1NC Heg Good K

The west is under siege and theories such as Baudrillards will kill all of
American hegemony 9/11 proves
Solway 11 [David Solway is a Canadian poet, educational theorist, travel writer and
literary critic of Jewish descent. He is a member of the Jubilate Circle and formerly a
teacher of English Literature at John Abbott College, Thoughts on the Tenth Anniversary
of 9/11]
As should be evident to anyone who is not in denial and is willing to credit the evidence mounting by the day, the West
is now under siege. Paradoxically, it appears to be increasingly at the mercy not only of radical Islam, but of its own
anomie and its blatant philistinism. Indeed the former preys relentlessly upon the latter as it does upon the ineluctable
corollary of cultural weakness, the presumably tolerant and progressive ethos of so-called liberal thinking. Something
stirs in the East, a sleepless malice says one of the characters in The Lord of the Rings [1]. What stirs in the West,
however, is a growing tendency to fall asleep, a kind of spiritual encephalitis generating an epidemic of lethargy before
reality and accompanied by various spastic maneuvers intended to disguise the truth. Reasonable people can

have little sympathy with the feverish pack of journalists, academics, and intellectuals
who believe that 9/11 was payback for Americas supposed colonial iniquities and who
argue that the reaction of the Islamic world is understandable. Their number is legion but a few
instances of such chicanery will serve to fill out the picture. On September 16, just five days after the carnage visited upon
an unprepared America, Edward Said published a Comment [2] in The Observer in which, while professing concern for
the dead and injured, he went on to deprecate an American superpower almost constantly at warall over the Islamic
world, its ignorance of Islam that takes new forms every day, and the influence of oil, defence and Zionist lobbies.
Advising his readers to avoid fictive constructions that only complicate the issue this from Said! he placed 9/11 in the
context of the Iraqi peoples suffering under US-imposed sanctions and, of course, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian
territories, concluding that the roots of terror lay in injustice. No one seemed to notice that this was the rhetoric of the
ideological scavenger, picking over the carcasses to feed his hatred and fatten his agenda. Similarly, in an article [3]

titled The Spirit of Terrorism for Le Monde of November 2, 2001, the cynosure of the postmodern Left,
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, wrote of the prodigious jubilation of seeing this global
superpower destroyed; he went on to explain that this is the one which, in its
unbearable power, has fomented all this violence that is innate the world over. His
colleague Jacques Derrida, a fixture on the American university circuit, refers [4] to the date 9/11 as a telegram of
metonymy which merely points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do
not yet know how to qualify. Or in plain language, we are too dumb not to deserve what we got coming. As for the sheer
madness of Noam Chomskys predictable ramblings faulting the U.S. for its ostensibly genocidal campaigns, these have
already been deconstructed in many different places and can be shunted aside as nothing more than the intellectual refuse
he unfailingly produces. Nevertheless, his absurd maunderings have been disproportionately

influential. These are only a mere handful of such righteous denunciations of the
American hegemon.
This is a dangerous game that assures violence.
Kagan, 98 PhD, graduate of Harvards Kennedy School of Government, adjunct history professor at Georgetown, senior associate at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace (Robert, Foreign Policy, The benevolent empire)

Those contributing to the growing chorus of antihegemony and multipolarity may know they are playing a
dangerous game, one that needs to be conducted with the utmost care, as French leaders did during the Cold War, lest the entire
international system come crashing down around them. What they may not have adequately calculated, however, is
the possibility that Americans will not respond as wisely as they generally did during the Cold War.
Americans and their leaders should not take all this sophisticated whining about U.S. hegemony too seriously. They
certainly should not take it more seriously than the whiners themselves do. But, of course, Americans are taking it seriously. In the United States these
days, the lugubrious guilt trip of post-Vietnam liberalism is echoed even by conservatives , with William
Buckley, Samuel Huntington, and James Schlesinger all decrying American "hubris," "arrogance," and "imperialism." Clinton
administration officials, in between speeches exalting America as the "indispensable" nation, increasingly behave as if what is truly indispensable is the prior

there is a stirring of neo-isolationism

in America today, a mood that nicely complements the view among many Europeans that America is meddling too much in everyone else's business
approval of China, France, and Russia for every military action. Moreover, at another level,

and taking too little time to mind its own. The existence of the Soviet Union disciplined Americans and made them see that their enlightened self-interest lay in a
relatively generous foreign policy. Today, that discipline is no longer present. In other words,

foreign grumbling about American

hegemony would be merely amusing, were it not for the very real possibility that too
many Americans will forget - even if most of the rest of the world does not - just how important continued
American dominance is to the preservation of a reasonable level of international security and
prosperity. World leaders may want to keep this in mind when they pop the champagne corks in celebration of the next American humbling.
Extinction
Thayer, 06 PhD, professor of security studies at Missouri State, Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard (Bradley, The National Interest, In defense of primacy)

A grand strategy based on American primacy means ensuring the United States stays the world's number one power the diplomatic, economic and military leader.
Those arguing against primacy claim that the United States should retrench, either because the United States lacks the
power to maintain its primacy and should withdraw from its global commitments, or because the
maintenance of primacy will lead the United States into the trap of "imperial overstretch." In the previous issue of The
National Interest, Christopher Layne warned of these dangers of primacy and called for retrenchment.1 Those arguing for a grand strategy of retrenchment are a
diverse lot. They include isolationists, who want no foreign military commitments; selective engagers, who want U.S. military commitments to centers of economic
might; and offshore balancers, who want a modified form of selective engagement that would have the United States abandon its landpower presence abroad in

retrenchment, in any of its guises, must be avoided. If the United

it would be a profound strategic mistake that would lead to far greater
instability and war in the world, imperil American security and deny the United States and its allies the
benefits of primacy. There are two critical issues in any discussion of America's grand strategy: Can America remain the dominant state? Should it
strive to do this? America can remain dominant due to its prodigious military, economic and soft
power capabilities. The totality of that equation of power answers the first issue. The United States has overwhelming military
capabilities and wealth in comparison to other states or likely potential alliances. Barring some disaster or
tremendous folly, that will remain the case for the foreseeable future. With few exceptions, even those who advocate retrenchment
favor of relying on airpower and seapower to defend its interests. But
States adopted such a strategy,

acknowledge this. So the debate revolves around the desirability of maintaining American primacy. Proponents of retrenchment focus a great deal on the costs of

risks of primacy are reported in newspapers

every day; the benefits that stem from it are not. A GRAND strategy of ensuring American primacy takes as its starting
point the protection of the U.S. homeland and American global interests. These interests include ensuring that critical resources like
oil flow around the world, that the global trade and monetary regimes flourish and that Washington's worldwide
network of allies is reassured and protected. Allies are a great asset to the United States, in part because they shoulder some of its
burdens. Thus, it is no surprise to see NATO in Afghanistan or the Australians in East Timor. In contrast, a strategy based on retrenchment will
not be able to achieve these fundamental objectives of the United States. Indeed, retrenchment will make the United States less
secure than the present grand strategy of primacy. This is because threats will exist no matter what role America
chooses to play in international politics. Washington cannot call a "time out", and it cannot hide from threats.
Whether they are terrorists, rogue states or rising powers, history shows that threats
must be confronted. Simply by declaring that the United States is "going home", thus abandoning its commitments or
making unconvincing half pledges to defend its interests and allies, does not mean that others will respect American
wishes to retreat. To make such a declaration implies weak-ness and emboldens aggression. In the anarchic world
U.S. action but they fall to realize what is good about American primacy. The price and

of the animal kingdom, predators prefer to eat the weak rather than confront the strong. The same is true of the anarchic world of international politics. If there is
no diplomatic solution to the threats that confront the United States, then the conventional and strategic military power of the United States is what protects the
country from such threats. And when enemies must be confronted, a strategy based on primacy focuses on engaging enemies overseas, away from .American soil.
Indeed, a key tenet of the Bush Doctrine is to attack terrorists far from America's shores and not to wait while they use bases in other countries to plan and train for

a physical, on the ground presence that cannot be achieved by

offshore balancing. Indeed, as Barry Posen has noted, U.S. primacy is secured because America, at present,
commands the "global common" the oceans, the world's airspace and outer space allowing the United States to project its power far
from its borders, while denying those common avenues to its enemies. As a consequence, the costs of power projection for the United
attacks against the United States itself. This requires

States and its allies are reduced, and the robustness of the United States' conventional and strategic deterrent capabilities is increased.' This is not an advantage

in a world where American primacy is

clearly and unambiguously on display--is that countries want to align themselves with the United States. Of
course, this is not out of any sense of altruism, in most cases, but because doing so allows them to use the power of the
United States for their own purposes, their own protection, or to gain greater influence. Of 192 countries, 84 are allied
with America -their security is tied to the United States through treaties and other informal arrangements and they
that should be relinquished lightly. A remarkable fact about international politics today -

include almost all of the major economic and military powers. That is a ratio of almost 17 to one (85 to five), and a big change from the Cold War when the ratio
was about 1.8 to one of states aligned with the United States versus the Soviet Union. Never before in its history has this country, or any country, had so many
allies. U.S. primacy -and the bandwagoning effect has also given us extensive influence in international politics, allowing the United States to shape the behavior
of states and international institutions. Such influence comes in many forms, one of which is America's ability to create coalitions of like minded states to free
Kosovo, stabilize Afghanistan, invade Iraq or to stop proliferation through the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Doing so allows the United States to operate

American led wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq

stand in contrast to the UN's inability to save the people of Darfur or even to conduct any
with allies outside of the where it can be stymied by opponents.

military campaign to realize the goals of its charter. The quiet effectiveness of the PSI in dismantling Libya's
WMD programs and unraveling the A.Q. Khan proliferation network are in sharp relief to the
typically toothless attempts by the UN to halt proliferation. You can count with one hand countries opposed to the United States.

