into the American mind . These are cultural phenomena that perpetuate “endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance ”. These fundamentally empty symbols are then sold as if they have meaning. A porche sells status. A six-figure salary sells success. Trump sells a “Great America”. The size of Trump’s penis sells a “real man”. These phenomena  — sports cars, capital, Trump, penis size — appear to be something people desire. But in reality, they are bereft of any real substance, meaning, or value. But it’s

these empty symbols that fuel Donald Trump. It’s also these empty ideals that fu el the American Dream. And while Trump is the personification of the American Dream, the American Dream itself is the misogynistic, dwarf-throwing Jordan Belford in the Wolf of Wall Street. But Trump continues to represents a hyperreality in a second

way. He espouses hot air about being self-funded (while taking donations), and promises a politics that can no

longer by bought by corporations. This is the hollow appearance. The reality is utter hypocrisy. Every piece of legislation that Trump may revoke or invoke will have been bought by the profits of private enterprise. His private enterprise. When legislation is controlled by a group of big businesses, we have a Corporatocracy. When it’s essentially controlled by one enterprise — the Trump Empire — we descend even further into what former presidential candidate Ralph Nader aptly calls “American Fascism”. For it is one man’s corporate greed and profits that are seeing him propelled to the echelons of political power.

If this is not “purchasing political favor”, what is? These two hyperrealities are not something isolated to Trump. They are a reflection of something bigge r. A reflection of the popularity of empty ideals . And a reflection of the hypocrisy embedded in the dream of a revolution dependent on the status quo. This is a show that reveals both politics and life as an amalgamation of spectacle , catchphrases, and shallow morality . Trump currently leads this monstrous parody of present cultural ideals reduced to the absurd . It’s gone further than Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s idea that we can no longer discern the appearance from the reality. It’s more akin to Baudrillards idea that

the appearance is now the reality. The point scoring of Prime Minister’s Questions is not merely a ridiculous spectacle. That

ridiculous, point-scoring spectacle, is British politics. Yet we enjoy the performance, despite the horrifying spectacle being our reality. This play-acting hyperreality keeps us on the edge of our seats, and brings drama into the otherwise mundane. This self-conscious role-playing may have once been fraudulent, but now it’s real, and it’s terrifying. The result is a President as sociopathic as Frank Underwood. But this is a self-inflicted,

logical conclusion to a large portion of society with dreams built on a House of Cards.

This phenomenon is not isolated to trump, but rather the world writ large is a radical illusion by which we impose meaning onto things, and make them signify, in order to convince us of their originality. The only strategy we have left is undeniably fatal, we must combat truth with only a higher form of it. To expose the logic of hyperreality, we must begin toying with its own nature.

You should affirm the 1AC as a parody that exposes and challenges the violence of hyperreality through semiotic implosion. By analyzing ways in which violence is sutured through language, we can dismantle the principles that make such possible. Our politics is one of seductive enigma that injects mystery into the economy of debate. You should not succumb to the facile belief in information, for its nature is fundamentally morose. Only elusive encounters with language can create value through engagement with the unknown. Baudrillard 96 (Jean, “The Perfect Crime: Radical Thought”, Verso 2008, translated by Chris Turner, pp. 103-106 MK)

How fine indifference was in a world that was not indifferent - in a different , convulsive, contradictory¶ world, a world with issues and passions! That being the case, indifference immediately became an issue ¶ and a passion itself. It could pre-empt the indifference of the world, and turn that pre-emption into an event .¶ Today, it is

difficult to be more indifferent to their reality than the facts themselves, more indifferent to¶ their meaning than images. Our operational world is an apathetic world. Now, what good is it being ¶ passionless in a world without passion , or detached in a world without desire? It is not a question of¶ defending radical thought. Every idea one defends is presumed guilty, and every idea that

cannot defend itself¶ deserves to disappear. On the other hand, one must fight all charges of irresponsibility, nihilism or despair.¶ Radical thought is never depressive. On this point, there is total misunderstanding. Ideological and ¶

moralistic critique, obsessed with meaning and content, obsessed with the political finality of discourse, ¶

never takes into account writing, the act of writing, the poetic, ironic, allusive force of language, of the ¶ juggling with meaning. It does not see that the resolution of meaning is to be found there - in the form¶ itself,

the formal materiality of expression. Meaning, for its part, is always unhappy. Analysis is , by¶ definition, unhappy , since it is born of critical disillusionment. But language, for its part, is happy, even ¶ when referring to a world without illusion and without hope. That might even be the definition of a ¶ radical thinking: a happy form and an intelligence without hope . Critics, being unhappy by nature,¶ always choose ideas as their battleground. They do not see that if discourse always tends to produce¶ meaning, language and writing, for their part, always create illusion - they are the living illusion of¶

meaning, the resolution of the infelicity of meaning by the felicity of language. And this is surely the only ¶ political - or transpolitical -

act that can be accomplished by the person who writes. As for ideas, everyone has ¶ them. More than they need. What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis . That alone can justify¶ writing, not the wretched critical objectivity of ideas. There never will be any resolving the contradictoriness of ideas, except in the energy and felicity of language. ‘I do not paint

sadness and¶ loneliness,’ says Hopper. ‘What I wanted to do was to pain sunlight on the side of a house.’ At any rate, better a¶ despairing analysis in felicitous language than an optimistic analysis in an infelicitous language that is maddeningly¶ tedious and demoralizing platitudinous, as is most often the case. The absolute tediousness secreted by that¶ idealistic, voluntaristic thought is the secret sign of its despair - as regards both the world and its own discourse.¶ That is where true depressive thought is to be found, among those

who speak only of the transcending and¶ transforming of the world, when they are incapable of transfiguring their own language. Radical thought is a ¶ stranger to all resolving of the world in the direction of an objective reality and its deciphering. It does ¶ not decipher . It anagrammatizes, it disperses concept and ideas and, by its reversible sequencing, takes ¶ account both of meaning and of the fundamental illusoriness of meaning. Language takes account of¶ the very illusion of language as definitive stratagem and, through it, of the illusion of the world as¶ infinite trap, as seduction of the mind, as spiriting away of all our mental faculties. While it is a vehicle¶ of meaning, it is at the same time a superconductor of illusion and non-meaning. Language is merely the¶ involuntary accomplice of communication - by its very form it appeals to the spiritual and material¶ imagination of sounds and rhythm, to the dispersal of meaning in the event of language. This passion¶ for artifice, for illusion, is the passion for undoing that too-beauteous constellation of meaning. And for¶ letting the imposture of the world show through which is its enigmatic function, and the mystification of¶ the world, which is its secret. While at the same time letting its own imposture show through - the¶ impostor, not the composteur [composing stick] of meaning. This passion has the upper hand in the free and¶ witty use of language, in the witty play of writing. Where that artifice is not taken into account, not only¶ is its charm lost, but the meaning itself cannot be resolved. Cipher, do not decipher.

