**BAUDRILLARD**

Hyper-Reality = BSWe do, in fact, know the difference between simulation and reality—the media plays a healthy role in the public sphere. March, 95 James Marsh, Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, 95, Critique, Action, and Liberation, pp. 292-293

Such an account, however, is as one-sided or perhaps even more one-sided than that of naive modernism. We note a residual idealism that does not take into account socioeconomic realities already pointed out such as the corporate nature of media, their role in achieving and legitimating profit, and their

function of manufacturing consent. In such a postmodernist account is a reduction of everything to image or symbol that misses the relationship of these to realities such as corporations seeking profit, impoverished workers in these corporations, or peasants in

Third-World countries trying to conduct elections. Postmodernism does not adequately distinguish here between a reduction of reality to image and a mediation of reality by image. A media idealism exists rooted in the influence of structuralism and poststructuralism and doing insufficient justice to concrete human experience, judgment, and free interaction in the world.4

It is also paradoxical or contradictory to say it really is true that nothing is really true, that everything is illusory or imaginary. Postmodemism makes judgments that implicitly deny the reduction of reality to image. For example, Poster and Baudrillard do want to say that we really are in a new age that is informational and postindustrial. Again, to say that everything is imploded into media images is akin logically to the Cartesian claim that everything is or might be a dream. What happens is that dream or image is absolutized or generalized to the point that its original meaning lying in its contrast to natural, human, and

social reality is lost. We can discuss Disneyland as reprehensible because we know the difference between Disneyland and the larger, enveloping reality of Southern California and the United States.5 We can note also that postmodernism misses the reality of the accumulation-legitimation tension in late capitalism in general and in communicative media in particular. This tension takes different forms in different times. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, social,

economic, and political reality occasionally manifested itself in the media in such a way that the electorate responded critically to corporate and political policies. Coverage of the Vietnam war, for example, did help turn people against the war. In the 1980s, by contrast, the emphasis shifted more toward accumulation in the decade dominated by the “great communicator.” Even here, however, the majority remained opposed to Reagan’s policies while voting for Reagan. Human and social reality, while being influenced by and represented by the media, transcended them and remained resistant to them.6 To the extent that postmodernists are critical of the role media play, we can ask the question about the normative adequacy of

such a critique. Why, in the absence of normative conceptions of rationality and freedom, should media dominance be taken as bad rather than good? Also, the most relevant contrasting, normatively structured alternative to the media is that of the “public sphere,” in which the imperatives of free, democratic, nonmanipulable communicative action are institutionalized. Such a public sphere has been present in western democracies since the nineteenth century but has suffered erosion in the twentieth century as capitalism has

more and more taken over the media and commercialized them. Even now the public sphere remains normatively binding and really operative through institutionalizing the ideals of free, full, public expression and discussion; ideal, legal requirements taking such forms as public service programs, public broadcasting, and provision for alternative media; and social movements acting and discoursing in and outside of universities in print, in demonstrations and forms of resistance, and on media such as movies, television, and radio.7

Baudrillard is wrong about hyper-reality. We are very aware of differences between real life and media images. Just imagine how horrified you would be if you were watching a horror movie and found out that the actors were really being killed.Žižek, 2000 (University of Ljubljana), 2000 (Slavoj, March/April “The Cyberspace Real,” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/Žižek/Žižek-the-cyberspace-real.html).

Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace

the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real? As to the symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship": the author (say, of the interactive immersive environment in which we actively participate by role-playing) no longer writes detailed story-line, s/he merely provides the basic set of rules (the coordinates of the fictional universe in which we immerse ourselves, the limited set of actions we are allowed to accomplish within this virtual space, etc.), which serves as the basis for the interactor's active engagement (intervention, improvisation). This notion of "procedural authorship" demonstrates the need for a kind of equivalent to the Lacanian "big Other": in order for the interactor to become engaged in cyberspace, s/he has to operate within a minimal set of externally imposed accepted symbolic rules/coordinates. Without these rules, the subject/interactor would effectively become immersed in a psychotic experience of an universe in which "we do whatever we want" and are, paradoxically, for that very reason deprived of our freedom, caught in a demoniac compulsion. It is thus crucial to establish the rules that engage us, that led us in our immersion into the cyberspace, while allowing us to maintain the distance towards the enacted universe. The point is not simply to maintain "the right measure" between the two extremes (total psychotic immersion versus non-engaged external distance towards the artificial universe of the cyber-fiction): distance is

