1NC Baudrillard Kritik

The current consolidation of American Power has relegated war to the status of
a non-event. Single tracked globalization has monopolized all the channels of
international conflict and protest in order to maintain the normal operations of
U.S Intervention, which precludes the occurrence of any event that disrupts the
smooth functioning of the western order. Even as the 1AC claims to reduce
military presence, it should be read as another triumph narrative wherein, like
Vietnam, America loses the war but wins the movie. The 1AC is nothing other
than the latest, greatest iteration of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. This strategy of
global policing, of the reconciliation of all forms of violent antagonism through
the rhetoric of alliances and cooperation, is an attempt to install an
international order that is decked out in the signs of Western Identity and all
societies falling outside of the re-assured order utilitarian societies, all pre-
capitalist, symbolic spaces, must be annihilated on a global scale. The AFF’s
politics is nothing short of demilitarization in the name of total liquidation of all
difference.
---China link – the 1AC completes the project of rendering China a Western subject rather than a
radically other Eastern culture – they are recruited as America’s great apprentice in the global
play of power, a strategy operative since the Nixon Administration

Baudrillard 95. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation: The Precession of Simulacra, pg.
37-40xxx

The simultaneity of two events in the month of July 1975 illustrated this in a striking manner:
the linkup in space of the two American and Soviet supersatellites, apotheosis of peaceful
coexistence - the suppression by the Chinese of ideogrammatic writing and conversion to the
the "orbital" instantiation of an abstract and
Roman alphabet. The latter signifies
modelized system of signs, into whose orbit all the once unique forms of
style and writing will be reabsorbed. The satellization of language: the
means for the Chinese to enter the system of peaceful coexistence, which
is inscribed in their heavens at precisely the same time by the linkup of
the two satellites. Orbital flight of the Big Two, neutralization and
homogenization of everyone else on earth. Yet, despite this deterrence by
the orbital power - the nuclear or molecular code - events continue at
ground level, misfortunes are even more numerous, given the global
process of the contiguity and simultaneity of data. But, subtly, they no
longer have any meaning, they are no longer anything but the duplex
effect of simulation at the summit. The best example can only be that of the
war in Vietnam, because it took place at the intersection of a maximum
historical and "revolutionary" stake, and of the installation of this
deterrent authority. What meaning did this war have, and wasn't its unfolding a means of
sealing the end of history in the decisive and culminating historic event of our era? Why did this
Why did
war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic?
this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have
no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure
of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have
completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political
system. Nothing of the sort occurred. Something else, then, took place.
This war, at bottom, was nothing but a crucial episode of peaceful
coexistence. It marked the arrival of China to peaceful coexistence. The
nonintervention of China obtained and secured after many years, Chinas
apprenticeship to a global modus vivendi, the shift from a global strategy
of revolution to one of shared forces and empires, the transition from a
radical alternative to political alternation in a system now essentially
regulated (the normalization of Peking - Washington relations): this was
what was at stake in the war in Vietnam, and in this sense, the USA pulled
out of Vietnam but won the war. And the war ended "spontaneously"
when this objective was achieved. That is why it was deescalated,
demobilized so easily. This same reduction of forces can be seen on the
field. The war lasted as long as elements irreducible to a healthy politics
and discipline of power, even a Communist one, remained unliquidated.
When at last the war had passed into the hands of regular troops in the North and escaped that
of the resistance, the war could stop: it had attained its objective. The stake is thus that of a
political relay. As soon as the Vietnamese had proved that they were no
longer the carriers of an unpredictable subversion, one could let them
take over. That theirs is a Communist order is not serious in the end: it had proved itself, it
could be trusted. It is even more effective than capitalism in the liquidation of "savage" and
archaic precapitalist structures. Same scenario in the Algerian war. The other
aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence, the
murderous antagonism of the adversaries - which seems a matter of life
and death, which is played out as such (or else one could never send
people to get themselves killed in this kind of thing), behind this
simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes the two
adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else,
unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the
equal complicity of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal,
communitarian, precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of
language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished, that is
the object of murder in war - and war itself, in its immense, spectacular
death apparatus, is nothing but the medium of this process of the
terrorist rationalization of the social - the murder on which sociality will
be founded, whatever its allegiance, Communist or capitalist. Total
complicity, or division of labor between two adversaries (who may even
consent to enormous sacrifices for it) for the very end of reshaping and
domesticating social relations. "The North Vietnamese were advised to countenance a
scenario for liquidating the American presence in the course of which, of course, one must save
face." This scenario: the extremely harsh bombardments of Hanoi. Their untenable character
must not conceal the fact that they were nothing but a simulacrum to enable the Vietnamese to
seem to countenance a compromise and for Nixon to make the Americans swallow the
withdrawal of their troops. The game was already won, nothing was objectively
at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage. The moralists of war,
the holders of high wartime values should not be too discouraged: the
war is no less atrocious for being only a simulacrum - the flesh suffers just
the same, and the dead and former combatants are worth the same as in
other wars. This objective is always fulfilled, just like that of the charting
of territories and of disciplinary sociality. What no longer exists is the
adversity of the adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes, the
ideological seriousness of war. And also the reality of victory or defeat,
war being a process that triumphs well beyond these appearances.
In any case, the pacification (or the deterrence) that dominates
us today is
beyond war and peace, it is that at every moment war and peace are
equivalent. "War is peace," said Orwell. There also, the two differential poles
implode into each other, or recycle one another - a simultaneity of
contradictions that is at once the parody and the end of every dialectic .
Thus one can completely miss the truth of a war: namely, that it was
finished well before it started, that there was an end to war at the heart
of the war itself, and that perhaps it never started. Many other events
(the oil crisis, etc.) never started, never existed, except as artificial
occurrences - abstract, ersatz, and as artifacts of history, catastrophes and
crises destined to maintain a historical investment under hypnosis. The
media and the official news service are only there to maintain the illusion
of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of facts . All
the events are to be read backward, or one becomes aware (as with the
Communists "in power" in Italy the retro, posthumous rediscovery of the gulags and Soviet
dissidents like the almost contemporary discovery, by a moribund ethnology, of the lost
"difference" of Savages) that all these things
arrived too late, with a history of
delay, a spiral of delay, that they long ago exhausted their meaning and
only live from an artificial effervescence of signs, that all these events
succeed each other without logic, in the most contradictory, complete
equivalence, in a profound indifference to their consequences (but this is
because there are none: they exhaust themselves in their spectacular
promotion) - all "newsreel" footage thus gives the sinister impression of
kitsch, of retro and porno at the same time - doubtless everyone knows
this, and no one really accepts it. The reality of simulation is unbearable -
crueler than Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, which was still an attempt to
create a dramaturgy of life, the last gasp of an ideality of the body, of
blood, of violence in a system that was already taking it away, toward a
reabsorption of all the stakes without a trace of blood. For us the trick has
been played. All dramaturgy, and even all real writing of cruelty has
disappeared. Simulation is the master, and we only have a right to the
retro, to the phantom, parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials.
Everything still unfolds around us, in the cold light of deterrence
(including Artaud, who has the right like everything else to his revival, to a
second existence as the referential of cruelty).
This is why nuclear proliferation does not increase the risk of either an
atomic clash or an accident - save in the interval when the "young"
powers could be tempted to make a nondeterrent, "real" use of it (as the
Americans did in Hiroshima - but precisely only they had a right to this
"use value" of the bomb, all of those who have acquired it since will be
deterred from using it by the very fact of possessing it). Entry into the
atomic club, so prettily named, very quickly effaces (as unionization does
in the working world) any inclination toward violent intervention.
Responsibility, control, censure, self-deterrence always grow more rapidly
than the forces or the weapons at our disposal: this is the secret of the
social order. Thus the very possibility of paralyzing a whole country by
flicking a switch makes it so that the electrical engineers will never use
this weapon: the whole myth of the total and revolutionary strike
crumbles at the very moment when the means are available - but alas
precisely because those means are available. Therein lies the whole
process of deterrence.
It is thus perfectly probable that one day we will see nuclear powers
export atomic reactors, weapons, and bombs to every latitude. Control by
threat will be replaced by the more effective strategy of pacification
through the bomb and through the possession of the bomb. The "little"
powers, believing that they are buying their independent striking force,
will buy the virus of deterrence, of their own deterrence. The same goes for the
atomic reactors that we have already sent them: so many neutron bombs knocking
out all historical virulence, all risk of explosion. In this sense, the nuclear
everywhere inaugurates an accelerated process of implosion, it freezes
everything around it, it absorbs all living energy.
The nuclear is at once the culminating point of available energy and the maximization of energy
control systems. Lockdown and control increase in direct proportion to (and undoubtedly even
faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of the modern
revolution. It is still the absolute paradox of the nuclear. Energies freeze
in their own fire, they deter themselves. One can no longer imagine what
project, what power, what strategy, what subject could exist behind this
enclosure, this vast saturation of a system by its own forces, now
neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, nonexplosive - except for the
possibility of an explosion toward the center, of an implosion where all
these energies would be abolished in a catastrophic process (in the literal
sense, that is to say in the sense of a reversion of the whole cycle toward
a minimal point, of a reversion of energies toward a minimal threshold ).
In a world of total American dominance, the world order finds itself
everywhere opposed by hostile forces; the Chinese state has allied itself with
the American leadership in the fourth world war: an attempt to reinstate the
hegemony of the global via the War on Terror.
Nordin 14 (Dr. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
Religion at Lancaster University, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars,” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue: Baudrillard and War, May,
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-norden.html)//AG
III. Chinese approaches to war Before I venture into some discussion of contemporary Chinese modes of war, I shall state the obvious: what I discuss
here is merely a small selection of what one could write of as Chinese wars. There is a large and varied literature engaging the varied traditions of
Chinese strategic culture, the numerous cultural expressions that deal with the theme of war, not to mention the Chinese military in foreign policy. In
what follows I outline three dimensions of contemporary Chinese ‘war’ in order to bring out a number of contrast and themes that have some bearing
on Baudrillard’s discussion of war. I turn, first, to the People’s Republic of China’s participation in the war on terror. I thereafter contrast this allegedly
modern and Western-led war with contemporary rhetoric in Chinese academic and policy discourse, which draws on Ancient Chinese philosophy. This
discourse has focused on the pre-emption of war in conjunction with the language of harmony, innate peacefulness and soft power, portraying such
attitudes in opposition to the West. Having outlined a number of areas where I think Baudrillard’s discussions of war can shed some light on this
allegedly Chinese ontology of war, I thereafter turn to Chinese actors or discourses that act out war in other modes, including in popular culture and
propaganda. How should we understand these simultaneous approaches to war, in relation to the disappearance of war that Baudrillard and others
have described in modern Western practices? (i). Chinese participation in the war on terror As described above, there are aspects of Baudrillard’s

writing where all alternatives to American achieved utopia appear to be erased for
Baudrillard (Beck 2009: 110). In the final parts of America, for example, simulation is portrayed as a means of

sustaining and extending American dominance at home and abroad,

which is now ‘uncontested and uncontestable’, a universal model ‘even
reaching as far as China’ (Baudrillard 1989 [1986]: 116). And indeed, this universal model has literally reached the very
territorial border of China in the form of the war on terror that was rolled out all the way to

the Sino-Afghan border and beyond. In Baudrillard’s view, the 9/11 attacks
represented “the clash of triumphant globalization at war with itself” and
unfolded a “fourth world war”: The first put an end to European supremacy and to the era of colonialism; the second
put an end to Nazism; and the third to Communism. Each one brought us progressively closer to the

single world order of today, which is now nearing its end, everywhere
opposed, everywhere grappling with hostile forces (Baudrillard, 2003b). In this new
fractal state of war and hostility, the Chinese state has joined forces with
the American leadership to reinstate the hegemony of the global (of
which they have surely dreamt, just like the rest of us). To the American
unilateral war on terror in Afghanistan and George W. Bush’s call “you are either with us or against us”, the
Chinese government responded with a (perhaps reluctant) “we are with you!” This wish to
be part of the global American self has not meant, however, the full contribution to the war effort that some American representatives may have

hoped. China has, since around the time of 9/11 shifted from being extremely
reluctant to condone or participate in any form of “peacekeeping”
missions, including under United Nations (UN) flag, to being the UN Security Council member
that contributes most to UN peacekeeping missions. Much of this participation has taken the
form of non-combatant personal. Nonetheless, China has been an actively involved party in
‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. It has provided police training for
Afghanistan’s security forces, as well as mine-clearance. Though it was
opposed to the US invasion of Iraq without UN mandate, China has
emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the occupation, as it is one
of the biggest winners of oil contracts in Iraq. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, China has been accused of
‘free-riding’ on American efforts, but China has nonetheless been clearly positioned as part of the

participating and benefiting ‘we’. The Chinese state has benefited from participation in the war on terror in more
ways than one. The war has increased Chinese influence in Central Asia. It has

legitimized China’s harsh clamp-downs in Xinjiang, where the state claims

its violence is justified by the presence of separatist ‘terrorists’ in the Muslim Uyghur community.s Not least,

China’s participation in the war on terror has been used to demonstrate to the world
that China is now a ‘responsible great power’, as measured by the standard of ‘international society’
(see Yeophantong 2013 for a discussion of this ‘responsibility’ rhetoric). Again, this rhetoric of ‘responsibility’ has been

deployed by both American and Chinese leaders to tie China more tightly
to the purported American-led ‘we’. More recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has stressed the
importance of continued Sino-US co-operation over Afghanistan post-2014 troop withdrawal. Wang has publicly stressed the common goals of China
and the US with regards to Afghanistan: ‘We both hope Afghanistan will continue to maintain stability … We both hope to see the reconstruction of

China and the USA have

Afghanistan and we both don’t want to see the resurgence of terrorism’ (cited in Chen Weihua, 2013).

jointly engaged in what is termed advisory and capacity-building for Afghans, for
example in training Afghan diplomats, and their co-operation continues
around shared goals in the region. Much could be said here about China’s participation in the American-led
globalization project and war on terror. My point here is simply to note that whatever we read America as doing

through its war on terror, China is a supporting and benefiting actor in

this process. It is clearly positioned as part of this global idea of self. At
the same time, however, China is also portrayed, from within and
without, as a challenger, an alternative, or an ‘other’ to that global,
American or Western order. We therefore turn next to the Chinese scholarly and
governmental rhetoric that claims to offer such an alternative or challenge
to the Western way of war that Baudrillard criticized and that we can see
China joining in the war on terror.
Their conception of death as a biological end to life denies the value of death as
a reversible and subjective transformation. The result is the securitization
against death from which social control is made possible and life is reduced to a
capitalist prolongation and prohibition of death. This lays the foundation for all
exclusions against what is deemed “abnormal,” and makes war, genocide, and
discrimination inevitable.
Robinson 12. Andrew Robinson, political theorist and activist based in the UK, “An A to Z of
Theory | Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death” Ceasefire Magazine,
March 30, 2012, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/

Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a

The passage to capitalism:

central role in the emergence of capitalism. Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes
based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced by regimes
based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence. Baudrillard’s view of
capitalism is derived from Marx’s analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marx’s view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it
can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that

different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns economics
into the ‘reality-principle’. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic

level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the
Other to an eternal return of the Same. Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the
production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has little in

common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly
accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation. According to
Baudrillard, capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death.
Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It tries to ward off
ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life. But
this is bound to fail. General equivalence – the basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-

presence of death. The more the system runs from death, the more it
places everyone in solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is
fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through fixed
value is itself deathly. Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress, and linear
time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the
accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard, such
accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed

to be preserved – otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive

consumption. Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come
from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does
not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of

dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity – Baudrillard
 Capitalism produces the Freudian “death drive”, which is
here endorses Sahlins’ argument.

actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and
Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study – the economy and
the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also criticises
theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the
symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not
claim to live naturally or by their desires – they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human
liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that
the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a
separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of
unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting
them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound.
What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility. Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The
remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of
the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the ‘obscene’, which
is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined. This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack.
It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The
energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder. Our culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with

radical difference.The West continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups.

But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first – destroying its own
indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also
increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have
been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and
instability. Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard
thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it counterposes a different ‘principle of

sociality’ to that of the dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to offer a symbolic
challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of death remains

present among the oppressed, but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’ of immediate retaliation. The Church and State also exist
based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as
central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained some
degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the ‘social contract’ was based on the idea of a sacrifice – this time of
liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I haven’t seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the
impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art, theatre and
language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain
passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillard’s work. But on closer inspection, this seems to
be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of
symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups. Death: Death plays a central role in Baudrillard’s theory, and is closely related to symbolic

what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated

exchange. According to Baudrillard,

society is the ability to engage in exchanges with death. Death should not be seen here in purely
literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which

destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value – which returns

things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees
death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the “death” of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different

categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it

leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction
carries shades of death because one generation replaces another. Baudrillard’s
concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque. Death refers to metamorphosis,

reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective

transformation, as well as physical death. According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups
see death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an
adversarial will, which they must absorb. And they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is
a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not
signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the west’s idea of a
biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the
sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary oppositions.
For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original,
founding opposition on which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of others
have been created, confining particular groups – the “mad”, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on – to particular segregated situations. The definition

of the ‘normal human’ has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category. The original exclusion was of the dead – it
is defined as abnormal to be dead. “You livies hate us deadies”. This first split and
exclusion forms the basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and
exclusions – along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and so on. This
discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation

between living and dead. The modern view of death is constructed on the model of the
machine and the function. A machine either functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either
functions or does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death. The modern view of

death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be

reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social
institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal.

Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die –

or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The
internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as
Stirner would say, between the category of ‘man’ and the ‘un-man’, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by

destroying their actual connections to others. The symbolic haunts the code as the threat of its own death. The
society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions of the symbolic. The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure of death.

we still ‘exchange’ with the dead

The split never actually stops exchanges across the categories. In the case of death,

through our own deaths and our anxiety about death. We no longer have living, mortal relationships
with objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental. It is as if we have a transparent veil between us. Symbolic exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When

It is the process of excluding, marking, or

this disappears, laws and the state are invented to take their place.

barring which allows concentrated or transcendental power to come into

existence. Through splits, people turn the other into their ‘imaginary’. For instance, westerners invest the “Third
World” with racist fantasies and revolutionary aspirations; the “Third World” invests the west
with aspirational fantasies of development. In separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the resultant purity is

illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the other brings the other to the core of society. “We all” become dead, or
mad, or prisoners, and so on, through their exclusion. The goal of
‘survival’ is fundamental to the birth of power. Social control emerges
when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead
become prohibited. The social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life. People are compelled
to survive so as to become useful. For Baudrillard, capitalism’s original relationship to death has historically been concealed by
the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully visible now this system is collapsing, and production is reduced to operation. In modern

societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed outside society. For
example, elderly people are excluded from society. People no longer expect their own death. As a result, it becomes unintelligible. It keeps returning as ‘nature which will not

Western society is arranged so death is

abide by objective laws’. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual.

never done by someone else, but always attributable to ‘nature’. This

creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime of death, of which the concentration camp is the ultimate symbol.
The system now commands that we must not die – at least not in any old way. We may
only die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health and safety regulations. On the other hand,
murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-converted into
economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a regressive redistribution of
death. It is wrested from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies. For Baudrillard, there is not a
social improvement here. People are effectively being killed, or left to die, by a process which never treats them as having value. On the other hand, even when capitalism
becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying anxiety about being reduced to the status of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear

The slave remains within the master’s dialectic for as long as

of being manipulated.

‘his’ life or death serves the reproduction of domination. A fatal ontology?: In Fatal Strategies,
Baudrillard suggests an ontology which backs up his analysis of death. The world itself is committed to extremes and to radical antagonism. It is bored of meaning. There is an
‘evil genie’, a principle of Evil which constantly returns in the form of seduction. Historical processes are really pushed forward by this principle. All energy comes from fission
and rupture. These cannot be replaced by production or mechanical processes. There is no possibility of a collective project or a coherent society, only the operation of such

The world is fundamentally unreal. This leads

forces. Every order exists only to be transgressed and dismantled.

to a necessity of irony, which is to say, the slippage of meaning. Historically, the symbolic was confined to the
metaphysical. It did not affect the physical world. But with the rise of models , with the physical world derived increasingly from the code,

the physical world is brought within the symbolic. It becomes reversible. The
rational principle of linear causality collapses. The world is, and always remains, enigmatic. People

will give for seduction or for simulation what they would never give for
quality of life. Advertising, fashion, gambling and so on liberate ‘immoral energies’ which hark back to the magical or archaic gamble on the power of thought
against the power of reality. Neoliberalism is in some ways an ultimate release of such diabolical forces. People will look for an ecstatic excess of anything – even boredom or

What is inescapable is the

oppression. In this account, the principle of evil becomes the only fixed point. Desire is not inescapable.

object and its seduction, its ‘principle of evil’. The object at once submits
to law and breaks it in practice, mocking it. Its own “game” cannot be discerned. It is a poor conductor of the symbolic order but a
good conductor of signs. The drive towards spectacles, illusions and scenes is stronger

than the desire for survival.

The Aff’s presentation of impact scenarios is nothing more than the spectacle of extermination
that is both distant and consumed. This leads to a society built around pacified socialization, as
institutional violence is accomplished through life for life’s sake and the denial of death. This
securitization reduces life and death to a worthless commodity for bureaucratic manipulation,
ensuring a zombified existence for us all.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 173-175
This passionate, sacrificial death overtly accepts the spectacle of death, which, as with all organic functions, we have made into a
moral and therefore clandestine and shameful function. The good souls heavily insist on the shameful character of public executions,

butthey do not see that odiousness of this type of execution stems from its
contemplative attitude in which the death of the other is savoured as a
spectacle at a distance. This is not sacrificial violence, which not only
demands the presence of the whole community, but is one of the forms of
its self-presence [présence à ellemème]. We rediscover something of this contagious festivity in an
episode in England in 1807, when the 40,000 people who came to attend
an execution were seized by delirium upon seeing a hundred dead bodies
lying on the ground. This collective act has nothing in common with the
spectacle of extermination. By confusing the two in the same abstract
reprobation of violence and death, one merges with the thought of the
State, that is, the pacification of life. Now, if the right prefers to use
repressive blackmail, the left, for its part, is distinguished by imagining
and setting up future models of pacified socialisation. A civilisation's progress is thus
measured only by its respect for life as absolute value. What a difference from public, celebrated death by torture (the Black from
the Upper Volta laughing in the face of the guns that hit him, cannibalism in the Tupinamba), and even murder and vengeance,

When society kills in a totally premeditated fashion, we

passion for death and suicide!

do it a great honour when we accuse it of a barbaric vengeance worthy of the Dark

Ages, because vengeance is still a fatal reciprocity. It is neither 'primitive' nor 'purely the way of
nature'; nothing could be more false. It has nothing to do with our calculable and statistical abstract death, which is the by-product
of an agency both moral and bureaucratic (our capital punishment and concentration camps), and thus has everything to do with the
system of political economy. This system is similarly abstract, but never in the way that a revenge, a murder or a sacrificial spectacle

is abstract.We have produced a judicial, ethnocidal and concentration camp

death, to which our society has adjusted. Today, everything and nothing has changed: under the sign
of the values of life and tolerance, the same system of extermination, only gentler,

governs everyday life, and it has no need of death to accomplish its

objectives. The same objective that is inscribed in the monopoly of institutional violence is
accomplished as easily by forced survival as it is by death: a forced 'life for life's sake' (kidney
machines, malformed children on life-support machines, agony prolonged at all costs, organ transplants, etc.). All these procedures
are equivalent to disposing of death and imposing life, but according to what ends? Those of science and medicine? Surely this is just

scientific paranoia, unrelated to any human objective. Is profit the aim? No: society swallows huge amounts of profit. This
'therapeutic heroism' is characterised by soaring costs and 'decreasing
benefits': they manufacture unproductive survivors. Even if social security can still be
analysed as 'compensation for the labour force in the interests of capital', this argument has no purchase here. Nevertheless, the

system is facing the same contradiction here as with the death penalty: it
overspends on the prolongation of life because this system of values is
essential to the strategic equilibrium of the whole; economically, however, this overspending
unbalances the whole. What is to be done? An economic choice becomes necessary, where we can see the outline of euthanasia as
a semi-official doctrine or practice. We choose to keep 30 per cent of the uraemics in France alive (36 per cent in the USA!).
Euthanasia is already everywhere, and the ambiguity of making a humanist demand for it (as with the 'freedom' to abortion) is
striking: it is inscribed in the middle to long term logic of the system. All this tends in the direction of an increase in social control.

For there is a clear objective behind all these apparent contradictions: to

ensure control over the entire range of life and death. From birth control
to death control, whether we execute people or compel their survival (the prohibition of dying is the caricature, but
also the logical form of progressive tolerance), the essential thing is that the decision is withdrawn from them, that their life

and their death are never freely theirs, but that they live or die according
to a social visa. It is even intolerable that their life and death remain open to biological chance, since this is still a type of
freedom. Just as morality commanded: 'You shall not kill', today it commands: 'You shall not die', not in any old way, anyhow, and

death proper
only if the law and medicine permit. And if your death is conceded you, it will still be by order. In short,

has been abolished to make room for death control and euthanasia: strictly
speaking, it is no longer even death, but something completely neutralised that comes to be inscribed in the rules and calculations of

It must be possible to operate death as a

equivalence: rewritingplanningprogrammingsystem.

social service, integrate it like health and disease under the sign of the
Plan and Social Security. This is the story of 'motel-suicides' in the USA ,
where, for a comfortable sum, one can purchase one's death under the most agreeable

conditions (like any other consumer good); perfect service, everything has
been foreseen, even trainers who give you back your appetite for life, after which they kindly and conscientiously send
the gas into your room, without torment and without meeting any opposition. A service operates these motel-suicides, quite rightly
paid (eventually reimbursed?). Why did death not become a social service when, like everything else, it is functionalised as individual

and computable consumption in social input and output? In order that the system consents to such
economic sacrifices in the artificial resurrection of its living losses, it must have a fundamental
interest in withdrawing even the biological chance of death from people.
'You die, we'll do the rest' is already just an old advertising slogan used for funeral homes. Today, dying is already

part of the rest, and the Thanatos centres charge for death just as the
Eros centres charge for sex. The witch hunt continues. A transcendent, 'objective'
agency requires a delegation of justice, death and vengeance. Death and
expiation must be wrested from the circuit, monopolised at the summit
and redistributed. A bureaucracy of death and punishment is necessary,
in the same way as there must be an abstraction of economic, political
and sexual exchanges: if not, the entire structure of social control
collapses.

The 1AC is founded on vampirism of the suffering to nourish the psyche of the
West – their politics necessarily forefronts theories, methods, and explanations
mired in the suffering of others by way of unconscious prefabricated politics of
charity cannibalism. They advance projects of understanding which reproduce
and feed off fantasies of the suffering other resulting in inevitable exploitation
and decimation. All of this plays out like a market: their depictions of suffering
exchange for your ballot and a symbolic economy is reproduced in the moment
of decision which ultimately creates a DEMAND for more suffering, turns the
case.
Baudrillard 94. Jean Baudrillard, dead French philosopher, former professor emeritus at the University de Paris
X, The Illusion of The End, pg. 66-70

We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' ['autre monde]. We
must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that
poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The
extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has
become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of
the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable
condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and
bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing
enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to
recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist
oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say,
material exploitation is only there to extract that
contrary to the Marxist analysis, that

spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as

psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The
'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-
The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the
bearing stratum.

world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks
absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a
natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The
North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and
hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian
interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is
merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure
playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western
powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable
intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and
 our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact,
catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of

merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the

catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the
Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is
reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and
sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was
largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the
rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration,
on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of
the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering
hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be
complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the
world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer
able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern
Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as
an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best
suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our
media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we
give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our
technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism,
relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral
mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and
ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating
under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been
compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe
market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress
becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation , when we run out of disasters

from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be
forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need
for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes
it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out
the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us
Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the
Latin America
world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and

are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in
providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to
be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological
disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each
other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and
our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we
shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the
odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses
have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable
epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic
advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the
losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame,
if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and
catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the
, the
spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case

under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and

its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not
under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant
evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The
argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the
same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the
human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either
developed or under-developed peoples.Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by
revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the
objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal
absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer
know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this
evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its
own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and
that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered,
1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of
pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed
glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to,
but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy – by those whom God visibly scorns since
he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that
repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to
lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of
repentance, into the heart of the white race.

Death’s unpredictability and the strive to make it predictable drives the logic of
the Cold War and the War on Terror as simulated death scenarios become a
necromantic means of controlling death. This leads to a zombified existence in
which we frantically and brainlessly consume these images of death. To
understand Death as immanent within the system and without it resists this
simulation of Death—such is the salvation of theory in death, or the salvation
that is death.
Bishop 09. Ryan Bishop, Professor of Global Arts and Politics, Co-Director of the Winchester
Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media, Director of Research and Doctoral Research
within Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton, Baudrillard Now: Current
Perspectives in Baudrillard Studies Edited by Ryan Bishop Polity Press 2009, pg. 64-70

Reality is destroyed, or subordinated to the code, in several ways. It can be generated

from blueprints provided by the code (as discussed in earlier sections). It can be
‘deterred’, such that real events are not able to happen . Or it can be
recuperated through aleatory mechanisms of power. Let us start with the third possibility.
The system is aleatory. This means that it operates through the management of chance. It is determined in its broad outlines, but
relies on chance for its details. It rests on probabilities. Because the system determines outcomes ‘genetically’ – generating the
different options through the code – only certain things are possible. The variation by chance and probability allows the system to
control phenomena at an aggregate level. An aleatory system also brings in and incorporates resistances as they occur. It assigns
them a place in the code, as niche markets, questionnaire options, political parties, categories of deviance. It is a machine of total
recuperation which doesn’t wait for movements to emerge before it assigns them a category – it catches them in their early stages
and pre-empts them. For instance, a new social critique might rapidly give rise to a new party or NGO which is quickly recuperated.
Or it might be articulated by corporations themselves, as a new niche market. Although this process is often effective, it also
contains problems for the system, because ultimately, it means that the system is governed by chance. We are plunged into an
abnormal uncertainty. In response, the system creates an excess of causality and finality. But this compounds the problem.
Determined responses become hypertelic – they exceed their end. They become ends in themselves, pass the limits of their
functions or use-values, and colonise the entire system. This process is also referred to as excrescence. It is similar to the
proliferation of cancer cells in the body. For Baudrillard, this arrangement depends on a particular religious ontology. An accidental
world implies an infinite will and energy, to keep all determinate connections from forming. According to Baudrillard, reason seeks
to break the necessary connections among things which arise within cycles of symbolic exchange and conceptions of fate. Chance –
the possibility of indeterminate, mutually indifferent elements relating ‘freely’ – is an effect of this decomposition of connections. It
is an idea invented in modernity, along with the idea of a formless, unbonded world. It can only exist in a world without symbolic
exchange. And it depends on the continued suppression of symbolic exchange. The idea of chance or the aleatory can be related to
the elimination of symbolic exchange in various ways. Chance is actually impossible on a certain level. It is the perception we are left

It is a world in which one wanders like a dead soul,

with after the destruction of causality.

with little chance of intense connections. Chance, and also statistical causality,
remove both responsibility and seduction (or destiny). The dual rule of chance and necessity
expresses a human desire for control over the metamorphosis of things. This control destroys
the initiatory or ceremonial field. It thus paradoxically destroys any sense of mastery over our
destiny. The order of production exists to make the order of metamorphosis
impossible – to control flow and becoming. Simulation is also associated
with a process Baudrillard terms deterrence. This term is a play on nuclear deterrence
between the superpowers (before 1991), which Baudrillard saw as a telling case of
deterrence in general, a simulated conflict which exists to preclude a real
clash, a form of manipulation rather than destruction. Deterrence is not
so much a power relation as a mindset. It holds people in check by making
them feel powerless, disappointed, neutralised – deterred. When it is
strong enough, it no longer needs violent repression or war – it precludes
conflict in advance. In nuclear deterrence for instance, life is reduced to survival
and conflicts become pointless, as they can’t reach the ultimate stakes.
Simulation feigns reality and thereby deters or prevents reality. But this
feigned reality is not entirely unreal, because it produces effects of reality – it is like a
faked illness which produces real symptoms. Think for instance of punishments
applied in response to acts: they’re neither an objectively real consequence, since they’re
invented, nor an imagined consequence, since they actually happen. They’re a simulated
consequence, an artificially created hyper-reality. According to Baudrillard,
there is no true reality against which simulation can be compared. It is
therefore more subversive of reality than a simple appearance or
falsehood. It controls people in a different way – through persuasion or
modelling. Instead of demanding that people submit to a prior model or norm, it interpellates people as already being the
model or the majority. It thereby destroys the distance between the self and the norm, making transgression more difficult. It
creates a doubled self from which it is hard to extract oneself. The question “from where do you speak, how do you know?” is
silenced by the response, “but it is from your position that I speak”. Everything appears to come from and return to the people. The
doubled self is portrayed and displayed in forms such as CCTV images, without a gap between representation and what is
represented. This same doubling happens across different spheres – the model is truer than the true, fashion is more beautiful than
the beautiful, hyperreality is more real than the real, and so on. The effect of excess comes from the lack of depth (of the imaginary,
but also perhaps of relations and of context). Doubles are inherently fascinating. They’re very different from the seduction of

The double
effective images and illusions, such as trompe l’oeil (a type of art which can be mistaken for a real object).

allows a kind of manipulation or blackmail in which the system takes

hostage a part of the self – affect, desire, a secret – and uses it for control .
Baudrillard thinks we are stalked by our doubles, like in the film The Student of Prague. Yet
doubles are also insufficient. People don’t like being ‘verified’ and predicted in advance. People
prefer ideas of destiny to random probability. Deterrence is a barrier between
ourselves and our drive for the symbolic. Deterrence also has an effect of
deterring thought, of ‘mental deterrence’. It discourages people from
thinking critically, hence feeding unreality. Disempowerment feeds into
this deterrence of thought, as do the media, and the promotion of
superficial sociality. At the same time, the system also creates a kind of
generalised social lockdown or universal security system. This ‘lockup and
control system’ is designed to prevent any real event from happening .
This system, based on norms, replaces older systems of violence, war and
law, creating a social desert around itself. It tries to pre-plan everything,
to leave nothing to contingencies or chance. It tries to make everything
manageable through statistics and predetermined responses. The system
tries to prevent accidental death through systematic, organised death. For
Baudrillard, this is the culmination of years of civilising process and
socialisation. It is the culmination of the evolution of the dominant
system. The failure of progressive teleologies has occurred because
powers to lock-down and control have increased faster than powers to
emancipate. The result is a kind of generalised nihilism. Deterrence
induces general mobilisation, pacification and dissuasion – a death or
incorporation of active energies. The state dreams of dissuading and
annihilating all terrorism pre-emptively, through a generalised terror on
every level. This is the price of the security of which people now dream, as Baudrillard
already observed in 1983 – eighteen years before the state’s dream was realised. Overt and
selective repression transmutes over time into generalised preventive
repression. For instance, the police according to Baudrillard do not reduce
violence – they simply take it over from crime and and become even more
dangerous. The code deters every real process by means of its operational
double. For instance, it prevents real revolutions by means of simulated
revolutions, real wars by means of simulated wars, and so on. This leaves no
space for the real to unfold of its own accord or for events to happen. Baudrillard thinks
prisons and death are being replaced by a more subtle regime of control
based on therapy, reform and normalisation. The right and left are now
represented mainly by the split between direct repression and indirect pacification. Baudrillard
sees these options corresponding to the early, violent phase of capitalism, with its emphasis on
conscious psychology and responsibility, and its more advanced, ‘neo-capitalist’ form, which
draws on psychoanalysis and offers tolerance and reform. A therapeutic
model of
society, promoted by advertisers, politicians and modern experts, actually
covers up real conflicts and contradictions. It seeks to solve social problems by re-
injecting simulations such as controlled smiles and regulated communication. He also refers to a
regime of social control through security and safety, blackmailing people
into conformity with the threat of their own death. He sees this as
surrounding people with a sarcophagus to prevent them from dying – a
kind of living death. Deterrence functions by an anxiety to act because
action brings about massive destruction. Nuclear states can’t go to war
because of mutually assured destruction. Workers won’t strike because the entire
economy would be shut down. Small powers which get nuclear weapons actually
buy into their own deterrence. Memory of the Holocaust is neutralised by
its constant repetition on television. While this shuts down resistance, it
also makes the system’s power unusable. Power becomes frozen and self-
deterred. It creates a ‘protective zone’ of ‘maximum security’ which
radiates through the territory held by the system. It is a kind of ‘glacis’, a
zone where any assailant is constantly under fire from the system’s
defenders. In a simulated world, events are prevented because no social logic
or story can be deployed according to its own logic. A social force risks
annihilation if it tries this. This leads to an evacuation of any historical
stake from society. We are now living through the death pangs of strong
referentials, including of the sense of being in the march of history or in hope/at risk of a
pending revolution. It might actually be better to think of it as incapacitation
rather than deterrence. People become unable or afraid to act because
the capacity to fight and win has been taken away. This means that
everything is neutralised, and reinscribed in the system. This ‘absolute
model of security’ is according to Baudrillard elaborated from nuclear war. The
nuclear battle station is the point from which the model of deterrence
radiates out through social life. Deterrence is directed against a range of
phenomena such as complexity, finality, contradiction, accident, rupture,
chance, and transversality. Yet paradoxically, events continue to happen ‘at
ground level’, below the level of data-control. Misfortunes and personal crises
multiply. The social becomes organised like a disaster-movie script, with
constant struggles to survive, states of exception, discourses of risk-
avoidance and risk-management – a situation of everyday precarity. The
function of deterrence is not to prevent this permanent crisis. It is rather
to prevent it from having system-level effects. Phenomena such as the
Gulf War, Watergate, and other political/media events are treated by Baudrillard as
instances of deterrence. They are based on a simulation of a situation
where the old stakes still matter, keeping old antagonisms and lost
phenomena artificially alive as simulacra. They thus exude ‘operational
negativity’ – preventing the emergence of real antagonisms. Non-war in
the Gulf The theory of deterrence is exemplified in Baudrillard’s analysis of what
happened in 1991, when according to him, the Gulf War ‘did not take place’. What
took place, instead, was a ‘non-war’. This is a type of conflict specific to the third order
of simulation. A non-war is a simulated war. It reproduces exactly the elements
of a real war, down to its destruction, death, propaganda, and so on. But it is
not a situation which arises between adversaries, which is a real,
unpredictable event. A true war is a strategic conflict over an absent
centre of power which no-one can occupy. Both sides believe in a cause;
the outcome is unpredictable. This is why a non-war is not a true war.
Real power, according to Baudrillard, is a strategy, a relation of force, and a
stake. It is subject to death and the symbolic. On the other hand, power
exercised to conceal its own absence is no longer subject to death and the
symbolic. It can persist indefinitely, as an object of consumer demand . For
Baudrillard, war is pointless and impossible to wage in the nuclear era. There
is no proportion between means (total annihilation) and ends (strategic
objectives). Hence, the ‘scene’ of war – the scenario of total conflict to the
death, or of adversity over stakes between combatants – will never again
take place. War becomes ‘impossible to exchange'; it escapes symbolic
exchange. The distillation of war in everyday fear prevents the final
apocalyptic clash. Arguably, non-war is to war as hyperreality is to reality. A
non-war is a simulation in the sense of derivation from a prior model.
Western powers fight non-wars based on models, and go to war based on
models. The non-war, at least on the western side, is an operational unfolding of
models and signs already planned in advance. The symbolic dimension,
the exchange with the enemy, the reversibility of actions, are absent. This
is why, for Baudrillard, it is not a war, even though all the other
characteristics of war are very much present. He emphasises repeatedly
that non-war is still as deadly as war ever was. What it has lost is ‘the
adversity of the adversaries’, the ‘ideological seriousness’ of a war
between two counterposed possibilities, the reality of victory or defeat as
systemic changes. For Baudrillard, western non-wars are now simulations in that there isn’t
really a fight to the death between two adversaries. Rather, the purpose of western
power, and usually of both adversaries, is to prevent the liquidation of
the system’s deterrence. This requires the destruction of symbolic
exchange, and hence of ‘pre-capitalist’ societies and groups. Non-war is
missing the symbolic dimension a true war might have – the possibility of reversibility, or
conflictual dialogue with an enemy so to speak. Contact between America and Iraq
did not happen during the Gulf War. America can only imagine an
adversary in their own image. They are invulnerable to symbolic violence,
due to their pragmatism and masochism. America has been caught in a
spiral of unconditional repression by the aspiration to be a global police
force. They try to humiliate by defeating the enemy impersonally – “nothing personal” – and
avoid seeing or meeting the adversary. They seek to show the infallibility of their
machine, displaying signs of relentlessness. They seek to avoid any
reaction or living impulse. In electronic war, the enemy no longer exists –
there is only refractory data to be neutralised and brought into the
consensus. Non-war entails non-recognition of the enemy as such, with
precision and abstract operations displacing direct conflict. On the
American side, it is like safe sex – war with a condom on. But on the other
hand, America cannot imagine the other and therefore seeks to annihilate
whatever cannot be converted to the American way of life . Meanwhile, the
TV audience are also deterred, and experience voyeurism and repentance
over the fate of hostages. They consent to be gently terrorised, but never
lose their underlying indifference. Yet even this minimal participation is
enough to rescue war and politics, for now. America played the Gulf War
as a game of deterrence. They refused to bargain. Saddam, in contrast,
played it as a symbolic game of ruses, bargains, trickery and disguise . As a
result, both missed their target. They fought in two different times and
spaces. The enemy was foreclosed. There was not enough communication for
deterrence or war to be effective. Non-wars are not, however, directed primarily at rival
nation-states. They are primarily waged to domesticate or liquidate grassroots
movements and symbolic challenges which restore the dimensions of the
real and the event which the system fears. Non-war is waged to absorb
and reduce what is singular and irreducible. The Gulf War, Baudrillard suggests,
was aimed at the Islamic world. The French colonial war in Algeria was
aimed at the revolutionary movement. The Vietnam War was aimed at
guerilla revolt. Baudrillard’s reading of Vietnam (which could equally
apply to Iraq and Afghanistan) is that the real goal was to make the
enemy predictable. This is why the American defeat did not destroy American global
power. Each war ended as the revolutionary impulse was tamed or
bureaucratised. Non-wars are usually won or lost by which regime comes
under threat from its own population first. Sometimes, they are lost because an
accident, an event, or a loss of power to the other, breaks the machine of war and its
appearance of infallibility – as in Somalia.

The attempt to make the world transparent through information and research
is self-defeating. More knowledge fails to change reality. Facts and evidence are
uniquely dissuasive.
Baudrillard, 81 [Jean, “Simulacra and Simulations,” pg. 79-81]
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. Consider three hypotheses. Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the

Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning

brutal loss of signification in every domain.

is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected . In this case, one must appeal to a base productivity to replace
failing media. This is the whole ideology of free speech, of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of transmission, that is, into "antimedia" (pirate radio, etc.). Or information has nothing to do with
signification. It is something else, an operational model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely
functional, a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning, and thus should also not be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it does,
meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this case, there would simply be no significant relation between the inflation of information and the
deflation of meaning. Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it

The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive

neutralizes them.

action of information, the media, and the mass media . The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in

Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to

the face of every commonly held opinion.

media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or

 Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated
virtually asocial.

circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the

economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital.
Information is thought to create communication , and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it
that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and

We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha

irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose.

and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social
organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for
this very reason: because where we think that information produces
meaning, the opposite occurs. Information devours its own content. It
devours communication and the social . Rather than creating . And for two reasons. 1

communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication.

Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of
meaning speech, listeners who call in,
. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview,

participation at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are

concerned, you are the event More and more information is invaded by , etc."

this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening

dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one
stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication,
which is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the
, as one knows,

traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense

energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal
desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a
radical loss of meaning . It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there

it is a
first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none,

circular process The hyperreality of communication and of

that of simulation, that of the hyperreal.

meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished Thus .

not only communication but the social functions in a closed circuit, as a

lure to which the force of myth is attached. Belief, faith in information
attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself
by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was
attached to myths in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I know very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this
simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an
always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the

the pressure of information pursues an

masses. 2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media,

irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves

meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not
to a surplus of innovation , but, on the contrary, to total entropy. *1 Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly

This implosion
the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign.

should be analyzed according to the medium is the message McLuhan's formula, , the consequences

all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only

of which have yet to be exhausted. That means that

dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event whatever the

whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all

contents,

counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia , etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not
see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped
out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is and this is where McLuhan's formula leads, pushed to its limit there is not only an implosion of the message in the
medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of
the medium can no longer be determined. Even the "traditional" status of the media themselves, characteristic of modernity, is put in question. McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, which is the key
formula of the era of simulation (the medium is the message the sender is the receiver the circularity of all poles the end of panoptic and perspectival space such is the alpha and omega of our modernity), this
very formula must be imagined at its limit where, after all the contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such. Fundamentally, it is still the message
that lends credibility to the medium, that gives the medium its determined, distinct status as the intermediary of communication. Without a message, the medium also falls into the indefinite state characteristic of

the medium is
all our great systems of judgment and value. A single model, whose efficacy is immediate, simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the "real." Finally,

the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of
the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm
speaking particularly of electronic mass media) that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what
implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium
and of the real thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal

It is useless to
sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us.

dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation

through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single
nebula whose truth is indecipherable. The fact of this implosion of contents, of the absorption of meaning, of the evanescence of the medium
itself, of the reabsorption of every dialectic of communication in a total circularity of the model, of the implosion of the social in the masses, may seem catastrophic and desperate. But this is only the case in light

. We all live by a passionate idealism of meaning and

of the idealism that dominates our whole view of information

of communication, by an idealism of communication through meaning,

and, from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of meaning that lies
in wait for us . But one must realize that "catastrophe" has this "catastrophic" meaning of end and annihilation only in relation to a linear vision of accumulation, of productive finality,
imposed on us by the system. Etymologically, the term itself only signifies the curvature, the winding down to the bottom of a cycle that leads to what one could call the "horizon of the event," to an impassable
horizon of meaning: beyond that nothing takes place that has meaning for us but it suffices to get out of this ultimatum of meaning in order for the catastrophe itself to no longer seem like a final and nihilistic day
of reckoning, such as it functions in our contemporary imaginary. Beyond meaning, there is the fascination that results from the neutralization and the implosion of meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social, there
are the masses, which result from the neutralization and the implosion of the social. What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge the challenge of the masses to meaning and their silence (which is
not at all a passive resistance) the challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. All the marginal, alternative efforts to revive meaning are secondary in relation to that challenge. Evidently,
there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed [informe] or informed [informée] masses, or is it the masses who
victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them? Sometime ago, in "Requiem for the Media," I analyzed and condemned the media as
the institution of an irreversible model of communication without a response. But today? This absence of a response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of power, but as a counterstrategy of the
masses themselves when they encounter power. What then? Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the
violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make
themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the
terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction (cf. Umberto Eco on this eternal moral dilemma: how can one not speak of terrorism, how can one find a

The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they

good use of the media there is none).

manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the
vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to this, no logical
resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution. With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind exactly like children faced with the
demands of the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient,
conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy. To the demand of being an object, he opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of
emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness,

in the
hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive just as

political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation, expression,

and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and
subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior,
impact of all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject
position and of meaning precisely the practices of the masses that we
bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. The liberating
practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant
ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they
do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves
as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost,
of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game a
form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more
serious today To a system whose argument is oppression and repression,
.

the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this

strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if
we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the
current argument of the system is to maximize speech , the maximum
production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal
of meaning and of the spoken word or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. It is the strategy of the
masses: it is equivalent to returning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was

. All the movements that only play on

ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter

liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of

the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising ," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects

do not see that they are going in the direction of the system,
and of the masses,

whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration

of meaning and of speech.

The will to transparency of geopolitical events is self-defeating. The moment

war appears, it immediately disappears as it is swamped by media
indeterminacy. This confusion produces constant implosive violence as we
attempt to impose meaning onto the map of the globe.
Artrip and Debrix 14. Ryan E. Artrip, Doctoral Student, ASPECT, Virginia Polytechnic
Institute, and Francois Debrix, professor of political science at Virginia Polytechnical Institute,
“The Digital Fog of War: Baudrillard and the Violence of Representation,” Volume 11, Number 2
(May, 2014)

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 the demos) 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 implosivityor
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).

We don’t have to defend meaning. The form of meaning is always unhappy.

Any attempt to impose meaning paradoxically terminates in its own
disappearance, which is great because any idea that can be defended deserves
to disappear. The form of reality is simply too obvious to be real. We should
engage in the felicitous and happy form of language to push debate through to
its own disappearance. This is the only political act left. Bet on the form of
radical illusion.
Baudrillard 96. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, pg. 96

Say: This is real, the world is real, the real exists (I have met it) -- no one
laughs. Say: This is a simulacrum, you are merely a simulacrum, this war is
a simulacrum -- everyone bursts out laughing. With forced, condescending
laughter, or uncontrollable mirth, as though at a childish joke or an
obscene proposition. Everything to do with the simulacrum is taboo or obscene, as is
everything relating to sex or death. Yet it is much rather reality and obviousness
which are obscene. It is the truth we should laugh at. You can imagine a
culture where everyone laughs spontaneously when someone says: `This
is true', `This is real'.
All this defines the irresolvable relationship between thought and reality.
A certain form of thought is bound to the real. It starts out from the
hypothesis that ideas have referents and that there is a possible ideation
of reality. A comforting polarity, which is that of tailor-made dialectical
and philosophical solutions. The other form of thought is eccentric to the
real, a stranger to dialectics, a stranger even to critical thought. It is not
even a disavowal of the concept of reality. It is illusion, power of illusion,
or, in other words, a playing with reality, as seduction is a playing with desire,
as metaphor is a playing with truth. This radical thought does not stem from a
philosophical doubt, a utopian transference, or an ideal transcendence. It is the material
illusion, immanent in this so-called `real' world. And thus it seems to come
from elsewhere. It seems to be the extrapolation of this world into
another world.
At all events, there is incompatibility between thought and the real. There is
no sort of necessary or natural transition from the one to the other. Neither alternation,
nor alternative: only otherness and distance keep them charged up. This is
what ensures the singularity of thought, the singularity by which it
constitutes an event, just like the singularity of the world, the singularity
by which it too constitutes an event.
It has doubtless not always been so. One may dream of a happy conjunction of idea and reality,
cradled by the Enlightenment and modernity, in the heroic age of critical thought. Yet critical
thought, the butt of which was a certain illusion -- superstitious, religious or ideological -- is
in substance ended. Even if it had survived its catastrophic secularization
in all the political movements of the twentieth century, this ideal and
seemingly necessary relationship between the concept and reality would,
at all events, be destroyed today. It has broken down under pressure from
a gigantic technical and mental simulation, to be replaced by an
autonomy of the virtual, henceforth liberated from the real, and a
simultaneous autonomy of the real which we see functioning on its own
account in a demented -- that is, infinitely self-referential -- perspective .
Having been expelled, so to speak, from its own principle, extraneized, the
real has itself become an extreme phenomenon . In other words, one can no
longer think it as real, but as exorbitated, as though seen from another
world -- in short, as illusion. Imagine the stupefying experience which the discovery of a
real world other than our own would represent. The objectivity of our world is a
discovery we made, like America -- and at almost the same time. Now
what one has discovered, one can never then invent. And so we
discovered reality, which remains to be invented (or: so we invented
reality, which remains to be discovered).
Why might there not be as many real worlds as imaginary ones? Why a single real world? Why
such an exception? Truth to tell, the real world, among all the other
possible
ones, is unthinkable, except as dangerous superstition. We must break
with it as critical thought once broke (in the name of the real!) with
religious superstition. Thinkers, one more effort! 1
In any case, the two orders of thought are irreconcilable. They each follow
their course without merging; at best they slide over each other like
tectonic plates, and occasionally their collision or subduction creates fault
lines into which reality rushes. Fate is always at the intersection of these
two lines of force. Similarly, radical thought is at the violent intersection of
meaning and non-meaning, of truth and non-truth, of the continuity of
the world and the continuity of the nothing.
Unlike the discourse of the real, which gambles on the fact of there being
something rather than nothing, and aspires to being founded on the
guarantee of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought, for its
part, wagers on the illusion of the world. It aspires to the status of illusion,
restoring the non-veracity of facts, the non-signification of the world,
proposing the opposite hypothesis that there is nothing rather than
something, and going in pursuit of that nothing which runs beneath the
apparent continuity of meaning.
The radical prediction is always the prediction of the non-reality of facts, of the illusoriness of
the state of fact. It begins
only with the presentiment of that illusoriness, and
is never confused with the objective state of things. Every confusion of
that kind is of the order of the confusion of the messenger and the
message, which leads to the elimination of the messenger bearing bad
news (for example, the news of the uncertainty of the real, of the non-
occurrence of certain events, of the nullity of our values).
Every confusion of thought with the order of the real -- that alleged
`faithfulness' to the real of a thought which has cooked it up out of
nothing -- is hallucinatory. It arises, moreover, from a total misunderstanding
about language, which is illusion in its very movement, since it is the
bearer of that continuity of the void, that continuity of the nothing at the
very heart of what it says, since it is, in its very materiality, deconstruction
of what it signifies. Just as photography connotes the effacing, the death of
what it represents -- which lends it its intensity -- so what lends writing,
fictional or theoretical, its intensity is the void, the nothingness running
beneath the surface, the illusion of meaning, the ironic dimension of
language, correlative with that of the facts themselves, which are never anything but what
they are [ne sont jamais que ce qu'ils sont]. That is to say, they are never more than what they
are and they are, literally, never only what they are [jamais que ce qu'ils sont]. The irony of
the facts, in their wretched reality, is precisely that they are only what they
are but that, by that very fact, they are necessarily beyond. For de facto
existence is impossible -- nothing is wholly obvious without becoming
enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.
It is this ironic transfiguration which constitutes the event of language. And
it is to restoring this fundamental illusion of the world and language that
thought must apply itself, if it is not stupidly to take concepts in their
literalness -- messenger confused with the message, language confused
with its meaning and therefore sacrificed in advance.
There is a twofold, contradictory exigency in thought. It is not to analyse the world in order to extract from it an improbable truth,
not to adapt to the facts in order to abstract some logical construction from them, but to set in place a form, a matrix of illusion and
disillusion, which seduced reality will spontaneously feed and which will, consequently, be verified remorselessly (the only need is to
shift the camera angle from time to time). For reality asks nothing other than to submit itself to hypotheses. And it confirms them
all. That, indeed, is its ruse and its vengeance.

The theoretical ideal would be to set in place propositions in such a way that they could be disconfirmed by reality, in such a way

reality is an illusion, and all

that reality could only oppose them violently, and thereby unmask itself. For

thought must seek first of all to unmask it. To do that, it must itself advance
behind a mask and constitute itself as a decoy, without regard for its own
truth. It must pride itself on not being an instrument of analysis, not being
a critical tool. For it is the world which must analyse itself. It is the world
itself which must reveal itself not as truth, but as illusion . The
derealization of the world will be the work of the world itself. 2
Reality must be caught in the trap, we must move quicker than reality .
Ideas, too, have to move faster than their shadows. But if they go too
quickly, they lose even their shadows. No longer having even the shadow
of an idea. ... Words move quicker than meaning, but if they go too
quickly, we have madness: the ellipsis of meaning can make us lose even
the taste for the sign. What are we to exchange this portion of shadow and labour against
-- this saving of intellectual activity and patience? What can we sell it to the devil for? It is very
difficult to say. We are, in fact, the orphans of a reality come too late, a reality which is itself, like
truth, something registered only after the event.

The ultimate is for an idea to disappear as idea to become a thing among

things. That is where it finds its accomplishment. Once it has become
consubstantial with the surrounding world, there is no call for it to appear, nor to be defended
as such. Evanescence of the idea by silent dissemination. An idea is never
destined to burst upon the world, but to be extinguished into it, into its
showing-through in the world, the world's showing-through in it. A book
ends only with the disappearance of its object. Its substance must leave
no trace. This is the equivalent of a perfect crime. Whatever its object,
writing must make the illusion of that object shine forth, must make it an
impenetrable enigma -- unacceptable to the Realpolitiker of the concept.
The objective of writing is to alter its object, to seduce it, to make it
disappear for itself. Writing aims at a total resolution -- a poetic
resolution, as Saussure would have it, that resolution indeed of the
rigorous dispersal of the name of God.
Contrary to what is said about it (the real is what resists, what all hypotheses run up against),
reality is not very solid and seems predisposed, rather, to retreat in disorder. Whole
swathes of reality are collapsing, as in the collapse of Baliverna (Buzzati),
where the slightest flaw produces a chain reaction. We find decomposed
remnants of it everywhere, as in Borges's `Of Exactitude in Science' . 3
Not only does it no longer put up any resistance against those who
denounce it, but it even eludes those who take its side. This is perhaps a
way of exacting vengeance on its partisans: by throwing them back on
their own desire. In the end, it is perhaps more a sphinx than a bitch.
More subtly, it wreaks vengeance on those who deny it by paradoxically
proving them right. When the most cynical, most provocative hypothesis
is verified, the trick really is a low one; you are disarmed by the
lamentable confirmation of your words by an unscrupulous reality.
So, for example, you put forward the idea of simulacrum, without really believing in it, even hoping that the real will refute it (the
guarantee of scientificity for Popper).

Alas, only the fanatical supporters of reality react; reality, for its part, does not seem to wish to prove you wrong. Quite to the
contrary, every kind of simulacrum parades around in it. And reality, filching the idea, henceforth adorns itself with all the rhetoric of
simulation. It is the simulacrum which ensures the continuity of the real today, the simulacrum which now conceals not the truth,
but the fact that there isn't any -- that is to say, the continuity of the nothing.

Such is the paradox of all thought which disputes the validity of the real:
when it sees itself robbed of its own concept. Events, bereft of meaning in
themselves, steal meaning from us. They adapt to the most fantastical hypotheses,
just as natural species and viruses adapt to the most hostile environments. They have an
extraordinary mimetic capacity: no longer is it theories which adapt to
events, but the reverse. And, in so doing, they mystify us, for a theory which is
verified is no longer a theory. It's terrifying to see the idea coincide with the reality.
These are the death-throes of the concept. The epiphany of the real is the twilight of its
concept.
We have lost that lead which ideas had over the world, that distance which meant that an idea
remained an idea. Thought has to be exceptional, anticipatory and at the
margin -- has to be the projected shadow of future events. Today, we are
lagging behind events. They may sometimes give the impression of receding; in fact,
they passed us long ago. The simulated disorder of things has moved faster than we
have. The reality effect has succumbed to acceleration -- anamorphosis of speed. Events, in
their being, are never behind themselves, are always out ahead of their
meaning. Hence the delay of interpretation, which is now merely the
retrospective form of the unforeseeable event.
What are we to do, then? What becomes of the heterogeneity of thought
in a world won over to the craziest hypotheses? When everything
conforms, beyond even our wildest hopes, to the ironic, critical,
alternative, catastrophic model?
Well, that is paradise: we are beyond the Last Judgement, in immortality .
The only problem is to survive there. For there the irony, the challenging,
the anticipation, the maleficence come to an end, as inexorably as hope dies at
the gates of hell. And it is indeed there that hell begins , the hell of the unconditional
realization of all ideas, the hell of the real. You can see why, as Adorno says, concepts prefer to
scupper themselves rather than reach that point.