Work over the¶ illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is ¶ only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to ¶ spread a terroristic confusion about it , or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion - in other words, a¶ radical disillusioning of the real. Viral, pernicious thought, corrosive of meaning, generative of an erotic¶ perception of reality’s turmoil. Promote a clandestine trade in ideas, of all in admissible ideas, of¶ unassailable ideas, as the liquor trade had to be promoted in the 1930s. For we are already in a state of¶

full-scale prohibition. Thought has become an extremely rare commodity, prohibited and prohibitive, ¶ which has to be cultivated in secret places following esoteric rules. Everything must take place in secret .¶ We shall

take the view that the official thought market is universally corrupt and implicated in the prohibition of ¶ thought by the dominant clerisy. Every intervention by critical, enlightened and right-thinking intellectuals,¶ all of them politically correct even when they do not know it, will be considered vacuous and shameful.¶ Eradiate within oneself every trace of the intellectual conspiracy. Spirit away the reality file to wipe out¶ all its conclusions. It is, in fact, reality which is fomenting its own disavowal, preparing its own ruin by¶ way of our lack of reality. Hence the feeling that this whole affair - the world, thought and language - has¶ come from elsewhere, and might

disappear as though by magic. For the world does not seek to exist ¶ more, nor to persist in existing. It seeks , rather, the wittiest way to escape reality . It seeks, by way of¶ thought, what can lead it to its doom. The absolute rule is to give

back more than you were given. Never¶ less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us - ¶ unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.

This system has torn any relation constituted by symbolic exchange in favor of inaugurating the project of identity. People are no longer singular beings, but simulations that overcode the messy nature of life. Yet, one is encouraged to work within the parameters of the code, but nothing that exceeds it. In this way radical theory is foreclosed by simulation – only by challenging violence at the level of semiotics can we dismantle the system of implosive violence. Pawlett 7 (Dr. William, prof. of Sociology and Cultural Studies, University of Wolverhampton “Against Banality” pgs. 151-153)//kbuck

In order to understand Baudrillard’s approach to subjectivity, identity and agency we must, once again, take up the distinction between symbolic relations and simulatory abstractions. In modernity symbolic relations between people are severed , abstracted and reduced to semiotic, commodified relations plotted on a single , universal scale of identity/ difference . Baudrillard did not, of course, contend that the individual is free, authentic or ‘whole’ in the

symbolic order, or in the making of symbolic exchanges. Instead the severing of symbolic exchange relations sets the fundamental precondition for the historical emergence of the ‘individual’, which itself inaugurates the modern ‘project’ of identity.2 The ‘individual’ – meaning separate, autonomous, indivisible unit – emerges as kin, clan and ritual ties are broken. The individual comes to be understood as a creature of needs and desires, the possessor of a rational conscious will and an autonomous psychical structure consisting primarily of the instinct for survival (1981: 63–87).

But, as we know, for Baudrillard, this individual creature of needs is a term of the code, a simulation (see

discussion in Chapter 1). According to Baudrillard, the relationship between the social and the individual is transformed by the system of consumption. Social conduct remains remarkably orderly because the process of individualisation is also a process of integration – as the etymology suggests, parts or units become wholes, or rather the unit

is conceived in such a way that it must be integrated within the whole and makes sense only within this integration. Individuals as constituted by the code, according to Baudrillard, are in no sense singular beings but are expressed through a range of personality ‘types’ that fit into a larger whole – through the play of identity/difference that is the system of consumption. Types of person, like ‘types’ of consumer, ‘types’ of race and ‘types’ of social class, are designated by alphabetical or numerical series. The police speak of IC1s and IC2s, marketing and public relations people speak of A1s

and C3s, most social researchers are no better, positing ‘pink’, ‘grey’, ‘red’ and ‘green’ types of consumer. These are abstractions, not representations of actual people. They are not even idea ltypes in the sense developed by Max Weber (1949) because they are not

heuristic devices designed to aid the understanding of social relations, they are simulations that are designed to replace the mess of lived relations with an ordered , inert, version of the social . Social life is broken into elements, that which cannot be defined or located as an element (that which is ‘ambivalent’) is rejected and the remaining elements are reconstituted through the code into a ‘simulation’ of the social .3

It is upon the loss of difference that the cult of difference is founded. (Baudrillard, 1998a: 89) Things get a lot more exciting when you say ‘Yes’. (Virgin Mobile advertisement, UK, 2006) The concept of personalisation was central to Riesman’s influential study

The Lonely Crowd (1961). According to Riesman the major obligation of the modern citizen is no longer to produce goods, but to ‘produce’ a personality . Personality is the essential mode of integration and control in advanced modernity because it is the anchoring-point of the will, of choices and decisions made during the life course. Personalisation refers to ways in which society offers consumers differentiation, distinctiveness or uniqueness through

product choices. In other words, consumer products do the work of ‘personalisation’ for us, we merely have to choose one brand or another, using the ‘marginal or ‘inessential’ coded differences presented to us, in order to express our ‘selves’. We are ‘cool’, ‘trendy’ or ‘alternative’ because the signs we consume are ‘cool’, ‘trendy’ or ‘alternative’; the work of identity has been done for us, we are only required to say ‘Yes’, which is nevertheless an active, discriminating endorsement, never

a dumb passivity. Baudrillard extends Riesman’s analysis by using the concept of personalisation as a basis for

a critique of the ‘metaphysics’ of the subject. Just as Marcuse (1961) retained a distinction between true and false needs, Riesman (1961) operates with a distinction between true and false forms of personalisation. Baudrillard allows neither distinction and makes it clear that a new critical stance is needed because ‘it cannot be denied that even superficial differences are real as soon as they become

invested with value’ (1996a: 153). Further: to differentiate oneself is precisely to affiliate to a model, to label oneself by reference to an abstract model, to a combinatorial pattern of fashion, and therefore to relinquish any real difference, any singularity , since these can only arise in concrete, conflictual relations with others and the world. (Baudrillard, 1998a: 88) The individual, as it appeared in Enlightenment philosophy, a creature of passion and character, is ‘swept

out of our functional universe’ (ibid.). This ‘lost being’ is then reconstituted in coded, differential and semiotic form by the consumer system, resulting in ‘a synthetic individuality’ (ibid.).