rather a positive condition of immersion. If we are to surrender to the enticements of the virtual environment, we have to "mark the border," to rely on a set of marks which clearly designate that we are dealing with a fiction, in the same way in which, in order to let ourselves go and enjoy a violent war movie, we somehow have to know that what we are seeing is a staged fiction, not real-life killing (imagine our horrible surprise if, while watching a war scene, we would suddenly see that we are watching a snuff, that the actor engaged in face-to-face combat is effectively cutting the throat of his "enemy"…). Against the theorists who fear that cyberspace involves the regression to a kind of psychotic incestuous immersion, one should thus discern in today's often clumsy and ambiguous improvisations about "cyberspace rules" precisely the effort to establish clearly the contours of a new space of symbolic fictions in which we fully participate in the mode disavowal, i.e. being aware that "this is not real life."

2AC: Authoritarianism TurnBaudrillard’s simulation argument plays into the hands of power. His Gulf War example is proof of the authoritarian results of his argument—the Real is still being constructed but the Pentagon is doing it. Rectenwald, (Citizens for Legitimate Government), 03 (March 11, Michael, “Gulf War II: The New ‘Real’,” http://legitgov.org/mike_essay_the_new_real4_031103.html).

 In his book Simulations (1983), Jean Baudrillard introduced the notion of a new social order based on simulacra without originals. Malls, neighborhoods, amusement parks, even the political left and right—simulations of originals that no longer exist, imitations without real models. Baudrillard engaged academics and enraged Marxists and other social realists, when he later announced, with seeming blitheness, that the first Gulf War ‘wasn’t real.’ ‘Tell that to the estimated 15,000 Iraqi civilians killed in the war, or the estimated 100,000 dying in its aftermath, or the Gulf War veterans, suffering from Gulf War

Syndrome.’ But despite the critics of postmodernism’s dissolution of the ‘real’, there is something to what Baudrillard claimed: the first victim of the video war, the simulation, the reportage censored by Israel, was the notion of ‘reality.’ ‘The real’ suffered a mortal blow. The video representation of the Gulf War became the war itself, supplanting any kernel of reality with simulation. So that film could finally announce: “Welcome to the desert of the real!”—deserted because no one sees it, the desert of the real because for all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist. It appears from the previews we are receiving regarding the media coverage of Gulf War II, that the real, now dead, is to be declared alive-and-well, dressed up, camouflaged, and paraded around by the Pentagon itself: a remediation of the

real. The media becomes the proxy purveyor of newsreels—the new real being supplied by the Pentagon. Reporters are to be fully approved instruments of the war machine itself, like additional scopes fastened to the instruments of death, pointing only at acceptable targets, with a simulated vision not unlike the video version of the jet fighters and scopic filters of the combatants (on one side). The notion of ‘bias’ is decimated in the very act of killing—in media res—military perspectivalism serves as a placebo. Any remaining memory of “real” differing perspectives is thereby satisfied, if not obliterated in advance; perspectivalism becomes a multiplication of staged effects. Like cable television with its endless splintering of

sameness into a reputed ‘variety’, the multiple ‘perspectives’ of gunmen will supplant all other standpoints. Independent reporters, the Pentagon now reputedly warns, will be fired upon. “Death to Realism!” was the perhaps more apropos cry in that other, more ironic cyber film, eXistenZ. Thus, it appears that Baudrillard was only partly right. The real is indeed under fire, but like the repressed in Freud’s version of the psyche, it threatens to return. Likewise, measures must be taken against it. The Pentagon promises to take such measures.  Slavoj Žižek suggested that 9-11 threatened to shatter “the borderline which today separates the digitized First World from the Third World ‘desert of the Real,’” yielding, with its crashing of the simulation, an “awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction.” This awareness may be too painful for the denizens of the Matrix. Gulf War II (whose ‘moralistic/poetic’ name is still being debated by the Pentagon) is an attempt to reconstruct that Matrix, to re-inscribe the borderline, to reclaim the real and reissue it as military rations. The

real is parceled out. The media asks us incredulously: “Do you think that the Pentagon (or Powell, or Bush, or Rumsfeld) would actually lie to the American people?” We cannot answer, simply, “yes.” Not only are they lying, they are actually producing the new real.

