akinwumi - the banality of the immediate spectacle

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ISSN: 1705-6411

Volume 3, Number 1 (January 2006)

The Banality of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle: Globalization, Terrorism, RadicalCultural Denigration, and the Condition of Hollowity1

Akinbola E. Akinwumi(Graduate Student, Department of Geography, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria).

I. Introduction

[Globalization] is a simulacrum, a rhetorical artifice or weapon thatdissimulates a growing imbalance, a new opacity, a garrulous andhypermediatized noncommunication, a tremendous accumulation ofwealth, means of production, teletechnologies…2

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history ofanarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporarypartner of globalization.3

It was Them and Us with a vengeance now; the sweet freaks andchildren of nature up against the angry proprietor whose only thoughtwas to drive them all away and sell the empty house for a fat sum. Amelancholy change. Or, as some would say, no change at all, butsimply the true situation no longer disguised by kindly pretences fromboth sides.4

It is necessary to begin by mapping the most prominent features of a landscape of

the problematics and the degree to which they are interconnected.

In The Spirit of Terrorism, an unsettling book which began as an unsettling

article in Le Monde, written shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the

United States, Jean Baudrillard invokes aspects of his earlier work on the

“spectacle” and links these with the spectacular nature of contemporary terrorism:

“The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us”.5 Yet,

Baudrillard agrees that what is really at stake in the historic present is globalization

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and the machinery of antagonism that moves in tandem with it. In an interview with

Der Spiegel magazine, Baudrillard suggested that “[t]he immanent mania of

globalization generates madness, just as an unstable society produces delinquents

and psychopaths”. He also noted that any expressions of madness – such as

terrorism – are merely “symptoms of the sickness”.6 For Baudrillard, the terror acts

of September 11 were not only self-referentializing, they were a succinct expression

of the self-destructive nature of the modernist enterprise.

The Spirit of Terrorism provides a sharp perspective on otherized terrorism

in an age of a mediatized globalization. Indeed, while globalization has fast become

liberated from the limits of traditional geography, it has nevertheless intercepted,

with a kind of primal immediacy, new geographies of power – new dynamics of “us” /

”other”-centric terrorism. Baudrillard’s primary argument in The Spirit of Terrorism

revolves around the issue of the global media7 and its far-reaching network – the

“virtual space of the global”, “the space of the screen and the network, of

immanence and the digital, of a dimensionless space-time”.8 Baudrillard points a

finger in the direction of the media industry, accusing it of contributing to the

deepening banality of our always problematic relation to “reality” (which is an

increasingly mechanized relationship). Baudrillard strong disapproves of “the

planetary ascendancy of a single power and a single way of thinking”,9 elaborating

on his view that the U.S. (and, for that matter, its media culture), operating with a

superpower template, dominates the globe, and creates a world of disgruntled

“others.” It serves as grounds to present a revitalized supplement: that the

standardization enacted by a US centered globalization constructs terrains of

erasure and – programmatic – resistance along the way:

To understand the hatred the rest of the world feels towards the West,perspectives must be reversed. The hatred expressed at the West bynon-Westerners is not that of a people from whom everything hasbeen taken. It is the hatred of those who have received everything, buthave never been allowed to give anything back. This is not the hatredof the dispossessed or exploited, but that of a humiliation – of thosewho can give nothing in return. It is this symbolic understanding thatexplains the attacks of September 11, 2001 – acts of humiliationresponding to another humiliation.10

Globalization seeks to subsume and manipulate the spaces of otherness by

invoking the vocabularies of completeness and total control impossible without the

extensive globalist paraphernalia. Even more, it aids the construction of media


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power which in turn is necessary for contemporary terrorism to take place. On the

one hand, terrorism reaches out to touch the self-conscious aspect of the times –

the ocular which it frees to become entangled in the spectacular. Thus, one can

safely say that much of terrorism represents the permanent tension between the

gods of modernity and the demons of globalization, a cataclysmic fissure standing

astride the liminal boundaries of the factual and the counterfactual. On the other

hand, terrorism floats to the surface as both a resistance to and an exchange of

power11 – the power of an overwhelming globalism.

The particular globalization in question is one with credentials that virtually

eclipse difference and cultural individuality. Given this setting, another kind of power

materializes: one that shakes the foundation of everything that is “modern.” Indeed,

terrorism is undeniably a blunt assertion of this kind of power: it is the repudiation of

an “us” centric modernity. Terrorism is power that makes its case known in diverse

ways. At this juncture, questions arise: Are we witnessing Anthony Giddens’ vision

of a "radicalized modernity"12 now fully ripened, coming to play? Is this radicalist

fabrication responsible for the apocalyptic quality of terrorism, for its virulent

hostility? Are the terrorists not modern(ized) themselves, even though they position

themselves against the West and Western modernity?13

It is interesting that the 9/11 terrorists harnessed the power of globalization

and modernity – airplanes, the Internet, and the mass media – to create terror

spectacles. Yet, that they used modern methods to spatialize their own brand of

hyperpower and to launch a sacrificial missile, is another source of widespread

amazement. Indeed, contemporary terror spatialization is not the age-old kind of

spatiality in which power circled about in a kind of monocular confinement; this kind

makes a critical engagement with the globalist orbit of flows, with speed. The

actions of terrorists lend credibility to the idea that this is a world in which speed

seduces us with its “sweet” fruit. On the one hand, speed links with telepresence; on

the other, speed is the progeny of technologization. Interestingly, speed facilitates

among others the increased “derealization” of everyday life14, and it coincides with

the trend for massive terroristic visions. Paul Virilio has examined the intermeshed

nature of the political economy of speed and instantaneity, information technologies,

and the situation of a “lawless globalism”,15 in which telepresence assumes

preeminence over real presence and the “chronopolitics of instantaneity”16 become


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the order of the day.