They are the "Gang of Five": China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezeula. Of course, countries like India, for example, do not agree with all policy choices made
by the United States, such as toward Iran, but New Delhi is friendly to Washington. Only the "Gang of Five" may be expected to consistently resist the agenda and

even Beijing is
intimidated by the United States and refrains from openly challenging U.S. power. China proclaims that it will, if
actions of the United States. China is clearly the most important of these states because it is a rising great power. But

necessary, resort to other mechanisms of challenging the United States, including asymmetric strategies such as targeting communication and intelligence
satellites upon which the United States depends. But China may not be confident those strategies would work, and so it is likely to refrain from testing the United
States directly for the foreseeable future because China's power benefits, as we shall see, from the international order U.S. primacy creates. The other states are far
weaker than China. For three of the "Gang of Five" cases Venezuela, Iran, Cuba it is an anti U.S. regime that is the source of the problem; the country itself is not

peace
and stability have been great benefits of an era where there was a dominant power Rome,
intrinsically anti American. Indeed, a change of regime in Caracas, Tehran or Havana could very well reorient relations. THROUGHOUT HISTORY,

Britain or the United States today. Scholars and statesmen have long recognized the irenic effect of power on the anarchic world of international politics.

when we consider the current international order free trade, a robust

monetary regime, increasing respect for human rights, growing democratization is directly linked to U.S.
power. Retrenchment proponents seem to think that the current system can be maintained without the current amount of U.S. power behind it. In that they
are dead wrong and need to be reminded of one of history's most significant lessons: Appalling things happen when
international orders collapse. The Dark Ages fol-lowed Rome's collapse. Hitler succeeded
the order established at Versailles. Without U.S. power, the liberal order created by the United States will
end just as assuredly. As country and western great Rai Donner sang: "You don't know what you've got (until you lose it)." Consequently, it is
Everything we think of

important to note what those good things are. In addition to ensuring the security of the United States and its allies, American primacy within the international

U.S.
leadership reduced friction among many states that were historical antagonists , most notably
France and West Germany. Today, American primacy helps keep a number of complicated relationships
aligned -between Greece and Turkey, Israel and Egypt, South Korea and Japan, India and Pakistan, Indonesia and Australia. This is not to say it fulfills
Woodrow Wilson's vision of ending all war. Wars still occur where Washington's interests are not seriously threatened, such as in Darfur, but a Pax
Americana does reduce war's likelihood, particularly war's worst form: great power wars. Second,
American power gives the United States the ability to spread democracy and other elements of its ideology of
system causes many positive outcomes for Washington and the world. The first has been a more peaceful world. During the Cold War,

liberalism. Doing so is a source of much good for the countries concerned as well as the United States because, as John Owen noted on these pages in the Spring

liberal democracies are more likely to align with the United States and be sympathetic to
the American worldview.3 So, spreading democracy helps maintain U.S. primacy. In addition, once states are governed democratically, the
likelihood of any type of conflict is significantly reduced. This is not because democracies do not have clashing interests. Indeed they do. Rather, it is
because they are more open, more transparent and more likely to want to resolve things
amicably in concurrence with U.S. leadership. And so, in general, democratic states are good for their citizens as well as for advancing the interests of the
2006 issue,

United States. Critics have faulted the Bush Administration for attempting to spread democracy in the Middle East, labeling such an effort a modern form of
tilting at windmills. It is the obligation of Bush's critics to explain why democracy is good enough for Western states but not for the rest, and, one gathers from the
argument, should not even be attempted. Of course, whether democracy in the Middle East will have a peaceful or stabilizing influence on America's interests in
the short run is open to question. Perhaps democratic Arab states would be more opposed to Israel, but nonetheless, their people would be better off. The United
States has brought democracy to Afghanistan, where 8.5 million Afghans, 40 percent of them women, voted in a critical October 2004 election, even though
remnant Taliban forces threatened them. The first free elections were held in Iraq in January 2005. It was the military power of the United States that put Iraq on

even the Middle

East is increasingly democratic. They may not yet look like Western style democracies, but democratic progress has
been made in Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt. By all accounts,
the march of democracy has been impressive. Third, along with the growth in the number of democratic states around the world
has been the growth of the global economy. With its allies, the United States has labored to create an economically liberal
worldwide network characterized by free trade and commerce, respect for international property rights, and mo-bility of capital and labor markets. The
economic stability and prosperity that stems from this economic order is a global public
good from which all states benefit, particularly the poorest states in the Third World. The United States created this network not out
of altruism but for the benefit and the economic well being of America. This economic order forces American industries
to be competitive, maximizes efficiencies and growth, and benefits defense as well because the size of
the path to democracy. Washington fostered democratic governments in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Caucasus. Now

the economy makes the defense burden manageable. Economic spin offs foster the development of military technology, helping to ensure military prowess.
Perhaps the greatest testament to the benefits of the economic network comes from Deepak Lal, a former Indian foreign service diplomat and researcher at the
World Bank, who started his career confident in the socialist ideology of post independence India. Abandoning the positions of his youth, Lal now recognizes
that the only way to bring relief to desperately poor countries of the Third World is through the adoption of free market economic policies and globalization,
which are facilitated through American primacy.4 As a witness to the failed alternative economic systems, Lal is one of the strongest academic proponents of

the United States, in seeking primacy, has been willing to

use its power not only to advance its interests but to promote the welfare of people all over the globe. The
American primacy due to the economic prosperity it provides. Fourth and finally,

United States is the earth's leading source of positive externalities for the world. The U.S. military has participated in over fifty operations since the end of the

the U.S. military is the earth's "911 force" it

the world's police, the global paramedic and the planet's fire department. Whenever there is a

Cold War and most of those missions have been humanitarian in nature. Indeed,
serves, de facto, as

the United States assists the countries in need. On

tremendous earthquake and tsunami occurred in the Indian Ocean near
Sumatra, killing some 300,000 people. The United States was the first to respond with aid. Washington followed up with a large
natural disaster, earthquake, flood, drought, volcanic eruption, typhoon or tsunami,
the day after Christmas in 2004, a

contribution of aid and deployed the U.S. military to South and Southeast Asia for many months to help with the aftermath of the disaster. About 20,000 U.S.
soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines responded by providing water, food, medical aid, disease treatment and prevention as well as forensic assistance to help

Only the U.S. military could have accomplished this Herculean effort.
No other force possesses the communications capabilities or global logistical reach of the U.S. military.
identify the bodies of those killed.

In fact, UN peacekeeping operations depend on the United States to supply UN forces. American generosity has done more to help the United States fight the War
on Terror than almost any other measure. Before the tsunami, 80 percent of Indonesian public opinion was opposed to the United States; after it, 80 percent had

Indonesians still have overwhelmingly

positive views of the United States. In October 2005, an enormous earthquake struck Kashmir, killing about 74,000 people and leaving three
million homeless. The U.S. military responded immediately, diverting helicopters fighting the War on Terror in nearby
Afghanistan to bring relief as soon as possible. To help those ill need, the United States also provided financial aid to
Pakistan; and, as one might expect from those witnessing the munificence of the United States, it left a lasting impression about
America. For the first time since 9/11, polls of Pakistani opinion have found that more people are
favorable toward the United States than unfavorable, while support for Al Qaeda dropped to its lowest level. Whether in
Indonesia or Kashmir, the money was well spent because it helped people in the wake of disasters, but it also had a real impact on the War on Terror. When
people in the Muslim world witness the U.S. military conducting a humanitarian
mission, there is a clearly positive impact on Muslim opinion of the United States. As the War on Terror is a war
of ideas and opinion as much as military action, for the United States humanitarian missions are the equivalent of a
blitzkrieg.
a favorable opinion of America. Two years after the disaster, and in poll after poll,

We need to actively support hegemony in academic forums empirics first.

Mearsheimer, 95 Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago.
West Point graduate, retired Air Force officer (John, Professor Political Science at the University of Chicago, International Security, Summer, p. 93)

the debate over whether institutions cause

peace is not just a dispute about international relations theory; it also has significant real-world consequences. For example,
the Clinton administration and many European policymakers publicly maintain that states should not worry
about the balance of power that is old thinking, they say but should instead rely on institutions to protect them. This perspective
makes sense only if there is evidence that institutions can get the job done. But so far, the
evidence indicates that institutions do not provide a sound basis for building a stable post-Cold
War world. Institutions failed to prevent or shut down the recent wars in Bosnia and Transcaucasia, and
failed to stop the carnage in Rwanda; there is little reason to think that those same institutions would do better in the next trouble spot.
The bottom line on institutions seems clear: despite all the rhetoric about their virtues, there is little evidence that they can alter
state behavior and cause peace. States temporarily led astray by the false promise of institutional rhetoric eventually come to their senses
The discussion of institutions up to now has a distinct academic flavor. However,

and start worrying about the balance of power. Surely Bosnian policymakers now recognize their mistake in trusting institutions like the UN and the EC to pull

a state that ignores the balance of power can suffer

enormous damage. Thus, it would seem to make sense, from both a moral and a strategic perspective, for
institutionalists to tone down their claims about the peace-causing effects of institutions
until they have solid evidence to support their positions
their chestnuts out of the fir. In the meantime, however,

