What did Baudrillard think about terrorism?

>performance artistry
It is. 9/11 will be seen as the great artwork of its time. The timing of the second plane was perfect

I highly recommend reading The Spirit of Terrorism. It's very short and requires no background knowledge of his philosophy or continental thought.

Baudrillard sees terrorism as an inevitable consequence of any attempt at global hegemony. The West attempts this world dominance through market exchange, which, in its normal operation, absorbs every aspect of culture into commodifiable units. Terrorism is not a REaction against this system, since that would just allow it to be subsumed as a commodity--see how the military-industrial complex fuels world capitalism despite murder and atrocity ostensibly being "outside" civilized culture. Instead, terrorism is the attempt to create something that is impossible to be commodified: "Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a system of generalized exchange." If you know of Baudrillard's theories of simulacra, then you can see that terrorism is one of the few symbolic acts that escapes the order of simulation where signs only point to each other. By invoking a violence that is undeniably Real, terrorism "bring[s] about an excess of reality, and [has] the system collapse beneath the excess of reality."

It is in vain we try to find an explicable motive for an attack, whether it's a religious desire for martyrdom, an attempt to reestablish political sovereignty, or a narcissistic want to receive attention. Though the terrorists themselves might have these motives, the reason terrorism is terrorism itself is that it forces the system to recognize the limits of its exchange. If a terrorist more than willing to make a bad "exchange" by killing himself for a few minutes of media spectacle, if he undertakes this action even knowing that it won't destroy his enemy, what does that say about global capitalism in its positing that man always acts in his self-interest in a way that the market can facilitate? Obviously, it shows that this model is insufficient. But it is not insufficient in the usually understood sense of that which is outside the system being not-yet integrated (Deleuze & Guattari describe this apparatus of capture better than anyone); rather, the model proves insufficient because terrorism possesses a reality that will perpetually assert itself as an antagonist to world power.

Terrorism is not some idle alternative "worldview"--it can only assert itself through the apparatuses of capitalism, namely news media and neo-imperialist military response. After every attack, there will be an attempt to commodify it through fearmongering and military retaliation, but these are only the impotent arms of exchange, never touching on the Real of the terror itself. Exposing the uselessness and vanity of this apparatus is the highest mission of terrorism: "The terrorist attack corresponded to a precedence of the event over all interpretative models; whereas this mindlessly military, technological war corresponds, conversly to the model's precedence over the event, and hence to a conflict over phoney stakes, to a situation of 'no contest.'"

quality post

Não sei que porra estás para aí a dizer, mas suponho que a tua cabeça esteja cheia de posmodernistas como as academias do teu país. A tua associação livre a pedofilia pode ser de interesse aos muitos (demasiados, até!) psicanalístas franceses que trocam brejeirices por euros, já agora.

what is an apparatus of capture? sorry I am a brainlet

Ty for the recommendation, user

Appareil de capture. An alternative translation would be a machine, or a system of assimilation. In this context it is used to describe capitalism and its ability to absorb, neutralize and comodify conter culture, to capture it so to speak.

In other contexts it can mean camera.

What was the documentary called?

Capitalism functions by continually changing its rules to account for new circumstances. Whenever it encounters a new situation that at first might resist commodification, it can add a new "axiom" that updates the rules of exchange to make a profit from what previously was outside the system. To make an obvious example: Che Guevera becomes a T-shirt--instead of any revolutionary presenting ideas that counter capitalism, they are reduced to an image that can be sold, thus stripping them of revolutionary potential. An even more subtle form of capitalist axiomatics can been seen in something like Medicaid. Whereas in pre-New Deal economics, if someone was too poor to pay for their medical care, they fell into poverty and death if they became sick, but the Medicaid creates a new axiom that allows the poor and sick person to still be integrated into the market. Whereas before, by becoming sick they exited the market via death, now Medicaid serves as an axiom that allows them to continue to participate in the market regardless of wealth or health. While this might be touted for humanitarian reasons, it functions because it expands the market of potential workers and thus furthers capitalism. The resilience of capitalism is that it can create an axiom for anything, but Baudrillard argues that terrorism's power is that it is inherently un-axiomizable.

What if terrorism can be axiomable, like someone mass shooting a bunch of people on the street in broad daylight for no other reason than "for the lulz"?

In the Baudrillardian sense of terrorism, if someone killed people "for the lulz," it wouldn't be terrorism since it doesn't force the commodity system to attack itself through media fearmongering and profitable yet impotent military retaliation.

