CULTURAL POLITICS

VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1 PP 2326

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PORNOGRAPHY OF WAR
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
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.

The World Trade Center: the electric shock to power, the humiliation inicted 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 inicts 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 rst 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

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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 inict gratuitous humiliation, and, as we know, the violence we inict 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 inicted 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 ames. 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 isnt even a need for embedded journalists any more; its the military itself that is embedded in the image; thanks to digital technology, images are denitively integrated into warfare. They no longer represent; they no longer imply either distance or perception or judgement. They are no longer of the order of representation, or of information in the strict sense and, as a result, the question of whether they should be produced, reproduced, broadcast or banned, and even the essential question of whether they are true or false, is irrelevant. For images to constitute genuine information they would have to be different from war. But they have become precisely as virtual as war today and hence their own specic violence is now superadded to the specic violence of war. Moreover, by their omnipresence, by the rule that everything must be made visible, which now applies the world over, images our present images have become in substance pornographic; they therefore cleave spontaneously to the pornographic dimension of war. There is in all this, and particularly in the last Iraqi episode, a justice immanent in the image: he who stakes his all on the spectacle

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Translated by Chris Turner

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will die by the spectacle. If you want power through the image, be prepared to die by the image playback. The Americans are learning this, and will continue to learn it, by bitter experience. And this despite all the democratic subterfuge and despite a despairing simulacrum of transparency commensurate with the despairing simulacrum of military power. Who committed these acts and who is really responsible for them? The military higher-ups? Or human nature, which is, as we know, brutish even in a democracy? The real scandal lies not in the torture but in the perdy of those who knew and remained silent (or of those who revealed it?). At any rate, the whole of the real violence is diverted on to the question of openness, democracy nding a way to restore its virtue by publicizing its vices. Leaving all that aside, what is the secret of these abject tableaux? Once again, they are a response, beyond all the vicissitudes of strategy and politics, to the humiliation of 9/11 and an attempt to respond to it by a humiliation that is worse, much worse, than death. Not even counting the hoods, which are in themselves a form of beheading (to which the beheading of the Americans obscurely corresponds), and not counting the piled-up bodies and the dogs, enforced nudity is in itself a violation. We have, for example, seen GIs walking naked Iraqis through the streets in chains, and in Patrick Dekaerkes short story Allah Akhbar we see Franck, the CIAs man on the ground, make the Arab strip naked, force him to put on a basque and shnet stockings and nally have him buggered by a pig, all the while taking photographs that he will send to the village and to the mans family and friends. In this way the other will be exterminated symbolically. It is here we see that the aim of war is not to kill or to win but to abolish the enemy, to black out (the expression is, I think, Canettis) the light from his sky. And what is it, in fact, that we want to make these men confess? What secret are we trying to force out of them? We quite simply want them to tell us how it is and in the name of what that they are unafraid of death. This explains the zero-death soldiers deep jealousy of and the revenge he takes on those who are not afraid of death. For which reason they will have visited on them something worse than death . . . In the radical shaming, the dishonor of nudity, the ravaging of all veils, we are back at the same problem of openness and transparency: tearing off the womens veils or hooding the men to make them seem more naked, more obscene . . . This whole masquerade that tops off the ignominy of war, going so far as the literal travestying in what is the most ferocious image (the most ferocious for America), because it stirs up most phantoms and is the most reversible of the prisoner threatened with electrocution who has been turned completely into a hood, into a Ku Klux Klan member, crucied by his own kind. This really is America having electrocuted itself.

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