After a summer break lasting the month of August, I now start the new academic and business year with this major critique of the work of Louis Arnoux.

Louis Arnoux is a French intellectual, scientist, and entrepreneur who has lived the past several decades in New Zealand.

Arnoux runs two companies called IndraNet Technologies and MDI (Moteur développement internationale).

The first thing to notice about Louis Arnoux is that, on the MDI website, he calls himself “A GREAT MAN CHANGING THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.” Why? Apparently because he and his friend have developed a car engine that runs on compressed air, so he believes that he has solved the world’s dependency on oil. But look a little deeper and you will find that Arnoux fancies himself as being some kind of Nietzschean over-man. Take a look at the essay “Split or Die? The Innocent Fate of Humans” that he published at the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS), and this will become very clear.

In his IJBS article, Arnoux prognosticates “the death of the world of Homo sapiens sapiens (HSS), as that species has imagined it and instituted it up until now.” “I have never been at ease with fellow HSS,” he confesses. All of humanity (minus a very few super-elite intellectuals who have read the right set of books), for Arnoux, is hopelessly stuck in “dualistic thinking” (a term employed by him as a slogan or mantra 42 times in the article yet never explained or defined) and the “post-bicameral mind.” “Dualistic thinking” will be transcended not by an intense existential-psychological-political engagement and journey, but by pure intellectual abstraction, by being one of the very few geniuses who has asserted that he or she is “non-dualistic.” “HSS has now also to confront the irresistible prospect of a younger proto-species that may be more intelligent, and gleefully and cheerfully able to think at a stunning speed in baffling non-dual ways that HSS can only dimly contemplate.” “As Friedrich Nietzsche steadfastly pointed out throughout his work,” concludes Arnoux, “humankind is now tragically at the cross-roads (‘Kreuzweg’), its future is open, its past is long gone, and provided that enough individuals prove able to think it poetically, its fate is held in their [the Nietzscheans'] hands.”

The second thing to notice about Louis Arnoux is that there was an article published in a mainstream New Zealand newspaper reporting on one of IndraNet’s business investment prospectuses.

In her article “Beware the hype: Go straight to the sums” in The New Zealand Herald, journalist Jenny Ruth writes about an IndraNet business investment prospectus: “The prospectus does contain pages and pages of description, but to me most of it is gobbledegook. Try this: ‘IndraNet FraMe Networks will offer a fresh, coherent approach over the entire last 10 miles space, and its integration to the backbone, to leverage existing backbone and substantially expand broadband markets.’”

Jenny Ruth: “It says its FraMe ‘is built almost entirely of customer premises equipment (CPE) called ‘minders’ which communicate wirelessly thoughout the entire network’. It also involved ‘metaminders’ and ‘hyperminders’.”

Jenny Ruth: “A similar vagueness pervades the descriptions of its directors’ careers.”

Jenny Ruth: “Co-founder and managing director Louis Arnoux has ‘over 30 years’ experience in industrial development, R&D, technology development, transfer and marketing’. The prospectus goes on about his experience at length but again doesn’t say where this experience was gained except in vague terms as in: ‘He has worked closely with Australian, New Zealand and Asian private-sector and government bodies.’”

Alan N. Shapiro: Arnoux seems to evade providing any real, concrete facts about what he has done in his career.

Jenny Ruth: “A similar vagueness surrounds exactly what the company has up and running so far. It has been going since 1998 and the prospectus tells us that, in 2003, it ‘entered its global commercialisation phase through a series of projects begun in New Zealand, Australia and in Fiji’.”

Jenny Ruth: “It says these projects ‘have successfully demonstrated the benefits, costs and competitive advantages’ of its technology but, again, details are lacking.”

Jenny Ruth: “It also says that its development team ‘has managed to reduce the manufactured cost of the IndraNet network equipment by a factor of five’. Sounds great, but what did it cost to start with?”

Jenny Ruth: “The lack of clarity as to the nature of the company’s product and the people behind it is interesting because the marketing of its equity issue seems to be aimed entirely at Joe Blow Public. No broker is involved and the issue isn’t underwritten.”

Jenny Ruth: “I can’t help thinking promoters are operating on the ‘blind them with science’ principle.”

Jenny Ruth: “The company effectively refused to answer my questions, so that avenue of enlightenment was denied me.”

Jenny Ruth: “The one thing about the prospectus that you can get to grips with is its financial track record. The balance sheet at June 30, 2004, shows the company had already gone through almost $15.5 million of shareholders’ funds.”

