Baudrillard on War and World Cup

Penalty
Originally uploaded by Liberoliber.

An awfully juicy nugget from Baudrillard apropos today's non-events:

"Empty war: it brings to mind those games in World Cup football which often have to be decided by penalties (sorry spectacle), because of the impossibility of forcing a decision. As though the players punished themselves by means of 'penalties' for not having been able to play and take the match in full battle. We might as well have begun with the penalties and dispensed with the game and its sterile stand-off. So with the war [Gulf War]: it could have begun at the end and spared us the forced spectacle of this unreal war where nothing is extreme and which, whatever the outcome, will leave behind the smell of undigested programming, and the entire world irritated as though after an unsuccessful copulation."

(from The Gulf War Did Not Take Place)

Or, as Johnny Rotten might say: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"...

Comments

[Kenneth Rufo]

Oh and my Baudrillard/Lacan disconnect comment wasn't directed at you, Scott.

[Nate]

RIPope, I took Angela's point about masculinity differently, I heard it to be not about the masculinity of the game but about the trope in the conversation here - impotence and all that. The game and talk about it aren't wholly discrete but nor are they identical. Assessing success and failure (assessing at the level of theoretical analysis) in terms of frustation and impotence and so on can not do other than find these dynamics in the sport. (I wonder what your theoretical register would make of a film like Bend it like Beckham and of women's professional soccer.)

I also just don't see why you characterize soccer as impotent. I'm having troublg thinking of a non-gendered term here, in part because I'm not sure I get what you're saying but I think mainly because I don't share your take on the sport. I think you mean that soccer doesn't satisfy, makes a promise it doesn't keep? If so, I don't agree. Even if accepting for the sake of argument that some matches don't satisfy as much or to some, that doesn't characterize the sport as a whole (Germany/Portugal was a great match, for instance) but even if one were to take that as a trait of soccer as such one could turn it (as an exercise in cultural studies-ness) into a comment on the resistance of the sport to a certain type of pleasure on demand: it's not a matter of guaranteed satisfaction for payment, automatic accomplishment of the money-for-affect consumer circuit.

I don't find that read particularly convincing either, of course, as I find soccer great (particulary the anticipation and uncertainty, like a good suspense film, as opposed to say basketball where there's little more sure than that another basket will be made soon), but my point here is that what you take as a deficiency in the game can just as easily be read as a superior quality.

Take care,
Nate

[RIPope]

Adam, what are you, Wikipedia personified, or avatarized? "One of the Internet's leading..." What nonsense. Adam, and all you people who think you know Lacan, show it to me. Prove it. Don't just whine about the jargon, which seems all you are capable of doing - over and over and over and over again.

Many of you have no sense of humour. It's too bad.

And simply because Baudrillard never tires of attacking psychoanalysis, that doesn't mean his analyses aren't fused through and through with Lacanian inflections. Almost all of his direct attacks on psychoanalysis concern themselves exclusively with Freud, a rather idiosyncratic gesture for a Parisian coming of age during Lacan's two decades of Seminaires.

[John]

I support Kenneth's comment that "Baudrillard thinks psychoanalysis is as silly and simulacral as Marxism, so we might want to consider reading the starting quote without all the Lac[a]nian overtones," so I thought I'd look at some selections from Baudrillard's Simulations (Semiotext(e), 1983):

…order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, it always prefers this assumption…(B)ut this becomes more and more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation, through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.

I wonder if there is any discourse that, through its attempts to order, doesn’t simply lapse into the “silliness” of the simulacral. It would seem that FIFA’s rule on no replays actually seems to follow from this impossible task of separating the real from its (increasingly instantaneous) reproductions. And yet we are thrown by a simultaneous reliance (via media) on the simulation to somehow, once and for all, prove the “realness” of the real event:

This also means the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, in the minute duplication of the real, preferably on the basis of another reproductive medium - advertising, photo, etc…it becomes the real for the real, fetish of the lost object - no longer object of representation, but ecstasy of denegation and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal...(T)he very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction…(A)t the limit of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal.

As I mentioned before, the representation comes at the expense of the meaning and investment in the event itself. For Baudrillard, a game decided by penalties is a non-game, and a non-game that hinges on a “lost moment” of reality must be even moreso an exercise in impotence and futility. Moreover, the countless numbers who analyze the event, in the hopes of revealing the real truth of the situation, the event, the game itself, simply make their rhetorical bones upon a short-circuit. And, without wishing to inject any further “overtones” or widen any “disconnect,” there is a real connection here, for Baudrillard, to psychoanalysis, as merely one of the “media” that seek to order (conscious and unconscious) reality:

The messages of the unconscious have been short-circuited by the psychoanalysis "medium." This is libidinal hyperrealism. To the famous categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, it is going to be necessary to add the hyperreal, which captures and obstructs the functioning of the three orders.

All of this was, however, already agreed to, above, by Richard and Kenneth (and perhaps, unconsciously, by Adam) in Daniel’s impeccable summation:

“What a load of total shit.”

[RIPope]

Yes, John, that is a great quote from Baudrillard, appearing in a lengthy footnote. But alas, I should hope we've learned a thing or two about footnotes..

[Adam Kotsko]

I'm all for Lacanian jargon! Long may it prosper!

But surely we can all agree: Its mere presence is no guarantee of actual Lacanian thought.

[RIPope]

Yes, I agree - but then show me how it's not.

[nnyhav]

Mo'shit (BHL, WSJ, capitulum virumque)

[Adam Kotsko]

I'm thinking mainly of your use of the capitalized "Realized."

