Beyond The Spectacle Of Terrorism: Global Uncer...

Fighting terrorist attacks directed against cultural heritage needs to be inclusive in legal terms and beyond. Against this backdrop, this chapter examines the extent to which global cultural heritage governance can support intergovernmental efforts to fight terrorism, thereby improving cultural heritage protection and developing its international legal regime.

New global governance concepts that may complement state efforts to fight terrorism are needed as the quality of acts directly targeting cultural heritage has changed in recent years. Clearly, social and networked media are used to augment the impact of such acts with the aim of causing physical as well as emotional or psychological suffering that extends beyond the immediate public.33

Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the globalsocial praxis split up into reality and image. The social practicewhich the autonomous spectacle confronts is also the real totalitywhich contains the spectacle. But the split within this totalitymutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal.The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the rulingproduction, which at the same time are the ultimate goal of thisproduction.

Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought ofseparate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacleis the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectaculartechnology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placedtheir own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to anearthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque andunbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters withinitself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle isthe technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond;it is separation perfected within the interior of man.

The world at once present and absent which the spectacle makes visibleis the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived. The worldof the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its movement isidentical to the estrangement of men among themselves and in relationto their global product.38.The loss of quality so evident at all levels of spectacularlanguage, from the objects it praises to the behavior it regulates,merely translates the fundamental traits of the real production whichbrushes reality aside: the commodity-form is through and through equalto itself, the category of the quantitative. The quantitative is whatthe commodity-form develops, and it can develop only within thequantitative.

The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make peopleidentify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival thatincreases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival issomething which must always increase, this is because it continues tocontain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, ifthere is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because itis beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation.

The concentrated spectacle belongs essentially to bureaucraticcapitalism, even though it may be imported as a technique of statepower in mixed backward economies or, at certain moments of crisis, inadvanced capitalism. In fact, bureaucratic property itself isconcentrated in such a way that the individual bureaucrat relates tothe ownership of the global economy only through an intermediary, thebureaucratic community, and only as a member of this community.Moreover, the production of commodities, less developed in bureaucraticcapitalism, also takes on a concentrated form: the commodity thebureaucracy holds on to is the totality of social labor, and what itsells back to society is wholesale survival. The dictatorship of thebureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited masses any significantmargin of choice, since the bureaucracy itself has to choose everythingand since any other external choice, whether it concern food or music,is already a choice to destroy the bureaucracy completely. Thisdictatorship must be accompanied by permanent violence. The imposedimage of the good envelops in its spectacle the totality of whatofficially exists, and is usually concentrated in one man, who is theguarantee of totalitarian cohesion. Everyone must magically identifywith this absolute celebrity or disappear. This celebrity is master ofnon-consumption, and the heroic image which gives an acceptable meaningto the absolute exploitation that primitive accumulation accelerated byterror really is. If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus be Mao, itis because he can be nothing else. Wherever the concentrated spectaclerules, so does the police.

The critical concept of spectacle can undoubtedly also be vulgarizedinto a commonplace hollow formula of sociologico-political rhetoric toexplain and abstractly denounce everything, and thus serve as a defenseof the spectacular system. It is obvious that no idea can lead beyondthe existing spectacle, but only beyond the existing ideas about thespectacle. To effectively destroy the society of the spectacle, what isneeded is men putting a practical force into action. The criticaltheory of the spectacle can be true only by uniting with the practicalcurrent of negation in society, and this negation, the resumption ofrevolutionary class struggle, will become conscious of itself bydeveloping the critique of the spectacle which is the theory of itsreal conditions (the practical conditions of present oppression), andinversely by unveiling the secret of what this negation can be. Thistheory does not expect miracles from the working class. It envisagesthe new formulation and the realization of proletarian imperatives as along-range task. To make an artificial distinction between theoreticaland practical struggle since on the basis defined here, the veryformulation and communication of such a theory cannot even be conceivedwithout a rigorous practice it is certain that the obscure anddifficult path of critical theory must also be the lot of the practicalmovement acting on the scale of society.

If the logic of false consciousness cannot know itself truly, thesearch for critical truth about the spectacle must simultaneously be atrue critique. It must struggle in practice among the irreconcilableenemies of the spectacle and admit that it is absent where they areabsent. The abstract desire for immediate effectiveness accepts thelaws of the ruling thought, the exclusive point of view of the present,when it throws itself into reformist compromises or trashypseudo-revolutionary common actions. Thus madness reappears in the veryposture which pretends to fight it. Conversely, the critique which goesbeyond the spectacle must know how to wait.

From Princess Diana to 9/11, Jean Baudrillard has been the prophetof the postmodern media spectacle, the hyperreal event. In the 1970s and80s, our collective fascination with things like car crashes, deadcelebrities, terrorists and hostages was a major theme in Baudrillard'swork on the symbolic and symbolic exchange, and in his post-9/11 \"L'Espritdu Terrorisme,\" he has taken it upon himself to decipher terrorism'ssymbolic message. He does so in the wake of such scathing critiquesas Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism toPostmodernism and Beyond (1989), which attacked Baudrillard'stheory as \"an imaginary construct which tries to seduce the world tobecome as theory wants it to be, to follow the scenario scripted in thetheory\" (178). Did Baudrillard seduce 9/11 into being--is he terrorism'stheoretical guru--or did he merely anticipate and describe in advance the event's profound seductiveness To Kellner and other critics, Baudrillard's theory of postmodernity is apolitical as well as an intellectual failure: Losing critical energy and growing apathetic himself, he ascribes apathyand inertia to the universe. Imploding into entropy, Baudrillardattributes implosion and entropy to the experience of (post) modernity.(180) To be sure, Baudrillard's scripts and scenarios have always been concerned with the implosion of the global capitalist system. But while Baudrillard's tone at the end of \"L'Esprit du Terrorisme\" can certainly be called apathetic--\"there is no solution to this extreme situation--certainly not war\"--he does not suggest that there are no forces in the universe capable of mounting at least a challenge to the system and its sponsors (18). As in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) and Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard again suggests that terrorism is one such force, and that it functions according to the rule of symbolic exchange. Terrorism can be carried out in theoretical/aesthetic terms, the terms Baudrillard would obviously prefer, or in real terms, that is, involving the real deaths of real people, a misfortune Baudrillard warns against.[2] Though he states clearly \"I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons,\" he is characteristically ambivalent in relation to \"real\" terrorism, since the real is always in question, and perhaps also because ambivalence is Baudrillard's own brand of theoretical terrorism (Simulacra 163). One moment of his thought is the utopian dream of radicality and reversal, a revolution of symbolic exchange against the system, and the other moment is one of profound pessimism: \"The system...has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.\"In Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard wrote that systemic nihilism and the mass media are to blame for the postmodern human condition, which he describes as a combination of \"fascination,\" \"melancholy,\" and \"indifference.\" Against the system and its passive nihilism, Baudrillard proffers his own brand of what might be termed active nihilism, a praxis that includes theoretical and aesthetic \"terrorism,\" but not, in the end, the bloody acts of actual violence his theory accounts for. The terrorist acts of 9/11