Understanding Terrorism as Symbolic Violence: A Semiotic Analysis by Jean Baudrillard, Lecture notes of Philosophy

Download Understanding Terrorism as Symbolic Violence: A Semiotic Analysis by Jean Baudrillard and more Lecture notes Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity! Beever 1 Symbolic Violence as Subtle Virulence: The Philosophy of Terrorism Jonathan Beever Synopsis Jean Baudrillard’s semiotic analysis of violence leads us to understand the form of violence as three-fold: aggressive, historical, and semiotically virulent. Violence of the third form is the violence endemic to terrorism. If violence has been typically understood as of the first two types, terrorism should be understood as the virulence of simulacra. The conflation of these types of violence explains the failure of militaristic responses to terrorism. This paper will explore Baudrillard’s conception of symbolic violence as the virulence of signs and help us come to terms with the semiotic foundation of terrorism. Biography Jonathan Beever is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. Jonathan works primarily in environmental and bio- ethics but also has interests in contemporary continental philosophy, political philosophy, and semiotics. He is the co-founder of the Purdue Lectures in Ethics, Policy, and Science. Essay The analysis of terrorism by contemporary French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard presents terrorism as the violence of empty representation - from symbolic representation to simulation. While well-known,1 few scholars have focused on his analysis as not merely cultural but more specifically and interestingly semiotic. This focus gives us a way to better understand Baudrillard’s analysis and its implications post 9/11. In this presentation, I employ a semiotic framework to explore the contemporary problem of terrorism, outline three levels of violence, and distinguish these from terrorism. The goal of this analysis is to re-envision a not only political but also symbolic response to terror. 1. The Problem of Terrorism Terrorism as the violence of modernity2 can be understood as any reaction against the structure of the institution, broadly construed: a reaction of Good against 1 E.g., Staples’ 2009 explication of Baudrillard’s position on the role of the media in response to domestic terrorist acts. 2 While some find the distinction outmoded, the relationship between modernity and postmodernity is still a useful heuristic for analysis of modes of cultural thinking. Neither modernity nor postmodernity ought to be considered descriptions of particular Beever 2 Evil. The United States Department of Defense defines terrorism as “the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.” (DTIC) The State represents terrorism as intentionally violent threats to the system and our political ideology. On this definition, terrorism is a specifically political form of violence: one threatening civil ideologies, cultural norms, or systemic infrastructures. From this definition, the United States has seen the rise of an entire economic and political machinery in response to terrorism. Much effort has been spent in definition of, defense against, and response to real and imagined terrorist threats during the United States’ notorious Global War on Terror. But we must not accept this cultural definition tout court. The Department of Defense offers, as a function of its specific purpose, a narrow definition of a multi-faceted and deeply complex concept. This model provides dangerous space for the labeling of an incredibly broad group of anti-institutionalists as terrorists: the foreign nationals, the local militias, the prolific independent radio host, the local author, the anarchistic philosophy professor, the Iranian-American neighbor. By shifting the modes of representation through reinterpretation and manipulation of signs, arbitrary but definitive representations between “us” and “them” can be made in response to real or imagined threats. But on this model of semiotic Othering, no space is left to distinguish political violence from acts of terrorism3. So to hold up this definition – and so this way of thinking – as normative is to deliver a coup on behalf of the State: the enemy is the represented Other as long as there is totalization of power and of a totalization of representation. As an anti-modern response4, Jean Baudrillard’s analysis is grounded in an understanding of the implications of semiotic representation. Here we find a delineation of the boundaries and implications of terrorism quite unlike that of modernity; this analysis offers a cynical celebration of the virulence of signification. We must here ask: what do we mean by signification and furthermore virulent signification? Signification is the action of signs forming these basic relationships between signified and signifier that are the foundations of meaning.5 This dyadic relationship between the object and its representation stands as the basic ontological foundation for Baudrillard’s analysis of anti-modern violence. Virulent signification, however as we will see, is uniquely related to violence divorced from this dyadic exchange. II. The Forms of Violence historical moments but, rather, markers of modes of thought characterized by their relationship to the Grand Narratives of Society, Nature, the Good, etc. 3 I leave the question open whether either violence or terrorism is in any way justified or justifiable; for, this paper offers a metaphysical and not ethical analysis of these concepts. However, I might suggest that political violence may be justifiable in conditions of political oppression and terrorism, on my analysis below, may be justifiable in conditions of symbolic oppression. 4 Baudrillard scholars have often denied the application of the term “postmodern” to his work, regarding his analysis instead as “high modernist”. However, his analysis foreshadowed the possibilities of a semiotic postmodern landscape and remained critical of the structures of modernity, making his analysis anti- or post- modernist. 5 While I describe Baudrillard’s approach to signification in his dyadic terms (Saussure’s signifier and signified), the virulence of simulacra may be better explained in triadic terms (Peirce’s interpretant, representamen, and object). That is, meaning by way of the interpretant plays an active role distinct from the representamen and the object on a triadic reading. This triadic understanding likewise offers better support for Baudrillard’s insistence on the symbolic as an exchange rather than a concept or category. (see Toward a Critique 133) My use of “semiological” vs “semiotic” is meant to intentionally indicate this difference. Beever 5 significance that it does. If the Towers had not fallen, the event would be insignificant9. Consider, as another example, the August 24th, 2011 earthquake that cracked the Washington Monument. “Sure we’re disappointed the monument is closed,” a woman was reported to have said, “But it would be really upsetting if it had fallen over.” (Thompson A16) Another proclaimed, “People say that the monument is broken like our political system. But the fact is, it’s still standing and so are we.” (ibid.) Imagine if the Monument had collapsed in sympathy with the Twin Towers. Given slightly different circumstances, the August 