How then, does a human thinker and writer live and write in such times?

How does one find the concepts to begin to comprehend the fragmentary and

volatile world we inhabit but barely know as we once thought we did? How does one

think not only with but beyond the horizon over which Baudrillard’s increasingly

fragmentary texts disappear? How, in short, does one think and write in this state of

permanent weightlessness which ultimately leaves one with a nauseating feeling at

the prospect of the loss of human imagination:

We are going to end up looking for imagination in places further andfurther from power… Among the excluded, the immigrants, thehomeless. But that will really take a lot of imagination because they,who no longer even have an image, are themselves the by-products ofa whole society’s loss of imagination, of the loss of any socialimagination. And this is indeed the point. We shall soon see it is nouse trying to locate the imagination somewhere. Quite simply, becausethere no longer is any. The day this becomes patently obvious, thevague collective disappointment hanging over us today will become amassive sickening feeling.17

Set within the context of the above mapping of intertwined problematics, this

paper explores the systemic connections between the myriad issues encompassing

globalization, mediatization,18 and terrorism. These are also discussed in The Spirit

of Terrorism. I make several references to this book as I attempt to both experience

and extend Baudrillard’s thought. Specifically I attempt to think/write my way

through three main things: 1) A desire to do an ontologization of the present that

challenges conventional ontologies and previous imaginations of the mediatized

world order; 2) A desire to map the vague contours of a theoretical construction I

tentatively term “the ImMEDIAte Spectacle” and, 3) through this fragmentary lens,

survey the linkages between globalization, the media, the singularization of culture,

and terrorism. As such, I give consideration to the questions: what does terrorism

have to do with globalization? Is globalization “image power”, seduction, an

experience, a condition, a mantra? Or is it merely a smokescreen for totalizing

systems of mediatized dogma, for strengthening a hegemonic globalist culture that

not only destroys the basis of multiculturalism but also provokes terrorist violence?

This leads me to explore the ways in which the ImMEDIAte Spectacle produces

what I call the “hollowity” effect. This is also a jagged and as yet unpolished lens for

viewing however partially, that which is difficult to name and which I am motivated to

understand by two things: 1) A suspicion of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle and, 2) the


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tendency of this spectacle to homogenize culture and thus sideline the values and

mores of “minor” cultural systems. It is my view that both the ImMEDIAte Spectacle

and the problem of hollowity have great implications for terrorism, considering that

much of the condition is the product of a disjuncture, the impossibility of an

“exchange” between “us” and the “other.” While I am aware of the “sickening

feeling” Baudrillard describes, and which is growing more widespread with each

passing moment, I am not yet ready to sacrifice the imagination and its possibilities.

II. Mapping the ImMEDIAte Spectacle

In what has been labeled the new world order, the digitalization and

virtualization of the spaces of being through a high-powered globalization, are

foreshadowed new cloning effects. As techno-modernity strengthens its reach with

mechanical efficiency, the subtexts of global communication overlap with

socioeconomic forces, becoming radical in a no-nonsense, communicative way,

hybridizing the institutions of pure representations and the holographs of

audiovisualism. This is the world of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle, where the manifold

forces of cultural globalization take delight in mono-coloring hitherto multicolored

spaces – in a rush of televisual enthusiasm – with the peculiar gray paint I term

“postscriptomodernsity”.19 Moreover, we can further look to Baudrillard who had

earlier insisted that we are witnessing the ecstasy of communication. And this

ecstasy is obscene. Obscene is that which illuminates the gaze, the image and

every representation. Obscenity is not confined to sexuality, because today there is

a pornography of information and communication, a pornography of circuits and

networks, of functions and objects in their legibility, availability, regulation, forced

signification, capacity to perform, connection, polyvalence, and their free

expression. It is no longer the obscenity of the hidden, the repressed, the obscure,

but that of the visible, all-too-visible, the more visible than visible; it is the obscenity

of that which no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and

communication.20

To properly outline the ImMEDIAte Spectacle we should establish its

linkages with mediatization and communication. In James Carey's formulation,

communication can be seen in a dialectical fashion, encompassing the

"transmission view" and the "ritual view". The transmission view, the type prevalent


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in Western societies, is one in which media act as transmission channels that

convey information from one locale to another, into the minds of the end users by

the way of psychic transfer, where it can decide behavior, creating a similar horizon

of meaning. The ritual view conceives the transmission process of information via

the media as the systematic construction of a common social system, thus evoking

terms such as "'commonness', 'communion', 'community', and 'communication’".21

As such, the mass media, by creating a pattern of communicative intermeshing,

establish processes through which the world is mediatized. As Lars Qvortrup

succinctly puts it: "The world is not 'constructed', but 'formatted' by the mass media.

‘Our' world, i.e., the world we accept as our common world as citizens, is not

'reality', but the mass media's reality".22 Hence, we do not own the media – it owns

us. The increasing mediatization of the global cultural landscape is almost an

entirely American project of globalization and it is no surprise that in this context the

reciprocity between the cultures of "us" and "them" is like that of the python

swallowing the hare, to borrow Benjamin Barber's expression.23 In an increasingly

hyperreal world, mediatization reflects a duality: first, the communication of a

particular cultural set and – as a consequence – the construction of a membrane

around the "other" culture; and secondly, its spectacularization. Yet, the scandal of

the detail lies in between the spaces of the mediatized and the spaces of the

spectacularized.

