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Culture & Society

Carnival and Cannibal, or, The Play of Global Antagonism by Jean

Baudrillard. London/New York: Seagull Books (distributed by University of
Chicago Press), 2010
Ross Abbinnett
Theory Culture Society 2011 28: 145
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411399300

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Book Reviews

Carnival and Cannibal, or, The Play of Global Antagonism

Jean Baudrillard
London/New York: Seagull Books (distributed by University of Chicago
Press), 2010
Reviewed by Ross Abbinnett
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411399300

Have you ever received a backhanded compliment? You know the kind of thing: I
didnt think Asian guys could play football, but youre pretty good! You play
the blues pretty good for a white bloke! Youre really sexy for a Muslim woman!
What these well-intentioned put-downs reveal is a technique of subordination
that is all the more effective because of the apparent goodwill of those who
bestow the gift of their approval. For what is so annihilating about this kind of
compliment is the recognition of a valiant effort that was, from the beginning,
doomed to failure. The Muslim woman, the Asian guy and the white bloke
remain trapped within the confines of their respective modes of being and, as
such, their attempts to be something different are always slightly laughable. It is
precisely this kind of gift economy that is at stake in Jean Baudrillards two late
essays Carnival and Cannibal and Ventriloquous Evil.
No one could accuse Baudrillard of avoiding the big questions of modernity:
the relationship between the human and the technological, the loss of the symbolic
order of the social, and the fate of Enlightenment ideals of democracy. As is well
known, his approach to these issues was inspired by the writings of Durkheim,
Mauss, Bataille, and Levi-Strauss, and, as such, the fundamental concepts of his
thought are best understood as disclosing the loss of the symbolic energies that
the French anthropologists invoked as the originary source of the social. These
energies are given a variety of names (the sacred, taboo, sacrifice, etc.), and it is
they that mark the presence of an unfathomable being within the life of the
social, and which constitute it as a kind of dangerous performance that might at
any time incur divine retribution. For Baudrillard, the life lived within this sym-
bolic order is constituted by its intrinsic meaningfulness: the law is actually pre-
sent both in the performance of everyday life and in the soul of the transgressor
who immediately puts him/herself at risk of death. This condition is clearly very
different from the one in which we in the West currently find ourselves.
Something has happened that seems to have definitively separated our way of
living from the economy of the sacred that constituted the symbolic order of
primitive societies. We no longer dwell within the power of the unfathomable;
our sense of belonging and responsibility is stripped of meaning because

j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 28(4): 145^156

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146 Theory, Culture & Society 28(4)

everything in the world has been made subject to the universal law of
Enlightenment: that all things should be transparent, explainable, demystified.
And so, from the very beginning, Baudrillards reflections on the constitution of
the West as the place of a non-symbolic order of sociality raise the question of the
relationship between Enlightened and non-Enlightened, primitive and
modern, societies.
In Carnival and Cannibal, Baudrillard describes the relationship between
Western and non-Western societies in the following way. The West has become a
simulation machine: virtual and informatic technologies have become the mise
en sce'ne of the real and the symbolic order of the social is transformed into an
increasingly grotesque parody of itself. Religious conviction, political ideals,
gender identity, sexual morality, etc. ^ all of these have become hyper-realized.
They continue to exist as performative gestures, or signs, whose circulation
through the channels of the media moves them ever closer to the total extinction
of their symbolic meaning. Thus the spirit of seriousness with which the ideals of
the Enlightenment were pursued in the West has turned into a carnival in which
all principles are forced to demonstrate their validity, all identities become subject
to the law of exchange, and literally nothing is sacred. Or, to use Baudrillards
words, the whites carnivalized themselves . . . long before exporting all this to
the whole world (2010: 7). The counterpart of this ceaseless performativity is the
presence of death in the midst of the hyper-affirmation of life. For the media-
techno-scientific systems that disseminate the signs by which we are drawn into
the carnival also eat away at the substance of the social: the core of unfathomable
obligations that give weight to human existence. Now, the thing about carnivals is
that they are supposed to be bacchanalian: the forgetting of death in drunken
revels. And so it has been in the West. The drama of death, subjection and conflict
through which dialectical thought conceived the progress of civilization has been
absorbed into the play of simulacra: social life has become the absolute en joyment
of the instant and the dispersal of recollection into an orgy of signs.
This brings us back to the logic of the backhanded compliment. For
Baudrillard, the success that Western culture has had in establishing itself as heg-
emonic is due to the fact that its collapse into self-parody has, to a large extent,
inoculated it against the recognition of its essential lack of substance. However,
the expansionist logic of Western culture eventually brings it face to face with
the crisis of meaning it has brought about (Baudrillard, 2010: 8). Baudrillard
argues that the postcolonial cultures to which the West has exported its values of
transparency and rational agency can only parody what is already a simulation of
life. And so the subalterns performance of these Enlightenment ideals is charac-
terized by mistakes, exaggerations and faux pas that mark him/her with the
laughable enthusiasm of the proselyte. And yet there is more to this unintentional
parody than can be discharged by an indulgent smile or in the charitable urge to
do more to help. The sheer determination of some non-Western societies to
adhere to impersonal principles of exchange is a danger to the West because it
holds up a mirror to the complete evacuation of meaning from its cultural life.
What Baudrillard conceives as the carnival of market economics, moral individu-
alism and conspicuous consumption that has precipitated the emergence of the
Asian tiger economies has a disturbing fragility about it: the spectacle of cultural
traditions being suddenly morphed into new ideologies of personal fullment
and economic expansion is something that deates the certainty of the