Alan N. Shapiro: Now on to the business at hand:

In 2008, Louis Arnoux published a book called Peak Oil, Climate Change & All That Jazz. I don’t know if this book is available in any bookstores. For about two years, the book was available for download as an e-book from www.itmdi-energy.com/news/arnoux-publication.

Now it seems that Arnoux has removed the book from the main link where it was available on the Internet.

A summary of the book remains here: Peak Oil, Climate Change & All That Jazz Summary.

But wait! I have discovered a backdoor link where you can still read Arnoux’s book:

ARNOUX’S BOOK

http://www.itmdi-energy.com/pdf/news/book/POCCATJ_Arnoux-080908.pdf

Arnoux and his wife Victoria Grace (Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies) claim to be deeply interested in the thought of Jean Baudrillard. When I read Arnoux’s book on ecology, energy and the environment (Peak Oil, Climate Change & All That Jazz) in August 2009, I was so appalled by its total misunderstanding of Baudrillard’s position on this crucial political topic (as expressed most importantly in the great book The Illusion of the End), that I wrote a lengthy critique of Arnoux’s book.

Out of personal compassion for Arnoux and Grace, who were at one time friends of mine, I decided two years ago in September 2009 to not publish the critique anywhere. Instead I sent a copy of it electronically to Arnoux, hoping that he would respond in some kind of reconciliatory way. He did not. Could my critique be the reason why he later partly withdrew the book from the Internet? Maybe, maybe not.

After long and continuous reflection on the matter, I have decided – two years later – to publish my critique of Arnoux’s book. An additional part of the essay pasted below is about the work of Victoria Grace on Baudrillard. The text begins with a reassessment of Grace’s Baudrillard-related projects. In the “Introduction” to my book Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance – two separate book reviewers in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies wrote about the “Baudrillardian essence of the book” (Kristina C. Marcellus), the imprint of “Jean Baudrillard’s notion of ’simulacra’ on the book”, and the place of the book in “the classic Baudrillardian tradition” (Karim Remtulla) - I called Victoria Grace’s book Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading the best book on Baudrillard’s thinking available. I have since changed my mind about that, so the essay that I am pasting below also corrects that mistake that I made in the penultimate paragraph of the “Introduction” to my book on Star Trek.

Here is a summary in a few sentences of what this essay is about:

Many commentators have called Jean Baudrillard an apocalyptic thinker.  This is definitely wrong, as is clearly demonstrated in The Illusion of the End, where Baudrillard brilliantly criticizes the apocalyptic discourse surrounding ecology, energy, and the environment that is indeed the discourse of the mainstream media culture and of what Herbert Marcuse would have called “the dominant society”. Unfortunately, 98% of leftist critics who write about ecology, energy, and the environment have adopted and mimicked this dominant mainstream apocalyptic discourse. Louis Arnoux – unlike Baudrillard – is an apocalyptic “thinker”, even though he is married to one of the leading Baudrillard scholars in the world! My own project in this area is to think through, conceptualize, and creatively invent a rigorous alternative discourse about ecology, energy, and the environment — a discourse that will, finally, not be constructed around warnings about doomsday. Therefore it might succeed rather than fail.

One last point before diving into the material: at the end of the day, Baudrillard’s position on ecology, energy, and the environment is itself one-sided. It is an absolutely essential corrective to what everyone else says about ecology, energy, and the environment — but ultimately our project is going to be that of making a synthesis of what Baudrillard says and of what he criticizes.

Baudrillard and Doomsday:

On Louis Arnoux’s “Catastrophe Warning” Discourse

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it … and I feel fine.

– R.E.M., 1987

I. Meet Victoria Grace

In the Introduction to my first book, Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance (2004), I praised Dr. Victoria Grace, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, for – as I wrote at the time – having written the best book by far on the thought of Jean Baudrillard.¹ Her book is called Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000).²

In his review of Grace’s Baudrillard’s Challenge in The Semiotic Review of Books, Mike Gane, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Loughborough University, Loughborough, England – the author of several highly regarded books on Baudrillard and something like a legitimate authority in the field – makes the very valid argument that Grace’s attempt to develop a “Baudrillardian feminism” suffers acutely from its intellectual abstraction and from its high-flying distance from phenomenological reality, as she fails to engage with the details of consumer society, media culture, and feminist history.”³ “The way Grace has developed her ideas around Baudrillard,” Gane incisively asserts, “could be said to reduce Baudrillard’s position to a rather formal and theoretical point about reversibility, symbolic exchange, and identity.”⁴