People as constituted by the system are not different or singular in any meaningful way. They are merely different from each other according to a coded system of marginal differentials : a ‘chav’ is not cultured, a ‘square’

is not fashionable, a ‘goth’ is not mainstream. These differences, no matter how marked or dramatic they seem at the level of content,

represent conformity at the level of form; that is, at the level of the code, an ‘integration within a sliding scale of values’ (1998a: 89), the scale of identity/difference. Consumption, as a ‘generalised code of differentiation’ (1998a:

94), establishes a new and distinctive mode of exchange between individuals: ‘the unconscious discipline of the code’ is a system of ‘competitive co-operation’ (ibid.). Baudrillard insists that ‘the status of the individual is changing totally’: It is a move from an individual principle based on autonomy, character, the inherent value of the self to a principle of perpetual recycling by indexation to the code . . . of ‘personalisation’, which traverses each individual in his signified relation to others. (Baudrillard, 1998a: 170) Consumerism is

saturated with ‘false spontaneity’ and ‘orchestrated emotions’: the ‘have a nice day culture’. It is certainly possible to move around within the code, there are freedoms within the code , and, of course, power relations and constraints. Indeed, we are enjoined to manoeuvre within it, to improve ourselves, to become more assertive , or more attractive in the career and relationship markets . Within the code everything is a market , an abstract system for the interactive exchange of goods , money, bodies and images: communications companies tell us that ‘It’s good to talk’, that we should ‘get closer’ (Wrigley’s chewing gum), celebrity chefs tell us how to cook, how to eat, government initiatives tell us how to parent, popular publications tell us how to flirt or perform

cunnilingus. The code entreats us to ‘be’ , to verify ourselves , to be through self-coding ; indeed, to take responsibility for oneself is to be self-coding. These processes lead to new or deeper forms of alienation and to a ‘terrorism of

solicitude’ (1998a: 167). The code presents a gift, but at the same time makes a request and demands a response. The response can only be made in the terms of the code; the code leaves ‘practically no way of saying “no” ’ (1998a: 168). This is the symbolic violence of the code; it closes off the possibility of symbolic exchange by giving a gift that cannot be reciprocated or annulled – the gift of self.

The attempt to render the whole world transparent through the elimination of indeterminacy is the will to meaning which inaugurates a geopolitical conquest aimed solely at eliminating mystery. Reliance on such systems of representation engenders implosive violence aimed at securing a static position amidst enigma, around which the simulacrum of war can reproduce itself. Artrip and Debrix 14 (Ryan, Doctoral Student, ASPET, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Francois Debrix, professor of political science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, “The Digital Fog of War: Baudrillard and the Violence of Representation” http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-debrix.html)//kbuck

A beginning of an answer to some of these questions has already been provided by Der Derian and his concept of “virtuous war.” Der Derian warns that “virtuous war requires a critical awakening if we are not to sleepwalk through the manifold travesties of war.” Thus, Der Derian continues, we need to find ways to ceaselessly deploy critical perspectives that confront us with the “fact” that virtual/virulent war operates in everyday (digitalized, mediatized) life by “projecting a mythos as well as an ethos” (Der Derian, 2001: xvii). The mythos of virtual/virulent war is very much the product of its representational fog. This, in itself, is not a new discovery. What may be new, however, or at least more intensified, are the ways, techniques, layers, and levels of representation, and indeed media (and the members of the demos as media vectors and networks too) that strive to maintain war’s virulence and violence in this fog. This means that, with the help of Baudrillard’s insights into representation and the production of the real, we can argue that the radical uncertainty about war is predicated on and exponentially reproduced within an implosive violence, one that is internal to the system of war representation itself . Thus, in this article, we also make the case for “locating” the responsibility for war’s uncertainty and virulence not in its object (a so-called objective geopolitical event or situation) or subject (an allegedly intentional geo-political actor or agent), but rather in the expectation that a coherent and fixed political object of war, the visual verification of a center or core to war, the presence of key existential stakes and key social and political actors or agents granted ontological priority, and the deployment of contextualized circumstances, justifications, or purposes about war will all have been mediatically and digitally rendered or made real. Such an expectation about the ontological “location ” of the objects, subjects, stakes, and processes of today’s virulent war is generative of another expectation: that of the so-called self-evident violence of war and, by extension, of anything that socially and politically is said to matter for and about the demos(since virulent/virtual war is an all-encompassing, or all-swarming, “geopolitical reality”). In other words, what the so-called objects and subjects of today’s virtual/virulent war expect “their” war to represent is what ensures a disposition towards violence (a violence of “the global,” perhaps, as Baudrillard intimates) that may well be the result of attempts at securing a will to meaning , a will to make sense of things, and a will to be of political objects and subjects that today takes place or, rather, is intensified in virtual and digital modalities of representation and mediation. Part of the critical stake of this essay is to “locate” the violence/virulence of contemporary warfare not just in its empirical geopolitical “events,” but rather in the representational domain inside which those so-called events are expected to make sense, that is to say, in the always already preemptively belligerent and aggressive realm of representation (where the challenge is to produce and impose meaning at all costs). The claim about a certain quality of reality or even realism to new digital informational or communicative technologies has played a formative role in the global staging of several recent social and political conflicts . In both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements of 2011, for example, digital technologies were celebrated for their real-time capacity and their subversive (democratic) potentials. The virtue of reporting “from the ground” of the event itself was championed as a matter of authenticity. There was a common sense that “truth” would finally be able to speak from its “real” source (the demos itself?). Not only is there a prevalent uncritical (even if sometimes well-intentioned) faith in new media and their digital technologies today, but, more importantly, there is often an impulse of liberation. Yet, this impulse is stifled by its faith in representation. The hope for openness, transparency , immediacy, and indeed liberation is so tethered to the real (and to the will to reality) that it ends up being negative or, at least, self-defeating. It often becomes evident that the so-called democratic uses of new media technologies—particularly in terms of reporting violent war events or conflicts of allegedly great concern/importance to the global demos—are, far from producing a clearer

