INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
First of all, I would like to clarify my relation to this subject. I was thrown into it, the way certain questions throw you into a subject, out of sheer intellectual interest; I was also forced into it, like we were all forced into it, by the events of the late 70s and the early 80s.
I was also forced into this subject by the problems of Autonomia. Before that, my position with relation to the armed wing of the terrorist movement – well, I remember it was very popular as an image among downtown artists and intellectuals in New York.
Actually, I discovered the problem through friends of mine, young economists who had exiled themselves to New York. And through them, and also through contacts in Italy, I became aware of a very tricky problem that needed some clarification. As always, I think that if we don’t want to just teach, one of the functions of intellectuals is to try to clarify things that are very complicated.
So this special issue of Semiotext(e) on Autonomia1 was unlike other issues; it was some sort of crisis issue. I suddenly became aware that the problems in Italy were very complex, and people in this country had no idea what was going on. Most of the people who contributed to this issue were actually in jail. Some of them are still there. They were accused of being terrorists, and that forced me to think more seriously about terrorism – to try to disengage from this glamorous image that was very much part of the punk rock scene in New York.
So, this issue was an attempt to intervene in a very critical situation. The Italian thinkers, the Italian Autonomia, were being rounded up and put in jail. I was hoping that this would interest the American Left, but I was totally mystified, because the American Left pussyfooted around the problem and didn’t want to make a commitment.
Finally, I decided that we should organise a meeting in New York, to which the staffs of several radical magazines were invited. A few of them showed up, and at the very time when I announced that there would be a joint project of Telos and Semiotext(e), the people from Telos got up and said, ‘We are here as observers, we have no connection to this publication . . .’ And this went down like that for the whole of this meeting. We had twenty young, bright Italian intellectuals. No one, no one asked them any questions. No one wanted to know. And most of the questions turned out to be not about Autonomia, but about the concept – the concept – of terrorism. We had to define this very carefully, so everyone would feel at ease. So this is the context of my interest.
Now, first of all we have to define a bit what is the specificity of Autonomia, and why we are not talking about Autonomia here, but about terrorism. There is little that exists about Autonomia, at least little that existed before they were put on public trial in Italy, and subject to very heavy media coverage. In other words, what I liked about Autonomia, and what I still like about it, is that there was nothing spectacular about it. The whole idea about Autonomia was that it was a non-representative movement. And, by its composition and its mode of action, it was very diversified. Its goal was not at all to create media exposure, or to work through the media. That is why, of course, it didn’t create any attention.
One of my other surprises, in the last few weeks, when I started to research what was going on at the level of interest in terrorism and the media: I was surprised to see the whole library that has sprung up over the last ten years to cover the problem of ethics and the media, the effect of the media on terrorists, the effects of terrorism on the media, the countermeasures, the government commissions that were created to deal with it – I mean, it’s a huge enterprise that tends to see terrorism as something that exists independently. It creates a great deal of interest, it also creates a large number of studies. All of these elements fit very well into our society. And yet, there is practically nothing about Autonomia.
Again, that’s what interests me about Autonomia. It was an attempt – maybe the last attempt, though I hope history will surprise us – but Autonomia is for me the very singular original movement to have emerged since the 60s. In fact, Italy is the only country where the 60s movement extended itself much beyond the student confrontation with the state or with society. So Autonomia was very innovative in this respect, and in the sense that they really were one of the first to question the bases of Marxism within some sort of neo-Marxist perspective. And one of the most far-reaching attempts they made was to take away the notion of work, and value by work and through work, from Marxist theory. Which, I don’t know if you understand me, but it’s like taking the rug out from under Marx. [Laughter] But they did that in a way that was very active and problematic. Because they didn’t do it, like the new philosophers in France, out of a feeling that Marxism was in essence connected with repression, as if Stalinism and the deformation of the state were part of Marx’s theory. In fact, they tried to use Marxism in a pragmatic way. For example, they said, ‘Okay, Marx didn’t watch television, and perhaps a few things are to be done in our time besides a criticism of capital.’
So the idea was to re-evaluate Marxism in the light of a very specific situation: that of Italy in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Perhaps one of their first realisations was that there was something in Italy that didn’t fit within the traditional classical position. And one of their first attempts was to examine what they called ‘class recomposition’, and to see – in some sort of post-Marcusean way – that besides a classical workers’ movement, there was a series of what they called ‘new social subjects’ that were emerging: youth, women, the unemployed, etc., etc.; people who had no stake in the traditional class struggle. And instead of seeing themselves as marginal, they tried to take the margin as the centre. It doesn’t mean that they were central to the society, but that they carried the potentiality for the future, and the future of what we could call the political view of society.