1NC/2AC Privilege DA
Privilege DA- such questioning denies the existence of the worst violence.
The cover over what follows:
Every 7 (Peter, Principal Lecturer and an Associate Head of Department for Computing
at Coventry University, first class honors degree in Communication Studies, obtained an
MA with distinction in Media and Cultural theory, initially written in '96, edited in '07,
The Fascination Payload: Cultural Studies and the first Gulf War,
http://www.academia.edu/6175231/The_Fascination_Payload_Cultural_Studies_and_
the_First_Gulf_War)
Jean Baudrillard chose the occasion of the Gulf Conflict to extend his thesis that global
society is so caught in the grip of media simulation that its connection with reality has,
once and for all, been severed: Just a couple of days before war broke out in the Gulf,
one could find Baudrillard regaling readers of the Guardian newspaper with an article
which declared that this war would never happen, existing as it did only as a figment of
mass media simulation, wargames rhetoric or imaginary scenarios beyond all limits of
realworld, factual possibility (Norris: 11) In choosing to concentrate on the undeniably
manifest talk of war and foregrounding the role of strategic simulation whilst,
simultaneously, refusing to engage in an account of events beyond the media, Jean
Baudrillard was able to construct the case that a war conducted at a distance would be, of
necessity, a matter of pure speculation and simulation : Exchanging war for the signs of war
(Baudrillard 1994: 62). Written in to this article, almost as a failsafe device against the collapse of his
contention, was an interdiction against the ability of anyone to make a claim to know the
truth of the situation. For, in Baudrillards eyes, such a claim would be banking on a
realist ontology that clung to some variant of the truth/falsehood or fact/fiction
dichotomy (Norris: 13). A claim that would be forever stuck in nostalgia for some ultimate truth telling discourse
(or metalanguage) offering a delusory refuge from the knowledge that we are nowadays utterly without resources in
the matter of distinguishing truth from falsehood (ibid: 13). This

is akin to Richard Rortys position in

say that truth is not out there is simply to say that
where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human
language, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there
cannot exist independently of the human mind because sentences cannot so exist, or be
out there. (q.v. Sprinkler: 125) The ethical consequences of such linguistic relativism can be
seen when one compares Baudrillard or Rortys position to that of revisionist historian
Robert Faurrison. Faurrison claimed that as there were no surviving eye witnesses to
Nazi gas chambers there would, ultimately, be no way of confirming those chambers
existence. These consequences became more evident as events unfolded in the Gulf. Outbreaks of the real
Virilios interruptions such as the bombing of the El Almiriyah air raid shelter (no matter
how mediated or explained away by military spokespeople) could not disguise the fact
that people, civilians, actually died. There were eyewitness survivors. Baudrillards take
on the fact/fiction dichotomy began to look decidedly sickening: There will be nobody in
a position to know what they are seeing, reading or hearing is not some fictive
simulacrum of the real, conjured up by the ubiquitous propaganda machine or the
various techniques of media disinformation (Norris: 12) To go down the road, like
Baudrillard, of a fictive conspiracy theory in which images of death at El Almiriyah were
nothing more than the a highly competent, cinematically constructed, simulation is
surely stretching the limits of credibility. If contemporary truth is, according to this post
modern critical line, only a matter of rhetorical or suasive force then El Almiriya was the
point at which Baudrillards (un)truth claim lost its own persuasive appeal breaking
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity in which: To

the bounds of virtually every consensual notion of reality. Despite this, following the
conflict, Baudrillard was minded to publish an article entitled La Guerre du Golfe na
pas en lieu (The Gulf War did not take place) in Liberation An extract of which was
published in The Guardian. In the article he conceded that this simulated war has not
been entirely a product of massmedia illusionist techniques; that large numbers of Iraqi
conscripts and civilians had been killed by the Allied aerial bombardment; that massive
damage had been inflicted on the countrys infrastructure (Norris: 192). Nevertheless,
none of the facts had persuaded him to drop his original contention that the war had
predominantly existed as a virtual construct: If we have no practical knowledge of this
war and such knowledge is out of the question then let us at least have the sceptical
intelligence to reject the probability of all information, of all images whatever their
source. To be more virtual than the events themselves, not to reestablish some
criterion of truth for this we lack the means (q.v. Norris 194). With this Baudrillard
maintains a strict adherence to the notion of the impossibility of veridical knowledge.
And herein lays his paradox that in the same article he can admit the facts as regards
casualties whilst denying any means of ascertaining their truth. Admitting knowledge
and the impossibility of knowledge, in the same breath, is a logical error both cannot be
true.
Defense- degrees matter. Not all truth is the same and Ts not the worst
kind. Offense- their sweeping K sanctions privileged violence.
Every 7 (Peter, Principal Lecturer and an Associate Head of Department for
Computing at Coventry University, first class honors degree in
Communication Studies, obtained an MA with distinction in Media and
Cultural theory, initially written in '96, edited in '07, The Fascination
Payload: Cultural Studies and the first Gulf War,
http://www.academia.edu/6175231/The_Fascination_Payload_Cultural_Studies_and_
the_First_Gulf_War)
The near fetishisation of the concept truth laid these accounts open to a postmodernist theoretical attack (exploited, most clearly by
Baudrillard in the case of the Gulf war) namely, that they were guilty of the realist error of misrecognising that language is always already
metaphoric. That the world of words creates the world of things (in Lacans formulation of the symbolic). In

claiming a critical
distance from their object of study (the Gulf War), these critics excluded themselves from
their own representations hiding their own epistemological motivations. They could
not, therefore, recognise that the attempt to recast an erroneous ideological
representation by the media, in the name of truth, would merely boomerang back into
another form of ideological representation the critical academic text. In failing to give
an account of their own discursive practices, in failing to come clean about the
metaphoric predicates of their own epistemology, these texts mirrored, to a certain
extent, the overarching authority of the media in laying claim to metalinguistic
objectivity. Indeed, the reflection that spectators viewed much of the Gulf War from the
vantage point a camera mounted on the end of a missile renders manifest the fact that
they (we) only ever knew the Orient from the end of one camera or another including
the camera of academic representation. I am not arguing here, however, along the lines of a postmodern rereading
of Nietszche, for the impossibility of truth: Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of
life cannot live (Nietszche q.v. Dews: 52). From this position, of course, it is possible to state that there is nothing
in the world that is not open to discursive redescription. I am more inclined to the arguments of Adorno (as
outlined by Peter Dews: 1994) that the difficult problem of representation (that the object always
escapes the concept) should not lead enquiry to give up on the notion of truth. Rather,
enquiry should accept that there are no absolute objects of knowledge but there are
always superior representations: The opposition of the stable to the chaotic, and the domination of nature, would never
have succeeded without an element of stability in the dominated, which would otherwise incessantly give the lie to the subject. Completely
casting away that element and localising it solely in the subject is no less hubris than absolutizing the schemata of conceptual order

(Adorno q.v. Dews: 57) Similarly, several chapters of Christopher Norriss book, Uncritical Theory are given over to rescuing Derrida,
and the project of deconstruction, from being wrongly cast as an argument for the absolute relativisation of truth. Norris argues against a
postmodernist misreading of Derridas project which suggests that since the description of truth possesses a textual rhetorical dimension
then anything goes with regard to the free play of redescription. Rather, Derridas notion of reading, which requires that not only the
picture, but also the frame, of the text (i.e. the discursive devices deployed in order to sustain its semblance of reality) be taken into
account, is a necessary complexification in the quest for an account of discursive power. This in no way, Norris argues, gives a licence to play
fast and loose with the notion of truth. Derridas work may make problematic Habermas notion of the ideal speech situation, but neither
does it open the way to the building of a Tower of Babel. Whatever the problems or aporias brought to light by a deconstructive reading,

it should always be possible so Derrida asserts to invoke rules of competence, criteria of

discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigour, criticism, and pedagogy . (Q.v.
Norris: 35) I would argue that what these realist critical accounts required, in order to fend
off accusations of their mastery or colonisation of truth, was a certain reflexive attitude
to the discursive dimension of their own epistemology. That these accounts were
superior, in terms of competence, complexity, rigour, or good faith, to that of media
discourse is not in question. That their analysis gained equivalence with reality is
unsustainable. Isolation and death The fact that these accounts were able only to articulate
negativity towards media representations of the Gulf conflict rather than also setting
out coherent and positive calls to action, speaks volumes about the political isolation of
the academic Left. Popular support for military intervention allied to the
contemporaneous reactionary climate, (evidenced, for example, by increasing attacks on political correctness in the
USA or on liberal teaching methods in the UK), acted to sever what little connection there remained
between critical theory and progressive social practice. Exploiting this gap, almost as a
comfort buffer against the increasing marginalisation of intellectuals, were postmodern
theories of ambivalence and undecidability (Norris 1992) which further compounded
the ostracisation of the Left. The issue of war casualties, and the desperate rhetorical
strategies deployed in recovering their absence, is particularly telling of this isolation
devoid of the dialectical positive of a popular movement against military intervention,
critical accounts could only compulsively reiterate the negative predicates of the need for
such a movement as if the real endstop of a Left oriented epistemology was death,
rather than progressive affirmation. In 1988 Dick Hebdidge argued: A politics based exclusively on
the perfection of critique, on the identification of pain and exploitation, on the regular
exposure of hard, unwelcome truths .... a politics which offers dissent and resistance
as positive terms, is simply not enough. It will not work. (1988: 223)

A2: Baudrillard Generic Indict

Baudrillards theories have no statistical basis and are painfully vague
Dutton, 90 [Denis, philosopher hater extraordinaire, Jean Baudrillard, Philosophy
and Literature, vol. 4, pg. 234-5, //MW]
To this list of charges I would add only that, when it isnt unintelligible, almost everything
Baudrillard says is either trite or somehow vaguely or baldly false. We are not allowed long
to forget that Baudrillard is a sociology professor. Poster believes that Baudrillards work is invaluable in
beginning to comprehend the impact of new communication forms on society. Id advise anyone seeking to
understand the broad implications of computer and video technologies for information
and entertainment to search elsewhere, but if you want to know which way the wind is
blowing in theory, this is the place. The selections in this book begin in 1968, when Baudrillard was still some
kind of a Marxist, and continue through The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media (1985). This last
piece proposes the familiar notion that we are imprisoned in a world of media
simulations, video phantasms, and that we cannot come to know the real not because we are
ignorant but because we are overinformed: we will never in the future be able to separate reality from its
statistical, simulative projection in the media. This isnt an uncertainty weve experienced in the past, but a brand new
kind of uncertainty brought about by an excess of information. So much for the trite part about video

simulations replacing reality and media/ information overload. The false part comes when
Baudrillard talks about the public reaction to this. The response of the masses (he still
fancies bits of Marxist parlance) to the media is silence people get even with public opinion
polls, television, advertising, and so forth by plunging themselves into a state of stupor.
Like McLuhan, Baudrillard doesnt want to call this sort of thing good or bad ; unlike McLuhan, he
gives very few examples of the phenomena he purports to describe. There are no
examples whatsoever of how public silence, passivity, and alienation serve as strategies to
counter and undermine the oppression of the media. And how could he give an example
of this? To be sure, there is an abundance of stupified people out there sitting in front of
television screens; but to portray their stupefaction as a form of calculated revenge on the
media is frivolous without even being interesting.