However, the hidden strength of Grace’s book Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading comes to the surface in the section entitled “The Rule and the Law” (part of Chapter Five), where she arrives at the insight that the genuine subversion of the social and hierarchical conventions of our time, the challenge to imposed norms, will take place through the playing of a game with Rules that questions the false universality of the Law which underlies “integral reality” (Baudrillard) or the “supreme ideological form” (Grace).⁵ “Gaming opposes the logic of the Law,” Grace asserts, “and in fact radically interrogates chance.”⁶ Gane sees clearly the thread leading from the spirit of gam(bl)ing to the contestation of the entire established universe of simulation and simulacra, whose most vulnerable point is its cementing of the freedom and flexibility of sensuality and dance, and of the power of seduction, in the signifiers of the socio-culturally constructed female: “the fundamental order of symbolic exchange does not fix femininity in the female, but permits reversibility of masculine and feminine, seduction and production” (Mike Gane on Victoria Grace).⁷ The project hinted at by Grace in her first book is that of liberating so-called “femininity” from the biological-semiotic female, and so-called “masculinity” from the biological-semiotic male, but doing so via the vehicle of the duel/dual relationship as thought by Baudrillard, and not via the banal strategies of “trans” (criticized by Baudrillard at the beginning of The Transparency of Evil) or the multiple virtual identities of cyberspace as conceived thus far by cyberspace theory (for example, by Sherry Turkle in Life on the Screen).⁸

II. Enter Louis Arnoux

In the Acknowledgements section of Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,  Victoria Grace states that it was her partner, Dr. Louis Arnoux, who first introduced her to Baudrillard’s work when they met in 1986.⁹ Arnoux ”has studied Baudrillard’s work systematically,” she claims.¹⁰ Recently Arnoux published an essay in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies where he dons the team jacket of a Baudrillardian.¹¹ He boasts of his alleged deep familiarity with Baudrillard’s texts, as well as his “serious grounding in centuries of philosophical debates.”¹² Now Arnoux has published his first book, entitled Peak Oil, Climate Change & All That Jazz (2008).¹³

The primary subjects of Arnoux’s book are, as the title suggests, ecology, energy, and global warming. Given Arnoux’s close relationship to Grace, and Arnoux’s pronouncements in published articles that he is very interested in Baudrillard, I expected this book to be a glimpse into a reflection/research that has integrated/engaged with Baudrillard’s penetrating ideas about ecology, energy, catastrophe discourse, and Green politics as principally articulated in The Illusion of the End (1992).¹⁴ Much to my disappointment, there is not the slightest indication in this book that Louis Arnoux has understood or taken seriously the seminal ideas developed in The Illusion of the End. Especially in the essay “Catastrophe management” (“La gestion de la catastrophe”), but also throughout his entire book, Jean Baudrillard carries out a critique on precisely the kind of apocalyptic narrative of “the end” – with its concomitant misconceptions about what is real and what is virtual; shaky assumptions about the supposedly straightforward-linear nature of time; and contributions to the social-psychological atmosphere of fear, hysteria, and big-drama-addiction which pervade our viscerally anti-utopian society – with which Arnoux is involved.

Louis Arnoux, writing about the subject that is clearly the main focus of his life’s work, has completely ignored Baudrillard. He has instead produced a garden variety “warning of the ecological catastrophe” discourse. Baudrillard already explained what is wrong with it. Arnoux is a major practitioner of that very same catastrophe discourse that Baudrillard deconstructed.

On the other hand, what interests me is the question of how might Baudrillard’s ideas be developed into a new “Green Discourse”? A discourse that might jump-start the ecology-environmental movement into effective action, a fresh start beyond the same old same old approach to Green politics that has been tried for 40 years now and is not working.¹⁵

III. Baudrillard’s Critique of Catastrophe Discourse: Ignorance of the Virtual, Fear Mongering, and a New Energy Source for Western Intellectuals