Also, what I liked about them was the fact that, like the Red Brigades – and of course they came from the same ‘trunk’ – the Autonomists were very aware that we live in a technological society. But they didn’t think simply of using the spectacular effects of technology, they (some elements of the Autonomist movement) believed there was a possibility of reappropriating technology for other uses; that society needed a new revolutionary movement that would be as creative and as innovative as the system itself.
I would point out that this was not just a handful of people like the Red Brigade. It was a movement with a very broad base. While I was in Italy I noticed an incredible diversity, from people who were living as workers, to people who were squatting – and involved in popular and traditional political action – to people in Bologna who were much more fluid, much less attached to any sort of work, and who on the contrary advocated the idea that work was not something that should be at the centre of everyone’s life, and that everyone should not live for work, but should work for living. That one should use work as a way of surviving, but living your life independently of this work. And in exchange for that they realised they were giving up a form of security for the freedom to move. This represents a new form of nomadism, on the level of the form of nomadism that was being actually produced by society. The same way the technicians and scientists of Autonomia felt comfortable with the fact that, while factories were disappearing, with computers, etc. we have the emergence of new forms of industries. Society was actually moving into a huge transformation, and in a culture with an active social intelligence, a new form of life could be created.
Now, we talk about this at a time when Autonomia has been destroyed, precisely because of being caught in the flow of terrorism and the state. But I think if anything can come out in terms of political innovation, it will have to pursue this kind of thinking.
At the same time in Italy, there was a group of people in Autonomia that was for the most part gathered around the magazine called Metropoli, and I think they overvalued their own intelligence in relation to the terrorist phenomenon. In other words, they assumed it was possible to use terrorism instead of being used by terrorism. And so, they made a tactical attempt not to disassociate themselves from the terrorist movement, but tried to jump into the vacuum that they created, and tried to reappropriate it for the benefit of Autonomia. They were obviously totally mistaken, because they were thrown together with the Red Brigades and thrown in jail, and accused of being the submerged wing of the covert armed movement. And that allowed local District Attorneys to lump them together with the terrorists.
So, to go back to the notion of terrorism: the Autonomia movement was defeated, not only by their attempt to use terrorism for their own purposes, but also by the collusion between state repression – what we could call state terrorism – and the media. The media went along with the ‘lumping-together’ theory, and made it a kind of phantom command of the Red Brigades, and this basically destroyed the movement. Again, I hope it will come back in another form. Because Autonomia as an Italian movement is finished, but the world is still waiting.
Now, what happened to the Red Brigades may be a way of entering a discussion of the terrorist phenomenon. And again, we’re not talking about terrorism, but terrorism and the media, which is something very different. Whatever I’ve read by specialists and scholars in the field emphasises a symbiosis between terrorism and the media.
It’s a bit difficult to talk in generalities about the phenomenon, unless you do it like Virilio or Baudrillard, by establishing a theoretical level of reflection. Any reflection would have to start with the fact that terrorism is a general fact, but of course, if you lump together the Palestinian form of terrorism, the Italian, the German, the French, the IRA, I mean, all of these situations are very specific.
What was specific about the Italian movement was that both the Red Brigade and the future Autonomists were gathered together in Potere Operaio, which was an attempt to re-evaluate Marxism. And at a certain point the problem of armed action was raised. And after a certain period of hesitation, in which there was much lecturing against Toni Negri, who at the time was hesitant between the two possibilities, a very serious split occurred where one part of the group went into clandestine action, while another chose to remain in the open and develop more open forms of mass action. This latter group became Autonomia. And their strategy had little to do with the media, or with destabilising the state by using violent spectacular action, but on the contrary, by means of some sort of network or collective form of sabotage or reappropriation, none of which could be defined really as a form of terrorism.
Because the only definition I found which was fairly specific is that a terrorist action is an action where the victim is not really what is at stake, but is some sort of sign that is used to communicate a message to the population at large through the media. In other words, in terrorism, the victim is what they often call a ‘message generator’. And that is why a hostage does not have to be as recognisable as Aldo Moro was, it could be anyone. I think there is an article by Jean [Baudrillard] on the subject of the hostage, the anonymity of the hostage, which turns everyone into a potential hostage. Terrorists turn the hostage into a symbol in order to obtain a symbolic effect. It is an emphasis on the fact that terrorism is an act of communication.