A2: Baudrillard Cede the Political

Baudrillard is so incoherent as to fail to become political.
McClean, 01 [David, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Molloy
College, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion
%20papers/david_mcclean.htm]
Or we might take Foucault who, at best, has provided us with what may reasonably be described as a very long and eccentric footnote to
Nietzsche (I have once been accused, by a Foucaltian true believer, of "gelding" Foucault with other similar remarks). Foucault, who has
provided the Left of the late 1960s through the present with such notions as "governmentality," "Limit," "archeology," "discourse" "power"
and "ethics," creating or redefining their meanings, has made it overabundantly clear that all of our moralities and practices are the
successors of previous ones which derive from certain configurations of savoir and connaisance arising from or created by, respectively, the
discourses of the various scientific schools. But

I have not yet found in anything Foucault wrote or said

how such observations may be translated into a political movement or hammered into a political
document or theory (let alone public policies) that can be justified or founded on more than an arbitrary aesthetic

experimentalism. In fact, Foucault would have shuddered if any one ever did, since he thought that anything as grand as a movement went
far beyond what he thought appropriate. This leads me to mildly rehabilitate Habermas, for at least he has been useful in exposing
Foucault's shortcomings in this regard, just as he has been useful in exposing the shortcomings of others enamored with the abstractions of
various Marxian-Freudian social critiques. Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a
book that I think is long overdue, leftist

critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a

priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze,
Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative
attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of
homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that
it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to
recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own
twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in
neological and multi-syllabic jargon . These elaborate theoretical remedies are more
"interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy
should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our
basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to
speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's
academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either

attempts
to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a
Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country.
Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey
put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between
chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic,
schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs
and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered
from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left , which left is juxtaposed to the Political
Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its
members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and
the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly
evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the
nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society
as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e.
disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist
American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their
cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political
possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the
philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile

country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later

Barry Goldwater. To

invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always
ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a
conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same
sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are
not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We

who
fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our
ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is
yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that
are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is
it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho
almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the
need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The

new public philosopher

might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as
theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as
critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power
(all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social
institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but
where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant,
imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest
attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual
world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being
slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are
talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and
who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from
philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."
Baudrillard is the worst form of ivory tower academia instead of actually
helping people, he retreats to the safety of big words and abstract
philosophical concepts instead of seeking pragmatic political change
BALSAS, 06 [interdisciplinary journal on media culture, Interview with Art Group
BBM, on first cyborgs, aliens and other sides of new technologies,
http://www.balsas.cc/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=151]
Valentinas: We all know that Jean Baudrillard did not believe that the Gulf War did take
place, as it was over-mediated and over-simulated. In fact, the Gulf War II is still not over, and Iraq became much more
than just a Frankenstein laboratory for the new media, technology and democracy games. What can we learn from wars
that do not take place, even though they cannot be finished? Are they becoming a symptom of our times as a
confrontation between multiple time-lines, ideologies and technologies in a single place? Lars: Actually, it has always
been the same: new wars have been better test-beds for the state of art technologies and the latest computer-controlled
firearms. The World War I already was a fully mechanized war where pre-robots were fighting each other and gassing the
troops. And afterwards, the winners shape the new world order. Olaf: Who on hell is Baudrillard ? The

one who earns money by publishing his prognoses after the things happen? What a
fuck, French philosophy deals too much with luxury problems and elegantly
ignores the problem itself. Its no wonder, this is the colonizers mentality, you
can hear it roaring in their words: they use phrases made to camouflage genocide. I
went to see that Virilios exhibition "Ce qui arrive" at Foundation Cartier in 2003. I was smashed by that banal
presentation of the evil of all kinds: again , natural catastrophes and evil done by man were exposed on
the same wall, glued

together with a piece of "theory". There you find it all, filed up in one row: the pure
luxury of the Cartier-funded Jean Nouvel building, an artwork without any blood in its veins, and that
late Christian philosophy about the techno-cataclysm being the revenge of God. Pure shit, turned into
gold in the holy cellars of the modern alchemists museums. The artist-made video
"documents" of the Manhattan towers opposed to Iraqian war pictures: thats not Armageddon, thats man-invented war
technology to be used to subdue others. And there is always somebody who pushes the

buttons, even when the button is a computer mouse some ten thousand kilometers

away from the place where people die, or even if it is a civil airplanes redirected by
Islamists. Everybody knows that. War technology has always been made to make
killing easier. And to produce martyrs as well. Janneke: Compare Baudrillard with Henry
Dunant, the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Dunant was no
philosopher, he was just an intelligent rich man in the late 19th century. But his ideas went far more in
the direction where you should hope to find philosophers as well. He experienced war as a
"randonneur": he passed by, he saw the suffering and the inhumanity of war. And he felt obliged
to act. Apart from the maybe 10 days he spent on the battlefield, on the beautiful meadows in the Europeans Alps,
helping wounded people to survive, as a complete medical layman he decided to do something
more sustainable against these odds. He knew that his efforts couldnt prevent war in
general, but he felt that he could alter the cruelty of reality. And he succeeded in doing
it. No wonder that in our days we find the most engaged people to support the TROIA projects intention in
Geneva, where they are still based. And they are not only doing their necessary surgeons work in the field: they are as
well fighting with the same energy on the diplomatic battlefield.

Reality has not died, but merely been sent to the global south baudrillards
Eurocentric understanding of capitalism obscures massive violence done on
the periphery
Robinson 13 [Andrew Robinson Jean Baudrillard and Activism: A critique]
One limit to Baudrillards theory is his tendency to over-totalise. Baudrillard is talking about tendential
processes, but he often talks as if they are totally effective. There are still, for instance, a
lot of uncharted spaces, a lot of unexplained events, a lot of things the system cant handle. While
Baudrillard is describing dominant tendencies in the present, these tendencies coexist with older forms of capitalism, in a
situation of uneven development. The persistence of the systems violence is a problem for

Baudrillards perspective: the smooth regime of neutralisation and inclusive regulation

has not ended older modalities of brutality. At times, Baudrillard exaggerates greatly the
extent to which the old authoritarian version of capitalism has been replaced by subtle
regimes of control. He exaggerates the extent to which contemporary capitalism is tolerant, permissive and
maternal. This may be because his works were mostly written in France in the 1970s-80s, when the dominant ethos was
still largely social-democratic. What Baudrillard recognises as the retrograde version of

capitalism associated with the right-wing was to return with a vengeance, especially after
911. Another problem is a lack of a Southern dimension. Like many Northern authors,
Baudrillards approach mainly applies to the functioning of capitalism in the North . The
penetration of the code is substantially less in countries where information technology is less widespread. In parts of
Africa, even simple coding exercises such as counting votes or recording censuses are
extremely difficult. This is for the very reasons of respondent reflexivity which Baudrillard highlights. People
will under-record themselves to stay invisible, or over-record themselves to obtain
benefits. And without massive resources to put into its bureaucracies, the system is
unable to find enough people who will act as transmitters for the code. Instead, people use their
power to extract what they can from the system. Explosions still happen regularly in the South.
Furthermore, a contracting system forcibly delinks large portions of the globe. Its power on
the margins is lessened as its power at the core is intensified. As the system becomes ever
more contracted and inward-looking, liberated zones may appear around the edges.
Without an element of border thinking, Baudrillard tends to exaggerate the systems
completeness and effectiveness. Baudrillard assumes that any excess is everywhere
absorbed into the code. He ignores the persistence of borderlands. And when he talks about the South, he admits
that the old regime of production might still exist here: people still work seeking betterment; colonial wars are fought to
destroy persisting symbolic exchange; Saddam was not playing the Gulf War by the rules of

deterrence. The Arab masses are still able to become inflamed by war or non-war; Iran
and Iraq can still fight a real war, not a simulated non-war. So perhaps only a minority, only the included
layers within the North, are trapped within simulation and the masses. Perhaps reality has not died, but
been displaced to the South. It seems, therefore, premature to suggest that the system
has encompassed all of social life in the code. To be sure, its reach has expanded, but it has also forcibly

At the
limit, as in Somalia, simulated states collapse under their own irrelevance. In other
cases, an irrelevant state hovers over a largely autonomous society. And the struggle Baudrillard
advocated in his early works against subordination as labour-power is not simply theoretical. In fact, there is a
constant war, fought at various degrees of intensity, between the system and its others,
especially in highly marginal parts of the global South: Chiapas, Afghanistan, the Niger
Delta, Somalia, West Papua, rural Colombia, Northeast India, the Andes The system
continues to be drawn into these conflicts, despite its apparent self-deterrence from total
nuclear annihilation.
delinked large areas of the globe. The penetration of simulated reality into everyday life varies in its effectiveness.