In the second essay of The Illusion of the End, “The reversal of history,” Baudrillard writes of time running “in reverse,” a “non-Euclidean” strangely curved space-time, and the “end of linearity.” (IE:10) ”In this perspective,” he continues, “the future no longer exists.” (10-11) “We are faced with a paradoxical process of reversal, a reversive effect … a catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence … like a film played backwards.” (11) The catastrophe resides in the literary-narrative-historiographic-rhetorical-technological-media-virtualized forms and tropes of extreme- or hyper-modern society – in time distortion patterns like retroactivity, retroversion, recurrence, and reversibility, to name a few – and not in some x-y-axis-chart-extrapolated, PowerPoint-presentation-projected, statistically-forecasted literal occurrence of the conventionally creditworthy future, no matter how “real” one believes the coming incident of negative-whatever to be, because that obsessed-upon “real disaster” can only ever be hyper-real, a cheap alibi used to justify some much more generalized, pernicious, and always-already-embedded out-of-wackness. “There is no worse mistake,” writes Baudrillard further on in the book, “than taking the real for the real.” (61)

In the essay “The event strike,” and then in “Catastrophe management,” Baudrillard calls our entire calamitous situation of time-loop and temporal turbulence phenomena “the end of history.” Still this disaster or “present destruction” (see Elias Canetti) has to be managed. It has to be fueled. Where the fuel comes from is a crucial point. It is Western intellectuals – Armageddon-mongering bad filmmakers like Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) and terrorist-boogeymen-mongering bad actors like George W. Bush (disgusting endless War in Afghanistan-Iraq) [Arnoux is like Emmerich; Arnoux is not like Bush] – who take on the job of managing “the end of history” (with their payment being the rewards of membership in the power elite).¹⁶ Their fuel to manage the across-the-board (“virtual”) catastrophe is the discourse of the impending (“real”) catastrophe. “The end of history, being itself a catastrophe, can only be fuelled by catastrophe. Managing the end therefore becomes synonymous with the management of catastrophe.” (66) In “Catastrophe management,” Baudrillard makes a brilliant political science, Management School, and “sociology of knowledge“ analysis of how Western intellectuals (in America, that social layer can even include baseball team owners and entrepreneurial peddlers of soft Carvel ice cream) go about procuring autonomous class power for themselves. It is parallel to the brilliant political-social analysis made by Gyorgy Konrád and Ivan Szelényi in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (subtitled “A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism,” originally written as a Samizdat essay in Hungarian in 1973-1974), a seminal work on how sleight-of-hand universalist ideology functioned under the system of Soviet-Eastern-Europe Empire.¹⁷

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Walter Rodney).¹⁸ During the classic, centuries-long era of colonialism, on a worldwide scale, the North raped and exploited the South. Now colonialism has entered its post-historic ironic phase. “Hegel remarks somewhere [nobody knows exactly where…] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852).¹⁹ “The South is a natural producer of raw materials,” writes Jean Baudrillard in “Catastrophe management”, “the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe … Other people’s destitution becomes our adventure playground.” (67) The primitive capital accumulation deriving from the exploitation of slaves in and from Africa is followed by the accumulation of intellectual capital deriving from the left-liberal “politically correct” whitewashing of the history of slavery, down to the censoring of the word “Negro” in an artwork, or of the artwork itself, which comments on the brutal treatment of the subjugated in Europe’s (former) African colonies.²⁰ The exploitation of the oil and mineral deposits in Third/Fourth World countries is followed by the exploitation of the so-called catastrophe of the exhaustion of the oil and mineral deposits. We are now living in the age of the careful cultivation of symbolic deposits, “a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West.” (67) This wailing and whining about the depletion of resources is itself the new (ethically illegitimate) energy source, a “ferocious form of moral predation … spiritual raw material … psychological nourishment.” (66-67) “We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market).” (67) “We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen.” (68) Addicted to catastrophe, like to alcohol or drugs.

IV. Buried Beneath a Blizzard of (Louis Arnoux) Citations

The chronological-future “real” catastrophe – and warning of it – is Louis Arnoux’s drug. He is literally in love with the words “warning,” “threat,” “danger,” and “trouble,” which he uses over and over again (Microsoft took away my Office license after the 30-day free trial period on my new laptop expired, so I can’t provide exact word count statistics). His book Peak Oil, Climate Change & All That Jazz is “a series of essays addressing the first global discontinuity to be encountered by humankind since the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago.” (POCCATJ:1) In the 1970s, Arnoux “became acutely aware that the world was already on a very dangerous trajectory.” (3) The content(s) of many of Arnoux’s concerns is/are important. What is wrong is the form: his rhetorical strategy, his discourse, his “narrative,” the decisions that he made regarding how to write about and express his concerns.