At this point, Baudrillard’s musings on the subject make for pensive

consideration. Indeed, his views on the role of the media in formulating the

globalized world are indivisibly connected to those he holds about simulations and

simulacra. Baudrillard reasons that in this new stage of history, society is not only

marked by the dyadic experiences of implosion and hyperreality – all boundaries

are eradicated by the overwhelming power of technology. In Baudrillard’s

conceptualization the mass media are “obscene”, designed to ensnare people in a

seductive and manipulative world of simulacra where the boundaries between the

spectacle and the real disintegrate, where even interpersonal and intercultural

relations become increasingly “telegenetically modified”.24 And as such, the masses

are dominated by a perverted kind of "reality" – a reality rendered “dissuasive”25 –

reduced to apparently passive spectators – albeit in an ironic and dissuaded

manner as “silent majorities”.26

Baudrillard sees culture and the electronic media, especially television, as


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being not only instruments of modernity but, as a consequence, of manipulation and

domination. For him, both are capable of representing reality and for this reason

able to produce an ample range of effects on the personal and social scenes,

especially since they are involved in the constitution of a rather benumbing politics

of everyday life. However, the media transcend the orbit of mere representation and

move into the realm of the hyperreal, where “reality” loses meaning. And as the

media camouflage reality, information/ communication ends up totally neutralized,

rendered meaningless. “The loss of meaning,” Baudrillard writes:

…is directly linked to the dissolving and dissuasive action ofinformation, the media, and the mass media. …Information devours itsown contents; it devours communication and the social …informationdissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading…to total entropy.27

But what is new here? In The Perfect Crime Baudrillard28 makes generous

use of the ideas of simulation, hyperreality, and implosion to explicate his thoughts

on a new order that feeds on the power of image-ination to create and perpetuate a

false consciousness of reality. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard opined that

systemic nihilism and the mass media are responsible for the postmodern human

condition, which he describes as comprising elements of “fascination,” “melancholy,”

and “indifference”.29 Baudrillard is indeed famous for his concern with the process

by which human beings create symbols and en-liven signs and images – graphical

representations for communicating a specific perception of reality. In The Consumer

Society, on the other hand, Baudrillard writes: “Like violence, all forms of seduction

and narcissism are laid down in advance by models produced industrially by the

mass media and composed of identifiable signs”.30 With this, the increasingly

deterritorialized nature of global space means that hegemonies of a “global” culture

can, like wandering ivy, transcend national spaces, to become emplaced fixities,

disharmonized from actuality. So, terrorist violence can exploit “the ‘real time’ of

images, their instantaneous worldwide transmission”31 and draw attention by

focusing on the power of “mass fascination”32 with real time images, the ilk of what

Virilio terms “the art of the lie – a series of manipulations of appearances, tricks and,

in some cases, a tissue of absurdities”.33

For Baudrillard, the ascendancy and “violence” of the image signifies the

concealment – even annihilation – of the real, since the real is a manufactured


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product. “The image…is violent because what happens there is the murder of the

Real, the vanishing point of reality”.34 An image, of course, can attach a picture –

however warped – to a name or a word and render non-organic wholes of disjointed

subjects. Baudrillard suggests the neutralization of reality through the

displacement/destruction of meaning: ours is a world where information increases

substantially, but not at the same pace with meaning. So much, then, for the

dynamics of meaning; utterly at odds with explicit recognition, it saps the existential

force of its own elements. It has thus become clear that “where we think that

information produces meaning, the opposite occurs”.35 This is an order

fundamentally illusory, ephemeral, and meaningless because information is

dictated, valorized and sensationalized by the ImMEDIAte Spectacle.

Yet, the ImMEDIAte Spectacle masks the reality about the power of

globalization to dishevel. By affiliating with the dazzling impulses of a romanticized

informative order in this seductive – and no less gaudy – culture, we have become

oblivious to the real. As we celebrate the death of reality, we are left – face-to-face –

with an ecstatic hyperrealism, with a regime of jouissance in which the spectacle

continues to fascinate but in a strangely absorbing way. Take for instance, the

cinematically spectacular effect of 9/11 which would have been meaningless without

the media.

It is said that without the media there would be no terrorism. And it istrue that terrorism does not exist in itself as an original political act: it isthe hostage of the media, just as they are hostage to it. There is noend to this chain of blackmail – everyone is the hostage of the other:this is the end of our so called ‘social’ relation. Besides, there isanother factor behind all of this, which is something like the womb ofthis circular blackmail: the masses, without which there would beneither media nor terrorism.36

From a Baudrillardian position, the 9/11 event was, for the most part, a pure

moment of acceleration: globalization’s clash with terroristic vision, an apocalyptic

surrealism, a chaotic transference, a humiliation in response to a humiliation. In a

related stance, Slavoj Zizek argues that the destruction of the World Trade Center,

presented by the media in a movie-type spectacle symbolizes the destruction of an

image – that of globalization.37 For Jacques Derrida, 9/11 was a kind of mirage, a

mirage of “absolute terror”.38 Manuel Castells also suggested that the terrorists were

able to bring about “media-conveyed humiliation of the imperial power of the United

States”.39 For Douglas Kellner, 9/11 was a terror spectacle that "was partly a


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symbolic event, traumatizing many who experienced it live, or on television, and

sending out a message that the U.S. was vulnerable to terror attack".40 In the flurry

of 9/11 the universal domain of the media, unarguably, morphed into the universe of

terrorism waged between "them" and "us". But the condition has now been reversed

to depict a battle between "us" and "them".