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 Book Reviews 147

Enlightenment paradigm of progress (Baudrillard, 2010: 12). The attitude of

Western nations to those who have been most successful in aping their model of
remorseless accumulation therefore is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand they
compliment them on their eorts to become Western in the sense of embracing
the impersonal principles of the market, and on the other they castigate them for
their unwillingness to pursue democratic principles that they themselves have
only been able to simulate.
The nature of the hegemonic power that the US is able to exert in the world
is, for Baudrillard, essentially related to the distribution of symbolic resources in
the global economy. Those developing nations who have pledged themselves to
the accumulative model of capitalism (China, India, Japan, etc.) enter into an
unstable relationship of attraction and repulsion with the West, while those who
retain a theocratic structure (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) are the ones that, for
Baudrillard, are destined to refuse the fatal determination to be better mimics of
Enlightenment culture. It is this refusal to participate in the cycle of pornographic
disclosure to which Enlightenment has been reduced that has determined the
cosmopolitical function of the US. For given that America has now virtually aban-
doned a democratic process based on opposition and dialogue, and that elections
are little more than the contestation of idols and personalities, politics in the US
has become a brutal enforcement of power that takes place both at home and
abroad (Baudrillard, 2010: 19). The election of George W. Bush as President and
of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California represents the complete
exchangeability of Hollywood and politics: both have made reputations as
strongmen who are able to cut through the complexities of the political situation
and to enforce their will on those elements who threaten the American way of
life. Indeed, the more stupid and violent the response (the invasion of
Afghanistan after 9/11 for example), the more chance there is that it will succeed
in uniting the masses in support of the action. And so the US becomes the
global defender of distracted consumption, obscenity and indierence: the pun-
isher of those who refuse subscription to the most disenchanted models
(Baudrillard, 2010: 24).
So, to refuse the backhanded compliment is potentially fatal. For to refuse
to be the Muslim man who likes baseball and freedom fries, or the Muslim
woman who discards the hi jab, may well be enough to arouse the suspicion of ter-
rorist sympathies. This is why, for Baudrillard, it is wrong to present the global
antagonism that has emerged between East and West, Islam and Christianity, as
a clash of civilizations in Samuel P. Huntingtons sense (2002). The idea of a
clash entails a symbolic challenge in which each party risks its integrity in a con-
ict whose outcome remains to be determined. The clash between Islam and
Christianity that has been working itself out since 9/11, however, is one whose out-
come was never in doubt. On the one hand, the Western carnival, like all aesthetic
phenomena, is far more seductive when it presents itself as the very model of
the new. And so the channels of global culture function to erode the symbolic
life of non-Christian societies by subjecting them to constant solicitations to get
naked, have sex, look good, be more, etc. On the other hand, however, refusal
to accept the gift of light and happiness that is oered by the West is immediately
to become embroiled in the politics of stupidity: counter-terrorism operations,
economic sanctions, special renditions, etc. For, in the words of George W. Bush,
If youre not part of the solution, youre part of the problem. And yet the twin