In the Introduction to his book, Louis Arnoux states that he discussed (at least some aspects of) his writing project with (the Baudrillard expert) Victoria Grace.(6)

At the beginning of his first essay, “The Crude Truth,” Arnoux tells a little story about the plane crash of a flight that he calls Flight BAU2012, invoking the same very-near-future year as Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster disaster film 2012. According to Wikipedia, “2012 Millenarianism [or Eschatology] is a present-day cultural meme proposing that cataclysmic or transformative events will occur in the year 2012.”²¹ Arnoux is quite clearly only interested in the cataclysmic side, and not in the “New Age” hopeful-utopian-transformative side, of the “forecasts” which have their origin in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. Arnoux is contemptuous of all things “New Age.” More from the Wikipedia article on the subject: “Some believers in 2012 millenarianism believe that it marks the beginning of an apocalypse. The 2012 doomsday prediction idea has been disseminated in numerous books and TV documentaries, and has spread around the world as an Internet meme through websites and discussion groups.”²² BAU stands for “Business as Usual,” one of Louis Arnoux’s favorite and oft-repeated phrases, used to describe what people who are not “critical intellectuals” do. Arnoux’s plane crash story is “a metaphor for the potential fate of humankind if the insistent warnings of an increasing number of energy experts remain ignored and unheeded.” (7) “The ‘flight path’ for the world economy is on a crash course.” (7) Repeat. “The ‘flight path’ for the world economy is on a crash course.” (7) Roger, I copy you. “Of much greater urgency and significance in our tale of Flight BAU2012 is the crash itself and the events leading up to it. This is the real drama that I see unfolding now.” (8)

Then we are presented with a series of timeline charts – Peak Oil based on ASPO data, Peak Coal, Peak Uranium, The End of the Fossil Fuels Era – models of linear history and linear time (Jean Baudrillard: the model precedes the real, the map precedes the territory). ASPO is the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. I attended one of their annual conferences, in Pisa, Italy, in July 2006. They are a fine and reputable international organization. But no one there has read Jean Baudrillard or Jacques Derrida. Or even more importantly: Claude Lefort or Hannah Arendt. Maybe that could still change.

Arnoux continues: “The world is at the beginning of a major discontinuity concerning all fossil and nuclear sources of energy. This is something humankind as a whole has never experienced in its 200,000 years of history.” (11) “We are now fast approaching ground zero.” (12) The next timeline chart has a drawing of a ferocious alligator superimposed on it, its Jaws spread wide apart, baring its sharp teeth and tongue. This is the “Gator Effect.”

Arnoux then valuably explains that the best available data on the disappearance of oil and gas as energy sources (disappearance – now there’s an interesting concept for approaching this problem) is “that produced by Prof. Charles Hall of New York State University [sic!] and colleagues.” (13-14) Louis, there exists no such university called “New York State University.” The institution of higher learning where Hall teaches and conducts his research is called “The State University of New York at Syracuse.”

“We are in fact in much the same position as the passengers on our fabled flight: unless they are told about an impending crash, passengers are fine and enjoying the ride until the very last second … the second ‘whammy’ [Climate Change] that awaits the survivors of the first ‘whammy’ [Peak Oil] … unpredictable chronic disruptions to transport fuels and electricity supplies, empty super market [supermarket] shelves, piles of rubbish in the streets, rapidly declining public health, and the likelihood of a global population crash.” (16) “The chances of avoiding a crash altogether are extremely slim.” (17) “What awaits them [the survivors of Peak Oil, Peak Coal, and Peak Uranium] is in the nature of a global ecological avalanche caused by humankind. It is an avalanche that … has already caught up with some of us in various parts of the planet in the form of devastating hurricanes, droughts, fires, floods, new crop diseases, failed crops, new human diseases, and so on. It is It is an avalanche that threatens to engulf the whole of humankind during the course of the 21st century.” (19-20) Baudrillard, as we shall see, analyses this rather differently. The hurricanes, etc., are a result of our wrong “humanizing” concept of nature, treating nature as “subject” instead of as “other.”

