Chartbook 435: All perversions have their acting out. Reading Baudrillard on the weekend of the attack on Iran.

And then, this morning, for seminar on Monday I find myself reading Jean Baudrillard’s extraordinary Consumer Society, published in 1970 amidst the Vietnam war.

And I can’t get the following section out of my head.

The Consumed Vertigo of Catastrophe

The usage of signs is always ambivalent. Its function is always a conjuring - both a conjuring up and a conjuring away: causing something to emerge in order to capture it in signs (forces, reality, happiness, etc.) and evoking something in order to deny and repress it. We know that, in its myths, magical thought seeks to conjure away change and history. In a way, the generalized consumption of images, of facts, of information aims also to conjure away the real with the signs of the real, to conjure away history with the signs of change, etc.

Reality we consume in either anticipatory or retrospective mode. At any rate we do so at a distance, a distance which is that of the sign. For example, when Paris-Match showed us the secret forces assigned to protect the General [de Gaulle] training with machine-guns in the basement of the Prefecture, that image was not read as ‘information’, i.e. as referring to the political context and its elucidation. For every one of us, it bore within it the temptation of a superb assassination attempt, a prodigious violent event: the attempt will take place, it is going to take place; the image is the forerunner to it, and embodies the anticipated pleasure; all perversions have their acting-out. What we see here is the same inverse effect as in the expectation of miraculous abundance within the cargo cult. Cargo or catastrophe - in both cases, we have an effect of consumed vertigo.

We may, admittedly, say that it is, then, our fantasies which come to be signified in the image and consumed in it. But this psychological aspect interests us less than what comes into the image to be both consumed in it and repressed: the real world, the event, history.

Hard to read this passage today and not think first and foremost of Venezuela. As I argued a few weeks ago, the Maduro heist was precisely the prodigiously violent event that had long been promised.

What characterizes consumer society is the universality of the news item [Ie fait divers] in mass communication. All political, historical and cultural information is received in the same - at once anodyne and miraculous - form of the news item. It is entirely actualized - i.e. dramatized in the spectacular mode - and entirely deactualized - i.e. distanced by the communication medium and reduced to signs. The news item is thus not one category among others, but the cardinal category of our magical thinking, of our mythology.

That mythology is buttressed by the all the more voracious demand for reality, for ‘truth’, for ‘objectivity’. Everywhere we find ‘cinema-verite’, live reporting, the newsflash, the high-impact photo, the eye-witness report, etc. Everywhere what is sought is the ‘heart of the event’, the ‘heart of the battle’, the ‘live’, the ‘face to face’ - the dizzy sense of a total presence at the event, the Great Thrill of Lived Reality - i.e. the miracle once again, since the truth of the media report, televised and taped, is precisely that I was not there. But it is the truer than true which counts or, in other words, the fact of being there without being there. Or, to put it yet another way, the fantasy.

What mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality [Ie vertige de la realite]. Or again, without playing on words, a reality without the dizzying whirl, for the heart of Amazonia, the heart of reality, the heart of passion, the heart of war, this ‘Heart’ which is the locus of mass communications and which gives them their vertiginous sentimentality, is precisely the place where nothing happens. It is the allegorical sign of passion and of the event. And signs are sources of security.

So we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at the images of the world, who can distinguish this brief irruption of reality from the profound pleasure of not being there? The image, the sign, the message - all these things we ‘consume’ - represent our tranquillity consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion to the real (even where the allusion is violent) than compromised by it

The profound pleasure of not being there. Think of Gaza.

The consumer’s relation to the real world, to politics, to history, to culture is not a relation of interest, investment or committed responsibility - nor is it one of total indifference: it is a relation of curiosity. On the same pattern, we can say that the dimension of consumption as we have defined it here is not one of knowledge of the world, nor is it one of total ignorance: it is the dimension of misrecognition.

Curiosity and misrecognition denote one and the same form of overall behaviour towards the real, a form of behaviour generalized and systematized by the practice of mass communications and characteristic, therefore, of our ‘consumer society’. This is the denial of the real on the basis of an avid and repeated apprehending of its signs.

We can at the same time define the locus of consumption: daily life. This latter is not merely the sum of daily doings, the dimension of banality and repetition: it is a system of interpretation. Everydayness is the separation of a total praxis into a transcendent, autonomous and abstract sphere (of the political, the social, the cultural) and the immanent, closed, abstract sphere of the ‘private’. Work, leisure, family, acquaintances: the individual reorganizes all these things in an involutive mode, this side of the world and of history, in a coherent system based on the closure of the private, the formal freedom of the individual, the securitizing appropriation of the environment, and misrecognition. Everydayness is, from the objective point of view of the totality, impoverished and residual, but it is, by contrast, triumphant and euphoric in its effort totally to autonomize and reinterpret the world ‘for internal consumption’.

