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U.S. manufacturing sector grew in May led by a rebound in new orders, albeit marginal, that led to faster growth in production and employment, final data from the purchasing managers' survey by S&P Global showed Monday.

The seasonally adjusted S&P Global US Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index rose to 51.3 in May from the 50.0 no-change mark in April.

The latest surveys by S&P Global reveal an American economy firing on all cylinders in June, with robust activity and cooling inflation creating a goldilocks environment, giving the Fed more leeway to cut interest rates.

S&P Global Purchasing Managers' Indices (PMIs) For June: Key Highlights

Broadly shared economic prosperity is a bedrock of America’s economic and political strength—both domestically and in the international arena. A strong and equitable recovery from the economic crisis created by COVID-19 would be a powerful testament to the resilience of the American system and its ability to create prosperity at a time of seismic change and persistent global crisis. Such a recovery could attack the profound economic inequities that have developed over the past several decades. Without bold action to help all workers access good jobs as the economy returns, the United States risks undermining the legitimacy of its institutions and its international standing. The outcome will be a key determinant of America’s national security for years to come. An equitable recovery requires a national commitment to help all workers obtain good jobs—particularly the two-thirds of adults without a bachelor’s degree and people of color who have been most affected by the crisis and were denied opportunity before it. As the nation engages in a historic debate about how to accelerate economic recovery, ambitious public investment is necessary to put Americans back to work with dignity and opportunity. We need an intentional effort to make sure that the jobs that come back are good jobs with decent wages, benefits, and mobility and to empower workers to access these opportunities in a profoundly changed labor market. To achieve these goals, American policy makers need to establish job growth strategies that address urgent public needs through major programs in green energy, infrastructure, and health. Alongside these job growth strategies, we need to recognize and develop the talents of workers by creating an adult learning system that meets workers’ needs and develops skills for the digital economy. The national security community must lend its support to this cause. And as it does so, it can bring home the lessons from the advances made in these areas in other countries, particularly our European allies, and consider this a realm of international cooperation and international engagement.

Shared Economic Prosperity Is a National Security Asset

While giants in technology and multinational corporations often capture the public’s attention, it’s small businesses that form the crux of the American economy. As we step into 2024, these businesses continue to evolve, reflecting not only their enduring role in job creation but also their significant contributions to innovation, economic dynamism and the country’s overall prosperity. The latest small business statistics for 2024 do more than just present a snapshot of the current state of affairs; they offer a window into the emerging trends and future directions.

Small Business Employment Statistics

Small business owners are feeling more confident about their businesses despite today’s inflation, according to The Q2 MetLife and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index. In fact, the index score has now hit its highest score since 2019. Joining us on the latest episode of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Update to discuss this further is Tom Sullivan, the Vice President of Small Business Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Key Takeaways