“A global ecological S.O.C. [Self-Organising Criticality] that includes Climate Change but encompasses far more, is precisely what has begun to unfold globally. As a result of that S.O.C., what humankind faces during the 21^st century is the abrupt, chaotic, and permanent transformation of all aspects and conditions of human life on earth … I say face and not ‘potentially face’ because in my analysis … humankind is rushing headlong towards extinction. What were concerns, hypotheses and warnings in the early 1970s have become solid scientific conclusions now.” (21) Science, for Arnoux, does not include Baudrillard, does not include narrative theory, literary criticism, discourse analysis. He is not interested in that. (Clearly, he does not read novels or literary theory, and he thinks that they do not offer him important knowledge. Wow, what a mistake. That is why he is totally unconscious about his own narrative, rhetoric, discourse, form) “[The world] faces the imminent prospect of abrupt collapse.” (23)

Next comes, astonishingly, a mention of Baudrillard, a “popularization” of what Baudrillard allegedly said about catastrophe, that is, well, wrong. Totally! “Media reporting about so-called Climate Change tends to give lay people the impression that the feared Climate Change catastrophe is something that may happen sometime in the future … In fact, the real catastrophe, the triggering of the global ecological S.O.C., has already happened … As Jean Baudrillard [spelling corrected] once quipped, “The future was yesterday.” (22-23) Quipped? No, Louis, Baudrillard wrote a whole book about this, called The Illusion of the End. He does not say that the “real catastrophe” has already taken place. He says that the “virtual catastrophe” has already taken place. Then one needs to understand what he means by the concept-term “virtual.” OK? I think I’ve kept my cool throughout. But enough is enough.  I’ve read enough of this catastrophe warning crap. Let’s get back to talking about a real book.

V. Towards a New Green Politics (in honour of Jean Baudrillard)

Continuing on with The Illusion of the End: “The virtual produces the real as its waste-product,” writes Baudrillard in the essay “Maleficent ecology.” “No ecology – no benevolent ecology – can do anything to stop it. It would take a maleficent ecology – one which treats evil with evil.” (IE:79) Our industrial and megalopolistic hyper-concentration converts nature and the planet into “le reste.” “The great modern construction projects (high-speed trains, motorways, city development),” shopping malls, department stores, suburban architectural prefab structures, “buiildings that are still-born,” transform everything around them into an arid desert. (73,79) We make the environment into a residue. Green Party intellectuals (in France and Germany, for example) fuel themselves with the energies of the activity of defending the “rights” of an idealized nature that has already been denigrated into abjection. The Greens want to safeguard humiliated nature in its state of humiliation. Well-intentioned yet misguided leftists and liberals want to elevate nature “to the status of a subject in law.” (80) Nature becomes an interactive subject, condemned to waste and domestication, instead of getting respected as a wily object and an other, irreducible to our anthropocentric categories. “Nature is also germs, viruses, chaos, bacteria and scorpions,” writes Baudrillard. (81) Nature is the cycle of metamorphoses, slow processes of evolution whose secrets elude us.

Baudrillard then writes of a “violence specific to the human race in general, a violence of the species against itself in which it treats itself as a residue, as a survivor – even in the present – of a coming catastrophe.” (82) This is fascinating in the extreme. It would seem that the “discourse warning of the ecological catastrophe,” or of any menacing catastrophe, is emblematically expressive of this species-specific self-inflicted violence by and to humans. The alternative to being taken in by the neuroses of anxiety and panic would be to stay calm, to not be alarmed that a stretch might lead to a slip, to live instead of to survive. It would be a truly empowering Gestalt social psychology opposed to the  dominant society of the permanent emergency, obsessed as it is with security, inflicting on us a limited existence, one-dimensionality of perceptions, and fear of life. If we do not achieve this calming down, this Gelassenheit (Heidegger), this self-confidence that we can “take pleasure” (87) in life, both on a daily basis and in the longer term, that we can be daring, live intensely, open ourselves up from restricted frames, and also live a long time, then we will possibly fall into the gap that Baudrillard ironically “warns” against in a strange self-contradictory lapsus (whereby he conflates technological projects of longevity and immortality). Through artifice, he writes, humanity “is perhaps hurtling even more quickly to its doom” (84). We can either contribute to our own disappearance by speaking about it in a careless way, or we can live “disappearance” as a process – not a product – intelligently.

