Page 184 - Cultural Theory

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••• Speculation to the Death •••

Humanist discourse that, as in semiology, abolishes the symbolic to incorporate it
into a system of values and their exchange that, in their hierarchical ordering, also
leads to racism (ibid.: 128–9). Under the universalist, harmonious guise of human-
ism, and through its global reach, the West has successfully pursued ‘the total
homogenisation of the world’ (ibid.: 130); a critique of Western modernity
Baudrillard develops in detail in The Illusion of the End ([1992] 1994a). Our society is
marked by this reduction of otherness, for example, in its communication systems
and in its cloning (1993c: 121; see 1993c: 114–17; 2000: 3–30), but, Baudrillard says,
this ‘radical exoticism’ survives as an irreducible force outside it in tribal societies and
other cultures, such as Brazil, Australia, Japan and the Islamic world, wherever possi-
ble resisting and reversing its processes (1993c: 124–55).
The latest phase of Baudrillard’s critique of the West and its technologies begins
with The Perfect Crime ([1995] 1996b), continuing to the present (Zurbrugg, 1997;
Baudrillard, 1998b; 2000; 2001c). his description there of ‘the perfect crime’ of the
extermination of the real is an extension of his claim that, in the world of simula-
tion, the real has passed beyond its own meaning and finality (‘ex-terminus’) into
indeterminacy (2000: 61–2), while developing his argument that it was itself only
ever a simulation – a ‘principle’ imposed upon the prior ‘radical illusion’ of the world
(1996b: 16): its non-identicality to and inexchangability for itself; for the subject’s
consciousness and representation. This ‘unbearable’ state was exorcised by the real-
ization of the world, ‘to make it exist and to signify at all costs’ for the subject by the
simulation of its ‘reality’, through a ‘gigantic enterprise of disillusionment’ leaving
‘an absolutely real world in its stead’ (ibid.: 16). Today, therefore, we do not lack real-
ity as ‘reality is at its height’ (ibid.: 64), ‘the unconditional realisation of the world’
(ibid.: 25) having brought a ‘saturation by absolute reality’ (ibid.: 62). At its extreme
this simulation results, Baudrillard argues, in a ‘virtualization’, understood here not
as an unreality not yet passed into actuality but rather as that which now dissuades
and proscribes reality (2000: 50). Hence Baudrillard’s critique of our contemporary
electronic ‘virtual’ technologies and their ‘high definition’, ‘real-time’ operation and
effects, a critique already gaining momentum through the 1990s in his discussion of
the ‘non-event’.
Here Baudrillard returns to and radicalizes again his earlier Boorstinian analysis of
the semiotic production of events (1998a: 125–6), now seeing all events as simula-
tions, as ‘non-events’ in their instant passage into the media. ‘Things no longer really
take place’, he says, ‘while nonetheless seeming to’ (1994b: 16): whereas once the
event was something that happened, something produced, now, as in Benjamin’s
work of art, it is something reproduced (ibid.: 21), ‘it is something designed to hap-
pen. It occurs, therefore, as a virtual artefact, a reflection of pre-existing media
defined forms’ (1993c: 41). The event as a symbolic scene – as lived and experienced,
with its own ‘aura’, ‘glory’, time, rhythm, unfolding, and historical impact – gives
way to its semiotic realization from its model. Such events have ‘no more signifi-
cance than their anticipated meaning, their programming and their broadcasting’
(1994b: 21), being instantly transferred ‘into the artificial womb of the news media’
(ibid.: 20), a combination of ‘artificial insemination and premature ejaculation’

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