Politics and the Possibility of War:
Merleau-Ponty and Baudrillard
by Chris Nagel
Department of Philosophy
California State University, Stanislaus
801 W. Monte Vista Ave.
Turlock, CA 95382
Hector. By what peculiar vagary did the world choose to place its mirror in this obtuse head? Jean Giraudoux, La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, (English translation: Tiger at the Gates)(1)
Helen. It's most regrettable, obviously. But can you see any way of defeating the obstinacy of a mirror?
Hector. Yes. I've been considering that for the past several minutes.
Helen. If you break the mirror, will what is reflected in it cease to exist?
Hector. That is the whole question.
In the Preface to Sense and Non-Sense, Merleau-Ponty gives paradoxical expression to his understanding of reason as a characteristic of being-in-the-world. Because reason is worldly, because it undergoes events, it is intelligible to say that authors could have "expressed the revolt of life's immediacy against reason."(2) But while human actions and expressions interrogate challenge, or threaten worldly reason, it remains true that all our actions show that "the world is, in principle, in harmony with itself." (SNS, 3) The human situation is in this specific way ambiguous: "born into reason as into language," we nevertheless experience "unreason" which we must not forget as we "form a new idea of reason." (SNS, 3)
If the paradox of the lived experience of reason and unreason is to be taken seriously, reason re-formed can not simply be the opposite of unreason. The revolt of immediate life does not force us to choose between the rational and the irrational, or the rational and the actual. If it were a matter of choosing between reason and unreason, the paradox would dissolve. If instead, as Hegel said, the rational is the actual and the actual rational, it seems to follow that immediacy and unreason must make a difference to reason, must leave reason changed somehow. In "The War Has Taken Place," Merleau-Ponty embraces this Hegelian notion of actual events making a difference to reason,(3) and works towards a new idea of reason through an account of the revolt against reason produced in war. As he explains, the war "takes place" not merely as a set of brute events simply opposed to reason, but as an expression of a challenge for worldly reason. If war is an experience of unreason, it fully takes place only when this challenge is accounted for in a new formation of reason. In other words, an effort of reconstitution or reconstruction is needed - an action that will restore "harmony." MMerleau-Ponty's essay contributes to this constitution of the meaning of war, and to the renewal of reason.
Following this logic, Jean Baudrillard's essays regarding the use of force against Iraq by US and British forces in January and February of 1991 would be difficult to interpret. They certainly seem to be an expression of the events, yet Baudrillard insists, as his title announces, that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. How should we read these essays, in light of Merleau-Ponty's understanding of worldly reason and the event of war? How can this interrogation of events of unreason fail to be an expression of their meaning? What does it mean to claim that a war did not take place?
Though it may strain us or the texts to do so, I would like to suggest reading Merleau-Ponty together with Baudrillard.(4) On the basis of the interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's essay I will develop below, Baudrillard's essays would appear to express a meaning of the Gulf War despite his apparent intent. If so, what Baudrillard's essays suggest is profoundly unsettling, namely, that hyperreal war cancels out the possibility of war as a revolt against reason. Reading Merleau-Ponty and Baudrillard together in this way challenges us to consider whether war is still possible, whether events - no matter the degree of violence - can still challenge worldly reason, and if not, whether worldly reason, human action and politics, have also become impossible. In provoking this consideration, I do not mean to settle the issue. But I do think that this provocation focuses attention on Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the constant human, political task of forming a new idea of reason. It raises the question: What does it mean to claim that a war has taken place?
Reason, Unreason, Politics: "The War Has Taken Place"
Merleau-Ponty characterizes a way of life prior to World War II's intercession of unreason as the life of a "solitary Cartesian," or simply "consciousness" (SNS, 145). Before the war, for such a consciousness, "politics seemed unthinkable ... because it treats men as statistics, and we saw no sense in treating these unique beings, each of whom is a world unto himself, according to a set of general rules and as a collection of interchangeable objects. Politics is impossible from the perspective of consciousness" (SNS 145). Indeed, politics is unthinkable for Cartesian consciousness, for whom politics would be useless for advancing right or reason. From a purely rational perspective, the establishment of the absolute value of freedom (to take Merleau-Ponty's example) is achieved by conscious intention. If war is politics by other means, it would appear doubly absurd to consciousness. Since politics is unnecessary and useless for the freedom espoused by Cartesianism, war as a means of politics would demand unnecessary and useless sacrifices and atrocities. Thus the "solitary Cartesian" thinks that "there is only one evil, war itself, and one duty, refusing to believe in victories of right and civilization and putting an end to war" (SNS 145f). The absurdity and evil of war is self-evident to reason.
