/lit/ - Literature

>>16163228
Exactly the opposite.
What Baudrillard didn't see was how 'hyperreality' is really the law of being in the modern era. It is our reality, the worst that can possibly be said about it in terms of irreality is that it acts as the bourgeois reaction to the nomos - which is essentially one of the modern laws of being (simple life, a peasant aristocracy). His own thought is a historicised reaction to the same events that he claimed others did not see

This becomes clear in his discussions of the Iraq War and 9/11. He is correct in saying that the Gulf War was an atrocity, but there was simply no ground for it to be seen as such. Everyone watched the explosions happen, and rather than the tv being some filter of reality it may be understood as a surveillance device. One stays in permanent contact with news and information precisely because it is the technical law of communication, how we know that things are progressing as they should. Those who watched the events of the Gulf War knew exactly what was happening, but the events were simply in keeping with their interests. The extent of the destruction was also nothing compared with precious wars, and even the day to day progress of the technical state. As Junger said, one could line up all of the ordinance of the First World War, strike instantly on a single target, and the destruction would be far less than what occurs at the level of metaphysical destruction. The same could be said nuclear warfare today, the results of the West are perhaps worse than if a nuclear war had taken place. What is low scale warfare in relation to this? Nothing, one of the paradoxes of our time is the extent to which it is immaterial forces that destroy everything we know, hence the difficulty of finding answers or even seeing what is really happening.

In relation to 9/11, Baudrillard saw what was little more than a representative event, But this is itself a technical way of seeing, a theory of effects which can never escape into meaning or a sense of what really happened. Causality is itself another means of correlation. What really occurred with 9/11 was an end of the modern era, or at least the beginning of the end. After the opposite pole of Russia fell it was necessary for America to become the absolute center of the world, or die trying. And through this law we see with near certainty that they brought down the towers themselves. But in the realm of law it does not really matter if it was a conspiracy, and act of representative treason, or if it really was an act of terrorists. What is significant is that the center of wealth was turned to ruins and that the war of the Western Nomos returned to Europe and the borders of the Middle East. There was no longer the force of democratisation at the center of law, as represented in the borders of Russia and America, instead what Tocqueville identified as the final conflict of modernity ends and the center of law returns to the very center of the world.