The contemporary age is haunted by spirits, spirits of terrorism that make life

fragile and the future less predictable, even spectral. Indeed, globalization has

problematized effectively our perceptions of the subject of “terrorism,” creating new

languages that speak unspoken realities, codifying new assemblages of domination

and virtualizing the exalted constituents of modern liberties. The lifeblood of the new

world order and the leitmotif of a cantankerous and volatile modernity, globalization

is constructing the “other” against an approved “us”, tearing sensibilities apart and

brewing new questions that demand brutally honest answers. The spirit of terrorism

is twin to the spirit of globalization, and sadly it is the spirit of “us.” A complicated

affair, terrorism has proven to be a corporeal extrusion, a sweeping idiosyncrasy

inflicted in episodic moments from the brazen realm of virtuality. Terrorism takes

advantage of the mediatization of the modern self to launch its attack while it “puts

finishing touches to the orgy of power, liberation, flows and calculation … while

being the violent deconstruction of that extreme form of efficiency and hegemony”.41

It should be added that the sinister legacies of 9/11 are a vicious rejoinder to the

voyeurism of an overly feisty ImMEDIAte Spectacle through which we are

perpetually kidnapped by audiovisual tendrils that control thought and action, and

through unrealities are inscribed upon the global landscape with sheer artistry. In

this hyperreal world of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle reality becomes icing without the

cake.

Terrorism thus follows at once the trajectories of neo-liberal globalization

and the culture of a neo-quotidian logic, igniting feverish streams performativity of

colossal absurdity, and exploding the non-effect of reality, of indifference. In the

archetypal Baudrillardian parlance the argument is that terrorism is a manifestation

of globalization’s attack on itself, given the reality in contemporary capitalism, linked

to the fantastic spectacle of wealth, which shames those on the downward slope of

the economic hill. In actuality, therefore, terrorism is not only contingent upon the

politics of maneuvering social space by capital but upon global disjunctions and the


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annihilation of reality in a world increasingly characterized by an aggressive media

constantly manipulating the global citizenry toward mediatized deliriums. As

Baudrillard dutifully reminds us, terrorists cannot unleash massive action like that of

9/11 without the enhancements that come from “technological efficiency”.42 And so,

“[i]n a sense, the entire system, by its internal fragility, lent [terrorism] a helping

hand”.43 The system, Baudrillard argues, is responsible for the “brutal retaliation”44

that terrorism characterizes. Furthermore, the dogmatic machinery is controlled by

avatars living in the matrix of global society that refuses to search out the root

causes of “terrorism.” It is one that can distort and misrepresent the “other” – (e.g.,

every Muslim is a terrorist, every Arab is a fanatic, etc.) – and control the rhythm of

public opinion through images. And this is not a restless telos of depersonalization

that rejects the uncanonized; it is a standard puzzle-solving tendency without a

puzzle to unravel. But, of course, this is far from emancipatory and not without

dangerous consequences.

Because the globalist media culture has succeeded to a large extent in

knocking down the multiscaped spaces of difference, it has ultimately engendered a

certain kind of multi-scalar local-global efficiency that springs from the very heart of

what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri term “Empire”.45 Hardt and Negri’s analysis

passes through deterritorialization seeking a vision of reterritorialization, restating

the question of the local-global in a renewed way. This local-global presencing

creates what Stuart Hall has termed a “web of global commitments”46 and its politics

brings to the fore platforms imbued with the power of communications systems,

techno-capital, and planetary absorptivity. The media circuit constantly expands in

range and runs a conspicuous webopolis47, an arrangement representing newer

constellations of networks, mediatized practices, cultural forms and practices that

contextualize a vague but no less powerful sense of hyperreality. This takes us to

the problem of radical cultural denigration and hollowity.

III. Hollowity As Product of ImMEDIAte Spectacle

To discuss the condition of hollowity we must first draw attention to what I

term “radical cultural denigration", the culturally sublimated context from which

hollowity evolves. The ImMEDIAte Spectacle contributes to the production of this

condition, which includes the “synthetic banality” Baudrillard writes of.48 The basic


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issue is that radical cultural denigration acts as the conduit for direct cultural

disarticulation and contempt, and is therefore prone to bring about ferocious

resistance. In this case, the beholder gropes in the eye of the beauty, left to wander

in a void in which the superimposed is recreated in its own image and "ugliness"

and is then left to mutate. A calculus of fragmentation, still ongoing and assuming a

clairvoyant stance, globalization’s radical cultural denigration showcases the

absurdity of modernity’s impersonality, the meaningless minutiae of the brazenly

meretricious. By effecting a seizure of presence, the regressive immediatism of

radical cultural denigration conflates with globalization to sweep “away all

differences and all values, bringing into being an entirely in-different culture”.49 I

would add that as a climactic requirement for indoctrination into the higher echelons

of global surrealism, radical cultural denigration fuels globalization’s final leap into

the trivial space of hollowity. Yet, having produced itself as the very propellant of

derealization, radical cultural denigration has to generate alternative components of

reality, new authors, different representatives that influence the roots of political

power, knowledge, and social outlook. With this process at work, a residual space is

created: the space where the absolute energy of the global triangulates to form a

kind of enclosure – what I would like to call the globalist pericardium. This space

encapsulates the infosphere in a process enabled by the ImMEDIAte Spectacle,

and produces, in real time, the hollowity effect.

The perfect omnipresence – the seductive effect of technologization and its

political, spatial, and technological geometries – hollowity is at once its own

apparatus and repudiation. This signals to a large extent the fact that hollowity is the

condition where our relationship to technology is opened up to the spatiality and

materiality of seduction: “Everything is seduction and nothing but seduction.” As

Baudrillard further puts it, seduction is a kind of death, death to reality and the

reconstitution of oneself into an illusion.50 In this seductive milieu, spatial

relationships are created between “us” and “other” but socially constructed to be

meaningless. Hollowity is the vulgarity of seduction gone berserk, significantly

situated in the antagonism of the monocultural, in the world of its immediacy. The

opus of appearance, hollowity flourishes in a soil fertilized by the rays of the

ImMEDIAte Spectacle. It usurps power at every scale – from the body to the global,

penetrating every sense. Yet, insofar as hollowity and seduction both spy on and

conspire against themselves, they do influence terrorists to seize upon the


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surroundings of a megalomaniacal culture in which domination alone is the most

probable source of fury – the most probable source of power. And, as Baudrillard

puts it, “the increase in the power of power heightens the will to destroy it”.51

