Virtuality and Events: The Hell of Power
Jean Baudrillard
European Graduate School
...It is going to be necessary, then, to invent a security system that prevents any event whatever from occurring. A whole strategy of deterrence that does service today for a global strategy. Steven Spielberg's recent film, Minority Report, provides an illustration of such a system. On the basis of brains endowed with a gift of pre-cognition (the “precogs”), who identify imminent crimes before they occur, squads of police (the “precrimes”) intercept and neutralize the criminal before he has committed his crime. There is a variant in the film Dead Zone (directed by David Cronenberg): the hero, who, following a serious accident, is also endowed with powers of divination, ends up killing a politician whose future destiny as a war criminal he foresees. This is the scenario of the Iraq war too: the crime is nipped in the bud on the strength of an act that has not taken place (Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction). The question is clearly whether the crime would really have taken place. But we shall never know. What we have here, then, is the real repression of a virtual crime. Extrapolating from this, we can see looming beyond the war a systematic de-programming not only of all crime, but of anything that might disturb the order of things, the policed order of the planet. This is what “political” power comes down to today. It is no longer driven by any positive will; it is merely a negative power of deterrence, of public health, of security policing, immunity policing, prophylaxis....
We are dealing henceforth with the exercise of power in the pure state with no concern for sovereignty or representation; with the Integral Reality of a negative power. So long as it derives its sovereignty from representation, so long as a form of political reason exists, power can find its equilibrium – it can, at any rate, be combated and contested. But the eclipsing of that sovereignty leaves an unbridled power, with nothing standing against it, a savage power (with a savagery that is no longer natural, but technical). And which, in a strangely roundabout way, might be said to get back to something like primitive societies, which, not knowing power, were, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, societies without history. What if we, the present global society, were once again, in the shadow of this integral power, to become a society without history?...
To the pure management of flows and markets under the banner of planetary deregulation, there corresponds the “global” event – or rather the globalized non-event: the French victory in the World Cup, the year 2000, the death of Diana, The Matrix, etc. Whether or not these events are manufactured, they are orchestrated by the silent epidemic of the information networks. Fake events.
François de Bernard analyses the war in Iraq this way, as a pure transcription of film theory and practice. What we are watching as we sit paralyzed in our fold-down seats isn't “like a film”; it is a film. With a script, a screenplay, that has to be followed unswervingly. The casting and the technical and financial resources have all been meticulously scheduled: these are professionals at work. Including control of the distribution channels. In the end, operational war becomes an enormous special effect; cinema becomes the paradigm of warfare, and we imagine it as “real”, whereas it is merely the mirror of its cinematic being...
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