24th earthquake could have easily been read as a terrorist event: the collapse of yet another symbol of the State. The earthquake as the terrorist Other. Imagine, on the other hand, if the Twin Towers had not collapsed. The spirit of terrorism is semiotic in nature: it is grounded in the symbolic representation of violence or, rather, the violence of symbol against the symbolic. The strike against the Twin Towers was a symbolic strike, even if the twin collapse was not the intention of the agents involved: “…Neither politically nor economically did the abolition of the Twin Towers put the global system in check. Something else is at issue here: the stunning impact of the attack, the insolence of its success and, as a result, the loss of credibility, the collapse of image.” (Baudrillard “Hypotheses” 82) An act of violent aggression became an act of terrorism through the symbolic collapse of the Towers-as-symbol. Beyond the immense physical damage, the terrible loss of human life, and the temporary interruption of financial and social information transfer, the stability, security, and power that the Twin Towers symbolized was threatened. A hole was stabbed through that empty signifier and, for a moment at least, the world saw through to the fragile raw signified. The attacks of 9/11 were unlike political violence, civil unrest, or even international acts of war in that the terrorists managed, through the resulting collapse of the image for which the Twin Towers stood, to snub the rules of violent engagement with which the State is attuned. Pearl Harbor, the Cold War stand-off, and the resulting Cuban Missile Crisis were instances of violence or potential violence that fell within the framework of the political, social, and economic system of which they were a part. These were not, or would not have been, acts of terrorism. The violence of the 9/11 attacks, however, can be classified as terrorism: the results of the bombers’ actions were symbolic in nature as well as and even to a greater degree than they were political. It was as if they had followed Baudrillard’s own “advice” when he wrote: “Never attack the system in terms of relations of force. That is the (revolutionary) imagination the system itself forces upon you – the system which survives only by constantly drawing those attacking it into fighting on the ground of reality, which is always its own. But shift the struggle into the symbolic sphere, where the rule is that of challenge, reversion, and outbidding. So that death can by met only by equal or greater death. Defy the system by a gift to which it cannot respond except by its own death and its own collapse.” (The Spirit of Terrorism 17) Symbolic violence is terrorism in that it perpetuates events that thrust the ontological emptiness of simulacra up against the representations of the Real. This terrorism 9 Baudrillard foreshadows the symbolic importance of the Twin Towers even in his 1976 Symbolic Exchange and Death: “The fact that there are two identical towers signifies the end of all competition, the end of every original reference…. This new architecture no longer embodies a competitive system, but a countable one where competition has disappeared in favour of correlation.” (69) Beever 6 frames the collapse of image around the ontological fragility of whatever the foundations of this representation might have been. In this way, symbolic violence is the violence of terrorism. IV. Responses to Terror Violence is never terrorism unless it exists as a symbolic action. This is the contribution Baudrillard offers to the ongoing international discussion seeking to define this concept. Terrorism is understood as a symbolic act – specifically the virulent proliferation of the image – as a function of systemic political antagonism but also as a function of the semoisic condition of empty simulation under which this paradigm functions. The lucid moment that the terrorist action brings to light is the recognition that the Good is a semiotic concept held up by the play of simulacra. This is the fundamental point that responses to terror have failed to comprehend. The Department of Defense and other political, militarized organizations often respond to symbolic terrorist acts as if they were a form of aggression against the socio- political machinery of the State: they mobilize forces, exert power, seek revenge against the Other. On Baudrillard’s insightful analysis this political power “plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, and political stakes” in the face of the “play of signs.” (Simulacra 22) From within a modernist framework, the State fails to recognize the symbolic nature of terror. It remains unable to comprehend its own weakness regarding symbolic representation and the possibility of simulation. Instead, it offers an inappropriate response to such an inherently symbolic event. Indeed, what is the appropriate response to terror if our access is only to the precession of models, of possible symbolic representations, of simulacra? “…[W]e are in a logic of simulation,” Baudrillard writes, “which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact… These facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once.” (Simulacra 16) Responses to terror must themselves “play the game,” so to speak. To avoid falling into an abyss of terror – to effectively respond to viral representation and reproduction of the symbolic event of terror – they must differentiate terrorism from political violence by its symbolic nature. This semiotic form of violence is a challenge to our political order of power that takes into account the symbolic nature of terror and the modes of simulation and finds space between political violence and terrorist acts. Only in these terms can the State respond to that symbolic challenge with an appropriately symbolic response. And yet perhaps we see the first recognition of Baudrillard’s challenge in the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May of 2011. 10 His assassination and the burial of his body at sea set up one symbol and denied another. This was a not merely a political move or a moment of “frontier justice”, as was the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein in 200611, but rather a wholly and importantly symbolic action: an image for an image, the semiotic justice of 10 The death of Osama Bin Laden on May 2nd, 2011 (The White House) was, arguably, the death of an empty image: a symbolic response. 11 Baudrillard wrote of the Gulf War, “…Saddam Hussein, for his part, bargains his war by overbidding in order to fall back, attempting to force the hand by pressure and blackmail, like a hustler trying to sell his goods. The Americans understand nothing in this whole psychodrama of bargaining, they are had every time until, with the wounded pride of the Westerner, they stiffen and impose their conditions… The Americans… have much to learn about symbolic exchange.” (The Gulf War 54-55) Beever 7 Hammurabi done in the name of the symbol, the simulation of the Good and the Right. While we had “much to learn about symbolic exchange” (The Gulf War 55) in 2006, perhaps 2011 indicates our ability to learn. As such, it should be recognized as indicating impressive conceptual acuity. The objective of terrorism is rightly defined as the symbolic semiotic object. It is rightly owed a symbolic response.