1nc

Their demand for a uniform rationality inculcates a violent technocratic eradication of

irrationality while only recapitulating a tragic ontology of ressentiment.
Ossewaarde 10. Marinus Ossewaarde, Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Twente,
“The Tragic Turn in The Re-Imagination of Publics: Resentment and Ressentiment,” Animus 14, 2010

tragedy transforms this unbearable absurdity of life into an aesthetic

For Nietzsche, the Heraclitean vision sees the truth about reality while subsequently

public without masking the horror itself The Socratic dialectic and its Apollonian publics intellectually
, .

involve people who are incited to search for the good in the realm of ideas in spite of the ,

phenomenological flux and absurdity of things. Dionysian publics do not try to check the becoming of
reality but incite the participants to live it as art
, instead, , by making them become part of the story itself. In Socratic dialogues, disputing friends critically question all established orders in their search for

The urge to control drives bureaucracies which

the rational or good order. Both the Dionysian and the Apollonian publics can disturb an established order and institutions. , , in order to effectively fix one

have to destroy all forms of publics that have the potential to upset order
type of reality, bureaucracies . In modern societies,

impose an enlightenment model of rational order devoid of mythical content and uncertain self-
knowledge upon a reality that is thereby made fully intelligible controllable and correctible
, , . Nietzsche considers the

The enlightenment movement’s confidence in the

European enlightenment as the modern successor to the Socratic myth-annihilation, which characterizes the Apollonian publics.8

capacity of reason and its belief in the rational order of reality are Socratic in origin . However, Nietzsche suggests that the enlightenment
goes steps further than Socrates in its annihilation of myth. Although Socrates ridicules and destroys the legendary tales of the tragedians, his dialogues are premised upon the myth of the Delphic oracle (which revealed that there was no one wiser than Socrates). An d, although Socrates
maintains that reason rather than myth is the foundation of European culture, reason, the nous, is itself a mythical entity (Nietzsche 2000: 72): the ‘voice of reason’ is the ‘divine voice’ of Socrates’ daimonion, which makes itself be heard in the dialogues (Nietzsche 2000: 75). In the

the enlightenment movement postulates a vision of

Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, inspired by Nietzsche (c.f., Wellmer 1991: 3), maintain that

reason that is devoid of mythical content Enlightenment reason seeks to make people think for . , in its origin,

themselves and to liberate them from their fears and superstitions but in the modernization process it , , ,

becomes an instrument that serves bureaucratic objectives , such as enforcing laws effectively, fixing a machine, or making a business run more efficiently.9 Horkheimer and

this pathology of enlightenment reason turns into a bureaucratic

Adorno (2007: 57) emphasize that Nietzsche, like Hegel before him, had grasped that

instrument Enlightenment reason provides the static concepts

. The reduction of the Socratic nous to an instrumental reason has far-reached political and cultural implications. ,

to construct bureaucratic limits and boundaries, which in turn rationally

mummified categories, classifications and catalogues that are required

order reality Dialogical or democratic practices have no place in such a technical organization
(Honneth 2007: 70).

of reality . Bureaucracies, whose function is to implement the enlightenment or any other theoretical model of reality, have no need for the Socratic publics and consider dialogues and the need for intellectual justification rather troublesome and disorderly (Gouldner

The participants of Socratic dialogues are turned into bureaucratic subjects

1973: 76; Gardiner 2004: 35). (potential) , like workers, consumers and clients,

into ‘spectators without influence’ whose lives are governed by the enlightened power elites and
that is, ,

civil servants The identity of bureaucratic subjects is determined by typically large and
(Honneth 2007: 33).

powerful organizations, such as government agencies and enterprises (Mills 1956: 355). The Enlightenment movement is, in Nietzsche’s words (2000: 85), ‘the
most illustrious opponent of the tragic world-view.’ Horkheimer and Adorno stress that the enlightenment movement, or perhaps more exactly, some kind of process deriving from it, eventually comes to substitute the plebeian entertainment of mass culture industries for the tragic art of

bureaucratic subjects who live in a disenchanted world in which myths are

the aesthetic publics. According to Nietzsche,

annihilated by Apollonian reason cannot bear the horrific and absurd truth about their own
existence The subjects of the culture industries no longer have the opportunity to participate in
.10

enchanting tragic myths that cultivate powerful passions and the Dionysian will to live , which characterize Nietzsche’s ‘good

European’. The entertainment provided by manufactured images and commodity forms, like music productions, films, television programmes and glossy magazines, ensures that the absurdity of life and the Dionysian abyss are forgotten (Horkheimer and Adorno 2007: 159).11

Being thoroughly rationalized such subjects cannot develop the mythical imagination or a certain
,

sensitivity that would have allowed them to ‘live the tragedy’ in and through the aesthetic publics . In a

subjects cannot experience feel or live the tragic fate of the Dionysian hero because
bureaucratic culture, , , , as Nietzsche (2000: 45) insists,

shielded by bureaucracies they are not ‘equipped for the most delicate and intense suffering.’
,

Bureaucracies expect and demand passive obedience from their subjects, which makes cultural movement nearly impossible. Such passive spectators or so-called ‘consumers of art’ (Shrum

governed to take refuge in comfortable boring and mindless

1991: 349; 371), are, Horkheimer and Adorno (2007: 155; 166) point out, deluded en masse, ,
bureaucratic forms of entertainment Culture industries provide ready-made experiences to a passive
.

public that is willing to buy them to fill the emptiness of a disenchanted world and appease the
cowardly fear of living in the flux The experience of
, which they explicitly experience in temporary relationships and the continuous flow of new products and changed consumption patterns.

the flux can also be more implicit or unconscious, resulting in a sort of malaise, feeling of insecurity or
restlessness the escape from life into a manufactured dream-world of cultural productions does
. However,

not really quench the thirst which allows the culture industry to carry on with
, as the Socratic dialogue and the Dionysian festival do, , therefore,

its provision of manufactured dream-worlds, to fill an emptiness that never decreases .

 1nc
The rifts of modernity have abandoned all objects within the terrain of their own
tragically self-imposed subjectivity. The orbital phenomena of signification now serves
to entrap the world within integral reality – a despotic regime of accelerating warfare
that subjects all beneath its gaze to genocidal violence in the name of its own
integrity. It is here we are reminded of that timeless maxim – that an explosion is
always a promise.
Baudrillard 5. Jean, the king of the trees, “The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact,” Translated by
Chris Turner, Page 191-196

Lines of fracture, inversions, splits, rifts : there is , as it were, a line beyond which, for every
expanding system - every system which, by dint of exponential growth, passes beyond its own end - a
catastrophe looms . We are no longer in a system of growth, but of excrescence and saturation, which
can be summed up in the fact that there is too much. There is too much everywhere, and the system
cracks up from excess . Every mass produces a critical mass effect - in the physical sense of a certain
magnitude (mass , temperature, pressure) that produces a radical change in the properties of a body or in the
development of a phenomenon. It is in this way that every phenomenon can reverse its course by mere
acceleration or prolife ration . It is in this way that a simple variation in the overall mass of the cosmos can tip our universe over
from expansion to sudden, violent contraction. All velocity produces an equivalent or even greater mass. All acceleration produces an e qual or
even greater inertia. All mobilization p roduces an e qual or even greater immobility. All differentiation p roduces an e qual or even greater
indifference. All transparency produces an equal or even greater opacity . All information produces an
equal or even greater entropy or disinformation . All communication produces an equal or even
greater incommunicability . All knowledge, all certainty produces an equal or even greater
uncertainty . Etc. Every process growing exponentially generates a barrier: the speed barrier, the heat
barrier, the information barrier, the transparency barrier, the Virtual barrier . And that barrier is insuperable.
The energy of acceleration is exhausted in compensating for the inertia resulting from that acceleration. The additional information
intended to offset the perverse effects of information merely reinforces those effects. Every
exponential form leads to the critical threshold at which the process reverses its effects . For example, the
accumulation of truth, of the signs of truth, produces an irresistible effect of uncertainty. There is nothing more dissuasive than

the accumulation of evidence . Nothing more unreal than the accumulation of facts . On the horizon of the
signs of the real the simulacrum looms. When the signs of good accumulate, the era of evil and the transparency of evil begins. In this way, the
passage from the true to the false (or rather to the undecidable), from the real to the simulacrum, from good to evil, is like a critical mass
effect, a non-dialectical logic, a fateful logic of excess. The
excess of health engenders viruses and virulence. The
excess of security produces a new threat, that of immune system failure. The excess of capital
engenders speculation and financial collapse. The excess of information engenders undecidability of
facts and confusion of minds . The excess of reason engenders the unjustifiable. The excess of
transparency engenders terror . The gravitational collapse of every system, of every process, of every
body in movement, whose acceleration creates a reciprocal shock wave, an antagonistic force not just
equal but greater, which constitutes its absolute limit, its negative horizon, and beyond which it
cancels itself out. Too much is too much. Without noticing it, we have gone through the social barrier, the politics barrier, the
information barrier. It might even be said that we have gone through the virtual reality barrier and we are approaching the critical eventuality
of a collapse of the information systems. Perhaps, like demographic growth, intelligence itself, in its neuronal extension, constitutes a critical
mass? There will soon be as many artificial neurones on earth, in all of our 'intelligent' machines, as in
all our ' natural' brains (120 billion neurones each ) . Are we not running the risk, after the elimination of dark matter,42 of an
exhaustion of all grey matter, from the point when the s tock of Artificial Intelligence exceeds the symbolic capital of the species, this latter
ceasing to exist once its much more efficient artificial counterpart comes into being? Is there room on the earth for as many artificial as natural
species , for as much computer-generated substance as organic matter, dead or alive, for as much Artificial Intelligence as natural intelligence?
Is there room for both the world and its double? So
long as we were in a kind of spatial, geographical and mental
infinity and transcendence, universality could function as a dynamic idea - totality being fine and
desirable only as a dream . What we have today is the absolute reverse of the dialectic of the
universal, the stage of the globalization of a finite, excessive, transcendence-less universe. Too much
is too much. The 'fine souls' say: 'The excess of culture will never abolish the desire for culture. The
profusion of sex will never abolish desire. ' And the same goes for communication, information,
democracy and human rights too. They cannot imagine that there is too much (yet obesity, that surfeit of body-mass, ought to
make them think) . All this is wrongheaded. Nothing escapes the law of sudden, violent deflation through excess,

