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

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

dear <nettime>

thanks to Brian for his Baudrillard translation - i thought this would
be an appropriate time to post my writings on S11, (written in early
October) which pursue the logic of Death elaborated in "L'Echange
Symbolique et la Mort" (1976). i've split it into 2 parts.

dt

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
*S11 and the Political Economy of Death*

“The ease of dying: such would be the danger watching over us … that, in
any life, shields us from death …”
 [Maurice Blanchot, “The Ease of Dying” in l’Amitié, 1971]


The Political Economy of Death: on the famous Terrorism of September 11

Today, the War is once again mediated, like past wars – death and the
dead have been edited out.  The Gulf War was rated PG – parental
guidance was recommended, but only for the sake of shoring up the
infrastructure of suspicion, fear and hatred, which, like charity, begin
at home.  If its 100 000 dead had not been so meticulously exiled from
the screen, the Gulf War would have been rated X.  As it turned out, it
was more or less suitable for a General Audience.  Sanitised by the
screen and its graphical science, the viewing public was treated to
everything – the strategic maps, the reconnaissance imagery, the target
zone and highlighted target, before and after – right up to the moment
of impact, the fiery consummation, the climactic explosion.  But Death
was nowhere to be seen.  The Death card was held close to the chest.

This time things are different: this time we started with the explosion,
and this time the Death card was turned up first, and once played, it
demanded to be exchanged and made to circulate.  The immediate source of
this death was America’s Eastern seaboard, even though the market (or
theatre?) of death was opening much wider, even globally.

What distinguishes this global event from the last is the very immediacy
(that is, the unmediated nature) of the opening/overture, confirming as
it did both the reality of television and the tele-visuality of the
real.  Not only was the western audience finally able to identify with
victims of disaster, of this destruction so graphic, disseminated in
such a blanket – even more important is the mediation itself: the
domestic technology of imaging the disaster ensured that the image of
Death was understood perfectly everywhere, even if it was not
‘believed’.  The arrogance of the operation’s timings confirms this.  A
thousand fascinated cameras made certain there would be a rupture in the
screenic fabric of the public sphere, in the first hours, before the
media corps had been properly mobilised.  Little breaches, like bodies
hurling themselves from the WTC towers, an important glimpse into the
theatre of Death, like Medusa’s eyes…

Once aroused, the economy and exchange of Death could not be stopped.
But even now that the long program of reprisals has begun and we have
returned to the simulated war (war the whole family can enjoy) – even
now that Death has been exiled once again, its secretion and exchange
metred as carefully as capital or power – still the symbolic economy of
Death cannot be fully controlled.


Death Awakens

"One cannot treat the gift … without treating [its] relation to economy,
even to the money economy.  But is not the gift … also that which
interrupts economy? That which, in suspending economic calculation, no
longer gives rise to exchange? That which opens the circle so as to defy
reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure…? … It must not circulate,
it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted."
(Derrida)[1]

In the wake of tragedy, confusion reigns, if only briefly.  The
institution of a new world order plunges all into uncertainty, as the
arrogant disregard for life brings everywhere a regard for Death.  What
is certain, however, is that the acts of September 11 have resuscitated
a political economy of Death.

It must be remembered that, like all political economy, what this
describes is not some firm, material order or knowledge.  Rather, what
it describes is social relations and power relations.  Political economy
offers neither truth nor certainty about how any ‘object’ is – it only
charts the changing relations between subjects.  Contrary to popular
belief, political economy has never explored purely economic relations –
this the great insight of Marx: that the relations that were the object
of political economy, including those that could be described in
economic terms, expressed first and foremost social relations.

Political economy, then, is a history which chronicles how one subject
relates to another.  A political economy of death, therefore, charts how
one’s death relates to the other, and to the death of the other.  Some
have argued that the trajectory of “civilization”, and its attendant
notion of ‘progress’, is a historic program of the radical exclusion and
extradition from society of the Dead, of Death, and of other types of
‘Other’.

Allow us to pursue this proposition for a moment: If the extradition of
Death from our cities and minds describes our civilization, then on
September 11, Death came home to roost.  On that day, Death returned
from exile, it returned to ‘currency’, in social exchange.  (But this
was not just any Death, and nor was it just another home-coming.  It was
not the routine Death which most of us know, and from which we think we
flee, day-in and day-out.  This quotidian death also haunts us, scares
us and defies us; despite our best efforts to shut it out, ignore it and
extradite it, even from its exile it haunts us.  But S11’s was no
ordinary, everyday death.  The Death which took to the streets of
Manhattan was not the loss of life, but the radical waste of life –
needless death, wanton death, wasteful death.  Excessive death,
luxuriant and abundant death, porno death, death in stereo.)  Death’s
desublimated return from exile will be the psychic return, metred,
return as the “danger”, the “ease of dying” which must return to the
everyday in order for this act to be properly successful terrorism.  We
must return to the skies to know how easily we might have died, how
easily we might now die, how easily we might ever die.  We must return
to the skies to recall how safe we are, which is to feel how very unsafe
we are, and always were.  Only thus will we discover the full extent of
the terror.  Airliners – the Potential Energy of Death.