2AC: Conformism Turn

Baudrillard’s politics are deeply conformist. Playing with the pieces of hyper-reality shuts down real alternatives. Donahue, (Department of English, Gonzaga University), 01 (Brian, “Marxism, Postmodernism, Žižek,” Postmodern Culture,12.2, Project Muse).

According to Žižek, theorists of postmodern society who make much of the usurpation of the Real by the simulacrum either long nostalgically for the lost distinction between them or announce the final overcoming of the "metaphysical obsession with authentic Being," or both (he

mentions Paul Virilio and Gianni Vattimo, and we might add Baudrillard to the list). In either case they "miss the distinction between simulacrum and appearance ": What gets lost in today's plague of simulations is not the firm, true, nonsimulated Real, but appearance itself. To put it in Lacanian terms: the simulacrum is imaginary (illusion), while appearance is symbolic (fiction); when the specific dimension of symbolic appearance starts to disintegrate, imaginary and real become more and more indistinguishable.... And, in sociopolitical terms, this domain of appearance (that is, symbolic fiction) is none other than that of politics.... The old conservative motto of keeping up appearances thus today obtains a new twist:... [it] stands for the effort to save the properly political space. ("Leftist" 995-96) Making the same argument about a slightly

different version of this problem, Žižek writes that the standard reading of "outbursts of 'irrational' violence" in the postmodern "society of the spectacle" is that "our perception of reality is mediated by aestheticized media manipulations to such an extent that it is no longer possible for us to distinguish reality from its media image" (Metastases 75). Violent outbursts in this context are thus seen as "desperate attempts to draw a distinction between fiction and reality... [and] to dispel the cobweb of the aestheticized pseudo-reality" (75). Again with reference to the Lacanian triad of Imaginary-Symbolic-Real, Žižek argues that this analysis is "right for the

wrong reasons": What is missing from it is the crucial distinction between imaginary order and symbolic fiction. The problem of contemporary media resides not in their enticing us to confound fiction with reality but, rather, in their "hyperrealist" character by means of which they saturate the void

that keeps open the space for symbolic fiction. A society of proliferating, promiscuous images is thus not overly fictionalized but is, on the contrary, not "fictionalized" enough in the sense that the basis for making valid statements, the structure guaranteeing intersubjective communication, the order permitting shared narratives and, to use Jameson's term, "cognitive mapping"11--in

short, the realm of the Symbolic--is short-circuited by an incessant flow of images, which solicit not analysis and the powers of thought but rather nothing more than blank, unreflective enjoyment. The kind of subjectivity that corresponds to this hyperreal, spectacularized society without a stable Symbolic order is what Žižek

calls in Looking Awry the "pathological narcissist" (102). That is, following the predominance of the "'autonomous' individual of the Protestant ethic" and the "heteronomous 'organization man'" who finds satisfaction through "the feeling of loyalty to the group"--the two models of subjectivity corresponding to previous stages of capitalist society--today's media-spectacle-consumer society is marked by the rise of the "pathological narcissist," a subjective structure that breaks with the "underlying frame of the ego-ideal common to the first two forms" (102). The first two forms involved inverted versions of each other: one either strove to remain true to oneself (that is, to a "paternal ego-ideal") or looked at oneself "through the eyes of the group," which functioned as an "externalized" ego-ideal, and sought "to merit its love and esteem" (102). With the stage of the "pathological narcissist," however, the ego-ideal itself is dissolved: Instead of the integration of a symbolic law, we have a

multitude of rules to follow--rules of accommodation telling us "how to succeed." The narcissistic subject knows only the "rules of the (social) game" enabling him to manipulate others; social relations constitute for him a playing field in which he assumes "roles," not proper symbolic mandates; he stays clear of any kind of binding commitment that would imply a proper symbolic identification. He is a radical conformist who paradoxically experiences himself as an outlaw. (102)

