Gulf War did not take place

Reality is destroyed, or subordinated to the code, in several ways. It can

be generated from blueprints provided by the code (as discussed in earlier
sections). It can be deterred, such that real events are not able to
happen. Or it can be recuperated through aleatory mechanisms of power.
Let us start with the third possibility. The system is aleatory. This means
that it operates through the management of chance. It is determined in its
broad outlines, but relies on chance for its details. It rests on
probabilities. Because the system determines outcomes genetically
generating the different options through the code only certain things are
possible. The variation by chance and probability allows the system to
control phenomena at an aggregate level.
An aleatory system also brings in and incorporates resistances as they
occur. It assigns them a place in the code, as niche markets, questionnaire
options, political parties, categories of deviance. It is a machine of total
recuperation which doesnt wait for movements to emerge before it
assigns them a category it catches them in their early stages and preempts them. For instance, a new social critique might rapidly give rise to
a new party or NGO which is quickly recuperated. Or it might be
articulated by corporations themselves, as a new niche market.
Although this process is often effective, it also contains problems for the
system, because ultimately, it means that the system is governed by
chance. We are plunged into an abnormal uncertainty. In response, the
system creates an excess of causality and finality. But this compounds the
problem. Determined responses become hypertelic they exceed their
end. They become ends in themselves, pass the limits of their functions or
use-values, and colonise the entire system. This process is also referred to
as excrescence. It is similar to the proliferation of cancer cells in the body.
For Baudrillard, this arrangement depends on a particular religious
ontology. An accidental world implies an infinite will and energy, to keep
all determinate connections from forming. According to Baudrillard, reason
seeks to break the necessary connections among things which arise within
cycles of symbolic exchange and conceptions of fate. Chance the
possibility of indeterminate, mutually indifferent elements relating freely
is an effect of this decomposition of connections. It is an idea invented in
modernity, along with the idea of a formless, unbonded world. It can only
exist in a world without symbolic exchange. And it depends on the
continued suppression of symbolic exchange.
The idea of chance or the aleatory can be related to the elimination of
symbolic exchange in various ways. Chance is actually impossible on a
certain level. It is the perception we are left with after the destruction of
causality. It is a world in which one wanders like a dead soul, with little
chance of intense connections.
Chance, and also statistical causality, remove both responsibility and
seduction (or destiny). The dual rule of chance and necessity expresses a
human desire for control over the metamorphosis of things. This control
destroys the initiatory or ceremonial field. It thus paradoxically destroys
any sense of mastery over our destiny. The order of production exists to

make the order of metamorphosis impossible to control flow and

becoming.
Simulation is also associated with a process Baudrillard terms
deterrence. This term is a play on nuclear deterrence between the
superpowers (before 1991), which Baudrillard saw as a telling case of
deterrence in general, a simulated conflict which exists to preclude a real
clash, a form of manipulation rather than destruction.
Deterrence is not so much a power relation as a mindset. It holds people
in check by making them feel powerless, disappointed, neutralised
deterred. When it is strong enough, it no longer needs violent repression
or war it precludes conflict in advance. In nuclear deterrence for
instance, life is reduced to survival and conflicts become pointless, as they
cant reach the ultimate stakes.
Simulation feigns reality and thereby deters or prevents reality. But this
feigned reality is not entirely unreal, because it produces effects of reality
it is like a faked illness which produces real symptoms. Think for instance
of punishments applied in response to acts: theyre neither an objectively
real consequence, since theyre invented, nor an imagined consequence,
since they actually happen. Theyre a simulated consequence, an
artificially created hyper-reality. According to Baudrillard, there is no true
reality against which simulation can be compared. It is therefore more
subversive of reality than a simple appearance or falsehood.
It controls people in a different way through persuasion or
modelling. Instead of demanding that people submit to a prior model or
norm, it interpellates people as already being the model or the majority. It
thereby destroys the distance between the self and the norm, making
transgression more difficult. It creates a doubled self from which it is hard
to extract oneself.
The question from where do you speak, how do you know? is silenced by
the response, but it is from your position that I speak. Everything
appears to come from and return to the people. The doubled self is
portrayed and displayed in forms such as CCTV images, without a gap
between representation and what is represented.
This same doubling happens across different spheres the model is truer
than the true, fashion is more beautiful than the beautiful, hyperreality is
more real than the real, and so on. The effect of excess comes from the
lack of depth (of the imaginary, but also perhaps of relations and of
context).
Doubles are inherently fascinating. Theyre very different from the
seduction of effective images and illusions, such as trompe loeil (a type of
art which can be mistaken for a real object). The double allows a kind of
manipulation or blackmail in which the system takes hostage a part of the
self affect, desire, a secret and uses it for control.
Baudrillard thinks we are stalked by our doubles, like in the film The
Student of Prague. Yet doubles are also insufficient. People dont like
being verified and predicted in advance. People prefer ideas of destiny to
random probability. Deterrence is a barrier between ourselves and our
drive for the symbolic.

