| by contrast, today's
virtual global culture has replaced universal concepts with screens,
networks, immanence, numbers, and a space-time continuum without any
depth.[4] in the universal, there was still room for a natural
reference to the world, the body, or the past. there was a sort of
dialectical tension or critical movement that found its materiality
in historical and revolutionary violence. but the expulsion of this
critical negativity opened the door to another form of violence, the
violence of the global. this new violence is characterized by the
supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization,
integral circulation, and the equivalence of all exchanges. |
|
additionally, the violence of the global puts an end to the social
role of the intellectual (an idea tied to the enlightenment and
universalization), but also to the role of the activist whose fate
used to be tied to the ideas of critical opposition and historical
violence.
is globalization fatal? sometimes cultures other than ours were able
to escape the fatality of the indifferent exchange. but when it became realized in the global,
it disappeared as an idea, it committed suicide, and it vanished as
an end in itself. since humanity is now its own immanence, after
taking over the place left by a dead god, the human has become the
only mode of reference and it is sovereign. |
| but this humanity no
longer has any finality. free from its former enemies, humanity now
has to create enemies from within, which in fact produces a wide
variety of inhuman metastases.
this is precisely where the violence of the global comes from. it is
the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and
singularity, including of course death as the ultimate form of
singularity. it is the violence of a society where conflict is
forbidden, where death is not allowed. it is a violence that, in a
sense, puts an end to violence itself, and strives to establish a
world where anything related to the natural must disappear (whether
it is in the body, sex, birth, or death). |
| better than a global
violence, we should call it a global virulence. this form of violence
is indeed viral. it moves by contagion, proceeds by chain reaction,
and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our
capacities to resist. globalization has not completely won.
against such a dissolving and homogenizing power, heterogeneous
forces -- not just different but clearly antagonistic ones -- are
rising everywhere. behind the increasingly strong reactions to
globalization, and the social and political forms of resistance to
the global, we find more than simply nostalgic expressions of
negation. we find instead a crushing revisionism vis-a-vis
modernity and progress, a rejection not only of the global
techno-structure, but also of the mental system of globalization,
which assumes a principle of equivalence between all cultures. this
kind of reaction can take some violent, abnormal, and irrational
aspects, at least they can be perceived as violent, abnormal, and
irrational from the perspective of our traditional enlightened ways
of thinking. |
| this reaction can take collective ethnic, religious, and
linguistic forms. but it can also take the form of individual
emotional outbursts or neuroses even. in any case, it would be a
mistake to berate those reactions as simply populist, archaic, or
even terrorist. everything that has the quality of event these days
is engaged against the abstract universality of the global,[5] and
this also includes islam's own opposition to western values (it is
because islam is the most forceful contestation of those values that
it is today considered to be the west's number one enemy).
who can defeat the global system? certainly not the
anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow down
global deregulation. this movement's political impact may well be
important. but its symbolic impact is worthless. this movement's
opposition is nothing more than an internal matter that the dominant
system can easily keep under control. |
positive alternatives cannot
defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither
positive nor negative can. singularities are not alternatives. they
represent a different symbolic order. they do not abide by value
judgments or political realities.
they cannot be regularized" by means of a collective historical
action. yet they do
not present themselves as a unique counter-thought. simply, they
create their own game and impose their own rules. not all
singularities are violent. some linguistic, artistic, corporeal, or
cultural singularities are quite subtle. but others, like terrorism,
can be violent. the singularity of terrorism avenges the
singularities of those cultures that paid the price of the imposition
of a unique global power with their own extinction. |
|
we are really not talking about a clash of civilizations" here, but
instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an
undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in
whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity. from the
perspective of global power (as fundamentalist in its beliefs as any
religious orthodoxy), any mode of difference and singularity is
heresy. singular forces only have the choice of joining the global
system (by will or by force) or perishing. the mission of the west
(or rather the former west, since it lost its own values a long time
ago) is to use all available means to subjugate every culture to the
brutal principle of cultural equivalence. |
| once a culture has lost its
values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. beyond
their political or economic objectives, wars such as the one in
afghanistan [7] aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the
territories. the goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to
colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both
geographically and mentally.
the establishment of a global system is the result of an intense
jealousy. it is the jealousy of an indifferent and low-definition
culture against cultures with definition, of disenchanted
and de-intensified system against high intensity cultural
environments, and of de-sacralized society against sacrificial
forms. according to dominant system, any reactionary form is
virtually terrorist. (according to logic we could even say that
natural catastrophes are of too. major technological
accidents, like , are a act and a
disaster. the toxic gas leak in , india, another technological
accident, could also have been a act.. .. |
| gene blackwell raytheon |