The impact is extinction, the refusal to engage in traditional politics is an abdication of social responsibility that makes all social crises inevitable

Boggs, 97 (Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America”, December, Volume 26, Number 6, http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h16r0/fulltext.pdf)The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and

challenges. Many ideological currents scrutinized here – localism, metaphysics,

spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep Ecology – intersect with and reinforce each other. While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the

1990s. Despite their different outlooks and trajectories, they all share one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and overcome alienation. The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved – perhaps even unrecognized – only to fester more ominously in the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals

and visions. 74 In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth

is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people’s lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites – an already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise – or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society. 75

Alt Fails – Policy Paralysis*Baudrillard’s alternative is politically paralyzing. Wolin, 06 (The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, Richard Wolin, Professor of History and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, City University).

In the epitome of postmodern political fatalism, the only strategy Baudrillard has to recommend is "death” solely by aping the information society's own lifelessness and inertia-a practice he refers to as "crystal revenge" does one stand a chance, argues Baudrillard, of escaping its enervating clutches. Thus, according to Baudrillard, the implosions of media society portend the collapse of the emancipatory project in general. His verdict on the impossibility of progressive historical change reiterates one of the commonplaces of reactionary rhetoric: the so-

called futility thesis, according to which attempts to transform society are condemned a priori to failure. The nihilistic implications of Baudrillard's approach have been confirmed by the unmitigated schadenfreude with which he responded to the September 11,2001 terrorist attacks. In his view the assault represented a justified response to the challenge of American global hegemony. Although terrorist groups based in the Middle East may have been nominally responsible for executing the attacks, in truth it was an act that fulfilled the longings and aspirations of people all over the world. As Baudrillard observes, "haven't we dreamt of this event, hasn't the entire world, without exception, dreamt of it; no one could not dream of the destruction of a power that had become hegemonic to such a point. . . . In essence, it was [the terrorists] who committed the deed, but it is we who wished for it.

Baudrillard concedes the alt can never solve – no means of creating political change. Kellner 03 (Douglas, George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA, "Jean Baudrillard," The Blackwell companion to major contemporary social theorists, p. 315)

Baudrillard's focus is on the "logic of social differentiation" whereby individuals distinguish themselves and attain social prestige and standing through purchase and use of consumer goods. He argues that the entire system of production produces a system of needs that is rationalized, homogenized, reification, domination, and exploitation produced by capitalism. At this stage, it appeared that his critique came from the standard neo-Marxian vantage point, which assumes that capitalism is blameworthy because it is homogenizing, controlling, and dominating social life, while robbing individuals of their freedom, creativity, time, and human

potentialities. One the other hand, he could not point to any revolutionary forces and in particular did not discuss the situation and potential of the working class as an agent of change in the consumer society. Indeed, Baudrillard has no theory of the subject as an active agent of social change whatsoever (thus perhaps following the

structuralist and poststructuralist critique of the subject popular at the time). Nor does he have a theory of class or group revolt, or any theory of political organization, struggle, or strategy.

Baudrillard’s theories depoliticize politicsBoggs, 97 (Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America”, December, Volume 26, Number 6, http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h16r0/fulltext.pdf)

The problem is that the main thrust of postmodernism so devalues the common realm of power, governance, and economy that the dynamics of social and institutional life vanish from sight. Where the reality of corporate, state, and military power wind up vanishing within a post- modern amorphousness, the very effort to analyze social forces and locate agencies or strategies of change becomes impossible. In its reac- tion against the comprehensive historical scope of Marxism, the micro approach

dismisses in toto macropolitics and with it any conceivable modern project of radical transformation. An extreme "micro" focus is most visible in such theorists as Baudrillard who, as Steven

Best and Douglas Kellner put it, in effect "announce the end of the political project in the end of history and society 51 - a stance that replicates the logic of a profoundly depoliticized culture.

