Baudrillard - Screened out

This paperback edition published by Verso 2014
First published in English by Verso 2002
Verso 2002, 2014
Translation Chris Turner 2002, 2014
First published as Ecran total
Editions Galile 2014

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The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-155-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78168-209-8
eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-518-1

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v3.1

History reproducing itself becomes Farce.

Farce reproducing itself becomes History.

With a few exceptions, these pieces originally appeared as articles in the Paris newspaper Libration between June 1987 and May 1997. The author made several minor changes in turning them into book form and a very few, even more minor rectifications have been made in preparing this translation.

The publication in book form contained no footnotes, some of the material initially published as such in the newspaper articles having been restored to the body of the text. The footnotes to this translation are therefore without exception my own and are included solely to elucidate points that would have been clear to a French audience at the time, but may be obscure to a non-French audience today.

C.T.

AIDS, computer viruses, terrorism Virulence makes its appearance when a body, system or network expels all its negative elements and resolves into a combinatorial of simple ones. In this sense, virality is closely related to fractality and digitality. It is because computers and electronic machines have become abstractions, virtual machines, non-bodies, that viruses run riot in them (they are much more vulnerable than traditional mechanical machines). It is because the body itself has become a non-body, an electronic, virtual machine, that viruses seize hold of it.

The current pathology of the body is now beyond the reach of conventional medicine, since it affects the body not as form, but as formula. The body of cancer is the body fallen victim to the disruption of its genetic formula. The AIDS body is the body damaged and impaired in its immune systems, in its systems of controls and anti-bodies.

These new pathologies are the illnesses of a codified, modelled body; they are sicknesses of the code and the model.

The human being, conceived as an electronic, cybernetic machine, makes a perfect home for viruses and viral illnesses, just as computers provide an ideal terrain for electronic viruses.

Here again, there is no effective prevention or therapy; the metastases invade the whole network virtually; de-symbolized machine languages offer no more resistance to viruses than do de-symbolized bodies. The traditional mechanical accident or breakdown had a good old reparative medicine to deal with it, but the sudden failures, anomalies and betrayals of anti-bodies (quite apart from any deliberate hacking into their functions) are beyond remedy.

Virality is the pathology of closed circuits, of integrated circuits, of promiscuity and chain reactions. It is a pathology of incest, understood in a broad, metaphorical sense.

He who lives by the same will die by the same. The impossibility of exchange, of reciprocity, of alterity secretes that other invisible, diabolic, elusive alterity, that absolute Other, the virus, itself made up of simple elements and of recurrence to infinity.

We are in an incestuous society. And the fact that AIDS first hit the homosexual community and drug abusers has to do with this incestuousness of groups which function as closed circuits.

In the past, haemophilia struck at families with long histories of consanguine marriages, highly endogamous lineages. The strange disease which for a long time attacked cypress trees was a kind of virus which was in the end attributed to a reduction in the temperature differential between summer and winter, to the seasons coming to intermingle. There again, the spectre of the Self-same struck. In every compulsion for resemblance, every excision of differences, in every case of things being contiguous with their own images or becoming confused with their own code, there is a threat of incestuous virulence, of a diabolical alterity, knocking the marvellous machinery out of kilter. In other cases, this takes the form of the resurgence of the principle of Evil (there is no moral dimension or guilt here: the principle of Evil is merely synonymous with the principle of reversion and the principle of adversity). In systems moving towards total positivization and hence de-symbolization evil simply equates, in all its forms, with the fundamental rule of reversibility.

The uninterrupted production of positivity has a terrifying consequence: if negativity engenders crisis and critique, absolute positivity, for its part, engenders catastrophe, precisely through its incapacity to distil the crisis. Every structure, system or social body which ferrets out its negative, critical elements to expel them or exorcise them runs the risk of a catastrophe by total implosion and reversion, just as every biological body which hunts down and eliminates all its germs, bacillae and parasites in short, all its biological enemies runs the risk of cancer or, in other words, of a positivity devouring its own cells. It runs the risk of being devoured by its own anti-bodies, which now have nothing to do.

It is logical that AIDS (and cancer) should have become the prototypes for our modern pathology and for all lethal virality. When the body is exposed to artificial prostheses and, at the same time, to genetic fantasies, its defence systems are disorganized, its biological logic destroyed. This fractal body, fated to see its own external functions multiply, is at the same time doomed to unstoppable internal division among its own cells. It metastasizes: the internal, biological metastases are in a way symmetrical with those external metastases, the prostheses, the networks, the connections.

In an over-protected space, the body loses all its defences. We know that in operating theatres, there is such a level of prophylaxis that no microbe or bacteria can survive. Now, it is precisely there, in that absolutely spotless space that we are seeing mysterious, anomalous, viral diseases emerging. For viruses survive and proliferate as soon as room is made for them. So long as there were microbes, there were no viruses. In a world cleansed of its old infections, in an ideal clinical world, an intangible, implacable pathology unfurls, a pathology born of disinfection itself.

A pathology of the third kind. Just as we are up against a new violence in our societies a violence born of the paradox of a permissive and pacified society, so we are up against new diseases, the diseases of bodies over-protected by their artificial shields both medical and computer shields. Bodies which are, as a result, susceptible to every virus, to the most perverse, unexpected chain reactions. A pathology no longer based in accidents or anomie, but in anomalies. And it is the same in the social body, where the same causes produce the same perverse effects, the same unpredictable dysfunctions and a whole range of anomalies and terrorisms, comparable to the genetic disturbance of cells a phenomenon similarly brought about by over-protection and over-coding. The social system, like the biological body, is losing its natural symbolic defences in direct proportion to the increased technological sophistication of its prostheses. And medicine is not going to find it easy to deal with this entirely new pathology, since it is itself part of the system of over-protection, the system of protectionist and prophylactic zeal towards the body. Just as there is apparently no political solution to the problem of terrorism, so there does not currently seem to be any biological solution to the problem of AIDS or cancer. And for the same reason: these are anomalous symptoms, a certain type of violence and certain types of illness arising from the depths of the system itself and countering, with reactive violence or virulence, the political over-control of the social body, the biological over-control of the physical body.