So the Red Brigades, although they had some support, especially at the beginning, from some layers of the population, only had one way to reach the wider audience they hoped to persuade, and that was to get some sort of free ride from the media. So, from the beginning, the kidnapping of the director of the bank in 1972, in which they took a picture of him holding a placard that said ‘Strike One to Educate 100’ . . . they didn’t do any educating themselves; the media was there to do the educating – to publish the picture, and to help get the message across. So, in a way, this from the very beginning defined a kind of collusion between the terrorists and the form of media we have, which is a business like any other, which has to satisfy its customers, and in which the greatest news value is violence. I mean, 80 per cent of what is going on on American TV has to do with violence. Violence is the best way to sell a story.
Also, there is a law proper to the media, which is the escalation of violence, which of course reverberates back to the terrorists. In the same way, a demonstration can attract a two-second spot on the TV screen, but it is always the most violent element which is shown by the media. So, if you want to have the maximum impact in the media, you have to use the element that is going to be reported.
And where there is this kind of collusion, there the collusion is more than a mere mirroring. There is a reciprocal challenge, where the media becomes a model at the same time that it models the actions that the terrorists want to achieve. The media dictates its own forms of recognition, and the terrorists themselves have to abide by these forms of recognition, to emulate them or to simulate them, and eventually to become just like them. This creates a situation where you don’t know exactly if a terrorist situation is being reported by the media or generated by the media.
And that leads to a kind of impossible situation, especially in Western countries that rely on the free flow of information. It results from this free flow of interest, but also from the fact that the media is a vampire that is hungry for the very kind of action that the terrorists incarnate. We don’t know exactly if it’s the chicken or the egg; we don’t know if it’s the media that creates this kind of violence, maybe it’s some archaic cruelty that’s being satisfied by the media. But it should be pointed out that in the history of the printed media, there is an evolution from a kind of a partisan information to a media that is a business like any other. And hence, terrorism, though it is politically motivated, had to enter the business of communication, and had to follow the rules.2
SL
HS But does the media need political violence, or will any kind of violence do? I mean, would mass-murders do?
SL Mass murder cannot be assimilated into terrorism because it doesn’t deliver a message, but inasmuch as political violence is totally decontextualised, the motivations of terrorists, unless they are very concrete – territorial claims, etc. – are lost. And hence, we have this very strange couple; the media absorb the terrorism as the terrorists absorb the media.
JB Yes, but just maybe it is not a double game between the media and terrorism. Maybe there are three actors – there are also the masses. And I ask if maybe the media need violence and the terrorists want political results if the source of the thing is not that the masses want spectacle, the spectacle of violence. So the very manipulators of this game would be in fact the masses themselves. There is a total complicity. It is very difficult to explain this complicity between terrorism and the masses by referring to the media. The media are not responsible. That the media want/need violence – is wrong. It’s a wrong point of view. It’s just evidence, it’s false evidence.
SL The political scene has lost most of its attraction and its reality, so at least with the terrorists we have some sort of exacerbated, extrapolated form of politics. A politics reappears; reappears through violent means, because it has mostly disappeared somewhere else. Also, just to point out, you have the Shining Path in Peru, which is not very media oriented. It addresses people who can’t read, who don’t have a television, and this is a form that is perhaps more collectively violent. The masses are not the same there as in our society.
HS That means then, that politics that is not violent – like Autonomia – becomes impossible to get injected or covered by the media.
SL Yes, but that brings up not only the question, ‘what is terrorism?’ but ‘what are the masses?’, and ‘do the masses themselves exist?’ The Autonomists knew that there was a population-at-large, but their attempt was to produce singularities. Of course, in your perspective [indicating Baudrillard] which is –
JB The masses are a void, a political void. And the terrorists – their action is to create a void. They put a path out of the system. They act, not by adding something to the system, but by subtracting something from the system. They create a void, and this void coincides – or resonates – with the masses as a void.
SL What is the element they subtract?
JB The hostage.
MV Would it be that the masses as a void are just an eye? That would imply a certain teleology, that they are mesmerised by violence, that there is a need to be filled up by violence. At the execution of Danton there was such a spectacle of violence. And that was the purpose of the execution, to satisfy this need. Literally in an orgiastic way, to be filled up by violence and blood.