Baudrillard’s alternative fails to confront real world politics. Best & Kellner, 98 Department of Philosophy at University of Texas-El Paso, 1998 [Steven & Douglas, http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/illuminations/kell28.htm, “Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future”]

In the aftermath of the 1960s, novel and conflicting conceptions of postmodern politics emerged. Postmodern

politics thus take a variety of forms and would include the anti-politics of Baudrillard and his followers,

who exhibit a cynical, despairing rejection of the belief in emancipatory social transformation, as well as a variety of efforts to create a new or reconstructed politics. On the extreme and apolitical position of a Baudrillard, we are stranded at the end of history, paralyzed and frozen, as the masses collapse into inertia and indifference, and simulacra and technology triumph over agency. Thus, from Baudrillard's perspective, all we can do is "accommodate ourselves to the time left to us."

Baudrillard = NihilismBaudrillard is too nihilistic to apply to politics. Butterfield 02 (Bradley, Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, "The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good and Evil" Postmodern Culture, volume 13, September, Project MUSE)

From Princess Diana to 9/11, Jean Baudrillard has been the prophet of the postmodern media spectacle, the hyperreal event. In the 1970s and 80s, our collective fascination with things like car crashes, dead celebrities, terrorists and hostages was a major theme in Baudrillard's work on the symbolic and symbolic exchange, and in his post-9/11 "L'Esprit du Terrorisme," he has taken it upon himself to decipher

terrorism's symbolic message. He does so in the wake of such scathing critiques as Douglas Kellner's Jean

Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1989), which attacked Baudrillard's theory as "an imaginary construct which tries to seduce the world to become as theory wants it to be, to follow the scenario scripted in the theory" (178). Did Baudrillard seduce 9/11 into being--is he terrorism's theoretical guru?--or did he merely anticipate and

describe in advance the event's profound seductiveness? To Kellner and other critics, Baudrillard's theory of postmodernity is a political as well as an intellectual failure: Losing critical energy and growing apathetic himself, he ascribes apathy and inertia to the universe. Imploding into entropy, Baudrillard attributes implosion and entropy to the experience of (post) modernity. (180) To be sure, Baudrillard's scripts and scenarios have always been concerned with the implosion of the global capitalist system. But while Baudrillard's tone at the end of "L'Esprit du Terrorisme" can certainly be called apathetic--"there is no solution to this extreme situation--certainly not war"--he does not suggest that there are no forces in the universe capable of mounting at least a challenge to the system and its sponsors (18).

Relegating human suffering to the realm of simulation is just nihilism, crushing politics.Kellner, 89 Phil. Chair @ UCLA, 1989, Jean Baudrillard, p. 107-8, Douglas

Yet does the sort of symbolic exchange which Baudrillard advocates really provide a solution to the question of death? Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange between life and death and his ultimate embrace of nihilism

(see 4.4) is probably his most un-Nietzschean moment, the instant in which his thought radically devalues life and focuses with a fascinated gaze on that which is most terrible — death. In a popular French reading of Nietzsche, his ‘transvaluation of values’ demanded negation of all repressive and life- negating values in favor of affirmation of life, joy and happiness. This ‘philosophy of value’ valorized life over death and derived its values

from phenomena which enhanced, refined and nurtured human life. In Baudrillard, by contrast, life does not exist as an autonomous source of value, and the body exists only as ‘the caarnality of signs,’ as a mode of display of signification. His sign fetishism erases all materialjty from the body and social life, and makes possible a fascinated aestheticized fetishism of signs as the primary ontological reality. This way of seeing erases suffering, disease, pain and the horror of death from the body and social life and replaces it with the play of signs — Baudrillard’s alternative. Politics too is reduced to a play of signs, and the ways in which different politics alleviate or intensify human suffering disappears from the Baudrillardian universe. Consequently Baudrillard’s theory spirals into a fascination with signs which leads him to embrace certain privileged forms of sign culture and to reject others (that is, the

theoretical signs of modernity such as meaning, truth, the social, power and so on) and to pay less and less attention to materiality (that is, to needs, desire, suffering and so on) a trajectory will ultimately lead him to embrace nihilism (see 4.4).