Baudrillard is just a fashionable source of cynicism not a political strategy

Rojek, 93 [Chris, Professor of Sociology and Culture at Nottingham Trent University,
Forget Buadrillard?,, pg. 109]
His lacerating nihilism, his readiness to prick any cause, his devotion to experience for experience s sake, are all
recurring tropes of at least one type of modernism. To be sure, modernism is a multi-faceted concept.
Rather than speak of the project of modernism it is perhaps more accurate to speak o projects of modernism. These

projects work around a central dichotomy: reflecting the order of things and exposing
the fundamental disorder of things. In the political realm the keynote projects designed
to reflect the order of things have been (a) providing a theory of liberal democracy which
legitimates the operation of he market; (b) the socialist critiques of capitalism and the
plan for the reconstruction of society; and (c) the feminist transformation of the male
order of things. These are all constructive projects. They either aim to give shape to people's lives or
they seek to replace the easing set of politico-economic conditions with a state of affairs that is judged to be superior on
rational or moral grounds. Baudrillard it might be said, traces the dispersal of these projects He
relishes being the imp of the perverse, the ruthless exponent of the disorder of things His work exposes the posturing and
circularities of constructive arguments. But in doing this Baudrillard is not acting as the harbinger of

a new postmodern state of affairs. Rather he is treading the well worn paths of one type
of modernist sceptism and excessa path which has no other destiny than repletion. His
message of no future does not transcend the political dilemma of modernism, it
exemplifies it.

A2: Baudrillard Reality Exists

Reality is as alive as ever
Hayles 91 [Katherine, Hayles In Response To Jean Baudrillard]
Imagine, now, that you're a sort of post-postmodern radical opponent of the Temple hegemony living in the time of the
destruction of the Temple, as a sort of marginalized literary scholar. Unless you're a priest, you are rooting

for the revolution away from near-idolatrous sacrifice and hierarchy, from the
architecture of transcendence, towards the more portable architextuality of
transcendence. Hey man, there's this new system for getting at the Schechina, the Spirit, out there and it relies upon
your imagination and interpretive skills. It's this whole other architecture and it's TEXTUAL man, you carry it in your
head! Completely portable! Just jack in to the reading, dude, and you're in the hypertextual space of transcendence! But

if you're a high priest who is about to be dispossessed, you construct an angry jeremiad
out of your nostalgia for the props of the old reality and the architecture that's been demolished.
You're going to lose your grips on reality! you warn the populace from atop the ruins.
You won't be able to distinguish the truth from sophistic lies ! You might even adopt
Baudrillard's rhetoric: "The conquest of [verbal] space, following [the demolition of the Holy Architecture] promotes
the derealizing of human space, or the reversion of it into a simulated hyperreality," you might shout. " It is the end of
metaphysics, the end of fantasy, the end of SF. From this point on something must change: the projection, the
extrapolation, the sort of pantographic exhuberance which made up the charm of [The Temple] are now no longer
possible." Of course, we know in retrospect that with our emigration to the text as the locus of imagination and
transcendence, away from the locus of the public space and legislated architecture, just the opposite happened. We

found a whole new order of imagination and a new, more robust opportunity for
transcendence in language itself. And now I can't wait to see what happens to SF and all our other media when
they move into the space they helped create for themselves in hyperreality, that space beyond words. Cyberspace,
hyperreality, virtual space, threatens to unseat the dominion of the Logomatrix of mere words and grammars, projecting it
into the frothing uncertainties and romance of direct cognitive access and neurology . Of course the high priests

of words like Baudrillard are upset at the imminent demolition of their temple of the
text. If you take a moment to reflect on the visions projected by Gibson (for instance), you will
see that the possibilities for transcendence are definitely not sterilized; they are multiplied,
and re-fertilized. Gibson tells us as much, I think, in Neuromancer (1984) when Case asks
Wintermute/Neuromancer after the latter is apotheosized by Case's intervention: "So what are you now, God ?" Stop
rattling the bars of your cage, Jean. You're weeping in the ruins.

A2: Baudrillard Warming

Baudrillards theorization precludes activism and causes EXTINCTION!!!!
ITS BASICALLY DDEV
Robinson 13 (Andrew, political theorist and activist based in the UK, Jean
Baudrillard and Activism: A critique, Ceasefire Magazine, February 7, 2013,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-14/)
There are serious limits to Baudrillards work, in terms of his hostility to minority struggles. Many of his
formulations are inadvertently sexist and racist. There are also times when Baudrillard comes across as ableist in his critiques of the
therapeutic. There are also times when Baudrillard

attacks activism in strong terms: Hippies reproduce

capitalist ideology; Feminists displaying images of porn are actually being seductive,
against their will; The left is keeping capitalism alive with its moral critiques and its
quests for meaning. There are times when it is hard to tell if Baudrillard is a reactionary,
attacking the concerns of progressives, or an ultra-left, criticising every rebellion as
insufficiently extreme. If one looks past such problems, however, there are important implications in Baudrillards work for

emancipatory practice. Baudrillards work was clearly an influence on Negris early work. Ideas such as the reduction of the system to
command, the spread of diffuse apparatuses of power and the panic of the system in the face of its own arbitrariness reappear in texts such
as Time for Revolution. The idea of the code or system functioning as a self-propelled irrational machine is also reminiscent of primitivists
such as Fredy Perlman. Baudrillard seems to see the regime of the code as the high-point of civilisation, in an almost anarcho-primitivist
sense. Where he differs from such analyses is that he sees the core of civilisation not in technology or the domestication of desire or the
political principle of state power, but in the denial and suppression of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is partly thinking through the issue
of diffuse power. In capitalist and statist social regimes, power is immensely concentrated. He also gives a particular spin to the distinction
between expressive and instrumental. We can link the idea of the code to preventionism and its impact on protest. As discussed above,
Baudrillards idea of initiatory groups could also be applied to activist neo-sects. Baudrillard also offers answers to some of the big
questions of today regarding psychological barriers to revolt. The loss of reality might explain why hope for liberation seems so hard to
come by, and why revolutionary movements now seem to lack a clear vision of transformation. The Immediatist Potlatch would be an
example of gift-exchange as political action. Occupation of the remainders and waste-grounds of cities has been a constant aspect of
dissident practice, from Traveller communities such as Dale Farm and shanty-towns in the global South, to reclaimed factories used as
squats, to projects such as South Central Farm. Reversibility could also be thought of in terms of vendettas and cost-imposition. These
return to the system the power it exercises, reversing it. Another useful way to extend Baudrillards work is to cross-read it with Open
Marxist views of capitalism as a process which must constantly be reproduced to exist. Simulation is not a finished process. It has to be
constantly repeated in order to be kept active. The process of deterrence (or counterinsurgency) is therefore an ongoing process. Baudrillard
is often misread as celebrating the end of reference and the triumph of self-referential signs. It is easy to see how this misunderstanding
came about, since he advocates outbidding the system in its own disintegration. He doesnt think its possible or desirable to go back to
production or fixed meanings. But the central point of his work is still anti-capitalist. He sees the system as unable to provide anything
referential or emotionally meaningful. He sees it as a kind of totalitarian engine of permanent mobilisation for the empty goal of its own
reproduction. Even in his fatalistic later works, he remains fiercely opposed to the code and the system.

Baudrillards critique

of Marx

gives the
impression of a disillusioned Situationist seeking to find an alternative to revolution in a
world where none is apparent. As a result, he finds ways to read conformist mass
practices as unconscious resistances, irrational systemic functioning and implosion, and
so on. Baudrillard is also too prone to conflate system collapse with liberation. There are
is interesting, and I think largely valid. What he puts in place of Marxs theory is, however, contentious. His recent work

scenarios of implosion which

would lead to
not

liberation.

One might, for instance, think of climate change due to overconsumption as a scenario of
system-collapse. This would bring about the end of the code, but also possibly

the end of humanity.

In some ways,

the idea of implosion echoes Sing Chews theory of world-system collapse. Based on previous episodes of
collapse, Chew argues that the world-system will collapse when it reaches its ecological limits. It wont explode; it will
collapse inwards and break down as the processes which sustain it are reversed. Each civilisation is followed by a dark age. Populations
move outwards from cities, power is diffused, and local knowledge replaces global knowledge. This

is not quite what Baudrillard has in

mind, but similar enough to be suggested as an effect of continued implosion. Or maybe implosion should be compared
to the extraordinary communities of disaster, to the sudden collapse of the systems management structures after which people take over
their own self-management (as in Argentina), to the fraying round the edges of a system which can no longer secure the code at its more
remote limits (as in Africa). Perhaps as the code burns itself up, we will be left occupying wastelands where we are finally free, but at great
cost. Hence, an implosive collapse of the system might give rise to a hope for other social forms. It might, after all, be liberation in disguise.
What of the crucial concept of symbolic exchange? Baudrillards discussion of symbolic exchange oscillates between three poles. Firstly, it
refers to the experience of living in an embedded society, with rituals, exchanges and local knowledges. Secondly, it refers to the crisiseffects of the decomposition of the code, which create symbolic exchange as their effect. Thirdly, it refers to a kind of experience beyond the
regime of simulation, through arbitrary connections. The

political effects of the process Baudrillard

advocates is thus rather ambiguous. Does the rise of symbolic exchange herald a return to embedded forms of social
relations, to some kind of modern band or tribe which reproduces aspects of embedded forms, or something else entirely?