From the essay “Exponential instability, exponential stability”: We are in the region of a “non-linear space, of a non-Euclidean space of history.” [here I have corrected Chris  Turner’s English translation]²³ In the “virtual geography” (McKenzie Wark) of a global media space, increasingly vectorized lines of communication “are suppressing the cause-effect relation and hence all historical continuity … distortion of causes and effects … cause-effect reversibility, engendering a disorder or chaotic order.”²⁴ (110) Catastrophe is the normality, the normal state, of our system. (112) Catastrophe needs primarily to be understood as a literary form, as a category of (bad) literature. It is bad form, a deterioration of the lofty forms of tragedy and irony, which are figures of destiny. We need a literary sociology of “all the extreme phenomena, the exorbitant effects, the vertiginous forms of disorder, everything which attests to the precession of effects over causes.” The catastrophe of late capitalism or “extreme-modernity” “which has already taken place” is simulation, which is to be read or interpreted as “a form of catastrophe of reality, this dizzying whirl of the model, the virtual and simulation carrying us further and further from the initial conditions of the real world.” (113)

From “Hysteresis of the millennium,” which brilliantly concludes The Illusion of the End: None of it is true. None of the discourses about the end is true. “There will be no end to anything, and all these things will continue to unfold slowly, tediously, recurrently.” (116) But some will try “to relocate the zone of reference, the earlier scene, the Euclidean space of history … [in an attempt] “to escape the apocalypse of the virtual … to rediscover the real and the referential … [But] the more we seek to rediscover the real and the referential, the more we sink into simulation.” (117) “Our Apocalypse is not real, it is virtual. And it is not in the future, it is here and now.” (119)

Our task is to find the right process, to get on the right train. In his existential self-analysis (or autobiography) Les Mots, Jean-Paul Sartre describes himself as having always been a “traveler without a ticket.”²⁵ Jean Baudrillard has gotten us past that insecure situation. He recommends that we who try to change the world in his wake carry “strange attractors in our pocket” (a phrase used by his friend Marc Guillaume).²⁶ As a literary trope, Baudrillard prefers anastrophe to catastrophe. “What this brings us to, more or less, is a poetic, ironic analysis of events. Against the simulation of a linear history ‘in progress’, … we have to accord a privileged status to all that has to do with non-linearity, reversibility … Everything occurs through effects which short-circuit their (metaleptic) causes, through the Witze of events, perverse events, ironic turnabouts.” (121)

In rhetoric, anastrophe is a figure of speech involving an inversion of a language’s ordinary word order. In sociology, the German sociologist-anthropologist Dieter Claessens has written about anastrophe as being the counter-term to catastrophe, a comprehensive or local change for the better.²⁷

We can make good cinema about ecological issues. We can make good performances about ecological issues. We can take a vow of silence to talk less and not so directly about “real” catastrophes, but rather practice a Baudrillardian “fatal strategy” or Heideggerian double-movement between concealment and disclosure. Instead of implementing a naïve aesthetics in movies about global warming, the melting of the polar icecaps, the destruction of old-growth forests, oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, polluted water in the Berkeley Pit, threats to the Great Barrier Reef, loss of biodiversity, and the extinction of species, we can develop a lucid and intelligent aesthetics of environmental disaster – I think of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) as an example of a very good film that goes in this direction. We can figure out how to do this while transcending the dualism between high culture and popular culture. “Might we not transpose language games on to social and historical phenomena:,” writes Baudrillard. “Anagrams, acrostics, spoonerisms, rhyme, strophe and catastrophe? Not just the major figures of metaphor and metonymy, but the instant, puerile, formalistic games, the heteroclite tropes which are the delights of a vulgar imagination? … Is there a chance that history lends itself to such a poetic convulsion … [which would] allow the pure materiality of language to show through, and – beyond historical meaning – allow the pure materiality of time to show through? (122)

In an essay in The Yearbook of English Studies, published by the Modern Humanities Research Association, Mark Bould develops a “perspective informed by the materialist critique of idealist linguistics found in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, David McNally, and Alan N. Shapiro. [This perspective] argues that the critical theory derived from Saussurean linguistics strips language of its materiality in a manner homologous to capital’s abstraction of social products from the labouring bodies that produce them.”²⁷

Baudrillard winds up: “Such would be the enchanted alternative to the linearity of history, the poetic alternative to the disenchanted confusion, the chaotic profusion of present events.” And here’s the pitch: “In this very way, we enter, beyond history, upon pure fiction, upon the illusion of the world. The illusion of our history opens on to the greatly more radical illusion of the world.” (122)

The batter swings and misses. Doubtlessly, the game is not over.