Yet even the rational beings Merleau-Ponty and his colleagues were ultimately could not ignore the contradictions posed to them by the worldly situation, and as Merleau-Ponty writes, "the moment came when our inner-most being felt the impact of these external absurdities" (SNS 145). At that moment, "events kept making it less and less probable that peace could be maintained"(SNS 139), Merleau-Ponty writes. Rational consciousness finally came face to face with unreason, and through this encounter faced the necessity of action; specifically, the events of unreason came to demand political action. In this context, Merleau-Ponty claims, a pacifist had no right to denounce England's role in starting the war (SNS 145). The judgment of the pure evil of war that would have been obvious to Cartesian consciousness was no longer valid.
This is not to argue that those caught up in the war should be skeptical of the value of freedom or give up on understanding fellow human beings as unique individuals. Merleau-Ponty asserts that what was of value in 1939 remained of value in 1945. The significance of the event of unreason was not the overturning of reason, but a recognition of the necessity of politics for the sake of reason and value. Because no one can escape from history, because no one is a pure consciousness, Merleau-Ponty writes, "[n]o effective freedom exists without some power. Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it"(SNS 148).
If we interpret these as the 'lessons' of war, they seem to be the result of a reflective reconstruction of events as meanings. But Merleau-Ponty says something slightly different: "There are not two histories, one true and the other empirical; there is only one, in which everything that happens plays a part, if one only knows how to interpret it" (SNS 149). Taking war as a form of "the revolt of life's immediacy against reason" which we must not forget in forming our new idea of reason suggests that history encompasses both the events of war and the events of interpretation, both unreason and reason. There are not two separate spheres, of pure events and of pure accounts. There is only the one history that no one can escape without at the same time leaving the world behind, and with it the possibility of genuine valuing and real freedom. The formation of a new idea of reason is impelled by events, and events are the enactments of forms of reason.
In short, war is not an unmotivated and utterly irrational outburst to be controlled through rational means. Because war is a human activity and because human activity, as Sonia Kruks writes, "cannot avoid expressing reason since it is human," (1981, 54) we must conclude that war is a result of rational human historical action. Yet to say that the war has taken place is to say that politics has erupted in the direction of unreason, that unreason and reason have met, and in that unforgettable event lies the possibility and the necessity of re-forming reason itself. War is one way reason undergoes an experience of unreason that is necessary for reason to become worldly, or real. If so, it would appear likewise true that the possibility of war taking place is founded on the activity of reason made real, that is, history and politics.
Simulation, Hyperreality, the Absence of Politics: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
At first it appears absurd even to entertain the notion that the Gulf War did not take place, in the face of the actual killing of Iraqis by allied US and British forces. Of course, Baudrillard did not deny that hostilities occurred, and indeed numbers the Iraqi dead (GW, 72). If we insist in the face of this evidence that the war did not take place, we could be denying that it took place as a war, in one of a number of possible senses: that the political will and moral righteousness claimed in declarations of war were absent, or that the war was so one-sided, or so ideologically perverse, as not to deserve to be called a war. We could also mean that the events of the war occurred, but were made to disappear as such, only to reappear in the seductive shape of a media presentation.
Comparing Baudrillard's essays to their nominal cousin, Merleau-Ponty's "The War Has Taken Place," suggests something different, in my view. Just as Merleau-Ponty does not seem to mean his reflections on World War II and the sense of the events leading to it and following after it in France to apply only to that particular time and place, Baudrillard's essays likewise seem to have a broader goal. I take them as suggestive of an inquiry into the impossibility of war, where war is understood as an event of unreason to be remembered in our new idea of reason. It is the meaning-producing or reason-expressing transcendent intersubjective act that Baudrillard's essays show to be missing, not as though through a simple evasion of responsibility, but through its having been rendered unnecessary (the hyperreality of the war having been prefabricated) and through its lack of a medium (the media presenting the events having been absorbed in the hyperreal).