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148 Theory, Culture & Society 28(4)

poles of the Western model of globalization, cultural seduction and military inter-
vention are unable to achieve their ultimate end: the pacication of the world
through the homogenization of desire. For insofar as Muslim societies have yet to
succumb completely to the Western potlatch of exchangeability, they sustain a
reactive energy that resists the humiliation of the backhanded compliment
(Baudrillard, 2010: 27). Thus, the reversion to terrorism is a predictable outcome
of a system that seeks to appropriate everything: it is a counter-gift of sacricial
zeal that cannot be returned, and which constantly provokes the West to new
ights of violent stupidity.
Baudrillard concludes Carnival and Cannibal by warning that: Perhaps we
have to resign ourselves to the idea that even reversibility as a weapon of mass
seduction is not an absolute weapon (Baudrillard, 2010: 28). Perhaps Western
indierence to the real will eventually become so acute that life will become little
more than the spectacle of its own destruction, at which point the counter-gift of
the terrorist will no longer have any eect on our system of technological happi-
ness. It is this fatal possibility that is addressed in Ventriloquous Evil.
There is, it seems to me, an implicitly Heideggerian trajectory in
Ventriloquous Evil. Baudrillard begins by reformulating the relationship
between capitalism, simulation and technology in a way that is reminiscent of
Heideggers essay The Question Concerning Technology (1996). He argues that
the object/reality has been vaporized by the digital systems through which it is
staged: nothing is left except the hyper-realized forms of love, sexuality, heroism,
etc. through which the whole of human life has been capitalized (Baudrillard,
2010: 47^8). The evolution of the relationship between the human and the techno-
logical, in other words, is implicated in a catastrophic loss of meaning that, for
Heidegger, could only be addressed by fundamentally re-thinking the existential
implications of modernity. Heidegger maintains that the origin of the technologi-
cal networks in which Being has become enframed is a non-technological art in
which world and culture are brought into unfathomable events of mutual solicita-
tion. This non-aesthetic art, or techne, is what gives form to the life of the Greek
Polis, and yet it is also that which opens the possibility of transforming the
world into a realm of useable matter, the ready to hand. Thus, technological
modernity carries within it a possibility that subverts its own model of universal
functionality. For as the world teeters on the brink of total enframing, the crisis
of meaning reignites the poetic sensibility from which the technological paradigm
originally came. The crisis of technological modernity, in other words, is as
grand and tragic a spectacle as anything in human history ^ and it is this crisis
that precipitates the return of art as a mode of existential reection (Heidegger,
1996: 340^1). Heideggers analysis of the self-perpetuating power of technocratic
control is very close to Baudrillards ^ and yet it is crucially dierent. For insofar
as Baudrillards thought is focused on the media-technological networks that
have sprung up since Heidegger wrote his essay in 1955, the modality of control
he discusses is that of simulation rather than enframing. However, it seems to
me that there is a Heideggerian sense of tragedy in Baudrillards later writings ^
a sense of the world being transformed by ontological shifts rather than political
possibilities.
The concept of ventriloquous evil configures an effect of globalization that,
for Baudrillard, is multiplied by the growth of its powers of technological simula-
tion. This effect is the distribution of unforeseen possibilities of refusal: of
saying no to the hyper-functional modality of global culture, and to the

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 Book Reviews 149

humiliations which accompany its promise of unlimited self-fulfilment.

