When the forces of Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the result was very nearly bloodless. The real blood began to be spilled only during the Occupation. When an international coalition retaliated by striking back, the result may not have been quite as swift or as bloodless, but it was pretty close. While hostilities from both wars were going on, Jean Baudrillard was paying attention in a way that few others must have been doing. To him, both wars were not wars at all, at least not in the traditional Clausewitzean sense. Most societies envisioned war as brutal and bloody, causing much harm to a great many combatants and non-combatants. In the case of the Gulf War, Baudrillard insists that the calculus of war had changed in a fundamental way. The difference lay in the interaction between the media and the opposing armies. Before hostilities had even begun, both sides had run innumerable computer simulations of pertinent variables. By changing one variable, one outcome emerged. By changing another, a newer outcome resulted. These outcomes looked real and sounded real to those writing the programming. A variable reality was created that could not be distinguished from the eventual real thing. It is this relentless focus on the creation of simulacra that had been the obsession of Baudrillard for nearly twenty years.
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is a slim volume of three essays that were published over a three month period as separate pieces for a French newspaper Libération and a British newspaper The Guardian. The original title of each is telling. The first was "The Gulf War Will not Take Place." The second: "The Gulf War is not Really Taking Place." The third: "The Gulf War did not Take Place." All three collectively insist that this war was a phony war, but not to be confused with the German Sitzkrieg in France in 1940. In that war real soldiers simply sat around for months waiting for orders to shoot. In this war, there was real shooting all right. Real people were killed and many buildings were blown up. So how dare Baudrillard defame and dishonor the dead on both sides by calling the "war" no more than a Playstation computer run? His response: there was a "real" war but real in a new sense. From start to finish, from the first shot to the last, the Gulf War was pre-planned right down to a paper clip. Things ran so smoothly that even the Joint Chiefs were amazed. War rarely co-operates by being predictable. But in this case it was. The images of the fighting were sent in real time to America's television sets by CNN. The reality of the fighting precisely coalesced into what Baudrillard termed the simulacra of war. It looked much more savage than it was. From this delving into a war once removed from reality, Baudrillard called it a non-event. Many critics objected, thinking that by "non-event" he meant a hoax. But Baudrillard had a motivation that transcended semantic distinctions. For him, he wished to publicize the Dawn of a New Day, one that had long been in existence but only now paradoxically were the images of a false reality emerging from the shadows of an all too real entrenched apathy. In his earlier books, Baudrillard had described how signs had slowly begun disconnecting from their moorings. The image of a thing now was thought to exist in its own right. The "copy" was now indistinguishable from the "original." The next step would have to be hyper-reality, a mad universe where the inhabitants do not question their existence or their surroundings, nor should they since they are pursuing their lives just as if the hyper-real were truly real. It is this fear that humanity has already come perilously close to this insane world that motivated Baudrillard to write The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
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anne savage
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place as performance art
Reviewed in Canada on May 1, 2015