This article has illuminated ways in which emphases on the political potencies of language have brought about a variety of problems for the critical efficacies of poststructuralist political thought in the context of the global expanse of neoliberal capital. It initiated an original dialogue between two poststructuralist authors and raised this to a second engagement with current debates over the crises of critical thought and, by extension, carries contemporary relevance as well. As I have sought to argue, both authors deliver on a vision of radicalized autonomy through linguistic creativity that bears great similarity to and continuity with modern visions of the agonistic play of autonomies that have been integral to liberal conceptions of civil society and negative liberty. With Delanty (2000: 148), then, their work becomes representative of a deep entanglement of modern and postmodern thought in that “what liberalism and postmodernism share is a strong privatism and a skepticism about the possibility of universal validity and of foundations.” As Paul Patton (2006: 132) frames the relationship, liberal democratic “values and institutions are presupposed” by poststructuralist thinkers precisely “to concentrate attention on the conditions under which limits to their application may be overcome.” In essence, then, poststructuralist politics becomes a means of liberating liberalism to its better self and, further, I would argue, a rife ground for theoretical and practical cooperation with it. The continuity with liberal conceptions of liberty and diversity emerges with radical poststructuralist commitment to forms of linguistic pluralism, ones that lead to the conclusion, with Baudrillard (2015: 71), that “the world” cannot be brought to the subject but rather that the two stand permanently apart: “to clear a space, as it were, around the object, to act so that it shone out resplendent in all its indifference . . . so that the subject himself can attune himself to the world in a kind of symbolic exchange of indifference.” This bleak and fatalistic assessment commits postmodern persons and their political powers to forms of agency circumscribed by the boundaries of discursive power and, by extension, a destiny of attuning themselves to the neoliberal landscape as it is and as they find it. Having stripped history and politics bare to their discursive wills to power, their adaptations of pataphysical and paralogical agencies to the neoliberal landscape as sine qua nons of poststructuralist linguistic gaming become, paradoxically, capitulations to neoliberalism. In essence, their goal of securing persons and groups space for normative, political, and surely material leverage through linguistic forms of agency achieves, with Emilia Steuerman (1992: 100), “a radicalization that in no way challenges the modernity project as such” but instead entrenches and deepens its crises. Against my and related positions, not all of them programmatically Marxist, Dillet, MacKenzie, and Porter (2013: 522) present a contemporary defense of the critical potency and usefulness of poststructuralist thought but do recognize the cogency of “the argument that the ideas of 1968 were complicit and prepared the terrain for a new form of capitalism.” They counter, however, that “it is not the ideas of poststructuralists that ground a new form of capitalism, but their recuperation” (522). In short, on their account, appropriations of poststructuralism have become embroiled in projects that have diverged from its original and innovative purposes. On these grounds they defend the position that the “transgressive nature of poststructuralism is a way to revivify this project in an intellectual and cultural landscape that tends toward homogenizing experience in the name of capitalist axiomatics” (512). In response though, and given this comparative study of paralogy and pataphysics, the poststructuralist divorce of the signified and the referent has been part and parcel of a broad contemporary shift toward a politics of difference and identity, one that aligns its forms of political agency with the pluralist priorities of liberalism and, by extension, neoliberalism. On the theoretical side, Susen (2015) has recognized the continuities between poststructuralist emphases and the liberal tradition. He argues that the “celebration of signs and appearances under the banner of postmodernism constitutes an extreme form of liberal individualism,” one that he sees as concomitant of the contemporary emphasis on embodiment as an expansion of personal freedom from external intervention (115–16). This emphasis on “the autonomy from power” and negative liberty that can be witnessed in both Baudrillard and Lyotard, as well as the classical liberals examined above, extends to ongoing poststructuralist theorizations of insurrection and inclusion for the precarious subjects of the late capitalist condition (115–16). A preeminent case in point is Judith Butler’s performative politics of the precarious. Her recent works (Butler and Athanasiou 2013; J. Butler 2015) on the political promise of the performative meet up with those of Lyotard and Baudrillard in the way incommensurable groups and persons come to represent themselves through linguistic and embodied forms of resistance and subversion. With Lois Ruskai Melina (2014: 321), Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (1995: xxv), and Susen, however, the political potentials inherent to “language, are not suppressed but, rather, promoted and re-appropriated by the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ and, hence, by the predominantly neoliberal policies designed to defend and realize it” (Susen 2015: 201). By extension, the “singularity” of late capital, the reduction of history to regimes of space, as Jameson (2015: 128) reminds, has lowered the horizon of politics to the body precisely because the diminishment of our “experience of past and future [amounts to] the reduction of our temporality to the present of the body.” In these ways, the counterpart to poststructuralist language games of subversion is the reinforcement of liberal norms and rights, aligning these subversive forms with liberal and neoliberal policies that conjointly take possession and the “sanctity of contracts and the individual right to freedom of action” as the legitimate basis of social and political life (Harvey 2005: 64). My study then, albeit a partial one, suggests serious limitations for the fate of poststructuralism as an effective mode of critical and political resistance in the condition of late capitalism. To the extent that poststructuralism’s “submersion within the academy . . . as a critical undercurrent . . . [is] one that does not cause too many waves,” its diminished horizon as a critical force may be the dusk in which philosophy now paints its grey in grey and the owl once again takes flight (Dillet, Mackenzie, and Porter 2013: 511).