The Enlightenment, for Baudrillard, brings about a fundamental transformation
in Western societys relationship to the sacred: the world is reduced to a constantly
expanding universe of signs that is without redemption in the reality of God or
Being (Baudrillard, 2010: 71). And so to seek the truth of Enlightenment philoso-
phy in the spectres which haunt the networks of mass communication (as
Derrida has done in his latter writings), or to have faith in the nal revelation of
a God whose traces have been expunged from secular life, is to give in to the old
theological demand that there must always be meaning to be found in human his-
tory (Nietzsche, 1995: 83^167). Baudrillards idea of ventriloquous evil, however,
occupies neither of these positions. It is perhaps closest to the notion of excess
that Georges Bataille develops in Eroticism (2001), in which it is not the law as
such that is constitutive of primitive societies, but the economy of counter-desires
that are immediately attendant upon the establishment of taboo. The law, in
other words, becomes a constitutive force through the eroticization of its necessity;
and so the complete transparency and repeatability of desire that is encoded in
the system of simulation constitutes the reduction of the social to the porno-
graphic aesthetics of the carnival. And yet, for Baudrillard, it is this innite play
of the aesthetic that gives rise to a deep anthropological abreaction: the irrational
no that is inscribed at the origin of the system of representation, and which
returns in utterly unpredictable events of reversion (Baudrillard, 2010: 73).
The critical questions that arise here, of course, concern the nature of such
events: where they come from, who performs them and their impact on the
system of simulation. According to Baudrillard, the universe of the hyperreal
has opened up a new symbolic economy in which shame has less to do with trans-
gression of the law than it does with refusal to pursue the goals of radical perfor-
mativity: be all you can be, do all you can do, want all you can want. And so the
radical denegation to which this system is exposed is that of random dysfunction-
alities and reversions (Baudrillard, 2010: 76). Baudrillard presents this vulnerabil-
ity to the unforeseen as something that comes into being with the system of
simulation, a fatal possibility that has haunted, and continues to haunt, the aes-
thetic register of both literature and lm. Thus, Melvilles Bartleby declines the
imperative of the work ethic at the height of bourgeois individualism, and Gary
Gilmore, the central character of Lawrence Schillers lm The Executioners
Song, refuses the demand to live at all costs that is the nucleus of biopolitical
modernity. All such refusals are irrational from the point of view of the economic
genre: for they contradict the principle of exponential expansion that is entailed
in the techno-performative encoding of human life. And so when immigrants
burn down the schools that were built to complete their integration into divine
Europe, or when Zidane head-butts Materazzi in the World Cup nal, the totalitar-
ianism of the good trembles a little from the shock of such blatant dysfuctional-
ity. For Baudrillard, these events disclose the death that lies at the heart of
power far more eectively than the frontal insurrections of Marxism, human
rights, green politics, etc., which are destined to be reabsorbed into the system
(Baudrillard, 2010: 85).
At the end of Ventriloquous Evil, Baudrillard restates the guiding thesis
of his work: that the impetus to re-present the world that lies at the foundation
of the symbolic order of the social comes down to humanitys anthropological
desire to be the origin of the world. The system of simulation therefore develops
as a counter-gift to the unfathomable reality of the object: the substitution of

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150 Theory, Culture & Society 28(4)

