Pornography of War

CULTURAL POLITICS 23 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2005 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS PORNOGRAPHY OF WAR JEAN BAUDRILLARD The World Trade Center: the electric shock to power, the humiliation inflicted on power – but from the outside. With the Baghdad prison images it is worse. This is the humiliation, just as lethal symbolically, which world power – in the form of the Americans, as it happens – inflicts on itself. The electric shock of shame and bad conscience. This is how the two events are linked. To the two events,a violent reaction throughout the world: in the first instance, a sense of momentousness, in the second, a sense of abjection. 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 VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1 PP 23–26 JEAN BAUDRILLARD LIVES IN PARIS WHERE, FOR MANY YEARS, HE TAUGHT SOCIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NANTERRE. HIS LATEST BOOKS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION ARE MASS IDENTITY ARCHITECTURE – ARCHITECTURAL WRITINGS OF JEAN BAUDRILLARD AND FRAGMENTS: INTERVIEWS WITH JEAN BAUDRILLARD. > CULTURAL POLITICS 24 JEAN BAUDRILLARD 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...