SL But see what happened to it. The execution was a great festival. Everyone was there, even the criminal was part of it. Families would be there, and kids could watch the blood dripping. But now, what do they do with capital punishment? They pretend it doesn’t even exist. In Texas, the way they did it was really something. There were two executioners, and they were hidden behind a brick wall, holding two plastic tubes. And they didn’t even know which one was the one that was giving the poison. So not only was the whole thing unseen by the population, but even the executioners didn’t know who was doing the executing. We hide everything that used to constitute a communal bond. On one hand, the social function of violence has been taken away from the social. On the other, the social has been invaded by simulated or real executions and spectacularised. And the vacuum of these, all these symbolic functions, is being transferred into the vacuum of the media.
JW But what about the execution of that young murderer in Florida who had killed the sixteen women? The striking thing about that was that at one and the same time, it was invisible, and there was a great public celebration and participation around it for about a week. So what was interesting was that it was invisible and spectacularised at the same time. It could not be repressed.
SL In New York I got to know very well a police videographer. His job was to document crime scenes and establish the visual record for public trials. This document had to be impartial and objective. In other words, each movement of the camera had to be carefully justified; he had to adopt a very neutral position.
These tapes were to be shown to a jury – representatives of the masses – who were not especially equipped to deal with individualised violence. So, on one hand, he had to establish an objective document on which truth was going to be established; on the other hand, he had to take into account these ‘masses’’ subjective reactions which would possibly hamper their judgement. In other words, he had to avoid giving too much blood. And when he did, he had to make it very gradual, so they would get used to the idea that they were going to be confronted with a bloody body.
But he had another constraint: the jury was confronted daily with simulations that were even more gory. So he was caught exactly between these two contrary needs. And what he resorted to was the technique of the horror film. What he does, he said, is tease the audience; he whets their appetite, until finally he comes up with the cake, which is the body on the bed, the body lying down in the blood, etc. He had to use fiction to make reality credible.
And in dealing with terrorists as a media phenomenon, we are confronted with that. What is the form of representation? Does the form have to challenge the usual presentation of violence? And there, the challenge is not only between terrorists and the media, or terrorists and the masses, but the escalation of the image itself.
JBR Is this not a demand of the human organism/society for extremes? Since our lives are so boring and monotonous, don’t we seek diversion from that boredom?
SL Yes, it’s like the notion of la dépense (expenditure) in Bataille. The world of work and rationality keeps deferring violent expenditure . . .
HS I’d like to pursue a theoretical point on the notion of the masses. [Draws a model of communication on the blackboard.] Jean Baudrillard’s model is that the masses need spectacle, which the media provides; the terrorists use the media to provide the violence that the masses need. But after all, there aren’t any masses. That’s one construct we have made about the way people are organised, and it assumes that people behave in a uniform way. But it may be that only part of the people are part of the masses part of the time.
WS But you can’t distinguish among these things. Here [pointing to Schwartz’s model] we have the production of violence, here we have the mediation of violence, and here we have the reception of violence. So this is only a functionalist model. And all of these poles may have imploded into each other.
HS Well . . . what groups like Autonomia are trying to do is basically to create some life over here. [Points beyond the masses on the blackboard.] But that assumes that this is not an inevitable organisation of society.
JB I think it’s wrong to say that there is a production of violence, mediation of violence and the masses’ reception of violence. These three actors, or protagonists, are on the same level. In other words, the masses have no needs, and they have no representation. They are out of the field of representation; they cannot be represented. And neither can the terrorists, of course. I wouldn’t say the masses want to be represented; they don’t want to be. And the fact that it is not possible to represent them creates once more a void. And that void is the same on the side of the media. Media are not a scene of representation, they are a void of representation. The three have this in common. And in the process, we cannot take one of the players as wholly responsible. The whole process acts in the circulation of the void of representation. And, maybe, we could use a physical metaphor. But it would be ridiculous.
SL Well, I guess I agree with you, in a sense, but you’re not talking about anything specific here. The masses are just a blind extrapolation of a diverse population. You start from a statistical model, and you challenge reality to prove you are right.
JB I don’t know that it begins with such a model, but it avoids – it escapes delusion. Because when we say the media are responsible, we fall into all these traps of morality: what is violence? what is information? This is no solution.
SL Yes, but as soon as we accept your model, then a lot of problems disappear that are interesting problems. [Laughter]
JB Sure, sure, but some problems are exhausted in their insolubility. And some problems are solved, but are not exhausted in their problematicity.
SL In your model there is no more humanity. That’s what makes it so seductive. I mean, we get rid of the subject. At the same time, I hope we do not go in that direction. Yes, we live in a society that massifies the population through the media. The word masses is Marxist in origin –
JB But it doesn’t signify anything.