It is here that there is profound, organic collusion between the sphere of private everydayness and mass communications. Everydayness as closure, as Verborgenheit, would be unbearable without the simulacrum of the world, without the alibi of participation in the world. It has to be fuelled by the images, the repeated signs of that transcendence. As we have seen, its tranquillity needs the vertiginous spin of reality and history. Its tranquillity requires perpetual consumed violence for its own exaltation. That is its particular obscenity. It is partial to events and violence, provided the violence is served up at room temperature. The caricature image of this has the TV viewer lounging in front of images of the Vietnam War. The TV image, like a window turned outside-in, opens initially on to a room and, in that room, the cruel exteriority of the world becomes something intimate and warm - warm with a perverse warmth.

For Vietnam, for Kuwait, for Iraq (at least in 2003) this seems spot on. But, the question now, surely, is how many people are even watching?

At this ‘lived’ level, consumption makes maximum exclusion from the (real, social, historical) world the maximum index of security. It seeks the resolution of tensions - that happiness by default. But it runs up against a contradiction: the contradiction between the passivity implied by this new value system and the norms of a social morality which, in essentials, remains one of voluntarism, action, efficacy and sacrifice. Hence, the intense sense of guilt which attaches to this new style of hedonistic behaviour and the urgent need, clearly outlined by the ‘strategists of desire’, to take the guilt out of passivity. For millions of people without histories, and happy to be so, passivity has to be rendered guiltless. And this is where spectacular dramatization by the mass media comes in (the accident/ catastrophe report as a generalized category of all messages): in order for this contradiction between puritanical and hedonistic morality to be resolved, this tranquillity of the private sphere has to appear as a value preserved only with great difficulty, constantly under threat and beset by the dangers of a catastrophic destiny. The violence and inhumanity of the outside world are needed not just so that security may be experienced more deeply as security (in the economy of enjoyment [jouissance]), but also so that it should be felt justifiable at every moment as an option (in the economy of the morality of salvation). The signs of destiny, passion and fatality must flourish around the preserved zone in order that everydayness may seize back the grandeur and sublimity of which it is, precisely, the reverse side. Fatality is thus evoked and signified on all sides, so that banality may revel in it and find favour.

The fact that road accidents play so extraordinarily well on radio and TV, in the press, in individual conversation and in the talk of the nation proves this: the crash is the finest exemplar of ‘daily fatality’. If it is exploited with such passion, this is because it performs an essential collective function. The litany of road deaths is rivalled only by the litany of weather forecasts. In fact the two form a mythic couple - the obsession with the sun and the litany of death are inseparable.

Looking out at the window at the genly falling sleet, I wonder how long will it be before the drama in the Middle East is interrupted by warnings about an impending “winter storm"?

Everydayness thus offers this curious mix of euphoric justification by ‘social standing’ and passivity, on the one hand, and the delectatio morosa of potential victims of destiny on the other. The whole forms a specific mentality or, rather, ‘sentimentality’. The consumer society sees itself as an encircled Jerusalem, rich and threatened. That is its ideology.1

Conclusions?

It seems obvious that Trump is the Baudrillardian President.

No less obvious is the fact that there is a real geopolitical agenda at work in the effort to decapitate Iran. That geopolitics may be that of Netanyahu, but it is nonetheless real. At least as far as the Middle East is concerned, there is an inveterate revisionist strain in US policy which became apparent with Biden.

But what I am not sure of, is whether the broader framing of Baudrillard’s analyss is any longer relevant. This may be unfair, Baudrillard specialists feel free to weigh in, but his framing seems basically functional. He was explaining how a system cohered.

In 2026 does that presume too much?

Do we live in a world in which the question of popular legitimation for war, or the legality of Trump’s actions - the classic questions still posed by war-making in the period between Vietnam and Iraq and implicitly answered by Baudrillard - still matter very much any more?

As Stephen Wertheim points out, there was zero preparation of the American public for this conflict. What is by any stretch of the imagination a major military action seems entirely divorced from American politics in any conventional sense.

In this regard the Venezuela action was different. It fit very neatly with the dominant dynamic of that moment which centered on ICE and images of Latinos being brutally manhandled by American security forces.

But when it comes to Iran in 2026, what is the connection?

Could we be beyond Baudrillard?

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