I would argue that there is currently an axiom to capitalize on "for the lulz" killings: every time there's a mass shooting, guns and ammo sales spike because of the fear that guns will be taken away soon. Gun companies have lobbied to decrease background checks that prevent mentally ill people from buying guns for the sole reason that this way they'll sell more guns. From the gun companies' perspective, there is zero incentive to stop mass shootings because they do nothing to hurt their profits. Furthermore, the "solutions" to preventing these shootings always involve spending more money, whether it's officers in schools, arming teachers, more expenditure on security, etc. Capitalism has already integrated the mass shooting into its profit schemes.

It’s only terrorism if you’re the victim

So to contextualize the New Zealand attack in light of this line of thinking, the Aussie is fighting against the axiom of mass migration being a source of cheap labor to sustain consumerist society. He is anti-capitalist in the sense that he recognizes that a culturally cohesive nation is impossible under a system that can only function by importing outsiders with no concern for national character.

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I wonder how this view holds up however, given that the NZ terrorist willingly commodified himself, and indeed only expressed himself through memes, ostensibly a sort of internet currency. The fact of the live-stream supports the idea that terrorism can only express itself via existent apparatuses, but, especially when "Terror-core" is now a fashion trend, it's clear that terrorism has become another empty commodity: so empty that everyone forgets about every attack a month later.

I'd give another alternative translation: a captivating device.

>He said terrorism was the highest form of performance artistry or something like that,
did you confuse him with stockhausen?

>he is anticapitalist in this way that does not imply anti capitalism

He thought it provided him a new opportunity to make another series of bombastic statements that were sure to capture media atention, and further mistify him in the eyes of the pomo cliques.

Unfortunately for him he blew his load early on the Gulf War, so he didn't get the chance to write the would-be-much-more-successful The Iraq War Did Not Take Place - it would've have also been about Iraq, USA and Bush, though it would make even more sense to talk about the falsehood of it due to the WMD claims, but it wouldn't have the novelty value the second time.

>...The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true. - Ecclesiastes, as cited by Baudrillard
But the quote is fake. Get it? Damn, so deep.

is not the adoption of terrorism in memes a form of commodification already? or in the other areas already mentioned (fashion for example)

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Baudrillard is the only philosopher who got it exactly right.

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the "Event" is what we crave for. We are at peak hyperreality with the Trump presidency and are glued to the screens awaiting every folly and foible. Now the anticipation for Mueller is at a fever pitch and people are betting on what DT will do to distract from it. War? Assassination? Invasion? We are hurtling towards an end, and its our own death drive that is in control

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OP from here, which books from Baudrillard or Zizek should I read to get a better understanding of what happened in NZ?

First suggestions are good. Society of the Spectacle, Simulacra etc. Zizek's "Event" and "The Sublime Object of Ideology". You can also read Mark Fischer's Capitalist Realism.

If you want to understand the sense of why the NZ shooter did what he did (to a degree), you can read "The Last Messiah" by Peter Wessel Zapffe.

>The Spirit of Terrorism
>Society of the Spectacle
>Simulacra
> Zizek's "Event"
>Capitalist Realism
>The Last Messiah
Anything else I should look into?

This, Baudrillard was a hack with no solutions, just masturbating over the corpse of the West. Hyperreality is going to feel even more hyperreal when formerly white states are balkanized and civil wars break out on our doorsteps.

Interesting. He seems to be a victim of his own philosophy, missing the event of the 90s due to the fog of hyperreality while seeing the hyperreal 'event' of the 00s as real.

That terrorism is the natural response to globalism, like an organism rejecting a foreign body.

Solution: kill all capitalists and the cuckolds that support them. Bomb America into dust.

There are some solutions. Now, tell me if they'll ever be done because they're the only effective things that can change anything.

>no mention of western deep states backing terrorism or feds letting domestic terrorism happen

imagine being so stupid that you take this stuff seriously

baudrillard is blue pilled normie tier made for midwits who think it is profound

To be fair, the situation is extremely complex and the people who truly understand the modern situation can be counted on a single hand. And the few people who read them tend to misread them. NeoChinese Whispers arrive from the past.
Solutions walk an even more precarious path.

>people are betting on what DT will do to distract from it
Imagine using words like "hyperreality" and "folly" but pushing the same narrative as late night tv comedians and editorial pages of the NYT.