Baudrillard = TerrorismBaudrillard’s philosophy justifies terrorism. Butterfield 02 (Bradley, Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, "The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good and Evil" Postmodern Culture, volume 13, September, Project MUSE)

In Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard wrote that systemic nihilism and the mass media are to blame for the postmodern human condition, which he describes as a combination of "fascination," "melancholy," and

"indifference." Against the system and its passive nihilism, Baudrillard proffers his own brand of what might be termed active nihilism, a praxis that includes theoretical and aesthetic "terrorism," but not, in the end, the bloody acts of actual violence his theory accounts for. The terrorist acts of 9/11, as his theory predicted, were destined to be absorbed by the system's own narrative,

neutralized by the very mass media they sought to exploit. In "L'Esprit," Baudrillard nevertheless attempts to explain again the logic, the spirit, of terrorism and to account for its power. Two of the three letters written to Harper's Magazine after its February 2002 printing of "L'Esprit" would, predictably, take Baudrillard to be an apologist for the terrorists' means and ends. Edward B. Schlesinger

and Sarah A. Wersan of Santa Barbara, California, write: Embedded in Jean Baudrillard's almost incomprehensible prose is the shocking assertion that terrorism is justifiable, that the threat of globalization, as visualized by Baudrillard, justified the World Trade Center attack. (Kelly et al. 4)

Baudrillard justifies the use of violence and terrorism. Butterfield 02 (Bradley, Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, "The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good and Evil" Postmodern Culture, volume 13, September, Project MUSE)

Baudrillard's postmodern-primitive symbolic, on the other hand, aimed to obliterate the difference in value between the imaginary and the real, the signifier and the signified, and to expose the

metaphysical prejudice at the heart of all such valuations. His wager was that this would be done through aesthetic violence and not real violence, but having erased the difference between the two, there was never any guarantee that others wouldn't take such theoretical "violence" to its literal ends. Graffiti art, scarification and tattooing are just the benign counterparts of true terrorism, which takes ritual sacrifice and initiation to their extremes. Literalists and extremists, fundamentalists of all sorts, find their logic foretold in Baudrillard's references to the primitives.

What the terrorists enacted on 9/11 was what Baudrillard would call a symbolic event of the first order, and they were undeniably primitive in their belief that God, the dead, and the living would somehow honor and benefit them in the afterlife. Unable to defeat the U.S. in economic or military terms, they employ the rule of prestation in symbolic exchange

with the gift of their own deaths. But Americans are not "primitives"--we do not value death symbolically, but rather only as a subtraction from life. Capitalism's implicit promise, in every ad campaign and marketing strategy, is that to consume is to live. We score up life against death as gain against loss, as if through accumulation we achieve mastery over the qualitative presence of death that haunts life. Our official holidays honoring the dead serve no other function than to encourage consumption.

Macro-Politics GoodBaudrillard leaves the masses to collapse, only engaging in macro-politics solvesBest and Kellner 02 prof phil @ UT el paso and Kellner prof phil @ UCLA 2k2 (Steven, Doug, “Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future” http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell28.htm)

A postmodern politics begins to take shape during the 1960s, when numerous new political groups and struggles emerged. The development of a new postmodern politics is strongly informed by the vicissitudes of social movements in France, the United States, and elsewhere, as well as by emerging postmodern theories. The utopian visions of modern politics proved, in this context, difficult to sustain and were either rejected in favor of cynicism, nihilism, and, in some cases, a turn to the right, or were dramatically recast and scaled down to more "modest"

proportions. The modern emphasis on collective struggle, solidarity, and alliance politics gave way to extreme fragmentation, as the "movement" of the 1960s splintered into various competing struggles for rights and liberties. The previous emphasis on transforming the public sphere and institutions of domination gave way to new emphases on culture, personal identity, and everyday life, as macropolitics were replaced by the micropolitics of local transformation and subjectivity. In the aftermath of the 1960s,

novel and conflicting conceptions of postmodern politics emerged. Postmodern politics thus take a variety of forms and would include the anti-politics of Baudrillard and his followers, who exhibit a cynical, despairing rejection of the belief in emancipatory social transformation, as well as a variety of efforts to create a new or reconstructed politics. On the

extreme and apolitical position of a Baudrillard, we are stranded at the end of history, paralyzed and frozen, as the masses collapse into inertia and indifference, and simulacra and technology triumph over agency. Thus, from Baudrillard's perspective, all we can do is "accommodate ourselves to the time left to us."