will, agency and reflexive identity for the economy of the sacred (Baudrillard,
2010: 87^8). This anthropological shift is, for Baudrillard, an essentially Western
event: the Enlightenment is the point at which the representative codes that were
already inscribed in Western culture become the condition of the appearance and
verication of reality. Thus, the progress of the West towards its condition of cul-
tural weightlessness is what has given rise to the present extremity of the antago-
nism between East and West, Christianity and Islam. As is well known,
Baudrillard maintained that the attack on the World Trade Center was an unre-
turnable gift from a culture whose values of devotion and obligation to God were
being eroded by the expansion of global culture (Baudrillard, 2003: 18). The
potency of the 9/11 attacks, therefore, lay in their sacricial excess: their complete
refusal of the labile happiness that has spread from the West and their absolute
devotion to the economy of the sacred. So it seems as if the power to induce rever-
sion has been distributed to the East. For insofar as fundamentalist groups are
able to mobilize the power of the symbolic, they pose what amounts to an ontolog-
ical threat to the Western order of simulation. The crucial issue that arises from
this description of the antagonism between East and West is, of course, that of
the symbolic power of Islam, or, more specically, the power that Islamic funda-
mentalism has to deate the Western order of simulation. For it would seem as if
both Ventriloquous Evil and Carnival and Cannibal end up paying the ultimate
backhanded compliment to the East: You were too wise to eat from the tree of
Enlightenment, and now such deep wisdom must return to the sinfulness of the
West.
It is hard to avoid this conclusion if we follow Baudrillards anthropology to
its logical end. And yet those who would simply mark him down as another
white Orientalist who seeks the antidote to Western decadence in the passion of
the East miss something that is deeply troubling in his work. The essence of crit-
ical writing lies in the fact that it is both compelling and profoundly uncomfort-
able ^ that it penetrates into the shifting forms of work, satisfaction and desire
that constitute the fatal trajectory of the present. This is something that
Baudrillards writing shares with that of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno ^
the ability to pull into sharp focus that which is already seducing us in our every-
day lives. Perhaps therefore the best critical writing must always risk the flirtation
with ontology, with configurations of subjectivity, agency and identity that call
into question the primacy of free will in the order of social existence. This is cer-
tainly the case in Horkheimer and Adornos earliest formation of the culture
industry thesis, which struggles with the Heideggerian problem of how to avoid
rendering the masses as nothing more than the reified object of a politics of spec-
tacle and charisma (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 144^9). Baudrillards later
writings have tried to elucidate the global antagonisms that are implicit in this
Western trajectory: the logic of carnival and cannibal that arises from the con-
frontation of two entirely dierent modes of being (the symbolic Orient and tech-
nological Occident). Perhaps this does mean that Baudrillard is complicit with a
certain Orientalism, and that his descriptions of East^West relations do exclude
certain possibilities of cross-cultural transformation. Yet there is so much of his
account of global culture that is conrmed in the economic, political and military
strategies pursued by the Western Alliance; strategies that seem to be touched by
the fatal surrealism of powers that have reached their absolute extremity.
Baudrillards two late essays therefore offer no easy way out of the infinitely
circular logic of global antagonism. For as with all of his late writings, they leave

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 Book Reviews 151

us only with the task of seeking unforeseeable events that might possibly outplay
the logic of reversion that has always been essential to his work, and which might
offer some future for the concept of Enlightenment. And so, as parting gifts,
both Carnival and Cannibal and Ventriloquous Evil are imbued with an even
greater power to exasperate the most serious of modernist thinkers (Marxists,
postcolonialists, Greens and feminists), for now the evil genius of the simulacrum
can never be made to recant.

References
Bataille, G. (2001) Eroticism, trans. M. Dalwood. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Classics.
Baudrillard, J. (2003) The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris
Turner. London: Verso.
Baudrillard, J. (2010) Carnival and Cannibal, or, The Play of Global Antagonism,
trans. Chris Turner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, M. (1996) The Question Concerning Technology, in M. Heidegger,
Basic Writings, edited by D. Krell. London: Routledge.
Horkheimer, M. and T. Adorno (1986) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming. New York: Continuum.
Huntington, S.P. (2002) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the
World Order. New York: The Free Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1995) On the Utility and Liability of History for Life, in Unfashionable
Observations, trans. RichardT. Grey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ross Abbinnett is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Theory at the

University of Birmingham. His books include Marxism after Modernity (2006)
and Culture and Identity (2003). He has just finished work on the manuscript of
The Politics of Happiness. [email: r.abbinnett@bham.ac.uk]

City Life
Adrian Franklin
London: SAGE, 2010
Reviewed by Scott McQuire
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411404442
Adrian Franklins new book belongs to the recent wave of more optimistic
responses to the city, driven in part by changes in policy resulting from critiques
formulated in the 1970s and 1980s, but also from the emergence of new culturally
driven formations of urban life. In this regard, Franklin explicitly sets sail against
what he regards as excessively negative assessments of the city ^ from the charac-
terization of urban spaces dominated by tourism and consumerism as superficial
modes of sociality to more general charges that the city form itself is environmen-
tally unsustainable. Franklin also pitches his book as an antidote to traditional
sociological concern with abstract systems (structures and infrastructures, demo-
graphics and policies), seeking to reorient analysis around the life of cities.

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