picture of an objective event, contributing to an ever thickening fog of meaning and truth. These new media technologies in and of themselves are not the object of our critique here. Moreover, we are not interested in “clearing the fog” of the real or war. Again, our critical intervention in this essay has more to do with deploying perspectives that may expose the violent dispositions of the contemporary mythos of war (and revealing the complicit role of the digitalized demos in the intensification of this mythos) than with attempting to clear the way for a different ethos about everyday reality, digitalized media, and the prevalence of warfare in political representations. In fact, part of our argument is also to suggest that the various cultural, political, and ethical mechanisms that seek to clear the fog of the real (and war) often end up reproducing it. The lure to criticize and debunk reality often requires that another real, another certainty, another dominant meaning , or indeed another democratic necessity be established through the same means and techniques, and media, that had to be challenged in the first place (thus, the simulacrum continues to proliferate its reality-effects). Behind the widespread “global” celebration of digitalized technologies for their newly found representational capabilities and accuracies, there lies the idea that, perhaps following a collective disgust with the dealings of Western media outlets as more or less uncritical props for the social/economic/ethical status quo in the past several decades, disseminated and “democratized” media technologies can de-mystify the world, lift its aura in a way, or perhaps “dig deeper” into the “truth” than, say, what the media networks involved in reporting news (including war news) in the 1980s and 1990’s (the famous CNN effect) ever could do. Because these technologies are far more in real-time than news networks, they are also generally thought to be able to evade oppressive/repressive censorship of particular corporate/class/state/ideology interests. But even more than escaping filters, digital representations today are often thought to be able to eliminate all of the ambiguities born of time. Thus, we (members of the public/demos) want to believe that mediation can be removed. And we want to subscribe to the view that any distortion occurring between an event and its perception/memory, or between the “actual” and its account, can evaporate. By reducing to the virtually infinitesimal or invisible the filter/screen between the image that represents and the real that is and, furthermore, by placing the productive responsibilities for the image into the hands of the user (literally into the digits), the digital establishes itself as something capable of demolishing the “malicious” surface of appearances to reveal a meaningful density of truth through the quasi-immediate interface. This is the dream of immediacy rediscovered and perhaps finally realized. At a most basic level of analysis, the risk involved in pointing to this desire for mediatized or digitalized immediacy would be to undermine the visual evidence of the violent/virulent occurrence of the omnipresence of war. For example, could we have deployed a critique of the US military’s and the US government’s use of torture in the War on Terror were it not for the seemingly unfiltered “shock and awe” of the Abu Ghraib photos? Again, from the point of view of the ethos of virtual/virulent war, the lure of digitalized immediacy has its uses (and, possibly, benefits, too, even for the demos). But, from the perspective of war’s mythos, it must be said that the “truth” about war and war operations cannot be fully revealed because representation , no matter how immediate or seemingly unmediated, always works by imposing some meaning onto things/ events that are made visible /representable. Consider the role played by digital media in the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013. Within a matter of minutes of the blasts, even before the smoke could clear the scene, images and videos of terror taken from spectators’ mobile devices circulated through cyberspace. Everything was seemingly captured in that instant. The horror that drew so many people to capture images through their smart phones seems to speak on its own; it needs no commentary, no meaning to be given to it. In fact, it appears to have no mediation, no appropriation or narrativizing, no

contextualizing either. That is precisely why smart phones are so apt at giving us such images, such representations, such “pure” meanings about things. Especially, such a horrifying violence, it is said, needs no commentary, no sense to be made of it. An immeasurable violence is done to the violated when one tries to make sense of the senseless (Agamben, 1999). Yet, as Baudrillard had already pointed out in his remarks on the Gulf War, “everything which is turned into information becomes the object of endless speculation, the site of total uncertainty. We are left with the symptomatic reading on our screens of the effects of the war, or the effects of discourse about the war, or completely speculative strategic evaluations” (Baudrillard, 1995: 41). In their digital representation, images of war and images of terror are dissolved into their own information . Information (what the image/event wants to tell us, to reveal, allegedly) already infiltrates the tweeted or texted image /scene (of horror, of war) with an urgency of signification and meaning . Images of horror cannot make sense , perhaps must not be made sense of, and yet they somehow beg for meaning , for circulation, or for propagation, in the hope that they may reveal something to someone . Thus, the digitalized mediation of the image, even in its instantaneity, still takes place. Images—or whatever event might have been “caught”—must succumb to a will to information, to a will to meaning, even if it is falsely affirmed that what is digitally rendered needs no commentary. Put differently, the image levels the event it represents by entering into a mass/global indifferent exchange , into a virulent global (representational) circulation that murders singularity or, indeed, the moment of trauma (on this question of the erasure of trauma, see Debrix, 2008: 4-5; Edkins, 2003: 37-38). The enigmatic singularity of the event—which, for Baudrillard, was once a precondition for any sort of historical transition—gives way to an endlessness of representation, whether such representation appears to have a clear ethical or political purpose/signification or not. It is in this always operative tendency of rendered appearances to yield meaning (even if their meaning is to be information-worthy), not in the image or event itself, that we situate the conditions of possibility and reproducibility for the ever-thickening representational fog and for the violence /virulence of images , or better yet, of appearances. To make war or, as the case may be, the terror event mean something—even in some of the most immediate reactions often designed to evoke injustice or, indeed, incomprehension—is the generative point of violence , the source of representation as a virulent/virtual code and mode of signification. Baudrillard writes, “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible.” He adds, “We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; […] we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us” (Baudrillard, 1988: 63). Indeed, the Western world—increasingly, the global—has found itself with a proliferation of meanings and significations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is as if the so-called crisis of nihilism (thought to be characteristic of much critique and philosophical suspicion throughout the 20th century) later on produced something of the opposite order. The mass violence of the 20th century inaugurated not a complete void of despair or meaninglessness, but instead a flood of meaning, if not an overproduction of it. Baudrillard refers to this frantic explosion of meaning/signification as “a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production […]” (Baudrillard, 1983: 7). Here, Baudrillard describes a mode of production of a different kind, not motivated by class interests or exploitation of value, but by an automated, perhaps viral, abreaction to the empty core or disenchantment of things and the world: that is to say, the degree to which things seem to lack a singular center of gravity or have lost a justifiable reference to the real world, and yet each thing that “matters” is also an attempt to get at reality as a question of accumulation (of meaning), circulation (of signs), and filling up of all interstitial spaces of communication and value. The end result is an over-abundance of signs and images of reality, something that culminates in what Baudrillard calls hyperreality—things appear more real than reality