A2: Baudrillard Totalizing

Baudrillard is too totalizing and therefore unable to account for American
or Southern capitalism- means hes too apathetic
Robinson 13 (Andrew, political theorist and activist based in the UK, Jean Baudrillard
and Activism: A critique, Ceasefire Magazine, February 7, 2013,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-14/)
One limit to Baudrillards theory is his tendency to over-totalise. Baudrillard is talking
about tendential processes, but he often talks as if they are totally effective. There are
still, for instance, a lot of uncharted spaces, a lot of unexplained events, a lot of things the
system cant handle. While Baudrillard is describing dominant tendencies in the present,
these tendencies coexist with older forms of capitalism, in a situation of uneven
development. The persistence of the systems violence is a problem for Baudrillards
perspective: the smooth regime of neutralisation and inclusive regulation has not ended
older modalities of brutality. At times, Baudrillard exaggerates greatly the extent to which
the old authoritarian version of capitalism has been replaced by subtle regimes of
control. He exaggerates the extent to which contemporary capitalism is tolerant,
permissive and maternal. This may be because his works were mostly written in France in
the 1970s-80s, when the dominant ethos was still largely social-democratic. What
Baudrillard recognises as the retrograde version of capitalism associated with the rightwing was to return with a vengeance, especially after 911. Another problem is a lack of a
Southern dimension. Like many Northern authors, Baudrillards approach mainly
applies to the functioning of capitalism in the North. The penetration of the code is
substantially less in countries where information technology is less widespread. In parts
of Africa, even simple coding exercises such as counting votes or recording censuses are
extremely difficult. This is for the very reasons of respondent reflexivity which Baudrillard highlights. People will under-record
themselves to stay invisible, or over-record themselves to obtain benefits. And without massive resources to put into its bureaucracies, the
system is unable to find enough people who will act as transmitters for the code. Instead, people use their power to extract what they can

from the system. Explosions still happen regularly in the South. Furthermore, a contracting system forcibly
delinks large portions of the globe. Its power on the margins is lessened as its power at the core is intensified. As the system becomes ever
more contracted and inward-looking, liberated zones may appear around the edges. Without

an element of border
thinking, Baudrillard tends to exaggerate the systems completeness and effectiveness.
Baudrillard assumes that any excess is everywhere absorbed into the code. He ignores
the persistence of borderlands. And when he talks about the South, he admits that the
old regime of production might still exist here: people still work seeking betterment; colonial wars are fought to
destroy persisting symbolic exchange; Saddam was not playing the Gulf War by the rules of deterrence. The Arab masses are still able to
become inflamed by war or non-war; Iran and Iraq can still fight a real war, not a simulated non-war. So perhaps

only a
minority, only the included layers within the North, are trapped within simulation and
the masses. Perhaps reality has not died, but been displaced to the South. It seems,
therefore, premature to suggest that the system has encompassed all of social life in the
code. To be sure, its reach has expanded, but it has also forcibly delinked large areas of
the globe. The penetration of simulated reality into everyday life varies in its
effectiveness. At the limit, as in Somalia, simulated states collapse under their own irrelevance. In other cases, an irrelevant state
hovers over a largely autonomous society. And the struggle Baudrillard advocated in his early works against subordination as labour-power
is not simply theoretical. In fact, there is a constant war, fought at various degrees of intensity, between the system and its others, especially
in highly marginal parts of the global South: Chiapas, Afghanistan, the Niger Delta, Somalia, West Papua, rural Colombia, Northeast India,
the Andes The system continues to be drawn into these conflicts, despite its apparent self-deterrence from total nuclear annihilation.

A2: Compassion Fatigue Link

Our determinism thesis applies to war reps. Their thesis is Nixonism.
Albanese 8 (Jeffrey, practicing attorney in New York State, BA from the University of
Rhode Island, JD from University of Maine School of Law, "Opening the Aperture:
Examining Images of War in the Press," 2008, Senior Honors Projects, Paper 110,
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1114&context=srhonorsprog)
Did visual images of war really contribute so much to Americas failure i n Vietnam? Does television really have a
pacifist[ic] bias (Hallin, 1994: 45)? Does tel evision coverage of war inherently demoraliz[e] the home front as
Richard Nixon and countless other policymakers assert (Nixon, 1978 as quoted in Hallin, 1986: 3)? The
assumptions that form the foundation of what Perlmutter terms visual determinism are not without their cr iticisms. I will link, from
Perlmutters list, the fourth and fifth assumptions (that the meaning of an image and the emotional responses it elicits are unambiguous)
with Hoskins first (the s ingularity of the audience). Visual determinism seems less convincing when these assumptions are considered
in the context of framing. According to Robert Entman, to frame is to select some aspects of a perceive d reality and make them more
salient in a communicating text in such a way as to promote a parti cular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation,

the meaning of
the information contained in pictures is not fixed or unambiguous. As Perlmutter not es, visual
images are chronologically and spatially limited anecdotes about speci fic incidents
(Perlmutter 1998: 17) and facts or quotes chosen for commentary... are frames meant to affect [t
heir] meaning (Perlmutter 1998: 39). Pictures need to be contextualized by the press or ot her
political elites in order to have meaning. Similarly, identical pictures can serve c
ontradictory purposes (Perlmutter 1998: 23). Consider AP photographer Eddie Adams iconic photograph (see fig. 1) of
and/or treatment recom mendation (Entman, 1993 as quoted in Perlmutter 1998: 7). Despite their high-definition,

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, leader of South Vietnams police and intelligence units, sum marily executing an NLF prisoner on the streets of
Saigon during the Tet Offensive. To some , the villain in the photograph is the NLF soldieran agent of the enemy who killed Americans. To
other s, the villain is General Loan, a man the U.S. supported and, it seemed, may have committe d a war crime. In a 1988 issue of the comic
book The Nam , the photograph is re-created and it is the photojournalist himself who is the villain for putting the scene on the [f]ront
page of eve ry newspaper in the states. As Franklin notes, [t]he logic of this comic-book mil itarism is nescapable: photographers must be
allowed to image for the public only what the mili tary deems suitable (Franklin 1994: 40). This relates to Hoskins critique of the concept
of a mass audience (Hoskins 2005: 15). Just

as different frames can construct different meanings for

identical pi ctures, the different experiences of audiences may result in identically
framed pictures having different meanings. As Hallin notes, [o]ne of the traditional findings of research on the

effects of mas s communication, for instance, is that because of selective perception, the media will often te nd merely to reinforce peoples
existing attitudes (Hallin 1986: 107). A photographic image

does not have a meani ng, but rather meanings.

There is not a mass audience, but rather audiences. The exis tence of a diversity of
meanings and audiences results in a diversity of emotional impa cts and responses an
image has the potential to provoke. III. Media coverage of war does not occur in a
vacuum. It must be situated historica lly when analyzing its impact on public opinion
and governmental policy. However, as Hallin has noted, this has not deterred many people from believing that there was a
causal relat ionship between Vietnams status as the first televised war and Vietnam being (in 1986, at l east) the countrys most divisive
and least successful war (1986: 105). As noted above, the conventional wisdom among policymakers and members of the military has been
that it was televi sion coverage of the Vietnam War that was the principal cause of what they see as a national fai lure of will, a failure
which led to military defeat (Hallin 1986: 105).

War reps create ethical responses in the wake of violence.

Albanese 8 (Jeffrey, practicing attorney in New York State, BA from the University of
Rhode Island, JD from University of Maine School of Law, "Opening the Aperture:
Examining Images of War in the Press," 2008, Senior Honors Projects, Paper 110,
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1114&context=srhonorsprog)
Images of dead or wounded soldiers or civilians provide important evidentiary
information about the human costs of war. They also may provide information that is
requi red for ethical behavior. British archaeologist Timothy Taylor has establi shed the concept of visceral insulation, an
inevitable consequence of social stratification and s pecialization: This phrase describes the way in which the necessary

specialization of the moder n world screens or insulates people from visceral

things...Visceral insulati on is a recoil from corporeality, as if we feel that, by coming too
close to what is bodily, our inevit able mortality will somehow make itself too painfully
known (2002: 277). Control over the imagery of war through press restrictions and the
dissemination of bom b-scope footage by the Department of Defense are devices that viscerally
insulate the American public, create the appearance of a war from which the human
body is absent, and make it e asier for citizens to accept war. In March of 2008, the Pew
Research Center released the results of polling that found that only 28% of Americans
were aware of how many Americans had been kille d in Iraq (Pew Research Center 2008). Perhaps a
lack of publicly available images depicting dead or wounded soldiers has contributed to
this lack of knowledge about the human costs of war. Perhaps, as Taylor suggests,
knowledge of death as an inevitability is the best s pur to ethical behavior, because
[d]eath signals the end point beyond which our reputations become irrevocable (2002:
287).

A2: Indifference Good

Baudrillard is sexist, racist, ableist, and generally rude to activism
Robinson 13 (Andrew Robinson, political theorist and activist, Ceasefire, Jean
Baudrillard and Activism: A Critique, February 7, 2013,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-14/, LD)
There are serious limits to Baudrillards work, in terms of his hostility to minority
struggles. Many of his formulations are inadvertently sexist and racist. There
are also times when Baudrillard comes across as ableist in his critiques of
the therapeutic. There are also times when Baudrillard attacks activism in
strong terms: Hippies reproduce capitalist ideology; Feminists displaying images of
porn are actually being seductive, against their will; The left is keeping capitalism alive
with its moral critiques and its quests for meaning. There are times when it is hard to tell
if Baudrillard is a reactionary, attacking the concerns of progressives, or an ultra-left,
criticising every rebellion as insufficiently extreme.
Apathy is inherent in Baudrillards work
Dhamee no date (Yousuf, I have no idea who this guy is, A Critique of Baudrillard,
Cyberspace, Hypertext, and Critical Theory, no date,
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/theory/ydbaud.html)

In The Precession of Simulacra Jean Baudrillard attempts to disentangle the phenomenon that the Post-Structuralist movement simultaneously identified, decried

Baudrillard finds a world

where representation through a surplus of images has obscured all former notions of
truth. The annihilation of the real has become a manifestation of Marx's nightmare of the commodity fetish. He portrays the United States, in
particular, as a grim militaristic state controlled by the media's manipulation of images.
Baudrillard finds himself disempowered by the endlessly proliferating images which
confound the real. His position becomes that of the male hysteric , due in part to the fact
that intellect and reason cannot make sense of the post-modern "world of hallucinations"
where image, reality, and surface representation blur into each other. Baudrillard in a
sense writes himself out of his own text. In a world without truth the theorist/the
semiotician/the intellectual (indeed the university itself) becomes irrelevant, if not
totally impotent. The idea of the loss of meaning is inherent in the concept of the simulacrum . Here the idea of an accurate copy becomes to a
and helped popularize: the disappearance of the real. In examining the cultural climate of the West following 1970

certain extent pass. Baudrillard states that we are removed from the binary which sets up copy and original; there are only copies of copies. In fact he takes the
notion farther: the simulacra exists as a copy which has no original. According to Baudrillard the "imitation" can, in fact, precede the original. This results in a
world without depth, a place where reality is only an endless interplay of surfaces. Simulations are produced in order to hide the fact that there is no original, no