[Kenneth Rufo]

I don't know, Adam. In my more cynical moments, I'm tempted to think Lacanian jargon might just be coterminous with Lacanian thought.

Though seriously, 99 Helens agree: Realized?

And to say that Baudrillard is fused through and through with Lacanian inflections is like saying Heidegger is fused through and through with Cartesian inflections or that Plato is fused through and through with Sophistic inflections.

[RIPope]

Yes, "Realized" - the act, or passage to the act, of traversing or 'experiencing' the Real.

Funny, it's a usage of the term that, to my knowledge, neither Lacan nor (I'm less sure here) Zizek employ. So what's the gist here, that we shouldn't use jargon not already employed by the 'masters'?

Heidegger directly addresses Descartes, and Plato the Sophists. Besides this one little footnote well-brought out by John, and, I should add, a few confused references in Seduction, Baudrillard does not address Lacan like one might - or should - expect him to in his denunciations of psychoanalysis.

[Kenneth Rufo]

My understanding is that JB considered writing an anti-psychoanalysis book after Mirror of Production and before Seduction, but thought that, between Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death, the argument was at that point all too obvious.

And yes, we should use no jargon not authorized or used by the Masters. That's what I was trying to get at. Yup.

[RIPope]

Yes, he was going to. Seduction became - or short-circuited - that text. Which is a way of saying he must of read a lot of Lacan (or attended his seminars), but never really addressed him...

[Kenneth Rufo]

Oh and if your complaint is that JB doesn't "reference" or "cite" Lacan sufficiently, it's because after Symbolic Exchange and Death, he decides the form of academic writing, with all that incestuous citing, is part of the simulacral nature of critical theory and something best avoided; so he decides to try his hand at short essays, with limited (or no) citations, and aphorisms.

One can't trick illusion into returning if they spend all their time obeying the formal rules that govern the discovery and discussion of the operations of the Real, especially now that the Real no longer exists, or rather exists only as a product of all those formal rules that govern discovery.

Puts the patter in pataphyics.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Btw, can you email a copy of your T&E article to those of us who don't currently have project muse access? If we ask nicely?

[Circle Jerk]

How does the impotence and slow pace of football rest against the mirror of academic (re)production?

And what of its affinity with abstruse, jargon-riddled academic speculations on academics blogs as to the True Meaning of a footballer's head-butt, masculine tongues half-in-male-cheeks or not?

Am I effacing the *difference* of "politicized" "cultural theorists" by asking such impertinent questions?

I am a big fan of this blog and the individual blogs of its posters, but what is this if not a circle jerk?

[RIPope]

Cat-calling repetition, again. We have not left the schoolyard. Shall we burn Seminar XX next?

[riocabo]

Zidane in "Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait": "The game, the event, is not necessarily experienced or remembered in real time. I remember playing in another place, at another time, when something amazing happened. Someone passed the ball to me, and before even touching it, I knew what was going to happen. I knew I was going to score. It was the first and last time it ever happenend."

So it is not all that ludicrous to speak of the pre-posterous nature of the event that is remembered as an after-effect. The goal that was 'always already' or in this case "the last time it ever happened" i.e the 'never already'...a thought which would most certainly please rye bau...

[isakofsky]

circle jerk, I think it's possible to be ironic about being serious. Then it's possible to be either serious or ironic about having been ironic about being serious. circle jerk is a great name, btw - though it has to be translated for UK consumption.

[Matt]

fucking hell, and the game itself?

I sure hope there's a rebroadcast of that sometime.

(Aren't penalty shootouts in ice hockey soooo boring...OMG)

[Matt]

And then there's the anti-macho, liberal sentimental, über-truistic, greco-noble-moralising take (for which thankfully she gets a lot of flack). In fact, this comment was so good I'm just going to copy it on over. The author begins by quoting Lindsay Beyerstein's guest post:

#“...abject failure as a captain, a sportsman, and a human being”

Oh, please, he’s a soccer player, not Kofi Annan or the pope. I would prefer to keep such serious criticism of someone’s humanity for the Bush Administration, or Al Qaeda/terrorists, or any of the various “war lords” out there. But all the shock and dismay at a soccer player giving another player a thump on the chest is overdone. Of course what he did was stupid, but hardly tragic.

I wish people would stop insisting that athletes in the midst of intense competition, and physical battles and exertion, should be perfect role models. At that point society better start pointing the finger at itself.

And what’s worse, spending one hundred minutes of kicking, elbowing and insulting a player specifically to provoke them (rather than just concentrating on playing well), or fighting back for one second? Again, what he did was stupid, but all the provoking that goes on is certainly no more sportsman-like.

Also, in the strange world of sports, sometimes starting a fight ignites a team rather than breaks it down. I know I’ve seen it several times—you can never tell.
Posted by mroberts on 07/10 at 04:03 PM
#

By the way, Lindsey, look at the picture at the top of the blog you’re writing for

and so on..

[s0metim3s]

John: doesn't this blind "impotence" at the heart of the machismo circumvent its phallogocentric base

But it's that circumvention which isn't happening, so long as 'impotence' is lamented, as frustrating, and so on.

[John]

Angela,

I see your point. All of these lamentations - cries of foul - simply reassert the chest-beating machismo anew. Thanks for responding.

[Ricky Ponting]

And we haven't even begun on headbutt, heads, giving head, bowing down in front of someone but only in order to assault them, Materazzi's backward fall, Materazzi prone etc etc.

[Ricky Ponting]

What a thoroughly useless post! You are truly one of the Internet's leading discreditors of Lacanian psychoanalysis -- but apparently unconsciously (see, did you catch the reference to psychoanalysis there, with the word "unconsciously"?).