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••• William Merrin •••
producing forced and hurried events, spectacular in their explosion onto the screens,
yet ultimately unsatisfying and unconvincing (ibid.: 31). Predictable and empty, they
occur, Baudrillard says, with ‘the strange aftertaste of something that has happened
before, something unfolding retrospectively’ (ibid.: 19), their pre-processed meaning
removing all personal relationship to and investment in them, and their program-
ming and real-time realization and dissemination preventing them from even ‘hap-
pening’. Having a ‘maximal’ diffusion but ‘zero’ historical resonance (ibid.: 58), they
are immediately replaced by other ‘events’, superseding each other in spectacular
procession, each aiming to be definitive yet each having ‘less and less meaning’
(ibid.: 58), hollowing out before them ‘the void into which they plunge’ (1994b: 19),
blazing momentarily upon the screen of the media to barely leave a retinal afterglow.
In this real-time transmission the medium and message and reality and image
implode in a simulation, the scene of the event becoming ‘a virtual space’, the site
of a ‘definitive confusion’, with the source and its information ‘interfering drasti-
cally’ to create a feedback effect casting ‘a radical doubt on the event’ (ibid.: 5–6; 57).
Thus, Baudrillard says, ‘the real event is wiped out by news … All that remains of it
are traces on a monitoring screen’ (ibid.: 56). McLuhan’s globally extended, shared
electronic reality becomes, for Baudrillard, a world of processed and programmed
experience, in which all media productions merge as ‘events’ whose reality, value,
meaning and significance all become exchangeable and undecidable, all consumed
at home for pleasure in the comfort and distance of the sign. Although the contem-
porary procession of celebrity, soap, sports, and television and popular culture
‘events’ could provide ample evidence of these ‘non-events’, Baudrillard instead
turns to the most heavily mediated and important news events as the paradoxical
proof of his theory.
Hence his controversial claims in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place ([1991] 1995a)
which, far from denying the military operation and casualties, develops rather a cri-
tique of both the military production and mediated reception of this event. Militarily,
this was a technologically realized simulation of war – a production of war from its
model that, in its success, excluded all reciprocity, conflict or Iraqi resistance, result-
ing not in a ‘war’ but in a massacre of Iraqi forces. ‘Won in advance’, Baudrillard says,
‘we will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have
been like’ (ibid.: 61). Meanwhile the Western audience consumed this ‘war’ in the
comfort of their homes, without any personal experience, risk or danger. From this
perspective even September 11th remains a non-event, in its instant passage into live
breaking news for its audience who consumed the rolling coverage, speculation, and
edited montages of the explosions and collapsing towers without any experience of
the actual scene. However, the symbolic may still irrupt at the heart of the system’s
non-events, hence, Baudrillard says, the pure spectacle of September 11th was also
‘the absolute event’, representing ‘the purest symbolic form of challenge’ by Islamic
terrorism against the Western ‘historical and political order’ (2001b: 8).
Even the ‘perfect crime’ of the extermination of the real may not be perfect (2000:
63), therefore, as the symbolic again breaks through to disrupt the processes of vir-
tuality. Similarly, radical illusion ‘cannot be dispelled’ (1996b: 19), Baudrillard argues,
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