Baudrillard begins "The Gulf War Will Not Take Place" with a sentence reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty's: "From the beginning, we knew that this war would never happen." (GW, 23)(5) War, Baudrillard asserts, has entered a "definitive crisis," (GW, 23) lacking strategy and action, yet this is not yet widely understood:
The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual, according to which no available weapon will not one day be used and such a concentration of force cannot but lead to conflict. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual. (GW, 27)
The Gulf War, the "non-war," proceeds at that point by way of intoxication, anaesthesia, or induced belief: deterrence of action is its chief weapon.
Prior to the first bombing sorties, this could almost be literally true, but Baudrillard did not retreat from this position even after the air raids began. "The Gulf War - Is It Really Taking Place?" begins by comparing the war to an advertising campaign for GARAP, "whose product never became known, " and by claiming the war is "pure and speculative." (GW, 29) Certainly this claim refers to the promotion of the war on CNN, as a media event. CNN's presentation of the Gulf War resembled nothing so much as a video game,(6) and we may recall reporters displaying the cockpit training mock-ups and VR flight simulators. But the hyperreality of the war was not limited to its representation on CNN; events themselves had been overtaken by the non-war, "the absence of politics pursued by other means." (GW, 30) Institutions, both intellectual and political, have become "confused in explanations." "Their war-processors, their radars, their lasers, and their screens render the passage to war as futile and impossible as the use of a word-processor renders futile and impossible the passage to the act of writing, because it removes from it in advance any dramatic uncertainty." (GW, 34)(7)
Uncertainty is necessary for war to threaten worldly reason or to arise as an event that demands politically meaningful action in response. This does not mean merely that something unforeseen must happen or that a calculation or an aim must be off the mark. What is important here are the stakes risked in the prosecution of the battle. What would be risked in real war is, in a certain sense, the political meaning of the war - that is, a claim of reason.(8) Where nothing is risked, the events demand nothing, threaten nothing. One form of non-war, in which worldly reason is put out of play, occurs through electronic mediation. Baudrillard suggests that the electronic mediation of the war expresses a will to avoid risk; that will, rather than the success or failure of the efforts of mediation themselves, is what defines the Gulf War as a non-war.
Similarly, the use of decoys exemplifies the general effort to prevent the war from taking place.(9) Decoys are as important to the war industry as placebos are for medicine or counterfeits are for art and culture. They are important products in an age of industrial deception. But peculiarly, this culture which "labors assiduously at its counterfeit... no longer harbors any illusion about itself" (GW, 43).(10)
Baudrillard explains this point further in reference to a line of Brecht's:
... [T]his war is not a war, but this is compensated for by the fact that information is not information either. Thus everything is in order. If this war had not been a war and the images had been real images, there would have been a problem. For in that case the non-war would have appeared for what it is: a scandal. Similarly, if the war had been a real war and the information had not been information, this non-information would have appeared for what it is: a scandal. In both cases, there would have been a problem (GW, 81).
There is no problem, because the war has been swallowed like a placebo we know is a placebo. The deception does not deceive us, because we never believed in it - neither in its effects, nor in the symptoms it would have given the semblance of curing.
The War Against Terrorism Will Not Take Place
In Baudrillard's account of the non-war there is a curious sort of Cartesianism. We could call it a methodological deception - a procedure whereby we allow ourselves to be deceived not because we believe in the deception, but in order to seek a foundation for it. Merleau-Ponty had written that it was for Cartesian or pure Marxist consciousness to deny the reality of war. At work in this abstract consciousness is a disembodiment, a virtualization of historical events which cannot take the events themselves seriously. Reason thus purified of all events has somehow deceived itself about the necessity of historical contingency, that is, the menace of unreason.
Still more has happened, according to this reading of Baudrillard. Purified reason's self-deception is no longer a deception, because we no longer believe reason's claims; we recognize that it's a placebo. The non-war no longer faces us with the necessity of forming a new idea of reason, because there is no longer an urgency for an idea of reason (nor of its presentation of value or freedom). Reason has become unworldly; events with the power to menace no longer take place. Politics - the encounter between reason and unreason - no longer has a means, not even recourse to war.
How could this have happened? Baudrillard's essays are often read as making an empirical claim (at least implicitly) that there has been a fundamental transformation of society, located temporally (albeit roughly) in the last half of the 20th century. Could an historical event be responsible for canceling out the significance of historical events? Could a rational decision be made to revoke the claims of reason, and hence the claims of unreason? If Baudrillard is correct, or if what he writes is intelligible, isn't his writing it performatively contradictory? Or should we not take him, or the Gulf War, seriously? Or is he straightforwardly wrong, as it seemed already at first?