Something else has been stolen from us: indifference. The power of
indifference, which is the quality of the mind, as opposed to the play of
differences, which is the characteristic of the world. Now, this has been
stolen from us by a world grown indifferent, as the extravagance of thought has
been stolen from us by an extravagant world. When things, events, refer one to another and to
their undifferentiated concept, then the equivalence of the world meets and cancels out the
indifference of thought -- and we have boredom. No more altercations; nothing at
stake. It is the parting of the dead sea.
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 preempt 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 paint 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 demoralizingly 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 concepts 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.
 1NC Alternative – Seduction
We affirm a process of seduction, rather than imposing a specific value criteria
by which we understand bodies, we affirm the affective unknowability present
in all object. We are a refusal of the affirmative’s/negative’s static value
judgments that destroy singularity
Baudrillard 77. Jean Baudrillard, dead French philosopher, former professor emeritus at the University de
Paris X, Forget Foucault, MIT Press, pg. 37-41

The production channel leads from work to sex, but only by switching
tracks; as we move from political to "libidinal" economy (the last acquisition of
'68), we change from a violent and archaic model of socialization (work) to a
more subtle and fluid model which is at once more "psychic" and more in
touch with the body (the sexual and the libidinal). There is a metamorphosis and
a veering away from labor power to drive (pulsion) , a veering away from a model
founded on a system of representations (the famous "ideology") to a model operating on a
system of affect (sex being only a kind of anamorphosis of the categorical social imperative) .
From one discourse to the other-since it really is a question of discourse-there runs
the same ultimatum of production in the literal sense of the word. The
original sense of "production" is not in fact that of material manufacture; rather, it
means to render visible, to cause to appear and be made to appear: pro-
ducere. Sex is produced as one produces a document, or as an actor is said to appear (se
produire) on stage. To produce is to force what belongs to another order (that
of secrecy and seduction) to materialize. Seduction is that which is
everywhere and always opposed to pro-duction; seduction withdraws
something from the visible order and so runs counter to production,
whose project is to set everything up in clear view, whether it be an
object, a number, or a concept. Let everything be produced, be read,
become real, visible, and marked with the sign of effectiveness; let
everything be transcribed into force relations, into conceptual systems or
into calculable energy; let everything be said, gathered, indexed and
registered: this is how sex appears in pornography, but this is more
generally the project of our whole culture, whose natural condition is
“obscenity.” Ours is a culture of "monstration" and demonstration, of
"productive" monstrosity (the "confession" so well analyzed by Foucault is one of
its forms) . We never find any seduction there-nor in pornography with its
immediate production of sexual acts in a frenzied activation of pleasure;
we find no seduction in those bodies penetrated by a gaze literally
absorbed by the suction of the transparent void. Not a shadow of
seduction can be detected in the universe of production, ruled by the
transparency principle governing all forces in the order of visible and
calculable phenomena: objects, machines, sexual acts, or gross national
product.5 Pornography is only the paradoxical limit of the sexual, a realistic exacerbation and
a mad obsession with the real-this is the "obscene," etymologically speaking and in all senses.
But isn't the sexual itself a forced materialization, and isn't the coming of
sexuality already part of the Western notion of what is real-the obsession
peculiar to our culture with "instancing" and instrumentalizing all things ?
Just as it is absurd to separate in other cultures the religious, the economic, the political, the
juridical, and even the social and other phantasmagorical categories, for the reason that they do
not occur there, and because these concepts are like so many venereal diseases with which we
infect them in order to "understand" them better, so it is also absurd to give autonomy to the
sexual as "instance" and as an irreducible given to which all other "givens" can be reduced. We
need to do a critique of sexual Reason, or rather a genealogy of sexual Reason, as Nietzsche has
done a genealogy of Morals-because this is our new moral system. One could say of sexuality as
of death: "It is a habit to which consciousness has not long been accustomed." We do not
understand, or we vaguely sympathize with, those cultures for which the
sexual act has no finality in itself and for which sexuality does not have
the deadly seriousness of an energy to be freed, a forced ejaculation, a
production at all cost, or of a hygienic reckoning of the body. These are
cultures which maintain long processes of seduction and sensuousness in
which sexuality is one service among others, a long procedure of gifts and
counter-gifts; lovemaking is only the eventual outcome of this reciprocity measured to the
rhythm of an ineluctable ritual. For us, this no longer has any meaning: for us, the sexual has
become strictly the actualization of a desire in a moment of pleasure—all
the rest is "literature." What an extraordinary crystallization of the orgastic
function, which is itself the materialization of an energetic substance.
Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation. More and more, all seduction,
all manner of seduction (which is itself a highly ritualized process), disappears
behind the naturalized sexual imperative calling for the immediate
realization of a desire. Our center of gravity has in fact shifted toward an unconscious and
libidinal economy which only leaves room for the total naturalization of a desire bound either to
fateful drives or to pure and simple mechanical operation, but above all to the imaginary order
of repression and liberation. Nowadays, one no longer says: "You've got a soul
and you must save it," but: "You've got a sexual nature, and you must find
out how to use it well." "You've got an unconscious, and you must learn
how to liberate it." "You've got a body, and you must know how to enjoy
it." "You've got a libido, and you must know how to spend it," etc. , etc. This
compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what
is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the
force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any
fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments
must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction . This
is the form itself which the current realization of value takes. It is the
form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it
appears at the level of bodies. Besides, the body to which we constantly refer has no
other reality than that of the sexual and productive model. It is capital which gives birth
in the same movement to the energetic of labor power and to the body
we dream of today as the locus of desire and the unconscious. This is the
body which serves as a sanctuary for psychic energy and drives and which, dominated by these
drives and haunted by primary processes, has itself become primary process-and thus an anti-
body, the ultimate revolutionary referent. Both are simultaneously conceived in repression, and
their apparent antagonism is yet another effect of repression. Thus, to rediscover in the
secret of bodies an unbound "libidinal" energy which would be opposed
to the bound energy of productive bodies, and to rediscover a phantasmal
and instinctual truth of the body in desire, is still only to unearth the
psychic metaphor of capital. This is the nature of desire and of the
unconscious: the trash heap of political economy and the psychic
metaphor of capital. And sexual jurisdiction is the ideal means, in a
fantastic extension of the jurisdiction governing private property, for
assigning to each individual the management of a certain capital: psychic
capital, libidinal capital, sexual capital, unconscious capital. And each
individual will be accountable to himself for his capital, under the sign of
his own liberation. This is what Foucault tells us (in spite of himself) : nothing
functions with repression (repression), everything functions with production;
nothing functions with repression (refoulement) , everything functions with
liberation. But it is the same thing. Any form of liberation is fomented by
repression: the liberation of productive forces is like that of desire; the
liberation of bodies is like that of women's liberation, etc. There is no exception to the
logic of liberation: any force or any liberated form of speech constitutes
one more turn in the spiral of power. This is how "sexual liberation" accomplishes a
miracle by uniting in the same revolutionary ideal the two major effects of repression, liberation
and sexuality.
 1NC Alternative – Word-Play
This overproliferation of harmony has created an immune system of dissent
suppression in the Chinese government– protest was not censored, it simply
had been harmonized; traitorous officials did not die, they simply had been
suicided
In response to this endless analysis of the World Fair, the globe’s simulation of
harmony, the 1AC is act of 恶搞 (Ègǎo), an effusive playing with language – the
rendering of 和谐 (héxié) into 河蟹 (héxiè), of harmony into river crab, of
debate into the bait for the trap of its own making –an act onco-operativity
giving rise to a cancerous metastases that the system has no choice but to
destroy, yet cannot destroy without destroying itself – the great firewall has
paradoxically been great firewalled
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin [Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster
University], “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of
Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages
174-213)

Chinese discourse on “harmony”

ITERATION AND LANGUAGE PLAY: RESISTNIG HARMONISATION Previous chapters of this thesis have examined how the

operates by way of exclusion of discord, and through the violent spatio-

temporal double-act of inclusion into sameness and exclusion as
“behind”. If such attempts at harmonisation of others have been traced in various times and spaces, this is not to imply that they are not crucially linked to the sovereign power of the policy discourse, by way of which we began the

This version of harmony has bordered its national space in

exploration of harmony in this thesis: Hu’s harmony.

many ways, including by the insistence on territorial sovereignty so

closely associated with Hu’s “harmonious world” policy. This insistence on
sovereignty and non-interference has been deployed precisely to
legitimate in the international arena the various forms of harmonisation
that have come to be associated with harmonious world’s policy twin,
“harmonious society”. One key tactic employed by the state for Being harmonised online

containing dissidence and making resistance more difficult has been

through harmonising expression on the Internet. Where some may initially have imagined the Internet to provide the space for near-

state
unlimited freedom of expression and provide a tool to hold government accountable, more empirical studies soon resulted in more sober analyses (Chase and Mulvenon, 2002; Kurlantzick, 2004; Lagerkvist, 2005). On the one hand, the

has been active in trying to include the public through e- governance and
“guidance” (导向), and by shaping opinion through overt or covert
propaganda online Officials have portrayed the implementation of
(Lagerkvist, 2005: 206).

information and communications technologies in police and security

organs as a “necessary strategic choice”, echoing Hu’s view of the future in terms of an “inevitable choice” (Minister of Public Security, Jia Chunwang, in Huliang -

One example of such propaganda is the anonymous

175 - zhoukan, 2002, cited in Lagerkvist, 2005).

participation in online fora by what netizens call the “50 cent party”,
individuals paid to tow the party line and steer online discussion so as to
be favourable to the party. Another example is the increasing amount of
what Johan Lagerkvist has called “ideotainment”. This term denotes “the
juxtaposition of images, symbolic representations, and sounds of popular
Web and mobile phone culture together with both subtle and overt
ideological constructs and nationalistic propaganda”, which may be
exemplified by the Online Expo examined in the previous chapter (Lagerkvist, 2008: 121). The
desired outcome of such e-governance, according to Lagerkvist, is “installing a machine” that can provide “‘scientific and correct’ knowledge among citizens and state officials” (2005: 197). The success of the state in achieving the goals of its inclusionary “thought

state has been simultaneously active in trying to

work” (思想工作) nonetheless remains questionable (Lynch, 1999). On the other hand, the

exclude the public, through deleting posts and blocking the Internet . Border regions like

about the work of their “harmony

Xinjiang have been without Internet access for long periods as a way to hinder communication and spread of information

makers” and to pre-empt the spread of “splittism”.115 A parallel strategy

deployed to keep the flow of information harmonious and pure
throughout China has been to surround Chinese virtual space by a “Great
Firewall”, a programme that blocks many sites based outside China from
being accessed from within China and to simultaneously (including Google+, Facebook, Twitter and other social media),

demand extensive policing and censorship of sites located “inside” this

walled space. An important part of this exclusionary censorship practice
has been the widespread blocking of specific words in online
communication. A message that includes one of the thousands of
characters that at any particular moment is deemed “sensitive” can be
instantly deleted by censorship software. The line between acceptable and unacceptable expression remains elusive and shifting (Breslin and Shen, 2010:
266). In drawing it, however, explanatory emphasis is on a language of “health”, with censorship purported to 115 The blackouts were noted in the Western mainstream press (Blanchard, 2009; AFP, 2011). For a fuller explanation of exactly what this blockage

In response to the
entailed in terms of access, see Summers (2009) - 176 - cleanse “pollution” and “unhealthy” elements in favour of “health” and “hygiene” (Lagerkvist, 2008: 123, 134).

governmental policing of the Internet, and to its “harmony makers” in off-

line conflicts, the notion of having “been harmonised” has grown (bei4hexie4le 被和谐了)

popular as a way of expressing discontent. The use of this passive

grammatical voice dubbed by one commentator the “passive (bei 被),

subversive indicates that one has been coercively made to (appear to)
” (Kuhn, 2010),

do something. The term gained such popularity that the “passive tense
era” made the top of the list
(beishidai4 被时代) of Southern4Metropolis4Weekly’s 2009 list of most popular neologisms (Southern Metropolis Weekly, 2009), and bei4was made quasi-official
when an arm of the Education Ministry elected it the Chinese character of the year in 2009. Lei Yi, one judge of the event and a historian of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the term won by a landslide by popular Internet vote: “[w]e felt we should
recognize this result … so we named ‘bei’ as the character most representative of China’s situation last year” (in Kuhn, 2010). Doubleleaf, a Beijing-based blogger who had his blog “harmonised”, meaning shut down, emphasised in an interview the subversive nature

[f]or centuries we’ve been told that the emperor represented the
of bei:

people’s interests … or that some organization or some leader

represented our interests. People did not realize that they had ‘been
represented’. This word of the year signals the awakening of citizens’
consciousness Chinese netizens have made use of this language in
(in Kuhn, 2010).4

particular to criticise the Chinese censorship of the Internet to shut down

any uncomfortable discussion. For example, one Flash animation, found
at an online competition to raise awareness about scientific development
and harmonious society, features a Bulletin Board System (BBS) comment
thread that gets “harmonised”. It shows the BBS thread of net jargon,
discussions of a famous person, people trading insults and the posts being
suddenly deleted. When one netizen asks what happened the answer is
“they have been harmonised”. Finally, a smiling Hu Jintao appears
alongside the slogan “Everyone is responsible for a harmonious society”
The Flash animation that has
(renren4you4ze4hexie4shehui4 人人有责，和谐社会) (Martinsen, 2007; Zhuru cilei, 2007). Egao: Resistance in the sphere of politics and the political

“been harmonised” is part of a wider form of online culture known as

egao4(恶搞), which has become popular since the launch of the
harmonious policies and received international attention since around
2006. The term is made up of characters e (恶), which means bad or evil,
and gao (搞), which means to change or deal with, leading to translations
of the word as “evil jokes reckless doings or simply ” (Li Hongmei, 2011: 71), “ ” (Meng Bingchun, 2009: 52),

“spoofing” This spoofing culture uses irony and satire to mock

(Lagerkvist, 2010: 150).

power holders as well as government policies and practices. Scholars have

almost universally described egao as a form of “resistance”, “subversion”
or “contestation”. “[e]very joke is a tiny revolution”
116 Many base their claim on George Orwell’s comment that (for example Li

it is moreover based on an understanding of a

Hongmei, 2011: 72; Tang Lijun and Bhattacharya, 2011: 2.4). To a number of commentators,

discrepancy between on the one hand PRC party-state language, including

tifa like “harmonious world” and “harmonious society”, and on the other
hand an “alternative political discourse” ( “hidden transcript” Meng Bingchun, 2009: 39) or (Perry, 2007: 10;
Esarey and Xiao Qiang, 2008: 752; Meng Bingchun, 2009: 39), including expressions like having “been harmonised”.117 The most pervasive scholarly interpretation of this relation between official and unofficial discourse has been in terms of Bakhtinian carnival – an
unruly and fantastic time and space in medieval and renaissance Europe. One volume characterizes the entire Chinese cyberspace as a quasi-separate space of the carnivalesque (Herold and Marolt, 2011). On this understanding, the carnival is an event in a time and
space 116 For example Séverine Arsène (2010), Larry Diamond (2010: 74), Nigel Inkster (2010: 7.2), Tang Lijun and Yang Peidong (2011: 680, 682, 687), Seth Wiener (2011: 156) and Xiao Qiang (Xiao Qiang, 2011a: 52). 117 Scholars have discussed this discrepancy in
various contexts. See for examples Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (2001), He Zhou (2008), Esarey and Xiao Qiang (2008), Patricia Thornton (2002). - 178 - where rules are suspended, separate from normal constraints (Herold, 2011: 11, 12). It is the
antithesis of normal life, “free and unrestricted” (Bakhtin cited in Herold, 2011: 12). Similarly, to Li Hongmei, this space “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin, 1984 [1965]: 10, cited in Li Hongmei, 2011: 72).

egao “virtual carnival” resistance is said to be

Meng Bingchun reads a “collective attempt at resistance” (2011: 44) in the (2011: 45, 46). This

directed against the “official” or “established” order (Meng Bingchun, 2011: 46) (Li Hongmei, 2011: 71) . Tang Lijun and Syamantak

in such online
Bhattacharya, despite reading egao as carnivalesque, take it to reveal a “widespread feeling of powerlessness, rather than offering the general public any political power” (2011). Nonetheless, they see

spoofs “the potential to generate a chain of related satirical work, which

can create a satire movement and subject power to sustained shame and
ridicule” (Tang Lijun and Bhattacharya, 2011). One scholar who has remained decidedly skeptical to such claims about resistance is Johan Lagerkvist, who asks with regards to egao: “[i]s it a weapon4of4the4weak, or is it a rather feeble
expression among well-heeled and largely apolitical urban youth-” (2010: 151). Lagerkvist explains egao as “[p]ermeated with irony and an ambivalence that occasionally resembles, or indeed is, resistance” (2010: 146). Nonetheless, to him, “[t]he crux of the matter
 [i]nstead of viewing the egao
is only what larger influence you have on politics, if that is at all desired, if your critique is too subtle” (2010: 146). Therefore, he concludes:

phenomenon as politically subversive, at least in the short term, it may

make more sense to view it as the growth of an alternate civility, more
indicative of social and generational change, building up ever more
pressure against the political system – in the long term (Lagerkvist, 2010: 158). To Lagerkvist the point of egao then, for now

Egao is “neither performed to be, nor perceived as, a

at least, is to vent anger in a non- revolutionary manner.

direct threat against the Party-state” This (Lagerkvist, 2010: 159). In this chapter I take Lagerkvist’s point that irony is not by4definition radical or revolutionary.

claim in itself, however, says little about what it does do (or undo), but
simply leaves the question open. In previous analyses of egao, the focus is
clearly on potential for changing politics, but none of the authors sustain
any discussion about what they mean by this “politics”. In order to understand their disagreement, we can benefit from
returning to the distinction made at the outset of this thesis between politics in the narrow sense, or politics,4and politics in the wider sense, or the4 political. I have taken the latter to be concerned with “the establishment of that very social order which sets out a

depoliticization” is equal to “a
particular, historically specific account of what counts as politics and defines other areas of social life as not politics” (Edkins, 1999: 2). On such a reading, “

reduction to calculability” or the application of rules To repoliticize, (Edkins, 1999: 1, 11).

again, is instead “to interrupt discourse, to challenge what have, through

discursive practices, been constituted as normal, natural, and accepted
ways of carrying on” (Edkins, 1999: 12). In view of this differentiation between politics and the political, Lagerkvist’s evaluation of egao with regards to what larger influence it has on politics seems to refer to

These
politics in the narrow sense, rather than the political. Tang and Bhattacharya’s judgment of egao4with reference to its potential to “create a satire movement” seems to be concerned with the same narrow politics.

accounts, then, dismiss egao as not political unless it can achieve some
movement or influence with regards to politics (in the narrow sense). This
makes the scholars’ readings of egao themselves depoliticizing. My concern, by contrast, is rather with
the question of the political, and I will comment on this in more detail at the end of this chapter.118 It is in this realm of discourse and the political that I ground an understanding of resistance. The previous chapter pointed to the problems of conceptualizing
resistance as revealing “realities”, “the facts”, when what we are dealing with is a hyperreal system. Rather, I argued, we need to think about theory and resistance as a challenge. What does this mean- Roland Bleiker has written about the type of resistance that
occurs in this realm of the discursive, a resistance that revolves around interactions between different types of speech. To him: 118 My discussion of the literatures on egao in relation to politics and the political here draws on Nordin and Richaud (2012), where we

Aesthetic
discuss the distinction as perceived by the young netizens who produce and consume it, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. [o]vertly committed art forms often do no more than promote a particular position….

politics, by contrast, has to do with the ability of artistic engagements to

challenge, in a more fundamental way, how we think about and represent
the political. Here the political content lies in the aesthetic form itself,
which often is not political in an explicit and immediately recognisable
manner engaging with language is engaging in social
(Bleiker, 2009: 8). On this understanding, Bleiker has shown that

struggle Alternative forms of language, he argues, can challenge “the

(2000: 43).

state’s promotion of a black-and-white, one-dimensional and teleological

approach to history” by celebrating multiplicity and making ambivalence
part of language (Bleiker, 2000: 43). He moreover shows that this is part of global politics through drawing on David Campbell to the effect that the everyday life in which these forms
of linguistic resistance are deployed is not “a synonym for the local level, for in it global interconnections, local resistances, transterritorial flows, state politics, regional dilemmas, identity formations, and so on are

Alternative forms of speech and writing, then,

always already present” (Campbell, 1996: 23, cited in Bleiker, 2000: 44).

show how political change can be brought about by forms of resistance

that “deliberately and self-consciously stretch, even violate existing
linguistic rules” because in doing so they can provide us “with different
eyes, with the opportunity to reassess anew the spatial and political [and,
I would add, temporal] dimensions of global life” Rather than (Bleiker, 2000: 45).

seeking a quick-fix by revealing the scandalous “truth”, or forming a mass

movement explicitly aimed at intervening in narrow politics, this
discursive form of resistance works through pushing gradually at the
terms in which we can conceive of the world. It thereby “resists the
temptation to provide ‘concrete’ answers to ‘concrete’ questions” (Bl
eiker, 2000: 45). In the rest of this
chapter I examine egao as one particular instance that can help us think further about such linguistic resistance in/to “harmonious world”. Resisting harmonisation and deconstructive reading The above example of having “been harmonised” shows how Chinese

By re-citing official
netizens are “being harmonised” by the government, but also how they are negotiating such “harmonisation” through language and grammar. This is what I mean when I write that tifa are iterative.

language and reinscribing it in other chains of meaning, Chinese netizens

are turning its purported message against itself. Where Hu’s harmony
purports to be inclusive, peaceful and open, its re-iteration with a simple
grammatical modifier, bei, reads this official take on harmony as being
exclusive, violent and working to close down possibilities for difference.
This shows us that language is indeed a crucial part not only for the
government to try to harmonise dissidents, but also for these to negotiate
(or possibly resist) such harmonisation. This language play is thus made
possible by iterability, which means we can remove the repeatable
meaning of a term like “harmony” from the specific context in which it
was first deployed and “recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it
or grafting4it onto other chains” harmony” does not have (Derrida, 1988: 9, cf. Massey, 2005: 19). For this reason “

one fixed meaning, but we can play with it, graft it into other chains of
signification that can reveal meanings that were always already there in
harmony in the first place. This possibility is exploited by netizens. We can read deconstruction taking place in the term “harmony” in many places. What dissident use does is precisely shake it loose
from its intended meaning in Hu’s policy documents, reversing and displacing its meaning, without therefore separating it from that policy discourse. Below I illustrate how this takes place in various tactics of resisting harmonisation in China. The point is to not
simply accept “harmony” as having one straightforward meaning, to obey, avoid or bin the term. Instead, we can, as Baudrillard would have it, “recycle” it in potentially subversive ways. Recycling4harmony4(和
谐)41:4Close4reading4of4the4radicals4that4make4up4a4character4 - 182 - Figure 9: Close reading the radicals of “harmony” (Source: Danwei.org) Derrida’s way of reading a text is often termed “close reading”, which involves paying attention to the details of
structure, grammar and etymology of a term or text. This is a tactic we often use in academia when we discuss the meaning of Chinese terms through a close reading of the radicals that make up a character. This is also a common practice among netizens, in online
discussions and in other media, like the above logo from the Economic4Observer for its feature section on the 2006 NPC and CPPCC Sessions (Martinsen, 2006). The English term “harmony” comes from Greek harmos or harmonía, meaning “joint, agreement,
concord”.119 和谐 is usually translated as “harmonious” or “concordant”, the individual characters carrying the same meaning. 谐 is composed of radicals 讠(言) “words” and 皆 “all”.120 With the 口 “mouth” radical the 和 character, pronounced hé, can signify
singing in harmony, or talking together.121 If what we see in China’s current “harmonising” of dissidents is a harmonious society or harmonious world, harmony here retains only its meaning of “singing in harmony” (as we saw through the example of Expo avatars
singing the Expo song in harmony), its “talking together” is only in “agreement” or “concord”. 119 According to dictionary definition (Hoad, 1993; Oxford Dictionaries, 2011c: 6.3996.3910). 120 According to dictionary definition (Karlgren, 1974 [1923]: 364;
Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995). 121 According to dictionary definition (Wieger, 1965 [1915]: Lesson 121a; Karlgren, 1974 [1923]: 70; Lindqvist, 1991: 187; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.602.601). - 183 - Recycling4harmony4(和
谐)42:4Differently4pronounced4Chinese4character4gives4alternative4 meaning4 Figure 10: 和 pronounced hú1is the battle cry when winning a game of mah\jong (Source: Zhang Facai, 2008) This, however, takes us to another tactic of bringing out and playing with
the differently pronounced alternative meanings that Chinese characters often have. 和 can also be pronounced hú, a battle cry of victory when completing a game of mah- jong. Through this battle cry competition or conflict returns to visibility in harmony, as the
excluded term on which it relies. This disruption acknowledges the antagonism involved in play, unsettling the notion of permanent harmonious “win-win” purported by the party-state. It reminds us of the violence we have traced in previous chapters of a dominant
China’s turning other into self. What goes on in this reading is in a sense the first of the two moves of Derrida’s deconstructive double gesture. We have read Hu’s harmony in a way that is faithful to its purported meaning, where the end-state of “harmony” rests on
the exclusion of violence, discord and conflict. His harmonious world, as we saw in chapter 1, is one that has done away with misgivings and estrangement, where everyone wins and no one loses. The “inevitable choice” (or what if we were nasty we could call “the
single prescribed future without responsibility of choosing”) is a future harmonious world order where China will always stand for “fairness and justice”. Anyone who disagrees with this sense of justice is simply wrong and irrational, euphemised as “unscientific”. -
184 - What the pronunciation hú does is acknowledge the excluded other of Hu’s “harmony”, namely discord and competition. Hú can only be achieved after vanquishing the opponent, there is no win-win here.122 The hú of mah-jong, just like the harmonious
Tianxia utopia, is premised on the superiority of the self to the other. Only this hierarchy can establish order, harmony or hú. Acknowledging that competition is always already there in harmony, implied in the alternative pronunciation hú, I propose that we can
acknowledge a third tactic of resistance, the play with homonymous characters. Recycling4harmony44(和谐)43:4“Rivercrab”4(héxiè)4as4a4nearWhomonym4for4“harmony”4 (héxié)4 Derrida’s first deconstructive move is reversal, identifying an operational binary –
such as harmony/discord – and showing how the exclusion of the second term from the first is artificial and that in fact the first is reliant on the second. An equally important move is displacement, the creation of a term that is not fully contained within the old
order. We can get at such a displacement through paying attention to “rivercrabs” (héxiè4 河蟹), a near homonym for “harmony” (héxié4 和谐). Before I go on to discuss these rivercrabs in more detail, I should point out that these two deconstructive moves are not
separate, chronologically or otherwise. My discussion of them here in turn is for the benefit of my reader, in order to illustrate more clearly what this dissident language play can do for us. Similar sounding characters are often used to replace sensitive words as a
way to get through the keyword searches of censorship software that has been bolstered as a way to simultaneously avoid and criticise “being harmonised”. When netizens are blocked by harmonising government software from writing “harmony” (héxié 和谐), they

In recent years, the rivercrab has become popular

can replace the term by the similar sounding characters for “rivercrabs” (héxiè 河蟹).

as a signifier of resistance. In 122 Indeed, the very game of mah-jong is itself involved in contestation as a battle ground for politics, where popular practice has been shown to resist official
campaigns to regulate and “sanitize” a “popular mah-jong” (民间麻将) and promote “healthy mahjong” (健康麻将 4or 卫生麻将, meaning no gambling) as “a competitive national sport and a symbol of China’s distinctive cultural legacy” (Festa, 2006: 9). - 185 -
popular Chinese language a “crab” is a violent bully, making its image a new playful and satirical, but heavily political, way of criticising the harmonising “rivercrab society” (Xiao Qiang, 2007).123 Figure 11: Insist on three watches, establish rivercrab society (Source:
Xuanlv, 2010) One popular satire on it can be seen in the above rivercrab with three watches. The caption overhead reads: “insist on three watches, establish rivercrab society” (jianchi4 san4ge4daibiao4,4chuangjian4hexie4shehui4 坚持三个戴表， 创建河蟹社会).
The first phrase is a nonsensical mockery of the party slogan “insist on the three represents” (jianchi4san4 ge4daibiao4 坚持三个代表)124 and the second is a mockery of the slogan “establish harmonious society” (chuangjian4hexie4shehui4 创建和谐社会). The
political tactic here is one of intentional (mis)reading of official discourse, an iteration of party-state language against itself in order to reveal aspects of harmony that remain hidden from view in official discourse. Again, the acknowledgement of the purported
message and its hierarchical binary as well as the first deconstructive move of reversing that hierarchy are here in this picture, this is not a separate stand-alone symbol or event. 123 As a simple indication of the popularity of satirical depictions of the “rivercrab”, a
Google image search for the Chinese term “rivercrab society” (河蟹社会) gave ca 212 000 hits on 3 March 2011. 124 The “three represents” is previous General Secretary Jiang Zemin’s legacy tifa, which became a guiding ideology of the CCP at its Sixteenth Party
Congress in 2002, together with Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory. It stipulates that the CCP should be representative to advanced social productive forces, advanced culture, and the interests of the overwhelming majority. The tifa
was part of the shift to Chineseness as a legitimising force of the CCP as a ruling party representative of the majority of Chinese people as opposed to its original legitimisation as a vanguard revolutionary party driven by the “proletariat”. It also helped legitimise the
 rivercrab also displaces this binary and functions as a
inclusion of capitalist business elites into the party. However, the

new term which does not obey that order in any simple manner, but
rather shakes it up and brings to the fore the irresolvable contradiction
between these terms. To clarify the position of my analysis here in relation to Derrida’s, I speak of the rivercrab as a “second term” which displaces the harmony/discord binary implied in Hu’s harmonious

This
world and society. As such, it does not obey the order of that binary in a simple manner. However, it also does not necessarily function as a new “master term” in the way Derrida often seems to understand the role of a new term.

mockingly reiterative form of resistance is not confined to the Internet

egao culture, but has spread beyond its online origins to impact both on
official state media and on forms of resistance offline. Artist Ai Weiwei
staged one such example that received attention in the West some time
before his infamous detention by the authorities. When his newly built
Shanghai studio was to be demolished by the authorities, Ai threw a
grand farewell party in November 2010, to which he invited several
hundred friends, bands and other supporters to feast on a banquet
consisting of rivercrabs. Ai was put in house arrest in Beijing to prevent
him from attending the banquet, but the event took place nonetheless
with supporters chanting: “in a harmonious society, we eat rivercrabs”
( The official party-state strategies of responding to such
Branigan, 2010). Party\state response

resistance take the form of harmonising it, ignoring it, or on occasion

acknowledging its presence whilst attempting to again re-read its
meaning, significance and implications in an effort at downplaying its
critical potential. With respect to the “passive subversive” bei making the top of lists of neologisms in 2009, a Xinhua article displays the latter tactic. The article stresses state tolerance through emphasising that the poll,
which resulted in bei4being elected character of the year, was “jointly conducted by a linguistic research centre under the Ministry of Education and the state-run Commercial Press”. The tense was said “to convey a sense of helplessness in deciding one’s own fate”

The example of “being suicided” was

and to reflect “dissatisfaction over the abuse of official power” (Xinhua, 2010c). (bei4zisha4 被自杀)

discussed, explaining that the abuse of official power concerned was

perpetrated by a local official, who was duly sentenced to death by higher
authorities. Other examples were “being volunteered” (bei4ziyuan 被自愿) and “being found a job” (bei4jiuye4 被就业). From the “passive subversive” bei4the article turns into proof of how good and improving the government is:
‘[b]ei’ was not censored in the government-run poll of buzzwords, and grassroots’ voices are finally being heard and even recognized by the government … The government is beginning to respond to inquiries from the public, instead of ‘dodging’ them as it did
before (Xinhua, 2010c). Yet much resistance is still treated with violence or silence by Chinese official sources. According to interviews by Tessa Thorniley at Ai Weiwei’s rivercrab banquet over 40 domestic media sources were invited and none showed up, and
amongst the over 50 media outlets that interviewed Ai in house arrest regarding the event the only domestic media that spoke to him was the English language edition of conservative paper Global4Times4(Goldkorn, 2010). Within half a year of the rivercrab
banquet, Ai had been detained by Chinese police, accused of a number of crimes. After 81 days in detention he was released on “bail” (取保候审), on the condition that he did “not speak” (Branigan, 2011; Committee to Protect Journalists, 2011; US Asia law NYU,
2011). During his disappearance Chinese Internet sites such as Sina Weibo blocked searches on Ai Weiwei (艾未未), a number of his nicknames and puns on his name, including “艾未” (Ai Wei), “未未” (Wei Wei), “艾” (Ai), “未” (Wei), “艾胖子” (Fatty Ai), “胖子”
(Fatty) and “月半子” (Moon Half Son). They also blocked writing including the term “未来”, meaning “future”, which is built up of characters similar to “Weiwei” (Xiao Qiang, 2011b). ONCO\OPERATIVE HARMONY From the above analysis we see that there are
similarities between Derridean approaches to reading deconstruction in academia and practices of subversive iteration of “harmony” amongst dissident netizens in contemporary China. The possibilities for alliances that reside within such shared tactics are
potentially valuable to both parties and may help us here to bridge the theory/practice divide. - 188 - Derrida and Baudrillard were both masters of language play, frequently building on the various meanings that can be drawn out of words by way of their
etymological roots, their different pronunciations, by playing with homonyms and near-homonyms and by combining words into new ones to reverse and displace previous binaries. Such techniques pervade the writing of both thinkers.125 However, this is not to say
that the similar practice of Chinese language that I outline above is an entirely new phenomenon created by recent practices of Internet censorship and/or influences from some “Western postmodernity”. On the contrary, the struggles and practices that I have

Linguistic play with characters and homonyms has been a

outlined have a long and rich history in China.

sensitive topic in China for millennia. Such practices have also been
known to academics in the Anglophone world for decades. For example, a
1938 article argues that literary persecution was especially cruel during
the Qing dynasty and continues with a description that
(1644-1911 AD) (Ku Chieh-Kang, 1938 [1935]: 254),

could just as well be of contemporary Chinese censorship regimes on the

Internet: under the circumstances they [Chinese scholars, artists,
intellectuals and others] could do nothing but resort to veiled satire. This
being the situation, their words and writings were spied on and
scrutinized; if they did not use every care they suffered the severest
punishments But, the author continues, although the Qing
(Ku Chieh-Kang, 1938 [1935]: 254).126

were the worst offenders, similar practices of harsh censorship had taken
place since the Qin and Han the first two dynasties of what is
(361-206 BC) (206 BC-8 AD),

typically considered imperial China. 125 In Derrida, some such terms that I have touched upon in the course of this thesis include iterability, which plays on “reiterate” and
combines the Latin iter (“again”) with the Sanskrit itara4(“other”) (Wortham, 2010: 78), and différance, which combines the two meanings of French différence, difference and deferral, “changing an ‘e’ to an ‘a’ adds time to space” (Massey, 2005: 49). It also includes
terms such as artifactuality, activirtuality, circonfession, avenir/à4venir, hauntologie and so on. Despite what may be interpreted as a dismissal at points of Derrida’s deployment of word play (as discussed in chapter 1. See also Baudrillard, 1996 [1990]: 25),
Baudrillard uses very similar tactics in his deployment of terms such as seduction, drawing on the original Latin sense of seducere, “to lead away”, and semiorrhage, semiotic haemorrhage (Baudrillard, 2002 [2000]: 208). 126 I should be noted that this article was
written by a Chinese author at a time when the 1911 nationalist revolution had recently thrown the Qing dynasty from power, which may have affected this commentary. - 189 - The article goes on to list numerous death sentences during the Ming dynasty (1368-
1644 AD), occasioned by the “homophonic nature of certain words employed” (1938 [1935]: 262). As in contemporary PRC, although “misreading” set texts could be very dangerous (1938 [1935]: 296-301), the attempt to provide set phrases and pre- structured
models for expression could not prevent such double meanings from seeping through text (1938 [1935]: 263). There is thus Chinese historical precedent of interplay between violent oppression of speech and the kind of linguistic resistance that builds on reiterative,
mocking punnery in ways similar to the contemporary deployment of rivercrabs. Crabs as cancerous disease Where associations emerging from Chinese language aligns crabs with harmony, bullies and competition, most European languages associate it with the
disharmony of the body that shares its name: cancer.127 In what follows I introduce the European roots of this term in order to foreground my subsequent analysis of the above “harmony/rivercrabs”, where I argue that these “rivercrabs” operate precisely according
to a cancerous logic. The term “cancer” is originally Latin, meaning “crab or creeping ulcer”, with its etymological roots in Greek karkinos, said to have been applied to such tumours because they were surrounded by swollen veins that looked like the limbs of a crab
(Demaitre, 1998: 620-6; Oxford Dictionaries, 2011b). Although the European term, like the Chinese one, has mythological connotations,128 a contemporary dictionary entry for “cancer” describes it as “a malignant growth or tumour resulting from an uncontrolled
division of cells”, but also as “an evil or destructive practice or phenomenon that is hard to contain or eradicate” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2011b). 127 Scandinavian languages have interpreted cancer to equate a crayfish, rather than a crab, to give the Swedish kräfta,
Norwegian kreft4and Danish kræft. 128 In astronomy, the “Cancer” constellation represents Hercules crushing a crab with his foot. This tale derives from Greek mythology, where the crab nipped Heracles when he was battling the monster Hydra and was crushed.
The mother deity Hera who was at odds with Heracles at the time honoured the crab’s courageous efforts by placing it in the heaven. In astrology, the cancer/crab is the fourth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters at the northern summer solstice, about 21 June
(Oxford Dictionaries, 2011a). The term also has spatial connotations, indicating the direction south, as in the tropic of cancer. - 190 - In this second capacity, cancer is not separate from contemporary understandings of international politics and visions of a
harmonious world. Rather, the language of cancer and tumours has long been common in IR and politics, and cancer is frequently used as a metaphor for moral and political ills on the body politic to be cured or removed.129 At the same time, descriptions of
biomedical cancer often resort to metaphors or similes borrowed from societal relations130 and from military conflict and battle.131 In Chinese language, the close link between security in the medical and political realms is explicit in the character zhi (治), which
refers to both therapy (zhi4 liao 治療) and governance (zhi4li 治理) (Unschuld, 2010: xxvi; Cheung, 2011: 7). Many studies have shown how the knowledge systems of Western biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) reflect the intellectual and political
landscape in which they respectively developed.132 As such, many have understood the spatial distance between China and Europe as a foundation for an epistemological difference in understanding of their medical bodies, which directly parallels that which is
claimed to underpin the understanding of the 129 Hobbes gave a detailed analysis of dangers to the state as illnesses to the body politic (Hobbes, 1996: 221-30), building on an established metaphor of societies as bodies (Hale, 1971). For another example of early
European use, Italian thinker Francesco Guicciardini, writing in the 16th century, constantly repeats the metaphors of medicine and cure. Guiccardini identifies the disease with the Italian city states’ willingness to ally with outside states that are more powerful than
themselves, and cautions against ignoring “how dangerous it is to use medicine which is stronger than the nature of the disease” (Guicciardini, 1984: 20-1). The French Revolution saw the use of illness/therapy metaphors to justify the terreur as a cure for societal
illness (Musolff, 2003: 328). In contemporary scholarship, Susan Sontag in her famous Illness4as4Metaphor singled out cancer as a type of “master illness” that is “implicitly genocidal” (Sontag, 1991: 73-4, 84). Otto Santa Anna describes how the American civil rights
movement used cancer as a metaphor for racism in the 1960s (Santa Anna, 2003: 215-16, 222). In contemporary IR Kevin Dunn has written at length about the how Mobutu’s cancer-ridden body led to a recasting of him as a cancer on the body politic of the Republic
of Zaire, and Zaire in turn as a tumour on the region (Dunn, 2003: especially 139-42). See also Deborah Wills (2009) for recent use of “cancer” terminology in English language IR, and Wang Yizhou (2010: 11) for similar use in Chinese language IR. 130 For a good
overview of such metaphorical use in patients and media, see Lupton (2003). For a good overview of other forms of cultural and artistic expression relating to the narrativisation of cancer, see Stacey (1997). 131 For such military metaphors, see for example Annas
(1995: 745), Clarke (1996: 188), Stibbe (1997), Clarke and Robinson (1999: 273-4), Lupton (2003: 72), Reisfield and Wilson (2004) and Williams Camus (2009). 132 For its treatment in recently discovered Chinese medical literature, see Lo and Cullen (2005). For
commentary on the parallel emergence of political and medical epistemologies in imperial China, see Unschuld (2010). For commentary on parallel developments of political and medical knowledge in Europe, see Have (1987) and Stibbe (1997). - 191 - Chinese geo-
body, examined in previous chapters.133 Western biomedicine, it is thus said, follows Descartes and builds on the idea that parts of the body are discrete and can be calculated, measured and cured in isolation (Have, 1987; Kaptchuk, 2000).

Chinese medicine is said to build instead on a “holistic” idea of the body

where illness is explained in terms of a “pattern of disharmony” (Kaptchuk, 2000: 4). Just as a
bounded notion of space is typically portrayed in terms of an imposition on China by Western imperialism, so too is a biomedical imaginary and representation of discrete body parts portrayed as an imposition by the West and a catching up by a China that had fallen
behind (Cheung, 2011: 9; Gilman, 1988: 149, 151, 154). With regards to the geo-body, I have argued throughout previous chapters that its two spatial imaginaries (that of discrete units and that of a holistic system) are not mutually exclusive, but rather coexist in
practices in contemporary China. The scope of this thesis does not allow for a thorough deconstruction of the parallel epistemology that is applied to debates over the medical body.134 Suffice it to say at this point that contemporary literature on Chinese medicine
typically reflects on how biomedicine and TCM are complementary.135 Most importantly for my argument here, and as I will explain in what follows, TCM and biomedicine have produced strikingly 133 This imagination of the human body is particularly clear in
writing on pictorial representations thereof. The negotiation of Chinese-Western power relations and self/other hierarchisation through modes of pictorial representation has been traced in the mid-19th Century medical paintings of Lam Qua, who focused on
depicting tumours on Chinese bodies for Western consumption. Discussions of these can be found in Gilman (1988) and Heinrich (2008), as can some of Lam Qua’s pictures of tumours and abscesses (Gilman, 1988: 150; Heinrich, 2008: 50, 54, 55, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86,
87), as well as earlier and later Chinese images of such growths (Heinrich, 2008: 57, 91, 92; see also Barnes, 2005: 292). 134 Such an endeavour might point to the early exchange and hybrid nature of information, and to similarities of TCM and early forms of
European medicine: the inner body as masculine (or Yang) and the outer body as feminine (or Yin) (for expression in European tradition, see Erickson, 1997: 10, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 12); the focus on balance of a
holistic system (for expression in European tradition, see Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Unschuld, 2010: xxve); the focus on bodily flows and the understanding of blockage of flows as cause for disease (for expression in European tradition,
see Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 28), the discursive parallels to the societal body and the need for governance of both societal and medical body (for expression in European tradition, see Porter, 1997: 158;

There are many examples of this

Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Unschuld, 2010), and so on. 135 (for example Cui Yong et al., 2004; Bao Ting et al., 2010;

similar responses to the appearance of cancer:

Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010; Wong and Sagar, 2010). - 192 -

to cleanse and purge in conjunction with studied manipulation of the

immune system. Reading cancer and the autoimmune in Baudrillard and Derrida The

His interest in
previous chapter drew on Baudrillard’s interest in the pre-programmed character of contemporary culture to examine the (re)production of human bodies as computer coded avatars on the Expo screen.

the coding of the human body also extended to the replication and
transmission of data on the micro level, in the form of genetic code and
cellular regeneration. As pure information, the human body is not
understood as the source of selfhood, but rather as an effect produced by
the code Embedded in this code is the potential for
(Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 98, see also Toffoletti in Smith, 2010: 28).

cancer and autoimmune disease According to Baudrillard, (Baudrillard, 2002 [2000]: 98, 207).136

consumer society or European democracy is driven by a “perverse” logic (2002

where a range of phenomena – terrorism, fascism, violence,

[2000]: 97, 207),

depression, and so on – are the outcome of “an excess of organization,

regulation and rationalization within a system” These societies tend (2002 [2000]: 97).
to suffer from an excess of rationality and logic, surveillance and control,
which in turn leads to the emergence for no apparent reason of “internal
pathologies … strange dysfunctions … unforeseeable, incurable accidents
… anomalies”, which disrupt the system’s capacity for totality, perfection
and reality invention This is the logic that Baudrillard reads of an (2002 [2000]: 97).

excessive system that fuels the growth of anomalies – just like cancer and
autoimmune disease (Baudrillard, 2002 [2000]). What characterises these anomalies in Baudrillard’s theorising is that “they have not come from elsewhere, from ‘outside’ or from afar, but are rather a product
of the ‘over-protection’ of the body – be it social or individual” (Smith, 2010: 59): 136 Like cancer, the question of immunity reinforces the close link between the governance of the socio- political and the bio-medical body, as “immunity” was originally a legal
concept in ancient Rome (Cohen, 2009: 3). For my analysis of cancer and autoimmunity in Baudrillard’s work, I focus on the various articles collected in Screened Out (2002 [2000]), and particularly the essay “Aids: Virulence or Prophylaxis-” (2002 [1997]).

[e]very structure, system or social body which ferrets out its negative,
critical elements to expel them or exorcise them runs the risk of
catastrophe by total implosion and reversion, just as every biological body
which hunts down and eliminates all its germs, bacillae and parasites – in
short, all its biological enemies – runs the risk of cancer or, in other
words, of a positivity devouring its own cells. It runs the risk of being
devoured by its own anti-bodies the system’s overcapacity (Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 3). On this reading, “

to protect, normalise and integrate” is shown throughout (Smith, 2010: 60) (we could say “harmonise”)

society as natural immunity is replaced by artificial systems of immunity –

like pre-programmed firewalls (Baudrillard , 2002 [2000]: 98). This replacement happens in the name of science and progress (or perhaps a “scientific outlook on
development”). Derrida developed a strikingly similar deployment of the autoimmune, where for example the West since 9/11 is “producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm” (2003a: 99).137 Derrida analyses this “perverse” logic in
terms of an autoimmune process (2003a: 99); “that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunise itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (2003a: 94). This term recalls previous Derridean
terms,138 but particularly reinforces Baudrillard’s claim about cancer and immunity: “[i]n an over-protected space, the body loses all its defences” (Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 3). In this way, to Baudrillard and Derrida, in cancer and autoimmunity it is the system’s own
logic that turns it against itself; the code works too well in its overzealous cleansing, integrating, normalising logic. Derrida reads in this process a double and contradictory discourse of concurrent immunity and auto-immunity in endless circulation, where the system
“conducts a 137 For Derrida, I draw mostly on his reading in “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides” on 9/11 (2003a) and in Rogues:4Two4Essays4on4Reason (2005 [2003]-a), rather than on earlier mention of autoimmunity in texts such as “Faith and
Knowledge” (1998) or Resistances4of4Psychoanalysis (1998 [1996], for some comments on the use of the "autoimmune" in this volume, see Wortham, 2010: 160). 138 As expressed by one commentator: “[u]ndecideability, aporia, antinomy, double bind:
autoimmunity is explicitly inscribed in Rogues into a veritable ‘best of collection’ of Derrideo-phemes or deconstructo- nyms” (Naas, 2006: 29). - 194 - terrible war against that which protects it only by threatening it” (1998: 46).139 The immune and the autoimmune
may not, then, be easily distinguishable: “murder was already turning into suicide, and the suicide, as always, let itself be translated into murder” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 59). Derrida and Baudrillard – and others who have since deployed this aspect of their
analyses140 – tend to describe autoimmunity as generated by the current Western system, although they sometimes indicate the more general nature of such praxis (Thomson, 2005). I have argued in previous chapters that other phenomena they bring to our
attention (such as the deconstructibility of language, or simulacra) cannot be confined in time and space to a bounded notion of “the West”, “late capitalism”, “postmodernity” or some other unit to which we posit China as the “other country”. In the same way, the
observed “unfettered process of a techno-metastatic production of value, the hyperinflation of meaning and signs” is not confined to democracy/capitalism/the West/America that they take as the primary focus of their analyses (I. C. R., 2007). Rather, this cancer has
its parallel in contemporary China, precisely in the form of rivercrabs. Reading cancer and the (auto)immune through biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine To explain this point, and to dispel any understanding of my argument in terms of a Chinese
“catching up”, let me elaborate slightly on how biomedicine and TCM have understood cancer. 139 Derrida sometimes takes the term to denote a specific targeting of a body’s defence mechanisms, its “protecting itself against its self-protection” (Derrida, 1998: 73,
note 27), which is closer to the biomedical definition of autoimmunity and further from its description of certain forms of cancer. At other times, the autoimmune involves an attack against any part of the body, “in short against its own” (son4propre4tout4court)
(Derrida, 1998: 44). We note here the numerous meanings of French “propre”, translated here as “own”, but which also means self-possession, propriety, property and importantly cleanliness, stressing again the cleansing that I emphasise in this chapter (cf. Spivak's
translation in Derrida, 1976 [1967]: 26). Where some have found this ambiguity problematic (Haddad, 2004: 39-41), I think it points to an important aspect of autoimmunity that is the impossibility of separating a part that “defends” a (geo)body from one that simply
“is”. It acknowledges the malleability of the system. For this reason I also allow for (auto)immunity and cancer to denote the same process, as they do to Baudrillard. 140 For example Bulley (2009: 12, 25-29), Vaughan-Williams (2007: 183-92), Osuri (2006: 500),
Thomson (2005), and Haddad (2004: 30). - 195 - The disease that in English is called cancer is called ai (癌) in modern TCM terminology, and cancerous tumours can also be referred to as liu (瘤).141 TCM philosophy is based on the idea that a body is healthy when it
is in harmony, and illness and pain occur when harmony fails to be achieved, manifest in a “pattern of disharmony” (Bao Ting et al., 2010: 171).142 Cancer/ai/liu is on this view “a systemic disease from the start” (Schipper et al., 1995; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3).
Cancer and tumours are understood as the manifestation of disharmony (Bao Ting et al., 2010: 170; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 344), and more specifically of the relative lack of Zhengqi4(正气), a concept analogous to the biomedical notion of immune system
competency/strength (Abbate, 2006; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57). The understanding of TCM’s potential to aid the body in restoring harmony is similarly centred on immunity.143 Biomedicine, which has been associated with the West and with the
imagination of body-parts as discrete and calculable, explains cancer in a very similar way, emphasising the role of immunity. In this school of thought, cancer is a development where transformed cells “acquire the ability to disregard the constraints of its
environment and the body normal control mechanisms” [sic] (Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3), or “the abnormal and uncontrollable proliferation of cells which have the potential to spread to distant sites” (Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 343). Like TCM, biomedicine
thus understands cancer as immune system failure (Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 349). Microscopically, cancer cells display features indicative of a faster proliferative rate and disorganised alignment in relation to other cells, and 141 The first known description
of ai comes from Wei4Ji4Bao4Shu circa 1171 AD, in the Song Dynasty (Pan Mingji, 1992, in Bao Ting et al., 2010: 57). Cancerous tumours were also referred to as liu in inscriptions on oracle bones over 3,500 years old (Pan Mingji, 1992, in Bao Ting et al., 2010: 57).
142 For a more thorough explanation for the lay person of the philosophical foundations of TCM as well as an outline of its foundational texts, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang (2009). 143 This is a marked trait throughout contemporary TCM literatures (Abbate, 2006;
Lahans, 2008; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 342, 349; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3, 4, 15). TCM scepticism of biomedical forms of treatment – such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy – stems from their “collateral damage”, the
killing of normal cells along with the malign cancer cells, which leads to further immune suppression and hence further reduction of zhengqi. TCM treatment focuses on strengthening zhengqi in order to maximize the immunity of the system beset by cancer. Herbal
medicines used to treat cancer are thus (partly) focused on strengthening the body’s general immunity (fuzheng) (Lahans, 2008; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57). - 196 - differences between cancer cells and normal cells are increasingly understood at the level of
genetic code (Marcovitch, 2005: 111). The very code that is pre-programmed in the system thus has the capacity to produce the cells that threaten it, and the spread of malignancy in the system is a result of its failed attempts at “regulation” and cleansing. Like
cancer/ai/liu, the Chinese crab has early associations with cleaning and purification of spaces, with one legend having the emperor using the crab to rid his palace of the scorpions, fleas, mosquitoes, and mice that disturbed his harmony and caused dis-ease.144 In
Europe, like in China, cancer has a long history of association with insufficient cleansing, since its description in pre-modern pathologies that attributed it to insufficient purging of black bile.145 One contemporary cancer self-help book likewise describes cancer in
terms of societal disorder strikingly reminiscent of disruptions to the harmony conveyed by Hu Jintao and Zhao Tingyang respectively: “[c]ancer growths are made up of cells which belong to our body but which have stopped behaving in a co-operative and orderly
fashion” (Reynolds, 1987: 26, cited in Lupton, 2003: 71). It further observes that the multiplication of cancer cells “has no purpose … unlike normal body cells we can think of cancer cells as unco-operative, disobedient, and independent … [n]ormal cells exist
peacefully side by side with their neighbours” (Reynolds, 1987: 27, cited in Lupton, 2003: 71). This description is certainly fitting to characterise the Chinese “rivercrabs” described above. Crabs/cancer disturb and threaten the harmony of the system. They are truly
“malignant” in the sense that they disregard normal mechanisms of control and cleansing (they are unco-operative), and they are capable of spatio-temporal spread into secondary deposits or “metastases”. As such, we may understand crabs/cancer in terms of the
European medieval rendition as a parasitic animal (Pouchelle, 1990: 169; Demaitre, 1998: 624), pervasive also in contemporary society (Herzlich and Pierret, 1987). 144 Renditions of this lore can also be found online (The Vanishing Tattoo, 2011). 145 On this
understanding, breast cancer for example was caused by insufficient cleansing by menstruation of the blood from the dregs of spoiled black bile (Caulhiaco and McVaugh, 1997: n. 9, 94, see also Demaitre, 1998: 618 and notes 37, 38). An overview of the
development of European ideas of cancer can be found in Demaitre (1998). - 197 - Yet, crabs/cancer are indeed “a systemic disease from the start” (Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3), their malignancy is a direct product of the code. The possibility for drawing out the various

Moreover,
meanings of hexie4 和谐 explored at the outset of this chapter was always already there in the character – through its pictographic make-up, its alternative pronunciation as hú and through its homonym the rivercrab.

the ironic critique displayed by these iterations was provoked by Hu’s

policy of overzealous “harmonisation” and the online deployment of
rivercrabs came about as a way to simultaneously avoid and criticise
“being harmonised” by the great firewall and other government
censorship software. In this way, it is the harmonious system itself that
produces that which leads to disharmony. As such, rivercrabs are not
simply unco-operative, but onco-operative: they operate like cancerous
metastases that derive from the code of the system itself to cause dis-
harmony and dis-ease. the Chinese THE COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES OF ONCO\OPERATIVE HARMONY The claim I have made up to this point of the chapter is that

“harmonious” system is not so different from what Derrida and Baudrillard describe in contemporary “Western democracy” or late capitalist “consumer society”. Although China is often recast as the opposite

suffer from the same autoimmune problems. Its

of these systems and their logic – the “other country” – it seems to

symptoms may be different, but the onco-operative character of its dis-

ease is the same. What, then, are the implications of such an illness – and how do we deal with it- Looking for cures in an onco\operative system Biomedical and TCM treatments of cancer/ai/liu do, as I have indicated

The lack
above, follow a similar pattern to those commonly prescribed for dealing with unco-operative elements of the geo-body. Biomedicine typically resorts to screening, “surgical strikes”, chemo- and radio-therapies (Marcovitch, 2005: 112).

of precision of these therapies give them a quasi-suicidal nature through

which the parts of the body deemed “healthy” or “normal” become
collateral damage. This in turn often further endangers the system through weakening its immune system. The alternative approach, of strengthening the system’s own immune capacity or zhengqi, urges the - 198 -
system to auto-harmonise, to turn the bad qi into the good – another form of cleansing, or “purging the excessive” and ousting “evil Qi” (Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 30). Both these ways of dealing with unco-operative elements of the medical body thus echo

In this way, the onco-

the problems seen in relating to “others” in the geo-body: we eliminate through radical separation (cutting off) or through radical harmonisation (turning the bad into the good).

operative character of the system means its over-zealous attempts at

cleansing – through therapy and governance ( actually come to (zhi4liao) zhi4li) –

threaten the system itself. This, in turn, exposes an aporia at the very
heart of the system, in that the dis-ease must be cured, but cannot be
cured without sacrificing the system itself: “there is no effective
prevention or therapy; the metastases invade the whole network
‘virtually’ … He who lives by the same will die by the same” (Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 2). Or, in Derrida’s words:
“there is no absolutely reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune. By definition” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-b: 150-1). To Baudrillard, the fact that cancer is a reflection of the body’s victimisation by the disruption of its genetic formula is thus what makes it impossible
for conventional medicine to cure it: “[t]he current pathology of the body is now beyond the reach of conventional medicine, since it affects the body not as form, but as formula” (2002 [1997]: 1). To put it a different way, the fact that the system itself produces,
through its own code, that which threatens it means there is little use looking to the rationality of the system to combat its excrescences: “[i]t is a total delusion to think extreme phenomena can be abolished. They will, rather, become increasingly extreme as our

spontaneous self-regulation of systems is

systems become increasingly sophisticated” (Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 7). On Baudrillard’s reading,

something well- known: systems produce accidents or glitches in their

own programme, interfering with their own operation enables (Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 5). This

systems to survive on a basis contrary to their own principles, against

their own value-systems: they have to have such a system, but they also
have to deny it and operate in opposition to it…. But it is entirely as
though the species were … producing … through cancer, which is a
disruption of the genetic code and therefore a pathology of information, a
resistance to the all-powerful principle of cybernetic control…. With … - 199 -

cancer, we might be said to be paying the prize for our own system: we
are exorcising its banal virulence in a fatal form Again, this is (Baudrillard, 2002 [1997]: 5).

precisely how rivercrabs operate: they metastasise and spread through a

disruption of the code that lets them slip through it’s pre-programmed
screening/fire- wall/censorship. This is indeed a resistance to cybernetic control, but one generated by the system itself. If we bring this analysis back to the discipline of IR, this way of
understanding cancer complicates things. Within Chinese IR, Wang Yizhou has argued that analysing terrorism in terms of cancer calls for the question of how cancer comes into being. He reads it as a symptom of structural imbalance (Wang Yizhou, 2010: 11). Where

military action can only “cure the symptom but not the source”,
harmonisation or re- balancing of the system will prevent radicalism from
breeding (2010: 16). In view of the above explanation of cancer, we may concur with both him and Baudrillard that traditional treatment may only serve to aggravate the problem through weakening the system and causing collateral damage.
However, having excavated the forms of therapy suggested by the “alternative” of “harmonisation” by TCM or Chinese IR, it appears that it stands equally powerless. Increasing harmonisation is unlikely to curb cancer/crabs, but may rather contribute to spurring

There is no use looking to the systems own rationality to combat the

them on.

crabs it produces. Spatiotemporal bordering in an onco\operative system What, then, are the spatio-temporal implications of these crabs, as metastases of an (auto)immune and onco-operative system- Nick Vaughan-
Williams (2007) has productively drawn on Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity to discuss spatial and temporal bordering. The temporal bordering he discusses draws on Brian Massumi’s description of “flashes of … sovereign power” as a particular form of pre-

parallels what Baudrillard thinks of as a

programmed decision making in the “space of a moment” (Massumi, 2005: 6; Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 187-8). This

pre-programmed instantaneous operation. Understanding borders in

terms of this decisionist ontology highlights the specificity of
contemporary wordplay and rivercrabs, in relation to previous historical
deployment of homonyms to avoid censorship in China , as described earlier in this chapter. Previous forms of bordering
decisions with regards to such homonymous wordplay involved a deliberative process of human interpretation. In this era of the virtual and the hyper-real, the bordering decision is pre-programmed and instantaneous. Vaughan-Williams, following Massumi, argues

When it arrives, it always seems

that this approach is the temporal equivalent of a tautology: “[t]he time form of the decision that strikes like lightning is the foregone conclusion.

to have preceded itself. Where there is a sign of it, it has always already
hit This form of decision is accordingly a foregone
” (Massumi, 2005: 6, cited in Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188).

conclusion because it sidesteps or effaces the blurriness of

(or following Hu perhaps an “inevitable choice”) “

the present in favor of a perceived need to act on the future without

delay”, in the face of a threat of an indefinite future yet to come (Vaughan- Williams, 2007: 188;
Massumi, 2005: 4-5). Both authors read this as a temporal shift, from “prevention” to “pre-emption”, from the temporal register of the indefinite future tense to the future perfect tense: the “always-will-have-been-already” (Massumi, 2005: 6-10; Vaughan-Williams,

In parallel to the autoimmune, this politics induces rather than

2007: 188).

responds to events: [r]ather than acting in the present to avoid an

occurrence in the future, pre- emption brings the future into the present.
It makes present the future consequences of an eventuality that may or
may not occur, indifferent to its actual occurrence. The event’s
consequences precede it, as if it had already occurred (Massumi, 2005: 7-8, cited in Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188).