through overproduction - particularly not desire , which is pretty much geared to lack! The same law
applies here as in the markets, and the same crash looms over any form of excrescence, be it sexual,
cultural or economic. Information, communication, production, spectacle - what if there were an explosive accumulation of all these
things? We might think that the human capacity for adapting to the very worst is infinite . Most of the time it is proven to be so, and that can
even produce an inverted thrill - but perhaps it will not turn out to apply indefinitely? The surfeit of the social drives us out of the social. The
surfeit of politics drives us out of politics . The surfeit of reality drives us out of reality. One soul more and everywhere is overpopulated.43 One
single element more and the whole system tips over into excess or exclusion. A
single mad cow and the whole herd has to
be slaughtered. This is the dictatorship of abundance, of excess, of the critical mass that overturns the
accounting principles and sets us on an abusive, exponential course. In any event, for the maleficent spirit of
pataphysics everything is already excessive . The world itself is de trop . The world, having become

integral, absorbs everything into its fullness and, in so doing, expels itself. In its very totality, which is
at once, like Ubu, naIve and ridiculous, it demonstrates irrational behaviour. This is why, from a certain critical
density onward (for example, the density of traffic in traffic j ams) , rational behaviour no longer pays . To move towards one 's goal randomly is
as efficient as taking a calculated route (as in Naples, for example, where absolute disorder produces the same results as absolute order) .
Sometimes irrational behaviour can even be superior to the rational: so, for example, two boats on Lake Constance in dense fog are in less
danger of colliding if their pilots are drunk than if they are attempting to master the situation. And from this we can draw some conclusions
regarding the beneficial effect of evil and also the diabolic effect of good. In our current situation, where we are everywhere on the verge of
this critical density, if not indeed beyond it, the wise thing would be to act generally in irrational ways. Out
of intolerance to the
system itself. For, paradoxically, whereas tolerance is held up everywhere as the supreme value, the
question of intolerance to the system itself and to its effects is never raised, of intolerance to good
and to the excess of good. Tolerance, this peaceful coexistence of all cultures, all religions, of mores
and ideas, is more or less the equivalent of that degraded form of energy that is heat (leaving aside
the fact that, following its own ' humanitarian' logic, it assumes, on occasion, entirely intolerant
forms of intervention ) . In a world ruthlessly doomed to this principle, the irruption of intolerance will
soon be the only event . The automatic return of all forms of racism, integrism and exclusion in
reaction to this unconditional conviviality. Whereby evil ironically resurfaces. However, it may seem that
positive values emerge from evil, but once again it is evil that is at work in this ironic reversal - there is, once again, in this violation of logic a
violence done to reason. It was in this way thatJarry drew happy consequences from the exponentiality of sex, writing in The Supermale that
once a certain critical threshold has been passed, you can make love indefinitely ... But that is pataphysics!
The appeal to information as a means of democratic truth-speaking is a procedure in
the nihilistic dissection of the world within the paradigm of absolute transparency.
Their faith in consciousness raising and mediated digital activism as a methodology for
proliferating the truth about racism is a failing project that passively invests blind faith
in the technologies of that same system as a praxis for mobilization and ultimately
serves to obfuscate and mystify the global violence of the imperial west.
Artrip and Debrix 14. Ryan E. Artrip, Doctoral Student, ASPECT, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and
Francois Debrix, professor of political science at Virginia Polytechnical Institute, “The Digital Fog of War:
Baudrillard and the Violence of Representation,” Volume 11, Number 2

The claim about a certain quality of reality or even realism to new digital informational or
communicative technologies has played a formative role in the global staging of several recent social
and political conflicts. In both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements of 2011, for example , digital
technologies were celebrated for their real-time capacity and their subversive (democratic)
potentials . The virtue of reporting “from the ground” of the event itself was championed as a matter of authenticity. There was a
common sense that “truth” would finally be able to speak from its “real” source (the demos itself?). Not
only is there a prevalent uncritical (even if sometimes well-intentioned) faith in new media and their digital technologies
today, but, more importantly, there is often an impulse of liberation. Yet, this impulse is stifled by its

faith in representation. The hope for openness, transparency, immediacy, and indeed liberation is so
tethered to the real (and to the will to reality) that it ends up being negative or, at least, self-
defeating. It often becomes evident that the so-called democratic uses of new media technologies—
particularly in terms of reporting violent war events or conflicts of allegedly great concern/importance to the global demos—are,
far from
producing a clearer picture of an objective event, contributing to an ever thickening fog of meaning
and truth. These new media technologies in and of themselves are not the object of our critique here. Moreover, we are not
interested in “clearing the fog” of the real or war. Again, our critical intervention in this essay has more to do with
deploying perspectives that may expose the violent dispositions of the contemporary mythos of war (and revealing the complicit role of the
digitalized demos in the intensification of this mythos) than with attempting to clear the way for a different ethos about everyday reality,
digitalized media, and the prevalence of warfare in political representations. In fact, part of our argument is also to suggest that the various
The lure to
cultural, political, and ethical mechanisms that seek to clear the fog of the real (and war) often end up reproducing it.
criticize and debunk reality often requires that another real, another certainty, another dominant
meaning, or indeed another democratic necessity be established through the same means and
techniques, and media, that had to be challenged in the first place (thus, the simulacrum continues to
proliferate its reality-effects). Behind the widespread “global” celebration of digitalized technologies for their newly found
representational capabilities and accuracies, there lies the idea that, perhaps following a collective disgust with the dealings of Western media
outlets as more or less uncritical props for the social/economic/ethical status quo in the past several decades, disseminated and
“democratized” media technologies can de-mystify the world, lift its aura in a way, or perhaps “dig deeper” into the “truth” than, say, what the
media networks involved in reporting news (including war news) in the 1980s and 1990’s (the famous CNN effect) ever could do. Because these
technologies are far more in real-time than news networks, they are also generally thought to be able to evade oppressive/repressive
censorship of particular corporate/class/state/ideology interests. But even more than escaping filters, digital
representations today
are often thought to be able to eliminate all of the ambiguities born of time. Thus, we (members of the
public/demos) want to believe that mediation can be removed. And we want to subscribe to the view that any distortion
occurring between an event and its perception/memory, or between the “actual” and its account, can evaporate. By reducing to the virtually
infinitesimal or invisible the filter/screen between the image that represents and the real that is and, furthermore, by placing the productive
the digital establishes itself as something
responsibilities for the image into the hands of the user (literally into the digits),

capable of demolishing the “malicious” surface of appearances to reveal a meaningful density of truth
through the quasi-immediate interface. This is the dream of immediacy rediscovered and perhaps
finally realized . At a most basic level of analysis, the risk involved in pointing to this desire for mediatized or
digitalized immediacy would be to undermine the visual evidence of the violent/virulent occurrence
of the omnipresence of war. For example, could we have deployed a critique of the US military’s and
the US government’s use of torture in the War on Terror were it not for the seemingly unfiltered
“shock and awe” of the Abu Ghraib photos? Again, from the point of view of the ethos of virtual/virulent war, the lure of
digitalized immediacy has its uses (and, possibly, benefits, too, even for the demos). But, from the perspective of war’s
mythos, it must be said that the “truth” about war and war operations cannot be fully revealed
because representation, no matter how immediate or seemingly unmediated, always works by
imposing some meaning onto things/events that are made visible/representable. Consider the role played by
digital media in the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013. Within a matter of minutes of the blasts, even before the smoke could clear the
scene, images and videos of terror taken from spectators’ mobile devices circulated through cyberspace. Everything was seemingly captured in
that instant. The horror that drew so many people to capture images through their smart phones seems to speak on its own; it needs no
commentary, no meaning to be given to it. In fact, it appears to have no mediation, no appropriation or narrativizing, no contextualizing either.
That is precisely why smart phones are so apt at giving us such images, such representations, such “pure” meanings about things. Especially ,

such a horrifying violence, it is said, needs no commentary, no sense to be made of it. An