Aside from being driven by a unilateral excessivism and designed to gain

global attention such as when it invokes the “spirit of terrorism”, hollowity speaks the

postmodernistic language of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle. Singed into spectatoral

reality and irradiating through a constricted passage of information, hollowity reflects

the ceaseless salience of an ever more extravagant media industry in scripting and

shaping social life with an absolute slow motion, residing outside the horizon of

meaning. Hollowity is because it is the manifestation of meaninglessness;

meaninglessness is, too, because it travels through mediatized thinness and

flattens into a plain of singularity where noncommunication then echoes

resoundingly. Hollowity thus reflects the seductive tension between meaning and

non-meaning, a state of uncertainty where “nobody ... is completely taken in: the

news is experienced as an ambiance, a service, a hologram of the social. The

masses respond to the simulation of meaning with a kind of reverse simulation; they

respond to dissuasion with disaffection, and to illusions with an enigmatic belief”.52

Within the domain of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle hollowity becomes a tool, viciously

systematized and customized for greater forms in a new, shockingly charged way

for the “webopolites”.53 The webopolites, in this case, are a globalized and

non-globalized populace equipped or unequipped to relish the hollowity of a

maximum culture that thins out everything else, propagating a tepid view of the

world – one pulled by the strings of neoliberalism in a deterritorialized, yet

omnipresent control.

I want to suggest further that hollowity functions in such a way as to reveal

the excesses of an ambivalent mode of self-reflexivity, to reveal an almost psychic

fixation with a hegemonized model of “otherization” that is simulated by the culture

of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle. Moreover, the opaque complexity of hollowity takes an

unavoidably self-serving, self-conscious form, actuated with the audience ordered

around it and functioning to the extent that the noncommunicating potential of the

media is intact. In many ways, hollowity makes its engagement with the social,

cultural, and political apparatuses of this narcissistic fixity, becoming representative

in an autopoetic way of a public culture that is idolized to the point of frenzy.


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Through this social totalization, the chilling effect of hollowity is foreground precisely

in the fetishistic impulses of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle, projecting a referentiality of

singularity from the circulatory machinery of the media. With the hollowity effect in

place, we find a lot of room for questioning the very values that the global

celebrates, for reflecting great suspicion about the primacy given to a singular and

exulted signifier. But this is the paradox: being inside and outside its magnetic pull,

yet to view it with a disinterested, critical eye. To make this claim is to call into view

the structural balance between the articulated and the silent, in both public and

private.

The product of local-global spatial logic characterized by a visible-invisible

continuum, hollowity is fragmented by center-power in a pull that makes (image)

power a totalizing exemplar, a fortified, non-corporeal internationality. It is within this

space that we must give consideration to the abnormality of the blatantly residual, to

the visually “pornographic” localization of the global, and the globalization of the

local – all through the media. But the ImMEDIAte Spectacle is not serendipitous;

rather, it is a brazenly optic illusion machine that is purely projective rather than

reflective. Take for instance the “pornographic” images beamed across the world

from the Abu Ghraib prison. Referring to them, Baudrillard suggested that 9/11

ended up becoming a front for humiliating and dehumanizing those on the other

side of imperial power. For Baudrillard, the pictures reflecting Iraqi prisoner abuse,

was an “obscene banality”, a “banal degradation”.54 It also depicted the hollow

nature of global culture and the sounds that move with it – as those who live by the

image perished by it.55 And this kind of projecto-dominance requires, essentially,

projecting the ImMEDIAte Spectacle unto the wanton plane of indivisibilities where

terrorism becomes localized. Whilst terrorism may be a fragmented question, it is an

ontological malaise, connected to and regulated by the tropes of the spectacle, the

electronic community, vis-à-vis a global image-ination and the maxims of sacred

habitation. In the place of normal social situatedness, reality is defined in terms of

systemic penetrations, in terms of audiovisual circulations, manufacturing a network

of spaces, the hegemony of the social arena, an immanent realm crisscrossed by a

horde of “legitimated” representations where radical cultural denigration results in

terrorism.

Finally, hollowity is a perpetual agent for objectifying, willy-nilly, the cycle of


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the ImMEDIAte Spectacle – a cycle in which we are all caught up, its motion

producing a symptomatic impulse, an abstract insufficiency, a prevailing effect

immersed in the river of the ethereal. In this spatially closed process, the

ImMEDIAte Spectacle becomes “effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior” with

the “tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized

mediations".56 As hollowity enmeshes diverse elements of the complex, the

resultant “complexity” can only be managed by more complexity – hypercomplexity

– to draw from the well of Lars Qvortrup.57 Because of the hollowity effect,

Webopolites are subjected to forces that congeal in the brutal universe of the media,

to metabolic hypertrophies. Indeed, by violently asserting the monstrously spooky

nature of the global, hollowity brings about a hyper-transformation, sautéing

together narcissism, individualism, and “magicalism” to consume reality, aware of

itself as such.58 The extraordinary process of hollowity thus leaves behind a

cognitive compression, a thicket for commandeering globalization, or, for globalizing

chaos, because hollowity forces unreality to be dispensed in a real way, compelling

a hypercomplex openness to “the vertiginous seduction of a dying system”.59

IV. Conclusion

It is difficult to disagree with McKenzie Wark’s assertion that “[o]urs is a

world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed".60 In this world,

where nothing is determined but “everything is antagonistic”,61 new realities make

for re-envisioning – new realities like terrorism. I am particularly inclined to entertain

a view that sees the modernist terroristic vision as the product of a "victorious"

globalization, as a struggle between the ability to transcend the lure of perception

and the possibility of reconfiguring consciousness. Yet, as much as terrorism is a

multi-layered phenomenon resisting any simplistic definition, it is easy to see that it

may in fact be a violent metaphor for all that is wrong with cultural homogenization,

with a globalized culture that has played a major role in permeating and organizing

everyday cultural life. Indeed, as Baudrillard captures it, “[w]e can no longer draw a

demarcation around [terrorism]. It is at the very heart of [the] culture which combats

it”.62 Clearly, as the infosphere continues to be aggressed and disarticulated by the

potent vitalism of the omniscient gaze of the global, terrorism becomes a validation,

bearing the signatures of radical cultural denigration and hollowity at its interior.