The Chinese practice of censoring/harmonising specific terms through its

Great Firewall works through this form of pre-programmed code, which
sensors in a “flash of sovereign power”. Terms are censored pre-
emptively to harmonise some not-yet- existing but possible future
dissident deployment of a once unthreatening term (such as the term
“future” 未来 itself, as seen earlier in this chapter in relation to Ai
Weiwei’s detention). In this manner, PRC Internet censorship policy acts
as a temporal bordering process: it pre-empts threats to the
government’s version of “harmonious world/society” that come from the
future, thus securing time and the future as something that belongs to the
state and not to the crabs or dissidents As an actual wall, the (c.f. Vaughan- Williams, 2007: 189).
form of electronic bordering that is exercised by the Great Firewall is also
a form of spatial bordering, in that it is intimately connected to questions
of sovereignty, territory and governmental power . Vaughan-Williams draws on William Walters to refer to this spatial bordering as

in contemporary China another term for having “been harmonised”

“firewalling” –

by the Great Firewall is having “been GFWed” (Walters, 2006, for examples see Calon, 2007; Chow, 2010). The self-attacking or autoimmune logic
of such GFW-ing is clear in the “blocking” of Internet and telephone access that was used in attempts to harmonise Xinjiang during the 2009 riots. This firewalling was intended to prevent “splittism” from spreading, yet could only do so by splitting Xinjiang as a spatial

This, too, is the spacing by which the Great Firewall

unit off from the rest of China, in virtual/physical space.

operates – to maintain a harmonious space, that space must be sealed off

as a (virtual) geobody from the rest of the world . Again, what is described in Vaughan-Williams as “innovations in the ways sovereign power

The practices of
attempts to secure the temporal and spatial borders of political community” could refer to something less localised in time and space than may at first appear (Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 191).

Internet “harmonisation” in China can thus be described in terms of a

bordering of time and space that has parallels in contemporary
expressions of (auto)immunity in the European system. Having said this,
the particular practice of using homonymous characters like the rivercrab,
to simultaneously criticise and avoid “being harmonised” on the Chinese
Internet, is a locally specific way of negotiating this particular kind of
virtual bordering in time and space. This particular form and double
function differentiates it from other forms of satire or political irony that
can be found in other systems around the world. Moreover, in attempting
to secure time and space as belonging to the state, these harmonising
Chinese censorship regimes effectively provoke the kind of critical
wordplay that I exemplify here through rivercrabs. In this way,
cancer/crabs work within the system and yet repeatedly escape it: where
“harmonisation” may be understood as an attempt at temporal
bordering, the experience of cancer has been described as a disturbance
to such temporality, a “falling out of time” (Stacey, 1997: 10). The more the Chinese government attempts to secure, cleanse and harmonise, the more
creative and subversive are the iterations that use its language against itself. Rivercrab metastases and heterotemporalities As a consequence of this (auto)immune logic of the onco-operative system, rivercrabs, like cancer cells, increasingly display features

In the “here-now”, crabs, like cancer, are

indicative of a faster proliferative rate and disorganised alignment in relation to other cells (Marcovitch, 2005: 111).

marked by the way they spread and metastasise through mutation of the
code. In this way, we can understand how Chinese crabs similarly migrate,
multiply and change in what is precisely an “iterative” manner. Every crab draws on previous
iterations of harmony and crabs, but also mutates into something different. One example of such a “metastasis” can be seen in the figure below. It shows a replica of the logo for the computer game “World of Warcraft”, saying instead “Rivercrab World” (hexie4shijie
河蟹世界). The text at the top means “do things others could never do” (做别人永远做不到的事), and the one below means “the late arrival of the battle expedition” (迟到的远征). The links to themes discussed throughout this thesis are marked, including the
direct link to Hu’s “harmonious world” policy, the competition inherent in games and play and the violent military underpinning of harmonious world. Figure 12: Rivercrab world of warcraft (Source: Heifenbrug, 2008) - 203 - The rivercrab metastasises in similar ways
into numerous constellations – some very close copies, some with more creative distance. The rivercrab recurrently appears on blogs and can be found in an online dictionary compiled by China Digital Times (Xiao Qiang, 2010; China Digital Space, 2011a), where it
appears together with dozens of other characters and expressions that have metastasised from similar homonymic wordplay and in reaction to governmental harmonisation. It also appears as a permanent feature on the cap of another Internet meme, the “Green
Dam Girl” (绿坝娘). The Green Dam Girl is an anthropomorphism of the “Green Dam Youth Escort” software (绿坝·花季护航) that was developed under the direction of the Chinese government to filter Internet content on individual computers.146 The Green Dam
Girl and rivercrab also appear in merchandise (Xu Yuting, 2009; Gaofudev, 2011; Lotahk, 2011), numerous cartoons (Hecaitou, 2009a; Hexie Farm, 2011) and music videos (Stchi, 2009; Tutuwan, 2009; DZS manyin, 2010) that typically work through copies of copies,
interweaving the themes and symbols discussed throughout this thesis. In one such music video, the connection between rivercrabs, harmony and Tianxia is once more highlighted (Tutuwan, 2009). This cover-song called “Harmony or die” features the chorus “Green
dam, green dam – rivercrab/harmonise your entire family (lv4ba,4lv4ba,4hexie4ni4quanjia4 绿坝绿坝 – 河蟹／和谐你全家), sometimes writing the same- sounding lyrics as “harmony” (和谐), sometimes as “rivercrab” (河蟹) in the subtitles. The second verse begins:
Green dam - green dam, will kill you in the bud. Rivercrabs all under heaven, arrogant attributes erupt [She] has asked you not to open your eyes too wide Is it possible that [she is] envious and jealous-147 146 According to China Digital Space: “Pre-installation of
Green Dam software was originally intended for all new computers; however, because the proposed policy proved deeply unpopular, mandatory pre-installation has been delayed to an undetermined date. Green Dam girl first appeared sporadically in June 2009 on
Baidu’s online encyclopaedia” (China Digital Space, 2011b). Some, however, suggested that the actual reason for the government’s about-face was the many security flaws within the software that allowed hackers to take over computers (jozjozjoz, 2009), and that it
was built on copyright and open sourcecode violations (Koman, 2009). Popular Chinese blogger Hecaitou (和菜头) says the Green Dam Girl shows the creativity of the post-80s generation in resisting Internet regulation (Hecaitou, 2009a). 147 绿坝‐绿坝 把你萌杀
(lv4ba4W4lv4ba,4ba4ni4meng4sha) - 204 - This kind of video typically brings together numerous key elements discussed here with reference to the onco-operative nature of contemporary Chinese society: the Green Dam Girl, rivercrabs, harmony, Internet
censorship, cleansing and Tianxia.148 This mixing of online lingo and symbols is reiterated also in art off-line. In a 2011 art exhibition at the Postmaster Gallery in New York, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung exhibited his mixed media installation “The Travelogue of Dr. Brain
Damages” (Hung, 2011). The installation was a response to the increasing harmonisation of artistic and netizen dissidence in China, and explored the role of the Internet in facilitating “both freedom and suppression” (Hung, 2011). The Chinese title Naocan4youji4( 脑
残游记) is a wordplay on Lao4Can4youji (老残游记), “The Travelogue of Lao Can”, a late Qing dynasty novel attacking the injustice and hypocrisy of government officials at the time. The project thus questioned whether the Internet in China is an effective tool for
social change, through remixing Chinese netizens’ meme languages with Western icons. The installation consisted of 10 framed digital prints, a 6-minute long video and a ping-pong table sculpture, seen in the figure below. Several of the prints in this installation
include replicas of one or more rivercrabs, often copied from images circulated on blogs. For example, in the piece titled “Justice Bao faces the Red Sun everyday” (天天见红日), Bao4Zheng (包拯), a Song dynasty judge who is a symbol of justice in China, is holding a
 On the walls behind the prints
laptop of the “Great Firewall” brand displaying a copy of the rivercrab with three watches that was discussed at the beginning of this chapter (Hung, 2011).

were written in large red characters: “You are not a real man until you
have leaped the Great Wall of China” which is one (Bu4fan4changcheng4fei4haohan 不翻长城非好汉),

character from the original quote from Mao: “You are not a real man until
you have been to the Great Wall of China” (Bu4dao4changcheng4fei4 河蟹天下 傲娇属性大爆发 (hexie4Tianxia,4aojiao4shuxing4de4baofa) 拜托了你们
眼别睁态大 (baituo4le4nimen,4yan4bie4zheng4tai4da) 莫非羡慕妒嫉了吗- (mofei4xianmu4duji4le4ma-) My translation. Full video with Chinese subtitles can be found online (Tutuwan, 2009). 148 See for example (Hrehnr, 2009b; Stchi, 2009, which later got a
avatar dancetroop found at Hrehnr, 2009a; DZS manyin, 2010). - 205 - haohan 不到长城非好汉). The calligraphic style recalls the hand-painted signs that forbid uncivilised behaviour (like spitting) and promote harmonisation in Chinese cities, but also the signs that
appear on walls to be demolished. Figure 13: “Ping, ping, no pong” artwork by Kenneth Tin\Kin Hung (Source: Kenneth Tin\King Hung) The central sculpture of the installation, seen in the figure above, was titled “Ping, ping, no pong” (Ping,4ping,4wu4pang4 乒乒无
乓) and consisted of a ping-pong table with a whole cut out in the shape of a rivercrab on the Chinese side panel. The net was replaced by a sculptured wall, symbolising the Great Firewall of China, and accompanied by a ping-pong ball to symbolise the exchange of
information (Hung, 2011). The sculpture highlights how the purported harmonious “win-win” of mutuality is undermined by harmonisation, in the form of the rivercrab. Through depicting the rivercrab as a clearly visible and distinct hole or void, this installation also

The metastasising, hybridising,

highlighted the undecidable nature of rivercrabs as neither present nor absent, but simultaneously both.

prostheticising, mutating displacement of harmony 和谐/rivercrabs 河蟹

goes so far as to penetrate and reformulate the very characters
themselves , as can be seen in the images below. The mutating of characters into new ones became popular after China’s Ministry of Education unveiled a list of standardised Chinese characters in common usage, including 44 characters
that were - 206 - slightly revised in their print formats in the Song style, a popular Chinese character style in book printing format (Jiang Aitao, 2009). This re-formation of characters has grown in popularity since 2009, and can be seen in off-line art such as Hung’s (on
the ping-pong racket above) and on blogs and webpages on the Internet.149 Figure 14: Hybrid hexie1shehui, rearranging the characters for 河蟹社會 (Source: Keso) The image above shows a T-shirt printed by critical blogger Keso. The print displays a rearrangement
of the classical Chinese characters, used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for “rivercrab society” (hexie shehui 河蟹社会). The characters below similarly display an amalgamation of the characters for “harmony” (hexie 和谐) and “rivercrab” (hexie 河蟹). 149 The first
instance of this trend may be when on August 31 2009, netizens created three new Chinese characters together with other digital artwork within twelve hours. These new characters can be seen on Hecaitou’s blog and include a character pronounced “nan”, which
combines the characters for “brain damage” (naocan4 脑残), which is online lingo used to describe someone incapable of thinking straight because they have been crippled by party ideology; “wao” combining the characters for “fifty cents” (wumao 五毛) in a
reference to the “Fifty cent party” which is an online term for online commentators paid and trained by the government to anonymously spin online debate in favour of the Party Line; and “diang”, combining the characters for the CCP Central Committee
(dangzhongyang 党中央) interpreted to mean “the ultimate, sacred, absolutely correct, cannot be questioned; you get the shit beaten out of you but cannot say a word” ( 意思是至高无上的，神圣的， 绝对正确的，不容质疑的， 抽你丫没商量的) (Hecaitou, 2009b, for

This hybridisation of crabs

English language commentary at China Digital Times, see Xiao Qiang, 2009). - 207 - Figure 15: Hybrid hexie, combining the characters 和谐 and 河蟹 (Source: Alison, 2010)

has clear parallels to Baudrillard’s alignment of metastases and

prostheses, where the fractal (geo)body, “fated to see its own external
functions multiply, is at the same time doomed to unstoppable internal
division among its own cells. It metastasises: the internal, biological
metastases are in a way symmetrical with those external metastases, the
prostheses, the networks, the connections” (Baudrillard, 2002 [2000]: 3). In this way rivercrabs, too, metastasise in time and space. Heterotemporalities

Having examined the hybrid nature of the metastasising crabs,

and the undecidability of rivercrabs

the final point I want to argue is that this hybridity, in combination with
the autoimmune logics of which they are part, imbues them with a radical
undecidability . Derrida too emphasises this link between the autoimmunitary and undecidability: suppression in the name of the (harmonious) system may be legitimate in protecting it from those who threaten it, but is
simultaneously autoimmunitary in exposing the immune system by which the system defends itself as an “a4priori abusive use of force” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a). In this final section I thus want to emphasise the links between cancer/crabs and undecidability of the

The undecidable nature of cancer/crabs is visible

future against which harmonisation attempts to secure “harmonious world/society”.

in an aspect of the lore surrounding them, that refers to the way the crab
moves in time and space, in a forward and backwards motion that has
been connected to threatening dishonesty, but also to the inability to
decide something one way or the other, or to predict where it is going (Demaitre,
1998). This undecidability embodied in the crab is also emphasised by the Chinese interpretation of harmony that sees its roots in cooking. The crab can at times be poisonous and as a bottom-feeder it often includes contaminated substances. At the same time,
however, it is considered a delicacy and is believed to nourish the marrow and semen, making it a symbol of male potency and virility (The Vanishing Tattoo, 2011). As crabs are considered exemplary “salty” they can in the logic of TCM either disturb or restore
harmony of the body through their effect on the kidneys, and can thus cause or treat cancer (Lu, 1986: 52, 125-6; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 16).150 Like Derrida’s reading of the pharmakon in “Plato’s Pharmacy”, the crab, then, is simultaneously potential poison and
potential cure – indeed Derrida says that “[t]he pharmakon is another name, an old name, for this autoimmunitary logic”.151 Again, the interpretation of the crab as alimentary poison/cure as always already central to the concept of harmony can be seen in the
building blocks of the harmony concept itself. An alternative explanation of the character 和 reads the radical to the left 禾, which depicts standing grain,152 with the radical to the right 口, which depicts an opening or mouth.153 Together they link harmony to
eating, or having plenty of grain 禾 to eat 口.154 David Hall and Roger Ames accordingly argue that “harmony is the art of combining and blending two or more foodstuffs so they come together with mutual benefit and enhancement without losing their separate
and particular identities, and yet with the effect of constituting a frictionless whole” (Hall and Ames, 1998: 181, cited in Callahan, 2011: 259). Callahan also draws on this metaphor in a famous passage from the Spring4and4Autumn4Annals (Lüshi4chunqiu 呂氏春秋),
where a minister uses it to explain to his king the art of empire building: “[y]our state is too 150 For one example of such a cure: “Bake one male crab and one female crab and grind into powder, take the powder with wine all at once to facilitate healing of breast
cancer” (Lu, 1986: 126). 151 Derrida (2003a: 124, see also, Derrida, 1976 [1967]: 292; 1981 [1972]; 1995 [1989]-a: 233; Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 52, 82, 157). This is also how Chinese lore traditionally conceives of poisons/cures more generally, as is clear from the
“Five Poisons” (wu4du 五毒), incidentally near-homonymous with “no poison” (wu4du4 无毒). These are, like the crab, actually five animals that have traditionally been held to counteract harmful influences through counteracting poison with poison. They also had
corresponding medicines made from five animals or corresponding herbs, used to treat ulcers and abscesses, probably through active ingredients such as mercury and arsenic (Yetts, 1923: 2; Williams, 1976). 152 According to a dictionary definition
(Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 4.2588.1). 153 According to a dictionary definition (Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.566.14). 154 This etymology can be found in a number of dictionaries and books on Chinese characters (Wieger, 1965 [1915]: 121a;
Karlgren, 1974 [1923]: 70; Lindqvist, 1991: 187; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.602.1). small and is inadequate to have the full complement of the necessary ingredients. It is only once you are the Emperor that you would have the full complement” (Lvshi4
chunqiu, 1996, cited in Callahan, 2011: 260). To Callahan, this shows the constructed nature of harmony, built through “an active political process, and judged from a particular perspective – in this case the king’s perspective” (Callahan, 2011: 260). In Chinese
mythology, the crab is similarly associated with sovereign power and violent might, as well as with guarding and screening the passage into secured spaces. For example, in Chinese mythology and popular fiction, the Chrystal Palaces of the Dragon Kings of the Four
Seas are guarded by shrimp soldiers and crab generals (Mythical Realm, 2011). This stands as a parallel to the guarding of Chinese sovereign space by the Great Firewall, and the Green Dam Girl with her crab sign of repressive authority. At the same time, however,
this crustacean army is parodied in the Chinese idiom of “shrimp soldiers and crab generals” (xiabing4xiejiang4 虾兵蟹将), which is used to denote useless troops, a connotation which remains with contemporary Internet users, as can be seen in the image below,

which depicts shrimp soldiers and crab generals as precisely “ineffective troops” (Lee, 2011). Figure 16: Shrimp soldiers and crab generals: Ineffective troops (Source: Sean Lee) What is clear from these
metastases and their association is the undecidability of these crabs of
the onco-operative Chinese system. They are simultaneously poison and
cure, effective harmonisers and useless troops, a consequence of
sovereign bordering of time and space and that which “falls through” or
escapes such confines. This undecidability is inseparable from the “mutual
contamination” seen above in the crabs’ interaction with their environment and with other species of the zoology that has emerged as part of netizens’ play with humorous homonyms in the face of Internet harmonisation.

It is this “mutual contamination” that I think makes these rivercrabs and

their peers step up to the challenge of coeval multiplicities that was outlined in chapter 2 of this thesis, which
Hutchings articulated as the attempt to think “heterotemporality” which refers to “ultimately neither one present nor many presents, but a mutual contamination of ‘nows’ that participate in a variety of temporal trajectories, and which do not derive their
significance from the one meta-narrative about how they all fit together” (Hutchings, 2008: 166). These différantial metastases, differentiated and deferred through spacing, are of the system yet fall through the cracks of its time and space to engage in a “mutual

Their very undecidability means that we have to

contamination of ‘nows’” that each incorporates undecidable futures in the “here-now”.

take responsibility in the “here-now” for which of their possible readings,

or temporal trajectories, we chose to put across. In this chapter I have
chosen to put across one such narrative, of crabs as (auto)immune
metastases of an onco-operative harmony. Their significance, however,
cannot be ultimately decided or locked in by this narrative – it is not a
meta-narrative from which we can judge how they all fit together. It is
indeed impossible to do justice to the excess of meaning embodied in
these crabs. Nonetheless, I have traced some of them here and pointed to
some of their significance, in a way that I believe can emphasise their
radical undecidability as a “plurality of trajectories” or “simultaneity of
stories-so-far”. egao word play
CONCLUSION In this chapter I have explored how Hu’s version of a harmonious world is being challenged and reproduced by a particular form of Chinese

that works through deploying official language against itself. These

redeployments make visible how Hu’s harmony has come to work
through violent “harmonisation” of others . I have argued that these forms of wordplay draw on tactics similar to Derrida’s in particular, but also to

I have moreover argued that these forms

Baudrillard’s, thus providing for a resonance here between academic scholarship and dissident practice in China.

of resistance are inherently linked to Hu’s “harmonious world/society”

through the autoimmune logic of what I have termed an onco-operative
system: a system that in seeking to protect and cleanse itself actually
violates itself as the consequence of a violent non-recognition of the
“other” in the self. In exploring this quasi-suicidal interplay of harmony
and rivercrabs, I have shown how they are intimately linked to party-state
attempts at spatial and temporal bordering as a means to maintain a
cleansed/harmonious timespace. Deconstruction highlights the impossibility of ever making a clear-cut division between inside and outside, self and other and thus brings out a key
feature of the logics of “harmonious world” (or perhaps any system). Resistance to4harmony/harmonisation can in this way not be thought outside the resistance of4harmony/harmonisation, the resistance of the system itself to itself, of and to its “self” as “other”, a

it is impossible for harmony to acquire the conceptual

resistance of the “other” of itself to itself. For this reason,

unity or self-identity which would be needed in order for it to be placed

as a secure “object” to be straightforwardly resisted, critiqued or
condemned. In this manner I have insisted on the impossibility of
succeeding in creating such a purified space or object, and on the
undecidability of both harmony and crabs: like harmony, the crabs are
simultaneously poison and cure, they are intimately linked to the
possibility of the system in the first place, yet threaten it with
murder/suicide. Because of a tendency of any community to close in on itself and exclude the outside on which it relies for survival works according to an autoimmune logic, “[t]his tendency is not a perversion of proper

“[t]his self-
community (whether inoperative, unavowable, - 212 - or coming, as for Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben), but the condition of its existence” (Thomson, 2005). This is certainly the case for Hu’s “harmonious world”. In this way

contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is

to say, open to something other and more than itself” (Derrida, 1998: 51). Finally, then, I have argued that this undecidability

Returning to the question of the

is what makes it possible to think of this onco- operative system of metastases in terms of the “heterotemporalities” or “coeval multiplicities”.

political in harmony/rivercrabs, it seems the claim that the online world

of egao4offers a “free and unrestricted” time and space of Bakhtinian
carnival is premature. Rivercrabs are used to circumvent constraints, not
abolish them, and constraints are certainly still in place. The descriptions
of this culture as a separate sphere or “the antithesis of normal life” seem
similarly exaggerated. However, Lagerkvist’s idea that egao4is for venting anger as4opposed4to offering the public political power hinges on a focus on politics in the narrow sense, which is seen throughout
prior analyses of egao. Much previous scholarship rests on the assumption that egao4should be judged on its potential to influence politics, to contest the legitimacy, accountability or policy of the PRC government. Others imply that it should be measured against its

They make us
potential to cultivate collective resistance, collective empowerment or grassroots communities. If measured against such standards, rivercrabs certainly appear as “ineffective troops” in battling out Chinese politics.

laugh, but offer no way out, no alternative telos towards which a

movement of mass resistance can be directed. They even refuse to adapt
a single meaning and always oscillate – they are simultaneously harmony
and rivercrab, resisting and perpetuating the proliferation of harmony.
Precisely herein lies the political potential of rivercrabs. Previous
scholarship has aimed to understand the meaning of egao, to pin down its
potential significance in terms of a resisance/not resistance divide of
politics. I suggest instead that we can approach such phenomena by way
of interrogating the political, where “repolitcization” involves a disruption
of the regular proliferation of allochronically organized harmony, a
“challenge” to “what have, through discursive practices, been - 213 -

constituted as normal, natural, and accepted ways of carrying on” (Edkins, 1999: 12).

Through repeatedly deploying expressions like having “been harmonised”

or “rivercrab world” the meaning of the official “harmonious world”
discourse is “hollowed out” or “disrupted”, rather than contested head
on. The point is not necessarily to resist or not resist, but to “make
strange”. This is what pushes rivercrabs into the political, where multiple
meanings or doings – of words and purported significance – leads to
instances of openness where we need to make “impossible decisions”
with regards to their use and interpretation. It is only if we shift the focus
from politics to the political that it makes sense to conceive of this
language play as “alternative political discourse” (Meng Bingchun, 2011: 39) or “alternate civility” (Lagerkvist, 2010: 158). With this said,

repoliticisation is not stable, but egao too is repeatedly depoliticised, by

being designated as unimportant or as meaning only one thing (only
revolution, only apolitical escapism, only4a potential to become a proper
political movement). The point of this chapter is not to designate to egao
another correct4meaning, but to indicate the undecidability of this
meaning-making process. Because of The point, precisely, is to open back up the question of egao as potentially political even if it does not lead to a revolutionary politics.

the onco-operative logic of the system “our solutions to problems, our

attempts to perfect the world… are but a step on the way to worse
viruses developing” (Coulter, 2004). The question, then, has to be asked: “[w]hat is cancer a resistance to, what even worse eventuality is it saving us from-” (Baudrillard, 1993 [1990]: 10). It is thus to the question
of eventualities that I turn in my conclusion, to the (im)possibility of openness to this Other “to come”.
 1NC – Bifo
The 1AC only increase the speed of production increasing the spasms inherent
in the status quo. Rather than produce we ought to occupy the space of a
Chaoide and decode the excess chaos caused from semoicapitalism. Only
engaging the chaos inherent to spasms can we create a new rhythm of life not
defined by capital.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 216-222

While info-technologies are provoking an acceleration of the rhythm of

information and experience, simultaneously the space for physical
movement is shrinking and the resources for economic expansion are
becoming exhausted. I call this double process of acceleration and
exhaustion: the spasm. A spasm is a sudden, abnormal, involuntary
muscular contraction, or a series of alternating muscular contractions and
relaxations. A spasm is also a sudden, brief spell of energy and an
abnormal, painful intensification of the bodily nervous vibration. In his book
Spasm (1993), Arthur Kroker speaks of cyberpunk aesthetics and of partitioned recombinant bodies, in order to describe the effects

the introduction of electronic devices

of info-technology on the body-machine. According to Kroker,

in the flesh of the organic body (prostheses, pharmacology) and in the space between
organic bodies (digital enhancement of the bodily interaction, advertising, virtual sex) is the cause of an
acceleration of the nervous vibration up to the point of spasm. In Guattari’s
parlance a refrain (retournelle) is the link between the subject of enunciation and the

cosmos, between a body and the surrounding environment, between the

consciousness of a social group and its physical and imaginary territory.
Deterritorialization breaks the chains, and jeopardizes the relation
between subjectivity and its environment. As a reaction, the refrain tends
to harden, to become stiff in order to dam the process of
deterritorialization. In the case of neurotic identity the refrain is embodied in hardened representations, as an
obsessional ritual or an aggressive reaction to change. In the current anthropological mutation induced by digital info-technology

the social organism is subjected to an accelerated

and market globalization,

deterritorialization that takes the form of a spasm. In his last book, Chaosmosis (1992),
Guattari writes that ‘Among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millenaire, the question of subjectivity is now returning

All the disciplines will have to combine their creativity

as a leit motiv . . .’ He first adds: ‘

to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental implosion and chaosmic
spasms looming on the horizon.’ Then he writes: ‘We have to conjure
barbarianism, mental implosion, chaosmic spasm’.2 This last expression
marks the consciousness of the darkness, and of the pathology that
capitalism is bringing about. In that book Guattari foretold that the millennial transition
was going to be an age of fog and miasmas, of obscurity and suffering.
Now we know that he was perfectly right. Twenty years after Chaosmosis,
we know that the fog is thicker than ever and that the miasmas are not
vanishing, but becoming more dangerous, more poisonous than they have
ever been. Chaosmosis was published just a few months before the death of its author in 1992, when the world powers met
in Rio de Janeiro to discuss and possibly to decide about the pollution and global warming that in those years was becoming
increasingly apparent as a threat to human life on the planet. The American President George Bush Senior declared that the
American way of life was not negotiable, meaning that the US did not intend to reduce carbon emissions, energy consumption and
economic growth for the sake of the environmental future of the planet. Then, as on many other occasions afterwards, the United

the
States government refused to negotiate and to accept any global agreement on this subject. Today, twenty years later,

devastation of the environment, natural life and social life have reached a
level that seems to be irreversible. Irreversibility is a diffi cult concept to
convey, being totally incompatible with modern politics. When we use
this word we are declaring ipso facto the death of politics itself. The
process of subjectivation develops within this framework, which reshapes
the composition of unconscious flows in the social culture. ‘Subjectivity is
not a natural given any more than air or water. How do we produce it,
capture it, enrich it and permanently reinvent it in order to make it
compatible with universes of mutating values?’3 The problem is not to
protect subjectivity. The problem is to create and to spread flows of re-
syntonization of subjectivity in a context of mutation. How can the subjectivity flows that
we produce be independent from the corrupting effects of the context, while still interacting with the context? How to create
autonomous subjectivity (autonomous from the surrounding corruption, violence, anxiety)? Is this at all possible in the age of the

A spasm is a painful vibration which forces the organism to an

spasm?

extreme mobilization of nervous energies. This acceleration and this

painful vibration are the effects of the compulsive acceleration of the
rhythm of social interaction and of the exploitation of the social nervous
energies. As the process of valorization of semiocapital demands more
and more nervous productivity, the nervous system of the organism is
subjected to increasing exploitation. Here comes the spasm: it is the effect of a
violent penetration of the capitalist exploitation into the fi eld of info-
technologies, involving the sphere of cognition, of sensibility, and the
unconscious. Sensibility is invested by the info-acceleration, and the
vibration induced by the acceleration of nervous exploitation is the
spasmic effect. What should we do when we are in a situation of spasm? Guattari is not using the
word ‘spasm’ in isolation. He says precisely: ‘chaosmic spasm’. If the spasm is the panic
response of the accelerated vibration of the organism, and the hyper-
mobilization of desire submitted to the force of the economy, chaosmosis
is the creation of a new (more complex) order (syntony, and sympathy) emerging from the
present chaos. Chaosmosis is the osmotic passage from a state of chaos to a new order, where the word ‘order’ does not
have a normative or ontological meaning. Order is to be intended as harmony between mind

and the semioenvironment, as the sharing of a sympathetic mindset.

Sympathy, common perception. Chaos is an excess of speed of the
infosphere in relation to the ability of elaboration of the brain. In their last book,
What Is Philosophy?, which is about philosophy but also about growing old, Deleuze and Guattari speak of the relation between
chaos and the brain. ‘From Chaos to the Brain’ is the title of the last chapter of the book: We require just a little order to protect us
from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fl y off, that disappear hardly formed,
already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infi nite variabilities the appearing

They are infinite speeds that blend into the

and disappearing of which coincide.

immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse, without

nature or thought. This is the instant of which we do not know whether it
is too long or too short for time. We receive sudden jolts that beat like
arteries. We constantly lose our ideas.4 As consciousness is too slow for
processing the information that comes from the world in acceleration
(info-technology multiplied by semiocapitalist exploitation), we are
unable to translate the world into a cosmos, mental order, syntony and
sympathy. A transformation is needed: a jump to a new refrain, to a new rhythm;
chaosmosis is the shift from a rhythm of conscious elaboration (refrain) to
a new rhythm, which is able to process what the previous rhythm could not process. A shift in the speed of
consciousness, the creation of a different order of mental processing: this is chaosmosis. In order to shift from a rhythm to a

we need a ‘chaoide’, a living decoder

different rhythm, from a refrain to another refrain, Guattari says

of chaos. Chaoide, in Guattari’s parlance, is a sort of de- multiplier, an agent of re-

syntonization, a linguistic agent able to disengage from the spasmic
refrain. The chaoide is full of chaos, receives and decodes the bad
vibrations of the planetary spasm, but does not absorb the negative
psychological effects of chaos, of the surrounding aggressiveness, of fear.
The chaoide is an ironic elaborator of chaos. ‘The ecosophical cartography’, writes Guattari, ‘will not have the finality of
communicating, but of producing enunciation concatenations able to capture the points of singularity of a situation’.5 Where are
today’s concatenations that offer conscious organisms the possibility of emerging from the present spasmogenic framework, the

The rhythm that financial capitalism is imposing on

framework of financial capitalism?

social life is a spasmogenic rhythm, a spasm that is not only exploiting the
work of men and women, not only subjugating cognitive labour to the
abstract acceleration of the info-machine, but is also destroying the
singularity of language, preventing its creativity and sensibility. The financial
dictatorship is essentially the domination of abstraction on language, command of the mathematical ferocity on living and conscious

This is why we need to produce and to circulate chaoides, that is,

organisms.

tools for the conceptual elaboration both of the surrounding and of the
internalized chaos. A chaoide is a form of enunciation (artistic, poetic, political, scientific)
which is able to open the linguistic flows to different rhythms and to
different frames of interpretation. Chaosmosis means reactivation of the
body of social solidarity, reactivation of imagination, a new dimension for
human evolution, beyond the limited horizon of economic growth.

Focus on rational economic science has created a bloodthirsty form of

capitalism which attempts to erase affect and makes violence inevitable.
Neoliberalism constantly produces crisis to demonstrate its capacity for control.
While this system focuses on total peace, its hatred of uncertainty makes the
destruction of all life immanent.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 107-110

How does digital capitalism intertwine with the concept of uncertainty? What key changes have taken place in the structuring of the
world, via the digital and the biotechnological, what forces have emerged or coalesced, and finally, how do they affect the realm of
subjectivity and consumption? Here, Arthur Kroker has transposed McLuhan into the twenty-first century, performing an
interrogation of what he calls the
"digital nerve," basically the exteriorization of the human
sensorium into the digital circuitry of contemporary capitalism (Kroker, 2004:8I).This
(in)formation, "streamed capitalism," rests not exclusively on exchange value, nor material
goods, but something much more immaterial, — a postmarket, postbiological,
postimage society where the driving force, the "will to will," has ushered in a world
measured by probability. In other words, this variant of capitalism seeks to bind chaos by
ever-increasing strictures, utilizing an axiomatic based on capture and control, with vast
circuits of circulation as the primary digital architecture . This system runs on a densely
articulated composition, similar to the earlier addressed concept of sado-monetarism,
based upon extensive feedback loops running between exchange value and abuse value.
This assemblage, however, has multiple levels, and not all are connected to the grid at the same speeds; a number of different times
exist within this formation, including digital time, urban time, quotidian time, transversal time, etc. Spatially,
the
structure relies not on geography but "strategic digital nodes" for the core of the
system, and connectivity radiates out from these nodal points (Kroker, 2004: 125). For example, a
key site for these points would be the Net corporation, defined as "as a self-regulating,
self-reflexive platform of software intelligence providing a privileged portal into the
digital universe" (Kroker, 2004: 140). Indeed, his mapping of digital capitalism has clear parallels with the shifts Katherine
Hayles analyzes, in particular the underlying, driving mechanism whereby information severs itself from embodiment. Boredom
and acquisitiveness become the principle markers of this new form of capitalism, which
provides a rationale, or a new value set for the perpetual oscillation between the two
poles, producing an insatiable desire for both objects and a continuing stream of fresh
and intense experience. Perhaps the most densely argued assessment of capitalism, whose obvious parallel would be
Marx's Capital, is the two volumes by Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, With all the concern over the
theoretical concepts developed in these books, it
remains extremely important to understand the
analysis as possessing a fundamental focus on the question of political economy .
Capitalism forms, via its structural and affective matrix, a system capable of unparalleled cruelty and
terror, and even though certain indices of well-being have increased, "exploitation
grows constantly harsher, (and) lack is arranged in the most scientific ways " (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1983: 373). Their framework for analysis targets the global, where the deepest law of
capitalism sets limits and then repels those limits, a process well known as the concept
of deterrorialization. Capitalism functions, then, by incessantly increasing the portion of
constant capital, a deceptively concise formulation that has tremendous resonance for
the organization of the planet—resources continually pour into the technological and
machinic apparatus of capture and control, to the increased exclusion of the human
component (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 466—7). In other words, it not only thrives on crisis but one of the
principle definitions of capitalism would be to continually induce crisis; nostalgia for a
"los time" only drives these processes. The planet confronts the fourth danger, the most
violent and destructive of tendencies, characterized as a turning to destruction,
abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 229). Deleuze and Guattari
make clear this fourth danger does not translate as a death drive, because for them desire is "always assembled," a creation and a
composition; here the task
of thinking becomes to address the processes of composition. The
current assemblage, then, has mutated from its original organization of total war, which
has been surpassed "toward a form of peace more terrifying still," the "peace of Terror
or Survival" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 433). Accordingly, the worldwide war machine has entered a
postfascist phase, where Clauscwitz has been dislocated, and this war machine now targets the entire
world, its peoples and economies. - An "unspecified enemy" becomes the continual
feedback loop for this war machine, which had been originally constituted by states, but
which has now shifted into a planetary, and perhaps interstellar mode, with a seemingly
insatiable drive to organize insecurity, increase machinic enslavement, and produce a
"peace that technologically frees the unlimited material process of total war" (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987: 467).7 Deleuze has analyzed these tendencies extensively in his own work, in particular with his dissection of active
and reactive forces in his book on Nietzsche but also in his work on Sade and Masoch, where he points to a
type of sadism
that seems capable of attempting a "perpetually effective crime" to not only destroy
(pro)creation but to prevent it from ever happening again, a total and perpetual
destruction, one produced by a pervasive odium fati, a hatred of fate that seeks absolute revenge in
destroying life and any possible recurrence. (Deleuze, 1989: 37). This tendency far outstrips what Robert Jay
Lifton has described as the "Armageddonists," in their more commonly analyzed religious variant and in what he calls the
secular type, both of which see the possibility of a "world cleansing," preparing the way for a new
world order, be it religious or otherwise (Lifton, 1987: 5—9). Embedded within the immanence
of capitalism, then, one can find forces which would make fascism seem like "child
precursors," and Hitler's infamous Telegram 71 would be applied to all of existence ,
perpetually. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:467). One final complication in terms of currently emerging
subjectivities, the well-known analysis in Anti-Oedipus where capitalism, as basically driven by a certain
fundamental insanity, oscillates between "two poles of delirium, one as the molecular
schizophrenic line of escape, and the other as paranoiac molar investment " (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1983: 3I5). These two markers offer dramatically different possibilities for the issues
8

of subjectivities and agency, and questions of consumption and the political can be
posed within their dense and complex oscillations.

The expectation of a ballot for cognitive labor in the round accelerates the
productive system of Semiocapitalism inherent in the speech act. Time is now
fractalized, broken into pieces to be consumed. Capitalism has moved past the
material and now infiltrates all knowledge becoming Semiocapitalism, a game
of mirrors that hides itself from the material view.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 136-142

Semiocapitalism is based on the exploitation of neural energy. Attention

is under siege, both in the space of production and in that of
consumption. Attention implies a constant investment of nervous energy, and this is much more difficult to manage and is
much more unpredictable than the muscular effort required of workers on the assembly line. During the years of the Prozac

economy, cognitive workers were motivated to invest their creativity in the

process of production, in expectation of the success and profit that would
be their reward – they were persuaded that work and capital could be
forged together in the same process of mutual enrichment. Workers were
encouraged to think of themselves as free agents, and that phenomena
such as the dotcom bubble were based on real expansions of revenue,
generating high career expectations. But the alliance of semiocapital and
cognitive work was not to last forever. Neuro-Exploitation and Collapse In the last year of the dotcom
decade, when the technoapocalypse was announced in the guise of the Millennium Bug, dark clouds were

looming in the clear skies of the self-appointed ‘new economy’. The social
imagination was so charged with apocalyptic expectation that the myth of
the global techno-crash sent a thrilling wave of anticipation around the
world. Although the announced apocalypse went by the name of the ‘Millennium Bug’, when the clocks
turned twelve on the night of the millennium itself, the absence of any
cataclysmic event left the global psyche teetering on the brink of an abyss
of the collective imagination. A few months later, in spring of the year 2000, the dotcom crash ushered in the
slowmotion collapse – a collapse that, in one way or another, has never been really overcome – despite Bush’s infi nite war, despite
the proclaimed recovery.The recombinant alliance of cognitive work and fi nancial
capital was over. The young army of free agents, selfexploiters and virtual
prosumers was transformed into modernity’s horde of precarious
cognitive workers: cognitarians, cognitive proletarians and internet-slaves who invest nervous energy in exchange for
a precarious revenue. Precarity is the general condition of semio-workers. The

essential feature of precarity in the social sphere is not the loss of

regularity in the labour relation, since labour has always been more or
less precarious, notwithstanding legal regulations. The essential
transformation induced by the digitalization of the labour process is the
fragmentation of the personal continuity of work, the fractalization and
cellularization of time. The worker disappears as a person, and is replaced by abstract fragments of time. The
cyberspace of global production can be viewed as an immense expanse of
depersonalized human time. In the sphere of industrial production,
abstract labour time was embodied in a worker of fl esh and bone, with a
certifi ed and political identity. When the boss was in need of human time for capital valorization, he
was obliged to hire a human being, and was obliged to deal with the
physical weaknesses, maladies and rights of this human being; was
obliged to face trade unions reclaims and the political demands of which
the human was a bearer. As we move into the age of info-labour, there is
no longer a need to invest in the availability of a person for eight hours a
day throughout the duration of his or her life. Capital no longer recruits
people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable
and occasional bearers. In the internet economy, fl exibility has evolved
into a form of fractalization of work. Fractalization is the modular and
recombinant fragmentation of the period of activity. The worker no
longer exists as a person. He or she is only an interchangeable producer of
micro-fragments of recombinant semiosis that enter into the continuous
fl ux of the internet. Capital no longer pays for the availability of a worker
to be exploited for a long period of time; it no longer pays a salary that
covers the entire range of economic needs of a person who works. The worker
(a machine endowed with a brain that can be used for fragments of time) is paid for his or her occasional, temporary services.

Work time is fragmented and cellularized. Cells of time are put up for sale
online, and businesses can purchase as many of them as they want
without being obligated in any way to provide any social protection to the
worker. Depersonalized time has become the real agent of the process of
valorization, and depersonalized time has no rights, no union organization
and no political consciousness. It can only be either available or
unavailable – although this latter alternative remains purely theoretical
inasmuch as the physical body still has to buy food and pay rent, despite
not being a legally recognized person. The time necessary to produce the
info-commodity is liquefi ed by the recombinant digital machine. The
human machine is there, pulsating and available, like a brainsprawl in
waiting. The extension of time is meticulously cellularized: cells of
productive time can be mobilized in punctual, casual and fragmentary
forms. The recombination of these fragments is automatically realized in
the network. The mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the
connection between the needs of semiocapital and the mobilization of
the living labour of cyberspace. The ringtone of the mobile phone
summons workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux. In
this new labour dimension, people have no right to protect or negotiate the time of which they are formally the proprietors, but are
effectively expropriated. That time does not really belong to them, because it is separated from the social existence of the people

The time of work is fractalized,

who make it available to the recombinant cyber-productive circuit.

reduced to minimal fragments that can be reassembled, and the

fractalization makes it possible for capital to constantly fi nd the
conditions of the minimal salary. Fractalized work can punctually rebel,
here and there, at certain points – but this does not set into motion any
concerted endeavour of resistance. Only the spatial proximity of the
bodies of labourers and the continuity of the experience of working
together lead to the possibility of a continuous process of solidarity. Without
this proximity and this continuity, the conditions for the cellularized bodies to coalesce into community do not pertain.

Individual behaviours can only come together to form a substantive

collective momentum when there is a continuous proximity in time, a
proximity that info-labour no longer makes possible. Cognitive activity has
always been involved in every kind of human production, even that of a
more mechanical type. There is no process of human labour that does not involve an exercise of intelligence. But
today, cognitive capacity is becoming the essential productive resource. In the age of industrial labour, the mind was

put to work as a repetitive automatism, the neurological director of

muscular effort. While industrial work was essentially repetition of
physical acts, mental work is continuously changing its object and its
procedures. Thus, the subsumption of the mind in the process of capitalist valorization leads to a true mutation. The
conscious and sensitive organism is subjected to a growing competitive pressure, to an acceleration of stimuli, to a constant exertion
 the mental environment, the info-sphere in which
of his/her attention. As a consequence,

the mind is formed and enters into relations with other minds, becomes a
psychopathogenic environment. To understand semiocapital’s infi nite
game of mirrors, we must fi rst outline a new disciplinary fi eld, delimited
by three aspects: the critique of political economy of connective
intelligence; the semiology of linguistic-economic fl uxes; and the
psychochemistry of the info-sphere, focused on the study of the
psychopathological effects of the mental exploitation caused by the
acceleration of the info-sphere. In the connected world, the retroactive loops of
general systems theory are fused with the dynamic logic of biogenetics to
form a post-human vision of digital production. Human minds and fl esh
are integrated with digital circuits thanks to interfaces of acceleration and
simplifi cation: a model of bio-info production is emerging that produces
semiotic artefacts with the capacity for the auto- replication of living
systems. Once fully operative, the digital nervous system can be rapidly
installed in every form of organization. The digital network is provoking
an intensifi cation of the info-stimuli, and these are transmitted from the
social brain to individual brains. This acceleration is a pathogenic factor
that has wide-ranging effects in society. Since capitalism is wired into the
social brain, a psychotic meme of acceleration acts as pathological agent:
the organism is drawn into a spasm until collapse.

The world is accelerating towards the catastrophe, the only question we can
ask when faced with the current political sphere is Should We Take Shelter?
Our alternative is one where instead of reaching for survival and failing we
engage the coming apocalypse through a banishing of hope for the future.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 212-215

Curtis’s nightmares are frightening. He dreams of a yellow brownish rain

and of a tempest destroying everything, particularly destroying his family,
his wife and daughter, and the house where they live, one of those
depressing but comfortable houses scattered in the fl at landscape of the
American Midwest. Are nightmares life, or is life a nightmare? Curtis’s life is happy, he loves his wife Samantha and
he loves his daughter Hannah, who suffers from deafness. The company he is working for gives Curtis a good insurance plan that will
make it possible for his daughter to have surgery to resolve her hearing problems. Samantha is a stay-at-home mom who tries to

supplement the family income. Money is tight, but, thanks to his job, Curtis manages to
pay for the mortgage of the house. Yet during the night Curtis’s sleep is
troubled by the nightmarish premonition of catastrophe. He decides to
build a storm shelter in his backyard. To build the shelter he needs
money, his salary is not enough for the task, and he goes to the bank to
ask for a loan. ‘Beware my boy’, says the good bank director, ‘these are diffi cult times. You
have a family – running into debt is dangerous’. But Curtis insists that he
needs money in order to build a shelter and to protect his family from the
imaginary tempest. Signifi cantly, Jeff Nichols conceived the plot of the movie described here, Take Shelter, at the
end of 2008, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, during the time in

which, in the collective imagination, fi nance came to be increasingly

linked to catastrophic events. Samantha, Curtis’s wife, is worried. Her
husband’s behaviour is strange. She is alarmed by the loan, and she
understands that Curtis has mental health problems. She knows that his
mother has been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Then things take
a turn for the worse. In order to excavate the backyard and make room for the shelter, Curtis takes a digger from
the site where he works. Somehow the boss comes to know about this, and Curtis is fi red. He is now jobless,

anguished, on the brink of a nervous breakdown. The shelter is ready, and

one night a tornado warning sends him and his family into the shelter.
They sleep in the shelter, but the tempest is not the fi nal catastrophe,
and the following morning the sky is bright, and the neighbours are
cleaning up some debris. Samantha persuades Curtis to see a therapist. The doctor suggests
that they take a beach holiday before Curtis begins serious therapy, to
return more relaxed and ready to start a new life. They go to the beach
for a few days of vacation and relax. Curtis is on the beach with his
daughter building a sandcastle, when the little deaf-mute girl looks at the
horizon and makes the sign of a storm. Curtis turns his head and looks at
the sky: impressive clouds are announcing the most frightening of all
storms. Samantha comes out of the house running, and the thick brownish rain of Curtis’s nightmares begins to fall. She
looks at the ocean, where the tide is pulling back, and a tsunami is
growing in the distance. Take Shelter recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds,
not only in the sequences involving birds attacking humans but also in the
inexplicable premonition of an indefi nable threat. The premonition is the
same as that of the present global unconscious, as the inner landscape of
mankind is assaulted by fi nancial predation and by the coming
environmental catastrophe. Should we take shelter? Should we go to the bank and ask for
a loan, and invest our future in protecting our future? Should we take our premonitions seriously? Should we accept

that paranoia is a reasonable response to a danger that we cannot dispel,

or should we dispel this as a paranoid delusion? Nichols answers our questions: by
investing our energy in building a shelter, we fall into the trap, to accept
the dilemma of depression and catastrophe. When the tempest comes,
we won’t be home anyway, we’ll be too far away from the shelter. The
European hope is turning into a nightmare, as Northern Protestants remain reluctant to pay the bill for the perceived laxity of

Goldman Sachs has sown the wind, and now the

Southern Catholics and the Orthodox.

harvest of tempest is ripe. The hope of the Arab Spring is turning into a
nightmare too: Syrian civil war is spreading beyond the Syrian borders.
The Islamic State is declared. The implausible idea of the Caliphate is
becoming real and taking hold of a territory. And the Egyptian revolution
has been trashed by the democratically elected Islamist government,
subsequently overthrown by Sisi, Mubarak’s avatar. Israel is threatening
Iran and Iran is threatening Israel, while Hezbollah announces the
creation of a special force destined to occupy Northern Israel. Money is
our shelter, the only way we have to access life. But at the same time, if
you want money you have to renounce life. Don’t build a shelter, it is
surely going to be useless. Furthermore, building shelters is the job of those who
are preparing the storm. Remain calm. Don’t be attached to life, and most
of all: don’t have hope, that addictive poisonous weed.

Chaos dictates the struggle, infinite dichotomies as the relationship

between the brain and reality. Complexity swirls around the world,
creating an environment in continual flux. The determinism based on
understanding and ordering has failed to relate to intricate
relationships. The singularity is the inexplicable event that creates the
acceptance of the mysteriousness of the future instead of attempting to
fix it. The space of possibility is infinite; that is the only future with
consciousness and a space for creativity.
Bifo 11. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, “After the Future”, AK Press, pg. 159-163
Guattari is wondering here about
the possibility of a process of liberation, defining liberation
as "resingularization." He also speaks of fogs and miasmas. After the illusion of peace that
followed the crash of the Soviet empire, a chaotic war exploded in the Persian Gulf.
The Cold War geopolitical order was over and the new conflict was a symptom of a
general chaos in world relations. In 1992, in order to make some decisions about the global environment, a
summit of the leading nations of the world was called in Rio de Janeiro. On that occasion George Bush senior informed the
world that the American lifestyle was non-negotiable, and the Americans refused to talk about the environmental catastrophe.
The Rio de Janeiro summit was a failure, and it opened the way to the present environmental chaos. When Felix Guattari died,
some months after the Rio de Janeiro summit, he was conscious of the extreme dangers of the world situation. In the last years
of his life, he experienced the double black hole of internal and external chaos. In the black hole that psychiatrists call
depression, we can never distinguish among the personal, the social, and the planetary. Peoples, races, mobs are always there
in the mental landscape of schizo-consciousness (and unconsciousness). This is my starting point about chaos: the world-
chaos that Guattari talks about in his last book is not only depression, fog, and miasma. Chaos
is much more than
this. It's also the infinity of colors, dazzling lights, hyperspeed intuitions, and
breathtaking emotions. Chaos is a twofold word: in the last book they wrote together (What Is Philosophy?),
Guattari and Deleuze say that Chaos is both friend and foe. It's both enemy and ally: "It is as if
the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy"
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994,203). Chaos is an enemy, but it can also become a friend, because
chaos is the door of creation. We are walking in darkness, but we are able to create
concepts that illuminate the surroundings. Friendship is one of the keywords of this last book by Deleuze
and Guattari. Friendship means sharing a refrain, a semiotic set that allows us to see the
same vision and helps to create a world out of chaos. Chaos is not in the world;
reality knows neither chaos nor order. Chaos is in the relationship between the
speed of our brain and the changing speed of reality. Chaos is a complexity that is too dense,
toothick, too intense, too speedy, too fast, too much for our brains to decipher. We
speak of chaos when our speed of psychic elaboration is overwhelmed by the speed
and the complexity of the world. Chaos chaotizes, disentangles any consistency into
infinite pieces. But the task of philosophy is the creation of planes of consistency
without losing the infinity out of which thought arises. The chaos we are dealing
with has both a mental and a physical existence — not the physical existence of the
world, but the physical existence of the organism (as a conscious and sensitive
entity). The physical existence of the body is the space where chaos arises and takes
place. In this space of unhappiness and mental disorder, of panic, depression, and
loneliness, the projected order of the world collapses. Chaos is too complex an
environment to be decoded by the available explanatory grids, it is an environment
in which semiotic and emotional flows are circulating too fast for our minds to
elaborate. The elaboration of chaos is made possible by the emergence of a semiogenetic machine that Guattari calls a
refrain. This is chaosmosis, the emergence of a form: creative morphogenesis. The
morphogenetic process has long been described in deterministic terms by modern epistemology: Newton and Galileo founded
physics on the idea that a unifying language — the language of Mathematics — frames the whole of creation. The final goal of
theoretical and scientific work was the understanding of laws that describe the determinist generation of any natural process.
Biology and biogenetics have developed in the same deterministic frame: they describe biological morphogenesis in terms of a
deterministic relation between the code and the organism. Following the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, the body has been
conceived of as development and realization of the code, an implied order that accounts for the unfolding of life. This vision of
nature went along with the social episteme of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was based on a deterministic
relationship between economic factors and social effects. The
epis-temological framework based on
determinism has been fertile in the modern age, in the sense that the mechanical
paradigm has been useful to understand a world that was based on industrial
production and mechanical technologies. But the acceleration that electronic
technologies have imposed on production and knowledge has opened a new
dimension that cannot be described in deterministic terms. Determinism fails to
understand the fuzzy, hypercomplex organization of the network of cognitive labor:
the relation between labor time and value is dissolved, and the very idea of
determination fades. The uncertainty principle, first asserted by Heisenberg in the field
of microphysics, frames the new social consciousness . Just as in microphysics you cannot
determine the moment and the speed of a particle, because the presence of the observer alters the
picture, so too in sociology you cannot determine the relation between the present and the future, because the
subjective factor is too complex to be understood and described . At the present moment, the
predictive power of knowledge is at stake. The global mind's complexity is beyond
the understanding of the situated mind of any individual, group, party, or state.
Marxism has long been understood as a form of predictive science. Being able to
analyze the relationship between different social actors (bourgeoisie and working class), being
able to predict the dynamics of economic crises (overproduction, fall of the profit rate, breakdown of
the capitalist economy), the scholastic vision of Marxism claimed to also predict the outcome of the story: the final victory of
communism, the abolition of classes, and the realization of reason. In the official version of dialectical materialism (Diamat),
inherited from Hegel and reformulated by Engels, the relationship between the present condition
and the future was explained in terms of a deterministic reduction. The future was
imagined as the unfurling of a tendency inscribed in the present. Repetition
prevailed, and difference was ignored. The faith in a progressive future was based
on this deterministic reduction, and it evaporated as soon as that conceptual
framework was abandoned. The event is not predictable because it is not the development of what we presently
know. The event is a creative gesture creating a new refrain. So, I answer the question: why
resist, why persist in seeking autonomy from power? Where is the hope? The hope is in the
limits of my knowledge and understanding. My knowledge and understanding don't see how any
development of the social catastrophe could cultivate social well-being. But the catastrophe (in the etymology of
kata and strophein) is exactly the point where a new landscape is going to be revealed. I
don't see that landscape because my knowledge and my understanding are limited ,
and the limits of my language are the limits of my world. My knowledge and understanding miss the
event, the singularity. So I must act "as if." As if the forces of labor and knowledge
might overcome the forces of greed and of proprietary obsession. As if the cognitive
workers might overcome the fractalization of their life and intelligence, and give
birth to the self-organization of collective knowledge. I must resist simply because I
cannot know what will happen after the future, and I must preserve the
consciousness and sensibility of social solidarity, of human empathy, of gratuitous
activity—of freedom, equality, and fraternity. Just in case, right? Just because we don't
know what is going to happen next, in the empty space that comes after the future of
modernity. I must resist because this is the only way to be in peace with myself. In
the name of self-love, we must resist. And self-love is the basic ethical rule that an
anarchist prizes. The present ignorance has to be seen as the space of a possibility.
We have to start from the ignorance of the general intellect. The force of collective
intelligence is boundless. Theoretically. But it currently lacks any consciousness of
itself. Intelligence without self-consciousness. I am talking about the self-consciousness of the general
intellect, millions and millions of people worldwide producing the infoflow that makes the planet go around. Creating a
form of self-consciousness of the general intellect is the political task of the future.
And it is not only political, but philosophical, epistemological , and, in the end,
therapeutic. Poetry and therapy (thera-poetry) will be the forces leading to the creation
of a cognitarian self-consciousness: not a political party, not the organization of
interests, but the reactivation of the cognitarian sensibility. The ignorance of the
general intellect is the starting point, after the future. Why are the cognitariat weak
and disunited and unable to assert their rights as laborers, their knowledge as
researchers? Because they live in a bifurcated form, because their brain is detached
from their body, because their communication communicates less and less, while
more and more freezing sensitivity to life. The new space of activism is here, in the
connection of poetry, therapy, and the creation of new paradigms.
 2NC A2: Survival
Survival is the dismissal of death, the nexus of modernity lies in the view of
death as deviant. That original deviance of death formulated the ongoing
exclusive tactics which make life a banal process no different from death.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, dead French philosopher, former professor emeritus at the
University de Paris X, “Theory, Culture & Society” in Jean Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange and
Death, Sage Publications Ltd., pg. 126-27

Foucault's analysis, amongst the masterpieces of this genuine cultural history,

takes the form of a genealogy of discrimination in which, at the start of
the nineteenth century, labour and production occupy a decisive place. At
the very core of the 'rationality' of our culture, however, is an exclusion that
precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen,
children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as
their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death. There is an irreversible
evolution from savage societies to our own: little by little, the dead cease to exist. They are
thrown out of the group's symbolic circulation. They are no longer beings
with a full role to play, worthy partners in exchange, and we make this
obvious by exiling them further and further away from the group of the
living. In the domestic intimacy of the cemetery, the first grouping remains in the
heart of the village or town, becoming the first ghetto, prefiguring every future ghetto, but are
thrown further and further from the centre towards the periphery, finally
having nowhere to go at all, as in the new town or the contemporary
metropolis, where there are no longer any provisions for the dead, either
in mental or in physical space. Even madmen, delinquents and misfits can find a
welcome in the new towns, that is, in the rationality of a modern society. Only the death-
function cannot be programmed and localised. Strictly speaking, we no longer
know what to do with them, since, today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be
dead is an unthinkable anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death
is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. The dead are no longer inflicted on any
place or space-time, they can find no resting place; they are thrown into a radical utopia. They
are no longer even packed in and shut up, but obliterated. But we know what
these hidden places signify: the factory no longer exists because labour is everywhere; the
prison no longer exists because arrests and confinements pervade social
space-time; the asylum no longer exists because psychological control and
therapy have been generalised and become banal; the school no longer
exists because every strand of social progress is shot through with
discipline and pedagogical training; capital no longer exists (nor does its
Marxist critique) because the law of value has collapsed into self-
managed survival in all its forms, etc., etc. The cemetery no longer exists
because modern cities have entirely taken over their function: they are
ghost towns, cities of death. If the great operational metropolis is the final form of an
entire culture, then, quite simply, ours is a culture of death. 3 Survival, or the Equivalent to
Death It is correct to say that the dead, hounded and separated from the living, condemn us to
an equivalent death: for the fundamental law of symbolic obligation is at play in any case, for
better or worse. Madness, then, is only ever the dividing line between the
mad and the normal, a line which normality shares with madness and
which is even defined by it. Every society that internalises its mad is a
society invested in its depths by madness, which alone and everywhere ends up
being symbolically exchanged under the legal signs of normality. Madness has for several
centuries worked hard on the society which confines it, and today the asylum
walls have been removed, not because of some miraculous tolerance, but because madness has
completed its normalising labour on society: madness has become pervasive, while
at the same time it is forbidden a resting place. The asylum has been
reabsorbed into the core of the social field, because normality has
reached the point of perfection and assumed the characteristics of the
asylum, because the virus of confinement has worked its way into every
fibre of 'normal' existence. So it is with death. Death is ultimately nothing more than the
social line of demarcation separating the 'dead' from the 'living': therefore, it affects both
equally. Against the senseless illusion of the living of willing the living to the
exclusion of the dead, against the illusion that reduces life to an absolute
surplus-value by subtracting death from it, the indestructible logic of
symbolic exchange re-establishes the equivalence of life and death in the
indifferent fatality of survival. In survival, death is repressed; life itself, in
accordance with that well known ebbing away, would be nothing more
than a survival determined by death.
 2NC A2: Biology
Their biological rationality distinguishes the living and non-living in order to legitimate itself as a
code and create a good artifact for scientific development. Thus biology, the study of life,
becomes equivalent to the death drive, since we are constantly murdering to create objects of
scientific study. In their scientific rationalism, they have inevitably swept us into the axiomatics
of a system of death.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 152-153

Eros in the service of death, all cultural sublimation as a long detour to

death, the death drive nourishing repressive violence and presiding over culture
like a ferocious super-ego, the forces of life inscribed in the compulsion to
repeat; all this is true, but true of our culture. Death undertakes to abolish
death and, for this very purpose, erects death above death and is haunted
by it as its own end. The term 'pulsion' or 'drive' is stated metaphorically, designating the
contemporary phase of the political-economic system (does it then remain political economy?)
where the law of value, in its most terroristic structural form, reaches
completion in the pure and simple compulsive reproduction of the code,
where the law of value appears to be a finality as irreversible as a pulsion ,
so that it takes on the figure of a destiny for our culture. Stage of the immanent
repetition of one and the same law, insisting on its own end, caught, totally
invested by death as objective finality, and total subversion by the death
drive as a deconstructive process the metaphor of the death drive says all of this
simultaneously, for the death drive is at the same time the system and the
system's double, its doubling into a radical counter-finality (see the Double,
and its 'worrying strangeness', das Unheimliche).