This excessive death, like any sacrifice, consists in the laying of a
challenge, and the placement of a gift into social (symbolic) exchange.
I will be called callous for referring to this horror – an act so very
ungenerous – as a ‘gift’.  Yet would we not be restricting ourselves
here to the narrowest sense of the gift, to that specific understanding
(perhaps a Western one) of the gift of generosity?  The anthropologists
remind us of another sort of gift – the Potlatch, what Bataille called
the “gift of rivalry” – given not in generosity but in arrogance.  The
events of S11 surely constitute an arrogant assertion of rivalry,
therefore a sort of gift – and not just any gift, but a gift both
absolute and pure, that is, an unreturnable or unanswerable gift.
Which is to say an impossible gift: even if, as Derrida says (following
Heidegger), one cannot die for (“in the place of”) the other , yet one
can still give to the other their own death.  It will be further
objected that these killers gave nothing, that all they did was take
life; and perhaps taking life is not giving at all.  But does not the
suicide terrorist also give his own life, in giving himself his death?
Some of us will say that he has given nothing, that what he gave he
forfeited first.  Forfeited, perhaps.  But was it therefore worthless?
Is the life of he who perpetrated this vile injustice ‘worthless’?  Of
course, the terrorist’s death and those of his victims are properly
incomparable; the exchange is not fair; there is no “common measure”, no
equivalence.  Only the terrorist’s monstrous ambivalence.

But in the absence of equivalence are we tempted to reduce the value of
his life to zero?  This reduction, while understandable, would be
hypocritical and immoral, and – what’s much worse – would prevent us
from gaining the only thing we might collectively take from this
dreadful gift, a scrap of understanding or a meaning.  How dare I
profess to ‘make sense’ of this ‘meaningless’ violence?  What is at
stake here is precisely the sovereignty of the terrorist and his act.
For Bataille, wholesome sovereignty arises only from that “sacred” and
“poetic” performance which restricts itself to a useless or “impotent
beauty” – “Sacrifice, consequently, is a sovereign, autonomous manner of
being only to the extent that it is uninformed by meaningful
discourse.”   Our challenge, then, is a challenge to this sovereign
sacrifice, the challenge of interpretation.

The act was atrocious but not meaningless; it was unreasonable but not
insane; it was neither sensible nor sensitive, but nor was it senseless;
as Bataille remarks of the Potlatch, such a gift “would be senseless if
it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition.  Hence giving must
become acquiring a power.  Gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of
the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject
appropriates the surpassing: he regards his virtue, that which he had
the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses.  He
enriches himself with a contempt for riches…”[2]   Even if the terrorist
only gives his death to himself, his all-round contempt for that which
is valued suggests something of this surpassing and this enrichment and
indicates both a sense and a meaning.  Both of these last attach only to
communications – that is, human and social acts – just as the Potlatch,
which must be conspicuous or “ostentatious” is a public and eminently
social ‘giving’.  But to refuse to interpret the terrorist’s violence,
to deny it meaning, to empty his act of content, is also tantamount to
stripping his act, his life (and death) of any value.  And to value his
life at zero is to deny him his humanity.


Crimes Against Society

Before he boarded the flight in his collared shirt and trousers, with
his carry-on baggage and personal effects, we very readily took his
humanity for granted.  But if we granted him this so happily as he
boarded the flight, how could he come to be any less human when he
wreaks his crime?  Of course, we have no opportunity, in the interim, to
retract our offer; and this human who crashes the flight is the same
human who boarded it.

We have suggested already that this act of terrorism was primarily a
social act, rather than an economic or politico-military one.  The
important thing here would be to distinguish, if possible, between a
Crime Against Humanity and a Crime Against Society.  The former, in the
multilateral Western sense championed by the UN, may be reserved for the
moment for the highest order of atrocity: essentially for genocide and
mass-destruction.

The Act of S11, striking as it did at the very heart of American
multiculturalism (that is, the corporate multiculturalism of the
managerial class), clearly does not qualify for the former; and while
the destruction was massive, the targeting was really far too particular
and controlled to constitute “mass destruction” in the vein of
Hiroshima.  Disrespectful of life it certainly was; but not exactly
‘indiscriminate’, not quite.  The target of this attack was certainly
not the species.  It was the socius, and a particular socius at that.