SL But it meant exactly the contrary. It meant the people are massing together in the street.
HS ‘Masses’ is pre-Marxist; it’s a French revolutionary term.
SL You mean the French Revolution? The French Revolution?
HS Yes.
SL Ah! It’s unavoidable! [Laughter] But the masses have disappeared from the street – and reappeared behind the screen.
WC I must interrupt very briefly. I’m a political scientist and this discussion of what people need and how people constitute themselves is very problematic for a social scientist who has been reading postmodernism. I have been taking Professor Baudrillard’s work perhaps a bit more seriously than Mr Lotringer has because somebody who works next to people who do public opinion polls knows that it is correct that polls are not representative. There is no public there; the public do not constitute themselves, and any statement about them having needs, it seems to me, is very problematic.
SL But if the masses are problematic, what’s political science about?
WC It’s about the destruction of political science. [Laughter]
JC I want to go back to the media question. You said the video crime reporter was using fiction to report fact. I think he was using convention and sign – conventions of seeing. It’s neither fiction nor fact, it’s these conventions, which determine how meaning is constructed. Without these conventions, people wouldn’t understand what they were seeing; they would be shocked; they would not be able to decode these events without the convention. And the conventions are neither real nor fictional; they are the meaning-creators. In fact, the media doesn’t simply mediate between two things, they create meanings.
FM A good example of the point, I think: The first use in a fiction film of the establishment of reality by the television code was Dr Strangelove. When the army attacks the closed-off Air Force base – and you’ve been laughing at this film throughout – suddenly it gets very serious. The way Kubrick did that was that he used hand-held cameras, which are very jerky. And what that instantly clicked with everyone in the theatre was: this is television; this is real. This is the way things look on the television news when they’re reporting real war. So in a fiction film, you have reality established now through a technique that comes from television. It has nothing to do with the way reality is perceived, because it isn’t perceived in a jerky, ‘hand-held’ way. But that became the sign of reality because of the television news.
SL Since terrorism interests the media, of course it also interests artists. One is Vito Acconci. He went to Holland, got three trucks, and covered them with a black material so they looked hooded. The trucks had loudspeakers that were saying ‘Bring me your terrorists! Tell me where they are!’ And these trucks went around the whole summer of 1979 in Holland with no great result. So I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you do that in Germany?’ And he said ‘Well . . .’ [Laughter]
WS The jails would have been packed.
SL Right. Also when I was living right under the Brooklyn Bridge a downtown artist put a ‘bomb’ there. I mean, there was powder, there were all the elements. But they were not put together, so it couldn’t explode. The police came and arrested him, and he was put on trial. And the art community was called in to testify that this was performance art! Richard Serra testified; all the luminaries of the art world testified that there were no grounds for indictment.
But there is this strange position: if you outplay the terrorists at their own game, you are basically assumed to be with the terrorists. [To Baudrillard:] I think somewhere you mention that if you were to stage a fake bank robbery, it would be taken as a real attack.3
JB Yes. This was a case of a false hold-up in France; a simulacrum of a hold-up. Even when this was discovered, they were arrested and they were tried as simulators, and they were punished more severely as simulators than criminals, because it was an offense to the principle of reality! [Laughter]
WS Whereas otherwise it would have been a simple transgression!
JBR Biology establishes that all masses of primate species, and even some other mammals, are curious. They have needs and are attracted by action and difference. [Grumbling]
SL [To the others:] I agree that the question is problematic, but if we disregard the problematic element, we end up not dealing with the problem. The beauty of the Baudrillard model is that it allows us to think in a more well-rounded way. And it may be that we don’t have needs; and maybe our needs – even worse – have been created. But I think that inasmuch as there still exists any sort of political perspective or political stakes, we can’t start from the idea that there is no need in the masses. This predicates the end of the political or the end of the social. And that’s already an answer to the question, and there’s no point in talking . . .
JB I don’t like biological or animalistic analogies. The fact is, the masses exist as a chain reaction. And although they initiate the chain reaction, their very action is itself a chain reaction. We can see, for example, the chain reaction of images in the media. I mean, this would still be an analogy – still a metaphor. But it would be nearer to the process of the masses than an impulse.
WS [To Lotringer:] Here we’ve put our finger on the nub of the difference between your approach to terrorism and Professor Baudrillard’s. You’re still talking about terrorism as if there is a kind of impulse toward spectacle. And [to Baudrillard:] that is what you’re trying to get away from in your theories on terrorism. But I have a question for you, Professor Baudrillard, and that is, when you say the masses exist as a chain reaction, and then you say this is only an analogy or a metaphor – aren’t you speaking the language of representation precisely when the masses are a void?