This is what the myth recounts. But let's see what happens when it sets itself up as the objective
discourse of the 'pulsion'. With the term 'pulsion', which has both a biological and a psychical
definition, psychoanalysis settles down into categories that come straight
from the imaginary of a certain Western reason: far from radically contradicting
this latter, it must then interpret itself as a moment of Western thought . As
for the biological, it is clear that scientific rationality produces the distinction of
the living and the non-living on which biology is based. Science, producing
itself as a code, on the one hand literally produces the dead, the non-living,
as a conceptual object, and, on the other, produces the separation of the
dead as an axiom from which science can be legitimated. The only good
(scientific) object, just like the only good Indian, is a dead one. Now it is this
inorganic state to which the death drive is oriented, to the non-living status
that only comes about through the arbitrary decrees of science and, when
all's said and done, through its own phantasm of repression and death.
Ultimately, being nothing but the cyclical repetition of the non-living, the death drive
contributes to biology's arbitrariness, doubling it through a psychoanalytic route. But
not every culture produces a separate concept of the non-living; only our culture produces it,
under the sign of biology. Thus, suspending the discrimination would be enough
to invalidate the concept of the death drive, which is ultimately only a theoretical
agreement between the living and the dead, with the sole result that science loses
its footing amongst all the attempts at articulation. The non-living is
always permanently sweeping science along into the axiomatics of a
system of death (see J. Monod, Chance and Necessity [tr. Austyn Wainhouse, London:
Collins, 1970] ).
 2NC A2: Euro-Centrism
The affirmative has engaged in a creation of the other in the image of the ideal
model, which engenders ressentiment as the perpetual pursuit of perfect. This
production of difference and destruction of Otherness is the factor underlying
contemporary racism.
Baudrillard 94 “Figures de l'alterite” (Jean, spoke French) //pday

Starting with modernity, we have entered an era of production of the Other. It is

no longer a question of killing, of devouring or seducing the Other, of facing him,
of competing with him, of loving or hating the Other. It is first of all a matter
of producing the Other. The Other is no longer an object of passion but an
object of production. Maybe it is because the Other, in his radical otherness
[alterite], or in his irreducible singularity, has become dangerous or unbearable.
And so, we have to conjure up his seduction. Or perhaps, more simply,
otherness and dual relationships gradually disappear with the rise of
individual values and with the destruction of the symbolic ones. In any
case, otherness [alterite] is lacking and, since we cannot experience
otherness as destiny, one must produce the other as difference. And this is a
concern just as much for the body as it is for sex, or for social relationships. In order to escape
the world as destiny, the body as destiny, sex (and the other sex) as
destiny, the production of the other as difference is invented. This is what happens
with sexual difference. Each sex has its own anatomical and psychological
characteristics, its own desire with all the insoluble events that emerge from that, including
an ideology of sex and desire, and a utopia of sexual difference based on law and
nature. None of this has any meaning [sens] whatsoever in seduction where it is
not a question of desire but of a play [jeu] with desire, and where it is not a
question of equality between different sexes or of an alienation of one by the
other since this play [jeu] implies a perfect reciprocity of each partner (not
difference or alienation, but alterity/otherness [alterite] or complicity).
Seduction is nothing less than hysterical, since no sex projects its sexuality
onto the other. Distances are set. And otherness [alterite] is left untouched. This is
the very condition of this greater illusion, of this play with desire. What is
produced with the romantic turn, at the turn of the 19th century, is on the contrary the putting
into play of a masculine hysteria and, with it, of a change in sexual paradigms that once again
must be reinserted in the more general and universal context of a change in the paradigms of
otherness. During this hysterical phase, it is to a certain extent the femininity of men
that is projected onto women and that shape them as ideal figures of
likeness [ressemblance]. Romantic love is no longer about winning over a woman's heart, or
about seducing her. It is rather a matter of creating her from inside [de l'interieur],
of inventing her, either as a realized utopia (an idealized woman), or as a
"femme fatale", a star, which is yet another hysterical and supernatural metaphor. This is the
entire work of the romantic Eros: he is the one who has invented such an ideal harmony, such a
love fusion, almost an incestuous form, between twin beings (woman as a projected
resurrection of the same, and woman who takes her supernatural shape only as an ideal of the
same), an artifact from now on destined to love, that is to say destined to a pathos of ideal
likeness [ressemblance] of beings and sexes, a pathetic confusion that replaces the dual
otherness [alterite] of seduction. The entire erotic machinery changes
meaning/direction [sens] because the erotic attraction that once came from
otherness [alterite], from the strangeness of the Other, now shifts to the side
of the Same, to the side of similarity and likeness [ressemblance]. Auto-
eroticism? Incest? No, but rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same that eyes the other, that
invests and alienates himself in the other. But the other is never
more than the
ephemeral form of a difference that draws me closer to the I [me rapproche
de moi]. It is also the reason why, with romantic love and all its current by-products, sexuality
draws nearer to death: it is because sexuality is getting closer to incest and to its own destiny,
even if it is banalized (for it is no longer a question of a mythical or tragic incest; with modern
erotism we are only dealing with a diverted form of incest, that of the projection of the same
into the image of the other, which is the same thing as a confusion and a
corruption of all the images). Finally, it is the invention of a femininity which
renders women superfluous, the invention of a difference which is
nothing more than a diverted copulation with one's double. In the final
analysis [au fond], any encounter with otherness [alterite] is made impossible (by the way, it
would be interesting to know whether there has ever been a hysterical counterpart to this
phenomenon from the feminine side in the construction of virile and phallic mythologies.
Feminism is in fact an example of hystericization of the masculine by
women, a hysterical projection of their masculinity which follows exactly
the hysterical projection by men of their femininity in the mythical image
of a woman). But there still remains a dissymmetry in this forced allocation to difference.
And this is why I was saying, in a paradoxical way, that men are more different
from women than actually women are from men. This means that, in the context
of sexual difference, men are above all different whereas there is some
remnant of radical otherness within women, a radical otherness of
women which precedes the degraded status of [masculine] difference. In
short, in this extrapolation process of the Same in the production of the Other, in this hysterical
invention of the sexual other as a twin brother or sister (if the issue of twinning is so up-to-date,
it is because it reflects this very mode of libidinal cloning), there is a progressive assimilation of
the sexes which goes from difference to a lesser difference, and from there to a
visual inversion and non-differentiation of the sexes which, in the last analysis, turns
the sexual function into something totally useless. In the cloning process, useless sexual beings
will be reproduced. They are useless since sexuality is no longer necessary to their reproduction.
The real woman seems to disappear in that hysterical invention of femininity
(but she has many more ways to resist that), in that invention of sexual
difference whereby the masculine side is from the beginning the privileged
pole and through which all the ideological and feminist struggles will be
doomed to reconstruct either that very privilege or that unreconciled difference. But,
at the same, the so-called masculine desire also becomes, through the same invention,
completely problematic since it is no longer able to project in an other its own image, and thus
to become purely speculative. All this nonsense about the phallus
and the sexual
privilege of masculinity must also be re-examined. There is a sort of
transcending justice in this process of sexual non-differentiation, a justice
which drives both sexes to inexorably culminate in total non-
differentiation where they lose their singularity and their otherness
[alterite]. This is the era of Transsexualism where all the struggles linked to sexual Difference are
perpetuated well after any real sexuality or any type of real otherness has disappeared. This
(successful?) merger of a masculinely projected hysteria onto femininity is
renewed by every individual (man or woman) on their own bodies. An
identification and an appropriation of the body as if it was a projection of
the self, of a self no longer seen as otherness or destiny. In the facial
traits, in sex, in illnesses, in death, identity is constantly "altered." There
is nothing you can do about it: that's destiny. But it is precisely that which
must be exorcized at any cost through an identification with the body,
through an individual appropriation of the body, of your desire, of your
look, of your image: plastic surgery all over the place. If the body is no longer a
place of otherness [alterite], a dual relationship, but is rather a locus of identification,
we then must reconcile to it, we must repair it, perfect it, make it an ideal
object. Everyone uses their body like man uses woman in the projective mode of identification
described before. The body is invested as a fetish, and is used as a fetish in a
desperate attempt at identifying oneself. The body becomes the object of an
autistic cult and of a quasi-incestuous manipulation. And it is the likeness
[ressemblance] of the body with its model which then becomes a source
of eroticism and of "white" [fake, virgin, neutral,...] self-seduction to the
extent that this likeness virtually excludes the Other and is the best way
to exclude a seduction which would emerge from somewhere else. Many
more things partake of that production of the Other, of that hysterical
and speculative production: like racism, for instance, with its
development throughout modernity and with its current outbursts.
Logically, racism should have diminished thanks to Enlightenment's progress. But, the
more we know that a genetic theory of race is unfounded, the more racism is
reinforced. It is because racism is an artificial construction of the Other based on an erosion
of cultural singularities (of their otherness between one another) and on an
acceptance of a fetishistic system of difference. As long as there is otherness [alterite],
strangeness, and dual relationships (event violent ones), there is properly
speaking no such thing as racism. This was more or less the case until the 18th century,
as anthropological reports indicate. Once such a "natural" relationship is lost, one enters an
exponential relationship with an artificial Other. And nothing in our culture allows racism
to be curbed since our entire cultural movement goes in the same direction [sens]
which is that of a frenzied differential construction of the Other and of a perpetual
extrapolation of the Same through the Other. An autistic culture which takes the
shape of a fake altruism. Everyone talks about alienation. But the worst alienation
is not to be dispossessed by the other but to be dispossessed of the other,
that is to say to have to produce the other in his absence, and thus to be
continuously referred back to oneself and to one's image. If we are today
condemned to our own image (condemned to cultivate our body, our look, our
identity, and our desire), this is not because of an alienation, but because
of the end of alienation and because of the virtual disappearance of the other, which
is a much worse fatality. In fact, the paradoxical limit of alienation is to take oneself as a
focal point [comme point de mire], as an object of care, of desire, of suffering, and of
communication. This final short-circuiting of the other opens up an era of
transparency. Plastic surgery [la chirurgie esthetique] becomes universal. That
surgery of the faces and bodies is only the symptom of a more radical one:
that of otherness and destiny. What is the solution? Well, there is none to this erotic
movement of an entire culture, none to such a fascination, to such an abyss of denial of the
other, of denial of strangeness and negativity. There is none to that foreclosing of evil and to
that reconciliation around the Same and his proliferated expressions: incest, autism, twinning,
cloning. We can only remember that seduction lies in not reconciling with the Other
and in salvaging the strangeness of the Other. We must not be reconciled with
our own bodies or with our selves. We must not be reconciled with the Other. We must
not be reconciled with nature. We must not be reconciled with femininity (and that goes for
women too). The secret to a strange attraction lies here.

Radical otherness cannot and should not be subsumed in your understanding

Baudrillard 90 “The Transparency of Evil” pg. 147-148 (Jean, cool dude)//pday
Radical otherness is simultaneously impossible to find and irreducible. Impossible to find as
otherness per se (obviously a dream); but at the same time--- irreducible as a symbolic rule
of the game, as a rule of the game that governs the world. The promiscuity and
general confusion in which differences exist do not affect this rule of the
game as such: it is not a rational law, nor is it a demonstrative process - we
shall never have either metaphysical or scientific proof of this principle of
foreignness and incomprehensibility: we simply have to accept it. The worst thing here is
understanding, which is sentimental and useless. True knowledge is knowledge of exactly
what we can never understand in the other, knowledge of what it is in the
other that makes the other not oneself - and hence someone who can in no sense become
separated from oneself, nor alienated by any look of ours, nor instituted by
us in either identity or difference. (Never question others about their identity. In the case of
America, the question of American identity was never at issue: the issue was America's
foreignness.) If we do not understand the savage, it is for the same reason that he does not
understand himself (the term 'savage' conveys this foreignness better than all later
euphemisms). The rule of exoticism thus implies that one should not be
fooled by understanding, by intimacy, by the country, by travel, by
picturesqueness, or by oneself. The realm of radical exoticism, moreover, is not
necessarily a function of travel: 'It is not essential, in order to feel the shock [of the exotic I, to
revive the old-fashioned episode of the voyage. [ ... I The fact remains that such an episode and
its setting are better than any other subterfuge for reaching this brutal, rapid and pitiless hand-
to-hand conflict and making each blow count.' Travel is a subterfuge, then - but it is the most
appropriate one of all.

They are super wrong about power

Baudrillard 77 “Forget Foucault” (Jean, professor of philosophy and media criticism at the
European Graduate University)//pday
According to Foucault, this is the come-on that power offers, and it is not simply a discursive
trap. What Foucault does not see is that power is never there and that its institution, like the
institution of spatial perspective versus "real" space in the Renaissance, is only a simulation of
perspective-it is no more reality than economic accumulation-and what a
tremendous trap that is. Whether of time, value, the subject, etc., the axiom
and the myth of a real or possible accumulation govern us everywhere, although we
know that nothing is ever amassed and that stockpiles are selfconsuming , like modern
megalopolis, or like overloaded memories. Any attempt at accumulation is ruined in
advance by the void.* Something in us disaccumulates unto death, undoes, destroys,
liquidates, and disconnects so that we can resist the pressure of the real, and live.
Something at the bottom of the whole system of production resists the infinite
expansion of production-otherwise, we would all be already buried . There is
something in power that resists as well, and we see no difference here
between those who enforce it and those who submit to it: this distinction
has become meaningless, not because the roles are interchangeable but
because power is in its form reversible, because on one side and the other
something holds out against the unilateral exercise and the infinite
expansion of power, just as elsewhere against the infinite expansion of production. This
resistance is not a "desire" it is what causes power to come undone in exact proportion to its
logical and irreversible extension. And it's taking place everywhere today. In fact, the
whole analysis of power needs to be reconsidered. To have power or not , to take it or lose
it, to incarnate it or to challenge it: if this were power, it would not even exist.
Foucault tells us something else; power is something that functions; " ... power is not an
institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are
endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation
in a particular society" ( The History of Sexuality, p. 93). Neither central, nor
unilateral, nor dominant, power is distributional; like a vector, it operates
through relays and transmissions. Because it is an immanent, unlimited
field of forces, we still do not understand what power runs into and
against what it stumbles since it is expansion, pure magnetization.
However, if power were this magnetic infiltration ad infinitum of the social field, it would
long ago have ceased meeting with any resistance. Inversely, if it were the one-sidedness of
an act of submission, as in the traditional "optic," it would long ago have been
overthrown everywhere. It would have collapsed under the pressure of
antagonistic forces. Yet this has never happened, apart from a few "historical" exceptions.
For "materialist" thinking, this can only appear to be an internally insoluble problem: why
don't "dominated" masses immediately overthrow power? Why fascism?
Against this unilateral theory (but we understand why it survives, particularly
among "revolutionaries" -they would really like power for themselves),
against this native vision, but also against Foucault's functional vision in terms of relays and
transmissions, we must say that power is something that is exchanged. Not in the
economical sense, but in the sense that power is executed according to a reversible
cycle of seduction, challenge, and ruse (neither axis nor indefinite relay, but a cycle). And
if power cannot be exchanged in this sense, it simply disappears. We must say that
power seduces, but not in the vulgar sense of a complicit form of desire
on the part of those who are dominated-this comes down to basing it in
the desire of others, which is really going overboard in taking people for
idiots-no, power seduces by that reversibility which haunts it , and upon which a minimal
symbolic cycle is set up. Dominators and dominated exist no more than victims
and executioners. (While exploiters and exploited do in fact exist, they
are on different sides because there is no reversibility in production,
which is precisely the point: nothing essential happens at that level.) With
power there are no antagonistic positions: it is carried out according to a cycle of
seduction. The one-sidedness of a force relation never exists, a one-sidedness upon
which a power "structure" might be established, or a form of "reality" for
power and its perpetual movement, which is linear and final in the
traditional vision but radiating and spiraling in Foucault. Unilateral or segmentary: this
is the dream of power imposed on us by reason . But nothing yearns to be that way;
everything seeks its own death, including power . Or rather-but this is the same thing-
everything wants to be exchanged, reversed, or abolished in a cycle (this is in fact why
neither repression nor the unconscious exists: reversibility is always already there). That
alone is what seduces deep down, and that alone constitutes pure
jouissance, while power only satisfies a particular form of hegemonic logic
belonging to reason. Seduction is elsewhere. Seduction is stronger than power
because it is a reversible and mortal process, while power wants to be irreversible like value,
as well as cumulative and immortal like value. Power shares all the illusions of the real
and of production; it wants to belong to the order of the real and so falls over
into the imaginary and into self superstition (helped by theories which analyze it
even if only to challenge it) . Seduction, however, does not partake of the real
order. It never belongs to the order of force or to force relations. It is
precisely for this reason that seduction envelops the whole real process of
power, as well as the whole real order of production, with this never-
ending reversibility and disaccumulation-without which neither power nor
production would even exist. Behind power, or at the very heart of power and of
production, there is a void which gives them today a last glimmer of reality.
Without that which reverses them, cancels them, and seduces them, they
would never have attained reality. Besides, the real has never interested anyone. It
is the locus of disenchantment par excellence, the locus of simulacrum of
accumulation against death. Nothing could be worse. It is the imaginary
catastrophe standing behind them that sometimes makes reality and the
truth fascinating. Do you think that power, economy, sex-all the reals big
numbers-would have stood up one single instant without a fascination to support them
which originates precisely in the inversed mirror where they are reflected and continually
reversed, and where their imaginary catastrophe generates a tangible and immanent
gratification? Today especially, the real is no more than a stockpile of dead matter,
dead bodies, and dead language. It still makes us feel secure today to evaluate
this stock of what is real (let's not talk about energy: the ecological complaint hides the
fact that it is not material energy which is disappearing on the species' horizon but the energy of
the real, the reality of the real and of every serious possibility, capitalistic or revolutionary, of
managing the real). If the horizon of production has vanished, then the horizon
of speech, sexuality, or desire can still carry on; there will always be something to
liberate, to enjoy, and to exchange with others through words: now that's real,
that's substantial, that's prospective stock. That's power. Not so, unfortunately.
Not for long, that is. This sort of thing consumes itself as it goes along. We have
made, and have wanted to make, an irreversible agency (instance) out of
both sex and power; and out of desire we have made a force or irreversible
energy (a stock of energy, needless to say, since desire is never far from capital) . For we give
meaning, following our use of the imaginary, only to what is irreversible; accumulation,
progress, growth, production, value, power, and desire itself are all
irreversible processes-inject the slightest dose of reversibility into our economical,
political, institutional, or sexual machinery ( dispositif) and everything collapses at
once. This is what endows sexuality today with this mythic authority over bodies and hearts.
But it is also what makes it fragile, like the whole structure of production. Seduction is
stronger than production. It is stronger than sexuality and must never be
confused with it. It is not an internal process of sexuality, although it is generally reduced
to that. It is a circular and reversible process of challenge, one-upmanship, and death.
The sexual, on the contrary, is the form of seduction that has been
reduced and restricted to the energetic terms of desire. What we need to
analyze is the intrication of the process of seduction with the process of
production and power and the irruption of a minimum of reversibility in every
irreversible process, secretly ruining and dismantling it while simultaneously insuring
that minimal continuum of pleasure moving across it and without which it
would be nothing. And we must keep in mind that production everywhere and
always seeks to exterminate seduction in order to establish itself over the single
economy governing force relations; we must also keep in mind that sex or
its production seeks everywhere to exterminate seduction in order to
establish itself over the single economy governing relations of desire.

The postcolonial subject is naught but an involution of the liberal humanism

that it intended to oppose
Gupta 15 “Hyper reality and Identity in a Postcolonial World” (Indrani Das, professor of English
at Jamia Millia Islamia University)//pday

As Edward Said observed, reflections on identity inevitably invokes the “secret

sharer” of difference, and the “exploration of the remote” (Gupta & Ferguson
2). Postcolonial studies beginning with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) critiqued colonialist
discourses of having functioned in binaries, the creation of a “vision of reality
whose structure promoted the difference” between “us” and “them” (qtd.
in Loomba 43), but transformed its victimised subjects into agents of resistance by the
invocation of the very tenets of liberal humanism that it sought to challenge. The appeal to
justice, equality, and freedom which is the focal point of postcolonial studies
reveals according to Ivison, “the simultaneous invocation of the inadequacy and yet the
indispensability of liberal values” (qtd.in McCarthy ix). If, for Ashish Nandy, colonialism was an
effect of the rise of modern individualism and the “insane search for absolute
autonomy” (qtd. in McCarthy ix), so, the articulation of Postcolonial subject is more of a
repetition, a re-colonization of the colonialist legacy. Feminist and anticolonialists critics
discourse often hinges on the need to reclaim a space characterized by
‘essentialism’. But this positing of an identity based on binary oppositions,
merely juggles the term as Gunew and Yeatman pointed out and which, does not
contribute in “changing the power structures behind such construction ” (qtd. in Grace 78).
Hyperreality in Postcolonial Domain In the postcolonial contexts particularly, the
distinctiveness of identity is predicated upon notion of space, “located
elsewhere”. However, people who inhabit the peripheries, what Anzaldua
called the “narrow strip along steep edges” (Gupta and Ferguson 7), forces us to rethink
the identity/difference dichotomization. The structuring polarization between
identity as positive and difference as negative needs to be questioned, and the need of
the hour is to move along the lines of differences structured in accordance
with the “precession of the model” to rethink the subjectivities configured in
accordance with a logic of simulation (McCarthy xiii). With the places and localities becoming
blurred and indeterminate in the implosion of the simulation of reference, Baudrillard’s
fourth ‘fractal’ order, the erasure of all differences, has led to a renewed interest in
the culturally and ethnic distinctions. Simulacra and hyperreality allows for a re-
examination of the Postcolonial subject under question as well as problematize the
production and dissemination of knowledge in relation to identity and cultural
difference. In the hyperreal mode, the representation or image, no longer denotes the
referent, as the sign has itself become the real. “The territory no longer precedes the map, but
rather the map precedes the territory. The image bears no relation to reality, it is its own
simulation” (Baudrillard 11). Hyperreality facilitates an interrogation of the ‘real’
in both colonialist and anti-colonialist discourses making us aware of
Kristeva’s “writing as experience-limits” (Hutcheon 8). If identity established in
these discourses is “no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor
even parody”, but “a question of substituting the signs of the real for the
real” (Baudrillard 2), one could read that “colonialism and neo-imperialism
are functions of a broader Western civilizational strategy of obfuscating
the hidden absence of the ‘real’ by simulating reality as normative” ( qtd. in
McCarthy ix). As William Merrin signals, Baudrillard’s work can be understood most fruitfully as
occupying a space between historicity and philosophy. As an ideological
site for the
negotiation of postcoloniality, hyperreality allows postcolonial subjects to
move beyond merely identifying with the past (with a retrograde
voyeurism) to a deconstructive identification with unfixable and
positional identities within the simulacrum (qtd. in McCarthy xx). Now, with the
“whole edifice of representation, being a simulation” (Baudrillard 11), one
needs to ask in the words of Clifford, “what processes rather than essences are
involved in the present experience of cultural identity” (qtd. in Gupta and
Ferguson 14). Hyperreality critiques “the imperialist and colonialist notions
of purity as much as it question[s] the nationalist notions” (Bhabha 64).
Baudrillard’s views on simulacra and hyperreality shifts the ground considerably, in its insistence
to question what is at stake on the importance of “irreducible difference” (Grace 89). This
‘strategic essentialisms’ to use Spivak’s term, obfuscates the situatedness,
locatedness which cannot be subsumed within the all-pervasive notions
of identity based on oppositional binaries. Hyperreality tends to highlight
the limitations of an identity based on the fragmented space of ‘imagined
communities’ of a modern state. And the rapid advances in technology
and the processes of globalization which have resulted in new
configurations of margins and peripheries marked by migrations and the
diasporic community, what is termed by Gupta and Ferguson, as ‘the transnational
public sphere’ meaning that the fiction of the postcolonial nation- state,
whose boundaries enclose cultures and regulate cultural exchange can no
longer be sustained. Baudrillard’s description of consumptive society
inundated with simulated images “offers a ‘paradoxical space” for the
agency of the subject, facilitating both creative potential and selfdefining
possibilities being also subjected identities to the law of the market. The
“reversibility” implied in the “images preceding the real” is particularly
important in terms of the debates around identity predicted on difference
as it eventually shows the fictionality of all discourses about identity and
cultural differences exemplifying the change implicit in “collective
memory and orientation” (Rojek 115). Conclusion The world of Baudrillard
cannot be said to be devoid of agency, or nihilistic as one is continuously
aware of being a part of simulations, a world of consumption, which
allows for “the radical operation of the interrogating the ‘otherness’ of
the other” (Gupta and Ferguson 16). To conclude, hyperreality critiques the
identity realized on what Arjun Appadurai has termed the “spatial incarceration of
the native”, and allows for a rethinking of the between “culture, power,
and space” (Gupta and Ferguson 17). ). Moreover, through the myriad
images/signs which constitute our culture, our identity is constantly
renewed and expanded with the “signs being appropriated, translated,
rehistoricised and read anew” (Bhabha 37).
 2NC A2: Heg Good
American power has exhausted its relevance and transformed itself into a
killing machine, constructing global threats in an attempt to reinvigorate the
geopolitical theater
Baudrillard, 05 [Jean, “Pornography of War,” Cultural Politics, vol. 1 no. 1, pg. 23-25, //MW]

In the case of 9/11, the thrilling images of a major event; in the other, the shaming
images of something that is the opposite of an event, a non-event of
obscene banality, the atrocious but banal degradation not merely of the
victims but also of the amateur stage managers of this parody of violence.
For the worst thing about this is that here we have a parody of violence, a parody of war

itself, pornography becoming the ultimate form of abjection of a war that

is incapable of being merely war, of merely killing, and that is being drawn out
into an infantile, Ubuesque “reality show,” a desperate simulacrum of power.
These scenes are the illustration of a power that, having reached its extreme point, no longer

knows what to do with itself, of a power now aimless and purposeless

since it has no plausible enemy and acts with total impunity. All it can do
now is inflict gratuitous humiliation, and, as we know, the violence we inflict on
others is only ever the expression of the violence we do to ourselves. And
it can only humiliate itself in the process, demean and deny itself in a kind of perverse
relentlessness. Ignominy and sleaze are the last symptoms of a power that no longer knows what to do with itself.
September 11th was like a global reaction of all those who no longer
know what to do with – and can no longer bear – this world power. In the case
of the abuse inflicted on the Iraqis, it is worse still: it is power itself that no longer knows what

to do with itself and can no longer bear itself, other than in inhuman self-parody. These
images are as lethal for America as the pictures of the World Trade Center
in flames. Yet it is not America in itself that stands accused, and there is no point laying all this at the Americans’ door: the
infernal machine generates its own impetus, freewheeling out of control
in literally suicidal acts. The Americans’ power has in fact become too much for
them. They no longer have the means to exorcize it. And we are party to that power. It is the whole of the
West whose bad conscience crystallizes in these images; it is the whole of
the West that is present in the American soldiers’ sadistic outburst of
laughter; just as it is the whole of the West that is behind the building of the
Israeli wall. This is the truth of these images; this is their burden: the excess of a potency designating itself as abject and
pornographic. The truth of the images , not their veracity, since, in this situation, whether
they are true or false is beside the point. We are henceforth – and forever – in a
state of uncertainty where images are concerned. Only their impact
counts, precisely insofar as they are embedded in war. There isn’t even a need for
“embedded” journalists any more; it’s the military itself that is embedded
in the image; thanks to digital technology, images are definitively integrated into
warfare. They no longer represent; they no longer imply either distance or perception
or judgement. They are no longer of the order of representation, or of information in the strict sense and, as a result,
the question of whether they should be produced, reproduced, broadcast
or banned, and even the “essential” question of whether they are true or false, is
“irrelevant.” For images to constitute genuine information they would have
to be different from war. But they have become precisely as virtual as war today and hence their own specific
violence is now superadded to the specific violence of war. Moreover, by their omnipresence, by the rule that

everything must be made visible, which now applies the world over, images – our present images – have

become in substance pornographic; they therefore cleave spontaneously to

the pornographic dimension of war. There is in all this, and particularly in the last Iraqi episode, a
justice immanent in the image: he who stakes his all on the spectacle will
die by the spectacle. If you want power through the image, be prepared
to die by the image playback. The Americans are learning this, and will continue to learn it,
by bitter experience. And this despite all the “democratic” subterfuge and despite a
despairing simulacrum of transparency commensurate with the
despairing simulacrum of military power. Who committed these acts and
who is really responsible for them? The military higher-ups? Or human nature, which is, as we know,
brutish – “even in a democracy”? The real scandal lies not in the torture but in the perfidy of

those who knew and remained silent (or of those who revealed it?). At any rate, the whole of
the real violence is diverted on to the question of openness, democracy
finding a way to restore its virtue by publicizing its vices.
 2NC A2: Policy-Making Good
Policymaking and international relations are predicated on the symbolic
exchange of semiotics. Their binaristic thought process of normative legal
scholarship misinterprets the importance of art and makes impact calculus
impossible.
Polat 12 (Necati, professor of IR at Middle Eastern Technical Institute, “International Relations,
Meaning and Mimesis." Interventions (2012))

This book argues for imitation and exchange, and all that is associated
with these notions, such as copy, repetition, derivation, representation,
mediation, illustration, reflection and narrativity, as a pervasive force in
the construction of meaning in the study of international politics. Usually
a concept of disdain in the mainstream imagination in the study area, this
force is often shorthanded as mimesis. The established thinking, which
dismisses mimesis as simply subordinate and insignificant, tends to treat
meaning as fixed, self-same and unified beyond the fluidity it presents in
its specific manifestations. I hold that a radical distinction between
meaning and mimesis that informs this mindset not only fails to provide
adequate explanations of basic phenomena in inter-state politics but is
also unsound ethically for excluding difference, or alterity, that defines
mimesis. Strictly associated with literary and aesthetic theory, the
concept of mimesis has become an increasingly significant theme that
inspires and guides research in diverse fields of learning, social, political,
even biological (as in memetics). The study of international politics has so
far remained aloof from this interdisciplinary current. Almost equally
uncharted and unexplored in the study area is the very concept of
meaning, long transformed in the philosophy of language, chiefly through
the work by Wittgenstein. In this book, I try to show how these two themes, both new to the study of
international politics, are linked by applying Wittgenstein’s insights on reproduction and
repetition (as constitutive of meaning in language) to processes of
knowledge production in making sense of inter-state politics, equally
defined by representation and exchange. Added to this coupling of
meaning and mimesis in the book is the notion of the empowered and
discerning subject, of agency, that I consider to be a perennial function of
mimesis in each and every case, as taught by Lacan, rather than anterior,
or an exception, to mimesis. Obviously, the relevance and practical use of some
such undertaking may be questioned from the perspective of mainstream
theorizing. Yet, like many, pondering on the issue of relevance, I cannot
help but notice how remote and useless the theories of the established
imagination seem to be, as I put these words down, in drawing mere
sense out of the monumental developments of regime change that have
been taking place in several states in north Africa since late 2010, let aside
their utter failure in having predicted them. I try to offer an explanation in Chapter 1 for the
apparent success of the settled imagination in the research community in the face of its inadequacy to explain and predict
eventualities that are central to the practice of the community, notably as observed following the momentous shift in eastern
Europe from the late 1980s that, similarly, mostly eluded the gaze of the mainstream. An alternative to this gaze, with arguably
more practical use, would be to locate and focus on ‘the event’ that is the object of inquiry in some form, not as a category that can
be placed against a narrative of it, but as a condition that negates an absolute distinction of the event and the narrative – what
Wittgenstein would call a ‘game’, and what is perhaps best exhibited in the remarkable filmic oeuvre of Abbas Kiarostami. The

immersion in the event would draw on a world of exchange, that is, on

intersubjectivity, as the primordial condition that licenses (and is
sustained by) exchange, possibly along the lines assumed in the early
phenomenology of Heidegger. This valorizing of exchange would re-
humanize the study area away from its present, highly abstracted, de-
humanized state through tentative explorations of everyday modalities of
existence enabled in the modern order of formally autonomous entities .
How exactly do we, as people, relate to the body politic, to borders, foreign languages, military service, passport, international
markets, sports competitions, religion and so on? Responses to these and similar questions would be fluid to the extent that they
could only be captured in ‘stories’ that would leave out radical differentiations of reality and narrativity, of subjectivity and

the humanism urged here is hardly the Enlightenment

intersubjectivity. That is,

version of it, which, purportedly cut off from (and despising) the domain
of mundane exchange, is only a power tool. It is rather a re-humanization
that is perhaps reminiscent of Husserl in the 1930s on the ‘crisis’ of
European sciences: we certainly have smart, elegant theories, and
complicated research programmes based on them, but we do not seem to
be any closer to understanding international politics, for we gravely
ignore the narrativity in our down-to-earth, everyday experiences of
phenomena, in which policy-makers as main sponsors have no interest.
The human person as the agent of experiences in this heightened sense of
awareness towards the event – alert to worldly exchange that is
constitutive of all meaning – is a subject that is inseparable from practices
of subjugation in time and space, as suggested by Foucault. Yet, this is not what I do in this book. I do not
try to sample this gaze as an alternative to the mainstream, although my conviction that some such approach to international

politics would be more genuinely relevant and practical underwrites much of what I do. Instead, I offer some
justification for this gaze by hopefully demonstrating how deeply
problematic the conventional imagination is on meaning in inter-state
relations in its trade mark reliance on a distinction between meaning and
mimesis, not only in the more dominant political realisms in the
mainstream but also in forms of theorizing that are critical of those. In so
doing, I target a set of binary oppositions focal to the mainstream and try
to read them closely, as instructed by Derrida: sovereignty and
intervention, peace and war, identity and difference, law and violence,
and integration and the nation state. In each of these binary oppositions,
which simply reiterate one overarching distinction of meaning and
mimesis, the first term is typically privileged as ‘present’ or essential, at
the cost of the other term deemed to be inessential, thus ‘absent’.
Derrida, like Wittgenstein, argues for narrativity as intrinsic to meaning; and since
narrativity is traditionally assumed to be a quality of the term in the
binary that is absent, each and every one of the binaries is rendered in
this interaction as ultimately susceptible to a deconstructive
transfiguration. I pursue this reading by locking on a handful of concepts
that are pivotal to the study of international politics: the modifier
‘international’, peace, ethics, law and integration. The reassessment of these concepts
ventures at once into the assumptions, mostly tacit, that underlie a host of issue areas, offering critical appraisals. These

issue areas include peace research, normative theories, international law

and European studies.

Their vision of world politics is predicated on meaningless meanings and fictive

facts. Vote (aff/neg) to unsettle this hierarchy between the origin and
representation, between reality and what is made of it. The anti-realism of this
concept of art invokes a reality of its own and is well recognized as familiar
convention.
Polat 12 (Necati, professor of IR at Middle Eastern Technical Institute, “International
Relations, Meaning and Mimesis." Interventions (2012))

The fact that Waltz uses a mere tale, a flight of imagination, a playful
moment with reality, in putting through his hard-nosed message on state
security is arguably more significant than the message itself . His reliance
on the mediation and license of a story in constructing the reality of inter-
state relations seems to be more of a revelation, leading to rich
theoretical insights, than the lessons he ultimately draws from the story;
namely, a vision of world politics predicated on dour facts and stern
practice, uninfected by fiction and fantasy. What is more, Waltz does not
simply tell a tale; admittedly he retells a tale. In advancing the parable, he
only repeats – that is, copies – an earlier narrative by Rousseau. Yet the
reproduction, which is the representation of a representation, and which
comes in a hugely influential discussion of Rousseau, in which the latter is
associated with a brutally cynical view of state conduct, is in effect only a
semblance of the original. The parable is originally and briefly offered by Rousseau as an illustration of how
primitive humans, moving from an earlier state of nature with a solitary life to a next stage when they came to mix with others,
‘were strangers to foresight, and far from troubling their heads about a distant futurity, they gave no thought even to the morrow.’ 2

The parable replicated by Waltz is presented immediately after these words in Rousseau’s discourse. Last but by no
means least, Waltz uses the tale he appropriates from Rousseau to
suggest an image, a representation, of world politics. The thematic
account of state behaviour he advances is not the practice itself, the real
thing, but a picture, a mirror, reflecting the practice. The curious
conceptual realm implied in the words parable, tale, imagination, play,
mediation, representation, fiction, narrative, fancy, repetition, copy,
reproduction, semblance, replication, illustration, appropriation, image,
picture, mirror, and reflection – used in the preceding paragraph to define the exploitation of the stag-hunt
analogy by Waltz – is at the heart of the main argument in the present book. This argument is about mimesis, a

notion that roughly refers to the elusive interaction between the same
and the similar, that which is and its representation, the real thing and
emulation, the original and the copy.3 The interplay between the terms forms a semantic domain often
identified through the aid of concepts such as imitation, reiteration, and narrativity. The interchange denoted

in these concepts – mimesis – is treated in the bulk of conventional

explanations of international politics as secondary and irrelevant. In these
accounts, the emphasis is placed instead on the real thing, assumed to be
the origin of, and prior to, mimesis. Mimesis as such is a mere derivation
rooted in, and parasitic on, reality. In the book, I aim to unsettle this hierarchy
between the origin and representation, between reality and what is made
of it, by highlighting mimesis as focal to processes of meaning formation
in thematic grasps of international politics and therefore constitutive of
reality. Starting with the very modifier ‘international’, which, as I claim, is emblematic of the ambivalent exchange between
meaning and mimesis, I explore in the book some of the main themes in the study of inter-state relations that defy a radical
dichotomy between reality and mimesis; namely, peace, ethics, law, and integration beyond the nation state as instanced by the
transformation in Europe. I try to disclose the key function performed by mimesis in each and every theme, introducing an integral
ambivalence in meaning, by drawing on insights from a host of study areas outside the mainstream imagination on international
politics. Hinting at this ambivalence in the functioning of the mimetic that is apparently irreducible, Adorno describes the
relationship between representation and what it represents as ‘nonconceptual’. 4 The designation not only refers to the
insurmountable difficulty of capturing with precision the interaction in a specific case between representation and what Adorno calls
‘its unposited other’ – as this interaction is always already subject to the unsettling fluidity in contexts in which the representation is
produced and received, which Adorno finds akin to what is often understood in popular culture as ‘the 2 Introduction magic of art’. 5
But the resistance to conceptualization also brings up the inevitable limitations of possible thematic exercises in making sense of
mimesis as such, a concern and a considerable part of efforts in more recent attempts to define and theorize mimesis. Crucially, this
ambiguity is eschewed in the mainstream understanding of mimesis, which remains largely attached to the Platonic view of it as a
mere imitation, a shadow, in an antipodean relationship with reality for the illusion it imparts, hence at once a threat to reason.6
This view, which has subsequently been revised – following Aristotle,7 to treat mimesis as rational and part of irresistible worldly
interchange, of communicability and narration, whether through gestures or words and marks – has nevertheless persisted in

treating mimesis as simply derivative and suspect. On this take, mimesis inevitably produces an effect
in its functioning that estranges those exposed to it from the genuine
article. After all, the re-presentation is not the same as that which is
present, but a simulation, which is ultimately a distortion for the
unavoidable, defining gap that the representation analytically has with
what it represents. The reality (the origin) reproduced is assumed in this
thinking to stand unmatched, unique, autonomous, self-contained, and
self-referential; whereas the representation is an epiphenomenon, a
shadow, lacking substance, autonomous essence, capable of signifying
only through what it mimics. That this view may be an oversimplification in its radical distinction of reality
and mimesis is cued in ‘the magic of art’ cliché, of which Adorno speaks. A vivid statement of incredulity

in the conventional notion of mimesis, as offered in this prosaism, is the response of

the painter to the obtuse inquiry by one of the visitors at an exhibition
regarding the theme in a specific painting. ‘Is this a fish?’ ‘No,’ answers
the painter, ‘it’s a painting.’ (Magritte only adds a further layer of
playfulness to this by articulating the negation in the painting itself: ‘This
is not a pipe.’ 8 ) The anti-realism of this concept of art, which invokes
autonomy – that is, a reality of its own – for mimesis, is well-recognized
and largely accepted, if not as self-evident truth, as familiar convention.
More controversial is the function of representation in everyday, mundane life in defiance of a notion of originary reality which is

These floating forms of

outside the representation and to which the representation can be traced.

representation, called ‘simulacra’ by authors such as Deleuze and

Baudrillard, who posit the notion in making sense of the role of
representation in popular culture often established through the
intermediaries of mass communication, point precisely to some such
autonomous, constitutive mimesis that is indistinguishable from reality
By utilizing mimesis we can use their portable skills against them. Take that.
Polat 12 (Necati, professor of IR at Middle Eastern Technical Institute, “International Relations,
Meaning and Mimesis." Interventions (2012))
Waltz provides an account of inter-state politics that is avowedly
imitative, faithful to the practice. In so doing, he retells a tale, which
happens to be less than accurate. In other words, in his use of the stag-
hunt analogy, the Waltzean descriptionism exhibits all that is traditionally
attributed to mimesis to discredit it: narrativity (the stag hunt), copy
(from Rousseau), semblance (departure from the original). More
important, however, is the functioning of mimesis in this discourse when
recourse to fiction and fantasy is not as clearly flagged. Mimesis that is all too obvious in
the reliance on the stag-hunt analogy in the face of a simultaneous, if tacit, commitment to the traditional posture on mimesis, can
be shown to be at work in all its assumed duplicity in the account of inter-state politics offered by Waltz as an unwitting exercise in

the imitation or depiction of reality aimed in the account

mimesis. In the first place,

presents a curious problem of fidelity to the represented other, which is

often identified with realism in art, more specifically in painting. As is well known, these efforts
in art in the reproduction of reality have historically relied on a distinctly
European perception. The Chinese and Japanese paintings, the Iranian and Ottoman miniatures, or indeed
the medieval European practice in painting, do not seem to follow the linear perception

identified with the mainstream European artistic vision in the

representation of reality. This vision is typified in a specific notion of spatiality, depth and perspective, and in the
slavish reproduction of the corporeal form. Realism – if this is what it is – as a product of this vision follows a particular layout that is
invented (the ‘invention’ of perspective, as often referred to, is a clue in this regard), rather than simply mirroring an extension or
form of reality that is out there. This archetypal imagining of reality inevitably leaves out aspects of what is being represented that
are perhaps better covered in the non-European art, Introduction 5 such as the multiplicity of time and space in miniatures – more

The non-European perception

faithful to the intertextuality of life – in the depiction of one single moment.

of reality along these lines is comparable to the painting style that

emerged in Europe in the early twentieth century, which was partly
instructed by non-European art. This style arguably abandoned a
‘correspondence’ theory of truth in the approximation of reality, as
paradigmatically evident in photographic transmission of the object, for a
view of truth as no more than a ‘model’ of reality, leaving the gaze at the
object open and de-centred. This model of reality gives up on the realist
physical transmission, the enchanting corporeal reproduction in realist
art, but is able to accommodate in the depiction a depth that is alien to
realism. Notably given up is the privileging of a fixed gaze (a God’s eye viewpoint) that ignores or represses various alternative
points of observation in relation to the object. What is introduced in the place of this fixed gaze is a perpetual concern about the

Thus, Girl with a Mandolin

interaction between what is out there and the manner in which it is being perceived.

by Picasso captures a fragmented, inherently chaotic object – an effect of

various, often conflicting gazes. The painter seeks to include a multiplicity
of gazes, privileging none (although, inevitably, there is still an overarching gaze as limited and highlighted by the
 The result is not only a fragmented object but also a de-
frame of the painting).

centred subject. The reality depicted remains open and is as such more
true to life perhaps than a photographic rendition that reproduces a
linear perception of the physical presence, only part of reality, leaving out
all else. To go one step further, the uncertainty that emerges out of the painting by
Picasso is arguably more ‘real’ than forms of realism from the Renaissance
onwards, in the sense that quantum physics, with its inherent
uncertainty, is considered to be more real than the conventional physical
accounts it has come to replace; uncertainty in some fashion is at the
heart of our efforts to interact with reality. The gaze not simply depicts
but in effect constitutes the object, an insight that reverses the
conventional hierarchy between reality and its representation. The vision of inter-
state politics articulated by Waltz as a mere depiction of reality can be said therefore to be in serious denial of reality it otherwise
champions. His representation of reality may be compelling, as the realist European art is, in its limpid outline of what it purports to
depict, but it also crucially excludes many pertinent features, chiefly the intertextuality intrinsic to life, and is oblivious, unlike, say,
quantum physics, to the problems related to the authority of the gaze. Take the following representation of state behaviour on war,

A state will use force to attain

offered by Waltz in the context where he introduces the stag-hunt analogy. ‘

goals’, he observes, ‘if, after assessing the prospects for success, it values
those goals more than it values the pleasure of peace.’ 12 This reproduction
of state behaviour in theory relies on a logic that is perhaps admirable in
its artless, forthright realism and in its economy with words. Peace is
obviously an interest for the state, thus desirable. But there are also
interests which the state can achieve through war. Prospects for going to
war will ultimately depend on an assessment of conflicting interests 6
Introduction by the state. This estimation of war and peace seems to be
unassailable, until we notice that the brutally realistic representation it
relies on critically leaves out the value and meaning of peace, treated in
the account as a mere interest among others; entities – as interests
attainable through either war or peace – are de-contextualised by Waltz
beyond recognition. They are transformed into mere entries in the same broad category marked as ‘interests’, a
wholesale treatment of a range of concepts out of touch with the intersubjective meaning and purpose associated with each. The
impressive, yet abstract, logic through which Waltz identifies friendship between states as a mere interest excludes from its
depiction of reality a great deal, operating in a vacuum-like thought experiment greatly dissociated from the pertinent reality.
Besides, even if peace is to be treated as a mere interest among others, it should be possible to make a case for peace as the
overriding interest regardless of circumstances, as has been suggested in forms of liberal idealism, given the unavoidable loss and
misery associated with war, even for those fighting on the victorious side. But this is precisely the point. Waltz’s elegant calculation
of state interests makes sense only if it remains at a certain level of economy in representation, with the cost suffered by human
persons in war crucially filtered out, omitted from the picture. The state, on whose behalf people fight, is reified by Waltz as yet
another abstraction that serves no practical purpose in terms of everyday intersubjectivity. This domain of mundane exchange that
seems to evade the account by Waltz is, incidentally, the only possible source of meaning, theoretical or otherwise. The everyday
mimesis as the source of meaning, notably suspended in the reconstruction of the state behaviour on peace, does go on to make
unannounced appearances in Waltz’s discourse nevertheless, to remind us of its all-powerful presence, as in the statement, only a
few lines removed from the discussion of peace as a mere interest: ‘love affairs between states are inappropriate and dangerous.’ 13
 2NC A2: Simulation Good
In the construction of a realm of meaning that has minimal contact with
historically specific events or actors, simulations have demonstrated the power
to displace the "reality" of international relations they purport to represent.
Simulations have created a new space where actors act, things happen, and the
consequences have no origins except the artificial cyberspace of the simulations
themselves. Their realism has become hyperrealism.
der Derian 90 (James, recipient of the Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy at the American
Academy and professor at the University of Sydney, “The (S)pace of International Relations:
Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed.” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special
Issue: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies (Sep., 1990), pp. 295-
310)
The 1AC was a spectacularized simulation of the semiocratic IR system where Surveying the rise of a consumer society, anticipating
the failure of conventional, radical, spatial politics in 1968, Guy Debord, editor of the journal Internationale Situa- tionniste, opened

In societies where modern conditions of

his book Society of the Spectacle with a provocative claim: "

production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation

of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation" (1983: 1).8 At the root of this new form of representation was
the specialization of power, with the spectacle coming to speak for all
other forms of power, becoming in effect "the diplomatic representation
of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned" (1983: 23).
After analyzing the political economy of the sign and visiting Disneyland,
Jean Baudrillard, the French master of edifying hyperbole, notified the
inhabitants of advanced mediacracies that they were no longer distracted
by the technical repro- duction of reality, or alienated and repressed by
their over-consumption of its spec- tacular representation . Unable to recover the
"original" and seduced by the simula- tion, they had lost the ability to distinguish between the model and the real: "Abstrac- tion

Simulation is no longer that of a

today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.

territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models

of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal" (1983a: 2). Baudrillard exceeds Nietzsche in his
interpretation of the death of god and the inability of rational man to fill the resulting value-void with stable distinctions be- tween

the real and the apparent, the true and the false, the good and the evil. In the excessive, often nihilistic vision of Baudrillard, the
task of modernity is no longer to demystify or disenchant illusion-for
"with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world" (see Nietzsche,
1968: 40-41; Der Derian, 1987: Ch. 9)-but to save a principle that has lost its object:

"Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that

the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America
surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of
simula- tion. It is no longer a question of false representation of reality
(ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and
thus of saving the reality principle" (1983a: 25).9 7 See Kracauer, 1987 and 1963. 8 In a more recent
work, Debord (1988) persuasively-and somewhat despairingly- argues that the society of the

spectacle retains its representational power today. 9 For related analyses of the
representational shift that marks modernity and postmodernity see also Baudrillard (1983b), Benjamin (1969), McLuhan (1964), and

The representation of international relations is not immune to

Kittler (1987).

this development. In a very short period the field has oscillated: from realist representation, in which world-historical
figures meant what they said and said what they meant, and diplo- matic historians recorded it as such in Rankean fashion ("wie es
eigentlich gewesen ist"); to neorealist, in which structures did what they did, and we did what they made us do, except of course
when neorealists revealed in journals like the International Studies Quarterly and International Organization what they "really" did;

to hyperrealist, in which the model of the real becomes more real than
the reality it models, and we become confused.'0 What is the reality
principle that international relations theory in general seeks to save? For the
hard-core realist, it is the sovereign state acting in an anarchical order to maintain and if possible expand its security and power in
the face of penetrating, de-centering forces such as the ICBM, military (and now civilian) surveillance satel- lites, the international
terrorist, the telecommunications web, environmental move- ments, transnational human rights conventions, to name a few of the
more obvious. For the soft-core neorealist and peace-research modeler, it is the prevailing pattern of systemic power which provides
stable structures, regime constraints, and predicta- ble behavior for states under assault by similar forces of fragmentation. Before
we consider how simulations in particular "work" to save the reality princi- ple, we should note the multiple forms that these
simulations take in international relations. From the earliest Kriegspiel (war-play) of the Prussian military staff in the 1830s, to the
annual "Global Game" at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, simulations have been staged to prepare nation states for
future wars; by doing so, as many players would claim, they help keep the peace: qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.
Simulations are used at other defense colleges, such as the strategic and counterterrorist games played at the National Defense
University or the more tactically oriented computerized "Janus" game perfected at the Army War College." Then there are the early
academic models, like Harold Guetzkow's seminal InterNa- tion Simulation (INS), which spawned a host of second- and third-
generation models: SIPER (Simulated International Processes), GLOBUS (Generating Long- term Options by Using Simulation), and
SIMPEST (Simulation of Military, Political, Economic, and Strategic Interactions).'2 Many simulations are now commercially available:
the popular realpolitik computer game Balance of Power; the remarkably sophisticated video games modeled on Top Gun, the
Iranian hostage rescue mission, and other historical military conflicts; and the film/video WarGames, in which a hacker taps into an
Air Force and nearly starts World War III. And then there are the ubiquitous think-tank games, like those at the Rand Corporation,
that model everything from domestic crime to nuclear war, as well as the made-to-order macro- strategic games, like the war game
between Iraq and Iran that the private consulting company BDM International sold to Iraq (the highest bidder?). It may grate on the

An added impetus to leave reality

ears of some of the players to hear "gaming," "modeling," and 10

behind can be found in the hyperrational test that much of international

relations theory has set up for itself-the model's congruence with reality .
See Keohane, 1989. As well, the clean, abstracted techniques of the game theoretic, or the structures of the more positivistic
neorealists, have a certain technical appeal that the interpretive archives of genealogy and intertextualism do not. For eloquent yet
varied defenses of genealogy and intertextualism in international relations theory, see the exchange between Richard Ashley and
William Connolly in the epilogue to InternatzonallIntertextual Relatzons, pp. 259-342. I' For other examples of military simulations,
see Thomas Allen's fine book on the subject, War Games: The Secret World of the Creators, Players, and Policy Makers Rehearsing
World War III Today (1987). 12 See Ward (1985) for a compilation of essays in honor of Harold Guetzkow, which provide a lengthy if
uneven account of simulation in the discipline of international relations. See also Howard, 1987. "simulation" used
interchangeably.'3 Yet in the literature and during interviews I found users using all three terms to describe practices that could be
broadly defined as the continuation of war by means of verisimilitude (Allen, 1987: 6-7). Conventionally, a game uses broad
descriptive strokes and a minimum of mathematical abstraction to make generalizations about the behavior of actors, while
simulation uses algorithms and computer power to analyze the amount of technical detail considered necessary to predict events
and the behavior of actors. Judging from the shift in the early 1980s by the military and think-tanks to mainly computerized games-
reflected in the change of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gaming organization from SAGA (Studies, Analy- sis, and Gaming Agency) to JAD
(Joint Analysis Directorate)-it would seem that simulation is becoming the preferred "sponge" term in international relations.
"Sim- ulation" also has the obvious advantage of sounding more serious
than "gaming" and of carrying more of a high-tech, scientific connotation
than "modeling." The object of this inquiry is not to conduct an internal
critique of the simulation industry, nor to claim some privileged grounds
for disproving its conclusions.'4 Rather, the intent is to show how, in the
construction of a realm of meaning that has minimal contact with
historically specific events or actors, simulations have demon- strated the
power to displace the "reality" of international relations they purport to
represent. Simulations have created a new space in international
relations where actors act, things happen, and the consequences have no
origins except the artificial cyberspace of the simulations themselves. Over
the last four years I have collected numerous examples of this new phenome- non; I will share two of them here. 15 The first is the
case of the U.S.S. Vincennes which shot down an Iranian civilian airliner on July 3, 1988, in the mistaken belief that it was a military
aircraft. The Vincennes was equipped with the most sophisticated U.S. naval radar system, the Aegis, which according to a later
military investigation functioned perfectly.'6 It recorded that the Iranian Airbus was on course and flying level at 12,000 feet, not
descending towards the Vincennes as the radar operator, the tactical information coordinator, and one other officer reported at the
time. Some- how, between machine and man, a tragic misreading took place which resulted in the death of 290 people. One
possible cause is stress: the Vincennes and its crew had never been in combat and were engaged with Iranian speedboats when the
Airbus was first detected. Yet stress has many origins, and the military shows signs of ignoring the most serious one. The Vincennes
trained for nine months before it went into the Persian Gulf. That training relied heavily on tapes that simulate battle situations,
none of which included overflights by civilian airliners-a common occur- rence in the Gulf.17 13 I was, in fact, counseled against
conflating the terms by a top modeler at Rand, Paul Davis, who provided me with some valuable insights into the state of the art of
simulations (interview, Rand Corporation, 18 February 1988). See also his monograph with Bankes and Kahan, 1986. 14 Two
excellent criticisms of the internal assumptions of gaming can be found in a review of the literature by Ashley, 1983, and in Hurwitz,
1989. 15 A fuller account, based on teaching the prisoner's dilemma to-as well as learning it from-inmates at Gardner and Lancaster
State Prisons in Massachusetts, interviews with lieutenant colonels from the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) materials, can be found in Der Derian (1990). 16 See The New York Tzmes, 20 August 1988, pp. 1
and 5: "The 53-page 'Investigative Report' appeared to confirm earlier news accounts that human error resulting from combat stress
was among the main causes of the tragedy. 'Stress, task fixation, and unconscious distortion of data may have played a major role in
this incident,' it said." 17 See The New York Tzmes, 3 August 1988, pp. Al and A6: "A Pentagon officer who previously served in an
Aegis ship said crew train constantly with tapes that simulate every conceivable battle situation. But he said, 'the excite- ment factor