What is most important, in attempting to understand this particular
atrocity, is to preserve the ‘humanity’ of the terrorist perpetrators.
Labelling it “incomprehensible” – or labelling it a Crime Against
Humanity – is either unpardonable laziness or deliberate misinformation,
and in either case an irresponsible obfuscation.  The Crime Against
Humanity implies a certain otherness, it implies that the perpetrator is
to some extent Inhuman.  We tar these attackers with the same brush used
for the mad, the animal, the alien, etc when we place them in the
category of the Inhuman.  In doing so we are fooling ourselves.

Baudrillard reminds us of the deeper logic of this binary,
discriminatory anthropos:

"the progress of Humanity and Culture are simply the chain of
discriminations with which to brand ‘Others’ with inhumanity, and
therefore with nullity.  For the savages who call themselves ‘men’, the
others are something else.  For us, by contrast, under the sign of the
Human as a universal concept, others are nothing…"[3]

All talk of crime against this Humanity might thus be read as an attempt
to make the Other (who for once is something to us, is ‘in our face’, so
to speak) go away quietly, literally become nothing to us.  This
response is routinely deployed by all institutions for which the
criminalisation of the Other is a means of preparing the ground for a
retribution without limits.  The current criminalisation of the
‘Inhuman’ perpetrators and Osama Bin Laden is no exception – justice
begins with the ‘nihilisation’ of the Other.

But this broadly imposed absolute alterity always sounds a death knell
for understanding.  Such is the irrationality of the category of
Otherness that its science tends to obscure its meaning even further.
Thus Clastres, exposing the Western ethnologist’s conceit in equating
the accident of Western governance not just with a social organisation
‘lacking’ in primitive society, but with “political power” itself, the
“only authentically human group existence.”   The ethnologist’s
scientific strategy shares something here with those of our ‘war against
terrorism’ (Al Qaeda, that Other-without-a-state, are by implication
less than human, even without their technological backwardness), those
of other conquistadors and confessors to crusades, the British doctrine
of terra nullius, not to mention the United Nations’s own crusading for
Human Rights.  In every instance, the other is subjugated and this
subjugation is sanctioned by the State, always on the grounds of some
inexplicit sub-humanity, which faithfully looks, in this light,
tantamount to an excommunication from the society of god.

A “murderous shadow”, perhaps Blanchot’s “ease of dying”, ends up
pervading the social, of the “rejected and forgotten dead who, as is
quite normal, never accept being nothing in the eyes of the
living.”(p142)  The post-Foucauldian model of exclusion thus ends,
appropriately enough for B. as well, in an internalisation, an
involution, a re-inscription: “Death is ultimately nothing more than
than the social line of demarcation separating the ‘dead’ from the
‘living’: therefore, it affects both equally.” (p127)  Of course, in
both the material and spiritual dimensions of capitalist life and
culture (such as they are), Death is everywhere and immanent.  It is
spiritual, material and cultural – but above all, social.  And
therefore, Death is not really an Other, not a static, universal
principle but a continual negotiation; not a foreign state, but rather
an internal and immanent factor in the constitution of the socius.  So
the exile was never geographic, but is itself social, an
excommunication.

This is a critical distinction: Death is ultimately not the state of
not-living, but a “social line of demarcation”.  That is, it is the
(social) distinction itself which constitutes Death, which lend it its
meaning and power, as well as its ingenuity and resilience in the face
of strategies of objectification (such as exile, repression,
immortality, etc, in short: law).  The separation of life from death
(with its origins in the most primitive religion), keeping them apart,
is nothing other than the administration of the group’s relation to its
dead, and is portrayed as prima facie a fundamental principle of social
control: the priest mediates between the living and the dead, and thus
“power is established on Deaths borders” (p130).

By aligning the West’s Other with the West’s Dead, as twin spectres in
exile, haunting its Unconscious in tandem, Baudrillard articulates a
more or less generalisable principle of exclusion, the structural
occlusion of Capital’s other – and the dummie-Other of Capitalist
political economy (marxism), is no less susceptible to this almost
reverent program of excluding the radical other.  So the Dead other,
like the Inhuman Other, are never far away.  On S11, they returned:
Western capitalism was paid a visit by its Dead and its Other.

[more...]

>>>>
notes:
[1] Jacques Derrida, "Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money", (trans. Kamuf),
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992; p7.
[2] Georges Bataille, "The Accursed Share, vol. I, Consumption", (trans.
Hurley), Zone Books, New York, 1988; pp65-66.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, "Symbolic Exchange and Death", (trans. Grant),
Sage, London, 1993; p125

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