JB It’s a very vicious circle. Because, strictly, that would not be metaphor, it would be metonymy. The metonymy of the chain reaction. In this instance, my tropes were not metaphorical, but metonymical. And in this sense, the difference is not metaphoric, but metonymic. We can no more think in terms of metaphor, because we are out of the scene of representation, even at the heart and the core of language. But we can speak about the metonymic processes. There is no difference to speak of, because if we can state the differences, we then play the game of metaphor, which is a very beautiful game. But we can only get access to this new set of events through a metonymic approach. We can no more state difference, that’s a stale postmodern theory. All parts of the process are true – simultaneously.
SL It’s very seductive, because it’s like throwing the baby out with the bath water. And I like the idea. And the more I read about it, the same confusion exists on all levels of reflection. Who causes what needs? Are they created by the media? Is violence ancestral? We don’t know. We’re in a quandary. That’s why I’m not really in contradiction with Baudrillard. I think his approach is very helpful; we have to start from there.
But I do hope, like Autonomists, that something can be done. That subjectivity can be – not merely maintained – but maybe recreated in another context. You bet [indicating Baudrillard] on the object – on objectivity. But at this point, I’m not disagreeing with the operationality of the model. I’m just taking an ethical stance. If nothing can be done, then the only thing left is to be the one who thinks it, and that action is all yours. [Laughter]
JB Once more we are on the topic of metaphor. When we speak today of AIDS or computer viruses, that’s not a metaphor. For this reason, we cannot escape these facts. We cannot recreate a symbolic order. That would be very crude.
SL Yes, but experiments are not done just on the level of theory. They are also going on in society. For instance, ACT UP, the gay activist movement, is confronted with the same problems: the passivity and opacity of the masses. And they have had to devise new forms of intervention. They’ve chained themselves to buildings, etc. And now they’re discussing some sort of ‘terrorist’ action. In other words, destruction of property; for example, destroying the computer files that have the names of the people who’ve tested positive.
WS Maybe they could introduce a computer virus . . . [Grim laughter]
FM Isn’t this also part-and-parcel of the breakdown of the forms of understanding that enabled a revolutionary to be a traditional revolutionary – and not a terrorist?
SL There is a difference, in my mind, between the Red Army Fraction which was basically a political organisation that had to exacerbate the contradictions that existed in their given society – whose action was symbolic and dialectical – to force the state to show its fascist face, etc. and the direct forms of intervention that are envisaged here.
When I talked to people from ACT UP, they found themselves caught up in a situation that apparently had nothing to do with AIDS. They were protesting Chemical Bank’s investments in South Africa, and they forced a meeting with the vice-president of the bank. And the vice-president said to them, ‘I thought you were a movement dealing with AIDS. What are you doing here?’ What happened to them, is that by dealing with a very specific problem, they found that they couldn’t deal with the problem without dealing with the whole society, drug companies, research boards, international finance, etc. When we start with generalities, we end up dealing with generalities, because that’s where we are. By going deeper into singularities, you emerge somewhere else. In the case of ACT UP they realise they cannot afford to be a minority movement any longer. They need to have a broader base. Again, we return to the same problem: the de-massification of the masses.
HS But here we’re talking about fairly traditional interest-group politics.
SL But the problem that created their emergence as a political movement is a very postmodern problem, and not just in terms of the disease. So maybe now, if we have some sort of globalisation of the problem, we have some kind of action that meets the postmodern form of the threat. Again, my hope is that we can be surprised by history. Extrapolation is a wonderful game, but if the game is achieved at the cost of our own survival, then I look for another challenge. [To Baudrillard:] I think the next challenge should be not that your theory works, but that it doesn’t work. That would be much more paradoxical. I think if you want to be a poker player in theory, then the real challenge is reality.
JB You cannot go back again to the essentially regressive form of the metaphor. What you describe of terrorism and media is typical. Terrorists act – not exactly in reality – but in the political realm.
SL Yes, but there is a difference between the IRA and the Red Brigades. I’m a bit against having universals. I resisted that at the time of structuralism, when language was a universal. And now I wonder if logic isn’t the universal and your logic a catastrophic version of structuralism.
WS But you can universalise difference as well. And I think the question that Professor Baudrillard raises is, is the making of these distinctions meaningful, except according to its own gambit, its own game?