To be
is missing in such drills, because regardless of the realism of the simulation, it is just that, a simulation of the real thing.' "

sure, much more was involved in the decision to fire at the Airbus, not
least the memory of the U.S.S. Stark which was nearly destroyed in the
Persian Gulf by an Exocet missile from an Iraqi warplane. But I would like
to suggest that the reality of the nine months of simulated battles
displaced, overrode, absorbed the reality of the Airbus. The Airbus
disappeared before the missile struck: it faded from an airliner full of
civilians to an electronic representation on a radar screen to a simulated
target. The simulation overpowered a reality which did not conform to it.
Let us look at another case, an exemplary intertext of simulation: the work of Tom Clancy. Clancy saves U.S. hegemony in The Hunt
for the Red October when a Soviet commander of a nuclear submarine defects, with the submarine which contains ad- vanced
technology, more advanced than the silencing technology that the U.S. four years later penalized Toshiba (and jeopardized relations
with Japan) for transfer- ring to the Soviets. Clancy, whose Red October dustjacket sports a hyperbolic blurb from Reagan, supplied
in kind one for Thomas Allen's book on strategic simulations, War Games Today: "Totally fascinating," Clancy wrote, "his book will be
the standard work on the subject for the next ten years." Clancy's Patriot Games received a lauda- tory review from Secretary of
Defense Caspar Weinberger in the Wall Street Journal, which was then reprinted in the Friday Review of Defense Literature of the
Pentagon's Current News for the edification of the 7,000-odd Defense and State Department officials who make up its readership
(Current News 7 August 1987: 6). Clancy's Red Storm Rising, inspired by war gaming, was cited by Vice-Presidential candidate Dan
Quayle in a foreign policy speech to prove that the U.S. needs an anti-satellite capability.i8 In Patriot Games, Clancy magnifies the
threat of terrorism to prove that the state's ultimate power, military counter-terror, still has utility. In a later novel, The Cardinal of
the Kremlin, Clancy plots the revelations of a mole in the Kremlin to affirm the need to reconstruct with Star Wars the impermeable

Taken together, Clancy's novels stand as strategic

borders of the sovereign state.

simulations: jammed with technical detail and seductive ordnance, devoid

of recognizably human characters, and obliquely linked to historical
events, they have become the perfect free-floating intertext for saving
the realist principle of the national security state. What policy
implications are raised by these proliferating simulations? In the military arena we
soon could see life copying the hyperreal art of Aliens, where the Colonial Marines are buffeted as they enter the planet's
atmosphere and Ripley asks the obviously anxious Lieutenant how many drops this is for him. He replies "Thirty- eight," pauses, and
then adds "Simulated." He quickly proves incapable of respond- ing to situations that do not follow his simulation training. In
interviews I conducted with fast-track lieutenant colonels attending the U.S. Army War College, where a state-of-the-art, multi-

million dollar simulation center is currently under construc- tion, I learned that simulations are becoming the
preferred teaching tool. And at the Foreign Service Institute simulations like the "Crisis in Al Jazira" are being used
to train junior-level diplomats in the art of crisis management and counterterrorism (see Redecker, 1986). This is not to

issue a blanket condemnation of simulations. Their proliferation can, from

another perspective, be seen as symptomatic of a "neither war nor
peace" situation that may be fraught with dangers but is certainly
preferred to a shooting war. Properly executed, simulations can play an edifying role in alerting individuals to
the horrors of war. It has been said that Ronald Reagan's participation in a 18 The address, given to the City Club of Chicago, was the
same one at which Quayle articulated his preference for offensive weapons systems: "Bobby Knight [the Indiana University
basketball coach] told me this: 'there is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense [sic].' In other words a good
offense wins." See The New York Times, 9 September 1988, p. 1.
 2NC A2: Suffering Representations Good
Calls to take action and alleviate suffering from within the debate space are
nothing more than us vampirically draining the life out of the so-called
“victims,” commodifying their pain for the ballot and inserting them into the
liberal exchange economy and the military-industrial-complex – turns case
Baudrillard 96. Jean Baudrillard, the French master of edifying hyperbole, former professor emeritus at the
University de Paris X so more qualifications than Steinberg and Freely, The Perfect Crime , pg. 133 – 137

We have to do something. We
Our reality: that is the problem. We have only one, and it has to be saved. `

can't do nothing.' But doing something solely because you can't not do
something has never constituted a principle of action or freedom. Just a
form of absolution from one's own impotence and compassion for one's
own fate. The people of Sarajevo do not have to face this question. Where they are, there is an absolute need to do what
they do, to do what has to be done. Without illusion as to ends and without compassion towards themselves. That is what being real
And this is not at all the `objective' reality of their misfortune, that reality
means, being in the real.
which `ought not to exist' and for which we feel pity, but the reality which exists as it is -- the
reality of an action and a destiny. This is why they are alive, and we are the ones who are dead. This is why, in our own
eyes, we have first and foremost to save the reality of the war and impose that -- compassionate
-- reality on those who are suffering from it but who, at the very heart of war and distress, do
not really believe in it. To judge by their own statements, the Bosnians do not really believe in the distress which surrounds
them. In -- 134 -the end, they find the whole unreal situation senseless, unintelligible. It is a hell, but an almost hyperreal hell, made
the more hyperreal by media and humanitarian harassment, since that makes the attitude of the whole world towards them all the
more incomprehensible. Thus, they live in a kind of spectrality of war -- and it is a good thing they do, or they could never bear it.
But we know better than they do what reality is, because we have chosen them to embody it. Or simply because it is what we -- and
the whole of the West -- most lack. We have to go and retrieve a reality for ourselves where the
bleeding is. All these `corridors' we open up to send them our supplies and our `culture' are, in
reality, corridors of distress through which we import their force and the
energy of their misfortune. Unequal exchange once again. Whereas they find a kind of additional strength in the
thorough stripping-away of the illusions of reality and of our political principles -- the strength to survive what has no meaning -- we
go to convince them of the `reality' of their suffering -- by culturalizing it, of course, by theatricalizing it so that it can serve as a point
of reference in the theatre of Western values, one of which is solidarity. This
all exemplifies a situation which has now
become general, in which inoffensive and impotent intellectuals exchange their woes for those of the
wretched, each supporting the other in a kind of perverse contract -- exactly as the political class
and civil society exchange their respective woes today, the one serving up its corruption and
scandals, the other its artificial convulsions and inertia. Thus we saw Bourdieu and the Abbé Pierre offering
themselves up in televisual sacrifice, exchanging between them the pathos-laden language and sociological metalanguage of
wretchedness. And so, also, our whole society is embarking on the path of commiseration in the literal sense, under cover of
ecumenical pathos. It is almost as though, in
a moment of intense repentance among intellectuals and
politicians, related to the panic-stricken state of history and the twilight of values, we had to
replenish the stocks of values, the referential reserves, by appealing to that lowest -- 135
-common denominator that is human misery, as though we had to restock the hunting grounds
with artificial game. A victim society. I suppose all it is doing is expressing its own
disappointment and remorse at the impossibility of perpetrating violence upon itself. The New
Intellectual Order everywhere follows the paths opened up by the New World Order. The misfortune, wretchedness
and suffering of others have everywhere become the raw material and the
primal scene. Victimhood, accompanied by Human Rights as its sole
funerary ideology. Those who do not exploit it directly and in their own name do so by proxy. There is no lack of
middlemen, who take their financial or symbolic cut in the process. Deficit and misfortune, like the

international debt, are traded and sold on in the speculative market -- in

this case the politico-intellectual market, which is quite the equal of the
late, unlamented military-industrial complex. Now, all commiseration is part of the logic of
misfortune [malheur]. To refer to misfortune, if only to combat it, is to give it a base

for its objective reproduction in perpetuity. When fighting anything whatever, we have to start out
-- fully aware of what we are doing -- from evil, never from misfortune.
 2NC A2: Threats Real
Their prediction of catastrophes leads to a real repression of a virtual crime,
and this reduces existence to pure policing. Information thus merely becomes
the production of these non-events that produces a terror that power ends up
exerting on itself as it turns against its own populations. This makes war
inevitable.
Baudrillard 05. Jean Baudrillard, you should know who he is, excerpt from “Event and Non-
Event” originally published as "Le Virtuel et l'événementiel" in "Cahier de L'Herne 84: Jean
Baudrillard", edited by François L'Yvonnet, 2005. This translation published as part of
Semiotexte(e)'s 2007 edition of Baudrillard's "In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities" by Stuart
Kendall 2007, http://insomnia.ac/essays/event_and_non-event/

Two images: a bronzed technocrat, leaning on his briefcase, sitting on a

bench at the foot of the Twin Towers, or rather buried in the dust of the
fallen towers, like the bodies recovered from the ruins of Pompeii. It was like the signature
of the event, the pathetic phantom of a world power struck by an unforeseeable catastrophe.
The other figure: an artist working in his Tower studio on a sculpture of
himself, of his body cut by an aircraft -- meant to rise on the plaza of the World Trade
Center, like a modern St. Sebastian. He was still working on it on the morning of September
11th, swept away with his work, by the very event that it foreshadowed. Supreme
consecration for a work of art, being completed by the event that
destroys it.
Two allegories from one exceptional, fulgurating event, instantly projected from monotony to
the end of history. The only event worthy of the name, standing out against
the non-event to which we have been condemned by the hegemony of a
world order that nothing can disturb. At this stage, when every function, body,
time, language, is plugged into the network, when every mind is subjected to mental
perfusion, when the slightest event is taken as a threat; history itself is a
threat. It will be necessary to invent a security system that forewarns the
irruption of any kind of event. An entire strategy of prevention and
deterrence that passes for a universal strategy.
Steven Spielberg's Minority Report offers a recent illustration. Using minds
endowed with the power of premonition ("pre-cogs"), capable of identifying
imminent crimes ahead of time, the police squad ("pre-crime") intercepts and
neutralizes the criminal before they can act. Dead Zone is a variant: the hero,
also gifted with pre-cognitive powers following a serious accident, ends
up killing a policeman he identifies as a future war criminal. This is also
the plot of the war in Iraq: eliminating the embryonic crime on the basis
of an act that has not taken place (Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction).
The obvious question is whether the crime really would have taken place.
But no one will ever know. Therefore here we are dealing with the real
repression of a virtual crime.
Extrapolating beyond war, we grasp the outline of a systematic
deprogramming not only of every crime, but of everything that could
upset the order of things, the policed order of the planet. Today "political"
power can be summarized like this. It is no longer animated by some positive will,
it is no longer anything but the negative power of deterrence, of public
health, of prophylactic, immunizing, security forces. This strategy plays not only
with the future, but with past events too -- with September 11th, for example, attempting
to erase the humiliation through the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. This
is why this war is basically an illusion, a virtual event, a "non-event".
Stripped of an objective clear goal, it simply takes the form of a
conspiracy, of an exorcism. This is also why it is interminable: one can
never be finished with plotting such an event. They called it preventive -- in fact it
is retrospective, meant to defuse the terrorist event of September 11th, whose shadow floats
over the entire strategy of planetary control. Effacing the event, effacing the enemy, effacing
death: the imperative of Zero death is part of the obsession with security.

This world order is aiming at a definitive non-event. It is in some ways the end of
history, not through the fulfillment of democracy, as Fukuyama would have it, but through
preventive terror, a counter-terror that precludes every possible event. A
terror that power ends up exerting upon itself, under the sign of security.
There is a ferocious irony here: an antiterrorist world system that ends up
internalizing terror, inflicting terror on itself and emptying itself of all
political substance -- to the point of turning against its own population. Is
it a trace of the cold war and of the equilibrium of terror? But this time it is a deterrence without
cold war, a terror without equilibrium. Or rather it is a universal cold war, crammed into the
smallest cracks of social and political life.

This precipitation of power into its own trap reached a dramatic extremity
in the episode of the Moscow theater, where hostages and terrorists alike were
commingled in the same massacre. Just as in mad cow disease, the entire herd slaughtered
as a prevention -- God will recognize his own. Or as in the Stockholm Syndrome: their
confusion in death makes them virtual accomplices (that the presumptive criminal should be
punished in advance in Minority Report proves a posteriori that he couldn't have been
innocent).

And that is effectively the truth of the situation: in one way or another, the populations
themselves are a terrorist threat to power. And it is power itself that,
through repression, involuntarily seals this complicity. The equivalence in
repression shows that we are all virtually the hostages of power. By extension, one
can hypothesize a coalition of every power against every population -- we have had a foretaste
of it with the war in Iraq, since it has happened, with the more or less covert assent of every
power, in contempt of world opinion. And if global demonstrations against the war
have offered the illusion of a possible counter-power, they have certainly
revealed the political insignificance of that "international community"
confronted with American realpolitik.
Henceforth, we are concerned with the exercise of power in its pure state, without bothering
about sovereignty or representation, the integral reality of a negative power. As long as it draws
its sovereignty from representation, as long as political reason exists, power can find its
equilibrium -- in any case it can be challenged and contested. But the erasure of that sovereignty
leaves power unchecked, without counterpart, wild (with savagery no longer natural, but
technical). And, by a strange twist of fate, it recovers something from primitive societies, which,
according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, lacked history because they knew nothing about power.
What if our present global society, basking in the shadow of this integral
power, was again becoming a society without history?
But this integral reality of power is also its end. A power that is only founded on
prevention and the policing of events, which has no other political will than to brush
specters aside, in turn becomes spectral and vulnerable. Its virtual power is total, its
power to program everything in terms of software, indexes, packages, etc., but suddenly it
can no longer take any chances, except at its own expense, through all
kinds of internal weaknesses. At the height of its mastery, it can no longer lose face.
Such is, literally, the "Hell of Power."
Policing the event is essentially the job of information itself. Information is the most
effective mechanism for the derealization of history. Just as political economy is
a gigantic mechanism for the fabrication of value -- the fabrication of signs of wealth, but not of
wealth itself -- thus the entire system of information is an immense machine
made to produce events as signs, as values exchangeable on the universal
market of ideologies, of spectacle, catastrophes, etc., in short, for the
production of non-events. The abstraction of information is no different from the
abstraction of the economy. And just as all commodities, thanks to the abstraction of their
value, are exchangeable among themselves, so every event becomes substitutable one for
another on the cultural market of information. The singularity of the event, irreducible to its
coded transcription and to its mise-en-scène -- which, simply put, makes an event an event -- is
lost. We enter into a realm where events no longer really happen, thanks
to their production and diffusion in "real time" -- but rather lose themselves
in the void of information. The information sphere is like a space that, once events have
been emptied of their substance, recreates an artificial gravity and returns the events to
circulation in "real time." Once divested from history, events are thrown back
onto the transpolitical stage of information.
The non-event is not where nothing happens. On the contrary, it is the domain of
perpetual change, of a relentless actualization, of an incessant succession in real
time, from whence this general equivalence, this indifference, this
banality which characterizes the degree zero of the event.
 2NC Accident
Death is natural and death is inevitable, but ours is the culture of the Accident. The Aff’s
fantasies of catastrophic death is symptomatic of a societal phantasm of sacrifice and the violent
artifice of death. This imagination of the accidental death reduces non-catastrophic deaths to
meaninglessness and dooms all of us to banality and thus, we all become hostages in the
simulacra of accidental death, willed by the rest of society to Die.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 164-166

Why is it that today there are no expected and foreseen deaths from old age, a
death in the family, the only death that had full meaning for the
traditional collectivity, from Abraham to our grandfathers? It is no longer even touching, it is almost ridiculous, and
socially insignificant in any case. Why on the other hand is it that violent, accidental, and chance death,

which previous communities could not make any sense of (it was dreaded and cursed
as vehemently as we curse suicide), has so much meaning for us: it is the only one that is generally talked

about; it is fascinating and touches the imagination . Once again, ours is the culture

of the Accident, as Octavio Paz says. Death is not abjectly exploited by the Media since they are happy to gamble on the
fact that the only events of immediate, unmanipulated and straightforward significance for all are those which in one way or another
bring death onto the scene. In this sense the most despicable media are also the most objective. And again, to interpret this in terms
of repressed individual pulsions or unconscious sadism is trivial and uninteresting, since it is a matter of a collective passion.

Violent or catastrophic death does not satisfy the little individual

unconscious, manipulated by the vile mass-media (this is a secondary revision, and is already morally weighted); this
death moves us so profoundly only because it works on the group itself,
and because in one way or another it transfigures and redeems in its own
eyes. 'Natural' death is devoid of meaning because the group has no
longer any role to play in it. It is banal because it is bound to the policed and commonplace [banalisé]
individual subject, to the policed and commonplace nuclear family, and because it is no longer a collective mourning and joy. Each

With the primitives, there is no 'natural' death: every death is

buries his own dead.

social, public and collective, and it is always the effect of an adversarial

will that the group must absorb (no biology). This absorption takes place in feasting and rites. Feasting is
the exchange of wills (we don't see how feasting would reabsorb a biological event). Evil wills and expiation rites are exchanged over

here death gains status, and the

the death's head. Death deceives and symbolically gains esteem;

group is enriched by a partner. To us, the dead have just passed away and
no longer have anything to exchange. The dead are residual even before dying. At the end of
a lifetime of accumulation, the dead are subtracted from the total in an
economic operation. They do not become effigies: they serve entirely as alibis for the
living and to their obvious superiority over the dead. This is a flat, one-
dimensional death, the end of the biological journey, settling a credit:
'giving in one's soul', like a tyre, a container emptied of its contents. What
banality! All passion then takes refuge in violent death, which is the sole
manifestation of something like the sacrifice, that is to say, like a real
transmutation through the will of the group. And in this sense, it matters little
whether death is accidental, criminal or catastrophic: from the moment it
escapes 'natural' reason, and becomes a challenge to nature, it once again
becomes the business of the group, demanding a collective and symbolic
response; in a word, it arouses the passion for the artificial, which is at the same time sacrificial passion. Nature is
uninteresting and meaningless, but we need only 'return' one death to 'nature', we need only

exchange it in accordance with strict conventional rites , for its energy (both the dead
person's energy and that of death itself) to affect the group, to be reabsorbed and expended by the

group, instead of simply leaving it as a natural 'residue'. We, for our part, no longer have
an effective rite for reabsorbing death and its rupturing energies; there remains the phantasm of sacrifice, the violent artifice of

the
death. Hence the intense and profoundly collective satisfaction of the automobile death. In the fatal accident,

artificiality of death fascinates us. Technical, non-natural and therefore

willed (ultimately by the victim him- or herself), death becomes
interesting once again since willed death has a meaning. This artificiality
of death facilitates, on a par with the sacrifice, its aesthetic doubling in the imagination,
and the enjoyment that follows from it. Obviously 'aesthetics' only has a value for us since we are
condemned to contemplation. The sacrifice is not 'aesthetic' for the primitives, but it always marks a refusal of natural and biological
succession, an intervention of an initiatory order, a controlled and socially governed violence. These days, we can only rediscover
this anti-natural violence in the chance accident or catastrophe, which we therefore experience as socially symbolic events of the

Finally, the Accident is only accidental, that is to say,

highest importance, as sacrifices.

absurd, for official reason; for the symbolic demand, which we have never
been without, the accident has always been something else altogether.
Hostage-taking is always a matter of the same scenario. Unanimously condemned, it
inspires profound terror and joy. It is also on the verge of becoming a political ritual of the first order at a
time when politics is collapsing into indifference. The hostage has a symbolic yield a hundred times superior to that of the
automobile death, which is itself a hundred times superior to natural death. This is because we rediscover here a time of the
sacrifice, of the ritual of execution, in the immanence of the collectively expected death. This death, totally undeserved, therefore

the officiating priest or

totally artificial, is therefore perfect from the sacrificial point of view, for which

'criminal' is expected to die in return, according to the rules of a symbolic

exchange to which we adhere so much more profoundly than we do to
the economic order. The workplace accident is the concern of the economic order and has no
symbolic yield whatsoever. Since it is a machinic breakdown rather than a sacrifice, it is as
indifferent to the collective imagination as it is to the capitalist entrepreneur. It is the object of a mechanical refusal, of a mechanical

revolt, based on the right to life and to security, and is neither the object nor the cause of a
ludic terror. 29 Only the worker, as is well known, plays too freely with his security, at the whim of the unions and bosses
 We are all hostages, and that's the secret of hostage-taking, and we
who understand nothing of this challenge.

are all dreaming, instead of dying stupidly working oneself to the ground,
of receiving death and of giving death. Giving and receiving constitute one symbolic act (the symbolic
act par excellence), which rids death of all the indifferent negativity it holds for us in the 'natural' order of capital. In the same way,

our relations to objects are no longer living and mortal, but instrumental
(we no longer know how to destroy them, and we no longer expect our own death), which is why they are really dead objects that
end up killing us, in the same fashion as the workplace accident, however, just as one object crushes another. Only the automobile
accident re-establishes some kind of sacrificial equilibrium. For death is something that is shared out, and we must know how to

share it out amongst objects just as much as amongst other men. Death has only given and received
meaning, that is to say, it is socialised through exchange. In the primitive order, everything is done
so that death is that way. In our culture, on the contrary, everything is done so that death is never

done to anybody by someone else, but only by 'nature', as an impersonal

expiry of the body. We experience our death as the 'real' fatality inscribed in our bodies only because we no
longer know how to inscribe it into a ritual of symbolic exchange. The order of
the 'real', of the 'objectivity' of the body as elsewhere the order of political economy, are always the results of the rupture of this
exchange. It is from this point that even our bodies came into existence as the place in which our inexchangeable death is confined,
and we end up believing in the biological essence of the body, watched over by death which in turn is watched over by science.
Biology is pregnant with death, and the body taking shape within it is itself pregnant with death, and there are no more myths to

come and free it. The myth and the ritual that used to free the body from
science's supremacy has been lost, or has not yet been found. We try to
circumscribe the others, our objects and our own body within a destiny of
instrumentality so as no longer to receive death from them but there is nothing we can do about this the same goes for
death as for everything else: no longer willing to give or receive it, death encircles us in

the biological simulacrum of our own body.

 2NC Alternative
What emerges is not silence but an understanding that there exist the very
same Systems of assimilation which are not merely an extension of American
capitalism and democracy, and should not be essentialized into Alterity. The
same critical lens should be applied to people designated as radical Others
simply due to their geographic location.
Nordin 14 (Dr. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
Religion at Lancaster University, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars,” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue: Baudrillard and War, May,
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-norden.html)//AG

Baudrillard advocates an
IV. Baudrillard’s war and others’ wars in China and Asia As shown at the outset of this article,

interest in the other as Other, but is unclear about how this feeds in to knowledge about that other. What
form can our ‘interest’ take, if we disallow the attempt to gain
knowledge? We return, then, to the question of how we as scholars may approach Others’ wars, as they are
thought, operationalised and simulated in other places. What I think emerges
from the above is an understanding that ‘the global’, as we may understand it through Baudrillard, is precisely global.

Systems that try to assimilate anything and everything into their own
programmes exist in different forms in different places, including in Asia.
To essentialize these systems into one great mysterious unit of imagined
Alterity would ironically be a way to deny such alterity by fetishizing it
and reducing it to an Identity of Otherness. From Baudrillard's notion that every system contains the seed
of its own demise stems his suspicion of centralized systems and the pretence to holistic unity .

These systems, of which the American-led war on terror is one example and Zhao's

Sinocentric Tianxia is another, always claim to do good and attempt to

assimilate everything and anything into their system, striving towards
perfection. Asia offers no respite from this logic. Clearly, They grapple
with the same problems as We do, and can offer no greener grass where
the scholar can comfortably stretch out assured at having escaped the
confines of The System. In this way, perhaps China’s wars can indicate to us that the logics of Baudrillard’s
globality does not only have to be understood in the narrow sense of an operational system of total trade, but that its logic is
recognisable also in other systems – systems that are not just some extension
of Western capitalism and attempts at democracy, but that have their
roots in other philosophical traditions. Moreover, as Baudrillard tells us, these systems are
always susceptible to challenge by singularities of culture, that which is
excluded and condemned by the system because it tries to stand outside
it – the Other that does not want to be turned into self, the barbarian that
does not want to be civilized, or what Baudrillard himself calls ‘the other
who will not be mothered’, whose call to arms is ‘fuck your mother’ (Baudrillard
2006, see also Nordin 2013; forthcoming 2014). Baudrillard reads a clear antagonism as existing between the global and the singular (Baudrillard 2006,
2002 [2000], 155-6). To him, ‘foreignness is eternal’ (Baudrillard 1993 [1990]), or as Coulter writes: ‘Just as all those cultural singularities will never
merge into one global monoculture, people remain radically other to each other’ (Coulter 2004). This alterity or radical otherness, then, is there

whether the theorist recognises it or not. Of course, an argument could be made that all attempts at understanding,
studying or explaining something is a violent act that reduces its
purported object to a knowable unit and denies its alterity. That argument would have a
point – after all, speaking is an act of violence and there are numerous problems

with the scholarly endeavour to make visible, to communicate and to

reveal things as though they were not hyper-visible already. If, however,
we decide that we will choose to commit this violence of speaking (rather than,
say, choose a lifetime of silence or expressing ourselves only through the means of interpretative dance), there seems to be no

reason for remaining silent on swathes of people we have chosen to

designate as radical Others because of their geographical location. That is to say,
there are no reasons except ones based on the imposition of an artificial a priori

Identity as Other, for the purposes of exclusion, which again is surely intolerably patronising. Perhaps
we can draw on Baudrillard not so much to remind ourselves only of the alterity of exotic Others elsewhere, but to remind ourselves of the Other in the
Self. Perhaps the most crucial thing is to remember, with Coulter I think, that it is not those other (Asian, foreign) Others and Their wars that are
radically other to Us and Our wars, but people that are radically other to each other – and we who are radically other to ourselves, despite and through
all our attempts to knowledge.

So refuse the affirmatives engagement to allow the cloak of mystery to fall once
again
Nordin 2014 “Baudrillard and War Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars” (Dr.
Astrid, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, UK) //pday

Baudrillard’s reading of the Gulf war, then, gives us a thought provoking account of the
effects of an American or Western system that simulates war in a manner that
never meets or engages the Asian other that is purportedly at the
receiving end of this violence. This analysis of war mirrors Baudrillard’s
interest elsewhere in a code or system that disallows alterity, the seduction of the
irreconcilable, or any form of Rumsfeldian ‘unknown unknown’, allowing only
domesticated forms of knowable ‘difference’. This raises the question of how we
deal with the idea of otherness in Baudrillard’s own writing, and for the
purposes of this article in his writing on war.
In Baudrillard’s writing on this ‘system’ of simulation, it is sometimes European democracy,
sometimes the modern West, sometimes consumer society more broadly, that
are driven by the ‘perverse’ logic he describes (Baudrillard 2002 [2000]: 97, 207; 2004
[2002]). Baudrillard appeals to a ‘we’, the specificity of which varies across his writings
(Baudrillard 1989 [1986]: 116). Thus, as John Beck has noted, ‘there is no outside of the
American rhetoric of achieved utopia; for Baudrillard, it erases all alternatives’ (Beck
2009: 110). In The Spirit of Terrorism, Beck similarly notes the deployment of a Western ‘we’ in
opposition to an enemy ‘them’, ‘not dissimilar to those utilized by official American (and British)
discourse determined to externalise the other side’ (Beck 2009: 112). Beck argues that the 9/11
attacks revealed to Baudrillard that there is ‘another side, a reading of American power that can
move inside it but remains other to it’ (Beck 2009: 112). This, however, does little to destabilise
the original us/them binary.
On anything we may imagine beyond these imagined units of the ‘we’, Baudrillard is largely
silent. Of course, we should not over-emphasise the potentially problematic consequences of
Baudrillard’s focus on these specific spatio-temporal configurations – after all, nobody can write
about everything, nor should they necessarily try. Nonetheless, Baudrillard’s ascription of the
logics he describes to the modern West, European democracy and consumer society raises the
question of what lies outside those configurations and on what logics that outside may operate.

Baudrillard has a limited amount to say about this outside, but with regards
to Asia, and more specifically Japan, he argues for increased exoticisation (Baudrillard
2003a). For Baudrillard, it is the modern West’s refusal of alterity that spawns nostalgia for
the Other, who is now always already domesticated (Baudrillard 1990 [1987]:145, 165).
Despite this nostalgia, we must not try to ‘foster’ difference. It is
counterproductive to call for ‘respecting the difference’ of ‘marginalized groups’, as
this relies on a presumption that they need to have an Identity and makes the marginal
valued as such, thus leaving the marginal where they are, ‘in place’. Difference must
therefore be rejected in favour of greater otherness or alterity: ‘otherness
[l’altérité] is not the same thing as difference. One might even say that
difference is what destroys otherness’ (Baudrillard 1993 [1990]: 127, 131). Thus ‘the other
must stay Other, separate, perhaps difficult to understand, uncontrollable’ (Hegarty 2004:
118). In this way, Baudrillard advocates more ‘exoticism’, an interest in the other as Other. The
Other can only remain Other insofar as we resist the urge to assimilate.

The biggest threat to the global order lies within. In the transcapitalist era, any
oppositional revolution against the system that acts through means of semiotic
abstraction risks being complicit in the evils it tries to critique. Deterrence leads to
war, not peace. Terror leads to true insurrection against the system.
Pawlett 14 (William Pawlett, a professor of media and cultural studies at the
University of Wolverhampton, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Baudrillard and War, “Society at War With Itself,” Volume 11, Number 2, May
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-pawlett.html , LD)
I. Introduction It all depends on the ground we choose to fight on … most
often … we choose to fight on ground where we are beaten before we
begin (Baudrillard 2001: 119). This paper examines Baudrillard’s assertion, made in later works including Impossible Exchange (2001),
The Intelligence of Evil (2005) and Pyres of Autumn (2006), that individuals, society and indeed the global

system, are internally and irreconcilably divided, that modernity is ‘at

odds with itself’ (Baudrillard 2006: 1). In his view dissent, rejection and
insurrection emerge from within, not from external challenges such as
alternative ideologies or competing worldviews, but from within bodies,
within borders, inside programmes. For Baudrillard much of the violence,
hatred and discomfort visible around the globe can be understood as a
latent but fundamental ‘silent insurrection’ against the global integrating
system and its many pressures, demands and humiliations (2001: 106) .
This is an endogenic or intra-genic rejection, it emanates from within the
system, from within individuals, even from within language, electronic
systems and bodily cells, erupting as abreaction, metastasis and sudden
reversal.2 For Baudrillard then, despite the many simulations of external threat and enmity – radical Islam currently being the best example – the
most dangerous threat lies within: ‘society faces a far harder test than
any external threat: that of its own absence, its loss of reality’ (2006: 1).
The global order, conventionally labelled “capitalist”, is neutralising its
values and structures, its ideologies disappear, its principles are sacrificed.
Even the sense of “reality” produced by the abstract sign and by
simulation models begin to disappear (2005: 67-73; 2009: 10-15). The goal is
‘integral reality’, a limitless operational project geared towards the total
transcription of the world into virtuality: ‘everything is realised and
technically materialised without reference to any principle or final
purpose’ (2005: 18). Yet there is an internal war or “backlash” taking place
between integralist violence which seeks ultimate control by eliminating
all otherness, and duality. Duality, for Baudrillard, is “indestructible” and
is manifest as the inevitable or destined re-emergence of otherness: of
death, Evil, ambivalence, the ghosts of symbolic exchange, the accursed
share within the system. The integrating system then suffers a ‘dissent
working away at it from inside. It is the global violence immanent in the
world-system itself which, from within, sets the purest form of symbolic
challenge against it’ (2005: 22). This is a war or conflict that does not end, the outcome of which cannot be predicted or programmed.
It is a war that is quite different from the disappearance of war into simulated non-events, such as occurred with the Gulf wars (Baudrillard 1995). Indeed, Baudrillard suggests ,
the deterrence of world wars, and of nuclear wars, does not result in
peace, but in a viral proliferation of conflicts, a fractalisation of war and
conflict into everyday, local, and ubiquitous terror (1993b: 27). This paper
will examine Baudrillard’s position on internal rejection through two closely
related themes: complicity and duality. Complicity, and the closely related
term collusion, are themselves dual in Baudrillard’s sense. That is,
complicity or collusion express an internal division or ‘duality’ which is
not a simple opposition of terms. As is so often the case, Baudrillard’s position
builds on his much earlier studies: Requiem For the Media (orig. 1972, in
Baudrillard 1981: 164-184) had already argued that the dominance of the
abstract sign and of simulation models meant that any critique of the
system made through the channels of semiotic abstraction were
automatically re-absorbed into the system. Any meaningful challenge
must invent its own, alternative medium – such as the silk-screen
printings, hand-painted notices and graffiti of May 1968 – or it will lapse
into an ineffectual complicity with the system it seeks to challenge (Baudrillard
1981: 176). In his later work, Baudrillard’s emphasis on duality and complicity is extended much further, taking on global, anthropological and even cosmological dimensions ,
and increasingly complicity and collusion are seen as dual, as
encompassing both acceptance and a subtle defiance. This paper examines the dual nature of
complicity and collusion. It considers the influence of La Boetie’s notorious Essay on Voluntary Servitude on Baudrillard, seeking to draw out what is distinctive in Baudrillard’s
position. The second section turns to the notion of duality, examining Good and Evil and Baudrillard’s assertion that attempts to eliminate duality merely revive or re-active it.

Complicity implies a complexity of relations, and, specifically, the

condition of being an accomplice to those in power. To be an accomplice is
to assist in the committing of a crime. If the crime is murder, the term accomplice implies one who plans, reflects, calculates
– but does not strike the lethal blow. The crime which is of particular interest to Baudrillard is,

of course, the perfect crime: the elimination of otherness, of ambivalence,

of duality, even of “reality” and of the abstract representational sign
which enables a sense of “reality” (Baudrillard 1996). The global, integral,
carnivalising and cannibalising system, which might loosely still be called
capitalist, is at war against radical otherness or duality; yet, for
Baudrillard, as duality lies at its heart, locked within its foundations, it is
indestructible and emerges through attempts to eliminate it. If the system has been largely
successful at eliminating external threats, it finds itself in an even worse situation: it is at war with itself.
*All methods of resistance through critical theory is complicit with the system they critique
because they act within the terrain demarcated by their opponents. The system criticizes
itself, making their academic critique a redundant action that only helps give a sense of reality
to the system. The critique of neoliberalism is integral to 21 st century society, which renders
any means of traditional revolution a reproduction of the simulacra.
Pawlett 14 (William Pawlett, a professor of media and cultural studies at the
University of Wolverhampton, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Baudrillard and War, “Society at War With Itself,” Volume 11, Number 2, May
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-pawlett.html , LD)
II. Complicity Complicity is a particularly slippery term. In the 1980s Baudrillard’s thought, mistakenly assumed to be “Postmodernist”, was argued to be complicit with
capitalism, largely because it questioned the ability of dominant strands of Marxism and feminism to significantly challenge the capitalist system (Callinicos 1989; Norris 1992).
At the same time, Baudrillard was alleging that the work of supposedly radical theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari (1984 orig. 1972) and Lyotard (1993 orig. 1974) was, with

So which
their emphasis on desire as productive and liberatory force, complicit with the mechanisms of advanced consumer capitalism (Baudrillard 1987: 17-20).

branch of contemporary theory is most complicit with capitalism? Liberals,

humanists and environmentalists who see their clothes stolen by mainstream politicians? Marxists and Communists who by refusing to update their thinking provide a slow
moving target for right-wing snipers? Post- Modernists and Post-Structuralists who attack Enlightenment thought but refuse to speak of the human subject and so have “thrown
the baby out with the bath water”? Network and complexity theory which flattens all phenomena and experience to a position on a grid, producing a very complex

all critical theories are complicit with

simplification? The list could go on but it is a question that cannot be answered because

the system they critique. They fight on a terrain already demarcated by

their opponents, a terrain on which they are beaten before they begin,
one where the most compelling argument can always be dismissed as
doom-mongering or irresponsible intellectualism. This includes
Baudrillard’s own critical thinking, as he readily acknowledges (Baudrillard
2009a: 39). Further, and even more damaging to the project of critique, in
a hegemonic or integral order the system solicits critique and it criticises
itself, so displacing and making redundant the laborious attempts at
academic critique. The latter continue, even proliferate, but with
decreasing impact. So, what does Baudrillard mean by complicity with the global order? Baudrillard’s concern is
primarily with complicity at the level of the form of the (capitalist)
system, not at the level of belief, consent or allegiance to particular
contents of capitalist life (consumer products, plurality of ‘lifestyles’, a degree
of ‘tolerance’ etc.). Complicity is often seen, by critics of capitalism, as
acceptance of consumerism and its myriad choices and lifestyles, but this
is a reductive level of analysis from Baudrillard’s perspective. By
complicity or collusion Baudrillard means, on the one hand, the very
widespread willingness to surrender or give up beliefs, passions and
“symbolic defences” (2010: 24), and on the other – as the dual form – an
equally widespread ability to find a space of defiance through the play of
complicity, collusion, hyperconformity and indifference (1983: 41-8). That
is, while many of us (in the relatively affluent West) share in the
profanating, denigrating and “carnivalising” of all values, embracing
indifference, shrugging “whatever”, we do so with very little commitment
to the system, rejoicing inwardly when it suffers reversals: we operate in
a dual mode. While such attitudes of indifference may seem to accept that there is no meaningful alternative to capitalism: an attitude that has been called
‘capitalist nihilism’ (Davis in Milbank and Zizek, 2009) and ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2008), Baudrillard’s notions of “integral

reality”, duality and complicity may have significant advantages over

those approaches. Unlike thinkers who remain anchored to critical
thinking defined by determinate negation, Baudrillard’s approach
emphasises ambivalence, reversal and both personal and collective
modes of rejection more subtle than those envisioned by the increasingly
exhausted mechanisms of critique. The critique of consumer capitalism –
the consumption of junk food, junk entertainment and junk information – is now integral to the system ; the critique of finance

capitalism – banker’s bonuses, corporate tax avoidance – is integral to the system , yet it fails to bring about meaningful

or determinate social transformation. Indeed, such critiques may do no

more than provide the system with a fleeting sense of “reality” – real
issues, real problems to deal with – around which the system can
reproduce its simulacra, perhaps to reassure us that “something is being
done”, “measures are being put into place” etc. “Reality” cannot be
dialectically negated by critical concepts when both ‘reality’ and the
critical concept disappear together, their fates clearly tied to each other
(Baudrillard 2009b: 10-12). There is a sense then in which the production of
critique is in complicity with the system, the unravel-able proliferation
and excess of critical accounts of the system has the effect of protecting
the system. Complicity consists in a sharing of the denigration of all
values, all institutions, all ideas, all beliefs: so long as we believe in
nothing – at least not passionately – then the system has us, at least
superficially. For example, in recent decades we have seen the denigration of religious faiths – or their reduction to ‘cultural identity’ and ‘world heritage’
objects; the denigration of public services and welfare provision accompanied by their marketisation; the denigration of the poor, the young, immigrants and the unemployed .
Yet this is not only the denigration of the powerless or disenfranchised,
there is also the widespread denigration of those seen as powerful : politicians,
corporations, celebrities. For Baudrillard, it is quite inadequate to focus only on the power of global neo-liberal policies such as marketisation in these processes of denigration.

This is where Baudrillard’s position departs decisively from anti-globalists and from neo-Communists such as Negri, Zizek, and Badiou . Global power has
deliberately sacrificed its values and ideologies, it presents no position, it
takes no stand, it undermines even the illusion that “free markets”
function and has made “capital” virtual; become orbital it is removed
from a terrestrial, geo-political or subjective space. These are protective
measures enabling power to become (almost) hegemonic (Baudrillard
2009a: 33-56; 2010: 35-40).

*It has become impossible to locate a nexus of power – power is everyone and
in everyone. We have internalized power and usurped the position of the
master, but this power turns on the self as tyranny of the self by demanding
maximization of opportunities. The West has already parodized and
desacralized itself; there is no sovereign. We are now dually complicit with the
system – over-eager acceptance and deep rejection. The most pure form of
subjugation of the system is through subtle defiance – through silence, radical
indifference, and hyperconformity.
Pawlett 14 (William Pawlett, a professor of media and cultural studies at the
University of Wolverhampton, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Baudrillard and War, “Society at War With Itself,” Volume 11, Number 2, May
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-pawlett.html , LD)

Baudrillard often emphasises the fragility and the vulnerability to reversal

of the “powerful” and the distinction between powerful and powerless is
radically questioned in his work. So what is this global power? Where is it? The answer, of course, is that it is
everywhere and it is in everyone. We have not liberated ourselves from slavery, but, Baudrillard contends, internalised the
masters: ‘[e]verthing changes with the emancipation of the slave and the internalisation of the master by the emancipated slave’ (2009a: 33). We tyrannise

ourselves, for example by demanding that we maximise our

opportunities, fulfil our potential. This is a deeper level of slavery – and
complicity – than any previous historical system could inflict (Baudrillard
1975; 2009a: 33). Yet duality always re-emerges, Baudrillard insists:
indifference is dual, complicity is dual. Carnivalisation and cannibalisation are
themselves dual: the global system absorbs all otherness in a ‘forced
conversion to modernity’ (2010: 5), reproducing otherness within the
carnival of marketable “difference”, yet cannibalisation emerges as a reversion and derailing of this process. The world adopts
Western models: economic, cultural, religious – or it appears to. Hidden within this complicity with the West, there is, Baudrillard suggests, a deeper sense

of derision and rejection. The allegiance to Western models is superficial;

it is a form of mimicry or hyperconformity that involves a ritual-like
exorcism of the hegemonic system. Further, such mimicry reveals the
superficiality of Western cultural and economic models: this is not only a
superficial acceptance, but an acceptance of superficiality. Western values
are already parodic, and, in being accepted, they are subject to further
parody as they circulate around the globe (2010: 4-11). The West has
deregulated and devalued itself and demands that the rest of the world
follows: "It is everything by which a human being retains some value in
his own eyes that we (the West) are deliberately sacrificing … [o]ur truth
is always to be sought in unveiling, de-sublimation, reductive analysis …
[n]othing is true if it is not desacralised, objectivised, shorn of its aura,
dragged on to the stage" (Baudrillard 2010: 23). Western desacrilisation
amounts to a powerful challenge to the rest of the world, a potlatch:
desacralise in return or perish! But who has the power? Who is the victor?
There isn’t one, according to Baudrillard. Of the global order, Baudrillard writes:
‘We are its hostages – victims and accomplices at one and the same time –
immersed in the same global monopoly of the networks. A monopoly
which, moreover – and this is the supreme ruse of hegemony – no one
holds any longer’ (2010: 40). There is no Master, no sovereign because all
the structures and dictates of power have been internalised, this is the
complicity we all share with global order, yet it is a dual complicity: an
over-eager acceptance goes hand-in-hand with a deep and growing
rejection. Baudrillard’s discussions of power, servitude and complicity make frequent reference to Estienne La Boetie’s essay on voluntary servitude, completed
around 1554. The fundamental political question for La Boetie is : ‘how can it happen that a vast number of

individuals, of towns, cities and nations can allow one man to tyrannise
them, a man who has no power except the power they themselves give
him, who could do them no harm were they not willing to suffer harm’ (La
Boetie 1988: 38). It seems people do not want to be free, do not want to
wield power or determine their own fates: ‘it is the people who enslave
themselves’ (La Boetie 1988: 41). People in general are the accomplices of the powerful and the tyrannical, some profit directly
through wealth, property, favour – ‘the little tyrants beneath the principal one’ (1988: 64), but many do not, why do they not rebel? Baudrillard takes up La Boetie’s emphasis on
servitude being enforced and maintained from within, rather than from without. Yet, there are also major divergences. La Boetie deplores the “common people” for accepting

Baudrillard rejects such elitism and

the narcotising pleasures of drinking, gambling and sexual promiscuity, while

celebrates the masses abilities to strategically defy those who would

manipulate them through perverse but lethally effective practices such as
silence, radical indifference, hyperconformity – dual modes of complicity
and rejection (Baudrillard 1983: 1-61). Though La Boetie’s essay prefigures the development of the concept of hegemony, he never doubts that voluntary
servitude is unnatural, a product of malign custom that is in contradiction with the true nature of human beings which is to enjoy a God-given freedom. Baudrillard, by contrast ,
examines voluntary servitude as a strategy of the refusal of power, a
refusal of the snares of self and identity, as strategy of freedom from the
tyranny of the will and the fiction of self-determination (Baudrillard 2001:
51-7). For Baudrillard the “declination” or refusal of will disarms those
who seek to exert power through influencing or guiding peoples’ choices
and feelings towards particular ends. It also allows for a symbolic space, a
space of vital distance or removal, a space in which to act, or even act-out
(of) a character (Baudrillard 2001: 72-3). This is a space where radical
otherness may be encountered, a sense of shared destiny which is a
manifestation of the dual form at the level of individual existence
(Baudrillard 2001: 79). It could certainly be argued that modern subjects are confronted by a far more subtle and pervasive system of control
than were the subjects discussed in La Boetie’s analysis. In theorising the nature of modern controls Baudrillard develops suggestive themes from La Boetie’s work. Speaking of
slavery in the Assyrian empire, where, apparently, kings would not appear in public, La Boetie argues, ‘the fact that they did not know who their master was, and hardly knew

Whatever its historical provenance,

whether they had one at all, made them all the more willing to be slaves’ (1988: 60).

this strategy of power is, it seems, generalised in modernity; particularly

after the shift away from Fordist mass production it has become
increasingly hard to detect who the masters actually are. While workers are
persecuted by middle managers, supervisors, team leaders, project co-ordinators
who are the masters of this universe? Who are the true beneficiaries? Rather
than trying to identify a global neo-liberal elite, as do many proponents of
anti-capitalist theory, Baudrillard suggests that the situation we confront
is so grave because “we” (those in the West in relatively privileged positions)
have usurped the position of masters; we have become the slave masters
of ourselves, tyrannising every detail of our own lives: trying to work
harder, trying for promotion or simply trying to avoid redundancy. We are
all the accomplices of a trans-capitalist, trans-economic exploitation. We
are all tyrants: a billion tiny tyrants servicing a system of elimination . But
this is not to say that Baudrillard ignores power differentials altogether:
‘it is, indeed, those who submit themselves most mercilessly to their own
decisions who fill the greater part of the authoritarian ranks, alleging
sacrifice on their parts to impose even greater sacrifices on others’ (2001:
60-1). We all impose such violence on ourselves and on others as part of our daily
routines, hence Baudrillard’s injunction to refuse power: ‘Power itself
must be abolished – and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated,
which is at the heart of all traditional struggles – but also, just as violently,
in the refusal to dominate’ (2009a: 47).
*In an attempt to rid society of the otherness, society has reduced the duality
of the world to binary oppositions that fail to capture the unknown of the
radically dual other. Good and Evil have been distilled by modern morality to
reduce Evil to the accidental, that which can be controlled and eradicated. This
allows for the violence of the axis of good. The diversion of Good and Evil has
given Evil the autonomy to change the rules of the game. Strategies of sudden,
ironic reversions through symbolic exchange have the potential to bring back
Evil and radical otherness and disrupt the ‘hell of the same’
Pawlett 14 (William Pawlett, a professor of media and cultural studies at the
University of Wolverhampton, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Baudrillard and War, “Society at War With Itself,” Volume 11, Number 2, May
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-pawlett.html , LD)

III. Duality There is a kind of progressive break with the world, the terminal
phase of which might be said to be that in which the Other has
disappeared, and in which one can now feed only on oneself (with a relish
mingled with horror and disgust) (Baudrillard 2010: 42). The notion of duality and the “duel” is fundamental to Baudrillard’s
thought and can be seen running through all of his major terms, processes and relations. In Passwords Baudrillard defines

reversibility as ‘the applied form’ of duality (2003: 81). Baudrillard’s analysis of duality and its conflict
with ‘integrism’ spans the largest, anthropological, global and structural levels through to the micro-level of everyday life, and smaller still into the world of viruses (Baudrillard

1993b: 161-3). For example , symbolic exchange consists in a dual and reversible process
of gift and counter-gift which work against or in defiance of the abstract,
unified and hierarchic process of commodity exchange. The notion of
seduction consists in the dual and reversible relations that take place
between masculine and feminine not in the biological opposition of male
and female. Fatal strategies are closely related to symbolic exchanges in
that they consist in the sudden ironic reversions and failures of the
system of power, which falters precisely because it is unable to respond
to the rule of symbolic exchange (1990b; Baudrillard & Noailles 2007: 78). In
Baudrillard’s later terminology ‘the hell of the same’ is always haunted by
radical otherness (1993b: 113-123); there is always ‘the other side’ of the
perfect crime, ‘the nothing’ or singularity that ‘runs beneath’ the
something (2001: 6-9). Duality, in Baudrillard’s sense (seemingly inspired by the
religion of Manichaeism – see Smith (2004) and Pawlett (2014)) challenges as
reductive all thought based on determinate conceptual oppositions:
good/evil, real/unreal, masculine/feminine, both dialectical and
empirical. Duality posits something else, something unknown,
unmanageable and beyond understanding in terms of oppositions. This
something, or “nothing”, forms the duality along with, and in antagonism
to, the great series of oppositions which are taken to constitute the
totality of life. In other words, what is generally taken to be real, material,
objective and universal is strictly limited . From the perspective of duality,
the vast sum of identities and differences, the immense plurality of the
world, is still homogeneous at the level of signs. Duality, in Baudrillard’s sense, does not contend that the
world is divided into two opposed principles, nor that there are two fundamental perspectives on the world. Rather, it posits two worlds: one

world of order, value, meaning, and another world in which these

concepts have little or no purchase (2004: 37). The system of oppositions
are contrasted with what Baudrillard calls radical otherness or singularity :
life beyond performative existence, beyond Will and subjectivity, where
the otherness of self meets the otherness of others: "What defines
otherness is not that the two terms are not identifiable, but that they are
not opposable. Otherness is of the order of the incomparable … not
exchangeable in terms of general equivalence; not negotiable, yet
circulating in the mode of complicity and the dual relation, both in
seduction and in war" (Baudrillard 1996: 122). Duality does not refer to a
position or resource outside of the system, something that might negate
the system, or alternatively be assimilated by it. Rather duality is “the
reversibility internal to the irreversible movement of the real” (2005: 21).
Reversibility is not the movement from one conceptual term to the other,
but the reversion of complementary oppositions such that the ‘reality’
they jointly produce is annulled, suspended or shattered (1993a: 133).
Good and Evil are perhaps Baudrillard’s most developed example of
duality. Good and Evil as symbolic forms are irreconcilable yet
inseparable, they alternate or ‘duel’, neither can vanquish nor eliminate
the other. The unending, cyclical duel of Good and Evil is dramatised in the great myths and tragedies. Heroes and heroines do not lay the foundations for social
order, they experience or embody the metamorphosis, collusion or reversibility of Good and Evil (2001: 54). Good and Evil, considered as dual or symbolic relations are eternal

and destined to emerge from each other . The dynamic, alternating energy of duality defies
structure, value, power and hierarchy. However, morality seeks to
separate or “distil” Good and Evil, working to produce the conceptual
opposition good/evil, literally barring their symbolic exchange, denying
their duality. Modernity, or Post-modernity, is even less tolerant of Good
and Evil as symbolic forms, and works to replace both the symbolic and
moral dimensions of Good and Evil with the reductive, individualised and
psychologised notions of happiness/wellbeing in opposition to
misfortune/ victimhood (2005: 139-158). “Evil” reduced to misfortune is
understood as something accidental, something that can and should have
been secured, controlled and finally eliminated, for example by a culture
of insurance, surveillance, risk assessment and “future-proofing”.
Reduced to a quantifiable scale happiness should always increase, and
misfortune decrease. The cultural demand now is that we show all the
signs of happiness at all times, and, for Baudrillard, the simulacra of
happiness and wellbeing sustain the system and flourish precisely in order
to obscure the symbolic dimension of Evil, which is nevertheless
ineradicable. This is not a historicist position, Good and Evil as symbolic
forms are not eliminated, they are diverted, disjointed, severed,
smothered yet they remain, and indeed take their revenge on
happiness/misfortune. Good has been progressively disarticulated from Evil, the goal being its universalisation, yet, Baudrillard insists, Evil
reappears or “transpires” through the hegemony of this enervated sense of Good, often generated by very measures employed to eliminate it : "by denying

the very existence of Evil (all the forms of radical, heterogeneous,

irreconcilable otherness) … Good has, in a way, given Evil its freedom. In
seeking to be absolute Good, it has freed Evil from all dependency and
given it back its autonomous power, which is no longer simply the power
of the negative but the power to change the rules of the game" (Baudrillard 2010: 55-6).
Where Good attempts to eliminate Evil, Evil will reappear in the measures taken by Good. Misfortune and happiness, as binary oppositions, feed and complement each other,

Baudrillard notes that misfortune and victimhood become increasingly

indeed

attractive to all as ‘a kind of escape route from the terroristic happiness

plot’ (Baudrillard 2005: 145). To give some examples, it is through the
misfortune/happiness binary that violent and tragic events are produced
as instances of types of events such as “human rights violations” or
“crimes against humanity”. Not allowed to be singular events of tragedy,
the awarding or conferral of the title “crime against humanity” produces
an event to be deplored by the media, not one to be thought about, but
one to be consumed quickly. A violent event cannot, under this way of
thinking, be worse than a crime against humanity, there is nothing worse.
Further, for Baudrillard, the current political fashion for apologies, for ‘the
rectification of the past in terms of our humanitarian awareness’ (2005:
150) is an extension of colonial rule and global liberal capitalist hegemony
because it declares – Ok, we are sorry, get on with your mourning and
then you can join the new economic order that we have defined: ‘we
make imbeciles of the victims themselves, by confining them to their
condition of victim, and by the compassion we show them we engage in a
kind of false advertising for them’ (Baudrillard 2005: 153). It might well be that those who are genuinely deprived and powerless
simply do not have the time or energy to promote themselves as victims, however it might also be, as Baudrillard suggests, that the powerless sense

or implicitly understand the snares, humiliations and loss of symbolic

defences that await them if they try to play by the rules imposed upon
them by liberal humanitarian discourse (Baudrillard 1983: 48-61). This is the violence of the good, the “Empire” or, in a
particularly memorable phrase, the ‘axis of good’ (Baudrillard 2010: 88 & 111). If Evil has no

essence, neither does Good. They are relational; each is internal to the other, a charge that is carried by the other. Good and Evil as
symbolic forms are not reducible to individual acts or choices , but they emerge in the ambivalence and

reversibility of order and system, and in events or exchanges between

people caught up in the cycle.
 2NC China Link
Politics of harmonization eradicates that which presents itself as an alternative
option ordering the world into hierarchies of difference. The formulation of
politics in this manner pits the insiders versus the outsiders promoting
perpetual antagonism within the populous.
Nordin 16 (Astrid, “Futures beyond ‘the West’? Autoimmunity in China’s harmonious world”, Review of
International Studies, 42, pp 156-177, January 2016) DP

The party-state version of harmonious world has then been deployed to ‘do’
various concrete things in Chinese international politics. At the level of
imagining difference, it appears to share our concern here with
multiplicity and openness. However, groups and cultures are described in ways that
correspond with David Kerr’s ‘blending diversity under universalism’, which tends towards an
imagination of difference as hierarchically ordered, and sometimes as something that should be
eliminated. The future harmonious world is envisaged as an ‘inevitable
choice’, and China is imagined as having a privileged position in the
construction of this future because of its purported harmonious nature
based on history. It is inevitable, yet needs to be constructed and
fostered. Against this background, ‘harmonious world’ is said by some to
indicate ‘an increasingly confident China relinquishing its aloofness to
participate and undertake greater responsibilities in international affairs’.
Nonetheless, the term remains to a significant extent a ‘catch all’ phrase
of friendly connotations. ‘Harmonious world’ may be useful precisely because of its
vague and elusive implications, that nonetheless speak to both Chinese and non-Chinese
sensibilities. Indeed, ‘who could argue against global peace and prosperity?’
Nonetheless, what emerges from accounts of harmony as articulated in
China in the last decade is a tension in the harmony concept between its
need for multiplicity on the one hand, and its presupposition of
universalisability on the other. Bart Rockman has suggested that harmony may be
a ‘necessary glue without which neither a society nor a polity are
sustainable’, but that ‘complete social harmony is ultimately suffocating
and illiberal’. Jacob Torfing has also taken issue with predominant understandings of
harmony in Southeast Asia that he argues present a ‘post-political vision of politics
and governance that tends to eliminate power and antagonism’. Drawing on
Laclau and Mouffe, he understands such a post-political vision as both theoretically
unsustainable and politically dangerous. It is unsustainable because power and
antagonism are inevitable features of the political dimensions of politics. Therefore politics:
cannot be reduced to a question of translating diverging interests into
effective [win-win] policy solutions, since that can be done in an entirely de-
politicized fashion, for example, by applying a particular decision-making
rule, relying on a certain rationality or appealing to a set of undisputed
virtues and values. Of course, politics always invokes particular rules, rationalities and
values, but the political dimension of politics is precisely what escapes all
this. Politics, then, unavoidably involves a choice that means eliminating
alternative options. Moreover, although we base our decisions on reasons
and may have strong motivations for choosing what we choose, we will
never be able to provide an ultimate ground for any given choice – in
Derridean terms, such grounds will always be indefinitely deferred. Therefore, ‘the ultimate
decision will have to rely on a skillful combination of rhetorical strategies and the use of force’.
The acts of exclusion that politics necessarily entails will produce
antagonism between those who identify with the included options and
those who do not. For this reason, the attempt by the promoters of harmony
to dissociate harmonious politics from the exercise of power, force and
the production of antagonism, claiming a harmony where everyone wins
and no-one looses, is bound to fail. Moreover, the post-political vision of politics and
harmony is dangerous because its denial of antagonism will tend to alienate those excluded
from consideration. This, Torfing writes, will
tend to displace antagonistic struggles
from the realm of the political to the realm of morals, ‘where conflicts are
based on non-negotiable values and the manifestation of “authentic”
identities’. Such non-negotiable values would be the opposite of the cooperative harmony
sought. To both Rockman and Torfing, then, complete or perfect harmony will defeat harmony
and create disharmony. In this way, the excessive production of harmony is what produces the
disharmonious elements that come to threaten it. We can see this happening in
contemporary China, where the ‘harmonising’ policies enforced under the
‘harmonious society’ slogan have produced a range of oppositional
movements, from Chinese youth mocking harmony online to the
increasing number of selfimolations we currently witness in and around
Tibet. Numerous scholars argue that in order to imagine harmony, we need to
imagine heterogeneity and multiplicity. We can now add that the problematic
organisation of difference that remains in imaginations of harmonious world
eliminates the multiplicity in the here-now that is a prerequisite for
harmony. What these renditions of harmony show, I believe, is that the tensions in and logics
of harmony are very similar to the ones that are described by Derrida and others in terms of the
autoimmune. What we see in these accounts is an irresolvable contradiction ,
which mirrors the autoimmune logic outlined at the beginning of this article. Harmony must
by definition be universal, but its universalisation by definition makes
harmony impossible. In this respect harmony works on a self-defeating
and self-perpetuating logic that is very similar to what we saw described
in the ‘modern West’ and in ‘democracy’.
 2NC China Rise Link
The world no longer operates through the logic of nation building, but rather
the over profusion of simulation - the expo was not isolated to Shanghai, the
entire globe is a world fair – a harmonius simulation of international coherence
where countries are isolated spatial and cultural totalities, where the
distinctions between visiting the expo and being the expo are blurred until all
notions of subject are rendered incoherent, copies of copies without originals,
simulacra avatars in a virtual hyper-reality – This is the expo; have fun at the
American pavilion!
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin [Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster
University], “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of
Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages
149-168)
TAKING BAUDRILLARD TO THE FAIR Above, I have examined different ways in which China is imagined as ahead in the historical queue that is posited at Expo 2010. However, as explained in the introduction to this thesis, a most common way of imagining China
elsewhere in discourse on the country’s relation to the world is as behind, or catching up. This way of understanding China’s role in international politics has its roots in an imagination of Chinese experience as radically different to that of Western modernity – as the

In recent years a key Chinese strategy for negotiating both its

“other country” (Chow, 1991: 81).

claims to particularism and to being a modern great power has been

through the public diplomacy of “mega events”, including Exp 2010. The success of

As symbols of a changing Chinese identity and

Chinese mega events in altering international opinion is debatable (Manzenreiter, 2010: 29-48).

outlook they have nonetheless come to be understood as an important

aspect of Chinese “image management” we need to (Xin Xu, 2006; Brownell, 2008; Price and Dayan, 2008). In this section I argue that

take the next step and understand China’s mega events not only on the
level of representation and ideology, but also on the level of simulation
and simulacra. such a reading is that we need to stop
106 I moreover argue that a consequence of

imagining China as the “other country”. Mega event genres came about in Western industrialising capitalist countries engaged in nation building and imperial

Roche has connected mega events as a

consolidation of the late 19th century (Rydell, 1984: 8, 236; Roche, 2003: 100). Maurice

phenomenon to “a temporal world view framed in terms of ‘progress ,’

the assumed responsibility to build a diffuse western ‘civilisation,’ and the
assumed capacity to do so by actively ‘making history’ ” (Roche, 2003: 103, see also Roche, 1999: 1-31). He has further

mega-events are potentially memorable because they are a special-

suggested “

kind of time-structuring institution in modernity time ” (Roche, 2003: 102, emphasis in original). Like Roche, I examine how

and modernity are negotiated by a mega event, but rather than looking
for this time-shaping capacity in the scale and cyclical occurrence of
events I examine one particular event, that is Expo 2010. World fairs have been described as instrumental in creating
the distinction between reality and representation, a dualism that has become central to the way we capture the modern world (Mitchell, 1988; Harvey, 1996). In the remainder of this chapter I 106 Penelope Harvey has begun the work of reading world fairs as
simulacra in Hybrids4of4Modernity:4 Anthropology,4the4Nation4State4and4the4Universal4Exhibition (1996). Recent publications have hinted at the possibility of such a reading of Chinese mega events. Most notably, Price and Dayan’s Owning4the4 Olympics4takes
off in an imaginary of the Beijing Olympics as “spectacle, festival, ritual, and finally as access to truth” and concludes: “Or should we rewrite MacAloon’s sequence in a style inspired by Baudrillard: ‘spectacle, festival, ritual, and finally… simulacrum-’” (Dayan, 2008:
400). To my knowledge none have followed through with an empirical analysis of what such a reading may look like in the Chinese case. explore what happens when we read the world fair – symbol of modernity – through the work of Jean Baudrillard – symbol of
 I suggest that we read Expo 2010 not only as an exercise of nation-
postmodernity.

building, but as shaping also the imaginary of the world as a holistic unit.
Expo 2010 could easily be read as a representation of the world, as
mimicry or a fake version of the real world beyond its gates. I read it
instead as simulation. the world fair is everywhere, that in fact the My key claim is that

world is a fair, reading of the world fair as simulacrum

and that this has serious consequences for the study thereof. The shows

we may be mistaken to imagine Chinese experience as radically other to

how

that of Western modernity, or postmodernity for that matter. It provides

a different way of thinking about space, time and subjectivity. Importantly, I argue that Baudrillard, who is
often accused of being intellectually uncritical or irresponsible (for example by Norris, 1992), can help us think differently about intellectual strategy in our study of such a simulacral harmonious world fair. I first outline Baudrillard’s discussions of the simulacrum and

the fair is not a fake copy of a “real” world, but that

use this discussion to interrogate the “being” of the world fair. I argue that

as simulation it marks the breakdown of the distinction of the copy from

the original, of the fair from the world. Having asked where the fair is,
arguing that fairness is everywhere, anywhere and nowhere , I next ask when the fair is. I show that the fair
works through recycling, revival and reuse. I thereafter ask who is the fair through an exploration of what happens to subjectivity in the interactive technologies of the fair. I examine how our simulation as subjects and objects of interactive technologies breaks both

being in the world fair turns us into simulacral avatars,

of these categories down. I argue that

circulated in virtual hyper-reality. I finally conclude through asking how to be fair in such a simulacral world fair. I argue that thinking the world in terms of its simulacral fairness

the world we live in

does not need to rob us of intellectual strategy, but that we can draw on Baudrillard to think of theory as challenge. To be simulacral, or where is the fair- Let us return to Baudrillard’s claim that

has passed into the hyper-real, “the generation by models of a real

without origin or reality” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 1). What has been lost, he argues, is metaphysics: “[n]o more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept” (1994 [1981]: 2). Crucially,

As a consequence the real will never again have a

this is not a question of imitation, duplication or even parody, but of substitution.

chance to produce itself, but is replaced by a “hyper-real” where there is

no distinction between the real and the imaginary, “leaving room only for
the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of
differences” (1994 [1981]: 3). What is at stake in Baudrillard’s analysis, then, is the reality principle: [t]o dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence,
the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending … Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the

In few places is the question of the real and

difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 3).

the imaginary, the true and the false, the original and the fake as
pertinent and as sensitive as in contemporary China. The lack of respect in
China for copyright is a frequent bone of contention in its foreign relations. Domestic relations have been shaken in recent years by the “tainted milk” scandal, where a number of infants were killed and hundreds of

underestimating the “China

thousands fell ill from ingesting “fake” milk powder containing melamine (Barriaux, 2011). In IR, voices are raised that worry about Westerners

threat” because China may be faking it, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” ( Gang Lin, 2005: 1).