itself. The story that needs to be told is thus not about the undoubtedly deplorable “truth” or fact of explosive and warlike violence, but about a violence of another sort. In the radical digital transparency of the global scene, we (members of thedemos) often have full or direct exposure to explosivity, as we saw above with the image of terror. But what still needs to be thought and problematized is implosivity or what may be called implosive violence. Implosive violence is a violence for which we do not, and perhaps will never, have much of a language (Rancière, 2007: 123). Although, not having a language for it or, rather, as we saw above, seeking to find a language to talk about it and, perhaps, to make sense of it is still sought after. This is, perhaps, what digital pictures of war/terror violence seek to capture or want to force through. Implosive violence, often digitally rendered these days, is in close contact with media technologies and representational devices and techniques because it seeks representation and meaning. This is why implosive violence insists on calling in wars (against terror, for example) and on mobilizing war machines (against terrorist others, against vague enemy figures), but wars and war machines that no longer have —to the extent that they ever had—a clearly identifiable object and subject, or a clear mission /purpose . As such, this implosive violence and its wars (the new Western/global way of war, perhaps) must remain uncertain , unclear, foggy, inwardly driven, representational, and indeed virulent . They must remain uncertain and confused even as they are digitally operative and desperately capture events/images to give the impression that meanings/significations can and will be found. Yet, as we saw above, it is not meanings exactly that must be found, but information and the endless guarantee of its immediate circulation. As information occupies the empty place of meaning, certainty, or truth, images must be instantaneously turned into appearances that search for meanings that will never be discovered because, instead, a proliferation of information-worthy facts and beliefs will take over (perhaps this is what US fake pundit and comedian Stephen Colbert famously referred to as “truthiness”). Or, as Baudrillard puts it, “free from its former enemies, humanity now has to create enemies from within , which in fact produces a wide variety of inhuman metastases” (Baudrillard, 2003). Thus, this implosive violence is destined to be a global violence since it "is the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity , including of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. […] It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear […] Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, produces by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist" (2003; our italics).

Our performance of radical theory is one that shatters the very possibility of reifying the coded and economic meaning of engagement within debate that sets the conditions for violence to emerge. We must challenge the semiotic medium through which politics is filtered through an analysis of the form. The Code necessarily precedes experience, and shapes all violence. Pawlett 13. William Pawlett, senior lecturer in media, communications, and cultural studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, Violence, Society and Radical Theory : Bataille, Baudrillard and Contemporary Society, pg. 132

Baudrillard began to describe various codes of meaning (or signification) as integrated by what he called ‘the code’ ( le code, la grille, le Code du signes, la matrice ). By “the code” Baudrillard intended not particular codes of meaning (English, French, Morse) or particular modes of the interpretation of meaning (dominant,

resistant, plural) but rather the condition of possibility of coding . 2 For an effective critique of the consumer society to be made , Baudrillard suggests, we must focus analysis on the form of the Code, not its contents or representations which are, of course, extraordinarily open, malleable and diverse. The Code as form is preconscious, or, in Baudrillard’s terminology, has the effect of “precession”; that is, as grid or network it precedes individual experience , perception and choice. The medium of this grid is the abstract, arbitrary sign. Signs, visual and linguistic, are the medium of coding , of the ordered exchange between coded elements. Composed to two sets of inter-locking relations, the sign-referent and signifier-signified, the sign is the universal form constructing the oppositions of subject and object, of real and representation, of self and other : the building blocks of ‘reality’ itself . The ordered exchange of signs produces identity and difference: every ‘thing’ is semiotic; every ‘thing’ is a ‘thing’ because it is not some other ‘thing’. Signs produce social meanings and values on a scale or grid whereby all points can be measured and compared. To clarify, it is not that every ‘thing’ can be converted into sign form, it is rather that the very process of transcription or coding produces ‘things’ within a scheme of identities and differences. Though the Code encompasses every ‘thing’ it cannot process symbolic exchange, seduction, the ambivalence (or becoming) of life which consist not ‘things’ with identity but of volatile relations, always “in transit” or metamorphosis. The Code then does not merely express particular aspects of the consumer

capitalist system such as media, fashion or advertising: it is far more fundamental. At the fundamental level the Code is what prevents symbolic exchange by breaking its cycles or by seizing and diverting its potential . Symbolic exchange now occurs or rather “effracts” only when the Code and its value systems are annulled, reversed or suspended. Symbolic exchange traverses all oppositions, challenging fixed or stable positions or power relations. Baudrillard’s major example of symbolic exchange is, of course, the gift and counter-gift discussed in

Chapter 2. To reiterate, the meaning of the gift never settles into fixity or identity, it is not structured by a logic of difference, its meaning can be transformed at any moment in the on-going relation or “pact” between parties – indeed this relation is of the gift and the gift is of this relation: relation and gift flourish together, and die together. Baudrillard defines the Code as a “generalised metaphysics” synthesising social values, social production and social identities, and this system ends any sense of the social as dynamic, symbolic form. The Code enacts an “obligatory registration of individuals on the scale of status ”

(1981: 68), producing a “hierarchy of differential signs” which, crucially, “constitutes the fundamental, decisive form of social control – more so than acquiescence to ideological norms ” (ibid.). It makes no difference whether we, as individuals, endorse the consumer capitalist system or not , since we are all positioned by the Code, and are positioned through it by others: the game of ideological critique takes place within the terms set by the Code. The Code breaks, blocks and bars ambivalence producing the structure of difference – the play of identity and difference characterised by oppositions such as true/false, good/evil, self/other, black/white, male/female. The standard dimensions of consumer status positioning

flow from this source: rich/poor, young/ old, fat/thin, attractive/unattractive. While structural or dialectical oppositions are characteristic of the first and second orders of simulacra, in the third order the Code simulates choice, difference and diversity through binary “modulation” by allowing the privileged terms of its oppositions to switch, fuse or “implode” (1983: 95-110). For example ‘fat’, ‘poor’ and ‘old’ can be beautiful too – if only within the confines of

fashion, cosmetics advertising or pop music video. The Code operates in “total indifference” to content; everything is permitted in sign form; that is as “simulation”. The Code also performs a pacifying effect on society: the once clear-cut, structural divisions such as class and status are made less visible by registering all people as individual consumers on a single, universal scale. Everyone becomes a consumer, though some, of course, consume far more than others. As universal form the status of consumer confers a kind of democratic flattening of social relations, but an illusory one. If class conflict was, to some extent, pacified, Baudrillard does not contend

that society as a whole is pacified; indeed other forms of violence and dissent emerge and cannot be deterred.