Baudrillard's intent is not to expose the falseness of the simulated real, but to lament the passing of the actual
real. He seems to find the depthless world of images oppressive. He writes of the "murderous power of
images," "the mirror of madness, and "the blackmail of the truth." His emotionally charged prose reflects a hysteria
that derives from powerlessness. The loss of reference points, which results from the death of originality, contributes to the confusion
real.

that marks the modern world. As Baudrillard points out, the charm of a simulation lies in being able to distinguish copy from original. "Because it is difference that
constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real." The loss of distinction between the two leads

Baudrillard, who holds a romanticized view of the real, seems nostalgic for a
time when meaning existed. "By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is
inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials." This statement appears problematic because he never can
quite prove that meaning has ever existed and therefore appears to rewrite history in
order to make others believe in depth. For example, in his discussion of the Iconoclasts he assumes that the smashers of images
to the loss of truth.

were working under his own set of cultural assumptions. "If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there
would have been no reason to destroy them . . . But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all , and that these

Baudrillard, like a flawed Freudian, can be seen

projecting his own beliefs onto the people he studies. By refusing to allow the Iconoclasts their own truth, he falls
victim to the same cultural prejudices he decries in others. At this point Baudrillard resembles the ethnologists he
images were in essence not images, but perfect simulacra . . . "

Baudrillard does not conclusively show

how meaning could be empowering. Part of his problem with the simulacra stems from an intellectual background heavily steeped in
so roundly criticizes. Even if truth's existence is taken for granted (in a bygone era)

Marxism. Marxists place a great deal of importance on the process of production. Simulation can be seen as stripping production of its meaning. When production
becomes unreal its ultimate object, "the product" is stripped of value. This reality would in turn strip Marxism of its relevance, a fundamental problem for many

The
liquidation of truth makes political resistance seem somewhat futille. Baudrillard,
significantly fails to offer a means of fighting the collapse of reason, and in his writings
the theorist is relegated to the role of commentator: Baudrillard is only able to announce
that the apocalypse has begun.
Post-Structuralists, who like Baudrillard have important ties with the Left. What exactly does it mean to be a Post-Structuralist and a Marxist?

A2: Information Oversaturation

Info overload is backwards- debate solves it
Turner 93 (Bryan, Dean of Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia, Baudrillard
for Sociologists, in Forget Baudrillard? 1993, Routledge London and New York, pg.
80-83)
While, as far as one can tell, Baudrillard was not influenced by Bells vision of the role of technology and the media in shaping postindustrialism, he was influenced by Marshall McLuhans analysis (Gane 1991b:48) of the impact of new media on the transformation of
modern culture, especially in The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan 1967). McLuhan was particularly sensitive to the idea that we live in a
processed social world where human beings live in a complete technostructure. This technological environment is carried with us as
extensions of our own bodies, but McLuhan did not adopt a pessimistic view of the age of anxiety, because his technological humanism
(Kroker et al. 1984) and Catholic values committed him to the idea of the immanence of reason and the hope of an escape from the
labyrinth. Indeed, a global technological system could become the basis of a universalistic culture. Although he was fully aware of the
sensory deprivation which he associated with the impact of the mass media, he none the less remained committed to the hope that these
negative effects were not fatal. Baudrillard, who as we have noted was deeply influenced by McLuhans idea that the content of

messages was relatively unimportant in relation to their form, has embraced a very nihilistic position with respect to our
processed environment. Baudrillards pessimistic view of the fissure in the historical development of the modern is based on his view of the
masses. Baudrillards analysis of the masses is a product of the Situationist responses to the May events of 1968, when it became
increasingly obvious that the critical social movements of modern society would not be dominated by Marxist theory or directed by a
vanguard of the working class. The crisis of May 1968 had not been predicted by Marxism or by mainstream sociology, but they did validate
the claims of Situationists like Guy Debord in the journal Internationale Situationiste . However, if the crisis had been unanticipated by
conventional political analysis, then the sudden collapse of the students and workers movements of 1968 found no easy explanation in the
framework of mainstream social sciences. Baudrillards

concept of the inexplicable nature of the mass

depend a great deal on the unusual circumstances surrounding the May events. By 1973 with

the publication of The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975), Baudrillard was already moving away from an orthodox Marxist view of
production, arguing that Marxism, far from being an external critique of capitalism, was merely a reflection or mirror of the principal
economistic values of capitalism. Instead of engaging in the production of meaning, a subversive, oppositional movement would have to
challenge the system from the point of view of meaninglessness. Subversion would have to rob the social system of significance. In taking
this stand, Baudrillard followed the Situationist claim that whatever can be represented can be controlled (Plant 1992:137). The mass events
of 1968 offered a promise of the nonrepresentational moment, the pure event of authenticity, which could not be explained, and therefore
could not be manipulated. Baudrillard, in dismissing Marxist theory as a means of representing events, sought to replace the idea of a mode
of production with a mode of disappearance. In taking this attitude towards modern social movements, Baudrillards

argument also rests on the various meanings of the word mass. Baudrillard is thus able
to make allusions to the idea of physical substance, matter, the majority and the
electrical meaning of earth. The translators note to In the Shadow of the Silent Majority points out that faire masse can
mean to form a majority and to form an earth. Baudrillard argues by allusion that the mass absorbs the
electrical charges of social and political movements; the mass thus neutralizes the
electrical charge of society. This use of allusion, parody and irony is typical of
Baudrillards mode of analysis, which is a type of sociological poetics, a style which is likely to make sociologists feel
uncomfortable (Gane 199la:193). There is here also a continuity with the style of Dada and the Situationists. The poetic and
striking character of Baudrillards style has no counterpart in professional social science,
least of all in the British context. Baudrillards sociological fictions (1990a:15) are striking and challenging, but they
are not ultimately convincing. Arguments which depend on allusion, allegory and similar
rhetorical devices are decorative but they are not necessarily powerful. The notion of mass society already has a clearly
worked out sociological critique. The idea of mass society might have been relevant in describing the new markets which were created in
the post-war period with the advent of innovative technologies, which had the immediate effect of lowering prices and making commodities
available to a mass audience. However, the

trend of sociological analysis in the last two decades has

been to assert that mass audiences have been broken down into more selectively
constructed niches for more individualized products. It is controversial to argue that industrialization

necessarily produces a mass society, characterized by a common culture, uniform sentiments or an integrated outlook. The idea of a mass
society was often associated with the notion that the decline of individualism would produce a directionless mass as the modern equivalent
of the eighteenth- century mob. Critical theorists like Adorno and Marcuse associated the massification of society with authoritarianism and
a potential for fascism. Of course, Baudrillards version of mass society is based on a particular view of the mass media creating a
hyperreality in which the real has been absorbed by the hyperreal; meaning has imploded on itself. Although Baudrillards analysis of
hyperreality is post- critical (Chen 1987), he does adopt in practice a critical position towards American civilization, which is the extreme
example of massification. Rather like critical theorists, Baudrillard believes that the (bourgeois) individual has been sucked into the
negative electrical mass of the media age. However, sociological

research on mass audiences shows that

there is no ground for believing that media messages are received, consumed or used in
any standardized manner, and the majority of social scientists working on culture have attempted to argue that cultural
objects in the age of the mass media are appropriated, transformed and consumed in

diverse forms and according to various practices (de Certeau 1984). In fact, sociologists, largely inspired by the
Situationists, have argued that everyday life is resistant to massification and that the concrete reality of
everyday life-situations is the principal arena within which opposition to massification
can be expected. Everyday life was regarded by both Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre (1991) as the foundation
of authenticity. Baudrillard, by arguing that criticism belongs to the period of modernism
and not to the age of hyperreality, has ruled out opposition to the system, at least at the
level of public debate and formal politics.

A2: Hyperreality
Baudrillards hyperreality theory is wrong. Hyperreality cant exist
autonoumous of its underlying materiality. Disappearance occurs as
an effect of the material world. Baudrillard frames hyperreality as
detached from reality, which casually ignores that the material world
is still effective.
Stolze 16 (Ted Stolze, Professor of Philosophy at Cerritos College, International Journal
of Zizek Studies, Contradictions of Hyperreality: Baudrillard, Zizek, and Virtual
Dialectics, Volume 10, No. 1,
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/92/373, LD)

3. A iekian Response to Baudrillard What should one make of Baudrillards account of the self-emptying of the real, its mundane knosis?