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Given an alibi by “globalization” for illuminating the horrors of exclusionism,

terrorism – the dark innards of a regime of proto-conscious subordination – hovers

like a ghost above our horizon, expanding the matrix of violence.

The argument therefore against the globalization of American norms – or

“modernization” – and its mediatization is no doubt against the classical separation

it fosters between “civilized” and “barbaric” cultures. From the point of view of the

media, almost everything can be reduced to a question of how modern or how

civilized – and as an implication, how globalized – we are. And this raises alongside

the conjoined issues of otherness and otherization, the rocky road of globalization

that makes the ride anything but smooth. The “other” in the globalization discourse,

we must note, is the faceless, focalized, and fatalized, purely irrational – if not

inhuman – person who materializes out of the mixing bowl, out of the relativizing

culture of the West. But effectively, “what we deem fatal … is the Other’s sovereign

otherness with respect to us”.63

True, in the heavily mediatized order of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle, the

simplistic singularizing paradigm of otherization births the debasement of diversity.

But at the same time the "other" does not exist as "an object of passion but an

object of production. Maybe it is because the Other, in his radical otherness

[alterite], or in his irreducible singularity, has become dangerous or unbearable".64

Moving in tandem with a marginalist consciousness bites deeply, otherization allows

for the feeling of being lost, being submerged in spectacles; as such, it is the

surprising fatality of “the Other’s sovereign otherness with respect to us. The

otherness which erupts into our life, with stunning clarity”.65 Indeed, the globalization

of the singular and its wanton ingredients coalesce to form an overarching

knowledge, a “social bond,” that indoctrinates us deeper into the web of

simulacrum, into Webopolis. In a swirling system of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle –

where praxis is no longer a question of what really is but how we are – the power of

cultural and mental homogenization, media saturation and subtle effacement snuffs

out the reality of the “other.”

In all of its illusoriness the ImMEDIAte Spectacle remaps “us”/”other”-ness

via the mainstreaming of images and symbols in an archetypal, yet paradoxical

arena empowered by communications technology. Because the ImMEDIAte

Spectacle is a vagabond, a synthesia of words, images, motion pictures and


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sounds, a vacuum of seduction and fascination, it traps individuals into this systemic

plasticity, into the luxurious sensuality of delusion. And the end-result is the

pervasive of all that is non-Western in the face of a “victorious” global. The

multitudes, it seems, must blend into One, enculturated into a dominant mode of

being. Where this does not occur, we are couched in an atmosphere of sympathy

that is disconnected from reality. A sympathetic aura that absolves the guilty one of

every sense of blameworthiness, and instead proclaims its innocence as well as its

impotence.66

It is no wonder Susan Sontag attempts to make us realize that true spaces

of safety require something that is, if you will, extra-violence – a movement from

violence as the scepter for dispensing vengeance in return for violence.67 Perhaps a

recall to a multicultural view of the world? The first step toward achieving this,

Sontag has identified, is becoming sensitive to the pain of others, because no

particular group of people’s pain – or even pleasure – is superior to that of others.

The essence of this new awakening to multiculturalism is the “multi” aspect of the

word. It is a reprocessing of the modalities of culture so it can have multiple and free

expression – like the die having more than one face – over a de-mediatized global

space. Following this understanding then, globalization ought not to displace, in a

disappearing act, cultural differentiation.

But as it stands, multicultural image-ination remains a fictive project,

unequipped to integrate disjointed visions, having no meaning except the meaning

of meaninglessness, embodying the formless form of formlessness. Baudrillard

points to the rapid proliferation of “singularities” such as religion and cultural power,

as the basis for the new wave of terrorism. On the whole these singularities emerge

as potent forces and platforms for radicalized resistance to the ImMEDIAte

Spectacle, employing gingerly the methods of globalization to fight globalization.

Fundamentally, terrorists denounce the swallowing power of an ImMEDIAte

Spectacle diffusing a destructive presence that sensualizes the cold realities of

modernity, enfolding the world into a fake caucus of existence through which

terrorism can explode. By and large, these terrorists quibble with the endangering of

cultural identity and relevance. Their acerbic activities infiltrate our cozy system of

sounds, images, and illusions, bringing about a virulent shaking to exemplars of

reality that rake the stakes in the society of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle.68 The


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manifestations of a hyperreal order measurable by the heightened level of its

“hyper-egoism”?69 Or the humdrum of hollowity, stewed by the techno-

mechanization of audiovisualism, penetrating the fortresses of our life-worlds and

transformed into a seedy but glamorous fetishism? The answer certainly comes at a

stiff price even if it is just a smidgen of what remains beneath waiting to be mined.

Still, it is only reasonable to recognize contemporary terrorism as the

historico-social product of the media, of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle. In Baudrillard’s

words:

The media make themselves into the vehicle of the moralcondemnation of terrorism and of the explosion of fear for politicalends, but simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, theypropagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselvesterrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction.70

The historical aspect is virulent and it brings to mind Deleuze and Guattari who state

that "history today still designates only the set of conditions, however recent they

may be, from which one turns away in order to become".71 A logical consideration

of becoming thereof is how mediatization creates impulses for the construction of

terrorism: how it fashions “the syndrome of confinement”,72 how audiovisualized

singularities precipitate new focalities of “us”-ness that incapacitate the possibility of

broad spaces of pluralisms, and engender a flat-out insistence on closure, on

re-producing globalization’s “other”. But a “conquest” of mediatized otherness can

be achieved through a sort of soul-cleansing that rethinks cultural production,

cultural hierarchy, and cultural power emanating from the media, and to expose the

rotten core of much of what constitutes modernity, a “project” that literally carves out

the lived reality of the “other”.