Baudrillard wrote of the emergence of new “anomalous” forms of violence, less intelligible, less structured, post-dialectical or implosive (Baudrillard 1998a: 174-85; 1994: 71-2)). He refers to the Watts riots of 1965 as an example of new violent rejections of the consumer system. Later, Baudrillard proposed the term “disembodied hate” or simply “the hate” to express aspects of this process (1996a: 142-7). The Code then is a principle of integration producing everything and everyone as a position on the scale of social value . With the last vestiges of symbolic orders around the world being eliminated by neo-liberal economic globalisation how is the Code to be challenged or defied? 3 Departing from the form but not the intent of Marxist theory, Baudrillard argued that the apparent distinction between use value and economic exchange value is produced as a “code effect”. In other words, use value is a simulatory form

produced by the capitalist system as justification and grounding for its trading of economic exchange values (1981: 130-42). For Baudrillard the illusion of use value, like the illusion of signified meanings and the illusion of the stable solid reality of the referent, are produced by the Code as structural groundings, shoring up the unstable ‘reality’ of signs and preventing the emergence of ambivalence (1981: 156 n.9). To challenge, defy or breach the Code then it is not sufficient to ‘return’ to use value. Indeed such strategies, shared by some Marxists, environmentalists and anti-globalisation movements actually feed the capitalist system: the market’s semiotic assimilation of environmentalism as the ‘green’ brand choice is an obvious example. But if Marxist theory fails to engage with and challenge the system of signs, so too, for Baudrillard, do many Structuralist, Poststructuralist and

Postmodernist theorists of desire, difference and liberation. To defy the system it is never sufficient to ‘play with signs’,

that is, to play with plural, ‘different’ or multiple identity positions. Here we encounter Baudrillard’s total rejection of what would later be called ‘identity politics’ and also a central misunderstanding of his position on signs. 4 For Baudrillard to play with signs – signs of consumption and status, signs of gender, sexuality or ethnicity is simply to operate within the Code . It is an unconscious or unwitting complicity with the Code’s logic of the multiplication of status positions; it is , in a sense, to assist it in the production of ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’. It is deeply ironic that some of Baudrillard’s critics have claimed that Baudrillard himself

merely ‘played with signs’ and that he advocated a playing with signs. Yet Baudrillard is clear, in order to oppose the system “[e]ven signs must burn” (1981: 163). In his controversial work Seduction (orig. 1979) Baudrillard draws an important distinction between the “ludique” meaning playing the game of signs, playing with signification (to enhance one’s status position or to assert one’s identity through its ‘difference’), and “mise enjeux” meaning to put signs at stake, to challenging them or annul them through symbolic exchange (1990:

15778). 5 For Baudrillard signs play with us, despite us, against us; any radical defiance must be a defiance of signs and their codings. Unfortunately, the distinction between ‘playing with signs’ – playing with their decoding and recoding, and defying the sign system has not penetrated the mainstream of Media and Cultural Studies. Eco’s influential notion of “semiotic guerrilla warfare” (Eco 1995) and Hall’s even more influential notion of “resistant decoding” place their faith in the ability of the sovereign, rational consumer to negotiate mediated meanings. For them the citizen-consumer confronts media content as the subject confronts the object. Hall does not consider that

much media content is now ‘ pre-encoded’ in an ersatz ‘oppositional’ form which renders the moment of ‘oppositional decoding’ merely one of conformity or ironic recognition (see Hall et al. 2002: 128-38). In other

words, the terms for ‘ resistant’ readings can be pre-set as positions within the Code . Critique is rendered uncertain, even meaningless by coded assimilation because the system sells us the signs of opposition as willingly as it sells us the signs of conformity ; it sells signs of inclusion and empowerment as eagerly as it sells signs of affluence and exclusion. Can we even tell them apart? In which category would we place the phenomenon of Sex and the City , for example? 6 Today, millions of people manage, archive and share signs of their designated identity through social media

platforms, in Baudrillard’s terms holding themselves hostage to the system of signs. The realm of symbolic exchange or seduction does not come about when individuals ‘play with signs’ but when (signs of) individuality, identity, will and agency are annulled through an encounter with radical otherness . Radical otherness, or

radical alterity, for Baudrillard, refers to otherness not ‘difference’, that is otherness beyond representation,

beyond coding – including ‘oppositional’ or assertive de/re-codings. A system of “total constraint” the Code does not merely produce identity but also difference, diversity and hybridity: indeed each of these now describe marketing strategies. Of course, the system does not seek to promote passivity or apathy among consumers but quite the contrary: to thrive and expand the system requires active, discriminating, engaged consumers, jostling for position, competing for advancement. The Code exists “to better prime the aspiration towards the higher level” (1981: 60), delivering diversity and choice at the level of signs or content (the goods that we choose to eat, the products and services that we choose to wear, watch, download) and it requires in return … nothing much at all – merely that we understand ourselves as consumers . The aim of the system is to make ‘the consumer’ the universal form of humanity yet within this form an almost infinite variety of differential contents or positions are possible; homogenisation and diversification become indistinguishable. Since ‘humanity’, for Baudrillard, as for Nietzsche, is already constituted as a universal form by the Enlightenment (1993a: 50) this task is close to completion, though the final completion, the “perfect crime” against Otherness will never, according to Baudrillard, come to pass (Baudrillard 1996a). 7 As a term the Code largely disappeared from Baudrillard’s writings after Simulacra and Simulation (1994). Are we to take it that the Code is still operational in the “fourth order” or is it defunct? We can answer this question by recalling two important points. Firstly, Baudrillard did not contend that the pacification and control effected by the Code would be total (quite the reverse, see Baudrillard 1996a: 142-

9; 1998a: 174-85), only that the Code aimed at total constraint. Baudrillard’s most developed example, the masses, let us recall, are not so passive and docile that they are manipulated by the system; rather, they withdraw into silence or practice a hyper-conformity without belief in, or commitment to, the integrated system of values. In other words, they refuse to be the active, discriminating, reflective consumers that the system requires. Baudrillard writes “We form a mass, living most of the time in panic or haphazardly ( aleatoire ) above and beyond any meaning” (1983: 15), the masses are clearly not only the poor and marginal, they are “us, you and everyone” ( nous, vous, tout le monde ) (1983: 46; 2005b: 51). This ‘we’ is not a rhetorical device used to assert a faux value consensus; rather it suggests a buried, banished commonality, a commonality of nothing except a shared rejection of systemic control. Everyone, as posited by the Code, is mass ; both inside and, at the same time, beyond the Code: mass, yet singularity . Secondly, in the late 1980s when Baudrillard proposed a fourth order, a fractal stage with “no point of reference”, where “value radiates in all directions” as a “haphazard proliferation” (Baudrillard 1993b: 11) he was clear that the previous orders continue to function alongside the fourth order. In other words, there are still dialectical tensions operating, associated with the second order, and the Code of the third order also flourishes. Indeed what is most distinctive about the fourth order is that: things continue to function long after their ideas have disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their content. The paradoxical fact is that they function even better under these circumstances (Baudrillard 1993b: 6). The idea or principle of the Code then is dead, but it functions even more effectively than ever, it becomes virtual, it produces “integral reality” as the complete and final