It would be inadequate to say it is mistaken, just an exaggeration of a

contemporary tendency toward dematerialization. What is required is an
immanent critique by which to restore the materialist lines of demarcation that might
push Baudrillards thought beyond itself without simply rejecting it in toto. In effect,
what is needed is not only an inversion of Leibniz but also a displacement.
93 Here then arises, as iek has suggested, a new opportunity for materialism to assert
itself at the ground zero of the real and subjectivity that Baudrillard has identified . We must
begin anew with less than nothing and nonetheless insist, as Galileo allegedly said of the earth, that eppur si muove (and yet it
moves).13 Indeed,

there remain contradictions of hyperreality itself that constitute a domain

of virtual dialectics. Following the lead of Engels and Lenin, iek has compellingly
argued that philosophers periodically have to rethink the meaning of
materialism in light of new scientific, cultural, and political events such
breakthroughs as relativity theory, quantum physics, Freudian psychoanalysis, and
the failures of twentieth-century communism.14 Such is certainly the case with the emergence of the new

electronic technologies that Baudrillard has rightly identified as fostering a hegemonic process that tendentially gives rise to hyperreality.
Baudrillard seeks to reverse Leibnizs question, Why is there something rather than nothing? by asking Why is there nothing rather than
something? Let us even grant Baudrillards point about the contemporary tendency to dematerialization, disappearance, indeed to

as G.W.F. Hegel contends at the beginning of his Science of Logic, nothing is

highly unstable.15 It operates, we could say, as a dynamic void: Nothing, pure
nothingness; it is simple equality with itself, complete emptiness, complete absence of
determination and content; lack of all distinction within. In so far as mention can be
made here of intuiting and thinking, it makes a difference whether something or nothing
is being intuited or thought. To intuit or to think nothing has therefore a
meaning; the two are distinguished and so nothing is (concretely exists) in
our intuiting or thinking; or rather it is the empty intuiting and thinking
itself, like pure being . Nothing is therefore the same determination or
rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as what pure
being is (Hegel 2010: 59). By similar reasoning, Hegel also shows that Being, the
indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing. As
a result, not only is there an irreducible void in the midst of Being, but also
something incessantly arises in the midst of Nothingness . So the inherent
instability of both pure Being and pure Nothingness pass over to becoming and the
dialectic is off and running. Another plausible way to respond to Baudrillard, though, would be to note a key contrast
between Leibniz and his contemporary Baruch de Spinoza. As we have already seen, according to Leibniz, Gods primal
act in creating the world serves only to initiate a drawn-out process of actualizing what
was virtually contained in his mind from the beginning; this truly is an origination of something from
nothing. But,

nothing. Spinoza, however, explains the relationship between God and the world in a way that anticipates Hegel or rather can be
retrospectively appreciated from a Hegelian vantage point.

Spinoza argues that the world was not created

once long ago 94 but instead always already commences and not from nothing but only
through the internal division within God (or substance) between naturing nature
(natura naturans) and natured nature (natura naturata).16 In Leibnizs
metaphysics virtual possibilities simply await their actualization; in
Spinozas metaphysics, though, we discover something less than
substance that drives and incessantly reopens the ontological process by
which both singular things (actualities) and accompanying new realpossibilities (virtualities) arise . The upshot is that both Leibnizs and
Baudrillards positions are one sided and effectively amount to holding the
same position . As Althusser famously put it regarding Marxs own relationship to
Hegel, it is clear that to turn an object right round changes neither its nature
nor its content by virtue merely of a rotation! A man on his head is the same man
when he is finally walking on his feet. And a philosophy inverted in this way
cannot be regarded as anything more than the philosophy reversed except
in theoretical metaphor: in fact, its structure, its problems and the meaning
of these problems is still haunted by the same problematic (Althusser 2005:
73). What is required, then, is a conceptual shift or displacement with respect to both
Leibnizs and Baudrillards questions and a transformation of the theoretical problematic
itself. The truth is to be sought in the dynamic interaction between
something and nothing , in what Bloch notably called the category of the Front of the world-process the so little
thought-out, foremost segment of Being of animated, utopian open matter (Bloch 1986, Vol. 1: 200). For Bloch the Front not only helps to
ground militant optimism but also serves as the leading edge of material movement or forward matter (Bloch 1986, Vol. 1: 209). In this

Bloch distinguishes his conception of the merely cognitively or objectively Possible

and the RealPossible: Objectively possible is everything whose entry, on the basis of a
mere partial-cognition of its existing conditions, is scientifically to be expected, or at
least cannot be discounted. Whereas really possible is everything whose conditions in the
sphere of the object itself are not yet fully assembled; whether because they are still
maturing, or above all because new conditions though mediated with the existing ones
arise for the entry of a new Real (Bloch 1986, Vol. 1: 196). Finally, Bloch stresses how
real possibility compels us to conceive of matter as processual continually opening what
has not-yet been realized in the world: Real possibility thus does not reside in any readymade ontology of the being of ThatWhich-Is up to now, but in the ontology, which must
constantly be grounded anew, of the being of That-Which-Is-Not-Yet, which discovers
future even in the past and in the whole of nature. Its new space thus emphasizes itself in
the old space in the most momentous manner: real possibility is the categorical InFront-of-Itself of material movement considered as a process; it is the
specific regional character of reality itself, on the Front 95 of its occurrence .
How else could we explain the future-laden properties of matter? there is no true
realism without the true dimension of this openness (Bloch 1986, Vol. 1: 237).
iek has noted that Blochs position is not simply non-teleological but acknowledges the
ontological incompleteness of reality itself.17 As a result, Blochs conception of a
radically open universe is at odds with a widespread perspective that we
live in or at least will do so in the near future a closed simulated
universe (iek 2013: xviii). The proper way to frame the contemporary ontological
question, then, is not in terms of hyperreality or virtual reality but in terms of the
underlying reality of the virtual. As iek writes in his book on Deleuze, Virtual
context,

Reality in itself is a rather miserable idea: that of imitating reality, of

reproducing its experience in an artificial medium. The reality of the Virtual, on
the other hand, stands for the reality of the Virtual as such, for its real effects and
consequences (iek 2004: 3). It is, of course, true that Baudrillard regards
hyperreality not as a mirror of reality but as a detachment from reality and, as we
have already seen, it generates a disappearance of the real (Baudrillard 2011: 33).
However, the problem with this way of framing the issue is that this very
disappearance occurs as an effect of the material world itself . Baudrillard himself
proposes that this effect historically arose from modern scientific inquiry into the structure of the external world as well as its technological
transformation; indeed, for him the real world begins, paradoxically, to disappear at the very time as it begins to exist (Baudrillard 2011:
11). Consequently ,

it would more accurate to say that the material world has not
disappeared but has remained causally effective, however much it has
become increasingly mediated through technological, cultural, and
conceptual means. Moreover, the disappearance-effect associated with
hyperreality is conditioned, and determined in the last instance, by
material causal factors. Hyperreality remains only relatively autonomous
from its underlying and causally efficacious material reality. 4. Conclusion Let me

conclude with an example. Consider a screen whether a computer, cell phone, or tablet. Recent neuro-linguistic research has indicated

screen-based reading and writing significantly reduce memory retention and have
proven to be less effective means of study than simply reading and writing on paper.18
One is tempted, in fact, to say that an electronic screen embodies and yields less
virtuality than does a newspaper, magazine, or book. As a result, the contemporary
situation has turned out not to be the proliferation of hyperreality via new
96 technologies; rather, it has become the impoverishment of human
imaginative, empathic, and cognitive capacities. Moreover, a screen is composed
of material and is materially produced, its illumination and functionality is materially
generated, its energy source is materially produced and conveyed; and it is eventually
discarded as material electronic waste or perhaps it is materially recycled. There
exists, in other words, an entire material economic process extraction,
production, distribution, consumption, and disposal19 underlying
whatever effect is associated with the screen to provide information or
entertainment . It is true that this effect cannot wholly be subsumed into an
overdetermination of material causes; but neither can it be entirely
detached from them, not least of which because of the actually existing scarcity of the
rare earth metals whose continued extraction and recycling are essential for the
production of such technology.20 In sum, Baudrillard is doubtless correct to point out
that screens and their images give rise to certain disappearance-effects. But there is a
more plausible response to the pointed question expressed in the title of one of his last
books: Why has the world not disappeared? Answer: Because the world has
always already existed prior to, and forever remains independent of, the
very posing of the question.
that

Baudrillards understanding of hyperreality is reductive and ignores

individuals agency
Vitucci 4 [Francisco, Critic Of Baudrillard]

Images push their way into the fabric of our social lives. They enter into how we look and what we earn, and they are
still with us when we worry about bills, housing and bringing up children. They compete for attention through
shock tactics, reassurance, sex and mystery, and by inviting viewers to participate in
series of visual puzzles. Billboard advertising showing an image without a code impose themselves, infuriatingly,
on the most recalcitrant passer-by (McRobbie, 1994, 18). Accordingly, audiences or viewers, lookers or users
are no more simple-minded multitudes, but rather active and conscious counterparts. The
more the interconnections between audiences and media representations become intricate, the more the former division
between reality and virtuality seems to fade in a kind of renewed, interactive and collaborative form: Baudrillards
pessimistic thesis is that the media appear to extend themselves generously to their audience in a gesture designed to
demonstrate democratic embrace while in fact merely extending the sphere of their influence and control. A less
pessimistic postmodernist account might instead emphasize not just the flow of images and texts as they circulate through
the new economy of the sign but also the flow of active agents, whose role in the production and

distribution of the image is not as robotic as Baudrillard would suggest. Such an account would
also require much more analysis of the occupational culture and experience of media workers employed in this
postmodern de-regulated sector, as well as of their audiences. () The problems with the old model

of the
moral panic are as follows. First it assumed a clear distinction between the world of the
media and the world of social reality. But in one simple sense the media are as much a part of
social reality as any other component can be. We do not exist in social unreality while we
watch television or read the newspaper, nor are we transported back to reality when we turn
the TV off to wash the dishes or discard the paper and go to bed. Indeed perhaps there is no pure social reality outside
the world of representation. Reality is relayed to us through the world of language,
communication and imagery. Social meanings are inevitably representations and
selections (idem, 1994, 216-217). This approach seems to be backed up also by other thinkers theories such as those of
Marshall MacLuhan who arguing that the the medium is the message (1967) agrees on the ability of mass
broadcasting to create visual symbols and mass action as a liberating force in human affairs. According to this

technological utopianism associated with postmodernism, digital communication would

make the fragmentation of modern society a positive feature, since individuals can seek
out those artistic, cultural and community experiences which they regard as being
correct for themselves. In other words, the individual becomes able to form its identity and to structure the truth
from fragments while gaining, at the same time, the independence to organize his own environment. On this escort,

McRobbie (1994) seems to recall somehow the concepts explained by MacLuhan when
she states that real life means talking about what was on TV last night . Also other authors like
Lyotard (1979), debating about the possibly positive outcomes of mass media and in particular about computerization of
society, states that bringing people knowledge in the form of information, it will produce more liberty for the entire social
system.