Well that's what I'm saying. The event is now prime time and within the collective consciousness. I'm not in favour of it but rather see how the ethos of reality tv is blending into everyday thought for so many

Walter Benjamin, illuminations and reflections. But "The storyteller", "the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility" and "on some motifs of baudelaire" might be the most important

A teacher actually told me to read Baudrillard. I told him to go fuck himself (in not so many words, but I could tell he got the message)

None of that contradicts what I or Baudrillard have written. Even though state intervention is powerless to stop terrorism, the state gains power through terrorist attacks, so it's obvious to see how there would be an incentive for the "deep state" to allow and/or encourage terrorism to occur. Baudrillard agrees that the state uses terrorism as an excuse to strip liberties and expand its power through wars and surveilling citizens; the reason it can get away with this is that terrorism always escapes these overreaches of power, allowing an indefinite extension of power in order to "defeat" the terrorists. Whether or not the state funds terrorism is not the issue--Baudrillard is asking the question of symbolic value of the attacks. And the reason the attacks are so symbolically effective--and thus able to act as the justification for the obscene abuses of power we've seen in the 21st century--is because of what is previously written about terrorism being unable to fit into the market exchange, i.e. the driving paradigm of Western culture.

You might be of the ilk to think that every apparent happening in the world is an attempt to trick the populace into supporting the extension of state power, but even in this case, you fail to ask yourself why some symbolic events are more persuasive than others. That's the level Baudrillard is writing at. The historical causality of the event itself is secondary.

I'd like to take the opportunity to namedrop Byung-Chul Han. Read either In The Swarm or Psychopolitics.

The Plague of Fantasy by Zizek
The Transparency of Evil by Baudrillard

Bump

Terror-core was a fashion trend back in the Baader Meinhof days, probably even earlier

>terror is a commodity
>costs literally billions and stagnates the economy
GABBIDULL IZ ZENDIEND!!!!!

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is this just like an accelerated grug?

>None of that contradicts what I or Baudrillard have written.

Sure it does. You've stated, "... the model proves insufficient because terrorism possesses a reality that will perpetually assert itself as an antagonist to world power," when antagonism is not always the case, as the two are often working with each other (especially in the case of Western and Israeli intelligence agencies funding and training Muslim terror groups for the last few decades). To have an antagonism is for two actors butting heads in conflict; when instead, one actor often funds and trains the other, or allows the other actor to do what they do for the first actor's benefit. None of this is antagonistic, it's symbiotic. It's an alliance and cooperative. The opposite of an agon. Baudrillard and yourself are not just being contradictory to historical facts, but you're also on a literature board while not understanding what an antagonist is, lol.

>You might be of the ilk to think that every apparent happening in the world is an attempt to trick the populace into supporting the extension of state power,

Nah, you're the one saying terrorism necessarily has some attribute ("possesses a reality"), my reply is pointing this out. You are only replying with this sentence because you know you've been caught out in a contradiction, so you are trying to pre-emptively shut down any rival facts that undermine your shallow, but pretentious, explanation.

>but even in this case, you fail to ask yourself why some symbolic events are more persuasive than others. That's the level Baudrillard is writing at. The historical causality of the event itself is secondary.

Using terms like "persuasive" events and "symbolic effectiveness" with no rhetorical analysis of audiences, those involved in creating the persuasive moment, the content/form of the message, etc. is bad form. You say its effective, because it is, "unable to fit into the market exchange," but this says nothing at all about who is moved or effected by the persuasive event. Also, secondary to what? Baudrillard and yourself are putting an explanation forward that is supposed to be grounded in ontology (the is-ness of terrorism, excess of reality, etc). Sticking at the level of the symbol is not only shallow due to its specific level of analysis, but you haven't metaphysically explained anything. Economic causality is a subset of historical causality, since causation is in time, which self-undermines your own ontological claims about what is primary or not.

Bump

Maybe at the time he was right, it seems to be fully captured and integrated in to the spectacle by this point.

Someone asks, "What was Baudrillard's political position?", and a thousand little heads bury themselves in his books to try and find out. But Baudrillard has clearly no positions, not only in politics, but anywhere. He stops at the exact point where one would normally declare a position and... wonders. Because positions presuppose goals, and goals presuppose healthy people, you see. Or, to put it another way, he has no POSITIVE position. The furthest he goes is to refute existing ones, because his teacher taught him the existing ones are bullshit. But his teacher also taught him one goal that is not bullshit, and which should have been Baudrillard's political position if he had been a good student, and learned his lesson well: "The Overman is the meaning of the earth..."