As long as the entire world remains caught up in the banality of the

ImMEDIAte Spectacle, awash in its ostentatious and omnivariate orbit of flows and

dichotomized (read: “us” vs. “them”), terrorism has no looming finality. The difficulty

arises, Baudrillard suggests, because “[b]y seizing all the cards for itself, [the

system] forced the Other to change the rules. And the new rules are fierce ones,

because the stakes are fierce”.73 Given this setting, a new world of less terrorism is

possible to the extent that the widest concern is for affinities with the axes of

connection and difference, with a revitalization of every component of the whole

human spectrum. Even in the face of the incredulity of the hyperreal, in an


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ontologically insecure universe of the ImMEDIAte Spectacle where the effects of

“hollowity” are deeply felt, there remains the experience of freedom, albeit in a

permanent weightlessness. In doing so we can terrorize our own ineptitude and

enjoy the sensations that come from reconceptualizing the Manichean dialectic of

the spaces of “us” and “them”. Perhaps, this requires an overturning of the problem

Baudrillard has labeled the “excess of reality”?74 For now, we attempt to think and

write against the tide.

Akinbola E. Akinwumi is a graduate student and writer in Lagos, Nigeria. Hisrecent investigations explore interconnections between critical social/cultural theoryand various critical geographies.

Endnotes

1 Globalization, the media and the "media spectacle" are intrinsic to the formation of the ImMEDIAteSpectacle. The ImMEDIAte Spectacle is a labyrinth of a repertoire of presences, a proto-consciousness, properly exterior to a culture of seduction, of illusion, of disorder enveloping us atgreat speed in mediated real-time. This spectacle not only transmits meanings between people, itshapes meaning and has a colonizing effect on the future, as it is of overriding influence on bothculture and values. In my conception “hollowity” is the state of hollowness that develops as thespaces of globalism taper at the end, compressed by a kind of existential paucity wreaked by acomplicit and seductive system of mediatization that fully strangulates reality. This condition enlargesviciously – mystified and purloined by publicity – but discloses very little. And it is inseparable froman existence that is increasingly fragmented, homogenized, and concentric.

2 Jacques Derrida in Giovanna Borradori. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with JürgenHabermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003:123.

3 Jean Baudrillard. “Violence of the Global.” Ctheory.net. See: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385 .

4 Philip Toynbee. Part of a Journey. London: Collins, 1981:230.

5 Jean Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism. London: Verso, 2002:30.

6 Jean Baudrillard. “This is the Fourth World War: Der Spiegel, Number 3, 2002.

7 Here, I am more concerned with the audiovisual media – television, the Internet, and film.

8 Jean Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso, 2002:92.

9 Ibid.:51.

10 Jean Baudrillard. “Terrorism: Our Society’s Judgment and Punishment”. Selected translation fromJean Baudrillard. “La Violence du Mondial” In Power Inferno. Paris: Editions Galilée, 2002:62-83.Forthcoming in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 3, Number 2 (July 2006).Translated by Laura Nyssola.

An English translation of the original chapter is available as “The Violence of the Global” atCtheory.net (Translated by François Debrix). See: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385. A shorter translation is also available as: “The Despair of Having Everything” in Le MondeDiplomatique, November 2002. See: http://mondediplo.com/2202/11/12despair (Translated byLuke Sandford).

11 For more on the exchange of power see Jean Baudrillard. For A Critique of the Political Economyof the Sign. Translated with an Introduction by Charles Levin. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981.


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12 Anthony Giddens. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.

13 For another discussion of this point see: Mike Grimshaw. Religion, Terror and the End of thePostmodern: Rethinking the Responses. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 3,Number 1 (January 2006): http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_1/grimshaw.htm

Mohammed Atta, who flew an aircraft into one of the World Trade Center towers, made his flightbooking on the website of American Airlines. Some of the others made their bookings viaTravelocity.com. See Vincent Mosco. “Capitalism’s Chernobyl? From Ground Zero to Cyberspace andBack Again.” In Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in theTwenty-first Century. Edited by Andrew Calabrese and Colin Sparks. Lanham, MD: Rowman andLittlefield, 2004:211-227.

Editor’s Note: As Baudrillard points out:

...a new terrorism has come into being, a new form of action which plays the game,and lays hold of the rules of the game, solely with the aim of disrupting it. ... they have taken over all the weapons of the dominant power. Money and stock-market speculation, computer technology and aeronautics, spectacle and the medianetworks – they have similated everything of modernity and globalism, withoutchanging their goal, which is to destroy that power. ...Suicidal terrorism was aterrorism of the poor. This is a terrorism of the rich. This is what particularly frightensus: the fact that they have become rich (they have all the necessary resources)without ceasing to wish to destroy us (The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso,2002:19, 23).

14 As Virilio has noted, reality has lost out to “virtuality” and “ubiquity”. Certainly, “reality in all itsforms is being threatened now, more than ever. It is being eroded and it is washing away in thedeforming storm of nonreality, which masquerades as reality and which will eventually replace it if wedo not take appropriate steps” (C. Priest. eXistenZ. New York: HarperCollins, 1999:190).