immeasurable violence is done to the violated when one tries to make sense of the senseless (Agamben,
1999). Yet, as Baudrillard had already pointed out in his remarks on the Gulf War, “everything which is turned into
information becomes the object of endless speculation, the site of total uncertainty. We are left with the
symptomatic reading on our screens of the effects of the war, or the effects of discourse about the war, or completely speculative strategic
evaluations” (Baudrillard, 1995: 41). In their digital representation, images of war and images of terror are dissolved into their own information.
Information (what the image/event wants to tell us, to reveal, allegedly) already infiltrates the tweeted or texted
image/scene (of horror, of war) with an urgency of signification and meaning. Images of horror cannot make
sense, perhaps must not be made sense of, and yet they somehow beg for meaning, for circulation, or for propagation, in the hope that they
may reveal something to someone. Thus, the
digitalized mediation of the image, even in its instantaneity, still
takes place. Images—or whatever event might have been “caught”—must succumb to a will to
information, to a will to meaning, even if it is falsely affirmed that what is digitally rendered needs no
commentary. Put differently, the image levels the event it represents by entering into a mass/global
indifferent exchange, into a virulent global (representational) circulation that murders singularity or,
indeed, the moment of trauma (on this question of the erasure of trauma, see Debrix, 2008: 4-5; Edkins, 2003: 37-38). The enigmatic
singularity of the event —which, for Baudrillard, was once a precondition for any sort of historical
transition—gives way to an endlessness of representation, whether such representation appears to
have a clear ethical or political purpose/signification or not. It is in this always operative tendency of
rendered appearances to yield meaning (even if their meaning is to be information-worthy), not in the image or event itself,
that we situate the conditions of possibility and reproducibility for the ever-thickening representational
fog and for the violence/virulence of images, or better yet, of appearances . To make war or, as the
case may be, the terror event mean something—even in some of the most immediate reactions often
designed to evoke injustice or, indeed, incomprehension—is the generative point of violence, the
source of representation as a virulent/virtual code and mode of signification. Baudrillard writes, “Everywhere
one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible.” He adds, “We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning;
[…] we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us” (Baudrillard, 1988: 63). Indeed, the Western world—increasingly, the
global—has found itself with a proliferation of meanings and significations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is as if the so-called crisis
of nihilism (thought to be characteristic of much critique and philosophical suspicion throughout the 20th century) later on produced something
of the opposite order. The mass violence of the 20th century inaugurated not a complete void of despair or
meaninglessness, but instead a flood of meaning, if not an overproduction of it. Baudrillard refers to this
frantic explosion of meaning/signification as “a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of
material production […]” (Baudrillard, 1983: 7). Here, Baudrillard
describes a mode of production of a different kind,
not motivated by class interests or exploitation of value, but by an automated, perhaps viral,
abreaction to the empty core or disenchantment of things and the world: that is to say, the degree to which
things seem to lack a singular center of gravity or have lost a justifiable reference to the real world, and yet each thing that “matters” is also an
attempt to get at reality as a question of accumulation (of meaning), circulation (of signs), and filling up of all interstitial spaces of
communication and value. The end result is an over-abundance of signs and images of reality, something that culminates in what Baudrillard
calls hyperreality—things appear more real than reality itself. The story that needs to be told is thus not about the undoubtedly deplorable
“truth” or fact of explosive and warlike violence, but about a violence of another sort. In the radical digital transparency of the global scene, we
(members of the demos) often have full or direct exposure to explosivity, as we saw above with the image of terror. But what
still needs
to be thought and problematized is impalosivity or what may be called implosive violence. Implosive violence is
a violence for which we do not, and perhaps will never, have much of a language (Rancière, 2007: 123).
Although, not having a language for it or, rather, as we saw above, seeking to find a language to talk about it and, perhaps, to make sense of it
is still sought after. This is, perhaps, what digital pictures of war/terror violence seek to capture or want to force through. Implosive violence,
often digitally rendered these days, is in close contact with media technologies and representational devices and techniques because it seeks
representation and meaning. This is why implosive violence insists on calling in wars (against terror, for example) and on mobilizing war
machines (against terrorist others, against vague enemy figures), but wars and war machines that no longer have—to the extent that they ever
had—a clearly identifiable object and subject, or a clear mission/purpose. As such, this
implosive violence and its wars (the new
Western/global way of war, perhaps) must remain uncertain, unclear, foggy, inwardly driven, representational,

and indeed virulent. They must remain uncertain and confused even as they are digitally operative
and desperately capture events/images to give the impression that meanings/significations can and
will be found . Yet, as we saw above, it is not meanings exactly that must be found, but information and the endless guarantee of its
immediate circulation. As information occupies the empty place of meaning, certainty, or truth, images must
be instantaneously turned into appearances that search for meanings that will never be discovered
because, instead, a proliferation of information-worthy facts and beliefs will take over (perhaps this is what
US fake pundit and comedian Stephen Colbert famously referred to as “truthiness”). Or, as Baudrillard puts it, “ free from its former

enemies, humanity now has to create enemies from within, which in fact produces a wide variety of
inhuman metastases” (Baudrillard, 2003). Thus, this implosive violence is destined to be a global violence
since it "is the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including
of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. […] It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to
violence itself and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear
[…] Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, produces by
chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist" (2003; our italics). In a way, this global virulence is
all-out and everyday war itself. It is also the Global War on Terror, a war whose virulence and ever present (virtual, potential) violence
mediatizes and hyper-realizes everyday life for a lot of human bodies in the West and beyond (is that not also something that the Boston
Marathon bombing smart phone representations struggled to tell us?). For Baudrillard, this is how we should apprehend the mythos of
globalization (since globalization is all about virulence). To
suggest, as many still do, that there is any sort of remaining
hegemony in the production of cultural and political meanings (as, for example, Horkheimer and Adorno once told us; see
Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002) is anachronistic. But it is also a convenient claim to make. As we mentioned above, such a

posture implies that hope can be around the corner, that things can be changed, that the demos can
be rescued and liberated, that it can trust the immediacy offered by today’s digitalized media, and that such an immediacy is
the guarantee that not all meanings are lost (again, it is about proving meaning by way of information, the real by way of
appearances). Viral, virtual, and virulent media representations have assumed the empty throne abandoned by the

modern sovereign/core of power in the implosive West/ global. The implosive immediacy of proliferating videos, images,
memes, articles, utterances, leaks, wikis, blogs, clips, blips, flips, or flops reigns supreme and sovereign. And it is this proliferating
sovereignty of digitalized mediation/representation that ensures the circulation of war’s
violence/virulence too (it is, in this way, war’s platform and generator). As Baudrillard intimates, this representational, mediatized, and
informational virality or virulence is simply the historical logic of the West/modernity brought to its fatal and perhaps absurd end, a tautology
of Western modernity and globality inwardly and mediatically hyper-realized (truth, being, and language all operating as one and the same,
indifferently, in a circulatory movement of immediately available appearances). It is the eternal recurrence of the same, or
perhaps the eternal recurrence of the always already replayed . Of course, we (digital modern subjects) could ignore
all this. We could go on to celebrate representational, real-time digital technologies and their
visual/viral/virulent practices in the belief that, somehow, they will continue to give us the truth of
war, the truth of violence, the truth of senseless terror/horror. Perhaps, they may even give us a new hope/meaning
about the demos, about “our” ontological positioning in, through, and with digital media. And maybe the ethical impulse is indeed to ignore or,
at least, selectively use this Baudrillardian critique of war’s and representation’s violence and virulence. But another posture, one we advocate,
is to take another look at the violence of representation itself, at the virulence of the West and the global, and at modernity’s own implosive
history—which, of course, is the history of representation, too—to which today’s digitalized technologies and media owe their significance and,
at times, urgency.

War has become digital – a hyperreal play of information that transcends violence
itself. As the spreadsheet becomes the most dangerous weapon on the battlefield, the
structural law of domination escapes the material – yet this does not make
termination within the matrix any less of a threat
Öberg 16. Dr. Dan Öberg, Professor in Department of Military Science, Swedish Defense College,
Associate Editor for Journal of Narrative Politics, War, transparency and control: the military architecture
of operational warfare, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, October 20, 2016, p. 3-13