Merleau-Ponty's essay explains that the possibility of war is founded on the actualization of reason through history and politics. The determination of the political will to value freedom is an empty determination, unless it takes place through the transformation of a given historical context which is also a given historical form of reason. In politics, not the will, but the actuality of freedom is at stake. This meaning of the world proposed by reason does not become the meaning of the world without producing a real alteration of historical conditions. Those conditions are "non-sense" or "unreason" in that they obtain without the benefit of rational purpose. Political events take place as reason meets this unreason.
It is implied in Baudrillard's essays that the impossibility of war is founded on the virtualization or de-actualization (hyper-realization) of reason through history and politics. I do not believe this overturns Merleau-Ponty's understanding of reason, unreason, history and politics - in fact, it can be explained in terms of Merleau-Ponty's view. Baudrillard's position could be explained as giving an account of events that exploit an unchallenged establishment of a given form of worldly reason. Such events would fail to take place as an encounter between reason and unreason, because they pose no threat or propose no transformation. In that case, on both accounts taken together, we are left with a perplexing and disturbing possibility: that along with war, politics has ceased taking place.
Until recently, it has seemed that the situation we find ourselves in no longer sustains the encounter between reason and unreason through which reason becomes actualized. The institutions and relations of the political instantiation of this encounter continued to operate but did not permit the encounter to take place.(11) For instance: a public relations firm arranged for and coached testimony to the US Congress under the guise of "Citizens for a Free Kuwait."(12) Borrowing the general technique of media - simulation - the firm was able to provide an ideological grounding that did not need to be believed in order to be effective, since the conclusion of the committee was already predetermined. The simulation of ideology followed from the simulacral character of the committee itself.
No doubt this was a consensual hallucination, thoroughly enjoyed by many. But beyond the issue of the audience's consent, it appears that the historical event of war indeed did not take place, in the sense given this notion in the essays by Merleau-Ponty and Baudrillard, because in the non-war reason was not set against unreason. Nothing was really settled.(13) I believe this means that it is true for everyone that the Gulf War did not take place - even for its victims. No disregard of their suffering is meant here; instead, I think we should note the general level at which the non-war is a simulation: not at the level of the undeniable - and for Baudrillard undenied - bombings and deaths. "Desert Storm" was not a dissimulation - at least, not a successful dissimulation - foisted upon the CNN television audience. It was a simulation, produced through the conduct of attacks and official appearances already mediated by multiple technical sign systems - always already a television show.
Ten years later, another television show has presented us the new form of non-war. The perversely telegenic special effects of terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon exemplify the virtual war in Baudrillard's sense: the ascendancy of mediation and telecommunication over combat between rational claims about the shape of the world and history. For this reason, terrorism seems to work by means of inarticulation: An unfathomable hatred enacts unintelligible violence to undermine an unaware enemy. This is an illusion; there is no more clearly communicative message than a terrorist attack. For who could miss the symbolism of the targets and the medium of the message? Apparently aimed from thousands of miles away, simulacra of missiles struck at images, obliterated images, produced images, mimicked images, precipitated a grotesque play of images.
Rather than threaten or propose a shape of reason, terrorism attaches itself symbiotically to an established political order and meaning in the world. It does not threaten that established political order; it does not threaten the given shape of reason; it does not pose unreason against reason; it is not irrational. Terrorism operates entirely within a given shape of reason which it must leave intact or lose its power to terrorize. Once again, the given shape of reason is not risked.
Declaring a war against terrorism sends its own message: that there is only one evil, terrorism itself, and one duty, refusing to believe in challenges to a given shape of right and civilization, and putting an end to terrorism. As a result, fighting and winning such a "war" would only maintain the given shape of reason as the condition for the possibility of terrorism, and would therefore be a lost cause at the precise moment of victory. Only virtual war can restore an unchanged order, prevent transformation and maintain the status quo. Yet again, such a virtual war would only maintain the conditions for terrorism, by restoring its field of operation.
Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. by Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1995). Cited in text as GW.
-- , La guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu (Paris: �ditions Galil�e, 1991).
Clausewitz, Carl von, On War, trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton U. P, 1976).
Kruks, Sonia, The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1981).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern U. P., 1964). Cited in text as SNS
Whiteside, Kerry, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1988).