Deterrence also has an effect of deterring thought, of mental

deterrence. It discourages people from thinking critically, hence feeding
unreality. Disempowerment feeds into this deterrence of thought, as do
the media, and the promotion of superficial sociality.
At the same time, the system also creates a kind of generalised social
lockdown or universal security system. This lockup and control system is
designed to prevent any real event from happening. This system, based
on norms, replaces older systems of violence, war and law, creating a
social desert around itself. It tries to pre-plan everything, to leave nothing
to contingencies or chance. It tries to make everything manageable
through statistics and predetermined responses. The system tries to
prevent accidental death through systematic, organised death.
For Baudrillard, this is the culmination of years of civilising process and
socialisation. It is the culmination of the evolution of the dominant
system. The failure of progressive teleologies has occurred because
powers to lock-down and control have increased faster than powers to
emancipate. The result is a kind of generalised nihilism. Deterrence
induces general mobilisation, pacification and dissuasion a death or
incorporation of active energies.
The state dreams of dissuading and annihilating all terrorism preemptively, through a generalised terror on every level. This is the price of
the security of which people now dream, as Baudrillard already observed
in 1983 eighteen years before the states dream was realised. Overt and
selective repression transmutes over time into generalised preventive
repression. For instance, the police according to Baudrillard do not reduce
violence they simply take it over from crime and and become even more
dangerous.
The code deters every real process by means of its operational double. For
instance, it prevents real revolutions by means of simulated revolutions,
real wars by means of simulated wars, and so on. This leaves no space for
the real to unfold of its own accord or for events to happen.
Baudrillard thinks prisons and death are being replaced by a more subtle
regime of control based on therapy, reform and normalisation. The right
and left are now represented mainly by the split between direct repression
and indirect pacification. Baudrillard sees these options corresponding to
the early, violent phase of capitalism, with its emphasis on conscious
psychology and responsibility, and its more advanced, neo-capitalist
form, which draws on psychoanalysis and offers tolerance and reform.
A therapeutic model of society, promoted by advertisers, politicians and
modern experts, actually covers up real conflicts and contradictions. It
seeks to solve social problems by re-injecting simulations such as
controlled smiles and regulated communication.
He also refers to a regime of social control through security and safety,
blackmailing people into conformity with the threat of their own death. He
sees this as surrounding people with a sarcophagus to prevent them from
dying a kind of living death.
Deterrence functions by an anxiety to act because action brings about
massive destruction. Nuclear states cant go to war because of mutually
assured destruction. Workers wont strike because the entire economy

would be shut down. Small powers which get nuclear weapons actually
buy into their own deterrence. Memory of the Holocaust is neutralised by
its constant repetition on television.
While this shuts down resistance, it also makes the systems power
unusable. Power becomes frozen and self-deterred. It creates a protective
zone of maximum security which radiates through the territory held by
the system. It is a kind of glacis, a zone where any assailant is constantly
under fire from the systems defenders.
In a simulated world, events are prevented because no social logic or
story can be deployed according to its own logic. A social force risks
annihilation if it tries this. This leads to an evacuation of any historical
stake from society. We are now living through the death pangs of strong
referentials, including of the sense of being in the march of history or in
hope/at risk of a pending revolution.
It might actually be better to think of it as incapacitation rather than
deterrence. People become unable or afraid to act because the capacity to
fight and win has been taken away. This means that everything is
neutralised, and reinscribed in the system. This absolute model of
security is according to Baudrillard elaborated from nuclear war. The
nuclear battle station is the point from which the model of deterrence
radiates out through social life.
Deterrence is directed against a range of phenomena such as complexity,
finality, contradiction, accident, rupture, chance, and transversality. Yet
paradoxically, events continue to happen at ground level, below the level
of data-control. Misfortunes and personal crises multiply. The social
becomes organised like a disaster-movie script, with constant struggles to
survive, states of exception, discourses of risk-avoidance and riskmanagement a situation of everyday precarity. The function of
deterrence is not to prevent this permanent crisis. It is rather to prevent it
from having system-level effects.
Phenomena such as the Gulf War, Watergate, and other political/media
events are treated by Baudrillard as instances of deterrence. They are
based on a simulation of a situation where the old stakes still matter,
keeping old antagonisms and lost phenomena artificially alive as
simulacra. They thus exude operational negativity preventing the
emergence of real antagonisms.
Non-war in the Gulf
The theory of deterrence is exemplified in Baudrillards analysis of what
happened in 1991, when according to him, the Gulf War did not take
place. What took place, instead, was a non-war. This is a type of conflict
specific to the third order of simulation.
A non-war is a simulated war. It reproduces exactly the elements of a real
war, down to its destruction, death, propaganda, and so on. But it is not a
situation which arises between adversaries, which is a real, unpredictable
event. A true war is a strategic conflict over an absent centre of power
which no-one can occupy. Both sides believe in a cause; the outcome is
unpredictable. This is why a non-war is not a true war.
Real power, according to Baudrillard, is a strategy, a relation of force, and
a stake. It is subject to death and the symbolic. On the other hand, power