In what way does warfare relate to social control? Historically, war studies and military science, as well as military doctrine in general,
tend to understand warfare as the how of waging war, typically involving force-on-force military operations on a
demarcated field of battle (Creveld 1991, 10; Gat 2006, 9; Keegan 2004, 28; US DOD 2013, I2). That is, warfare as the “how” of war tends
to be reduced to the application of military battlefield tactics taking place in a more or less
demarcated space/time. As Caroline Holmqvist has stated, the focus on the question of “how” risks making the
method of war a preoccupation in its own right. Moreover, this might lead to a neglect of the way
warfare is always already interlinked with dominant legal, political and colonial discourses (Holmqvist
2010, 111–113; Mbembe 2003, 25; Pretorius 2008, 114). As part of attempts to understand warfare beyond such a ‘bare technique’ so as to
properly conceive of it as ‘a technological instrument in the management of a global(ised) system’
(Behnke 2006, 937), there have been a number of empirical studies which relate warfare (and predominately Western military imaginaries) to
discourses of control. They have studied the relationship between control and industrialized-mechanized warfare (see Bousquet 2009),
network-centric warfare (Lawson 2011), the interplay between military representations of strategy (Wasinski 2011), and the co-constitutive
aspects of fighting and political theory (Brighton 2013). As Dillon and Reid (2000, 2001, 2009) argue in their work on “the liberal way of war”,
to understand global warfare, we need to investigate the way it exerts control as a specific liberal
practice. They suggest that: the liberal way of rule … necessarily correlates with its own brand of war-making
… (and is) … shaped by its commitment to war, and the exigencies not simply of war-making but of the
continuous state of emergency and security as well as constant preparedness for war, which characterize
liberal rule as such. (Dillon and Reid 2009, 8) This is one reason why it makes sense to turn to the various preoccupations that characterize the
discursive character of liberal regimes: knowledge networks, complexity, self-adaption (Dillon and Reid 2001, 45) and, in addition to this,
transparency. Although a plural and complex enterprise, global
liberal governance is comprised of techniques on
managing populations that operate a strategic game highly dependent on assimilating war into its
practices of power (Dillon and Reid 2001, 41–42). Both historically and in the present, liberal wars, most notably the US-led
counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reflect the countries that wage them. They rest on the policing of a
foundational narrative of emancipation and humanitarian values . Such policing points towards an
increasing logic of surveillance against the movements of populations and thereby risks leading to an
“ unending war ” directed against the uncertainty and interconnectivity of political life. The current
militarization of the refugee situation in the Mediterranean is one case in point. In fact, other areas such as aid-
work can be seen as a complementary strategic facet which relies on military interventions to clear
the way and to protect. This is what has been known as the “Humanitarian Empire” (Duffield 2010, 69; Evans
2013, 47; see also Holmqvist 2014). It is interesting, moreover, to consider the way war and practices of liberal peace came together in the “war
on terror”. This conflation can be seen in how strategies
of violent interventions are committed to the
advancement of liberalism as a social organization . One example is the way liberalism is based on rational
means and ends deliberation that neglects how wars of “emancipation” involve radically different
perspectives on life, consequently leading to depolitization and dehumanization of the Other. This in turn
suggests that liberal warfare stems out of liberal peace interventionism and principles of ‘total
governance’ (Behnke 2004, 280–287; Bell 2011, 310–312, 323–325; Duffield 2010, 53–56). As Brad Evans has argued, even
humanitarian intervention rests upon an ‘operative fabric of … faith’ which leads to a politics of pre-
emption (2013, 179). Indeed, as we shall see in the final parts of this article, such logic is an integral part of the
operationalization of warfare. However, before we do so, the following sections turn to Baudrillard, to better unpack the way
warfare relates to transparency as a means of control. Transparency and control Already in the 1960s, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard
warned of the way transparency works as an ideology of social control. In challenging transparency, Baudrillard has
looked particularly at the way urban architecture combines mirroring and light with interconnected open spaces. He argues that these features
stand in direct relation to what he calls “operational violence”: namely, that transparency is generated by operational
modelling, algorithms, and the processing that occurs in networks and closed loops. This in turn gives
rise to a type of alienation that violently circumscribes the subject from lived experience (Baudrillard
2005a, 43; 2005b, 25–38). Baudrillard spent considerable effort investigating the way operational violence and transparency
are generated by capitalist and techno- scientific structures of production and liberation. Such
structures in turn create systemic effects in which lived experience works as an expression of an
ideological system based on total visibility (Baudrillard 1975, 54–64; 1994a, 61–73; 2005b, 17, 146). Baudrillard draws upon
these insights in a number of ways, claiming that transparency indicates a subtle form of censorship or even a
‘terror’ as it makes the global subject hostage to the fluid and systemic aspects of various
architectures of control (Baudrillard 1994b, 58; Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002, 9, 64). Understood in this way, architectures of
control help to generate a ‘hegemonic visibility’ which is best characterized as a world ‘where everything
must be immediately visible and immediately interpretable’ (Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002, 9). Arguably, the problem
of control through transparency centres on how to ‘invest mental and visual space’ (Baudrillard 2014, 11). Control is enabled through
summoning banal appearances that are “already there”—repeating and modulating themselves to
infinity, according to the nuances of a programmed operational code (Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002, 63; Baudrillard 2014, 22–23).
Baudrillard aptly summarizes this ideology as construing a world in which ‘everything is to be legible’,
‘visible’, ‘measurable’, ‘said, accumulated, indexed and recorded’ (1990a, 34–35). In the wake of Baudrillard (and
other thinkers like Foucault and Virilio), critical debate on the politics of transparency took off in the 1990s. Often situated as part of a critique
of liberal governing, such research emphasizes three important points (see for comparison Mahmud 2012, 1196; Hansen and Flyverbom 2014,
875–876). Firstly, the
notion of transparency is related to a modernist desire of democratic rationality . For
example, it emphasizes displays and gives the illusion of choice, but works as an imperceptible limit