Expo 2010 was a highly controlled space, yet it too had its own associated
scandals of fakery The
. Some suggested that Expo 2010’s mascot, Haibao, was a resurrection of American cartoon character Gumby, dubbing it “The Gumbygate scandal” (V Saxena, 2010).

Chinese national pavilion was exposed to similar allegations of plagiarism,

facing claims that it looked a lot like the Japanese pavilion from the 1992 Seville Expo, and equally similar to the

The biggest diplomatic scandal, nonetheless, surrounded the

Canadians pavilion at Montreal in 1967.
promotional tune Waiting for You which was officially written for Expo
2010, its video featuring all-Chinese superstars like Jackie Chan and Yao
Ming. A scandal erupted as it was revealed to bear an uncanny
resemblance to Mayo Okamoto’s 1997 Japanese hit Stay the Way You
Are. The irony was not lost on foreign commentators, with one commentator noting: [i]f the Shanghai Expo is the ultimate showcase of an economy roaring to world dominance, then the organizers have selected a theme song that perfectly captures
China on the cusp of the 21st century: strident, stirring – and ripped off (Lewis, 2010). The composer of the fair tune first strongly denied plagiarism allegations. Expo 2010 organisers thereafter suspended all use of the song citing “copyright reasons” and after “a
flurry of face-saving efforts” Expo 2010 organisers, without admitting any problematic recycling, asked if they could please use Okamoto’s work. The songwriter, whose practically forgotten tune had suddenly returned to the top of Japanese charts, selflessly
acquiesced (Lewis, 2010). These revelations of scandalous fakery, whether on the low level of song writing or the high level of lethal state violence, are typically understood as a form of resistance. They are taken to reveal the real4state of affairs. Some
commentators extrapolate fakery to a “Chinese characteristic”, portraying resistance to elite-led fakery as a resistance to power. In a short film on Chinese netizens and state power, blogger Wang Xiaofeng comments on Chinese fakes, with video shots of the Expo
interspersed: China is a country who likes to make fake things. Lying is a virtue (美德) of the Chinese. This is evident in all kind of matters. Statistical numbers are fake (假的) and whatever we create, even the good things, are fake. They [the PRC government] must

The existence of mainstream

say that some other countries are worse than China, to make common people (老百姓) think that China is the best place to live in (最好的国家).

media is based on this process of the never-ending creation of fake. the And

government itself is constantly creating this ‘fake’. If you go to remote places in China you discover very shocking realities, people

The
can’t even find something to eat, but you still think this country is a great country. So when you want to know the facts and get information you are actually challenging power. They are afraid of this (Wang Xiaofeng in Marianini and Zdzarski, 2011).

claim of the denouncers of scandalous fakery is that reality is being

masked the distinction between
, and the purpose of denunciation is to reveal this reality through exposing fakery. My claim in the reminder of this chapter, and in this thesis, is that

the real and the fake of the harmonious world is disappearing in a system
of self- referential signs. the whole system becomes weightless, it is Through this process:

no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum – not unreal, but a

simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for
itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference (Baudrillard, 1994
[1981]: 5-6). In this respect, simulation is very different from representation.107 The way the latter is often used implies an equivalence of the sign and the real – even if it is a utopian equivalence. Simulation, on the contrary: stems from the Utopia of the principle of
equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole
edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 6). As outlined in chapter 2, Baudrillard explains this in terms of successive phases of the image that I reiterate here:108 [1] it is the reflection of a profound reality … [2] it masks and denatures

The shift “from signs that

a profound reality … [3] it masks the absence of a profound reality … [4] it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 6).

dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing” is

crucial because the real is no longer what it once was. This is the 107 Problematising the dichotomizing relationship

we need not
between the sign and the real is, of course, by no means originary with Baudrillard, but has a long and varied tradition from Friedrich Nietzsche (1999 [1872]) to Derrida (1981 [1972]). 108 As explained in chapter 2,

read Baudrillard’s successive phases of the image as aligned in linear time.

The “era of simulation” need not be understood as temporally fixed (1994 [1981]: 2)

or discreet. significance of simulation, and its key effect is that in place of “the truth” we have a myriad of truths taking the shape of signs of reality and myths of origin (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 6). Baudrillard uses the example of

The adults’ parallel to

Disneyland to model the “entangled orders of simulacra” because he sees it primarily as a play of illusions and fantasy (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 12).

Disneyland in the contemporary era is the world fair, the most recent, the
biggest, the most expensive and the most visited of which, again, was
Expo 2010. Expo 2010 is built up of fantasm and as one of its feature
4Like Disneyland,

books announces “100 years of Expo dream” (Shanghai shibohui shiwu xietiaoju, 2009). At the same time, as will be seen in this chapter, Expo 2010

Expo 2010 was

involved truth claims in an explicit way that Disneyland never has, which makes it pertinent to examining both 1st and 2nd phase images and those of the 3rd and 4th phase.

constructed as a simulacrum of the world in ways that mix dreams with

truth claims (and, as I have argued above, the claims that the dreams are indeed the true dreams of humanity and that these dreams will come true). Just like Disneyland, the Expo is ideological: digest of the Chinese way of life,

the “Chineseness” of Expo 2010 can be

panegyric of Chinese values, idealised transposition of a contradictory reality. Nonetheless,
overemphasised in a format that is all about recycling. 109 As Penelope Harvey writes: [i]n many ways the form of the great
exhibitions has been maintained despite the changing economic, social and political circumstances. Nation states displayed cultural artefacts and technological expertise in their individual pavilions, seeking to educate and entertain the visiting public. The obligations
of the organizers of a fair with universal status are less concerned with the actual bringing together of exhibitors from all over the globe than with enacting a theme that simultaneously promotes the unity of mankind and the uniqueness of individual societies

The nation state has been the key cultural, political and economic
(Harvey, 1996: 35).

unit through which both IR and world fairs have traditionally told the tale
of global community, and Expo 109 Indeed, this paper, too, works through
recycling and intentionally so. the spatial
(of Baudrillard, Harvey, Expo 2010) 2010 recycles this conceptualisation. As I argue above,

organisation of the Expo sites, in Shanghai and online, is a starkly visual

simulacrum of the purported organisation of the international state
system. Essentialised culture is encapsulated in the spatial containers that
are Expo pavilions, which in turn are encapsulated in continents or
regions, which in turn are a subdivision of the neatly bounded and
mapped world fair. These mappings are presented as neutral and
innocent, helpful and real – some lines on a surface, fair and square (Expo Shanghai Online,
2010d). This particular model depends on a metaphor of scale by which the international community reproduces the form of its constituent parts: “[b]oth part and whole function as self-contained, coherent, bounded entities which are mutual transformations of

This imaginary reproduces units that differ from

each other through simple principles of aggregation and disaggregation” (Harvey, 1996: 50).

each other, but through a difference that is one of equivalence. Whether

we think of these units as natural or culturally constructed, they are
defined by precise boundaries in temporal, spatial and cultural terms,
they are distinct but equivalent entities. This model of equivalence by difference was highly visible at Expo 2010 as at previous world fairs (Harvey, 1996: 51). The
world fair appears as a taxonomisation of equivalent national units with their own pavilion, listing in official guidebooks and dedicated day of cultural display. The official Opening Celebration of Expo 2010 saw the parading of national flags, carried by Chinese youth
made up to look as repetitions and copies of each other (CCTV Documentary, 2010). In this way Expo 2010 recycled the form of Expo 1992 in Seville on which Harvey writes: [t]he Expo provided a concrete instance of endless replication, a cultural artefact built as if to
demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of an entirely consumerist world. Thus there was the appearance of choice, of multiple perspectives, yet the cultural forms on show were nevertheless clearly reformulations and repetitions of each other and of previous
events. Sameness and familiarity undermined the promise of difference (Harvey, 1996). What we learn from Baudrillard is that this second phase ideology moreover “functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order [or phase]: Disneyland exists in order to hide

The world fair, in this vein, exists in order to

that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 12).

hide that it is the “real” world, all of the “real” world that is the fair. The presentation of

The world fair takes us further than Disneyland

the Expo world as imaginary and as a dream functions to make us think that the rest is real.

does, as it is not content with a country, but must simulate the world –
always striving to be more inclusive, with Expo 2010 priding itself on
including pavilions of more countries than ever before, an inclusion which
cost the PRC government large sums in the form of subsidies (Xinhua, 2010e). In this way Expo 2010 marks a
shift from ideological nation-building to worlding by simulation. Shanghai, China and the world that surround the Expo are no longer real, but hyper-real, belonging now to the order of simulation: “[i]t is no longer a question of a false representation of reality
(ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 12-13). The relation between Baudrillard’s different phases or orders – those that dissimulate something and those that dissimulate
that there is nothing – comes to the fore in the hyper-awareness and self-reflexivity of Expo 2010, as it had begun to do in previous world fairs (Harvey, 1996). There were frequent references to the self- representations of previous world fairs, in TV programs, books

In many instances of its replication, the world

and in the “Expo museum” at Expo 2010 (see for example Shanghai shibohui shiwu xietiaoju, 2009).

fair reflected on itself as the exhibition of the exhibition of the exhibition

without end, as world fair exhibiting world fair. Key emblems, monuments and mascots of previous fairs were brought together with the effect
of appearing as self-referential signs, as copies of copies, representations of representations without original, signifiers of signifiers without signifieds, ad4 infinitum. In this way: [t]he exhibition represents the world, provides contexts and connections for an
understanding of external realities, but its reflexivity simultaneously confuses or confounds the distinction of insider/outsider, representation and reality” (Harvey, 1996: 37). The implication is one of implosion of the careful construct and of moving to the fourth
phase: “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 6). Therefore, we must take the step beyond understanding how the exhibition represents the world and grapple with how the harmonious exhibition is the

Reading the Expo through Baudrillard thus turns the world

world, and the harmonious world the exhibition.

into fair and the fair into the world. As I will continue to show throughout this chapter, the distinction between one as real or original and the other as fake or copy can no
longer be upheld. All4we4 have4are4versions4or4layers4of4the4harmonious4world/fair,4all4simulacra. This is why I argue with this chapter that we4need4to4take4the4step4and4study4it4as4such, rather than limit ourselves to reading China’s mega events purely
on the level of representation and ideology, upholding the reality principle. The layers of simulacra are all world/fair, but cannot be4the fair in a fully present way because Baudrillard, and others with him, have upset the dichotomisation of presence and absence.110
For this reason, the relation between the layers of simulacra is not that of a coherent system, of stable exchange or of dialectics. The world/fair is simultaneously nowhere and now here. To be recycled, or when is the fair- I have asked in the previous section where
the fair is and argued that “fairness” is everywhere and anywhere – that the world/fair is simultaneously nowhere and now here. I turn next to the temporality of simulacra in this formulation to ask when the fair is. Looking for the world/fair somewhere and
sometime beyond the dichotomisation of presence and absence I argue that the fair works through recycling, revival and reuse, that as a rem(a)inder, it is not new. What better place to start than with beginnings and origins- “We require a visible past, a visible
continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end. 110 This problematique has been discussed among others by Jean-Luc Nancy (1991 [1983]), Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988 [1980]) and Derrida (1976 [1967]). - 159 - Because finally we
 Beginnings were certainly important to displays of China
have never believed in them” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 10).

at Expo 2010. Throughout the Chinese national pavilion and dozens of

Chinese regional pavilions, China is described as the origin of the world,
echoing wider media and academic discourse in China. Various Chinese regional pavilions also pride China for figuring as the
origin of (Chinese) civilisation. I use brackets here because there is some discrepancy or ambiguity in terms of communicating such messages to Chinese speaking and English speaking audiences. In the Gansu province case, for example, which circles around its “long

This kind
history” of more than 8000 years of civilisation, a sign that reads in English “Dadiwan Site in Qin’an County Believed to Start the Chinese Civilization” in Chinese language simply reads “Civilization begins – Qin’an Dadiwan” (文明肇启).

of slippage between these terms appears throughout Expo 2010 and

makes Chinese civilisation appear coterminous with civilisation as such. This

an ideological tool that served to make the

exhuming of “Chinese civilisation” functioned as a cover for a simulation of the second phase, as

“5000 years of uninterrupted Chinese civilisation” appear real. This

uninterrupted history of harmony is part of the shift in legitimisation of
CCP rule from socialism to nationalism and “Chinese characteristics” ( Cheung, 2012;
Billioud, 2011). Most importantly, however, this exhumation took pride of place because of a dream, “behind this defunct power that it tries to annex, of an order that would have had nothing to do with it, and it dreams of it because it exterminated it by exhuming it

The fascination
as its own past” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 10). IR scholars are performing this same exhuming ritual when we dream of the emerging “Chinese school” of IR theory as a radical alternative to “the West”.111

with this Chinese school resembles that which Baudrillard describes of

Renaissance Christians with American Indians. At the beginning of the
Christian colonising movement existed an instance of bewilderment at
“the very possibility of escaping the universal law of the Gospel” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 10). In
this 111 This “West”, on my understanding, is not real in the first place and the breakdown of any hard line between inside and outside makes such radical dichotomization fall apart. - 160 - bewilderment we could either admit to the lack of universality of the Law, or

This tactic of
exterminate the evidence to the contrary. The conversion or simple discovery of these different beings is usually enough, for the Renaissance Christians as for scholars of IR, to slowly exterminate them.

discovery and conversion as a form of violent extermination of others has

been acknowledged elsewhere in IR scholarship and it remains a (Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004)

tactic in PRC policy towards its “internal others” in areas like Tibet and
Xinjiang. Chinese policy towards its ethnic minorities is presented as
112

proof of the superiority of Chinese civilisation: it produces more ethnics

than the ethnics themselves were able to do – since the PRC state
provides modern healthcare and “scientific development” and exempts
ethnic minorities from the one child policy. Moreover the PRC state
produces more ethnic ethnics than they themselves had mustered. This
promotion of Chinese ethnic minorities through their regional pavilions lies at the heart of Expo 2010, a base from which the Chinese national pavilion rises. Everywhere, the ethnic is exotically reproduced, recycled and rescreened. Everywhere
happy, colourful and anachronistic “ethnics” sing, dance and rejoice in the greatness of the motherland, as in the Xinjiang pavilion (“a harmonious place”). This overproduction is a means of destruction, a “promotion” and “rescue” which forms another step to their

As described above, it frequently uses clocks,

symbolic extermination. Nonetheless, the Expo is highly self-aware in its use of time.

hourglasses and pendula to mark the countdown to horror scenarios of

planetary destruction in order to drum home its purported message of
“Better city, Better life”. In places it moreover explicitly favours
“recycling” over “linearity”. 112 This is particularly the case in current PRC policy towards the Western “Autonomous Regions” of Tibet and Xinjiang where “splittism” is considered a challenge
to the integrity of the PRC state (Barabantseva, 2011). - 161 - Figure 6: “A linear model will result in excessive pollution and waste” (Source: Astrid Nordin) The theme pavilion City4being uses similar metaphors to Baudrillard to conceive of time, that of biological life

cycles, metabolism, circulation and recycling. These are said to be key to the proper functioning of the system. This pavilion is evocatively constructed as a sewerage system interspersed with circulating billboard messages of interconnection. It is
explicit about its rejection of linear models , as in a pair of diagrammatical signs of which the first reads “A linear model will result in excessive pollution and

“A cyclical model will feature greater recycling and less waste”.

waste”, and the second reads Figure

[h]istory will not come

7: “A cyclical model will feature greater recycling and less waste” (Source: Astrid Nordin) In this way Expo 2010, like Baudrillard, engages directly with claims to the end of history:

to an end – since the leftovers, all the leftovers – the Church, communism,
ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies – are indefinitely recyclable … History
has only wrenched itself from cyclical time to fall into the order of the
recyclable In
(Coulter, 2004). Through these examples we can see the world/fair engaged in different phases of simulation, which can be understood as dissimulating something, but also as dissimulating that there is nothing.

places, the world/fair appears unreflexive, as attempting to reinstate the

reality of its teleological progress. In other aspects, however, its reflexive
hyper-aware recycling seems to show how “it has no relation to any
reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard, 1994
[1981]: 6). Not only, then, can the world no longer be represented by the
fair, but more importantly it can no longer be fairly re-presented, it can
no longer be made present in time and space as some full or complete
presence. we need to take the next step
As such, it is not enough to remain within a simple framework of representation and ideology in our analyses thereof, but

and start analyzing China’s mega events also as simulacra. The world/fair
is simultaneously nowhere and now here. The world/fair is recycled. To
be screened, or who is the fair- the Having asked in previous sections where and when the fair is I turn to the question of who is the fair. What happens to subjectivity in

interactive technologies of the world/fair in an order of recycling, the - I argue that

technologies that make us simultaneously subjects and objects make the

distinction between subject and object untenable with the effect of
making these categories unworkable. It is clear that our embodiment matters in the world fair as it differentiates between ways of being in the world/fair along lines of
class, race, gender and so on. At the Shanghai Expo, where well over 90% of visitors were Chinese, the ability to identify me as a fair-skinned visitor from the outside made me an immediate part of the exhibited exotica (my being fair made me the fair, so to speak.
And simultaneously the reverse was true, my fairness positioned me as though outside the fair, observing it/them). But Expo 2010 goes much further in making us part of the fair, through the layers of interactive technologies by which the fair itself emerges. In the
first instance, we are an active part of this emergence, we can plan, steer and shape the world/fair, we are the subjects of its emergence. Visitors are often asked to actively participate in Expo 2010. Indeed, interactivity is a key feature of many pavilions and different
layers of the world/fair, and one pavilion is expressly dedicated to displaying it. Here, photographs from Expo 2010 and its preparation, submitted via the Expo 2010 website, are circulated on screens. Participants can also send “blessings and wishes for Expo 2010”
from various websites and have them screened in the pavilion, surrounded by cards with wishes and blessings written by its visitors. In a “wishing tree” we are encouraged to write wishes on colourful paper, fold it into airplanes and throw it into an artificial tree. In
parallel, the Online Expo 2010 has many venues where one’s avatar can leave wishes, such as the Vanke pavilion or the Expo4dream4home discussed above. On a multimedia display stand visitors to Expo 2010 can arrange various building models and simultaneously
a 3D image of its layout will appear on a background wall, surrounded by previous “excellent works”. In this way, a sign for the multimedia display tells us, “You could become one of the designers of a future city”. In Shanghai’s own pavilion at Expo 2010 the
“Shanghai forever” image wall, consisting of revolving triangles and more than 15000 photographs featuring Shanghai, is a product of “mass participation and joint creation” ( 公众参与，共同创作) intended to expound the “design conception of ‘New horizons

Images of images are everywhere and we can

forever’” (or in Chinese “Shanghai eternally marches towards a new horizon”, 上海永远迈向新天地).

be their creators. Nonetheless, in subjecting the world/fair to our gaze

and our actions, we are simultaneously subjected by it. Our bodies are
not only in the world/fair, they are the world fair, as the fair is our bodies,
simultaneously watching and watched, displaying and displayed. Often our recognition as
participants rests on our willingness to take on specific subject positions – tellingly, the English title of the pavilion for popular participation is “Citizens’ initiative pavilion”, interpellating us as citizens of the mapped state system on display. It is through such
citizenship that we are allowed recognition in the world/fair. Indeed, the different layers of simulacra share citizenship regimes as a key feature, invoked through the passport. At previous world fairs, at the Shanghai Expo, and at the online version of Expo 2010 we
can have a passport in which we collect “visa stamps” from the pavilions visited. At points, we have to actively change ourselves to make us acceptable as subjects in order to have our fair share. Passing through the world/fair we are screened and tested. This
screening echoes for the subject/object dichotomy (the who) the collapse we saw in previous sections of the here/there (the where) and the now/then (the when). As Richard Lane has observed with regards to Baudrillard: there is an interpenetration of the screen
metaphor with the notion of everything being on the surface here, including the ‘friendly’ surveillance which simultaneously shows the people under surveillance on television screens, which leads to a collapsing of perspectival space (the removal of the ‘gap’ or
distance both spatially and temporally between the viewer and the viewed) (Lane, 2000: 42). Here interpenetration is total, including of architectural and geographical space. The layers of simulacra cannot be separated. All of Expo 2010, the Shanghai Expo and its
virtual replica, Shanghai, China, all of the world/fair are indistinguishable “as a total functional screen of activities” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]: 76). In this way all of the world/fair operates through screening, in every sense of the word. The example above of the
excluded travel guide moreover exemplifies how our participation in the citizenship regimes of the world/fair is conditional – she was stopped at the border because she had not paid the fare. Indeed, the world/fair is most helpful in persuading us that we can (and
should) adjust our selves to pass its screening. In a book dedicated to Expo etiquette prospective visitors to the world/fair are most helpfully taught how to modify their behaviour and their bodies (Xu Bo, 2009). Chinese readers can learn amongst other things how to
greet, walk, shake hands, sit, queue and care for their personal hygiene in a polite manner. They can read about how to go to karaoke, drink coffee with foreigners and host them in their home according to global decorum. In an appendix we find a taxonomy of
etiquette, outlining customs country by country, from the US to Egypt (2009: 147-71). One drawn image, for example, shows one man (who we can assume, from the big nose in profile, is a Westerner) who sits nicely at his table with one glass and one plate on which
he is attacking a square (perhaps a piece of toast) with his knife and fork. He looks with bewilderment and a hint of fear at another man or boy who smiles a big smile as he carries his second plate to the table, where he has already assembled two glasses, various
fruits and one more plate overflowing with food (in the mish-mash of which we can identify various fruits, a whole fish, a crab and some shrimp). The picture’s caption instructs its Chinese readers the civilised manner of partaking of the fare of the fair through a
rhyming slogan: “big eyes, small stomach, cannot finish the delicious fare” (yan4da4duzi4xiao,4meiwei4chi4bu4liao 眼大肚子小， 美味吃不了) (2009: 62). The concluding chapter of the book, on “how to be a refined and well mannered Expo person”, clearly
conceives of such politeness in terms of the return to an original state. We are encouraged to “utilize the Shanghai Expo as a historical turning point, to make - 166 - every one of us change into politely speaking Expo people” and after being told about “the Expo’s
demand on the etiquette of the people of the host country” to “through the Expo make elegant etiquette return to China” (2009: 141-6, emphasis added). Thus, being a civilised citizen of the world/fair is not about being more like somebody else, but about being

more like your self; it is a question of recycling. At other points, moving through the world/fair our bodies are more
explicitly hi- jacked by screening, made to do things potentially against
our will proliferated, taken apart.
(and indeed through or in advance thereof), The Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region case for example shows visitors’ images captured and
repeatedly displayed on screens. As citizens of the world/fair our bodies are captured and displayed as copy upon copy throughout Expo 2010, media and academic work, including this thesis. Figure 8: Screened in Ningxia autonomous region case (Source: Astrid
Nordin) This hijacking technology is not simply in the hands of states. Siemens powerfully commoditised Chinese cultural heritage and the Chinese national modernisation project in its Tianxia4yi4jia pavilion discussed above. To English language audiences the

which also showcases

pavilion was marketed through the name We4are4the4world, a name which aptly brings out the recycling nature of the fair through reviving Michael Jackson’s old hit song, but

the ambiguity of the question “who is the world/fair”. The “we” is

ambiguous and inside the pavilion the capacity in which “we” become the
world/fair is telling – as described above, our faces pass through a computer program and are recycled on screen as avatars, transformed, singing along with the Expo 2010 theme tune. Our avatars in the virtual
version of Expo 2010 are, to some extent at least, a consequence of our volition and choice, albeit screened and monitored with a mandatory Chinese ID number registration. In Siemens’ corporate version of “All- under-heaven” we are the world/fair without being

Our avatars are exposed as pre-programmed, as playing a pre-

told in what our stardom will consist.

scribed role, and this play has only one script, one where we all sing along
with the Chinese tune. From these examples we can see two kinds of technologies operating in the world/fair: ones that represent the world and ones that operate through simulation, “provoking a reflexive
awareness of artificiality and simulacra”: [t]he first of these conceives of technology as enabler, and is the concept that lies behind the notion of the Expo as a technology of nationhood. Technology enables a perspective that can produce wholeness from

Expo 2010’s use

fragmentation. Expo enables the appearance of the world as a whole, through the revelation of the fragments that are cut from it and the apparent celebration of their differences (Harvey, 1996: 123).

of interactive technologies moved away from “representations ” of the

world as we know it to be. It celebrated instead the possibility of
producing a simulated world, copies of copies (dis)interested in an
original: a world of images more real than the real, a fascination with the
hyper-real, pretensions to realities that were never there in the first place
or at least not in such perfect form, concrete manifestations of abstract
possibilities [that] produce the essence of life itself as outcome not origin
w]e are living through a movement from an
(Harvey, 1996: 123). The examples discussed here reaffirm a rather sinister side to simulation: “[

organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system – from

all work to all play, a deadly game” (Haraway, 1991: 161). Through these technologies of the world/fair, not only our concepts of spatiality and temporality, but also our
notions of subject and object, are displaced. Being in a simulacral world/fair is simulacral being. As such, we need to move beyond analyses of Chinese “mega events” through concepts of simple representation and reality, and work to understand how they operate

We are copies of copies without original, simulacral avatars in

through simulation and simulacra.

virtual hyper-reality. The Expo is us: our bodies, our dreams, our future.

Their harmonious conception of Chinese rise to the global stage is nothing but
the integration of China into the Westphalian order of integral reality – you
should be skeptical of academic claims of this nature as they circulate
academia.
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin [Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster
University], “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of
Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages
135-149)
 China’s rise is commonly described in terms of inevitable destiny
We have seen how

because of history. the PRC leadership is strictly managing the

Meanwhile,

imagined form and significance of such a rise China has placed new . Since 2008

focus on using mega events to shape the expectations of domestic and

international audiences, and thus to shape the future. the 2008 Such mega events included

Olympic games, the 2009 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, as
well as Expo 2010 Shanghai China. Expo 2010 was seen as an expression
of and tool for the building of harmonious world by Chinese academics (for

The Expo was

example Zou Keyuan, 2011: 11). Yan Xuetong’s Ancient4 Chinese4Thought4was adorned with an image of the Chinese national pavilion at the Expo on its book cover.

also associated with harmony by the party- state. Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao stuck closely to the official articulation of “harmonious world”
when he described the Shanghai Expo as: an encyclopedia lying open on
the land and a magnificent painting showcasing the integration and
harmony of diverse cultures … The World Expo is a vivid demonstration of
the diversity of human civilizations. The Shanghai Expo has offered a
broad stage for inter-cultural exchanges and integration, reminding us
that we live in a divers and colorful world the Expo had (Wen Jiabao, 2010a). He continued to argue that

fully demonstrated harmony to be the common aspiration of mankind,

and that the Expo was above national, ethnic and religious boundaries. This, to

The Expo was

Premier Wen, was why “[i]t is important that countries … work together to build a harmonious world of lasting peace and common prosperity” (Wen Jiabao, 2010a).

made possible by China’s economic rise, but was also part of establishing
the story of such a rise as true, and of narrating a future where China rises
to be the benevolent leader of a new harmonious world order. In this chapter I examine the

China’s role as leader of a harmonious world proliferated at Expo

way ideas of

2010. I go about this examination in two parts. In the first part I trace the two cosmologies that I outlined in the academic literatures in the previous chapter, “unit- based” and “holistic” spatial
imaginaries. I continue to argue, now in the context of Expo 2010, that the two cosmologies are not mutually exclusive. I show how they are deployed at the Expo in ways that reinforce one another by ordering
spatial difference through teleological time. The two cosmologies are worked out in conjunction with one another at Expo 2010, in ways that support a particular discourse on China and the world, prescriptive of a

the Expo worldview

particular future where China leads a new harmonious world order. Like some of the academic literatures examined in the previous chapter,

portrays itself as “from the world” or “from everywhere”, yet insists on

“specifically Chinese” terms and experience, and on the singular China’s
Future as the (harmonious) world’s Future. On this view, there is only one
Future, and it does not welcome contestation. Having recognised this effect of harmony at the Expo, I argue in the second

we need to move beyond the reading of mega events as simple

part that

representation and ideology and read it also as simulation and simulacra.

Reading the Chinese world fair as a simulacrum of world order can
provide different ways of relating “the West” to its “other country” China.
 Where is the world fair- When is the world fair-
I examine this relation through asking what it means to be the fair:

Who is the world fair- Reading the world/fair as simulacrum disrupts the
fair’s notions of inside and outside, now and then, subject and object to
the point where these terms are no longer workable. What we end up with is not the many turning into the one,
with the convergence of others into the self. Instead, what remains is a fragmented plethora of truth, not the unreal but the hyper-real. My reading of Expo 2010 as simulacra examines some of the distinctions
implied in the where,4when4and4who4of the world/fair, and shows that we may be better off not taking our distinctions so seriously. THE TWO COSMOLOGIES AND HARMONY AT EXPO 2010 Expo 2010 took place

Expo 2010 has

in the tradition of scientific and industrial world fairs following on from the Great4Exhibition4of4Industries4of4All4Nations that was held in London in 1851.

been read in China to symbolise the greatness and international

significance of China – indeed, it was the largest, most expensive, and
most visited of its kind (Barboza, 2010; Xinhua, 2010d; 2010e). The 73 million visitors who passed through the Expo in Shanghai during the six months it was officially open
as world fair would be even greater if one counted the subsequent visitors attracted to the site’s permanent monuments (the Chinese national pavilion for example has been turned into a permanent museum)

Unit-
and to the online version of Expo 2010, where one’s avatar can stroll through a virtual 3D replica of the site, visit pavilions and partake in numerous exhibitions as well as interact with other visitors.

based spatial imaginaries are immediately obvious at the Expo. Space at

the Expo is typically imagined in a modernist manner as a flat surface
upon which humans act, as a “stage” or “platform”. As for the unit-based
territorialisation of this surface, the Expo site is organised as an imagined
state system, divided into bounded continents of national pavilions. At the online

Expo visitors,
Expo, we can take guided tours of pavilions and exhibitions and get a virtual passport in which we can collect visa stamps from the various territories visited. Likewise, at the

who may never have been abroad and may not own a passport in the
outside world, can get a multitude of visa stamps and “play” at being
well-travelled. It draws up borders
It is an enactment of the world that pretends such international life is readily available and unrestricted.

and barriers in order to let them be crossed, but by no means erased or

blurred. Through turning visa collection into a game, border controls appear innocent at the same time as their indisputable “natural existence” between states is reinforced. However, it becomes
clear that partaking in this game of “open borders” is conditional. At the Expo, I met a young travel guide, who visited the Expo with 60 tourists from Beijing. While her group went into the Pavilion of Future
(subtitled “Dream inspires the future”) and had their pretend passports stamped, she waited ticketless outside, stopped at the border because she did not have the right papers. Simultaneously, the “external”

This
nation-state system echoed in citizenship regimes inside the Expo when producing a “real” passport meant one could jump pavilion queues for the pavilion of the country that had issued it.

way of conceiving of space in terms of bordered units was marked

throughout the Expo. China’s own pavilion of regions was no exception,
subdivided into regional containers of culture – many even look like boxes
with essentialised culture exhibited inside, like the virtual version of the
Tibetan pavilion Although obviously steeped in a unit-based spatial
below.

imaginary, these bounded units are also enveloped in the holistic celestial
order of one-worldness. The key terms in holistic imaginaries are the “all-
encompassing” or “all-inclusive”, that with “no outside” or “no
exception”, “network”, and of course “Tianxia”. The holistic imagination
of everything as always already connected to everything else appears in
the room in Urbanian4Pavilion themed “Connection”( This room is 交往).

based on the “scientific theory called six degrees spatial theory”, which
states that no two people are separated by more than 6 relationships (Xu
Wei, 2010: 27). On the ceiling a film is projected showing selected
people’s movements on a map. Portraits of people appear in circles
connected by lines to more and more other people/circles until they form
a web or network on the round screen, bringing your mind to the Earth
and thus the idea that all people of the world are connected (Xu Wei,
2010: 27). There is no one outside the network. Moreover, this claim is
backed up by science, and thus requires no further explanation. The Pavilion of City Being
describes the city as a living being or organism, focusing on the theme of shengming (生命), meaning life, being or bios. The holistic imagination implied in this idea of the city as one body or life is clear from
slogans such as “city being multiplies endlessly, held together by superseding cycles” and “the unceasing adjustment between people and city maintains city life harmonious, healthy city life requires our common
protection” (Xu Wei, 2010: 40). The Pavilion4of4Urban4Planet moreover draws on a holistic spatial imaginary to tell us on the “Road of Solutions” how the resolution to the world’s problems can be found: “[t]he
seasons change, settlement becomes cities and trading routes develop into a completely4networked4world … Only with open mind and allWinclusive4view can we bring the hope of sustainable growth to our
planet Earth” (emphasis added). These references to the organically connected single organism or body, the web of connections with no outside and the completely networked world with an all inclusive view all
provide the basis of a holistic spatial imaginary. Moreover, the comments above indicate that this holistic imaginary is taken to demand the harmonious balance of all and “our common protection”. Classification

From the above we see that imaginations of China in the world at

in time and space

the Expo draw on both unit-based and holistic notions of space. This instance shows the two
spatial imaginaries coexisting in contemporary China, and so refutes the idea that one would be superseding the other. I next look closer at how they work in tandem at the Expo. Throughout the Expo,

holistic Tianxia
classification of space is marked. We have seen it above in the unit-based form of mapping state units, as well as that of regions as containers of culture. The

concept does not refer to the jigsaw-puzzled space of the unit-based

imaginary, but nonetheless classifies and sequentialises through a
centre/periphery, civilised/barbarian divide. Tianxia ordering is similar to
the Expo site centred on the Chinese pavilion. Similarly, the comparison and contrasting of “East” and “West” is ever present.
In a film screened at the Pavilion of City Being we are watched from the screen by “the eyes of Eastern people, the eyes of Western people” (Xu Wei, 2010: 49). Likewise, “Pre- show Hall” in the
Pavilion4of4Footprint shows “ideal cities” as they have been imagined in the East and in the West. Dreaming of a better future is described as universal, or eternal (永恒), but similarities end there and

The division of space into civilisational/regional/national units is

juxtaposition takes over.

aligned with division of time into eras, often in its ancient/modern guise.
This is where, just as in much academic discourse, we see evidence of the
alignment of dichotomized here/there, modern/ancient and
subject/object (cf. Fabian, 1983). As a number of “developing” countries could not fund their own participation in Expo 2010, Chinese subsidies to these countries ensured there were

The vastly different budgets and scales

more state and organisation pavilions, 246, than at any previous Expo (Xinhua, 2010e).

meant pavilions gave the impression of a developmental or aspirational

classification, in a visual display of global inequality. As in global
development, China financially supported “less-developed” states in a
way that visually emphasised the impressive scale and central location of
the Chinese pavilion and reaffirmed China as a “helper” and “developer”
ahead of the “helped” and “developing” states at the Expo site periphery,
such as the African Joint and Pacific Joint pavilions. This convening of others differentiated in space through time is
crystallised in Urbanian4Pavilion, which shows the morning rituals of families taken to represent five continents. It shows the similarities of getting up, washing, brushing teeth and so on of people from these
different spatial/cultural units. However, the sequentialisation in time is obvious. The man from Rotterdam has an electric toothbrush and the Chinese middleclass office worker wears new pyjamas in his modern
bathroom, whereas the bathroom in Rio de Janeiro looks worn and dirty. In this way spatial difference is aligned in temporal sequence. We all do the same thing; it is just that some are a bit behind on the road to

Spatial division is thus not only conceived as classification of

Modernisation and Development.

space, but also as classification in time. This classification is moreover

conceived of in a time that runs towards a particular end. Clock time
running out or towards the future is emphasised at the Shanghai train
station’s Expo clock tower, as well as throughout the Expo itself by
feature clocks, ticking pendula and hourglasses. The intertwining of temporal notions with strong assertions as to what
Chinese identity is in world affairs is clear from an introduction to the Expo on its official website, ringing with familiarity with the official party-line: [w]ith a long civilisation, China favours international exchange
and loves world peace. China owes its successful bid for the World Exposition in 2010 to the international community’s support for and confidence in its reform and opening-up. The Exposition will be the first
registered World Exposition in a developing country, which gives expression to the expectations the world’s people place on China’s future development … We count on the continuing attention, support and

In this context, depicting China as original

participation of all the peace-loving countries (Expo 2010 Shanghai China, 2008).

confers on it a status as fore-runner of developing countries, conveniently

forgetting the 1949 Haiti Expo (Expo 2010 Shanghai China, 2006a; Bureau
International des Expositions, 2011).4 China’s present and future direction
is frequently depicted in terms of a return to an original or always
intended state. The Expo itself is typically portrayed as the fulfilment (led
by the PRC/CCP party-state) of an ancient Chinese dream. This portrayal appears in articles (Expo 2010
Shanghai China, 2006b), in books such as 1004 years4of4Expo4dream4(百年世博梦)4(Shanghai shibohui shiwu xietiaoju, 2009), and in the World Expo Museum that looks back at more than 150 years of historical

I believe in China’s
preparation for the Shanghai Expo. Online commentators echo such narratives, and one commentator on the Expo online “Dream Wall” comments that “

actual strength, a country that has 5000 years of civilisation must be able
to produce glory once more ” (Expo Shanghai Online, 2010c). Finally, the feature film of the Xinjiang regional pavilion demonstrates how

classification of time and space come together into a particular, goal-

oriented progress under PRC leadership Xinjiang is] the communication :[

land of four great civilisations of the world ... It once was the road of
bonze Xuanzang, the silk road, the road of western expedition and the
road of eastern return … The great transformation of 60 years is the
evidence of our diligence and intelligence … Today, the assistance from
the motherland also lights up the passion in Xinjiang (Expo Shanghai
Online, 2010g) .104 This quote brings together the numerous elements that make possible the problematic imagination of self-other relations that is under discussion in this thesis. A
separation between civilisations is posited. Xinjiang is subsequently conceived of as a place where these separate civilisations meet. Progress is imagined as a return to a state that once was, and that is now
returning through Chinese diligence in its (re)civilising mission. One can only wonder at the irony as the motherland’s assistance “lights up the passion” in Xinjiang after the brutal ethnic clashes in the years
running up to the Expo (Xinhua, 2009d). 104 Bonze Xuan Zang is a Buddhist sage from Chinese literary classic Journey to the West. Metaphors of lines, circles, spirals and pendula may be used to describe this
temporality, but may be misleading as they change significance in their combined use (cf. Gell, 1992). Analogue clock time, for instance, may be circular if used as for example a toy, but indicates linear time flow
when allied with other concepts, such as civilisational progress and development. The point of China’s progress/return (to its rightful place as world leader) is not whether we describe it using the metaphor of the

key importance is instead the way it operates through a

circle or the line. Of

classification of time and space: and there is no doubt as to where we

are/should be heading. The point is that these temporalities support each
other and lead towards the same ultimate endpoint. The Future is one
where China leads a new harmonious world order Chinese discussions
surrounding the Expo typically conferred on it one central meaning – it
was a sign of China’s legitimate rise to world leadership. Wishes for Chinese superiority similarly appeared

China is in leading position

in the online Vanke-Pavilion, the corporate pavilion for a large Chinese property developer. One commentator wished that in 2049 “

in the world ” (中国处于世界领先) and another exclaimed that by then “China has really changed into a great cultural country, ten thousand countries come to pay tribute ” (万邦来朝)105

“Go Expo, China

(Expo Shanghai Online, 2010f). A majority of participants in the Expo’s “Dream wall” expressed love for the motherland, the Expo and Shanghai, with one exclaiming,
is invincible ” (Go Expo 中国无敌) (Expo Shanghai Online, 2010c). Key to justifying this Chinese world leadership is depicting such a world as “harmonious”, in accordance with the
harmonious world discourse. The Expo is steeped in this language of harmony. China’s national pavilion begins with the film “Harmonious China” (hexie4Zhongguo4 和谐中国) and concludes with telling us

the lotus flowers blossom, symbolising the harmonious and glorious

“

future of Chinese cities” (Expo Shanghai Online, 2010a). The Xinjiang pavilion is labelled “Xinjiang – a 105 This set formulation is commonly used to indicate great
power. - 146 - harmonious land”. We go to the Expo on a harmonious train, to visit Harmony Tower, and if we hurt ourselves we can have a band-aid from the harmonious first aid kit. Figure 5: Harmonious first aid

2010: A life at ease A

kit (Source: Astrid Nordin) The language of harmony is also prevalent among the wishes of Vanke4Pavilion. One participant wishes:

peaceful and stable job Wishing the great motherland is increasingly

thriving and prosperous My family is increasingly harmonious and happy
2049: There is no war in any corner of the world There is no
discrimination Peaceful getting along and also wish that when we reach
that time people from every corner of the world can all profoundly
understand China (Expo Shanghai Online, 2010f). We see here a mixing of
ideas of harmony with notions of a good personal life, a thriving China,
and an image of peacefully connected world citizens who comprehend
China. Again, there is an emphasis on making foreigners understand
“China”. A blurb for Pavilion4of4Future’s harmony sculpture similarly personalizes world harmony: “core concept of traditional Chinese culture: only the harmony of the world and all things

. There can be no outside to the

constitute the harmony of human’s spirit”. Just as in Zhao’s Tianxia, we require the harmony of all things

system, or it will fail. All things must be incorporated. This, the claim is, is
a distinctly Chinese idea of world order. Throughout all of these imaginings of China in the (harmonious) world, the two spatial

unit- based spatial

imaginaries combine in ways that repeat the problems outlined with regards to academic discourse, making difficult the imagination of others as coeval. The

imaginary provides a condition of possibility of Chinese particularism.

Throughout the Chinese pavilions at the Expo, China is the very origin of
civilisation and of the world – it is where the first fire burnt, the first bird
flew, and the superior values of Confucian harmony originated. The holistic spatial imaginary

The holistic idea of

becomes key to imagining the need for spreading this civilisation, and for the Chinese civilising mission we currently observe around the world (Nyíri, 2006).

space is core to construing the rise of China to leadership of a harmonious

world as peaceful and beneficial to all. In actuality, there is no outside,
everything is always already connected to everything else, and the view
of the Chinese party elite is a “view from nowhere”, or a view “from the
world”. Many of these themes are echoed through non-Chinese pavilions at the Expo, including the two spatial imaginaries, the goal-oriented notion of time, East-West juxtaposition and a reliance

many foreign states, organisations and enterprises used the

on blurry notions of civilisation. Notably,

Expo to exhibit their willingness to buy into the Chinese discourse on

harmonious world, allowing it prominence of place in the way they name,
speak of and write of their own pavilions. “Harmony” in particular is given
legitimacy through frequent use in foreign pavilions, such as “Harmonious
relations” (Pacific joint pavilion), “Feel the harmony” (Austria), “Harmony
of the heart, harmony of the skills” (Japan), and so on. While some academic analyses of Chinese foreign policy
argue that the PRC is being “socialised” into values and norms of “international society” (Johnston, 2008), the Expo showed the opposite: “outsiders” competing to be most attentive to and accommodating of

Non-Chinese corporate pavilions too helped reinforce and

China’s purported self- image.

legitimate this particular version of “harmony” with reference to Chinese

history. One example was the pavilion Tianxia one family called “Tianxia yi4jia” (天下一家): “ ”. This
pavilion was German multinational Siemens’ corporate pavilion, showcasing its technology through the aspirational middle class future of interactive games and wine coolers that will apparently be available to

As in a miracle of scientific
Chinese people in 2015. Entering Siemens’ harmonious and commercialised rendition of Tianxia we are photographed.

development our faces appear on a film screen at the exit, manipulated to

sing together in harmony with the Expo theme tune. The simulation is
explained [a]fter scanning and capturing the user’s facial
at a sign at the pavillion entrance:

features, the image will be recorded and transformed into an avatar

allowing users to feel as if they are starring in a pre-programmed movie or
video … How will this technology better our lives- Provides an
entertaining experience for people to play a role in a movie or become a
“star”. Everyone has the chance to stand in the spotlight. China’s Future,
in this commercialised version as in its official one, provides the time and
space for us all to be stars in the spotlight. It is worth recalling here the organisers’ own reading where the Expo took place
because of “the international community’s support for and confidence in [China’s] reform and opening-up”, expressing “the expectations the world’s people place on China’s future development” with China
sternly counting on “the continuing attention, support and participation of all the peace-loving countries” (Expo 2010 Shanghai China, 2008). In this version of the Future World we are allowed into the spotlight on
the condition that we become avatars that sing simultaneously in one voice to the Chinese melody. Foreclosing futures at Expo 2010 In this part of the chapter I have argued that the holistic and unit-based
cosmologies, or spatial imaginaries, were prominent at Expo 2010, aligning classified units of time/space in sequence. They are simultaneously deployed in ways that support a particular discourse on China and
the World, prescriptive of a particular future where China leads a new harmonious world order. World fairs were from the outset an exercise where self/other relations were heavily tinted by imperialism (Rydell,
1984). Today, although the specific selves and others reproduced by the Expo may be somewhat different their fundamental manoeuvre is the same. The articulation of time/space with the narrative of harmony is

Just like Zhao’s

problematic, again and despite itself, because it marginalises concepts of coeval multiplicities and difference. Others are not properly different, they are just behind.

Tianxia, the Expo worldview portrays itself as “from the world” or “from
everywhere”, yet insists on “specifically Chinese” terms and experience.
This is reinforced as the Expo shows an already nationalistic domestic
audience a China that rightfully rises to the place of world leader and the
folly of anyone imagining that such a rise would be less than beneficial to
all. This is buttressed by readings of foreign involvement and investment
in the Expo as endorsements of the Chinese model for its rise, and is
taken as a showcase for how harmonious the world is under Chinese
leadership. The Expo worldview portrays itself as “from the world”, yet insists on the singular China’s Future as the (Harmonious) World’s Future. On this view, there is only one Future, and it
does not welcome contestation. I propose that we can refuse scripting our songs in the pre-programmed manner suggested by predominant imaginings at the Expo. It can indeed be possible to meet the challenge
of coeval multiplicities that time and space should present us with. In the next section I begin to unsettle the dominant rendition of time, space and China in the world by way of reading it through the work of Jean
Baudrillard.
Debate is disappearing in the proliferation of harmony – the holistic
spacitalization of the globe produces a domesticticated form of difference that
eliminates the possibility for the truly Other– harmony is not meaningless, but
imbued with “hyper-meaning” – more meaningful than meaningful, which
paradoxically makes harmony terminate only its own disappearance – we
should engage in onco-operative logic to make possible coeval multiplicies that
undermine the perfectibility of debate in a process that pushes through to its
disappearance – this is the only political act left – bet on the form of 恶搞
(Ègǎo)
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin [Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster
University], “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of
Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages
214-231)

Thinking about multiplicity has remained a key

Conclusion: Futures of harmony and coeval multiplicities

conundrum for those who want to think about global politics as truly
political. One attempt at managing and grappling with the opportunities and challenges that multiplicity presents us with from “beyond the European imperium” has
been recent Chinese thinking about harmony and the concept of “harmonious world” (Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004: ix). This thesis is to be read

in the context of recently undertaken efforts to understand this and other

normative challenges to the way we imagine the times, spaces and
differences of the contemporary world. Its prime task has been to
scrutinise the way assumptions about time, space and multiplicity play
out in this challenge to what is perceived as Western ways of imagining
world order. With such a challenge in mind, this thesis has embarked on a disruptive reading of the multiplicity problematique in the “harmonious world”
concept. THE CONTINUED PROLIFERATION OF HARMONY Before moving on to discuss the findings of this thesis and their implications for thinking multiplicity, what for the

The term “harmonious world” has been written into the

immediate future of harmonious world-

CCP constitution and numerous official strategy documents. Foreign

envoys to the PRC have been taken on Confucius-themed trips by the
Chinese state, accompanied by a number of the academic promoters of
harmonious world through whom the envoys “acquired a deeper
understanding of China’s traditional cultural philosophy such as ‘seeking
for harmony but not uniformity’, ‘living in harmony with all other
nations’” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC, 2011a). The PRC establishment has also urged other
countries to be harmonious, recently for example in relation to Vietnam
(Xinhua, 2012d), the Maldives (Xinhua, 2012a) and India (Xinhua, 2012b). “Harmonious world” has moreover been well received by a number of
foreign dignitaries, and spread into their own language use. Leaders who have recently used it in ways that resonate with the sinister side we have seen to harmony include
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad (CNTV, 2012). At the same time, it has not been given positive play only by alleged “rogues” of the international arena, but by more widely
accepted players such as Kevin Rudd, Australia’s former minister of foreign affairs. He confidently declared, in a speech given to the Asia Society in New York in 2012: “there is
 UN officials,
something in China’s concept of a ‘harmonious world’; which the US, the rest of the region and the rest of the world can work with” (Rudd, 2012).

such as Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, have also promoted harmony in

official settings (Xinhua, 2012c). Such endorsement has been played up by Chinese officials, for example Li Baodong, Chinese permanent representative to
the UN, who refers to “the spirit of cultural diversity and harmony in the world advocated by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the United Nations” (Xinhua, 2012e).

