War and Jean Baudrillard’s Dilemma: Die or Disappear?
Is Zelensky's position on the war the same as that of the majority of the Ukrainian people? Riccardo Ruggeri's Cameo
I've always thought that only those who want to live can talk fluently about death. Of course, theirs. In my case this is the case, but first I forced myself to resolve Jean Baudrillard's dilemma: to die or to disappear?
He had dissolved it: "Dying is useless, you have to learn to disappear". He wrote a book about it: “The Indifferent Parossist” 1997 . (Note. The "paroxiton", whose Latin equivalent is the penultimate, characterizes in prosody the syllable that precedes the last. The paroxysm would therefore be the penultimate moment, which is not that of the end, but the one immediately before the end. Physically Baudrillard will die ten years later).
INFORMATION PROBLEMS
In the year he dies, I enter the (magical) world of information-communication. I am 73 years old. So that there are no doubts, I immediately put my hands forward, dictating my apota motto, which I will then take up again for Twitter: "As an editor-writer I live in the "interstices", I dream of readers who want to get informed, certainly not follow my ideas, worse, strengthen their biases".
At that moment I discovered two things:
- there is no good and bad information-communication;
- I had arrived in this curious world at the moment when the media began their process of self-destruction. How? They destroyed events, thus destroying themselves as an event.
Would that have been the beginning of the end? In the years to come, the decline of information-communication will accentuate, up to the current configuration of "neither true nor false". That is, to the final box, the one where the lie no longer exists.
If advertising and surveys are neither true nor false, information-communication suddenly loses its dimension, so it can only become fluctuating. It means that it becomes an interstitial virus, and with the play of its viral variants, you author, you reader, lose all your certainties, up to the confusion of roles. And you lie flat out when you involve (mythical) science, because you know science is Socratic or it isn't. Worse, it is an extremist when in doubt, it finds solutions, but considers them as hypotheses until they are definitively confirmed. Above all, he is never arrogant, as are his current kapos who govern us.
This is why I never wanted to write or talk about Covid or the war. Because the information was (is) interstitial, therefore unreliable. They spread as if they were true, of course, some are, some are not, sometimes they are denied (if they really have to!), but by now it's too late.
That information will never again be false, because for a time it was (almost) true. Above all believable. This is one of the foundations (of Baudrillard) on which information-communication rests at the time of CEO capitalism . Unlike "truth", "credibility" cannot be refuted, because it is virtual. As Baudrillard said "The space between the true and the false is no longer a relational space, but a space of random distribution".
WHAT DO UKRAINIANS THINK ABOUT WAR?
This being the case, having by now (as long as it lasts) an unlimited availability of time, I will continue with the work that I have invented for myself: "artisan scenario designer". A wonderful profession, where everything is staked on the so-called initial assumptions . My reference scenario is defined, it is that of 2033 reported in the Book incipit The Third World War by Gordon Comstock (I take the liberty of recommending it) and from which I draw inspiration.
Sensing that we are close to the final decision, I started working on Scenario 7 of the Ukrainian War. I have identified as an assumption that of Volodymir Zelens'kyj's speech at the end of 2022. It is an exciting document, in seventeen minutes an impeccable leader-actor recites an impeccable text. Is this the position of the majority of the Ukrainian people? Or out the invader or death? For my Scenario 7, I assume it is.
Then the move is up to the other actors. The Russians, and their boss Vladimir Putin, technically defeated on the field, must decide: 1. retreat? 2 push the fatal button? 3 Shooting for a living? And, in cascade, China, the United States, Europe, Italy, depending on the Ukrainian and Russian decision, must decide.
It would be nice for individual peoples to decide, but it won't be like this: the Leaders will decide. Melancholy, I return to my work as an "artisan scenario designer".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/guerra-dilemma-jean-baudrillard/ on Sun, 15 Jan 2023 06:15:57 +0000.