which might trap subjectivity in particular organizational architectures (see Gabriel 2005; Schuman 2007; Nordin
2016). Secondly, transparency, regardless of its aims, tends to relate to surveillance, in turn making the notion
strongly linked to social control. As Achille Mbembe has argued, both state and emancipatory violence has
often been historically characterized by striving towards absolute transparency between the state
and its people. Such a striving tends to be built on creating an open space in which ‘error’ is reduced, ‘truth’
enhanced and ‘aberrations’ eradicated (Mbembe 2003, 19). Thirdly, transparency is often considered to be a voluntary but
necessary aspect of global capitalism. The insight that transparency works as a means of corporate control is evident in research which
argues that media exposure and scientific progress often lead to less rather than more accountability
in global capitalist structures. For example, exposure of certain issues tends to enable blind spots in other
areas. Similarly, scientific discourse tends to remove ethical issues from the agenda by relying on a
specialized language which is difficult for the layman to understand (Zyglidopoulos and Fleming 2011, 692–693).
Arguably, these logics work as central dimensions in what we might call “an ideology of transparency” conflated with liberal core values. As
Slavoj Zizek has illustrated, ‘ideology’ should not be taken to mean (as in the orthodox Marxist premise) a ‘false consciousness’. Rather it
implies the formation of ‘a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its
participants as to its essence’ (Zizek 1989, 21). To outline and challenge transparency as an ideology is
therefore not an attempt to unveil a “better” reality through theory. It is rather an attempt to
understand, theoretically and empirically, what global liberal fantasies of making the world appear through
techniques of total visibility do in terms of producing specific discourses as reality . As has been outlined, this
ideology is present, and indeed produced, in distinct spheres such as information technology,
corporate culture or knowledge algorithms (Valentine 2000; Zyglidopoulos and Fleming 2011; Hansen and Flyverbom 2014).
But it is also an inherent part of the gendered and racialized visual regimes that underlie surveillance
activities and security practices in contemporary Europe, for example in the way the “colonial gaze” persists through
exoticizing difference (see Vaughan-Williams 2008; Jones 2011). This is evident particularly in the way transparency helps to
create an impetus for racialized othering in a world in which “all is uncovered”. Transparency and warfare As
the previous parts established, the logic of global warfare is characterized by its interrelation to liberal
discourses of interventionism. Moreover, transparency needs to be understood, not as “good governance” but as
part of an ideology which strives to render the world visible, measurable, indexed and recorded, so
as to invest it as a mental and visual space. How does this ideology of transparency relate to global warfare? One of the few
thinkers who have connected warfare with transparency as a means to control a battlefield is Paul Virilio. He explicitly locates an ideology of
transparency as part of the military imaginary waging war. In doing so, Virilio argues that socialcontrol over demarcated spaces
has given way to global control of the environment dependent on various techniques of transparency
(such as aerial imagery or radar), often enacted through military vision (Virilio 1989, 72; 2000a, 61). Tracing how the world
gradually becomes more and more transparent as a result of the visualization of the battlefield, Virilio interprets historical events
in warfare, such as the bombings of Belgrade by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1999, as part of an
attempt to extend a ‘matchless transparency’ to the globe (Virilio 2000b, 23). His argument mirrors other critics of
liberal warfare (often drawing upon Foucault) who state that when a population is targeted the consequences go beyond injury as it
aims to pacify global subjectivity . For example, Vivianne Jabri has argued that technologies that target bodies and
populations are not isolated occurrences but part of liberal governing (Jabri, 2006, 55). The argument that there is a
politics that unfolds on the field of battle is also evident in Shane Brighton’s urging that the study of warfare should engage directly with ‘the
killing mechanism on the battlefield’ so as to better grasp its politics (2013, 663–665). The point that warfare is about killing and violence is well
taken. However, it might be a mistake to think of battlefield practices as the locus of the way warfare exerts control. Arguably, thinking warfare
in this way indirectly helps to create a demand for more transparency on the field of battle. This
is not to say that the “terror”
Baudrillard identifies in the hegemonic visibility of modern life is any less relevant when it comes to
the battlefield, but simply that it extends beyond it. The “matchless transparency” that Virilio found in the
Kosovo war was enacted not merely through the Belgrade bombings but also as part of the whole
operational machinery which supported this effort. In fact, there is a whole subset of “supportive
functions” which occur beyond the field of battle . Much of the military supporting systems can be interpreted as a design
aiming to efficiently orchestrate combat.3 This design is called “operational warfare” and typically deals with planning,
employment and the supportive functions of war (see Vego 2007; Olsen and Creveld 2011). The idea that warfare is
operational underlies all US and NATO doctrine and can be exemplified by the way it is considered an “effects-based” process
which is fought by being coordinated, modelled and planned (see AFDD 2007a, 1-2, 37-40). In fact, the military itself
defines the art of operational warfare as the processes which ‘visualize how best to efficiently and effectively employ military capabilities ….’
(AFDD 2007b, 70). Let us, therefore, in order to better understand the relationship between warfare, transparency and control, consider the
military architecture beyond the field of battle and the way it operationalizes warfare. As Antoine Bousquet has outlined, the military has
been preoccupied for centuries with eradicating friction and uncertainty from warfare. In recent times,
attempts to lift the ‘fog of war’ in order to get an omniscient, real-time view of the battlefield are
often associated with ‘network centric warfare’ (Bousquet 2009, 215–234). While most authors emphasize the way
network-centric warfare relates to information and communication, what concerns me here is not so much the alleged shift in warfare due to
new technology. Rather, I find network-centric warfare interesting as part of an attempt to extend a “matchless transparency” to the global
battlefield through a logic of operational violence. In fact, the core characteristics of network-centric warfare are part
and parcel of operational warfare. As Steve Niva has shown, what today is called ‘shadow wars’ is to a large degree enabled as a
result of organizational changes in American bureaucratic structures which stem out of network-centric warfare (Niva 2013, 197–198). It is
therefore not far-fetched to examine military
discourses in accordance with a logic that aims to create “hegemonic
visibility” due to administrative and bureaucratic rituals. The historical attempt to lift the fog of war
and create an omniscient view of the battlefield mesh well with the way modern life is characterized
by hegemonic visibility, but with one important addition. As the following parts illustrate, the military fantasy to extend a
“matchless transparency” by global war is directed towards its external surroundings—the deepened and
widened global battlefield— but also towards itself as an organizational form . The self-referential repetitions
and modulations according to programmed codes that Baudrillard claimed characterizes an ideology
of transparency therefore need to be analysed as part of a military operational coding. The rest of the article
examines this, by a reading of US military doctrine documents and manuals, in order to explore and investigate the implications of transparency
as a technique of control. The military architecture as excess What does the inside of the military architecture look like? How does it invest
space and time discursively as part of ‘its own brand of war-making’ (Dillon and Reid 2009, 8) and what self-images are “already there”
modulated according to the codes of operational warfare? Military
doctrines and manuals are characterized both by
discursive content and by the hierarchical and syntactical architecture they form (Ansorge 2010, 362–363, 377).
The easiest way to encounter doctrines is as part of doctrine trees clustering through hyperlinks into open-source documents available online.
The fact that such documents are “official” creates a self-evident hierarchy between representations, as the doctrines represent an official
version of warfare in a synchronized manner, “one click away”.4 Such dissemination creates a technical and transparent
modus operandi. The architecture of military doctrines codes warfare as part of a discursive shift that emphasizes “post-heroic” aspects
of war. This shift is evident in that warfare is understood to be a matter of “administrative processing” that
functions in the same way as a “telecommuting job for office workers” (see Chamayou 2015a; Nordin and Öberg
2015). Let us consider the operational code through the way “geo-spatial intelligence” is collected by drones. Doing so one finds in the
doctrines various displays of detailed ‘end to end architectures’ over organizational relations for tasking, collecting and processing data (US Air
Force Instruction, 2012, 6). The doctrines string together dozens of abbreviations and combine them with features such as synchronization,
integration, managing, assessment and facilitation, supposedly guiding “warfighting” integration at all levels of warfare (AFI 14–132, 7–15). This
is but one example of the way the key aspects of warfare (and the factual issues or decisions it involves) appear as a
flowchart of organizational routines written in a specialized and technocratic language. A common
denominator of US military doctrines is the way warfare is modelled and rendered transparent as an operational
and bureaucratic practice. The amount of “knowledge” in this architecture is excessive to the point
where it makes oversight difficult. Consider how the US Department of Defense alone lists 80 joint publications ranging from
various types of military operations, homeland defense and electronic warfare to logistics and personnel support. To this we can add
hundreds of commission instructions, commission orders, staff policy documents and directives, not to
mention the respective doctrine hierarchy of the military services. Taken together this documentation
uncovers an operational, organizational and bureaucratic practice which comes out of an attempt to
efficiently plan and conduct warfare. The doctrines thereby render warfare visible through an excess
of information consisting largely of what resembles Orwellian “newspeak”, an excess of
abbreviations, and a transparency of organizational routines (see for example AFDD 2013b, 8). The open and accessible
form of warfare obscures the many extremely difficult decisions that are involved in waging war and that take place in briefings, staff meetings,
analysis cells and other arenas where there is no transparency at all. But ifone is to look for actual responsibility in a
campaign, for possibilities of agency, or for old-fashioned concepts like glory or combat, there is very little in the doctrinal
architecture. What we find is not warfare but operational warfare, more characterized by a
PowerPoint slideshow at a business meeting than an old-fashioned “Clausewitzian” war.5 The point here is not simply to
criticize military doctrines for masking certain content while creating smokescreens. Rather, I find it interesting that the excess of
doctrinal hierarchies and forms and the newspeak of military doctrines obscure the way this
operational coding enables a control of space and time . As argued in the introduction, the widening and deepening of
the battlefield, and the dissolving of spatial and temporal distinctions that follows from this, is often considered to be a result of the way
operational warfare has increased firepower, logistics and joint operations. However, in
an era of drone warfare and global
surveillance through space satellites, it is hardly a coincidence that military manuals and doctrines
tend to talk about “operational environment”, “area of interest”, or even “the playbox” rather than
the “battlefield”.6 One central tenet of the military architecture is that war is an activity that can be modelled, simulated
and constructed through planning. Traditionally, war has been considered to be limited in space (through the battlefield) and in
time (through distinctions between peace and war).7 The “already visible” coding of warfare enables ‘an operational
environment that is ever expanding’ (AFDD 2007b, 1) which makes the space of war resemble the model of
a global battlefield. The doctrinal organizational schedules work exactly the same at all times and
make no distinction between peacetime and wartime (AFDD 2013b, 1, 37). The military architecture
thereby codes space as an expanding area of operations and time as operational time (what is often called
“battle rhythm”). As the previous part illustrated, the military architecture is best understood through an excess of bureaucratic and
administrative doctrinal details. But what happens when we focus on its outside? What do we see from within the military architecture? In
what way are space and time coded through the imaginary of operational warfare? The
military architecture arguably displays an
obsession with rendering space and time visible through authority and control. Typically, when a military force
is deploying it does so by establishing a whole life-world along with it. Moving troops, building camps and securing the surrounding area
indicate techniques of control over what is called ROMO—the range of military operations—that is, time and space. Every military
operation depends on proper air-, sea- and land-lines of communication. Such lines are transportation bridges to
deploy and sustain forces within a particular area. In order to do so the military architecture depends on a system of supporting nodes such as
airfields, ports and other locations, and every system depends on the extent to which it is able to visualize space
and time, for example by keeping track of cargo, passengers, medical patients or property through real-time visibility (AFDD 4–0, 1–15, 27–
33, 42–47). The modelling of warfare is both a way of preparing for what will occur in an area of
operations and a means for conditioning this area of operation into a particular space/time. Military
operations appropriate, visualize and control space by occupying roads, ports, airfields or airspace. Coding takes place through, for
example, training cycles for deployment, and each step in such training amounts to repeating particular
preparations. Taken together, they are considered to give all the necessary knowledge when deployed. One example is when, in the 2003
Iraq War, military intelligence or logistics was often considered to “drive” warfare. Consider the way in which inventions in logistics
systems used delivery routes as mapping functions in order to render the surrounding “operational
areas” as transparent as possible.8 This meant that logistics convoys made the area of operations appear. Ideally, that which
occurred in relation to the “global area of operations” would then be screened out from within, and
visualized in relation to this particular point of view. Therefore, the possibility to kill , for example by striking
at a target, is indirectly produced as part of mundane tasks such as delivering food and supplies. Through the
way it is made to appear, the battlefield became an indirect consequence of operational warfare. The time of
warfare is coded as operational (a “battle rhythm”). This notion goes back to the perceived need to synchronize tactical, operational and
strategic processes in order to coordinate the planning, preparation and execution of warfare. The “battle rhythm” is an attempt (together with
notions like “zulu time”) to create a universal, military time zone which is staff-driven. The name “battle” basically means the same thing as
“efficiency” in this context. The operational level of warfare is defined as a constant search for efficiency
through coordination and ‘[i]t is essentially a schedule of important events which should be synchronized with the other Service or
functional components and combined forces …’ (AFDD 2–8, 9), within a given space/time. However, such coding of space/time obscures that
warfare works through specialized functions and compartmentalization in which all is reduced to
practical questions and organizational routines . Warfare becomes a matter not of killing , not of
ethics , not of politics , but of technical questions such as “Who is responsible for resources?”, or “Who commands which
staff-processes?” or, put more bluntly: “ When
is the next staff meeting? ” The doctrinal architecture on operational
warfare is characterized by a constant, real-time coding of the world as an area of operations through
planning and modelling. Consider how war games, concept creations and experiments are used in order to generate insights in the
use of space and time in warfare by demonstrating future unanticipated consequences, vulnerabilities and concerns. This is done in order to
fight more efficiently and to discover a more lethal relation to future space (AFDD 2011d, 40; AFDD 2011c, 40). The control of
space/time is a key characteristic of a military discourse on operational warfare that looks for threat
assessments of social activity to ‘predict future actions or provide advanced indications and warnings
of attack’ (AFDD 2011b, 15; see also 24–25) and intelligence as a means to ‘forecast’ and ‘anticipate future conditions’ (AFDD 2011d, 25).
Such forecasting has little to do with whether the monitoring affects the space/ time of one’s own forces, of neutral forces and of the enemy. It
is the patterns and dynamics of the global life-world itself (for example, weather or socio-biological patterns) which
needs to be monitored so as to render space/time transparent for targeting (see AFDD 2013b; US JFCOM 2011a;
2011b; White 2006; Brown 2007). That is, planning warfare obscures that the operationalization of space into a global area
of operations and of time into an operational rhythm is a violent appropriation of lived space and
time. As Brighton and others have pointed out, the battlefield involves a politics. However, warfare is not political, or violent, simply because
of the way it kills, but also through the way its operationalization codes space/time as a derivate of global warfare. This also goes for the way
the supporting functions of warfare involve a politics which occurs beyond the battlefield. The
military discourse constantly
interlinks knowledge from the global battlefield through feedback loops, validates it through more
combat, and disseminates it into the structure of the architecture in a transparent fashion (see for example
USAF 2014a, 10). In the liberal discourse, the increased transparency of an everexpanding battlefield is considered a stroke of luck. This is
because it enables better information management that ‘may contribute in providing prompt, accurate intelligence … and … improving shared
situational awareness’ which in turn might facilitate decision-making (’t Hart and Sundelius 2013, 453). However, such a view fails to recognize
that terms like “situational awareness” and “accurate intelligence” are enabled, and thereby constructed as needs, not
only through the uncertainty that violence brings, but also through the institutional and organizational demands that are
ritualized in the supporting functions of warfare. The transparency of global warfare The global battlefield
expands through the operational coding of a military architecture which constantly aims to make
space and time a derivate of an operational planning model . As space is rendered visible as a global area of operations
and time as a constant operational rhythm, the doctrinal architecture emphasizes that surveillance is on-going, seamless and
comprehensive: ‘a network of interrelated, simultaneous operations that can, at any given time, feed and be fed by other operations’
(AFDD 2012, 4; see also 5, 52–55). Surveillance is a crucial part of global liberal control as it monitors the
widened and deepened global battlefield. In this way it works as a ‘core function’ of warfare through the notion of ‘global
strikes’ across the full spectrum of conflicts, ‘holding any target on the planet at risk’ (Deptula and Francisco 2010, 15; USAF
2014b, 8). The US military has massive systems at its disposal for surveillance. For example air, space and cyber operations
centres and sensor systems are placed around the globe and in orbit. Consider the MQ-9 Reapers wide-area electro-
optical and ground moving-target-indicator surveillance and the Gorgon Stare: a wide-area airborne surveillance system with a spherical array
of many hundreds of video cameras for each drone (Deptula and Francisco 2010, 14). These sensors continuously transfer data
globally (each covering about 100 square kilometres), which is processed and disseminated into ‘actionable
intelligence’ that enables an ‘understanding of the operational environment’ (AFDD 2012, 2–3, 5). But what does
such “intelligence” and “understanding” amount to? The ultimate dream of the military architects is that data might
be ‘globally interconnected’ into an ‘end-to-end set of information capabilities for collecting, processing, storing, disseminating, and
managing information on demand to warfighters…’ (US DOD 2009, 10). This future system in the making is called a “ global