WC No, no. Isn’t the issue whether questions and answers are reversible? So that the terms of any political discussion are reversible. They still have meaning, but how that would fit into a functionalist scheme is endlessly reversible.
WS I can’t speak for Professor Baudrillard, but my sense is that there are some ambiguities in the works . . .
JB There are many. [Laughter]
WS Because sometimes the different terms are described as immanently reversible. Other times, the differences which generate meanings – distinctions – are described as collapsing in on each other.
JB I cannot choose between them. Here, my choice would be to act in this process to the extreme of the process. I am always a Situationist. And whatever the outcome, it would be an ironic one. Whatever happens, it will be a seductive strategy against simulation. I don’t know if it still makes sense to oppose these terms. Simulation and seduction are in a sense the same: both are out of reality, and both are a challenge to reality. But in another sense, they are totally irreducible to each other. I cannot choose between them. But, as far as political action, or any nostalgic resurrection of subjectivity or something like that: in seduction and simulation, there are no subjects anywhere. Either one implies that there is no subjectivity nor strategies related to subjects. Beyond that, I don’t know exactly. That is the radical ambiguity!
SL I like much of what you are devising. I still maintain that there is a way of looking at your scheme, and for it to be intellectually coherent, and still leave room for incoherence. For me, incoherence is not just a metonymical bent. But incoherence means that there is still a possibility of events, still the possibility of a surprise, and the surprise may come from beyond our own extrapolations. It may be beyond our horizon, and we are incapable of envisaging it. There may be a way into it that will bring out possibilities that we are not aware of. I do believe theory can be used pragmatically. This is a challenge to theory.
Now, precisely the kind of distortion that was presented yesterday by the Krokers wasn’t very satisfying, because it was a regression in response to this kind of theoretical challenge. Politically, I have no qualms with what they said. On theoretical grounds, they were simply using the postmodernist cover to reiterate things that we may believe, but which obviously have no pragmatic impact.
WS So it’s a case of radical politics undermined by conservative theory? This incoherence cannot be progress?
SL Well, you imply that any progress in theory is basically radical. [To Baudrillard:] Is it?
JB [Shrugs]
SL I must say that the reception of your theories in France by the New Right bothered me a lot. Did it bother you?
JB They liked me for a little while, but after America, they didn’t. I lost my last ‘friends’.
SL I mean, even at the time of The Political Economy of the Sign, your reading of Marx was not a reading from the Right.
JB No, no, no; not at all. But neither from the Left. It was already from another space, I would say, a radical one. I mean, the Left is not inherently radical; it’s the Left. For me the crash happened beginning with La Gauche divine in 1978, and then, even more after the Left gained power in France. They wanted intellectuals who opposed them to be expelled from the Left. But it couldn’t happen.
SL This was a social experiment that was waged, and you saw very clearly that accession to power by the Left was not an alternative – which has been proven.
JB It was in the 60s and 70s that we made a radical critique of politics and the media. We always made it in terms of a moral political sense; always on the basis of a denunciation of the media, fashion, advertising and so on. We were trying to transvestise the political into an analysis of media. The Left never accepted this. They stayed on an ideological base. And when we went further and renounced the moral point of view, there was no more chance that there could be a relationship between us. When I say ‘us’, I mean a marginal, yet in a way, powerful group of intellectuals that existed then in France.
Direct political action was no longer possible. We were left to do the same thing the terrorists do: destabilise. This results from a genealogy of enemies. In the first phase the enemy was frontal; the aggression of wolves. Then the enemy went underground; the enemy there is like rats. It’s a new state of things, and you can’t use the same strategies of defence against rats as you do against wolves. But people invented new strategies. And then, in the third phase, there were cockroaches. The rats operated in two-dimensional space, but the cockroaches operated in a three-dimensional world. You couldn’t defend against them with the same defence against rats. So they have invented other ways to deal with this new sort of enemy. But then enters the fourth phase: viruses. And viruses operate in the fourth dimension, which is no dimension. They have not yet the strategies to oppose this new aggression. They don’t even know the faces of the enemy.
So all former strategies, whether antagonistic–frontal or underground–subversive, are no longer valuable. There is now only the question of destabilisation. The first phase corresponds to war; the second, to insurrection. The third is some kind of underground subversion, and the fourth phase – the viral phase – is the phase of destabilisation. And in this context, we are all confused, whether we talk about the political or the transpolitical. However, the point would be to at least take account of the new dimension and act no more as political subjects because that does not confront the enemy. The enemy? Who is that? Who?