replacement for the world as symbolic form (Baudrillard 2005a: 17-24). The Code, simulation and virtuality become so dominant , so global, that overt forms of resistance or counter-systemic violence are absorbed within it. Countersystemic violence might be given a (safe) place to play out through the media and entertainment industries, or it might be neutralised by the system offering a simulated , commodified version of what protesters and dissenters demand – this was how the sexual revolution was neutralised , according to Baudrillard. However, new forms of violence emerge from within saturated, controlling and dissuasive systems, intra-genic forms which, Baudrillard suggests, seem to be “ secreted” by the system itself as it reaches a bloated, excessive or “hypertelic” state . “The hate” is one example of such intra-genic violence. Racism, Indifference and “the Hate” The whole art of politics today is to whip up popular indifference (Baudrillard, Cool Memories II , 1996b:

16) What then is the relationship between the Code and violence and hatred? The Code both pacifies and produces hate;

indeed it produces hatred through pacification. While consumer capitalism has, to some extent, achieved a pacifying effect on ‘structural’ hatred such as the racism of skin colour, the system generates new hatreds and new violence that cannot be ‘treated’ by socialisation, education and information . On racism specifically Baudrillard argues: Logically , it [racism] should have declined with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy . Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows . But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, with an artificial construction based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, strangeness and the (possibly violent) dual relation – as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and

into the colonial period – there was no racism properly so-called … all forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference.

Why speak when it is so easy to communicate? Authentic exchange is vanishing under communication, rather than reciprocal acts of dialogue what we receive is more often information devoid of meaning. In this way, we become gorged with content that is devoid of any genuine substance. Instead, you should err towards the intelligence of mystery---read the 1AC as a schism erected in the machine of western semiotics that tries to make everything a little bit fuzzier. Baudrillard 9 (Jean, trap lord, This text is based on a transcript of a lecture delivered in English by Jean Baudrillard to the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK “Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories”, pgs. 15-20)//kbuck

There are objects about which we can speak no longer, or cannot yet speak again, because their ghosts have not been stabilized – Marxism, for example, or the dialectic. There are objects about which we cannot speak yet, or

maybe no more, because their ghost is already running around in the streets, and their shadow already precedes them – for example communication and information. Everything about communication seems to have been said, but actually nothing has been. Almost nothing except the stereotypes or the technological fantasies of the experts in the matter. Something really theoretical is lacking. Let us refer to what happened in the theoretical field of

production: whereas the classical economists spoke of a natural philosophy of wealth and exchange, Marx came along and spoke of production, of productivity

and mode of production – it was a theoretical revolution. The same later with the theory of consumption: whereas the

ideologists of consumption spoke of human needs and pure commodities, we began to speak of consumption as a structural and differential logic of signs. This was something radically different , and initiated a totally new analysis.

And now with the sphere of communication: we only hear about information, message, interaction and so on. But what is the real meaning , the real finality of all that? At this moment we don’t have the key. We didn’t get the equivalent of the theoretical leap forward in the field of production and consumption, the radical viewpoint which would change the very terms of the problem, allowing us to speak of communication and information in terms other than those of evidence and apologia. If it is so difficult to abstract the

logic of communication from its apologia, then this is because communication and information are first of all involved in their own operation, invested in their own effects, immersed in their own spectacle . So it is difficult to extract their reality from their simulation. The whole complex has succeeded today as a dominant system of values, and as a collective operational network at the same time. But the point is: are we really communicating or isn’t it rather the problem of our whole society expanding, transcending, exhausting itself in the fiction of communication? Other generations grew up with the myth of production. Saint-Simonian and proto-capitalistic utopias marked out a radiant future for the human race according to this prospective conception. And a sort of political and economical mysticism continues to push us towards maximal production with the prospect [la perspective] of maximal wealth and social comfort – however cruelly smashed by the world crisis of 1929 and the latent crisis in all industrial countries ever since. Now we know that an excess of production may be obnoxious and fatal. Even consumption may reverse its finality. Ever-growing consumption of therapies and healthcare for example may turn out to be a catastrophe for social security and for our health itself.2 The consumption of cultural goods, or of sexual

pleasure, or of any commodity considered as a quantitative function, reveals itself to be an absurdity. The same paradoxical consequence is true for communication and information. We are at the critical limit where all effects can be reversed and communication vanishes into an excess of communication . All functions of transparency and fluidity

in social relations end in a useless complexity and a collective suffocation . This vanishing point is not a prediction, it is a pure presumption, but a logical one, or rather a tautological one – describing communication and information as a great tautological operation, as a great self-fulfilling prophecy . First of all: it isn’t true that men have always communicated since they first spoke to each other and lived in society . It is not even true that there have been ‘messages’ and information ever since men were connected by language . This anthropological extrapolation, which tends to extend the principle of communication back through the ages and to give it an

aboriginal status, is entirely misleading. It occults the very moment when communication began , in the technical sense

of the word (communication is a technology), when we began to be involved and engaged in a collective need for communication. It occults the specificity of communication as a modern invention, as a new mode of production and circulation of speech, connected to the media and the technology of media . Conversely : just as it has not always existed, perhaps also communication will not exist forever ; neither is information an extra-temporal notion – maybe both will last as long as the words to speak of them. The

terminological point is crucial. Things exist only when there is a determination of them, a sign which testifies, a warrant of their meaning and credibility . Whoever had the idea of ‘communicating’ in ancient societies, in tribes, in

villages, in families? Neither the word nor the concept existed, the question doesn’t make any sense. People don’t need to communicate, because they just speak to one another . Why communicate when it is so easy to speak to each other? So, my presupposition is: just as the failure [défaillance] of the real is the basis for the reality principle, so the failure of speech and symbolic exchange is the basis for the principle of communication. So the basic status, the basic definition of communication is negative. It is just like what Apollinaire says of