The insistence of belief in “the real” and simulation-virtuality are two sides of the same coin. This is how the entire cultural-political-economic-media-psychological system functions, on the basis of this double-sided coin. The only thing that genuinely opposes the system is a creative fiction. A fiction that is connected to something that is very real: the playful borderline between real and fiction. This is what I call “the new real”: a real that can move the capitalist system forward in a creative and “subversive” way (not oppose the system). This “new real” is not at all the same thing as the mainstream political or scientific or media or sleepwalking-psychological or technological real. All of these “reals” insist so much on being real that they are effectively hyper-real.

Being “spot on” the creative fiction is the true radical politics.

This is the core of my theory.

NOTES

1 – Alan N. Shapiro, Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance (Berlin: AVINUS Press, 2004); p.35.

2 – Victoria Grace, Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (London: Routledge, 2000).

3 – Mike Gane, “Reversible Feminism,” in The Semiotic Review of Books (11:3). See

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/srb/revfem.html.

4 – Ibid.

5 – Grace, Op. cit., pp.147-150.

6 – Ibid., p.149.

7 – Gane, Op. cit.

8 – Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (translated by James Benedict, originally published in French in 1990) (London: Verso, 1993). Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

9 – Grace, Op. cit., p.vi.

10 – Ibid.

11 – Louis Arnoux, “Split or Die: The Innocent Fate of Humans,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 3:2, July 2006.

12 – Ibid.

13 – Louis Arnoux, Peak Oil, Climate Change & All That Jazz (2008).

http://www.itmdi-energy.com/pdf/news/book/POCCATJ_Arnoux-080908.pdf

14 – Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (translated by Chris Turner) (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994). Originally published in French as L’illusion de la fin ou La grève des événements (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1992). To get a sense of what Baudrillard thinks about « catastrophe «, one need look no further than inside Gerry Coulter’s

The Baudrillard Index – An Obscene Project.

http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/pdf/book-index.pdf

at the many citations from Baudrillard under the entries “Catastrophe” and “Apocalypse.” For example:

“Apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, indifference.” SS:160 (Simulacra and Simulation)

“Apocalypse – the world is not sufficiently coherent to lead to an apocalypse.” G:49 (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place)

“The proliferation of the real is our true catastrophe.” PC:16 (The Perfect Crime)

15 – I remember participating in the first Earth Day at Herricks High School, Herricks, LI, NY, USA, on April 22, 1970, the day before my fourteenth birthday. In the way that ecological problems are talked about, nothing much has changed since then, and little progress in helping the Earth in its suffering has been made.

16 – C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

17 – Gyorgy Konrád and Ivan Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism (translated from the Hungarian by Andrew Arato and Richard E. Allen) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).

18 – Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, and Tanzania: Dar-Es-Salaam, 1973).

See http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm.

19 – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852. (Chapters 1 & 7 translated by Saul K. Padover from the German edition of 1869; Chapters 2 through 6 are based on the third edition, prepared by Friedrich Engels in 1885, translator uncredited, published by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1937) (first published in German in New York in Die Revolution, 1852).

See http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm.

20 – Recently (2009) I translated a collection of cartoons by the prominent Frankfurt/Main satirist Robert Gernhardt (born in Tallinn, Estonia) from German to English. One of the cartoons depicts a white European slaveholder in Africa talking in a racist manner about his slaves. My friend Robert used the word “Negro” in the slaveowner’s speech. The “Museum for Comic Art” (CARICATURA) in Frankfurt/Main eliminated the cartoon from the Gernhardt exhibition because they decided that the word “Negro” is “politically incorrect.” First they tried to persuade Robert’s widow Almut to allow them to change it to “black,” but Almut would not go along with their plan to blackwash the slaveholder’s speech. According to the position of the decision-makers at this museum, all defamatory remarks made about Jews by Hitler would have to be deleted from history.

21 – Wikipedia article on “2012 Millenarianism”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_millenarianism

22 – Ibid.

23 – See Jean Baudrillard, L’illusion de la fin ou La grève des événements (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1992); p.155.

24 – McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography : Living with Global Media Events (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).

25 – See Dominick LaCapra, A Preface to Sartre: A Critical Introduction to Sartre’s Literary and Philosophical Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (translated by Bernard Frechtman) (originally published in French in 1964) (New York: George Brazilier, 1964).

26 – Marc Guillaume, “Cool thinking,” in François L’Yvonnet, ed., Cahiers de L’Herne: Jean Baudrillard (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2004).

27 – Dieter Claessens, “Katastrophen und Anastrophen,” in Wolf R. Dombrowsky and Ursula Pasero, eds., Wissenschaft Literatur Katastrophe (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995).