SL Yes, but it strikes me that the end of the political doesn’t mean the end of political stakes. Homelessness, ecological catastrophe – these problems are still here. Simply because we talk about the silent majority doesn’t mean that the population doesn’t exist. We can proclaim the end of subjectivity, and we still exist as subjects. Although I agree with you that the stakes are now being raised to the level of the species, which is what the virus seems to indicate.
Beyond the political – what you call the transpolitical – is the future of the planet. And at this level, you may join up with some sort of ecological political struggle. Maybe in the way the Germans have, where, in the sense that they are aware of political stakes, there is a point where they have to be transpolitical in their actions. That is why I don’t find that I contradict your theory. I think this theory is the horizon of our species. Theory should be able to encompass that. But we can still look at it and not give up our desire to alter the scene.
JB When I am writing I don’t feel that it is a political act. I feel it maybe as a symbolic act. Maybe it is a fatal strategy itself – a theoretical fatal strategy – and maybe it has some symbolic effects to accelerate. I’m not trying to resist, surely. But, I don’t know, maybe somewhere I have some, not hope, but some opening to the void. Maybe there will appear out of the absence of representations, some new events, even more fascinating than past events. But we cannot create them out of our own will or representations. That is sure. In any case, it will be a suspension of the probability of events. Some new events have already appeared. Terrorism is a new event; and AIDS, viruses, and Wall Street crashes. These are new ‘objectile’ events. Our time is very poor – at least in France – as to traditional subjective political themes. But our time is rich – over-rich – in metonymic events. We have to look at that and confront it with something that I would no longer call theory.
MV This trans-theory that is being talked about now is reminiscent of a certain discourse of divinity, where fatal strategies could remind us of predestination. It could be that the central signifier, which has been displaced, has its own movement.
JB No, no, that is not the case. Because ‘fatal’, in this sense, has nothing to do with transcendence, nor with a transcendent creator. It would be an immanent logic. The word is very difficult, and we have had some problems translating it.
SL I was wondering – when I look at Deleuze and Guattari’s work, I sometimes feel that it’s the mind trying to transcend itself towards a Western vision of Zen. And there is something like that in Les Stratégies Fatales, some form of meditation, that may be as far as we can go into Eastern thought with our own logic.
JB Maybe, but I wouldn’t take it as a reference. We must try to extract the problematic – and its solution or non-solution – out of our own world.
MV What would be the relation between this fascination for violence, which terrorism and the media share in a very problematic way, and the ‘accursed share’ of Bataille? Bataille said, for instance, if you throw away ‘the natural’, whatever he meant by that, it comes back from the wrong side. It would be interesting to make parallels between what Artaud and Bataille said on the subject and this black hole, or void, from which seems to emanate an acute need for violence.
SL Artaud and Bataille are modem mystics. Both are defrocked priests of the absolute. Only a radical Christian like Artaud could abominate God with such vehemence. They mark the panic phase of the disappearance of faith. We are now just reaching beyond that; we are at the threshold of the disappearance of politics. Politics was really our last faith.
So I think there is a definite break and Jean is pretty much at the juncture of this segue. [To Baudrillard:] You are very much at the threshold of French intellectuality. Because up until you, every single philosopher in France had to measure up to politics. That is how it was being defined. That’s where people were waiting for you. The political stake was really what gave philosophy its weight. We are now floating free in a weightless universe, and we are panicked by it. A lot of the reactions to Jean’s theories are panicked reactions. We are at the point where it’s really too much for us to accept. And that’s why I find it very interesting, that you go on undisturbed by this panicked reaction. It doesn’t mean that this is a solution to the panic; but it’s a formalisation of the panic in theoretical terms. We can now see that the time between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War was a crisis period. We’ve now entered a new era and we’re still groping with too few theories on our side. What we’ve produced so far isn’t a guide, nor a comfort, but a revulsion for truth. And I think, Jean, that your theory fits here perfectly. It is too true to be good!
NOTES
1. Lotringer, S. and Marazzi, C. (eds) (1980), ‘Italy: Autonomia. Post-political politics’, Intervention Series 1, 3: 3, New York: Semiotext(e).
2. Sylvère Lotringer would like to thank Chris Kraus for helping to prepare his introductory comments to this seminar.
3. Baudrillard, J. (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 20. [Editors]
© William Stearns and William Chaloupka. Original publication: ‘Baudrillard shrugs: a seminar on terrorism and the media, with Sylvère Lotringer and Jean Baudrillard’, in W. Stearns and W. Chaloupka (eds) (1992), Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 283–302.