Baudrillard, September 11, and the Haunting Abyss of Reversal

Abstract

In his recent The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard argues that the events of 9/11 represented an irreducible, singular symbolic challenge to the West. Yet some have argued that the West merely absorbed this symbolic challenge into media spectacle. This essay argues against such a proposition. It turns its attention to Baudrillard’s “middle works” on terrorism, and their relation to the events of 9/11. These works focus on the West’s orders of simulation (and terrorism’s response to them), yet they also indicate Baudrillard’s continuing preoccupation with symbolic exchange as an ineluctable force that persists, haunting an indifferent, hyperreal order. The events following 9/11 suggest the validity of Baudrillard’s contention, for the West’s claim to a universal code is troubled and unsettled by the aftereffects of calamitous and seismic symbolic violence. —lw

. . . at the height of their coherence, the redoubled signs of the code are haunted by the abyss of reversal.

—Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death

In his article “The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good and Evil,” Bradley Butterfield examines Jean Baudrillard’s notion that terrorism functions according to the rule of symbolic exchange, a notion most fully articulated in Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism, written after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Butterfield analyzes the concept of symbolic exchange as it emerged in Baudrillard’s early works, particularly in For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign and Symbolic Exchange and Death. Butterfield traces Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange to Mauss’s studies of the Kula and Potlatch with their agonistic exchange of gifts.

Butterfield notes that Baudrillard sees death as pivotal to the idea of symbolic exchange: in “primitive” societies, death has no equivalent return in exchange value, but must take its place ritualistically as part of the continual cycle of giving and receiving, part of a “gift” economy that forms a counterpoint to political economy, positive value, and the linear calculus of the code. As Baudrillard puts it, “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” (Symbolic 166). Yet, as Butterfield notes (following Baudrillard), in contemporary society the symbolic import of death is denied; it becomes a “natural phenomenon,” a sheer negation of life, a “bar” between the living and dead. Acts of terrorism, however, represent a “revolt” against this naturalization of death, and terrorist spectacle returns symbolic distinction to death (13).

Butterfield isolates “a common motif” in Baudrillard’s speculations, and that is the potential for a moment “where simulation society is somehow reversed or revolutionized by the symbolic” (18). Nonetheless, Butterfield seems highly ambivalent about whether the events of 9/11 actually brought about such a reversal. He seems to concur with Baudrillard that 9/11 represented an “irreducible, singular, and irrevocable challenge to each and every imagination” (18). But ultimately he questions the efficacy of such a challenge: “What the system did in response to 9/11, or instead of responding to it, was to re-absorb its symbolic violence back into the never ending flow of anesthetized simulation [...]” (25). “We live mostly,” he continues, “as Ernest Becker claimed, in denial of death, which our marketing specialists have yet to fully package [...]. We see only TV spectacles. We do not see the real, or know the real, but we are a culture fascinated by its simulacrum” (26).

Butterfield’s discussion suggests intriguing questions: can a symbolic challenge be mounted effectively against a hyperreal regime in which the multiplication of images serves to divert and neutralize that challenge? How can symbolic exchange function to “reverse” the logics of a system if death itself (so central to the idea of symbolic exchange) is absorbed into the code and rendered hyperreal? Butterfield leaves these questions unexamined, in spite of the fact that The Spirit of Terrorism is a text that explores the very issue of the relation between symbols and signs, images and symbolic events. Moreover, he leaves the questions unexplored in spite...