Gulf War II: The New ‘Real’

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http://legitgov.org/mike_essay_the_new_real4_031103.html

 

Gulf War II: The New `Real'

 

--by Michael Rectenwald

 

 

 

In his book Simulations (1983), Jean Baudrillard introduced the notion

of a new social order based on simulacra without originals. Malls,

neighborhoods, amusement parks, even the political left and

right—simulations of originals that no longer exist, imitations

without real models. Baudrillard engaged academics and enraged

Marxists and other social realists, when he later announced, with

seeming blitheness, that the first Gulf War `wasn't real.' `Tell that

to the estimated 15,000 Iraqi civilians killed in the war, or the

estimated 100,000 dying in its aftermath, or the Gulf War veterans,

suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.'

 

 

 

But despite the critics of postmodernism's dissolution of the `real',

there is something to what Baudrillard claimed: the first victim of

the video war, the simulation, the reportage censored by Israel, was

the notion of `reality.' `The real' suffered a mortal blow. The video

representation of the Gulf War became the war itself, supplanting any

kernel of reality with simulation. So that film could finally

announce: " Welcome to the desert of the real! " —deserted because no one

sees it, the desert of the real because for all practical purposes, it

doesn't exist.

 

It appears from the previews we are receiving regarding the media

coverage of Gulf War II, that the real, now dead, is to be declared

alive-and-well, dressed up, camouflaged, and paraded around by the

Pentagon itself: a remediation of the real. The media becomes the

proxy purveyor of newsreels—the new real being supplied by the

Pentagon. Reporters are to be fully approved instruments of the war

machine itself, like additional scopes fastened to the instruments of

death, pointing only at acceptable targets, with a simulated vision

not unlike the video version of the jet fighters and scopic filters of

the combatants (on one side).

 

The notion of `bias' is decimated in the very act of killing—in media

res—military perspectivalism serves as a placebo. Any remaining memory

of " real " differing perspectives is thereby satisfied, if not

obliterated in advance; perspectivalism becomes a multiplication of

staged effects. Like cable television with its endless splintering of

sameness into a reputed `variety', the multiple `perspectives' of

gunmen will supplant all other standpoints. Independent reporters, the

Pentagon now reputedly warns, will be fired upon. " Death to Realism! "

was the perhaps more apropos cry in that other, more ironic cyber

film, eXistenZ.

 

 

 

Thus, it appears that Baudrillard was only partly right. The real is

indeed under fire, but like the repressed in Freud's version of the

psyche, it threatens to return. Likewise, measures must be taken

against it. The Pentagon promises to take such measures.

 

 

 

Slavoj Zizek suggested that 9-11 threatened to shatter " the borderline

which today separates the digitized First World from the Third World

`desert of the Real,' " yielding, with its crashing of the simulation,

an " awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe which

generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the

time with total destruction. " This awareness may be too painful for

the denizens of the Matrix. Gulf War II (whose `moralistic/poetic'

name is still being debated by the Pentagon) is an attempt to

reconstruct that Matrix, to re-inscribe the borderline, to reclaim the

real and reissue it as military rations. The real is parceled out.

 

The media asks us incredulously: " Do you think that the Pentagon (or

Powell, or Bush, or Rumsfeld) would actually lie to the American

people? " We cannot answer, simply, " yes. " Not only are they lying,

they are actually producing the new real.

 

Michael Rectenwald

 

Founder and Chair

 

Citizens for Legitimate Government

 

March 11, 2003