“Harmonious world” and the traditional strategic culture with which it

has been associated, then, has not only been deeply entrenched in PRC
policy documents, but has also been given positive play by other
influential individuals and organisations. This supports Joseph Cheng’s recent expectation that it will remain a major
element of Chinaʼs public diplomacy in the foreseeable future: “[a]s China pursues an increasingly ambitious

role in regional leadership and international institution-building, its

publicity work on building a ʻharmonious worldʼ will likely be stepped up”
(Cheng, 2012: 183). As explained at the outset of this thesis, every generation of Chinese leadership has used tifa to stamp their mark on Chinese politics. Xi Jinping, who is
expected to take over leadership after Hu Jintao in 2012, is not known as a great friend of Hu (he was not Hu’s preferred candidate for succession). We can therefore expect that

However, Xi has
Xi will introduce other tifa during his time in leadership, and some may expect a decline of “harmonious world” after he comes to power.

also made use of the language of harmony in the run-up to his take-over,
for example when he headed a large Central Government delegation to
the Tibet Autonomous Region Between 17 and 22 July 2011, for events to
mark the 60th Anniversary of what the party-state calls the “peaceful
liberation of Tibet”.155 Moreover, he was responsible for the inauguration ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where harmony played a central
role. For these reasons, it seems reasonable to expect that Hu’s stepping down from the presidency is not the last we will hear of harmonious world in Chinese policy or

academic discourse (see Nordin, 2011: 17). The cat-and-mouse game with online dissidents also
continues. A search for banned terms on Sina Weibo on 2 November 2011 showed the term “蟹农场” (xienongchang) to be
censored. The term refers to a series of political cartoons with the English name “Hexie farm”. This “hexie” refers to the double

meaning of harmony and rivercrabs, with the Chinese title using the term
for “crab” (xie 蟹) in this formulation. The cartoons focus on censorship
and violent promotion of harmonious policies and have become
widespread amongst other things through the China Digital Times project
(Hernandez, 2011; Hexie Farm, 2011). New puns are constantly created, then censored, giving

rise to further new terms. The rivercrabs have now morphed into new
humorous “national treasure” words that are deployed in egao culture
online. One such replacement word for harmony/rivercrabs is shuichan
(水产), meaning “aquatic product”. Another is the evocative near-homonym hēxiě or hēxuè (喝血), which means to “drink
blood”, an expression particularly popular in Taiwan. Through such terms, harmony/rivercrabs continue

to morph, metastasise and proliferate. In my examination of what

“harmonious world” does in terms of imagining time space and multiplicity, I set out in this
thesis to answer three sub-questions. I will now return to each of these questions in turn, and will make three key claims with regards to the doings of harmony. 155 For
examples of Xi promoting harmony during the celebration, see the full text (Xi Jinping, 2011a: 2, 3, 4) or a full length CCTV recording (Xi Jinping, 2011b: 12:27, 24:06, 33:24) of his
speech at the anniversary ceremony . Xi’s speech was also preceded by others stressing civilizational harmony (wenming4hexie 文明和谐), and followed by a parade displaying
ethnic harmony and unity under the theme “building harmony”, as can be seen in additional CCTV recordings of the ceremony. The broadcast ends by an assertion of the
expected harmonious life of ethnic unity under the central government (CCTV, 2011: 19:19, 20:20, 138:50, 147:14). - 217 - “HARMONIOUS WORLD” REPEATS AN
ALLOCHRONISING LOGIC The first question I asked in the introduction to this thesis was: what are the assumptions behind and political consequences of different ways of
articulating “harmonious world”, particularly in terms of ordering time and space- With regards to this question, this thesis has found that much of the official and academic
discourse on harmonious world deploys terms drawn from ancient Chinese thought. We have seen particular emphasis on concepts drawn from pre-Qin texts, such as “All-under

have
heaven” (Tianxia4 天下), “the kingly way” (wangdao4 王道), “the hegemonic way” (badao 霸道), “harmonism” (hehe4zhuyi4 和合主义), and so on. Yet, in the texts I

examined on “harmonious world”, these terms are aligned with concepts

of traditional “Western” IR and fall back on the spatial categories of
traditional IR theories. Through these spatial categories, the debates
reflect different ways of imagining the space of a harmonious world.
Some articulations rely on a unit-based political cosmology, including
civilizations, regions and most of all bounded states. Others are based in
holistic assumptions, deploying IR-terms such as “network space”, holistic
globalisation (specifically quanqiu4yitihua4 全球一体化) and an understanding of Tianxia that
similarly conceives of a space where everything is already connected to
everything else. Both of these ways of imagining space, however, marry
their spatialisations with conventional notions of modernization and
progress, or “turning the bad into the good”, that imply a linear or
teleological time. Such imaginations organise difference in epochs, and binaries such as advanced/behind, modern/traditional, developed/developing
and bad/good. Through these concepts multiplicity is aligned in a historical queue

with Chinese elites at the head. I have shown these terms and spatio-
temporal imaginings to reappear in party-state documents, academic
writing and the visualisations of harmonious world at Expo In all these contexts, I have shown
some of the things “harmonious world” does at the level of ideology, as a second order simulacrum. At this level, the key “doing” of harmonious world in the contexts I
examined is the allochronic organisation of time, space and multiplicity. This is politically problematic because it reduces not only the challenge, but the opportunity that time
and space could and should present us with: coeval multiplicities. This thesis thus presents a rebuttal of claims that “harmonious world” and associated concepts such as “All-

Despite claims to the

under-heaven” and “the kingly way” present a better alternative to more conventional ideas of world order.

contrary, they fail to escape the problematic organisation of difference

that they criticise in “Western thought”. Through examining the unit-based and holistic political cosmologies in academic
discourse and at Expo 2010 I have moreover contributed to a rebuttal of the idea that these two imaginaries are mutually exclusive with one replacing the other. I have shown
instead that they are both deployed together in contemporary China in ways that, although in certain tension, are mutually supportive in underpinning an allochronic world

Therefore, although there is some tension between different terms

imaginary.

and spatialisations used to articulate harmonious world, the diversity of

accounts is undermined in that they all fall back on allochronising
assumptions. In that sense, what they all do is produce a domesticated
form of difference that denies an open future. Through these findings this thesis intervenes in two fields. For
students of China and its foreign policy, it provides a rebuttal of some important claims by Chinese scholars and policy makers. The most important implication is that scholars
must stop treating China as the “other country”. China is not “behind” as some infant being socialised, as Johnston and others would have it. Nor is it a radical other to “the
West” that naturally escapes the problems of allochronic thought, as in Chinese exceptionalist narratives. For scholars interested in time, space and multiplicity in IR, and in the

this thesis provides a detailed study of a concept from

allochrony problematique in particular,

China, a context that has hitherto received less attention in these debates
than it merits. For these debates, it cautions against the allure of China as
an Other or alternative that escapes the traps of allochronic thinking.
HARMONISATION WILL NOT TAKE PLACE The second question I asked in the introduction to this thesis was: what is the overall effect of the proliferation of “harmony” in
contemporary Chinese society- After officially launching “harmonious world” in 2005, the PRC party-state has continued spurring the concept’s proliferation in Chinese and

Through the studies of this thesis we have seen “harmonious

international contexts.

world” amass so much meaning that the possibility of using it as a

meaningful concept has disappeared. Its meaning has been shown to
designate total co-operation, total subjugation, total respect for
difference, total control, totally moral leadership, and so on. Where other
scholars have tried to find out its true meaning, I have shown instead how
the illusion of this possibility has disappeared – not into meaninglessness,
but into what we may by Baudrillardean analogy think of as transparent
or obscene “hyper-meaning”, the more meaningful than the meaningful.
As an effect of this mass proliferation the term has become overripe and
collapsed under the weight of its own meaning to the point where it can
no longer function as an ideal. The fantasy and the reality of harmonious
world have collapsed into one another and the seduction of the concept
has been lost. The proliferation of harmony has made it disappear as an
imagined metaphysical possibility. Harmonization has not taken place, is
not taking place and will not take place. This effect of the proliferation of harmony, as a third order simulacrum of
simulation rather than second order ideology, is a key finding. Some scholars have called for caution with regards to the oppressive, homogenising and depoliticising aspect of

The threat
Chinese harmonization. In the context of its “hyper- meaning”, resistance to harmony and harmonious world must be thought of differently.

posed by proliferating harmonisation is not only the policing of

boundaries that I describe on the level of ideology: cracking down on
dissidents, blocking words online, preventing people from tweeting.
Indeed, we might want to reflect on why many of us are so obsessed with
condemning the limitation of communication: will the revolution really be
tweeted- Instead, a more spectacular threat to harmony comes from the
excess of communicating harmony itself, which destroys the illusion of
the real in the harmony concept. In that sense the mass- communication
of harmony is dangerous on a larger metaphysical plane. The CCP is working towards a controlled
hierarchical harmony, but it becomes something completely different. They are the ones robbing harmony of its illusion. Baudrillard writes concerning the Gulf War – which he
famously declared was not taking place – that it is stupid to be for or against the war if you do not for one moment question its credibility or level of reality (Baudrillard, 1991).

Therefore, those who promote the truth of it as a war and historical event
are the warmongers, the accomplices (Baudrillard, 1991; Merrin, 1994: 440). On the same logic,
it is misplaced to be for or against harmony. We have seen various
aspects of the “hyper- meaning” of harmony and harmonisation (total co-operation,
total subjugation, total respect for difference, totally moral leadership, total control). None of these things are taking place

in contemporary China or its relations to the world. If something is taking

place, it is not harmony or harmonisation. My task here has not been to promote or oppose this term, but rather to
question its credibility and indeed level of reality. This insight and its implications for resistance is a key contribution of this thesis to both of the fields in which I intervene.
Moreover, through reading “harmonious world” in terms of both its doing and its undoing this thesis suggests a novel way in which scholars of Chinese international relations
may study foreign policy concepts in general and Chinese set phrases in particular. It thus contributes to the literatures on “doing things with words” in Chinese politics through
emphasising ways of examining the undoings that doings necessarily imply. It moreover contributes to literatures on time, space and multiplicity in IR through showing how the
thought of Derrida and Baudrillard may help us shake up the manner in which questions of multiplicity and politics can be formulated, and foreign policy concepts can be studied

That harmony is not taking place, I stress once more, does not
in terms of excess.

mean it does not have effects. Two academic commentators claim with regards to its policy formulation that “it is implicit that a
harmonious world is one where supposed ‘heresies’ are tolerated” (Guo Sujian and Blanchard, 2008b: 4). Based on the finding that harmonious world repeats an allochronising

Relegating “heresies” (or “others”) to a

logic, I am less certain that such tolerance is implied in - 221 - harmonious world.

different time from our own means denying them coevalness in the here-
now. The implication in the texts I have examined is that “they” will
eventually come around to seeing the world as “we” do, which in turn has
depoliticising effects.THERE IS AN APORIA AT THE HEART OF HARMONIOUS WORLD AND COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES The third and final question I
asked in the introduction to this thesis was: are there contradictions in or between different articulations of “harmonious world”- How are these made visible- I have argued
above that the diversity of more or less official accounts of a harmonious world is undermined in that they all fall back on allochronising assumptions. However, I have also
shown how official language migrates and morphs in different contexts through which “harmonious world” is undone – resisted, deconstructed and changed – by its very own
logic. A reading of China’s mega events as simulacra of both the second and third order (ideology and simulation) has revealed how notions of inside/outside, now/then and
subject/object come apart. Moreover, dissident play with the concept of harmony makes visible certain contradictions, both between different articulations of harmonious
world and within the concept itself. I began this thesis by outlining the two contradictory imperatives of multiplicity, the threat and the promise of difference. Throughout the

Harmony must by
examination of harmonious world, this term has revealed itself as mirroring the aporetic imperatives of coeval multiplicity.

definition be universal, but its universalisation by definition makes

harmony impossible. Bart Rockman has suggested that harmony may be a “necessary glue without which neither a society nor a polity are
sustainable”, but that “complete social harmony is ultimately suffocating and illiberal” (Rockman, 2010: 207). Jacob Torfing has also taken issue with predominant

post-political vision of politics and

understandings of harmony in Southeast Asia that he argues present a “

governance that tends to eliminate power and antagonism” (Torfing, 2010: 257). Drawing on
Laclau and Mouffe, he understands such a post-political vision as both theoretically

unsustainable and politically dangerous. It is theoretically unsustainable

because power and antagonism are inevitable features of the political
dimensions of politics, as I have described the political (cf. Baudrillard, 1990 [1983]: 162, 182).
Therefore politics: cannot be reduced to a question of translating diverging

interests into effective [win-win] policy solutions, since that can be done
in an entirely de- politicized fashion, for example, by applying a particular
decision-making rule, relying on a certain rationality or appealing to a set
of undisputed virtues and values. Of course, politics always invokes
particular rules, rationalities and values, but the political dimension of
politics is precisely what escapes all this (Torfing, 2010: 257-8). Politics, then,
unavoidably involves a choice that means eliminating alternative options.
Moreover, although we base our decisions on reasons and may have
strong motivations for choosing what we choose, we will never be able to
provide an ultimate ground for any given choice – in Derridean terms, such grounds will
always be indefinitely deferred. Therefore, “the ultimate decision will
have to rely on a skilful combination of rhetorical strategies and the use
of force” (Torfing, 2010: 258). The acts of exclusion that politics necessarily entails will
produce antagonism between those who identify with the included
options and those who do not. For this reason, the attempt by the
promoters of harmony to dissociate harmonious politics from the exercise
of power, force and the production of antagonism, claiming a harmony
where everyone wins and no-one looses, is bound to fail. Moreover, the
post-political vision of politics and harmony is politically dangerous
because its denial of antagonism will tend to alienate those excluded
from consideration – those who count as “no-one” when everyone wins
and no-one loses. This, Torfing writes, will tend to displace antagonistic struggles from the realm of the political to the realm of morals, “where conflicts
are based on non-negotiable values and the manifestation of ‘authentic’ identities” (Torfing, 2010: 258). Such non- negotiable values

would be the opposite of the co-operative harmony sought. To both

Rockman and Torfing, then, complete or perfect harmony will defeat
harmony and create disharmony. We have seen how numerous scholars argue that in order to imagine harmony, we need to
imagine heterogeneity and multiplicity. We can now add that the allochronic organisation of difference eliminates the multiplicity in the here-now that is a prerequisite for
harmony. In order to imagine heterogeneity and multiplicity we need to delineate here and there, now and then in the fathomable aspect of différance that enables us to think

to imagine multiplicity we need borders

spacing between multiple trajectories à la Massey. In other words, in order

and boundaries, or else all we have is the unitary One. Such is language.
Rockman goes on to argue that although homogeneity of ascriptive identities like ethnicity, language or religion may enhance

harmony, the more important factor for constructing harmony is “the

capacity to assimilate, absorb and integrate perspectives to a common
ground for accommodation of diversity” (Rockman, 2010: 207). But the point is that the
idea of a “common ground” can only be built on exclusion, that such
assimilation, absorption and integration is what reduces the otherness of
the Other to only fathomable, definable and co-operative difference. To
Baudrillard, it is the modern West’s refusal of such alterity that spawns nostalgia

for the Other, who is now always already domesticated, a mass version of
what we saw in presentations of “ethnics” at Expo 2010 (Baudrillard, 1990 [1987]: 145, 165).
We have seen the same refusal of alterity in Chinese discourses on
harmonious world, with its focus on proper understanding and the
insistence on difference in order to make the world “colourful”. It is the
same nostalgia and exhuming ritual that IR scholars perform when
dreaming of an emerging “Chinese school” of IR theory as a radical
alternative to “the West”. Despite this nostalgia, we must not try to “foster” difference. It is
counterproductive to call for “respecting the difference” of “marginalized
groups”, as this relies on a presumption that they need to have an
Identity and makes the marginal valued as such, thus leaving the marginal
where they are, “in place”. Difference must therefore be rejected, to
some extent at least, in favour of greater otherness or alterity: “otherness [l’altérité] is not
the same thing as difference. One might even say that difference is what destroys

otherness” (Baudrillard, 1993 [1990]: 127, 131). Thus “the other must stay Other, separate, perhaps
difficult to understand, uncontrollable” (Hegarty, 2004: 118). In this way, Baudrillard advocates more “exoticism”, an
interest in the other as Other, and as beyond assimilation into “proper understanding” in the present. To Hutchings this absence of a “proper understanding” of the other in the
present is no doubt disappointing, because other times are indeed identified with an unpresentable supplement and thus with that which cannot be known, but only hoped for.

the Other can only remain Other insofar as we resist the urge to attempt
But

such assimilation. The alternative would be to fall back into “the One”
and loose sight of the possibility of harmony and coeval multiplicities.
What we have, then, is an aporia at the heart of both coeval multiplicities
and of harmonious world, despite attempts to conceal it. I have aimed through this thesis to
question little by little the attempts at harmonious organisation of time and space as belonging to the sovereign that this concealment has implied. I have examined different
strategies of reading and using “harmony” in ways that reveal the excluded other of Hu’s harmony – discord and competition – to be always already there within the political

the harmonious system is not based on co-

and linguistic system of harmony itself. I have argued that

operation or non co-operation, but works according to an onco-operative

logic: the quasi-suicidal logic of cancer and the (auto)immune. Ultimately, the
aim and most important contribution of this thesis has been to bring the
onco-operative uncertainty of the political back into the harmonious
world concept in order to elucidate the negotiation of danger and
necessity of multiplicity. (IM)POSSIBLE COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES; (IM)POSSIBLE HARMONY With regards to the main question of this thesis, I
thus make three interrelated claims about what “ harmonious world” does. First, it repeats the allochronising logic that we recognise from “Western”

discourses. Second, it disappears as an imagined metaphysical possibility as an effect

of its excessive proliferation. Third, when the aporia at the heart of the
harmony concept is recognised, it allows for a re- politicisation of
“harmonious world” and China’s role in world politics. I have argued that these findings make an
important contribution to both scholars of Chinese international politics and to theorists of time, space and multiplicity in IR. But where does this leave us- A key

effect of the onco-operative logic that I have identified in “harmonious

world” is undecidability. Harmony, as simulation, is paradoxically both
totalising and violent, and impossible (cf. Grace, 2003). To begin, its fetishised
perfectability is constantly undermined: [t]he perfect crime would be to
build a world-machine without defect, and to leave it without traces. But
it never succeeds. We leave traces everywhere – viruses, lapses, germs,
catastrophes – signs of defect, or imperfection (Baudrillard, 1997: 24). Moreover,
contemplating the illusion of the real reveals the object as neither the
static, subordinated other of the subject, nor the simulated project of an
idealist order: the object that is neither one thing nor the other is
fundamentally illusory (Grace, 2003). In Baudrillard’s terms: [i]llusion is simply the fact that
nothing is itself, nothing means what it appears to mean. There is a kind
of inner absence of everything to itself. That is illusion. It is where we can
never get hold of things as they are, where we can never know the truth
about objects, or the other (Baudrillard in Baudrillard and Butler, 1997: 49). Undecidables, then, cannot be reduced to opposition but reside
within opposition, in Derrida’s words “resisting and disorganising it, without4ever4constituting a third term” and thus without becoming dialectical (Derrida, 1987 [1972]: 43,

Such undecidables exist neither simply inside metaphysical

emphasis in original).

discourse and its constitutive binaries, nor simply outside them. They
work, instead, on their margins and limits, disrupting and displacing them,
as we have seen rivercrabs do. This makes them “[n]either/nor, that is,
simultaneously, either/or” (Derrida, 1987 [1972]: 43, emphasis in original). We can add to the previous discussion about the times and
spaces of undecidable harmony, and the potential I have located in it for thinking coeval multiplicities, through drawing on Derrida’s discussion of auto-immunity in relation to
the term renvoyer, which means re-sending, sending away, sending back (to the source) and/or sending on (Haddad, 2004: 37). Derrida explains that the autoimmune process:
consists always in a renvoi, a referral or deferral, a sending or putting off. The figure of the renvoi belongs to the schema of space and time, to what I had thematized with such
insistence long ago under the name spacing as the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space. The values of the trace or of the renvoi, like those of différance, are

Thus, in onco-operative harmony the

inseparable from it (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 35, emphasis in original).

(auto)immune topology in space demands that harmony be sent off

elsewhere, excluded, rejected. It must be expelled under the pretext of
protecting it, precisely by rejecting or sending off to the outside the
disharmonious elements inside it (cf. Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 35-6). As we have seen, such exiling does not
take place only in democracy, as Derrida implied, but also in harmony. It is the expulsion of internal ills that
has been promoted by Hu’s harmony and by both Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and biomedical approaches to cancer. It has been criticised by theorists of time and space
such as Fabian, Inayatullah and Blaney, Massey and Hutchings. Moreover, “since the renvoi operates in time as well, autoimmunity also calls for putting4off [renvoyer] until later

elections and the advent of democracy” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 36). So too does it postpone the coming of
harmony. Here, truly “harmonious” behaviour by the sovereign is
postponed until later, until more harmonious times. China needs to
become strong first, be in control of harmony on the inside first, use hard
power first. This renvoi reinforces my claim that there is no essence to harmony, no self with which harmony can be self-same. To paraphrase Derrida, this
double renvoi (sending off – or to – the other and putting off, adjournment) is an autoimmune fatality or necessity. It is inscribed directly in

harmony, directly in or right onto the concept of a harmony without

concept, directly in a harmony devoid of self-sameness. It is a harmony of
which the concept remains free, out of gear, free-wheeling, in the free
play of its indetermination. It is inscribed directly in this thing or this
cause that, precisely under the name of harmony, is never properly what
it is, never itself. For what is lacking in harmony is proper meaning, the
very meaning of the selfsame, the it-self, the properly selfsame of the it-
self. It defines harmony, and the very ideal of harmony, by this lack - 227 - of the proper and of the selfsame (cf. Derrida, 2003b: 61; 2005 [2003]-a: 36-7). Again, in a
slightly different sense, harmony has not taken place, is not taking place and will not take place. The onco-operative Chinese

system is not only a process by which harmony attacks a part of itself . This
renvoi, moreover, consists in a deferral or referral to the other: as the undeniable, and I underscore undeniable, experience of the alterity of the other, of heterogeneity, of the
singular, the not-same, the different, the dissymmetric, the heteronomous (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 38, emphasis in original). By undeniable, here, Derrida also means that it is
only deniable. The only way that it is possible to protect meaning is through a sending-off (renvoi) by way of denial. Harmony is differantial in both senses of différance. It is
différance,4renvoi, and spacing. This is why spacing, “the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space” is so important. (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-a: 38). Harmony, like
democracy, is what it is only in the différance by which it defers itself and differs from itself. Harmony can never achieve the indivisibility that it claims as its prerequisite. To the
extent that it tries to do so, it must enforce its law with violence (disharmony). In this sense, it is impossible. But, the perceptive reader may ask, do the traces and cracks that
make harmony come apart not also appear in the argument of this thesis- Could the same not be said about the argument that harmony is impossible- Indeed. A successful
failure. And the same is true for “coeval multiplicities”. This thesis has questioned whether it is possible to imagine harmonious world in a way that allows for coeval

However, the
multiplicities. The temptation set up by this question is to answer in terms of the dichotomy it implies: it is either possible, or impossible.

undoing of “harmonious world” I have examined exposes the need to

think otherwise about the dichotomy of possibility/impossibility and to
displace it. Following Derrida, both “harmonious world” and “coeval multiplicity” are best conceived as
both possible and impossible, never simply one or the other. Any
harmonious or coeval relation to otherness is also always a
disharmonious and - 228 - allochronising relation. This deconstructive
undecidability, as I have argued, is not negative (as Massey would have it). That harmony or coeval
multiplicities are not simply4possible is not an excuse to treat them as simply4impossible. The aim of reading deconstruction or reversibility throughout this thesis has been to

reveal the contradictions and complexity that reside within what we try to enact and make possible. The purpose has been to show
that the post-political articulations of “harmonious world” do not hold up,
and to bring the political back into the harmony concept. COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES AND
HARMONY TO COME I have argued that harmonious world will not take place , I have argued against its possibility, I have

used it against itself, and written an entire thesis with the express strategy to make it disappear. Are scholars then to resolutely

reject harmony and harmonious world as viable concepts in IR- Are

students to retreat back to the comfortable concepts and language that
have a more established history in IR literatures- Although it may appear paradoxical, I want to
answer these questions with a resolute “no”. Again: that harmony or
coeval multiplicities are not simply possible is not an excuse to treat them
as simply impossible. It calls, instead, for the opposite of abandoning
harmony and coeval multiplicities. The point that harmonious world is not
uniquely liberating, but repeats the politically problematic and
allochronising logic of more established writing in what is referred to as
“Western tradition”, simply means that it cannot escape the restraints
and problems recognisable in other terms. Therefore, retreating to other
(old, comfortable) terms is not a solution. There are, however, some good
reasons to continue discussing harmony and harmonious world as
important concepts of IR. First, although harmony has disappeared its
proliferation has not. As explained above, I believe that harmonious world will remain a key concept to Chinese politics for some time yet. This
in itself means we should keep engaging it. Second, I use it in acknowledgement of a tradition and aspiration to a way
of doing things differently. Derrida’s “democracy to come” is chosen in acknowledgement of his debt to a historical and intellectual heritage. As he claims in an interview
concerning autoimmunity: [o]f all the names grouped a bit too quickly under the category ‘political regimes’ (and I do not believe that ‘democracy’ ultimately designates a
‘political regime’), the inherited concept of democracy is the only one that welcomes the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely
improving itself (Derrida, 2003a: 121). I have shown that Derrida’s claim that “democracy would be the name of the only ‘regime’ that presupposes its own perfectibility” is
highly questionable (Derrida, 2003a: 121). There seems to be little impetus to call the processes and ideas that I have examined “democracy” (despite the CCP leadership’s
insistence that China is democratic). Yet, they operate on the same (auto)immune or onco-operative logic that Derrida takes as giving “democracy” its future, its “to come”. I
have argued that “harmony” is onco-operative in a similar manner, and its legacy should be recognised. Third, I want to retain the term “harmony” because of its universalist
implications (cf. Pin-Fat, 2010: 119-20). Its universal claim that all conceivable elements of a situation need to be in harmony for the situation to be harmonious conjures up the

question of exclusions and exceptions. Despite itself, it invites questions about what or who has
been excluded, why and on what grounds. I therefore take it as an
invitation to question and challenge the reality, precisely, of the divisions
that deployments of harmony have made visible to us. In the party-state’s
version of harmony, China’s future is an active programme, but
importantly this future is described through the oxymoron of “inevitable
choice” (State Council of the PRC, 2005b), legitimised as rational due to the application of
China’s “scientific outlook on development” and prescriptive of a future
where China will always stand for “fairness and justice” (Hu Jintao, 2007). I have questioned such
prescriptive narratives, in order to open up to the undecidability of an unimaginable future for harmonious world. The reason that I have

kept insisting on such openness (autoimmunity, undecidability, the Other,

and so on) is because it makes the political, and indeed any futures at all,
imaginable (albeit in ways I shall qualify below). To Derrida “[a] foreseen event is already present, already presentable; it has already arrived or happened and is
thus neutralized in its irruption” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-b: 143). Therefore, “[w]ithout the absolute singularity of the

incalculable and the exceptional, no thing and no one, nothing other and
thus nothing, arrives or happens” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-b: 148, emphasis in original). And again, “[w]ithout
autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen or
arrive; we would no longer wait, await or expect, no longer expect one
another, or expect any event” (Derrida, 2005 [2003]-b: 152, see also 157). This is why Derrida insists on the future “to come”
(avenir/à4venir). In accordance with my argument for (im)possible coeval multiplicities, this places focus on what comes, rather than that which begins from the self or the One.
Chinese language has the same connotations of the future as that which comes, where the character lai 来, meaning precisely “to come”, is part of the term for future, weilai 未
来. This places it in a chain of meanings of the “to come” as “future” (weilai4 未来 or jianglai4 将来), “return” (huilai4 回来), and “originally” (yuanlai4 原来). This echoes with
the spectral temporality discussed in this thesis, where the future is to come as a return of the other that is also its (non)origin. As we have seen weilai, the future, was itself

Through these ways of

harmonised in conjunction with Ai Weiwei’s detention, making it deferred in more than one sense.

rethinking harmony, we see how the undecidability at work in the very

concepts of harmony and coeval multiplicities leaves open the chance (or
threat) of a future, for both the terms themselves and for responsibility
and singular decisions to be taken beyond masterful sovereignty. This
future is not just in the future, something we can hope for, but it imposes
itself with absolute urgency in the form (or form-beyond-form) that the
imperative of harmony takes here and now. Because of its onco-operative
(im)possible character, “harmony” is structurally open to the other – an
other that does not await us as the unified ideal of a programmable or
predictable future, but that presses upon us (with all the force of its self-
difference) in the “here-now” (cf. Wortham, 2010: 131-2; Derrida, 1994). My point of retaining the
(im)possibility of a harmony to come is partly about retaining the term
“harmony”, but it is also about opening up to the possibility of its
continued destruction. By opening itself up to the other, harmony
threatens to further destroy itself, but also gives it the chance to receive
the other – in the here-now, in coeval multiplicity. The point of the “to
come” is a future that cannot be identified in advance, since it would
break with all the old names. Without countries, civilizations, progress,
we may ask whether it would still make sense to speak of harmonious
world under that name, or indeed of coeval multiplicities in world politics.
As a term, then, “harmony” is not sacred, neither is “coeval multiplicity” .
Some other context, some day, may demand that we use a different word in other sentences (cf. Derrida, 2002: 181). Just as the PRC state (or

indeed any state) works on an onco-operative logic, so too does language

attempt to remain immune to anything that may threaten its logical
syntax. This is a necessity for language to make sense. The definition of a term, by definition, is a
border and immune protection from what it is not, but we can read its
simultaneous auto-immunity through reading deconstruction. Therefore,
at the same time as the future is unpredictable, it is at work today, in
onco-operative harmony and coeval multiplicities: it is what is coming,
what is happening. The responsibility for what remains to be decided or
done cannot consist in following rules, rites or proper conduct of
harmony, nor in a prescriptive theory for how to think and write coeval
multiplicities, but must remain within the realm of the political.
 2NC China Simulacra Link
That which represents modernity is the absorption of China into Western
epistemic modalities, wherein China is no longer an other but a simulacral
realization provoked by China’s integration into the world/fair. The simulacrum
now formulates the hyperreal world permeating all of modernity, every crack,
every slit, and every crevice- this excessive seepage of information reverses
meaning. We inhabit a world devoid of meaning through our investment in the
China’s “mega events”, it’s preferable to live in a world with no meaning where
the simulacral is ultimately apparent.
Nordin 12. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster
University, PhD in Chinese International Politics, “Taking Baudrillard to the Fair: Exhibiting China in the World at the
Shanghai Expo”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 37, Number 2, May 2012, pg. 106-120

This article has asked what it means to be fair. I have argued that the fair is not a fake copy of a
“real” world, but that as simulation it marks the breakdown of the distinctions
of the copy from the original, of the fair from the world. The world/fair is
everything and nothing, simultaneously nowhere and now here. I have
shown that the world/fair works through recycling, revival, and reuse that,
as a rem(a)inder, is not new. I have further argued that being in the world fair
turns us all into simulacral avatars without original, circulated in virtual
hyperreality. All these claims have serious consequences for the study of China in the world.
My reading here shows the problem of thinking of China as the “other
country.”66 Baudrillardian simulacra have come to symbolize postmodernity,
continental philosophy, late capitalism, and an American way of life. All of
these terms imply a where, when, and who. A key finding of this article is that the
implied answers to those questions are not as straightforward as may at first glance appear.
Reading Expo 2010 as simulacra shows that we cannot locate “China” as an other, in
another place and another time, than that of our purported late
capitalism or postmodern condition. Importantly, though, through Baudrillard’s
simulacra we can see how this is not a case of “catching up,” of those
behind (finally) becoming like us. The point is not that “the others” have
now become “the same,” so that we can happily apply our “Western
theories” and ignore difference. The point is, rather, that reading the
world/fair as simulation messes with its notions of inside and outside,
now and then, subject and object to the point where these terms are no
longer workable. What we end up with is not the many turning into the one, with the
convergence of others into the self. Instead, what remains is a fragmented
plethora of truth, not the unreal but the hyperreal. The effect is our own
disappearance. The object becomes us, sees us. We see ourselves through the
Expo. The Expo is us. My reading here of Expo 2010 as simulacra has examined some of the
distinctions implied in the where, when, and who of the world/fair and shows that we may be
better off not taking our distinctions so seriously. But of course, the study of the world/fair is
serious. We all want to base our work on fair ground, but what happens to fair descriptions
when that ground has turned out to be a fairground? In the simulacral world/fair, can
we still retain strategy? Already in his earlier work, Baudrillard had come to the
conclusion that in a “hyperrealist” system, “[s]trictly speaking, nothing
remains for us to base anything on.” In a hyperreal world of simulacra, the
weight of information makes modernity (and its space) fall apart. This has
shattering implications for meaning: “where we think that information
produces meaning, the opposite occurs.”68 Meaning, truth and the real
are reversed, that is, they are divested of any universal meaning, which
restricts them to local, partial objects.69 In this age of simulation, we have
surpassed old versions of uncertainty and made our problem permanent.
Recycling and simulation, with what they do to reality, to time and space,
demand something from us: we no longer have the choice of advancing,
of preserving in the present destruction, or of retreating—but only of
facing up to this radical illusion. In this manner, the uncertainty of the
simulated world/fair is not necessarily a cause for pessimism. Coulter has
claimed, “Baudrillard has long found a radically uncertain and ultimately
unknowable world a far more comfortable place to live than one which is
predictable. Baudrillard lives, as well as do [sic], in a world in a permanent
state of reversibility, and he prefers it to a world that is accomplished.” I
agree with Coulters sentiment, but think we are better off thinking of Baudrillard’s (and
our) being in this recycled world as profoundly uncomfortable. The question
posed is most pertinent to the way we think about the world and our role in worlding: Does the
world have to have meaning, then? That is the real problem. If we could accept this
meaninglessness of the world, then we could play with forms, appearances and our impulses,
without worrying about their ultimate destination . . . Do we absolutely have to choose between
The absence
meaning and non-meaning? But the point is precisely that we do not want to.
of meaning is no doubt intolerable, but it would be just as intolerable to
see the world assume a definitive meaning. This implosion or
disappearance of meaning, truth and the real, however, does not mean
we cannot have strategy: “Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only
resource we have left us.”74 The strategy Baudrillard has developed is a “fatal
strategy,” one that values uncertainty and where, in contrast to banal
theory, the subject is no longer under any illusion of being more cunning
than the object.75 In contrast to the teleological narratives on China in the
world—in common approaches of IR theory, in the PRC government’s
rendition of China’s inevitable rise to world leadership, and in the
conceptualizations of time and space at Expo 2010—the world described
by Baudrillard is not determined. In this world, “everything is
antagonistic” rather than harmonious and good will not necessarily
triumph over evil. The strategy, then, is not for theory like in Enlightenment thought to
reflect the real but instead to work as a challenge. The world/fair is not compatible
with the “real” that is imposed upon it. Importantly though: “the function of
theory is certainly not to reconcile it, but on the contrary, to seduce, to
wrest things from their condition, to force them into an overexistence
which is incompatible with that of the real.”77 The purpose then of theory
is to s(t)imulate the (im)possible in the world/fair. My hope with this article is to
take one small step in such a direction and provoke us into thinking of China’s
“mega events” beyond representation, reality, and ideology—to think of
them in terms of simulacra.
 2NC Consumption
Dying to achieve immortality, the affirmative attempts to rid uncertainty
through consumption and materialism that leads to disenchantment with life.
This loss of wonder is the twilight of society, constructing the ultimate sacrifice
of thinking and knowledge.
Wiltgen 05. James Wiltgen, Professor at the University of California, PhD from UCLA in Latin American Studies,
“Consumption in the Age of Information”, Bloomsbury Academic, pg. 103-107

How to address the question of uncertainty becomes one of the most pressing issues of the contemporary moment, not in order to
"overcome" it, but to create new ways to think about both the ancient and current strands, a type of genealogy if you will

(Baudrillard, 1993:43). Hannah Arendt has argued, in The Human Condition, that uncertainty stems from a
"difficulty to believe in reality," and one of the key symptoms of this transition begins with Hobbes and his
introduction of the essential facets of "making and reckoning," where "only what I am going to make will be real" (Arendt, 1958:
300).5 Arguably the determining factor here, according to Arendt, occurred with the shift from an ancient belief of immortality, a
sense that in spite of the most lacerating of tragedies to befall individuals, families and city-states, there existed a strong perception
of continuity, that humans would always be in the world, to a sense of eternity, which Arendt dates most resolutely from the Fall of
the Roman Empire (Arendt, 1958: 20).6In the modern age, the shift solidifies with three events: the discovery of the "New World"
circa 1500, the Protestant Reformation, and the invention of the telescope and a new science to accompany it. A defining moment
for this emergence then, comes with Descartes and his dubito ergo sum, where doubt of reality becomes the defining relationship
between the subject and the world, where the certitude salutis, or the certainty of knowing if one can attain salvation has been
broken, where un Dieu cache produces two nightmares for the French thinker: either the reality of this life may be a dream, or a
Dieu trompeur, an evil spirit, "willfully and spitefully betrays man"(Arendt, 1958:276—9).The pagan "belief" in the immortality of life
would be replaced, then, by the Christian "belief" in the immortality of the individual, but in the modern age even this would be
"lost," replaced by what many observes deem a vast and terrifying vacuum, a void almost completely empty, conceptualized in
physics by the Big Bang and further exacerbated by recent "discoveries" that the universe is now flying apart at ever greater speeds.
Following this analysis, the primary explanation of the organization of both the macro-level as well as the microlevel will be a need,
the most abstract of need, to fill the vacuum left by the oblivion, or withdrawal, or disappearance of a former organizing center. Of
course, one can detect the outlines of both Nietzsche and Heidegger, among others, where they link the emergence of nihilism with
the trajectory of Western thought and culture. A pervasive new strain of thinking has emerged from a variety of earlier strands, and
as Arendt argues, "man can know only what he makes" and the famous homo faber takes center stage, as "man carries certainty of
himself within himself". However, this formulation folds in upon itself, as the set of forces creating "homo faber" have now mutated,
"redrawing" the measure, and contributing dramatically to uncertainty (Arendt, 1958: 279, 298). The form of measure has been set
adrift, and the human now seems to be part of a vast "experiment" about which only tendencies can be discerned — as Leonard
Cohen notes, "Though all the maps of blood and flesh are posted on the door, there's no one who has told us yet what Boogie Street
is for" (2001). Arendt acknowledges this shift, this pervasiveness of doubt and uncertainty on the part of the human condition, and a
"new zeal for making good in this life emerges," where "man can know only what he makes himself" (Arendt, 1958: 276, 293). The

implications for consumption would seem quite clear in this analysis, as humans have been thrust back upon themselves,
and the only reality possible in this scenario involves a radical and perhaps reactionary materialism, a

passive/aggressive type of hedonism based upon production and

consumption as the only criteria for "being alive." Or, as Arendt says, "the moderns needed
the calculus of pleasure or the puritan moral bookkeeping of merits and transgressions to arrive at some illusory mathematical
certainty of happiness or salvation" (1958: 310). Baudrillard, in his later works, takes an even more "apocalyptic" stance to these

uncertainty, has been generated

shifts, asserting that the most pressing philosophical problem,

because the contemporary world has extinguished its double, and there is
no longer anything for which the world can be exchanged (Baudrillard, 2001: 3). The
planet has entered what he calls the "ontological night," where la pensee unique or the concept of the
"good," seeks to extinguish its opposite, but the good in this case seems to be at the "control of a suicide machine" (2001: 98, 15,

37,99). Due to this pervasive malaise, which might, if at all possible, be attributed to a certain " blind consumption ...
we are building a perfect clone," a "virtual technological artifact, so that
the world can be exchanged for its artificial double" (200IL 99, 14, 28). He
also argues that humankind, "in its blind will for greater knowledge ... is
sacrificing itself to an experimental destiny unknown to other species ... in
order to construct his immortal double" (2001: 33). This points to gathering forces of a "final
solution" where the good has completely triumphed, the culmination of modernity's destruction of the world’s double, so an

Consumption, in this very bleak

artificial world may be put in its place, perhaps without leaving any traces.

landscape, furthers the construction of this artificial double, perhaps in

order to pull up the ladder Wittgenstein speaks of, disappearing into
another dimension, leaving this world and its "reality" behind. For
Baudrillard, then, the absolute catastrophe would be for the total
transparency of all data, a shimmering flash of everything in the now,
initiating an implosion on the order of a second Big Bang. All this may seem somewhat
hyperbolic, but then again cranial liposuction should, at certain levels, be taken quite seriously. One possible response to this crisis
of uncertainty would be to rethink the notion of wonder, what the Greeks referred to as thawnazein, that which depended, as has
already been noted, on a sense of the "immortality" of the ancient world, or in another context, the "rational cosmos" of the pagans
(Arendt, 1958: 233; Gillespie, 1995: 12). If one grants this argument for a moment, then what, if anything, might once again
structure such a belief in the continuity of life? Jane Bennett, in her book The Enchantment of Modern Life, lays out a number of

arguments that have been made for the "disenchantment" of modern life, a loss of the
sense of wonder, beginning with Max Weber and continuing through a number of thinkers, including Hans Blumenberg;
in place of disenchantment, she argues for a new form of "ataraxy", a new type of thinking the cosmos as Lucretius might have it —
as a poetics to Venus, as a celestial harmony of the infinite swerve of atoms in the unfathomable expanse of the void. This
intellectual maneuvering requires what might be called, in another context, a "leap," to think what Bennett calls "primordial
harmony" (Bennett, 2001: 48, 140, 169). A way to transvalue Arendt s concept of "eternity," "repeating" it as a pagan belief in the
continuity of existence, a way to "overcome" the pervasive and pernicious effects of ressentiment, and provide belief in this world.

entail "an enchanted materiality," dependent on the primacy of

This would

connectivity over the encounter with the other, composed of the

"primordially hybridized nature of everything" (Bennett,200I: II, 80, 88). As politics, Bennett then
calls for a much more careful analysis of all "goods" and their production/consumption, answering the questions what labor, what
material, what profits, and what forces are involved; the stress here falls on what she labels, via William Connolly, as "inclusionary
goods." Primordial harmony becomes the ontological basis of her approach, but the pivotal concept remains that of "shared
materiality" as it provides the conceptual matrix to transvalue the entire structure of modernity and capitalism — the new
assemblage would begin from a sense of a profound commonality, where all of existence encompasses the same molecular and
material basis. Interconnectivity then would take precedence over alterity; affectivity would be the basis of an ethical/aesthetic
approach to plentitude, and a cultivated sense of "generosity" would provide the abiding manifestation of this new sense of wonder.
Bennett uses the work of Deleuze and Guattari as key thinkers in this reformulation, focusing on their sense of the positivity and

will be
affirmation of the world, as well as their call for the formation of a "new earth." Before addressing these issues, it

necessary to take another look at the contemporary forces of capitalism.

 2NC Death
The notion of the irreversibility of death reduces our existence to merely an
object or machine, which either functions or doesn’t. This binary opposition
between life and death objectifies the body, which always takes revenge on the
subject by dying—and thus the quest for life has killed us all. Only a symbolic
exchange with death can achieve a reversibility.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society Baudrillard
Jean. Sage Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 158-160

The irreversibility of biological death, its objective and punctual character, is a modern fact of
science. It is specific to our culture. Every other culture says that death begins before
death, that life goes on after life, and that it is impossible to distinguish
life from death. Against the representation which sees in one the term of the other, we must try to see the
radical indeterminacy of life and death, and the impossibility of their autonomy in the symbolic order. Death is
not a due payment [échéance], it is a nuance of life; or, life is a nuance of death. But our modern idea of death is

controlled by a very different system of representations: that of the machine and the
function. A machine either works or it does not. Thus the biological machine is either dead or
alive. The symbolic order is ignorant of this digital abstraction. And even biology acknowledges that we start dying at birth, but this remains with
the category of a functional definition. 25 It is quite another thing to say that death articulates life, is exchanged with life and is the apogee of life: for
then it becomes absurd to make life a process which expires with death, and more absurd still to make death equivalent to a deficit and, an accelerated

Neither life nor death can any longer be assigned a given end: there
repayment.

is therefore no punctuality nor any possible definition of death. We are living entirely
within evolutionist thought, which states that we go from life to death: this is the illusion of the subject that sustains both biology and metaphysics

there is no longer even a subject who

(biology wishes to reverse metaphysics, but merely prolongs it). But

dies at a given moment. It is more real to say that whole parts of

'ourselves' (of our bodies, our language) fall from life to death, while the
living are subjected to the work of mourning. In this way, a few of the living manage to forget them
gradually, as God managed to forget the drowned girl who was carried away by the stream of water in Brecht's song: Und es geschah, dass Gott sie
allmählich vergass, zuerst das Gesicht, dann die Hände, und zuletzt das Haar . . . [It happened (very slowly) that it gently slid from God's thoughts: First
her face, then her hands, and right at the end her hair.] ['The Drowned Girl' in Bertolt Brecht: Poems and Songs, ed and tr. John Willett, London:

Methuen, 1990, p. 14] The subject's identity is continually falling apart, falling into God's forgetting.
But this death is not at all biological. At one pole, biochemistry, asexual protozoa are not affected by death, they
divide and branch out (nor is the genetic code, for its part, ever affected by death: it is transmitted unchanged beyond individual fates). At the

other, symbolic, pole, death and nothingness no longer exist, since in the
symbolic, life and death are reversible. Only in the infinitesimal space of
the individual conscious subject does death take on an irreversible
meaning. Even here, death is not an event, but a myth experienced as
anticipation. The subject needs a myth of its end, as of its origin, to form
its identity. In reality, the subject is never there: like the face, the hands and the hair, and even before
no doubt, it is always already somewhere else, trapped in a senseless distribution, an endless

cycle impelled by death. This death, everywhere in life, must be conjured up and localised in a precise point of time and a
precise place: the body. In biological death, death and the body neutralise instead of

stimulating each other. The mindbody duality is biology's fundamental

presupposition. In a certain sense, this duality is death itself, since it objectifies the
body as residual, as a bad object which takes its revenge by dying. It is according
to the mind that the body becomes the brute, objective fact, fated for sex, anguish and death. It is according to the mind, this imaginary schizz, that the

Therefore the mortal body is no more

body becomes the 'reality' that exists only in being condemned to death.

'real' than the immortal soul: both result simultaneously from the same
abstraction, and with them the two great complementary metaphysics: the idealism of the soul (with all its
moral metamorphoses) and the 'materialist' idealism of the body, prolonged in biology. Biology

lives on as much by the separation of mind and body as from any other Christian or
Cartesian metaphysics, but it no longer declares this. The mind or soul is not mentioned any more: as an ideal
principle, it has entirely passed into the moral discipline of science; into the

legitimating principle of technical operations on the real and on the

world; into the principles of an 'objective' materialism. In the Middle Ages, those who
practised the discourse of the mind or soul were closer to the 'bodily signs' (Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions [tr. Helen Lane, New York:

The Accident
Arcade, 1990] ) than biological science, which, techniques and axioms, has passed entirely over to the side of the 'non-body'.

and the Catastrophe There is a paradox of modern bourgeois rationality

concerning death. To conceive of it as natural, profane and irreversible
constitutes the sign of the 'Enlightenment' and Reason, but enters into
sharp contradiction with the principles of bourgeois rationality, with its
individual values, the unlimited progress of science, and its mastery of
nature in all things. Death, neutralised as a 'natural fact', gradually
becomes a scandal.

Death occurs through seduction and indecipherable complicity. In our fleeing

from death by endlessly resolving constructed threats, we inevitably run
towards it. As Baudrillard’s tale suggests, wherever we go, we will always find
Samarkand.
Baudrillard 03. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Death in Samarkand Translated by Brian Singer 2003
http://insomnia.ac/essays/death_in_samarkand/
 Consider the story of
An ellipsis of the sign, an eclipse of meaning: an illusion. The mortal distraction that a single sign can cause instantaneously.

the soldier who meets Death at a crossing in the marketplace, and believes he saw him
make a menacing gesture in his direction. He rushes to the king's palace and asks the king for his

best horse in order that he might flee during the night far from Death, as
far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace and reproaches him for having frightened one of his best servants. But
Death, astonished, replies: "I didn't mean to frighten him. It was just that I was
surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow,
in Samarkand." Yes, one runs towards one's fate all the more surely by
seeking to escape it. Yes, everyone seeks his own death, and the failed acts are the most
successful. Yes, signs follow an unconscious course. But all this concerns the truth of the rendez-vous in Samarkand; it does not account for the seduction of the story, which is in

no way an apologue of truth. What is astounding about the story is that this seemingly inevitable rendez-vous need
not have taken place. There is nothing to suggest that the soldier would have been in Samarkand without this chance encounter, and without the
ill-luck of Death's naive gesture, which acted in spite of itself as a gesture of seduction. Had Death been content to call the soldier back to order, the story would lose its charm.

The gesture does not appear to be part of a strategy, nor even an unconscious ruse; yet it takes on the
Everything here is hinged on a single, involuntary sign.

unexpected depth of seduction, that is, it appears as something that moves laterally, as a sign

that, unbeknownst to the protagonists (including Death, as well as the soldier), advances a deadly command, an aleatory sign
behind which another conjunction, marvelous or disastrous, is being enacted. A conjunction that gives the sign's trajectory all the characteristics of a witticism. No one in the

Behind the apparent

story has anything to reproach himself with - or else the king who lent his horse, is as guilty as anyone else. No.

liberty of the two central characters (Death was free to make his gesture,
the soldier to flee), they were both following a rule of which neither were
aware. The rule of this game, which, like every fundamental rule, must
remain secret, is that death is not a brute event, but only occurs through
seduction, that is, by way of an instantaneous, indecipherable complicity,
by a sign or signs that will not be deciphered in time. Death is a rendez-
vous, not an objective destiny. Death cannot fail to go since he is this rendez-vous, that is, the
allusive conjunction of signs and rules which make up the game. At the same time,
Death is an innocent player in the game. This is what gives the story its secret irony, whose resolution appears as a stroke of wit [trait d'esprit], and provides us with such
sublime pleasure - and distinguishes it from a moral fable or a vulgar tale about the death instinct. The spiritual character [trait spirituel] of the story extends the spirited
character [trait d'espritgestuel] of Death's gesture, and the two seductions, that of Death and of the story, fuse together. Death's astonishment is delightful, an astonishment at
the frivolity of an arrangement where things proceed by chance: "But this soldier should have known that he was expected in Samarkand tomorrow, and taken his time to get

there..." HoweverDeath shows only surprise, as if his existence did not depend as
much as the soldier's on the fact that they were to meet in Samarkand.
Death lets things happen, and it is his casualness that makes him
appealing - this is why the soldier hastens to join him. None of this involves the unconscious,
metaphysics or psychology. Or even strategy. Death has no plan. He restores chance with a chance

gesture; this is how he works, yet everything still gets done. There is
nothing that cannot not be done, yet everything still preserves the
lightness of chance, of a furtive gesture, an accidental encounter or an
illegible sign. That's how it is with seduction... Moreover, the soldier went to
meet death because he gave meaning to a meaningless gesture which did
not even concern him. He took personally something that was not addressed to him, as one might mistake for oneself a smile meant for
someone else. The height of seduction is to be without seduction. The man seduced is caught in spite of himself in a web of stray signs. And it is because the sign has been

It is when signs are seduced that they

turned from its meaning or "seduced", that the story itself is seductive.

become seductive. Only signs without referents, empty, senseless, absurd

and elliptical signs, absorb us.
 2NC Death – Political Framing
Life only exists in exchanges with death but their rejection of death undergirds oppressive
economies based on equilibrium and eliminating differences. Our injection of death into this
economy serves as a paroxysm of superabundance which dismantles this political economy in a
festival of eroticism and symbolic challenge, which reverses the economies based on production
and utility.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 154-156

Despite its radicality, the psychoanalytic vision of death remains an

insufficient vision: the pulsions are constrained by repetition, its perspective bears
on a final equilibrium within the inorganic continuum, eliminating
differences and intensities following an involution towards the lowest
point; an entropy of death, pulsional conservatism, equilibrium in the absence of
Nirvana. This theory manifests certain affinities with Malthusian political
economy, the objective of which is to protect oneself against death. For
political economy only exists by default: death is its blind spot, the absence haunting all its
calculations. And the absence of death alone permits the exchange of values
and the play of equivalences. An infinitesimal injection of death would
immediately create such excess and ambivalence that the play of value
would completely collapse. Political economy is an economy of death,
because it economises on death and buries it under its discourse. The death
drive falls into the opposite category: it is the discourse of death as the
insurmountable finality. This discourse is oppositional but complementary,
for if political economy is indeed Nirvana (the infinite accumulation and
reproduction of dead value), then the death drive denounces its truth, at
the same time as subjecting it to absolute derision. It does this, however, in the
terms of the system itself, by idealising death as a drive (as an objective finality). As such, the
death drive is the current system's most radical negative, but even it
simply holds up a mirror to the funereal imaginary of political economy.
Instead of establishing death as the regulator of tensions and an
equilibrium function, as the economy of the pulsion, Bataille introduces it in the
opposite sense, as the paroxysm of exchanges, superabundance and excess.
Death as excess, always already there, proves that life is only defective
when death has taken it hostage, that life only exists in bursts and in
exchanges with death, if it is not condemned to the discontinuity of value
and therefore to absolute deficit. 'To will that there be life only is to make
sure that there is only death.' The idea that death is not at all a breakdown of life, that
it is willed by life itself, and that the delirial (economic) phantasm of eliminating it
is equivalent to implanting it in the heart of life itself this time as an
endless mournful nothingness. Biologically, '[t]he idea of a world where
human life might be artificially prolonged has a nightmare quality about
it' (G. Bataille, Eroticism [2nd edn, tr. M. Dalwood, London: Marion Boyars, 1987], p. 101), but
symbolically above all; and here the nightmare is no longer a simple possibility,
but the reality we live at every instant: death (excess, ambivalence, gift,
sacrifice, expenditure and the paroxysm), and so real life is absent from it.
We renounce dying and accumulate instead of losing ourselves:

Not only do we renounce death, but also we let our desire, which is really
the desire to die, lay hold of its object and we keep it while we live on. We
enrich our life instead of losing it. (Eroticism, p. 142) Here, luxury and prodigality
predominate over functional calculation, just as death predominates over
life as the unilateral finality of production and accumulation: On a
comprehensive view, human life strives towards prodigality to the point of anguish, to the point
where the anguish becomes unbearable. The rest is mere moralising chatter. . . . A febrile unrest
within us asks death to wreak its havoc at our expense. (ibid., p. 60)

Death and sexuality, instead of confronting each other as antagonistic

principles (Freud), are exchanged in the same cycle, in the same cyclical
revolution of continuity. Death is not the 'price' of sexuality the sort of
equivalence one finds in every theory of complex living beings (the
infusorium is itself immortal and asexual) nor is sexuality a simple detour on the
way to death, as in Civilisation and its Discontents: they exchange their energies and excite
each other. Neither has its own specific economy: life and death only fall under the
sway of a single economy if they are separated; once they are mixed, they
pass beyond economics altogether, into festivity and loss (eroticism according
to Bataille): [W]e can no longer differentiate between sexuality and death [, which] are simply
the culminating points of the festival nature celebrates, with the inexhaustible multitude of
living beings, both of them signifying the boundless wastage of nature's resources as opposed to
the urge to live on characteristic of every living creature. (Eroticism, p. 61)

This festivity takes place because it reinstates the cycle where penury imposes the linear
economy of duration, because it reinstates a cyclical revolution of life and death where Freud
augurs no other issue than the repetitive involution of death. In Bataille, then, there is a
vision of death as a principle of excess and an anti-economy. Hence the
metaphor of luxury and the luxurious character of death. Only sumptuous
and useless expenditure has meaning; the economy has no meaning, it is
only a residue that has been made into the law of life, whereas wealth
lies in the luxurious exchange of death: sacrifice, the 'accursed share', escaping
investment and equivalence, can only be annihilated. If life is only a need to survive at any cost,
then annihilation is a priceless luxury. In a system where life is ruled by value and
utility, death becomes a useless luxury, and the only alternative.
In Bataille, this luxurious conjunction of sex and death figures under the sign of continuity, in
opposition to the discontinuous economy of individual existences. Finality belongs in the
discontinuous order, where discontinuous beings secrete finality, all sorts of finalities, which
amount to only one: their own death. We are discontinuousbeings, individuals
who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure,
but we yearn for our lost continuity. (Eroticism, p. 15)
Death itself is without finalities; in eroticism, the finality of the individual
being is put back into question: What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation
of the very being of its practitioners . . . ? The whole business of eroticism is to
destroy the self-contained character of the participants as they are in
their normal lives. (ibid., p. 17)
Erotic nakedness is equal to death insofar as it inaugurates a state of communication, loss of
identity and fusion. The fascination of the dissolution of constituted forms: such is Eros (pace
Freud, for whom Eros binds energies, federates them into ever larger unities). In death, as in
Eros, it is a matter of introducing all possible continuity into discontinuity,
a game of complete continuity. It is in this sense that 'death, the rupture
of the discontinuous individualities to which we cleave in terror, stands
there before us more real than life itself' (ibid., p. 19). Freud says exactly the same
thing, but by default. It is no longer a question of the same death. What Freud missed was not
seeing the curvature of life in death, he missed its vertigo and its excess, its reversal of the
entire economy of life, making it, in the form of a final pulsion, into a
belated equation of life. Freud stated life's final economy under the sign
of repetition and missed its paroxysm. Death is neither resolution nor
involution, but a reversal and a symbolic challenge.
Power is born from the prohibition of death and repressive socialization of life. The Aff’s attempt
to take death hostage by suspending exchange between life and death undergirds the instituted
division that lays the foundation for all other forms of oppression and exclusion.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 129-131

The emergence of survival can therefore be analysed as the fundamental

operation in the birth of power. Not only because this set-up will permit the
necessity of the sacrifice of this life and the threat of recompense in the next (this is exactly the priest-
caste's strategy), but more profoundly by instituting the prohibition of death and, at the same time,

the agency that oversees this prohibition of death: power. Shattering the union of the
living and the dead, and slapping a prohibition on death and the dead: the primary source of social control. Power is

possible only if death is no longer free, only if the dead are put under
surveillance, in anticipation of the future confinement of life in its
entirety. This is the fundamental Law, and power is the guardian at the gates of this Law. It is not the repression of
unconscious pulsions, libido, or whatever other energy that is fundamental, and it is not anthropological; it is the

repression of death, the social repression of death in the sense that this is
what facilitates the shift towards the repressive socialisation of life.
Historically, we know that sacerdotal power is based on a monopoly over death and

exclusive control over relations with the dead. 4 The dead are the first restricted area, the
exchange of whom is restored by an obligatory mediation by the priests. Power is established on death's borders. It will

subsequently be sustained by further separations (the soul and the body,

the male and the female, good and evil, etc.) that have infinite
ramifications, but the principal separation is between life and death.5 When
the French say that power 'holds the bar',6 it is no metaphor: it is the bar between life and

death, the decree that suspends exchange between life and death, the tollgate
and border control between the two banks. This is precisely the way in which power will

later be instituted between the subject separated from its body, between
the individual separated from its social body, between man separated
from his labour: the agency of mediation and representation flourishes in this rupture. We must take note, however,
that the archetype of this operation is the separation between a group and

its dead, or between each of us today and our own deaths. Every form of power will
have something of this smell about it, because it is on the manipulation and administration of death that power, in the final analysis,

All the agencies of repression and control are installed in this divided
is based.

space, in the suspense between a life and its proper end, that is, in the production of a literally
fantastic and artificial temporality (since at every instant every life has its
proper death there already, that is to say, in this same instant lies the
finality it attains). The first abstract social time is installed in this rupture of the indivisible unity of life and death (well
before abstract social labour time!). All the future forms of alienation that Marx

denounces, the separations and abstractions of political economy, take

root in this separation of death. The economic operation consists in life
taking death hostage. This is a residual life which can from now on be
read in the operational terms of calculation and value. For example, in Chamisso's The
Man who Lost his Shadow, Peter Schlemil becomes a rich and powerful capitalist once his shadow has been lost (once death is taken

hostage: the pact with the Devil is only ever a political-economic pact). Life given over to death: the very
operation of the symbolic.
 2NC Deterrence
Entrenched in unipolarity, the threat of US nuclear weapons
foreshadows a precarious tempest. The imperial aggression stems from
17th century mercantilism, the need to control resources, markets, and
reduce humans to gears in an economic machine. This consumption is
the self-implosive model beckoning for disastrous collapse.
Wiltgen 05. James Wiltgen, Professor at the University of California, PhD from UCLA in Latin American
Studies, “Consumption in the Age of Information”, Bloomsbury Academic, pg. 110-112

During the latter stages of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union effectively took the entire planet hostage, in
the sense that questions of war and peace made by those two countries had the distinct possibility of ending global life as it
has been commonly conceived. Indeed, after the advent of the hydrogen bomb, nuclear submarines, and MIRVed missiles, the
destructive capacity of the two countries reached almost "mythical" proportions, producing
what Helen Caldicott has called "nuclear madness" (2002), and Robert Jay Lifton has cited
as a type of idolatry for what only god or the gods could do in the past, namely destroy the
world (1987: 25). With the end of the Cold War, the United States emerged as the only
"superpower," a "hyperpower" consolidating the destructive power of the world's most
advanced war machine, and, responding to Nietzsche's question about who would have the will to become lords of the
earth by responding: only those who would be willing to destroy it. In an intriguing twist on the course of theoretical
formulations, the attempt by poststructuralism to undermine binary formations has, in a certain sense, come to pass — the
"binary" division of the Cold War has been dissolved, but now the situation seems poised between a return to a type of
unipolar formation, what Baudrillard called lepensee unique, or the advent of something more significantly dispersed and
multiple. Strangely, large factions across the political spectrum remain nostalgic for the previous
era of "stability," also known by the acronym MAD, mutually assured destruction. There is little doubt,
however, that we have moved into another phase and another moment of dangerous intensity, where the
stakes for global life continue to sway in the balance. What has become abundantly clear involves the
triumph of the US growth model, based on a neo-liberal approach, which seeks to marketize as much of the
worlds economy as necessary, with the exception of those areas the hegemonic powers
deem crucial to exempt from those forces.9This dense and complex series of formations, or
capitalism in another virulent manifestation, has been characterized by Deleuze and
Guattari as "the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety," where "capitalism's
supreme goal is to produce lack," what they call "antiproduction" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 225, 235). Two
clarifications — first, cynicism corresponds to the notion used here of monetarism, an objectifying and quantifying
of all existence, while the strange piety reverberates with a notion of "sadism," where the ressentiment
produced by the "disappearance" of God, coupled with sexual, digital, and bio technological mutations, drives
capitalism, and where powerful tendencies within the system qua system would rather "will
nothingness than will nothing at all."10 Second, the production of lack has been set by the system itself, and the
psychodynamics of the individual and the family have been generated from the macro-level, not the other way around. While
one might grant complex feedback loops between the macro and the micro, the determining forces in this analysis stem from
the aggregate level of capitalism itself. This
lack induced by capitalism has produced a "quasi-infinite
debt," where debt becomes the debt of existence, of life itself; however, it is important to note that there
exist several types of debt, but the analysis here concerns the overarching one crystallized by relations of exchange, distilled
and distorted by capitalism itself. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 197). A
new system of domination emerges, one
generated by the mechanisms of the market and ressentiment , where confinement and discipline no
longer form the key organizing principles of society, but debt, and where humans have begun the shift from individuals to
"dividuals." In this society of control, digital and biotechnological modulations produce continuous vibrations, oscillating
the human condition between forces of enslavement and what might be termed "other potentialities"
(Deleuze, 1995: 178-82). The
American model, then, bases itself on a type of passive forgetting,
which constantly configures the past into a self-justifying archive for the future expansion
and manipulations of capitalism.11 Again, this approach can be understood as the culmination of a long term
dynamic, or as William Spanos argues, "the Occident has been essentially imperial since its origin in late Greek and especially
Roman Antiquity" (Spanos, 1999:3—5). Aggressive control of resources, the installation of market
relations via debt, a political leadership offering "certainty," and the reduction of humans to
cogs in a global matrix provide key elements of this model — the crucial question becomes: can it sustain itself, or has
the model created an architecture of production and consumption which the planet and its resources cannot continue to
supply? As one response, Heidegger might be paraphrased here, that "only a (technologically-beneficent) God can save us
now." Obviously, these questions are far too dense to unravel here, but certain trends can be discerned. This situation will not
be "solved" if American power goes into decline, as so many predict, because the basic tendencies have such tremendous
resonance throughout the globe, with China and India being key examples in the processes of globalization. In Bataille s terms,
the American-inspired variant of capitalism has perfected a restricted economy, and rather than expending some of the excess
of energy in "profitless operations," they
consume extensively, a type of reactive destruction, bent on
a repetition for the sake of repetition, a repetition of the same, as the principle means of
overcoming existential and political uncertainty (Bataille, 1988: 25).u What, indeed, is to be done?
 2NC Economizing Death
In the economic organization, death has been converted to wage, labor, and
production. By removing death from our collective futures, the Aff has removed
all of us from the circulation of symbolic goods, and have perpetuated the
symbolic extermination of objects. We should embrace death – be ready to die
– and refuse to be put to the slow death of labor.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society. Sage
Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 38-43

birth and kinship, the soul and the body, the

Other societies have known multiple stakes: over

true and the false, reality and appearance. Political economy has reduced them to just
one: production. But then the stakes were large, the violence extreme and hopes too high. Today this is
over. The system has rid production of all real stakes. A more radical truth is dawning, however, and the system's victory allows
us to glimpse this fundamental stake. It is even retrospectively becoming possible to

analyse the whole of political economy as having nothing to do with

production, as having stakes of life and death. A symbolic stake. Every stake is
symbolic. There have only ever been symbolic stakes. This dimension is etched everywhere into the structural law of value,

everywhere immanent in the code. Labour power is instituted on death. A man must die
to become labour power. He converts this death into a wage. But the
economic violence capital inflicted on him in the equivalence of the wage
and labour power is nothing next to the symbolic violence inflicted on him
by his definition as a productive force. Faking this equivalence is nothing next to the equivalence, qua
signs, of wages and death. The very possibility of quantitative equivalence presupposes death. The equivalence of

wages and labour power presupposes the death of the worker, while that
of any commodity and any other presupposes the symbolic extermination
of objects. Death makes the calculation of equivalence, and regulation by indifference,
possible in general. This death is not violent and physical, it is the
indifferent consumption of life and death, the mutual neutralisation of
life and death in sur-vival, or death deferred. Labour is slow death. This is
generally understood in the sense of physical exhaustion. But it must be understood in another sense. Labour is not opposed, like a

labour is opposed as a slow death to

sort of death, to the 'fulfilment of life', which is the idealist view;

a violent death. That is the symbolic reality. Labour is opposed as deferred death to
the immediate death of sacrifice. Against every pious and 'revolutionary' view of the 'labour (or culture) is
the opposite of life' type, we must maintain that the only alternative to labour is not free time, or non-labour, it is sacrifice. All

this becomes clear in the genealogy of the slave. First, the prisoner of war
is purely and simply put to death (one does him an honour in this way). Then he is 'spared'
[épargné] and conserved [conservé] (=servus), under the category of spoils of war and a prestige good: he becomes a slave and
passes into sumptuary domesticity. It is only later that he passes into servile
labour. However, he is no longer a 'labourer', since labour only appears in the phase of
the serf or the emancipated slave, finally relieved of the mortgage of
being put to death. Why is he freed? Precisely in order to work. Labour therefore everywhere draws its inspiration
from deferred death. It comes from deferred death. Slow or violent, immediate or deferred, the

scansion of death is decisive: it is what radically distinguishes two types of

organisation, the economic and the sacrificial. We live irreversibly in the first of these, which has
inexorably taken root in the différance of death. The scenario has never changed. Whoever works has not been put to death, he is

refused this honour. And labour is first of all the sign of being judged worthy only of
life. Does capital exploit the workers to death? Paradoxically, the worst it inflicts on them is refusing them death. It is by
deferring their death that they are made into slaves and condemned to the
indefinite abjection of a life of labour. The substance of labour and exploitation is indifferent in this
symbolic relation. The power of the master always primarily derives from this

suspension of death. Power is therefore never, contrary to what we might imagine, the power of putting to
death, but exactly the opposite, that of allowing to live a life that the slave lacks the power

to give. The master confiscates the death of the other while retaining the right to risk his own. The slave is refused this, and is
condemned to a life without return, and therefore without possible expiation. By removing death, the

master removes the slave from the circulation of symbolic goods. This is the
violence the master does to the slave, condemning him to labour power. There lies the secret of power (in the dialectic of the
master and the slave, Hegel also derives the domination of the master from the deferred threat of death hanging over the slave).
Labour, production and exploitation would only be one of the possible avatars of this power structure, which is a structure of death.