information grid ” (or GIG) and will work as a comprehensive database that functions as an operational code for how one might
‘efficiently plan and conduct warfare’. This
is very much the end-point of the fantasy of network-centric warfare
aiming to ‘achieve shared situational awareness, increased speed of command, a higher tempo of
operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and … operational synergy’ (AFDD 2007b, 21). The military
goal is therefore to reach the point where all are interconnected and visible according to the logic of “global strike”. One example of this logic is
the way surveillance anticipates control over the global operational environment through visual sensors, real-time threat predictions, weapons
and warning systems, satellite surveillance or horizon scanning. This in turn implies a global, integrated, all-
encompassing surveillance which scans capabilities, civil or bureaucratic activities and behaviours in
general, as part of a network-centric and uninterrupted, on-going process (AFDD 2012, 52–55). It hardly needs
mentioning that rendering areas (such as northern Pakistan) transparent through surveillance implies extreme

violence . As one example, consider how US targeting methods against “insurgents” in Afghanistan at the end of the last decade started
focusing more on networks (consider the call to target “skill-bearers” and “knowledge”).9 At face value, it might seem ironic that
“knowledge”—a core value of the liberal imaginary if there ever was one—is made to appear a characteristic of enmity.
However, if seen in relation to an architecture in which the global battlefield is ever-present in real time, it follows suit that the banality

of everyday life appears as a target . The demand for unveiling space/times of war is well illustrated by the military method of
analysing according to social and biological patterns. The main aim of such analysis is to ‘notice when something is out of the
ordinary’ in relation to everyday behaviour and actions (US JFCOM 2011a, 21)—for example, to notice the types of
people who go to the market, the times of day that children play outdoors, where and when groups of males meet, what the prayer times and
prayer locations are, and so forth. The
aim of this surveillance is to ‘understand’ the way in which patterns of a
community’s ‘battle-rhythm’ emerge and are broken (US JFCOM 2011a, 20–22). The acts are then entered into
a ‘plot-sheet’ with exact times so as to deduce large-scale patterns and ‘predict future enemy actions’
(US JFCOM 2011b, 173). This in turn creates potential objects which are erased through military targeting.

The desire to predict and create the future as a threat constantly demands flows of more information ,
more visibility and more knowledge . Moreover, it constantly demands the means (such as weaponry, education, technology) to
maintain this demand. Leading officers have illustrated this logic at its purest by arguing that the US needs to act more like ‘hunters’: The
foundations of (the US military’s) achievement will hinge on the ability to sense, know, decide, and act ahead of our adversaries on a global
scale. These technologies and challenges have trumped the buffer of geography that historically afforded us the luxury of time to think and act,
demanding that we alter our … farmer-culture mind-set and begin to act more like hunters…. In the future, Air Force … professionals must
assure the availability of information necessary to bring a strategy to a successful outcome well before we need it. (Deptula and Francisco 2010,
16, my emphasis) As Grégoire Chamayou has argued, one quintessential aspect of contemporary warfare post 9/11 is the fact that combat has
in many ways been supplanted by “hunting”. This insight is important as it helps us understand part of the purpose of the immediate and all-
encompassing unveiling of the globe. The underlying idea of warfare as a ‘manhunt’ is the attempt to keep any and all threats in
check by simply erasing them at a higher pace than they form (Chamayou 2015b, 71). Operational warfare is
conceived of as a technical and administrative process run by “hunters” who, as they peek into the military architecture, see themselves as
being constitutedthrough a continuous race towards the future. In sharp contrast to this military subject, the global
object that is unveiled—be it a skill-bearer, a social pattern, a cluster of cell-phone signals, or a group of children gathering—
resembles a target signature more than a human subject. In the self-enclosed network which connects a continuous,
seamless collection of data, the military architecture creates an interior which revolves around the display of scenarios relating to global
superiority, mobility and strike capacity. The
end-point of operational space/time is the ‘ultimate position … the
position of total control’ of the Earth (Lyndon B. Johnson, quoted in AFDD 2011d, 1). The methodology of
operational warfare—the way it makes global space an area of operations and the past and the future a derivate of operational time—
constantly strives towards this (imaginary) position of control. The importance of the operational
coding of space/time cannot be overstated as it creates an underlying feature of a military imaginary
which warns against being ‘a prisoner of the future’ as it aims to increase its ‘future impact’ (USAF 2014a,
particularly 4–13). The goal is for warfare to be absolutely transparent —or “agile” as it is called in military discourse—so
as to reduce its presence and footprint, improving response times, constantly streamlining the way it meshes with other war processes (AFDD
2013b, 2; AFDD 2013a, 19). In short, the end point of the military architecture is to control not only space and
time, but also to make itself into a pure and transparent potentiality for warfare as control. Read in this
manner, the military urge to render the world transparent and invest it as a mental and visual
operational space and time becomes part of a liberal ideology that constantly strives to make the
world visible, calculable, decipherable and foreseeable. The “ideology of transparency” therefore needs to be understood
as interrelated with a liberal way of peace which constantly emphasizes transparency as “good governance”. But it also needs to be seen in
relation to a type of “liberal
warfare” which strives to operationalize a violence that is transparent not only to
itself, but also to the global battlefield it renders visible.