1. In Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics, Kerry Whiteside explains that Merleau-Ponty's essay "The War Has Taken Place" draws its title from Giraudoux's 1935 play (41).
2. The French text has "... la r�volte de la vie imm�diate contre la raison."
3. Whiteside writes that "Merleau-Ponty portrays the war as a process of Hegelian Bildung." (40)
4. There are reasons beyond the titles of the essays to do so. Most significantly, both Merleau-Ponty and Baudrillard seem to adopt versions of Clausewitz's definition of war as "politics by other means."
5. The French text has "D�s le d�but, on savait que cette guerre n'existerait pas." ( 9) It might be argued that this implies something different from the war never happening, but it seems to me that Baudrillard's use of the terms "real" and "exist" coincide with his usage of "take place" in the Gulf war essays, so that taking "exist" as a synonym of "happen" is acceptable.
6. Jeff Greenfield, on ABC News, January 23, 1991. Cited in Smart, Barry, "Europe/America: Baudrillard's Fatal Comparison," in Rojek, Chris and Bryan S. Turner, Forget Baudrillard? (New York: Routledge, 1993) p. 64.
7. Clausewitz claims that "No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance." In addition, chance is a necessary condition for the possibility of forms of courage: "Daring,... boldness, trusting in luck are only variants of courage, and all these traits of character seek their proper element - chance." (On War, pp. 85f)
8. Clausewitz defines war as politics "with the addition of other means" in Book Six of On War, "because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs." (op cit., p. 605)
9. Much of the mainstream press reported on the military use of decoys. See, e.g., U.S. News and World Report, Triumph without Victory (New York: Times Books, 1992), p. 223.
10. It is easy to become confused by Baudrillard's use of the terms "simulation" and "illusion" in reference to "deception." Often a Marxist "false consciousness" or psychoanalytic "denial" approach is taken to his terms, but Rex Butler has argued that this conflates the actually opposed notions of simulation and illusion. Butler explains that simulation is a process of realization that covers over the illusion of the world - or in short that Baudrillard should be read more like Nietzsche than Marx or Freud. Butler quotes the following passage from an interview with Baudrillard conducted by Anne Laurent:
... I would like to go towards a sort of Manichaeism. If you start from the idea that the world is a total illusion, then life, thought, become absolutely unbearable. So you have to make every effort to materialize this world, realize it, in order to escape from this total illusion. And the 'realizing' of the world, through science and technology, is precisely what simulation is - the exorcism of the terror of illusion by the most sophisticated means of 'the realization of the world'. And so it's illusion against simulacre, the only system of defence that men have found to avoid confronting this illusion. ("This Beer Isn't a Beer: Interview with Anne Laurent" in Mike Gane, ed., Baudrillard Live: Selected interviews (London, NY: Routledge, 1993) p. 184)
Baudrillard could be interpreted here to suggest that simulacra and the process of simulation are a means of recovering from a Cartesian gambit - a theme I will develop briefly below. Cf. Richard J. Lane, Jean Baudrillard (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 83-101; also Albert Borgmann, "The Artificial and the Real: Reflections on Baudrillard's America," in Stearns, William and William Chaloupka, eds., Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), pp. 160-176.
11. In a different context (regarding allegations that John Tower had handed out defense contracts to friends that became a discussion of his drinking habits during his Confirmation hearing to become Secretary of Defense), Steven E. Alford remarks on the institution's operation: "This is politics? Or is this yet another example of a system that has lost sight of its function, and instead allowed itself to be purchased by the television networks?" Review essay of Jean Baudrillard's America, available online: http://www.polaris.nova.edu/~alford/lectures/baud.html.
12. Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 67f, cited in Paul Patton's introduction to the English translation of The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 11f.
13. Yet again, press accounts support what might appear to be another outrageous factual error on Baudrillard's part. The U.S. News and World Report account explains that Saudi King Fahd and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak both pressed for Saddam Hussein to be left intact as dictator in Iraq, as they preferred Hussein, a Sunni, to a likely Shiite successor. See, e.g., U.S. News and World Report, Triumph without Victory (New York: Times Books, 1992), p. 395. Meanwhile, polls conducted by the mainstream press suggested a strong public will to continue the war until Hussein was removed from power, as reported in Mueller, John, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), Chapter 8 and pp. 276ff.