July 15th: Media and the "Reality" of War

Postmodernism Introduction

This page is more for you to review now. Most of it is highlights from Malpas (you still should read Malpas). There's no one overarching tenet of postmodernism, postmodernity, or the postmodern condition. However, if I had to try to hypercompress the idea of postmodernism, I would say it's based on fragmentation and plurality as opposed to continuity and hierarchy. Think many, lowercase 't' truths as opposed to capital 'T' Truth.

Dymilah's Leading Class Discussion

Let's give our attention to Dymilah while she leads us into a discussion on Baudrillard.

Emulating Celebrities

At some point tonight, we're going to back up and watch a music video or two and talk about social media and emulating celebrities.

Media, War, Culture

Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Indiana UP, 1991/1995)

Jean Baudrillard is a major contemporary philosopher (although he died in 2007). His theories would fall under a postmodernist classification. Although he has capitalist critiques, his later work focused on media and culture more broadly. The book we'll be discussing is an in between work that appears to be a bridge between critiquing capitalist culture and the media produced.

One way to think about Baudrillard's thesis is to consider the idea of virtual reality as opposed to concrete, in-front-of-you reality. Who/what create reality?

Below are some definitions from or for the text:

• simulacrum: the replication (upon replication) of a subject without being able to find the concrete beginning.

• hyperreality: More real than real!?! Or, as White Zombie would say, "More Human than Human." The idea of "hyperreality" is often associated with a viewer (an audience in general) believing the media-generated simulation is real or more real than an actual event, personality, condition, or, ultimately, an experience.

  • Brent on his experience as a helicopter gunner while playing Battlefield Vietnam (Electronic Arts). (Toscano, p. 17, 2011)

• war: "a conflict carried on by force of arms, as between nations or between parties within a nation; warfare, as by land, sea, or air." (dictionary.com)

Below are some notes from the text:

Paul Patton's "Introduction" (the translator)

• p. 2: "Baudrillardian simulacrum, a hyperreal scenario in which events lose their identity and signifiers fade into one another."

• p. 5: "technological dissimulation....the use of media to pass disinformation to the other side is simply another dimension of a consistent strategic embrace of the logic of simulation."

• p. 8: "The logic of deterrence has transformed the nature of war. Deterrence is a matter of the virtual exercise of power, action upon the action of the other by immaterial means. It is a means of waging war, but one in which the aim is precisely non-engagement or the avoidance of direct encounter between the parties involved."

Think about MAD and hegemony. Hegemony in cultural studies, as we've discussed, is the situation where a dominant group's values become the larger society's prevailing values. This isn't just that the middle class and poorer groups adopt the values of the "rich"; it's also the idea that the middle class's values influence what gets produced--including media (re)production. Of course, these values can be manufactured by media.

Therefore, hegemony or hegomonic power uses deterrence (prevents, keeps in check, stifles) without having to use physical force to keep non-dominant groups from disrupting the social order or status quo. Obviously, if I were to claim, "there are two ways of looking at this...", you'd call me out for resorting to a false dichotomy, and you'd be right to. Power, like sexuality, gender, political disposition, etc., exists on a continuum--no absolute physical force, no abosolute social conditioning. We succumb to the powers that be (the hegemons) because we've been conditioned to and because we fear retribution (incarceration, social stigma, disrupting our privileges). Here's the main point--power can be invisible and symbolic. Patton is arguing that US military (super)power is so great that it deters most groups from engaging in war, armed conflict with the US. Instead war is waged by avoiding direct conflict--that can be considered the apex of power.

• p. 12: "There is nothing inherently good about images and signs, and they can just as readily be employed to deceive as to tell the truth."
  {Can we also say there's nothing inherently good (or bad) about technologies?}

• p. 13: "Reports before and during the conflict phase [of the first Gulf War] directly influenced public opinion in support of the war."

• p. 15: "the tone and argument of Baudrillard's essays is entirely directed against the complicity which results from the failure to question the reality and the nature of [the media portrayal of the Gulf War]."

• p. 16: Major postmodern critique--we can't access Truth (notice the capital 'T'), so there is no Truth.

Baudrillard's Essays

• p. 25: "We are already all strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day, even while serving as exchange value."
  in situ--in the situation; for instance, a researcher observing a culture by actually being immersed in that environment as opposed to historical/archival research or remote research.

• p. 28: "We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real."
  {20+years later, we can easly extrapolate that the Internet or Web 2.0 is one of many mirrors.}

• p. 30: "War itself...is highly profitable but uncertain. It can collapse from one day to the next."

• p. 31-32: What's real? The oil slick or the televised bird covered in oil?

• p. 32: "there remians today the widespread will to spectacle, and with it the obstinate desire to preserve its spectre or fiction (this is the fate of religions: they are no longer believed, but the disincarnate practice remains)."

• p. 34: Just as the waste of time nourishes the hell of leisure, so technological wastes nourish the hell of war."

• p. 42: Targetted information and missles.

• p. 49: "The closer we supposedly approach the real or the truth, the further we draw away from them both, since neither one nor the other exists. The closer we approach the real time of the event, the more we fall into the illusion of the virtual."

• p. 50: "It is the same with God: even when we no longer believe, we continue to believe that we believe."
  {This might be hard to swallow, but consider "suspension of disbelief" and how viewers of clothing commercials (or similar bombastic media) might not believe they'll transform into the model by wearing his/her clothes, but they buy the clothes because they continue to believe in the power of consumption. If one doesn't believe in the value (social cachet) of fashion, why would one conform to socially valued fashion?}

• p. 51: Perpetual commentary on the war--so much will be said about strategy and speculation of strategy that being correct doesn't matter. As long as an analyst is talking about the war, it continues to be a media generated event controlled by those who produce this media.
  {But isn't it also desired by viewers...sitting in anticipation of the war, the trial's outcome, or other spectacle?}

• p. 52: "TV plays out fully its role of social control by collective stupefication: turning uselessly upon itself like a dervish, it affixes populations all the better for deceiving them, as with a bad dective novel which we cannot believe could be so pointless."

• p. 58: Are the Hawks and the Doves the only sides of the debate?
  {See false dichotomy}

• p. 66: "We cannot even say that the Americans defeated Saddam: he defaulted on them, he de-escalted and they were not able to escalate sufficiently to destroy him."

• p. 75: "We have neither need nor the taste for real drama or real war. What we require is the aphrodisiac spice of the multiplication of fakes and the hallucination of violence."
  {Is it just me or is he telling us we're a shallow culture and baffoonish?}
  {Read this short article on War Fatigue.}
  {Here's another (re)use of War Fatigue in a campaign ad from Nov. 2012.}

• p. 84: "Electronic war....This is what the Americans seek to do, these missionary people bearing electroshocks which will shepherd everybody towards democracy."
  {He's calling us out for being zombies to the "idea" of democracy, but we aren't actually spreading it; instead, we're engaging "rogue" nations in order to highlight that we are better because we're more free than the totalitarians. Ever heard of a straw man fallacy?} For the record, I'm NOT claiming Baudrillard is engaging in a "straw man" fallacy. Think about his point regarding the "lowest common denominator" in the entire paragraph where this quotation is. Who's punching the "straw man [nations]"?

Next Class--Hybrid Day

There is no scheduled reading for your prompts tomorrow, but I have a reading on logical fallacies. Check out the page for July 16th and your prompts about "reality and psuedo reality" issues on Moodle. For Wednesday (7/17), you have another short book to finish--Mark Fisher's (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? Our very own Brian will lead us on that discussion.