time: if you are talking about it, it is because it doesn’t exist any more … When we speak of communication, it is because there is no communication any more. The social body is no longer conductive, relations are no longer regulated by informal consensus, the communion of meaning [le sens] is lost. That is why we must produce a formal apparatus, a collective artefact, a huge network of information that assumes the circulation of meaning . A new specific function is born , reflected in a code , in numerous institutions, and then all at once emerge the techniques of communication, and then the sciences of communication, all the sophistries, all the casuistries, all the social and political complexity of communication. The simplest exchanges must transit through multiple codes and feedback, which change their sense . Everything becomes a ‘message’ (according to McLuhan,3

this pompous and ridiculous term sounds like ‘massage’, like manipulation). With the message, language becomes a pure ‘medium’ of communication, according to the structuralist and functionalist analysis. Emitter, receiver, code, context, contact, message: language is altered in its substance by this system of formalization , it is reduced to a one- dimensional function , according to the one-dimensional process of life . What was an act has become an operation. Speech was an act, communication is an operation, and along with it goes the operation of social life. Language is a form, but communication is a performance. Then it becomes more and more efficient [performant], easier and easier, faster and faster, but at the same time the system becomes heavier and heavier , more and more institutionalized, less and less conductive . (The very term ‘communication’ has a bureaucratic heaviness, it has all the beauty of a prosthetic mechanism.) We must never forget this when confronting the structure of communication: its very essence is non-communication . Its horizon is negative, and this has consequences for the future of all human relations. Communication became this strange structure where things (and beings) do not touch each other, but exchange their kinetic , caloric, erotic and informational energy through contiguity , just like molecules. Through contiguity, but without contact, always being at a distance from each

other. Take highway cloverleaves. Nothing is more beautiful than two roads crossing each other, but it is dangerous as an accident risk – so is the crossing of glances or the exchange of words, human words, as a seduction risk.

So we invented traffic infrastructures where cars can move without crossing each other, we invented structures of relations where humans can communicate without passing each other, without touching each other, without looking at

each other. We are all commuters, and the condition for the fluidity of information, for the fluidity of transit, will be the abduction of all senses, of looking, of touching, of smelling, of all the potential violence of exchange. It is the same with our mediatized and computerized human relations. We interact without touching

each other, interlocute without speaking to each other, interface without seeing each other. Here is something really bizarre. The strangeness of a blank attraction, of a blank interaction, the inseparability of particles at distances of light-years . They talk

about this a lot in physics. It seems that our social structure too is oriented towards this model, in a form of electronic solidarity. Just by chance we are discovering this in physics at the very moment when we are having the same experience in everyday life. Permeability to all images, to all messages, to all networks – submission to the virality of signs, to the epidemics of value, to the multiplicity of codes – tactility, digitality, contact, contiguity,

contagion, irradiation and chain reaction: what gets lost in this new ritual of transparency and interaction is both the singularity of the self, and the singularity of the other. That is, the irreducibility of the subject, and the irreducibility of the object. Interaction, communication describe the vanishing point of the subject , of its

secret, of its desire, of its Unheimlichkeit (strangeness to itself). But it is the vanishing point of the other as well, of transfer and challenge; of strangeness and seduction – all the fascination of alterity , of the external quality of the other, all dual and dialectical forms of relationship get lost, for all these forms presuppose distance, contradiction, tension or intensity, quite the contrary of the superficial fluidity of the electronic screen of communication. Another point is the question of time, of the suspension of time as well as the suspending of words, or of activity. In an interactive field there is no place for silence, for idleness, for absence . There is no stasis, no vacation, no rest – only metastasis along the networks, ramifications of time and space . No dead time, no distraction, no dreamtime: time is no longer your enemy, nor your luxury (you cannot spend it uselessly). It is not your master or your slave: it is your partner, and it resolves itself without past or future, in exhausting instantaneity . For it must be instantaneous in order to work. And images and messages must follow one another, without discontinuity. No break, no syncope, no silence. A text

may be silent, it may absorb or produce silence in its words – images, at least media-images, cannot. Silence on television is a scandal. That is why these lapses or silences on the screen are so significant, significant of nothing maybe, except the rupture of communication, but precisely this suspense is delightful, inasmuch as it makes obvious that all these non-stop images, this intensive information, is nothing but an artificial scenario, a pure fiction that protects us from the void – the void of the screen, of course, but also the void of our mental screen. The scene of a man sitting and staring at his

empty television screen, on a strike day, will be one of the most beautiful and impressive anthropological images of the end of the twentieth century. In the interactive social life, it is prohibited to disconnect yourself; prohibited even on your deathbed to disconnect the tubes and wires. The scandal is not so much the offence against life (nobody cares) as the attack on the network, on medicine and the technological apparatus of survival, which must first take care of its own survival. The principle of communication implies the absolute moral obligation not so much to be involved as to remain connected. This constitutes of course a possibility of being alienated by the whole system of interconnection, of being controlled even in your private life . But much more alienating, much more destabilizing is the reciprocal control given to you over the external world. The first danger is well known as the Big Brother story – the common fear of

total control. But the second is more sophisticated and perverse. By using all the available screens and videos and telematic possibilities

(including sex [l’amour] by telephone), it makes the external world superfluous, it makes all human presence, physical or linguistic, superfluous. All-out communication accentuates the involution into a micro-universe, with no reason to escape any more. A carceral niche with video walls. The fact that someone knew everything about you was frightening. But today, the best way of neutralizing, of cancellating someone is not to know everything about him, it is to give him the means of knowing everything about everything – and especially about himself. You no longer neutralize him by repression and control, you neutralize him through information and communication . You paralyse him much better by excess than by deprivation of information , since you enchain him to the pure obligation of being more and more connected to himself, more and more closely connected to the screen, in restless circularity and autoreferentiality, as an integrated network. At this point, the question of liberty doesn’t make sense any more. Our

sovereignty is diffracted along the technical and mental lines of parasitic ramifications . For this process happens not only externally, in the operational network of institutions and programmes, but also internally, in the labyrinth of our brain and our body. To put it another way: the exoteric complex of communication, this huge apparatus deployed on the

surface of our societies, goes along with an esoteric complex that rules the intimacy of each individual. Through this complex, through all techniques of introspection, through psychology, biology and medicine, man has learned to communicate with himself, to deal with himself as a partner, to interface with himself. He passed from the stage of passion and destiny to the stage of calculating and negotiating his own life, dealing with all the information about it, just like the way a computer operates. The sexual discourse itself is an operational one. Sexual pleasure becomes an act of communication (you receive me, I receive you), we exchange it as an interactive performance.