If power is death deferred, it will

This changes every revolutionary perspective on the abolition of power.

not be removed insofar as the suspension of this death will not be

removed. And if power, of which this is always and everywhere the definition, resides in the act of
giving without being given, it is clear that the power the master has to
unilaterally grant life will only be abolished if this life can be given to him
in a non-deferred death. There is no other alternative; you will never abolish this power by staying alive, since
there will have been no reversal of what has been given. Only the surrender of this life, retaliating

against a deferred death with an immediate death, constitutes a radical

response, and the only possibility of abolishing power. No revolutionary
strategy can begin without the slave putting his own death back at stake,
since this is what the master puts off in the différance from which he profits by securing his power. Refuse to be put to death, refuse
to live in the mortal reprieve of power, refuse the duty of this life and never be quits with living, in effect be under obligation to
settle this long-term credit through the slow death of labour, since this slow death does not alter the future of this abject dimension,

Violent death changes everything, slow death changes

in the fatality of power.

nothing, for there is a rhythm, a scansion necessary to symbolic exchange:

something has to be given in the same movement and following the same rhythm, otherwise there is no
reciprocity and it is quite simply not given. The strategy of the system of
power is to displace the time of the exchange, substituting continuity and
mortal linearity for the immediate retaliation of death. It is thus futile for
the slave (the worker) to give little by little, in infinitesimal doses, to the rope of labour on which
he is hung to death, to give his life to the master or to capital, for this 'sacrifice' in small doses is no

longer a sacrifice it doesn't touch the most important thing, the différance
of death, and merely distils a process whose structure remains the same.
 2NC Form First
The affirmative labors under the myth of the subject – a myth spun by
consumerism. Their focus on the content of the system rather than its form
forecloses true liberation.
Robinson 12 “Critique of Alienation” (Andrew, political theorist, author, and activist based in
the UK.)//pday

There is also a new kind of imaginary “subject” or self generated by consumerism. 

Consumer society portrays all its objects for sale as carefully formulated
for an impersonal “you” to whom they are addressed.  It is a kind of myth which
presents consumption as common sense, consuming the spectacle of consumption itself. 
Without the myth of consumption, it would not exist as an integrative social function.  It would
simply be a set of differentiated needs and desires.  The word ‘consumption’ actually
expresses a restructuring of social ideology.  It is not in fact a victory of objects, or
of earthly pleasures.  Rather, it is a set of reified social and productive relations and
forces.  In this world, revolutions are replaced by fashion cycles.  Even the
retraining of workers is little more than a fashion cycle.  It’s a way of
imposing “low-intensity” constraints and a threat of exclusion so as to ensure conformity.

Baudrillard is highly critical of the view that consumerism amounts to liberation.  It is true
that certain older regimes of authoritarianism have decayed.  But the new regime is also
a system of control.  Repression persists, but it moves sideways.  The image of a sterile,
hygienic body and fear of contamination establishes an inner control which removes desire from
in terms of status leads to a re-racialisation.  Puritanism
the body.  The ranking of bodies
becomes mixed-up with hedonism in this ranking process.  The body as locus of desire
remains censored and silenced, even when it appears to undergo
hedonistic release.  Sexuality is expressed in consumption so it can’t disrupt the status
quo.  What is now censored is the symbolic structure and the possibility of deep meaning. 
Living representations are turned into empty signs.  Because of this change, the old
resistances to repression no longer work.

Similarly, groups supposedly liberated – such as women, black people, and young people
– are denied the effects of liberation by being re-encoded in terms of myths.  Once
labelled as irresponsible, people’s liberation is attached to a coded meaning
which demands and bars responsibility and social power.  Real liberation is
avoided by giving people an image of themselves to consume – women are given the image of
Woman, the young an image of Youth, technological change by Technology
(gadgets), and so on.  Liberation is thus nullified, and re-encoded as a role and as
narcissism.  Concrete gains for liberation movements are side-effects of this immense
strategic operation to disempower oppressed groups through their reduction to a function
or role.  We are drip-fed little bits of democracy and progress to ensure the system’s
survival.  They operate as its alibis.  Even if income equality is encouraged, the system can
survive by moving inequality elsewhere, to status, style, power and so on.

At this point in his work, Baudrillard still believes

in desire, happiness, the real,
history and so on.  He sees them as alienated in the system’s insistence on
artificial, simulated and quantitative versions of them.  The system only knows
about its own survival.  It doesn’t understand the social or individual forces
which operate inside it.  Hence, changing its contents never changes how it works.  The
system tries to conjure away the real and history with signs representing them – replacing
them with the truer than true and so on.  Simulations are objects which offer
many signs of being real, when in fact they are not.
 2NC Futurism
The dominant ideology promotes a brighter future, a utopian future, but
the future is dead. The future is sacrificed amidst war, environmental
degredation, poverty, mass slavery, and racism that results in
something worse than extinction, loss of the future.
Bifo 11. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, “After the Future”, AK Press, pg. 17-19

In this book, I want to reconsider the cultural history of the century from this point of view: the
mythology of the
future. The future is not an obvious concept, but a cultural construction and
projection. For the people of the Middle Ages, living in the sphere of a theological culture, perfection was placed in the
past, in the time when God created the universe and humankind. Therefore, historical existence takes the
shape of the Fall, the abandonment and forgetting of original perfection and unity.
The rise of the myth of the future is rooted in modern capitalism, / in the experience
of expansion of the economy and knowledge. The idea that the future will be better
than the present is not a natural idea, but the imaginary effect of the peculiarity of
the bourgeois production model. Since its beginning, since the discovery of the new continent and the
rewriting of the maps of the world, modernity has been defined by an amplification of the very
limits of the world, and the peculiarity of capitalist economy resides exactly in the
accumulation of the surplus value that results in the constant enhancement of the
spheres of material goods and knowledge. In the second part of the nineteenth century, and in the first
part of the twentieth, the myth of the future reached its peak, becoming something more
than an implicit belief: it was a true faith, based on the concept of "progress," the
ideological translation of the reality of economic growth. Political action was
reframed in the light of this faith in a progressive future. Liberalism and social
democracy, nationalism and communism, and anarchism itself , all the different
families of modern political theory share a common certainty: notwithstanding the
darkness of the present, the future will be bright. In this book I will try to develop the idea that the
future is over. As you know, this isn't a new idea. Born with punk, the slow cancellation of the future got underway in
the 1970s and 1980s. Now those bizarre predictions have become true. The idea that the future has
disappeared is, of course, rather whimsical—since, as I write these lines, the future hasn't
stopped unfolding. But when I say "future," I am not referring to the direction of time. I am
thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural
situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated
during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak in the years after the
Second World War. Those expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks
of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegelo-Marxist
mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the
bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the
technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge; and
so on. My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological tempor-alization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to
get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of cultural lens. I'll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no
matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. These trends seem to be pointing toward the
dissipation of the legacy of civilization, based on the philosophy of universal rights. The
right to life, to equal
opportunities for all human beings, is daily denied and trampled on in the global
landscape, and Europe is no exception. The first decade of the new century has marked the
obliteration of the right to life for a growing number of people, even though
economic growth has enhanced the amount of available wealth and widened the
consumption of goods. A growing number of people are forced to leave their villages
and towns because of war, environmental waste, and famine. They are rejected,
marginalized, and simultaneously subjected to a new form of slave exploitation. The
massive internment of migrant workers in detention centers disseminated all over
the European territory dispels the illusion that the "camp" has been wiped out from
the world. Authoritarian racism is everywhere, in the security laws passed by
European parliaments, in the aggressiveness of the European white majority, but
also in the ethnicization of social conflicts and in Islamist fundamentalism. The
future that my generation was expecting was based on the unspoken confidence
that human beings will never again be treated as Jews were treated during their
German nightmare. This assumption is proving to be misleading. I want to rewind
the past evolution of the future in order to understand when and why it was
trampled and drowned.
 2NC Identity
Your project of identity replicates the semiotic exchanges of culture
invest into the information accumulation that sustains capitalism inside
the realm of production. Identities fall into the trap of proliferating of
points of aggression culminating in an acceleration of semiotic
exchanges.
Bifo 15. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, "Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 121-125

Identity is not naturally ascribed; it is a cultural product: it is the effect of the

hypostatization (fi xation and naturalization) of the cultural difference, of the psychological, social
and linguistic particularity. Identity is continuity and confi rmation of the place and of the
role of a speaker in the cycle of communication . In order to be understood, one must play one’s role
in the game, and this role is surreptitiously identifi ed as a mark of belonging. But identity is
continually searching for its roots, and the place from whence the enunciation comes is
often mistaken as one of natural origins: primeval and therefore undeniably true. The community,
which is a place of communication (a place of exchange of signs conventionally charged of meaning), is
mistaken as a natural place of belonging, and transformed into the primeval source of
meaning. The temporary and transitional convention that gives meaning to signs is strengthened and transformed into the
natural mark or motivated relation between sign and meaning . Identity may be seen as the hardening of the
inner map of orientation. Identity is the opposite of style, which is singularity and
consciousness of the singularity, a map of orientation fl exible and adaptable, retroactively
changing. Style never has a normative feature, nor implies any kind of interdiction and punishment. Identity is a limitation
(unconsciously realized) upon the possibility of comprehension and interaction. It is a useful limitation, of course,

but it is dangerous to mistake it as a condition of authenticity and primeval belonging . It is

the condition of mutual aggressiveness, of racism and violence, and
fascism. Identity is based on a hypertrophic sense of the root, and it leads
to the reclamation of belonging as criterion of truth and of selection .
Identity is the perceptual and conceptual device that gives us the possibility of knowledge,
but sometimes we mistake this knowledge for a re-cognition. So we are led to believe that which we
already know, that we possess a map thanks to our belonging. This can be useful sometimes, but it is dangerous to mistake our
cultural map for the inner territory of belonging. Without a map, one gets lost, but getting lost is the beginning of
the process of knowledge; it is the premise for creating any map. In their book Change: Principles of
Problem Formation and Resolution, the psychoanalysts Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch write that the repeated
application of the same solution in drastically different conditions is a neurotic attitude
which leads to pathological situations. Observed within the context of the current global
dynamic of deterritorialization–re-territorialization, such neuroticism emerges as a
constitutive component of today’s world order. On the one hand, globalization and the
acceleration of cultural and economic exchanges have increased the need for the fl exible
adaptation of conceptual and linguistic maps. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, the
deterritorialization that globalization entails hugely intensifi es the need for an identitarian
shelter, the need for the confi rmation of belonging. Here lies the identitarian trap which
is leading the world towards the proliferation of points of identitarian
aggressiveness: the return of concepts such as the homeland, religion and
family as aggressive forms of reassurance and self-confi rmation. We can also
read this dynamic in terms of technomutation and ethno-mutation. On the one hand, i nformation technology

has provoked the acceleration and intensifi cation of semiotic exchanges,

and on the other hand, the displacement of people and massive waves of economic and political
migration have provoked an unprecedented change in the ethnic landscape of the
territories, with all the concomitant cultural contamination and intermixing. In conditions of competition, these
processes tend to excite the need for identitarian belonging, and to give way to identitarian
aggressiveness. According to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , universal history can be viewed
as a process of deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is the passage from a space whose
code is known to a new space, where that code loses its meaning, so that things become
unrecognizable for anyone attempting to use the code that was produced by the previous
territory. The history of capitalism is continuously producing effects of deterritorialization.
At the outset, capitalism destroyed the old relation between the individual and both the
agricultural territory and the family. Subsequently, it jeopardized the national borders and
created a global space of exchange and communication . Currently, it is jeopardizing the very
relation between money and production, and opening the way to a new form of immaterial
semiotization. As capitalism destroys all forms of identifi cation, it frees the individuals from
the limitations of identity, but simultaneously it provokes a sense of displacement, a sort of
opacity that is attributable to the loss of previous meanings and emotional roots. As a result,
capitalism ultimately provokes a need for reterritorialization, and a continual return of the
past in the shape of national identities, ethnic identities, sexual identities, and so on. Modern
history is a process of forgetting that provokes an effect of anguish and that forces people to
desperately hold onto some kind of memory. But memory has faded, together with the
dissolution of the past, such that people have to invent a new set of memories . Like the character
Rachel in the 1982 neo-noir sci-fi fi lm Blade Runner, people create their own memories, putting together
pieces of old texts, of faded images, of words whose meaning is lost.
 2NC Non-War Impact
Despite this alliance, China is consumed by a spectacle of non-war, positing
itself as the peaceful antithesis of American hegemonic warmongering. The
new China is founded upon Tianxia, peaceful development in unity under
heaven. This violent inclusion, assimilation, and homogenization eliminates the
possibility for the unknown unknown. China’s neighbors are constantly
threatened by this non-war while it simultaneously papers over atrocities
within China’s own borders.
Nordin 14 (Dr. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
Religion at Lancaster University, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars,” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue: Baudrillard and War, May,
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-norden.html)//AG

In contemporary China, the official

(ii). Contemporary PRC rhetoric on pre-modern Chinese thought on war

rhetoric on war focuses on pre-emption and the claim that China will
never be a ‘hegemonic’ or warmongering power – unlike the US. In this
rhetoric, the Chinese war is by nature a non-war. Official documents
emerging in the last decade repeatedly stress that China is by nature
peaceful, which is why nobody needs to worry about its rise. In the 2005 government
whitepaper China’s Peaceful Development Road, for example, we are told that: [i]t is an inevitable choice based on China’s historical and cultural
tradition that China persists unswervingly in taking the road of peaceful development. The Chinese nation has always been a peace-loving one. Chinese
culture is a pacific culture. The spirit of the Chinese people has always featured their longing for peace and pursuit of harmony (State Council of the PRC

numerous other official and unofficial publications) posit an

2005b). The whitepaper (and

essentialised Chinese culture of peacefulness as prior to any Chinese

relations with the world. This rhetoric of an inherently non-bellicose
Chinese way has also echoed in Chinese academic debates, where Chinese pre-modern
philosophy has come back in fashion as a (selectively sampled) source of inspiration. The claims and logics that have come out of these debates are
varied. One significant grouping of Chinese academics directly follow the government line and claim that ‘choosing “peaceful rise” is on the one hand
China’s voluntary action, on the other hand it is an inevitable choice’ (Liu Jianfei 2006: 38). That peacefulness and harmony is something that ‘Chinese
people’ have always valued is an implication, and often explicitly stated ‘fact’ in these literatures. Zhan Yunling, for example, claims that ‘from ancient
times until today, China has possessed traditional thought and a culture of seeking harmony’ (Zhang Yunling 2008: 4). This claim to natural harmony is
mutually supportive of the claim that ‘the Chinese nation’ has always been a peaceful nation, to authors such as Liu Jianfei (2006), or Yu Xiaofeng and

A related set of commentators further stress the significance of

Wang Jiangli (2006).

militarily non-violent means to China getting its (naturally peaceful) way

in international relations. For example, Ding Sheng draws on the Sunzi quote mentioned above: ‘to subjugate the enemy’s
army without doing battle is the highest of excellence’ (Ding Sheng 2008: 197). This line of argument typically sees what

some would call ‘soft power tools’ as a way of getting others to become more like yourself without any need for
outright ‘war’ or other forms of physical violence. In a discussion of the official government rhetoric of ‘harmonious world’ under former president Hu
Jintao, Shi Zhongwen accordingly stresses that the doctrine opposes going to extremes, and therefore contradicts what Shi calls ‘the philosophy of
struggle’ (Shi Zhongwen 2008: 40, where ‘struggle’ implies Marxist ideology). Qin Zhiyong similarly argues that China needs to steer away from

At the same time, few Chinese

collisions and embrace the aim of ‘merging different cultures’ (Qin Zhiyong 2008: 73).

academics question the direction of the ‘merging of cultures’ discussed above –

clearly it is other cultures that should merge into China’s peaceful one. In
a common line of thought that draws on the historical concept of Tianxia,
or ‘All-under-heaven’, it is argued that the Chinese leadership can thus
bring about a harmonious world through ‘voluntary submission [by
others] rather than force’ simply through its superior morality and
exemplary behaviour (Yan Xuetong 2008: 159). On this logic, the leadership will never
need to use violence, because everybody will see its magnanimity and will
want to emulate its behaviour (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34. See Callahan 2008: 755 for a discussion). Much of
these debates have come to pivot around this concept of Tianxia, an imaginary of
the world that builds on a holistic notion of space, without radical self-
other distinction or bordered difference. To some thinkers, this imagination is based on a notion of
globalisation (for example Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli 2006: 59) or networked space (Ni Shixiong and Qian Xuming 2008: 124) where everything is
always already connected to everything else in a borderless world. In these accounts, Tianxia thinking is ‘completely different from Western civilisation,
since Chinese civilisation insists on its own subjectivity, and possesses inclusivity’ (Zhou Jianming and Jiao Shixin 2008: 28). Despite this apparent binary,
it is claimed that Tianxiaism involves an identification with all of humankind, where there is no differentiation or distinction between people (Li Baojun
and Li Zhiyong 2008: 82). A thinker whose deployment of the Tianxia concept has been particularly influential is Zhao Tingyang, who proposes the
concept as a Chinese and better way of imagining world order (Zhao Tingyang 2005; 2006), where ‘better’ means better than the ‘Western’ inter-state
system to which Tianxia is portrayed as the good opposite. In opposition to this ‘Western system’, he argues that Tianxia can offer ‘a view from
nowhere’ or a view ‘from the world’, where ‘[w]orld-ness cannot be reduced to internationality, for it is of the wholeness or totality rather than the

as a consequence of a prioritisation of order

between-ness’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 39). However,

over the preservation of alterity, ‘any inconsistency or contradiction in

the system will be a disaster’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). As a corollary of this prioritisation, Zhao comes to insist on the
homogeneity of his all-inclusive space, which aims at the uniformity of society (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33, emphasis in original) where ‘all political levels
… should be essentially homogenous or homological so as to create a harmonious system’ (2006: 33). The aim of the Tianxia system is thus to achieve

Clearly, for such homogeneity to be born from a

one single homogeneous and uniform space.

heterogeneous world, someone must change. Zhao argues that: one of the principles of Chinese
political philosophy is said ‘to turn the enemy into a friend’, and it would lose its meaning if it were not to remove conflicts and pacify social problems –
in a word, to ‘transform’ (化) the bad into the good (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34). Moreover, this conversion to a single ‘good’ homogeneity should happen
through ‘volontariness’ rather than through expansive colonialism: ‘an empire of All-under-Heaven could only be an exemplar passively in situ, rather

However, when we are given

than positively become missionary’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 36, emphasis in original).

clues as to how this idea of the ‘good’ to which everyone should conform
would be determined, Zhao’s idea of self-other relations seems to rely on
the possibility of some Archimedean point from which to judge this good,
and/or the complete eradication of any otherness, so that the one space
that exists is completely the space of self (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). Thus, Zhao confesses that
‘[t]he unspoken theory is that most people do not really know what is
best for them, but that the elite do, so the elite ought genuinely to decide
for the people’ (2006: 32). As explained by William A. Callahan: By thinking through the world with a view from everywhere, Zhao
argues that we can have a ‘complete and perfect’ understanding of problems and solutions that is ‘all-inclusive’. With this all-inclusive notion of Tianxia,
there is literally ‘no outside’.… Since all places and all problems are domestic, Zhao says that ‘this model guarantees the a priori completeness of the

This ‘complete and perfect’ understanding is hence

world’ (Callahan 2007: 7).

attainable only to an elite, who will achieve homogeneity (convert others

into self) through example. Eventually, then, there will be no other, the
‘many’ will have been transformed into ‘the one’ (Zhao Tingyang 2005:
13, see also 2006). It is through this transformation and submission to the
ruling elite that the prevention of war is imagined. If Baudrillard had engaged with these
contemporary Chinese redeployments of pre-modern thought on war (which, to my knowledge, he never did), I think he would have recognised many

of the themes that interested him in Western approaches to the first Gulf war. Most strikingly, this is a way of
talking about war that writes out war from its story. Like deterrence, it is
an imagination of war that approaches it via prevention and pre-emption.
What is more, we recognise an obsession with the self-image of the self to
itself – in this case, a Chinese, undemocratic self rather than a Western,
democratic one. In this Chinese war, like in the Persian Gulf of which Baudrillard wrote, there is no
space for an Other that is Other. In the Tianxia imaginary, Others can only
be imagined as something that will eventually assimilate into The System
and become part of the Self, as the Self strives for all-inclusive perfection.
There is no meeting with an Other in any form. Encounter only happens
once the Other becomes like the Self, is assimilated into the One, and
hence there is no encounter at all (for an analysis that reads Baudrillard and Tianxia to this effect in a Chinese non-
war context, see Nordin 2012). (iii). Contemporary Chinese war and its various modes As was the case with the first Gulf War, the war that

we are waiting for here in the Chinese case is thus a non-war. If by war we
mean some form of (symbolic) exchange or some clash of forms, agons, or
forces (as we tend to do even in the current ‘cutting edge research’ in ‘critical war studies’, see Nordin and Öberg 2013) – we cannot
expect it to take place. In China, we see not only a participation in the
Western system of (non)war through the war on terror, but also another
system that precisely denies space for imagining an other as Other, which
in turn makes the idea of exchange impossible. In this sense, the Ancient
Chinese approach to war through the Tianxia concept – at least as it is reflected by
current Chinese thinkers like Zhao Tingyang and Yan Xuetong – is not a Clausewitzean war continuing
politics by other means, but precisely a continuation of the absence of
politics by other means. It arguably shares this aspect with both the first and the second Gulf Wars. This,
however, is certainly not to say that there are not those who fear a
Chinese war or that we have no reason to fear it. In various guises, the
war that is imagined through a Clausewitzean ontology of agonistic and
reciprocal exchange returns and is reified also in China. It is not uncommon for authors
discussing the Chinese traditions of thinking war that I describe above to begin their discussion by explicitly drawing on Clausewitz and take his war as

it is clear that this building of a

their point of departure (for example Liu Tiewa 2014). For several Chinese writers,

‘harmonious world’ is directed against others whose influence should be

‘smashed’ (Fang Xiaojiao 2008: 68). From this line of thinkers, the call to build a harmonious world
has also been used to argue for increased Chinese military capacity, including its
naval power (Deng Li 2009). Although Chinese policy documents stress that violence or

threat of violence should be avoided, they similarly appear to leave room

for means that would traditionally be understood as both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ in Joseph
Nye’s dichotomisation (See for example State Council of the PRC 2005a). Indeed, many of Chinas
neighbours have voiced concern with growing Chinese military capacity
over the last few years, and a Chinese non-war is no less frightening to its
neighbours than a war – be it labelled ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, ‘real’ or ‘virtual’.
This Chinese war – past, present and future – is acted out in various
different modes. Violent war is reified through the spectacle of computer
games, art, online memes, cartoons and not least dramas on film and
television (Diamant 2011, 433). The Chinese state claims success in all of its wars, and
simultaneously claims that it has never behaved aggressively beyond its
borders (which is also, of course, a convenient way of glossing over all the
violence perpetrated by the Chinese state within those borders, the
violence with which they are upheld and with which they were
established in the first place, and the clear contradiction between the
state’s fixation on territorial integrity and its borderless and holistic
Tianxia rhetoric). Popular cultural renditions of war paint a more varied picture, but all
contribute to a reification of war. Recent Chinese productions that reify
war on the screen through what we may call ‘war porn’ are numerous –
indeed, it has been claimed that China produces what is probably the highest number of dramas
set in wartime in the world (Diamant 2011: 433). One example accessible to a non-Chinese audience is Feng Xiaogang’s
Assembly (Jijiehao 集结号) from 2007, which recreates horrifically violent and ‘realistic’ battle

scenes from the Civil War between Guomindang nationalists and Communist
troops. The Second Sino-Japanese war is another popular setting for these
reifications of war, providing the backdrop for another large budget film by Feng Xiaogang, the 2012 Back to 1942 (Yijiusier 一九四二), and

Life and
international star-director Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War (Jinling shisan chai 金陵十三钗). Another example is Lu Chuan’s City of

Death (Nanjing! Nanjing! 南京！南京！) which became a box office hit in China in 2009, but was criticized for its
portrayal of a Japanese soldier as a fully formed and sympathetic person in
its narration of the Nanjing massacre. Off screen China has, in the reform era since Mao’s death, seen a new and

related wave of commemorations of the Civil and Anti-Japanese wars in

museums throughout China, which play a central role in national
education campaigns to ‘never forget national humiliation’. Examples that house both
permanent exhibitions and temporary special exhibits commemorating particular war events include the Rape of Nanjing Memorial/Nanjing Massacre
museum in Nanjing; the Military Museum, the Museum of Revolutionary History and the Memorial Museum of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance
to Japan in and outside Beijing; and the September 18th Incident Memorial and Museum of the Manchurian Crisis in Shenyang, to name but a few

these
(these museums and their exhibits of war have been studied for example by Mitter 2000, 2003 and Waldron 1996). Many of

museums include vivid reconstructions, often as waxworks with sound

and motion, of horrific battlefield scenes for its audience to consume.
Reifications of war on screen and in museums moreover tie in with a ‘new remembering’ by
academic and popular publications since the late 1980s, which
commemorates and fetishizes China’s past experiences of war as well as
projects that experience into the present and the future through the ever-
present rhetoric of ‘National Humiliation’ (guochi.For articles tracing this ‘new remembering’, see Coble
2007 and Mitter 2003). Masses of propaganda are devoted to the commemoration of

the Anti-Japanese war, particularly relating to various Campaigns to Support the People’s Liberation Army and Military
Dependents, and in annually recurring celebrations of the Spring Festival, the Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, Army Day and the

‘National Humiliation Day’ which has received much academic attention in recent years (Callahan 2004, 2009; Wang Zheng 2008). Much ofthe
state-led reification of war, and particularly its treatment in academic publications
and governmental speeches, has centred on the ‘numbers game’ of
claiming high death tolls and economic costs of the battle histories of the
Anti-Japanese war, rather than fore-fronting the all-too-human element
that may be found in for example memoir literature (Coble 2007, 406). Accordingly, other
scholars have argued – and I agree with them here – that ‘[a]lthough Chinese movies and television

often feature military-related themes, it is rare to find frank and

politicized depictions of China’s military conflicts’ (Diamant 2011: 431). As in the
Tianxia narrative discussed above, politics is paradoxically eradicated
from these versions of war, together with an other understood as a
human other. However, the literatures critiquing this de-politicization typically criticise the intellectual elites in various cultural and
propaganda offices for producing an ‘artificial rendering of China’s wars’ denying veterans an ‘authentic military voice’ (Diamant 2011: 431, 461). My

point here is different.It is not a question of creating an image of false

representation, or what we may call a third order simulation, a masking of the reality
of war. Rather, the point is that reality and illusion can no longer be
distinguished, but have collapsed into one another. There is no longer a
‘real’ war behind these narratives which can be uncovered (cf. Nordin 2012).
Through these other modes, the Chinese non-war is reified as war. Like the Gulf
War of which Baudrillard wrote, it appears seamless, yet is riddled with contradictions. If what

took place in the Persian Gulf was the spectacle of war, what is taking place in contemporary China is

perhaps better understood as the spectacle of non-war. Like the spectacle of war it has a range of

strategic and political purposes for everyone involved. Like the pre-emptive narratives
of Tianxia, the reifications of war that hark back to a Clausewitzean
ontology relay a war that is scripted or coded in advance, disallowing
alterity. And to those who fear the possibility of the Chinese war, we might
indeed see reasons to fear, but also provide a reminder that it is stupid to
be for or against this war, if we do no for a moment question its
probability, credibility or level of reality.
What emerges is not silence but an understanding that there exist the very
same Systems of assimilation which are not merely an extension of American
capitalism and democracy, and should not be essentialized into Alterity. The
same critical lens should be applied to people designated as radical Others
simply due to their geographic location.
Nordin 14 (Dr. Astrid Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
Religion at Lancaster University, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars,” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue: Baudrillard and War, May,
2014, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-norden.html)//AG

Baudrillard advocates an
IV. Baudrillard’s war and others’ wars in China and Asia As shown at the outset of this article,

interest in the other as Other, but is unclear about how this feeds in to knowledge about that other. What
form can our ‘interest’ take, if we disallow the attempt to gain
knowledge? We return, then, to the question of how we as scholars may approach Others’ wars, as they are
thought, operationalised and simulated in other places. What I think emerges
from the above is an understanding that ‘the global’, as we may understand it through Baudrillard, is precisely global.

Systems that try to assimilate anything and everything into their own
programmes exist in different forms in different places, including in Asia.
To essentialize these systems into one great mysterious unit of imagined
Alterity would ironically be a way to deny such alterity by fetishizing it
and reducing it to an Identity of Otherness. From Baudrillard's notion that every system contains the seed
of its own demise stems his suspicion of centralized systems and the pretence to holistic unity .

These systems, of which the American-led war on terror is one example and Zhao's

Sinocentric Tianxia is another, always claim to do good and attempt to

assimilate everything and anything into their system, striving towards
perfection. Asia offers no respite from this logic. Clearly, They grapple
with the same problems as We do, and can offer no greener grass where
the scholar can comfortably stretch out assured at having escaped the
confines of The System. In this way, perhaps China’s wars can indicate to us that the logics of Baudrillard’s
globality does not only have to be understood in the narrow sense of an operational system of total trade, but that its logic is
recognisable also in other systems – systems that are not just some extension
of Western capitalism and attempts at democracy, but that have their
roots in other philosophical traditions. Moreover, as Baudrillard tells us, these systems are
always susceptible to challenge by singularities of culture, that which is
excluded and condemned by the system because it tries to stand outside
it – the Other that does not want to be turned into self, the barbarian that
does not want to be civilized, or what Baudrillard himself calls ‘the other
who will not be mothered’, whose call to arms is ‘fuck your mother’ (Baudrillard
2006, see also Nordin 2013; forthcoming 2014). Baudrillard reads a clear antagonism as existing between the global and the singular (Baudrillard 2006,
2002 [2000], 155-6). To him, ‘foreignness is eternal’ (Baudrillard 1993 [1990]), or as Coulter writes: ‘Just as all those cultural singularities will never
merge into one global monoculture, people remain radically other to each other’ (Coulter 2004). This alterity or radical otherness, then, is there

whether the theorist recognises it or not. Of course, an argument could be made that all attempts at understanding,
studying or explaining something is a violent act that reduces its
purported object to a knowable unit and denies its alterity. That argument would have a
point – after all, speaking is an act of violence and there are numerous problems

with the scholarly endeavour to make visible, to communicate and to

reveal things as though they were not hyper-visible already. If, however,
we decide that we will choose to commit this violence of speaking (rather than,
say, choose a lifetime of silence or expressing ourselves only through the means of interpretative dance), there seems to be no

reason for remaining silent on swathes of people we have chosen to

designate as radical Others because of their geographical location. That is to say,
there are no reasons except ones based on the imposition of an artificial a priori

Identity as Other, for the purposes of exclusion, which again is surely intolerably patronising. Perhaps
we can draw on Baudrillard not so much to remind ourselves only of the alterity of exotic Others elsewhere, but to remind ourselves of the Other in the
Self. Perhaps the most crucial thing is to remember, with Coulter I think, that it is not those other (Asian, foreign) Others and Their wars that are
radically other to Us and Our wars, but people that are radically other to each other – and we who are radically other to ourselves, despite and through
all our attempts to knowledge.
 2NC Simulation
Simulation bad
Gerofsky 10 “The impossibility of ‘real-life’ word problems (according to Bakhtin, Lacan, Zizek
and Baudrillard)” (Susan, Simon Fraser University, 2000, PhD, Curriculum Theory)//pday

Baudrillard's ideas about representing ‘reality’ are discussed primarily in relation to his concept
of simulations and simulacra in postmodern society, and in his concept of the impossibility of
exchange in our contemporary world (and thence, the impossibility of equivalence or
representation). Much of Baudrillard's work is focused on the idea of absence, particularly the
absence of a referent for signs and the absence of a transcendent reality
to ground claims of truth and validity. Both these absences are important in
our consideration of reality and mathematical word problems, since these
problems consist of words and stories often taken to refer to ‘real-life
situations’, and since their use in mathematics education is often legitimized
by claims to validity in the realm of a greater reality.
In his essay, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ (Baudrillard, 1988), Baudrillard presents the idea of the
‘precessession of the simulacra’ in our contemporary globalized, networked,
digitized society – the idea that simulations now precede, and in fact
supplant reality, existing entirely without any corresponding or matching
referent, and interacting primarily with other simulations:
It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication …  it is rather a question of
substituting signs of the real for the real itself … A hyperreal sheltered … 
from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room
only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of
difference. (p. 170)
Baudrillard's ‘hyperreal’ is best exemplified by the most exuberant excesses of American and
now global culture (Las Vegas, various Disneylands) which establish environments based on
simulated ‘nostalgic’ or ‘historical’ references to a history that has been altered and fictionalized
(namely Main Street USA, or the Luxor Hotel and Casino).

One step beyond simulation, simulacra arrive prior to any referent, create a virtual experience
that is taken as real, and interact with other simulacra and simulations. We are all becoming
casually familiar with simulacra through our interactions on networked social software on the
Internet. We throw sheep at one another on Facebook, participate in the viral proliferation of
video genres on YouTube, and watch our universities use ‘real’ cash to purchase virtual islands
for online campuses on Second Life.
Our postmodern world of networked computers and digital media creates strange
and hitherto-unknown simulacra that have effects beyond the virtual. An
article in the Canadian magazine Walrus (Thompson, 2004) documents some aspects of the
economy of virtual worlds in online fantasy games like EverQuest and Ultima Online.

The Walrus article documents a young economist's discovery of the economic and governmental

systems of an online game, EverQuest (Castronova, 2001). He discovered a strange system
where simulacra (virtual money and virtual goods) were traded for US dollars:

The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players
together created in a single year inside the game … turned out to be $2,266 US per capita. By
World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as
wealthy as Russia. It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even
exist. (Thompson, 2004, p. 41)

Not only are there multi-million dollar businesses that trade in game points, game levels,
avatars, offshore banking and currency trading amongst games, but gaming sweatshops in China
and Mexico have recently been documented. In these sweatshops, hundreds of low-wage
employees are hired to spend long hours and days playing games so that their on-line characters
gain powers, levels, and virtual possessions, which are then sold through brokers to wealthy
buyers.

Real-life wars are fought using video games and virtual environments, to the point where
simulacra may take precedence in creating experiences of war, at least for the privileged:

The US military has already licensed a private chunk of [an online ‘world’ called] There and
created a simulation of the planet on it. The army is currently using the virtual Baghdad
in There as a training space for American soldiers. (Thompson, 2004, p. 47)

For reasons like this one, Baudrillard made the famous, highly controversial statement that the
Gulf War of 1991 had not taken place. Certainly the nature of warfare has changed drastically
when both training and missile launches take place in virtual, video game environments and
when battles are telecast live by satellite on CNN.

Following McLuhan et al. (2005), it could be argued that the world of technology-
mediated simulacra where we now live creates a total service
environment that mitigates against a definable real that can be separated
from the virtual; the real and virtue are inextricably entangled and
mutually affecting.
Baudrillard goes beyond technological arguments to an even more
fundamental argument for the impossibility of any representation of the
real in any secular society. Using Levi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss’ anthropological
concepts of exchange as a fundamental to the circulation of commodities in a society,
Baudrillard (2001) argues that exchange has become impossible, and thus ‘reality’ exists only as
simulacra:

There is no equivalent of the world. That might even be said to be its definition – or
lack of it. No equivalent, no double, no representation, no mirror … There is
not enough room both for the world and for its double. So there can be
no verifying of the world. That is, indeed, why ‘reality’ is an imposture.
Being without possible verification, the world is a fundamental illusion. (p.
3)

Baudrillard's argument deals with the world or universe as a whole, but also
with systems within the world like law, politics, economics, aesthetics,
even the field of biology. In any of these systems, it is possible to pretend to
be able to represent reality at the micro level, but at the macro level, the
entire system is without grounding, unless we posit a ‘higher reality’
through religion or metaphysics (and this is not acceptable in a secular society).
Taking politics as an example, Baudrillard (2001) writes:
Politics is laden with signs and meanings, but seen from the outside it has
none. It has nothing to justify it at a universal level (all attempts to ground
politics at a metaphysical or philosophical level have failed). It absorbs
everything which comes into its ambit and converts it into its own substance,
but it is not able to convert itself into – or be reflected in – a higher reality
which would give it meaning. (p. 4)
For ‘politics’, we could substitute ‘mathematics’, since Gödel's Theorem has proved it impossible
to devise a mathematical system that is both consistent and complete; or ‘physics’, since
quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle have placed a radical uncertainty
and inconsistency at the heart of this field and of our ideas of matter itself.

Baudrillard's (2001) concept of impossible exchange leads to a conclusion very much like
Lyotard's assertion that, in our postmodern condition, no grand narratives are possible. Writing
about economics, Baudrillard (2001) says,

That principle [of a grounding of the field in reality and rationality] is valid
only within an artificially bounded sphere. Outside that sphere lies radical
uncertainty. And it is this exiled, foreclosed uncertainty which haunts
systems and generates the illusion of the economic, the political, and so
on. It is the failure to understand this which leads systems into
incoherence, hypertrophy and, in some sense, leads them to destroy
themselves. For it is from the inside, by overreaching themselves, that
systems make bonfires of their own postulates, and fall into ruins. (p. 6)
Taking this big, universe-sized idea to our little world of mathematical word
problems, there is a kind of unacceptable hubris in claims that there can be a
precise equivalence, a transparent matching, an exchange between
‘reality’ and these brief, generic pedagogic stories. To claim that mathematical
word problems (or the theorems of physics, or the narratives of history, or
novels in the style of ‘Realism’) have a relationship of identity with reality
is to ‘make a bonfire of our own postulates’. Baudrillard's concept of reality, like
Lacan's ‘Real’, cannot be captured in language or signs of any kind; it cannot
be matched up with its equivalent, since it is constitutionally impossible
to have an equivalent for reality. Positivistic science, a universe
completely marked out with the grid lines of Newtonian physics,
mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace's deterministic project to
know all present, past and future eventualities by extrapolation from a
complete knowledge of this instant – all of these aspects of the Modernist
projects have been foreclosed by the impossibility of providing a
grounding or an exchange for reality, and we are left with an unresolvable
uncertainty, perhaps mystery, at the heart of things.
 2NC Securitization
Securitization against death is a form of blackmail which dispossess us of our own death in order
that we die the only death the system authorizes—inside a glass sarcophagus. The aff merely
adds more bandages to the sarcophagus and maintains its repressive social control through the
continuous industrial prolongation of life that inevitably culminates in our destruction. To
recognize the radical compatibility of life and death is to refuse such social domestication and
colonization.
Baudrillard 93. Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and cultural theorist, former professor at
European Graduate School, Symbolic Exchange and Death: Theory, Culture & Society Baudrillard
Jean. Sage Publications, Inc. 1993, pg. 177-180

Security is another form of social control, in the form of life blackmailed

with the afterlife. It is universally present for us today, and 'security forces' range
from life assurance and social security to the car seatbelt by way of the
state security police force. 39 'Belt up' says an advertising slogan for seatbelts. Of
course, security, like ecology, is an industrial business extending its cover up to
the level of the species: a convertibility of accident, disease and pollution
into capitalist surplus profit is operative everywhere. But this is above all
a question of the worst repression, which consists in dispossessing you of
your own death, which everybody dreams of, as the darkness beneath
their instinct of conservation. It is necessary to rob everyone of the last
possibility of giving themselves their own death as the last 'great escape'
from a life laid down by the system. Again, in this symbolic short-circuit, the gift-
exchange is the challenge to oneself and one's own life, and is carried out
through death. Not because it expresses the individual's asocial rebellion (the defection of
one or millions of individuals does not infringe the law of the system at all), but because it
carries in it a principle of sociality that is radically antagonistic to our own
social repressive principle. To bury death beneath the contrary myth of
security, it is necessary to exhaust the gift-exchange.
Is it so that men might live that the demand for death must be exhausted? No, but in order
that they die the only death the system authorises: the living are
separated from their dead, who no longer exchange anything but the
form of their afterlife, under the sign of comprehensive insurance. Thus
car safety: mummified in his helmet, his seatbelt, all the paraphernalia of security, wrapped
up in the security myth, the driver is nothing but a corpse, closed up in another, nonmythic,
death, as neutral and objective as technology, noiseless and expertly crafted. Riveted to his
machine, glued to the spot in it, he no longer runs the risk of dying, since he is
already dead. This is the secret of security, like a steak under cellophane:
to surround you with a sarcophagus in order to prevent you from dying.40
Our whole technical culture creates an artificial milieu of death. It is not only armaments that
remain the general archetype of material production, but the simplest machine
around us constitutes a horizon of death, a death that will never be resolved
because it has crystallised beyond reach: fixed capital of death, where the living
labour of death has frozen over, as the labour force is frozen in fixed
capital and dead labour. In other words, all material production is merely a
gigantic 'character armour' by means of which the species means to keep
death at a respectful distance. Of course, death itself overshadows the
species and seals it into the armour the species thought to protect itself
with. Here again, commensurate with an entire civilisation, we find the image of the
automobile-sarcophagus: the protective armour is just death miniaturised and become a
technical extension of your own body. The biologisation of the body and the
technicisation of the environment go hand in hand in the same
obsessional neurosis. The technical environment is our over-production of pollutant,
fragile and obsolescent objects. For production lives, its entire logic and strategy are articulated
on fragility and obsolescence. An economy of stable products and good objects is
indispensable: the economy develops only by exuding danger, pollution,
usury, deception and haunting. The economy lives only on the suspension
of death that it maintains throughout material production, and through
renewing the available death stocks, even if it means conjuring it up by a
security build up: blackmail and repression. Death is definitively
secularised in material production, where it is reproduced on a large scale
as capital. Even our bodies, which have become biological machinery, are
modelled on this inorganic body, and therefore become, at the same
time, a bad object, condemned to disease, accident and death. Living by the
production of death, capital has an easy time producing security: it's the same thing. Security
is the industrial prolongation of death, just as ecology is the industrial
prolongation of pollution. A few more bandages on the sarcophagus. This is
also true of the great institutions that are the glory of our democracy : Social Security is
the social prosthesis of a dead society ('Social Security is death!' May '68), that is to
say, a society already exterminated in all its symbolic wheels, in its deep
system of reciprocities and obligations, which means that neither the
concept of security nor that of the 'social' ever had any meaning. The 'social'
begins by taking charge of death. It's the same story as regards cultures that have been
destroyed then revived and protected as folklore (cf. M. de Certeau, 'La beautédu mort' [in La
culture au pluriel, Paris: UGE, 1974]). The same goes for life assurance, which is the domestic
variant of a system which everywhere presupposes death as an axiom. The social translation of
the death of the group each materialising for the other only as social capital indexed on death.

Death is dissuaded at the price of a continual mortification: such is the paradoxical logic of
security. In a Christian context, ascesis played the same role. The accumulation of suffering and
penitence was able to play the same role as character armour, as a protective sarcophagus
against hell. And our obsessional compulsion for security can be interpreted
as a gigantic collective ascesis, an anticipation of death in life itself: from
protection into protection, from defence to defence, crossing all
jurisdictions, institutions and modern material apparatuses, life is no
longer anything but a doleful, defensive book-keeping, locking every risk
into its sarcophagus. Keeping the accounts on survival, instead of the
radical compatibility of life and death. Our system lives off the production
of death and pretends to manufacture security. An about-face? Not at all, just a
simple twist in the cycle whose two ends meet. That an automobile firm remodels itself on the
basis of security (like industry on anti-pollution measures) without altering its range, objectives
or products shows that security is only a question of exchanging terms. Security is only an
internal condition of the reproduction of the system when it reaches a
certain level of expansion, just as feedback is only an internal regulating
procedure for systems that have reached a certain point of complexity.
After having exalted production, today we must therefore make security heroic. 'At a time when
anybody at all can be killed driving any car whatsoever, at whatever speed, the true hero is
he who refuses to die' (a Porsche hoarding: 'Let's put an end to a certain glorification of
death'). But this is difficult, since people are indifferent to security: they did not want it when
Ford and General Motors proposed it between 1955 and 1960. It had to be imposed in every
instance. Irresponsible and blind? No, this resistance must be added to that which traditional
groups throughout have opposed to 'rational' social progress: vaccination, medicine, job
security, a school education, hygiene, birth control and many other things: Always these
resistances have been broken, and today we can produce a 'natural', 'eternal' and
'spontaneous' state based on the need for security and all the good things
that our civilisation has produced. We have successfully infected people
with the virus of conservation and security, even though they will have to
fight to the death to get it. In fact, it is more complicated, since they are fighting for the
right to security, which is of a profoundly different order. As regards security itself, no-one gives
a damn. They had to be infected over generations for them to end up
believing that they 'needed' it, and this success is an essential aspect of
'social' domestication and colonisation. That entire groups would have
preferred to die out rather than see their own structures annihilated by
the terrorist intervention of medicine, reason, science and centralised
power this has been forgotten, swept away under the universal moral law
of the 'instinct' of conservation. However, this resistance always reappears,
even if only in the form of the workers' refusal to apply safety standards in the factories; what
do they want out of this, if not to salvage a little bit of control over their lives, even if they put
themselves at risk, or if its price is increasing exploitation (since they produce at ever greater
speed)? These are not 'rational' proletarians. But they struggle in their own way, and
they know that economic exploitation is not as serious as the 'accursed
share', the accursed fragment that above all they must not allow to be
taken from them, the share of symbolic challenge, which is at the same
time a challenge to security and to their own lives. The boss can exploit
them to death, but he will only really dominate them if he manages to
make each identify with their own individual interests and become the
accountant and the capitalist of their own lives. He would then genuinely
be the Master, and the worker the slave. As long as the exploited retain
the choice of life and death through this small resistance to security and
the moral order, they win on their own, symbolic, ground. The car driver's
resistance to security is of the same order and must be eliminated as immoral: thus suicide has
been prohibited or condemned everywhere because primarily it signifies a challenge that
society cannot reply to, and which therefore ensures the pre-eminence of a single suicide over
the whole social order. Always the accursed share (the fragment that everyone takes from their
own lives so as to challenge the social order; the fragment that everyone takes from their own
body so as to give it; this may even be their own death, on condition that everyone gives it
away), the fragment which is the whole secret of symbolic exchange,
because it is given, received and returned, and cannot therefore be
breached by the dominant exchange, remaining irreducible to its law and
fatal to it: its only real adversary, the only one it must exterminate.
 2NC Value to Life Impact
Transparency is impossible, and striving for it kills all value to life.
Han 15 “The Transparency Society” (Byung-Chul, professor of philosophy and cultural studies
at the Universität der Künste Berlin)//pday

Thus, Humboldt also observes of language: [A] thing may spring up in man, for which no
understanding can discover the reason in previous circumstances; and we should . . . violate,
indeed, the historical truth of its emergence and change, if we sought to exclude from it the
possibility of such inexplicable phenomena.4 The ideology of “postprivacy” proves equally naïve.
In the name of transparency, it demands completely surrendering the private sphere, which is
supposed to lead to see-through communication. The view rests on several errors. For one,
human existence is not transparent, even to itself . According to Freud, the ego
denies precisely what the unconscious affirms and desires without reserve. The id remains
largely hidden to the ego. Therefore, a rift runs through the human psyche and
prevents the ego from agreeing even with itself. This fundamental rift
renders self-transparency impossible. A rift also gapes between people. For this
reason, interpersonal transparency proves impossible to achieve. It is also not worth
trying to do so. The other’s very lack of transparency is what keeps the relationship alive.
Georg Simmel writes: The mere fact of absolute knowledge, of full psychological
exploration, sobers us even without prior intoxication, paralyzes the vitality
of relations. . . . The fertile depth of relationships, which senses and
honors something more, something final, behind all that is revealed . . . ,
simply rewards the sensitivity [Zartheit] and self-control that still respects
inner privacy even in the most intimate, all-consuming relationship which
allows the right to secrets to be preserved.” Compulsive transparency lacks
this same “sensitivity”—which simply means respect for Otherness that can
never be completely eliminated. Given the pathos for transparency that has laid hold of
contemporary society, it seems necessary to gain practical familiarity with the
pathos of distance. Distance and shame refuse to be integrated into the accelerated
circulation of capital, information, and communication. In this way, all confidential spaces
for withdrawing are removed in the name of transparency. Light floods them, and they
are then depleted. It only makes the world more shameless and more naked.
Autonomy presumes one person’s freedom not to understand another. Richard Sennett
remarks: “Rather than an equality of understanding, a transparent equality,
autonomy means accepting in the other what you do not understand, an
opaque equality.”6 What is more, a transparent relationship is a dead one, altogether
lacking attraction and vitality. A new Enlightenment is called for: there are
positive, productive spheres of human existence and coexistence that the
compulsion for transparency is simply demolishing. In this sense, Nietzsche writes:
“The new Enlightenment. . . . It is not enough to recognize in what ignorance man and animal
lives; you must also learn to possess the will to ignorance. You must
understand that without such ignorance life itself would be impossible, that under this
condition alone does the living preserve itself and flourish .”7 It has been demonstrated that
more information does not necessarily lead to better decisions.8 Intuition, for example,
transcends available data and follows its own logic. Today the growing, indeed
the rampant, mass of information is crippling [eliminating] all higher judgment. Often
less knowledge and information achieves something more. It is not unusual
for the negativity of omitting and forgetting to prove productive. The
society of transparency cannot tolerate a gap [Lücke] in information or of sight. Yet both
thinking and inspiration require a vacuum. Incidentally, the German word for happiness [Glück]
derives from this open space; up until the Late Middle Ages, pronunciation revealed as much
the negativity of a gap would be a
[Gelücke]. It follows that a society that no longer admits
society without happiness. Love without something hidden to sight is
pornography. And without a gap in knowledge, thinking degenerates into calculation. The
society of positivity has taken leave of both dialectics and hermeneutics. The dialectic is based
on negativity. Thus, Hegel’s “Spirit” does not turn away from the negative but endures and
preserves it within itself. Negativity nourishes the “life of the mind.” Spirit has “power,”
according to Hegel, “only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it.”9 Such
lingering yields the “magical power that converts it into being.” In contrast, whoever
“surfs” only for what is positive proves mindless. The Spirit is slow because it
tarries with the negative and works through it. The system of transparency abolishes
all negativity in order to accelerate itself. Tarrying with the negative has given way to
racing and raving in the positive. Nor does the society of positivity tolerate negative feelings.
Consequently, one loses the ability to handle suffering and pain, to give them form.
For Nietzsche, the human soul owes its depth, grandeur, and strength precisely to the
time it spends with the negative. Human spirit is born from pain, too: “That tension of
the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, . . . its inventiveness
and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting
suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret,
mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not granted through suffering ,
through the discipline of great suffering?”10 The society of positivity is now in the
process of organizing the human psyche in an entirely new way. In the course of
positivization, even love flattens out into an arrangement of pleasant
feelings and states of arousal without complexity or consequence. Alain Badiou’s
In Praise of Love quotes the slogans of the dating service Meetic: “Be in love without falling in
love!” Or, “You don’t have to suffer to be in love!”11 Love undergoes domestication and is
and comfort. Even the slightest injury must be
positivized as a formula for consumption
avoided. Suffering and passion are figures of negativity. On the one hand, they
are giving way to enjoyment without negativity. On the other, their place has
been taken by psychic disturbances such as exhaustion, fatigue, and depression—all of
which are to be traced back to the excess of positivity. Theory in the strong sense of the
word is a phenomenon of negativity, too. It makes a decision determining what belongs and
what does not. As a mode of highly selective narration, it draws a line of distinction. On the basis
of such negativity, theory is violent. It is “produced to prevent things . . . from
touching” and “to redistinguish what has been confused.”12 Without the
negativity of distinction, matters proliferate and grow promiscuously. In this
respect, theory borders on the ceremonial, which separates the initiated and the
uninitiated. It is mistaken to assume that the mass of positive data and
information—which is assuming untold dimensions today—has made theory
superfluous, that is, that comparing data can replace the use of models.