exercised to conceal its own absence is no longer subject to death and the
symbolic. It can persist indefinitely, as an object of consumer demand.
For Baudrillard, war is pointless and impossible to wage in the nuclear
era. There is no proportion between means (total annihilation) and ends
(strategic objectives). Hence, the scene of war the scenario of total
conflict to the death, or of adversity over stakes between combatants
will never again take place. War becomes impossible to exchange; it
escapes symbolic exchange. The distillation of war in everyday fear
prevents the final apocalyptic clash. Arguably, non-war is to war as
hyperreality is to reality.
A non-war is a simulation in the sense of derivation from a prior
model. Western powers fight non-wars based on models, and go to war
based on models. The non-war, at least on the western side, is an
operational unfolding of models and signs already planned in
advance. The symbolic dimension, the exchange with the enemy, the
reversibility of actions, are absent.
This is why, for Baudrillard, it is not a war, even though all the other
characteristics of war are very much present. He emphasises repeatedly
that non-war is still as deadly as war ever was. What it has lost is the
adversity of the adversaries, the ideological seriousness of a war
between two counterposed possibilities, the reality of victory or defeat as
systemic changes.
For Baudrillard, western non-wars are now simulations in that there isnt
really a fight to the death between two adversaries. Rather, the purpose
of western power, and usually of both adversaries, is to prevent the
liquidation of the systems deterrence. This requires the destruction of
symbolic exchange, and hence of pre-capitalist societies and groups.
Non-war is missing the symbolic dimension a true war might have the
possibility of reversibility, or conflictual dialogue with an enemy so to
speak. Contact between America and Iraq did not happen during the Gulf
War. America can only imagine an adversary in their own image. They are
invulnerable to symbolic violence, due to their pragmatism and
masochism.
America has been caught in a spiral of unconditional repression by the
aspiration to be a global police force. They try to humiliate by defeating
the enemy impersonally nothing personal and avoid seeing or
meeting the adversary. They seek to show the infallibility of their machine,
displaying signs of relentlessness. They seek to avoid any reaction or
living impulse.
In electronic war, the enemy no longer exists there is only refractory
data to be neutralised and brought into the consensus. Non-war entails
non-recognition of the enemy as such, with precision and abstract
operations displacing direct conflict. On the American side, it is like safe
sex war with a condom on. But on the other hand, America cannot
imagine the other and therefore seeks to annihilate whatever cannot be
converted to the American way of life.
Meanwhile, the TV audience are also deterred, and experience voyeurism
and repentance over the fate of hostages. They consent to be gently

terrorised, but never lose their underlying indifference. Yet even this
minimal participation is enough to rescue war and politics, for now.
America played the Gulf War as a game of deterrence. They refused to
bargain. Saddam, in contrast, played it as a symbolic game of ruses,
bargains, trickery and disguise. As a result, both missed their target. They
fought in two different times and spaces. The enemy was
foreclosed. There was not enough communication for deterrence or war to
be effective.
Non-wars are not, however, directed primarily at rival nation-states. They
are primarily waged to domesticate or liquidate grassroots movements
and symbolic challenges which restore the dimensions of the real and the
event which the system fears. Non-war is waged to absorb and reduce
what is singular and irreducible. The Gulf War, Baudrillard suggests, was
aimed at the Islamic world. The French colonial war in Algeria was aimed
at the revolutionary movement. The Vietnam War was aimed at guerilla
revolt.
Baudrillards reading of Vietnam (which could equally apply to Iraq and
Afghanistan) is that the real goal was to make the enemy predictable. This
is why the American defeat did not destroy American global power. Each
war ended as the revolutionary impulse was tamed or
bureaucratised. Non-wars are usually won or lost by which regime comes
under threat from its own population first. Sometimes, they are lost
because an accident, an event, or a loss of power to the other, breaks the
machine of war and its appearance of infallibility as in Somalia