Independently, the 1AC tethers all agency to the administrative form, demonizing
extralegal activism which subsequently erects a will to institutionality within the very
psyche, acting to assuage the subject’s anxieties of contingency through a managerial
ordering of difference which renders violence against difference inevitable
Ferguson 8. Roderick, Professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies, PhD and MA
in Sociality from UCSD, Administering Sexuality; or, The Will to Institutionality, Duke University Press,
Radical History Review: Issue 100 (Winter 2008), p. 165-168
Such a claim is just one instantiation of contemporary globalization’s ingestion of forms of difference. Again, as Hall argues, contemporary
globalization cannot simply be grasped as a purely economic phenomenon but indeed as one that attempts to rule through culture and
difference. As Hall and Mohanty suggest, we can also think of the historical moment in which difference became a commodity of capital and of
the corporate university as the moment in which a new type of academic subject came into being, one that spoke in terms of the
institutionalization of difference. The reasons for that institutionalization varied, but most often it hinged on the promise of permanence.
Modes of inquiry and histories of difference that were once threatened with extinction, existing only as ephemera, would now enjoy the
consistency and reliability that the institutional form could presumably offer. The
demand for the institutionalization of
difference requires subjects that treat the administration as a matter of the libido. As Foucault wrote,
paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche, “the desire for [institutionality] has been transformed among us into a passion
which fears no sacrifice, which fears nothing but its own extinction.”21 This subject’s agency depends
on the very administrative forms of power that manage and commodify forms of difference . This is the
historical, political, and ideological context in which queerness enters the landscape of modern academic institutions.
The administrative university adapts to modes of difference by attempting to normalize them. Inasmuch
as the grammar for queerness’s incorporation into the administrative university is derived from the university’s incorporation of race and
gender, understanding the procedures by which queerness is brought into the administrative ethos means that we have to comprehend both
the administrative management of race and gender and theorize and the relation of those forms of difference to queerness as an
administrative object. This is the political economy that queerness—as a mode of embodiment and as a mode of critique—must negotiate. We
are now in a moment in which we must analyze sexuality and other modes of difference as effects of a will to institutionality. We might in fact
read Foucault’s early theorizations about discourses as theorizations about institutions and their exploitation of discourses. For instance, in
“The Discourse on Language,” a lecture that he gave at the College de France on December 2, 1970, Foucault begins by addressing the
relationship between knowledge and institutions: Inclination speaks out: “I don’t want to have to enter this risky
world of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all
around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and
truth emerging, one by one. All I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck.” Institutions
reply: “But you have nothing to fear from launching out; we’re here to show you discourse is within the
established order of things, that we’ve waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it—a place
which both honors and disarms it; and if it should happen to have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who give it
that power.”22 Foucault begins with the subject that is anxious about the unruly and disobedient nature of discourse, its penchant to steal
away from human intentions. The subject desperately wishes for the innocence of discourse and for the promise of truth. The voice of comfort
comes from the institution, telling the subject that discourse will bend to human agency and institutional protocols. Under
the will to
knowledge, the institution arises as that which will help the subject produce and tame discourse. And
so we have the narrative of the rational and authoritative subject and of the artifact known as truth—
the dramatis personae and the central props that comprise the will to knowledge. As Foucault states, “this will to truth . . . relies on
institutional support : it is both reinforced and accompanied by whole strata of practices such as pedagogy—
naturally—the book system, publishing, libraries, such as the learned societies in the past, and laboratories today” (219). Foucault argues that
the will to truth and the will to knowledge depend on a distinction between reason and folly or evidence and falsehood. This distinction has
several functions. First, it becomes the organizing principle of discourse—think here of the argument that sexuality constitutes the “ultimate”
truth of the individual. The distinction also operates as a system of exclusion, admitting only those forms of
knowledge that operate under a will to truth and excluding those subject and social formations
marked as irrational. In addition, the division between truth and untruth works to conceal the very thing
that it constitutes . As Foucault states, “The will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to
reveal cannot fail to mask it . . . thus only one truth appears before our eyes; wealth, fertility, and sweet strength in all its insidious universality.
In contrast we are unaware of the prodigious machinery of the will to truth, with its vocation of exclusion” (220). The will to truth was
constituted in the eighteenth century, a historical moment organized around the discourses of universal humanism, homogeneity, and
canonicity. But what world, exactly, has come into being in the poststructuralist era of feminist theory, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies,
queer theory, and other forms of identity politics – engaged scholarship and activism? One could argue that the will to institutionality among
groups and communities associated with difference emerged precisely after the critical upheavals of race, gender, and sexuality of the post –
civil rights era. But what is the machinery of this will to institutionality? We might say that the
will to institutionality is founded
on divisions between legitimacy and illegitimacy. For example, capital and the academy have to work
through and with difference in the global moment if they can claim any integrity at all. The will to
institutionality also seems to presume another distinction—that between the promise of formality and
the presumed ephemeral nature of informality. Formalizing certain forms of difference gives those
forms permanence and institutional protection, and will lift difference from the netherworld of
marginalization and informal curiosity. The will to knowledge, according to Foucault, obliges discourse to
truth . That obligation represents an engagement with institutionality as well. In “The Discourse on Language,”
Foucault states, “education may be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind
of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social
conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of a
discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it” (227). What positions, functions, and viewpoints does the will to
institutionality impose on modern subjects? And how does the genealogy of institutional incorporation become[s] the
horizon for determining the useful and the effective? Put simply, how is it that we understand agency in terms
of our ability to formalize knowledge and thus incorporate it into academic institutions ? How did the desire
for institutionalization become the common denominator for subjects differentiated in terms of gender, race, sexuality, and ideology? As
knowledge is obliged to institutionalization under the will to institutionality , by what routes does the subject of
knowledge become the subject of administration? By what genealogy can we understand institutionalization as the affirmation of difference
and thus analyze the will to institutionality as power’s most recent enactment? We
must pause and interrogate the subtle
and silent transformations that the tasks of knowledge and we—the subjects of knowledge—have
undergone. We must also scrutinize this will to institutionality if we are to create alternative forms of
agency and subjectivity not beholden to bureaucratization . We are now in a moment in which
institutionalization is the standard of the evolved and developed critical subject. What would it mean to
maneuver and retheorize genealogy to make sense of the subject who understands its progress through institutionalization? If genealogy is a
form of history that can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, and domains of objects, how can we make genealogy into a
form of history that can account for the institutionalization of knowledge, modes of difference, and critical agency? Put simply, by what
countercalculus can we maneuver difference for the purposes of rupture?
As they inevitably read framework in the 2AC, you must ask yourself why they read
this in debate and whether or not their intentions were something a little more
insidious
Berlant 11. Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, Cruel
Optimism, Routledge: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 33-6

When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want
someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a
person, a thing, an institution, a text , a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea - whatever . To phrase 'the object of desire' as a cluster of promises is
to allow us to encounter what's incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the

object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In
other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for
example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent's typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene

where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form. In optimism, the
subject leans toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with their object.' 'Cruel
optimism' names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is
discovered either to be impossible , sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. What's cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is
that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of
desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the
attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject's
sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition
different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject's desire to temporise an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is

the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object . One more thing: the cruelty of an optimistic
attachment is, I think, usually something an analyst observes about someone's or some group's attachment to x, since usually
that attachment exists without being an event, or even better , seems to lighten the load for someone /some group.^ But if the cruelty of
an attachment is experienced by someone/some group, even in disavowed fashion, the fear is that the loss of the object/scene of
promising itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything. Often this fear of loss of a scene of optimism as such is unstated and only experienced
in a sudden incapacity to manage startling situations, as we will see below. One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than
about what cluster of desires and affects we can manage to keep magnetised to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so

some scenes of optimism are clearly

breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the loss of x in the scope of one's attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself. But

crueller than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalising or animating potency of an object/ scene of
desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work
of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, working for a living, patriotism, all kinds of things.
One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one's attachments, usually unconscious ones, most
of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition. This means that a poetics of attachment always involves some splitting off of the story I can tell about
wanting to be near x (as though x has autonomous qualities) from the activity of the emotional habitus I have constructed by having x in my life in order to be able to project out my endurance as proximity to the complex of what x

To understand cruel optimism, therefore, one must embark on an analysis of rhetorical indirection, as a way of thinking
seems to offer and proffer.

about the strange temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling . I learned how to do this
from reading Barbara Johnson's work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a

performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains superhuman observational authority,

enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because this object is
something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I'll describe a bit the shape of my
transference with her thought. In 'Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,' which will be my key referent bere, Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophe for what has become
foetal personhood: a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a foetus) is animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the speaker in whose head the
entire scene is happening.' But the condition of projected possibility, of a hearing that cannot take place in the terms of its enunciation ('you' are not here, 'you' are eternally belated to
the conversation with you that I am imagining) creates a fake present moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a

performance of address can take place. The present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden
with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence. Apostrophe therefore appears to be a reaching out to a you, a direct movement from place x to y, but it is
actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen
now that realises something in the speaker, makes the speaker more or differently possible, because she has admitted, in a sense, the importance of speaking for, as, and to, two:
but only under the condition, and illusion, that the two is really (in) one. Apostrophe is thus an indirect, unstable, physically impossible but

phenomenologically vitalising movement of rhetorical animation that permits subjects to suspend

themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space of others, the objects of
desire who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but also by not being there).'' Later work, such as on 'Muteness Envy,' elaborates Johnson's description of the gendered
rhetorical politics of this projection of voluble intersubjectivity.'^ The paradox remains that the conditions of the lush submerging of one consciousness

into another require a double negation: of the speaker's boundaries, so s/he can grow bigger in rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and
of the spoken of, who is more or less a powerful mute placeholder providing an opportunity for the speaker's
imagination of her/his/their flourishing. Of course psychoanalytically speaking all intersubjectivity is impossible. It is a wish, a
desire, and a demand for an enduring sense of being with and in x, and is related to that big knot that marks the indeterminate relation between a feeling
of recognition and misrecognition - recognition is the misrecognition you can bear, a transaction that affirms you without, again,
necessarily feeling good or accurate (it might idealise, it might affirm your monstrosity, it might mirror your desire to be nothing enough to live under the radar,
it might feel just right, and so on).'' Johnson's work on projection shows that scenes of impossible identity, rhetorically rendered, open up meaning and knowledge by mining the negative - projective, boundary dissolving - spaces of
attachment to the object of address who must be absent in order for the desiring subject of intersubjectivity to get some traction, to stabilise her proximity to the object/scene of promise. In free indirect discourse, a cognate kind
of suspension, the circulation of this kind of merged and submerged observational subjectivity, has less pernicious outcomes, at least when Johnson reads Zora Neale Hurston's practice of it.' In a narrator's part-merging with a
character's consciousness, say, free indirect discourse performs the impossibility of locating an observational intelligence in one or any body, and therefore forces the reader to transact a different, more open relation of unfolding
to what she is reading, judging, being, and thinking she understands. In Jobnson's work such a transformative transaction through reading/speaking 'unfolds' the subject in a good way, despite whatever desires they may have not

to become significantly different." In short, Johnson's work on projection is about the optimism of attachment, and is often itself optimistic about the
negations and extensions of personhood that forms of suspended intersubjectivity demand from the reader. What follows is not so buoyant: this is an essay politicising Freud's observation that 'people never willingly abandon a
libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them'.^ It comes from a longer project about the politics, aesthetics, and projections of political depression. Political depression persists in affective
judgments of the world's intractability - evidenced in affectlessness, apathy, coolness, cynicism, and so on - modes of what might be called detachment that are really not detached at all but constitute ongoing relations of
sociality.'" The politically depressed position is manifested in the problem of the difficulty of detaching from life-building modalities that can no longer be said to be doing their work, and which indeed make obstacles to the desires
that animate them; my archive tracks practices of self-interruption, self-suspension, and self-abeyance that indicate people's struggles to change, but not traumatically, the terms of value in which their life-making activity has been
cast." Cruel optimism is, then, like all phases, a deictic, a phrase that points to a proximate location: as an analytic lever it is an incitement to inhabit and to track the affective attachment to what we call 'the good life,' which is for

the conditions of ordinary life in the

so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it. My assumption is that

contemporary world even of relative wealth, as in the US, are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject, and that the irony - that the labour of reproducing
life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it - has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the 'technologies of patience' or lag that enable a

Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived

concept of the later to suspend questions of the cruelty of the now.'^

imminence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartlehy, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the
wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation
of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the
consensual promise, and to misrecognise that promise as an achievement. This essay traverses three episodes of suspension - from John Ashhery, Charles Johnson, and Ceoff Ryman -
of the reproduction of habituated or normative life. These suspensions open up revelations about the promises that had clustered as people's objects of desire, stage moments of exuberance in the impasse near the normal, and

these exuberant attachments keep ticking not like the time bomb they might be but
provide tools for suggesting why

like a white noise machine that provides assurance that what seems like static really is, after all, a
rhythm people can enter into while they're dithering, tottering, bargaining, testing, or otherwise
being worn out by the promises that they have attached to in this world.
Empiricism only exists logically insofar as it maintains an illogical starting point and
there is no rational way to deduce the number of grains of sand in a heap – thus we
must speak evil to recognize the radical irreconcilability of the world as singularity – as
an always-evasive and reversible space of non-knowledge and horror founded on the
fine-tuned eradication of alterity. The ghost of reversibility will oversee the downfall
of every object and every subject. This is your hell, a nightmare of simulacrum that
swallows the world in the horrors of its own self-imposed reality. Welcome to our
theatre of cruelty.
Baudrillard 5. Jean, the king of the trees, “The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact,” Translated by
Chris Turner, Page 159-164

This, then, is the way we must begin, with the secret intelligence of - the secret insight into - duality and
reversibility, with speaking evil as in a mental Theatre of Cruelty . Above all, we must not confuse the
idea of evil with some kind of objective existence of evil . That has no more meaning than an objective
existence of the Real; it is merely the moral and metaphysical illusion of Manichaeism that it is
possible to will evil , to do evil, or, alternatively, to denounce it and combat it. Evil has no objective
reality . Quite the contrary, it consists in the diverting of things from their ' objective' existence , in their
reversal, their 'return' (I wonder if we might not even interpret Nietzsche's 'Eternal Return' in this sense - not as an endless cycle, not
as a repetition, but as a turning about, as a reversible form of becoming - die ewige Umkehr). In this sense, in precisely the same way as Canetti
conceives vengeance, evil
too is automatic. You cannot will it. That is an illusion and a misconception. The evil you can
will, the evil you can do and which, most of the time, merges with violence , suffering and death, has
nothing to do with this reversible form of evil . We might even say that those who deliberately practice evil certainly have no
insight into it, since their act supposes the intentionality of a subject, whereas this reversibility of evil is the reversibility of a
form . And it is, at bottom, the form itself that is intelligent, insightful: with evil it is not a question of an object to be understood; we are
dealing with a form that understands us. In the 'intelligence of evil' we have to understand that it is evil that is
intelligent, that it is it which thinks us - in the sense that it is implied automatically in every one of our
acts . For it is not possible for any act whatever or any kind of talk not to have two sides to it; not to have a reverse side, and hence a dual
existence. And this contrary to any finality or objective determination. This dual form is irreducible, indissociable from all
existence. It is therefore pointless to wish to localize it and even more so to wish to denounce it. The
denunciation of evil is still of the order of morality, of a moral evaluation. Now, evil is immoral, not in the way a
crime is immoral, but in the way a form is. And the intelligence of evil itself is immoral - it does not aspire to any value judgement, it does not
do evil, it speaks it. The idea of evil as a malign force, a maleficent agency, a deliberate perversion of the order of the world, is a deep-rooted
superstition. It is echoed at the world level in the phantasmic projection of the Axis of Evil, and in the Manichaean struggle against that power.
This is all part of the same imaginary. Hence the principle of the prevention, the forestalling, the prophylaxis, of evil; rather than morality or
metaphysics, what we have today is an infection, a microbial epidemic, the corruption of a world whose predestined end is presumed to lie in
good. A more subtle misconception is that of a hypostasis of evil as indestructible reality, a kind of primal scene, a sort of substratum of
accumulated death-drive. The radicality of evil is seen as that of a naturally inevitable force, associated always with violence, suffering and
death. Hence Sloterdijk's hypothesis that ' the reality of reality is the eternal return of violence' To which he opposes a 'pacifism that is in
keeping with our most advanced theoretical intuitions, a deep-level pacifism, based on a radical analysis of the circularity of violence,
deciphering the forces that determine its eternal return' A radical analysis, then, to remedy the radical evil. But can a 'radical' analysis have a
finality of whatever kind? Is it not itself part of the process of evil? However that may be, duality and evil are not the same as violence. The
dual form, the agon, is a symbolic form and, as such, it might be said to be much nearer to seduction and
challenge than to violence. Closer to metamorphosis and becoming than to force and violence . If there
were a force of evil, a reality of evil, a source and an origin of evil, one could confront it strategically
with all the forces of good. But if evil is a form, and most of the time a form that is deeply buried, one can only bring
out that form and come to an understanding with it [etre en intelligence avec elle]. This is how it is, for example, with the
Theatre of Cruelty: in that gestural and scenic externalization of all the 'perverse' possibilities of the human spirit, within the framework of an
exploration of the roots of evil, there is never any question of tragic catharsis. The point, rather, is to play out fully these perverse possibilities
and make drama out of them, but without sublimating or resolving them. 'To speak evil' is to speak this fateful, paradoxical
situation that is the reversible concatenation of good and evil. That is to say that the irresistible
pursuit of good, the movement of Integral Reality - for this is what good is: it is the movement
towards integrality, towards an integral order of the world - is immoral. The eschatological perspective of a better
world is in itself immoral. For the reason that our technical mastery of the world, our technical approach to
good, having become an automatic and irresistible mechanism, none of this is any longer of the order
of morality or of any kind of finality . Nor is to speak and read evil the same thing as vulgar nihilism , the nihilism
of a denunciation of all values, that of the prophets of doom. To denounce the reality contract or the reality
'conspiracy' is not at all nihilistic . It is not in any sense to deny an obvious fact, in the style of 'All is sign, nothing is real - nothing is
true, everything is simulacrum' - an absurd proposition since it is also a realist one! It is one thing to note the vanishing of the real into the
Virtual, another to deny it so as to pass beyond the real and the Virtual .
It is one thing to reject morality in the name of a
vulgar immoralism, another to do so, like Nietzsche so as to pass beyond good and evil. To be 'nihilistic' is to
deny things at their greatest degree of intensity, not in their lowest versions. Now, existence and self evidence have always been the lowest
forms. If there is nihilism, then, it is not a nihilism of value, but a nihilism of form. It is to speak the world in its radicality, in its dual, reversible
form, and this has never meant banking on catastrophe , any more than on violence. No finality, either positive or negative, is ever the last
To speak evil is to say that in every process of
word in the story. And the Apocalypse itself is a facile solution.

domination and conflict is forged a secret complicity, and in every process of consensus and balance,
a secret antagonism. 'Voluntary servitude' and the 'involuntary', suicidal failing of the power systems - two phenomena that are every
bit as strange as each other, on the fringes of which we can make out all the ambivalence of political forms. This is to say that: - immigration,
the social question of immigration in our societies, is merely the most visible and crudest illustration of the internal exile of the European in his
own society. - terrorism can be interpreted as the expression of the internal dislocation of a power that has become all-powerful global violence
immanent in the world-system itself. Hence the attempt to extirpate it as an objective evil is delusional given that, in its very absurdity, it is the
expression of the condemnation that p ower pronounces on itself. That, as Brecht said of fascism (that it was made up of both fascism and
antifascism), terrorism is made up of terrorism and anti-terrorism together. And that, if it is the incarnation of fanaticism and violence, it is the
incarnation of the violence of those who denounce it at the same time as of their impotence, and of the absurdity of combating it frontally
without having understood anything of this diabolical complicity and this reversibility of terror. The violence you mete out is always the mirror
of the violence you inflict on yourself. The violence you inflict on yourself is always the mirror of the violence
you mete out. This is the intelligence of evil. If terrorism is evil - and it certainly is in its form , and not at
all in the sense in which George W. Bush understands it - then it is this intelligence of Evil we need; the intelligence
of, the insight into, this internal convulsion of the world order, of which terrorism is both the event-
moment and the image feedback.
 case
Today the west operates on a consumption of images of pain – the affirmative only
keeps putting quarters into our moral register making it hinge upon listening to the
suffering of the others and feeling for them – absent the constant injection of new
images of suffering, the west would collapse – the affirmative is sustaining a system in
its death throes.
Baudrillard 94. Jean Baudrillard, dead French philosopher, former professor emeritus at the
University de Paris X, The Illusion of The End, pg. 66-70

We must today denounce the moral and sentimental

We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' ['autre monde].

exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction
and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and
gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable
condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the

extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance

material exploitation is only

of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that

there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of people which serves as psychological s,

nourishment for our daily lives

the rich countries and media nourishment for . The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum.

The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the
white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a
natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes
in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian

Other people's destitution becomes

interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order.

our adventure playground . Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a

our own efforts to alleviate it

phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of

(which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market);
there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that
extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental
equilibrium of the West . In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we s hould profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the
root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be

Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete

surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne?

so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete
only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds,

We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries
Bangladesh, etc.).

are the best suppliers We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this
- as, indeed, they are of other drugs.

paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our
technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the
news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging
it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up
to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the
catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point when , in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation,

we run out of disasters from elsewhere the West will be forced to produce or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities,

its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for
symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The
Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh,

Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing
black Africa and

symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes,
floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each
other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which
they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us,
whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of

One day, the West will break down if we

the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), t hat one day everything will break down.

are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not
very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course
normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the
spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly
indefinitely. In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and
its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are
only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The
argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of

Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by

current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples.

revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to
technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of

these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of
violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden
reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even
if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy – by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that
repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the
heart of the white race.