15 Paul Virilio. A Landscape of Events. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000:92.

16 Paul Virilio. Ground Zero. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002:25, 49, 31.

17 Jean Baudrillard. “TV Fantasies”, Liberation, (June 3, 1996) In Screened Out. New York: Verso,2002:190.

18 Generally, the term “mediatization” refers to “the impact of the logic and form of any mediuminvolved in the communication process” (David L. Altheide. "The Elusive Mass Media." Politics, Culture,and Society. Volume 2, Number 3, Spring. 1989:416).

19 “Postscriptomodernsity” is an assemblage of the fusing of postscript, modernity, and density. Postscriptomodernsity is characterized by the penury and melancholy of information andcommunication denseness and realized in an overbearingly pompous modern era marked byoutwardly inchoate visions but positioned to constantly revise itself, to add new layers of meaningsthat are supra-textual but largely exclusionary in nature.

20 Jean Baudrillard. The Ecstasy of Communication (c1987). Translated by Bernard and CarolineSchutze. Edited by Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988:22.

21 James W. Carey. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin andHyman, 1989:18.

22 Lars Qvortrup. The Hypercomplex Society. New York: Lang, 2003:155.

23 Benjamin Barber. “Disneyfication that Impoverishes Us All.” The Independent, Week End Review,29 August 1998:7.

24 Jean Baudrillard. “Dust Breeding.” Ctheory.net. See: www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=293.

25 Jean Baudrillard. Illusion of the End (c1992). Translated by Chris Turner. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1994:27.

26 See: Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities …Or, The End of the Social And OtherEssays. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983:19-30.

27 Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadows of the Silent Majorities. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983:96-100.


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28 Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. London: Verso, 1996.

29 Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation (c1981). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1994.

30 Jean Baudrillard. The Consumer Society (c1970). Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso,1998:96.


32 Ibid.:29.

33 Paul Virilio. Ground Zero. New York, Verso, 2002:67.

34 Jean Baudrillard. “The Violence of the Image”. (n.d.) http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-violence-of-the-image.html

35 Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan, 1994:80. Seealso Victoria Grace. “Baudrillard and the Meaning of Meaning.” International Journal of BaudrillardStudies, Volume 1, Number 1, January 2004. http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/grace.htm.

36 Jean Baudrillard. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski.New York: Semiotext(e), 1990:44.

37 Slavoj Zizek. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso,2002..

38 Jacques Derrida in Giovanna Borradori. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with JürgenHabermas and Jacques Derrida Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003:98-9.

39 Manuel Castells. The Power of Identity. Second Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004:140.

40 Douglas Kellner. Media Spectacle. New York: Routledge, 2003:53.


42 Ibid.:8.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.:9.

45 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

46 Stuart Hall. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity”, in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender,Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Edited by A. McClintock, A. Mufti, and E. Shohat. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1997:174.

47 Webopolis is the synthetic but no less charming cornucopia energized by the ImMEDIAteSpectacle, though not in the sense of a cause-and-effect. It binds together people of diverse originsin a powerful and passionate form of complexity, uniting them through the highly evolved andsensuous language of technology.

48 Jean Baudrillard. “Dust Breeding.” Ctheory.net www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=293

49 Jean Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso, 2002:91. For more along the line ofdestruction of old forms by technological progress, see F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson. Cultureand Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (c1932). London: Chatto and Windus, 1942:3).

50 Jean Baudrillard. Seduction. Montreal : New World Perspectives Press, 1990:41.

51 Jean Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso, 2002:6-7. Much more can be said ofBaudrillard’s concept of seduction and these processes but it is better left as the subject of anotherpaper.

52 Jean Baudrillard. Seduction Montreal: New World Perspectives Press, 1990:63.


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53 Citizens of Webopolis.

54 Douglas Kellner. “Baudrillard, Globalization and Terrorism: Some Comments on Recent

Adventures of the Image and Spectacle on the Occasion of Baudrillard’s 75th Birthday.” InternationalJournal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 1, January 2005. http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/kellner.htm.

55 See also: Jean Baudrillard. War Porn. Translated by Paul Taylor. International Journal of BaudrillardStudies. Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2005): http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/taylor.htm

56 Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle (c1967). Detroit: Black & Red, 1983. Paragraph 18.

57 Lars Qvortrup. The Hypercomplex Society.

58 Magicalism is a highly ocular-centric phenomenon that takes up specialized space in the terrain ofthe mind. And it can be explained by referring the reader to the idea of magic: in this case, aconditioned act characterized by spectacular occurrences that cannot be easily grappled by thenon-specialist but whose effect is nonetheless captivating, seductive, even intimidating. In The Spirit ofTerrorism, Baudrillard also recognizes the revelatory and amplificatory power of the magical: hecontrasts, for instance, the “white” magic of the cinematic with the “black” one of the terroristic (JeanBaudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso, 2002:29-30).

59 Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1994:154.

60 McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,2004. As Baudrillard has also noted: “As in the film 2001, we are journeying into space, with thecomputer monitoring us”. (“The Anorexic Ruins” in Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (Editors).Looking Back on the End of the World. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989:39.

61 Jean Baudrillard. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski.New York: Semiotext(e), 1990:162..


63 Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (c1990). Translatedby James Benedict. New York: Verso, 1993:174.

64 Jean Baudrillard. “Plastic Surgery for the Other.” Ctheory.net: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=75.

65 Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. New York: Verso,1993:174.

66 Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003.

67 Ibid.

68 A reinvention of the title of Guy Debord’s magnanimous text Society of the Spectacle.

69 “Hyper-egoism” is a term used by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist in Netocracy: The New PowerElite and Life After Capitalism. London: Reuters, 2002:107.

70 Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation (c1981). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1994:84.

71 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? London: Verso, 1994:96.

72 Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer. Crepuscular Dawn. Translated by Mike Taormina. New York:Semiotext(e), 2002:75.


74 Ibid.:104.


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akinwumi - the banality of the immediate spectacle

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