Baudrillard has lined up a number of arguments for abandoning Marxism, and perhaps as a result, his value theory has not attracted wide attention. Nevertheless, I will argue both that we can see some major weaknesses with the abandonment and also for the potential in his value theory. Although Smith (1990) dealt with Baudrillard’s arguments in MoP, additional consideration is warranted. Before this attack on Baudrillard’s late position, I want to highlight that his transition from Marxism to anti-Marxism does not mean the rejection of all his previous insights before MoP. It should be noted that the French subtitle of Mirror of Production is critique du matérialisme historique. Baudrillard concentrates his attack primarily on historical materialism, which is only a single part of the Marxian system, although some of the central tenets of dialectical materialism also get their share of critique. Baudrillard positions himself beyond needs, beyond truth, beyond ideology, and beyond revolution. Smith (1990) has convincingly refuted all these claims by showing that they are either untenable or tenable but compatible with the writings of Marx. But an important criticism not mentioned by Smith concerns Baudrillard’s critique of historical universalism. The Marxist conceptions of (for example) history and material production are developed within the temporal context of capitalism. Marx conceives history as the history of modes of production, and thus periods before capitalism can also be analyzed through production, the concept is no longer temporal, and the Marxist analysis becomes universal (see Baudrillard 1975, 48). Baudrillard objects to this universalism, peculiarly enough by merely postulating that there were no dialectics in primitive societies. Poster (1975) rightly points out that this argument is problematic in several ways. Poster’s strongest argument states that, if we accept that applying any contemporary concept to the past is a kind of universalism, Baudrillard is defeated by his own argument. Poster observes that Baudrillard’s texts are infested with such “universalism.” For instance, his semiotic concepts are problematic, as he employs them on all stages of human societies without justification. Another problem is that Baudrillard has framed his critique so that it is in need of empirical support. He claims that there are no longer any exchange-value transactions untouched by sign values. That begs for empirical evidence, and the onus is on Baudrillard, if he is to be believed, rather than other social scientists. There may be some nonempirical explanation as to why exchange-value transactions must be dominated by sign values, but that is not the way Baudrillard frames the discussion. Instead, he treats current trends and possibilities as finalities, treats tendencies as realized states (see Kellner 1989), and extrapolates wildly from interesting insights (see Smith 1990). Related to this, Baudrillard makes no qualification or delimitation as to the scope of his ideas. Indeed, he tends to totalize the system of the society. This is very problematic because totalization is the germ source that will cause Baudrillard to rule out all political strategies, including his own theoretical interventions. In his later works, Baudrillard positions himself, in Smith’s (1990) words, “beyond truth,” yet Baudrillard’s arguments (in particular those in MoP) are made in such a way as to invite empirical evidence. He extrapolates from singular cases in his search for a strategy. From studies in fashion (CS), goods consumption (MoP), and French Communist Party activity (UB), Baudrillard wildly extrapolates that every political activity has one or more sign values as its objective, making any political activity futile (including even gifts and Saussurean anagrams). But this is an unwarranted extrapolation. A political activity that is use-value-oriented is conceivable, and theorization may also be proffered as an act governed by use value. A final problem is that his later theories generally overlook or neglect many aspects of many people’s current social experience. This does not necessarily make the theory false—but it needs to be taken into account (Kellner 1989). How does Baudrillard respond to the many third-world workers who feel resentment over their labor being exploited? According to Baudrillard, they should rather be immersed in sign-value-related activity, such as identity management. He leaves unarticulated whether the perception of social injustice is exactly that. Before there is reason to take Baudrillard’s later standpoints seriously, they need to be grounded in empirical investigations, or at least theoretically justified.

Baudrillard is undoubtedly correct to point to the importance of the television as a central element in contemporary culture. It is a startling development that in the last 30 years practically every individual in capitalist countries is able to witness footage of events from almost anywhere around the globe. It is also true that this footage is invariably misleading, even though it is apparently so compelling and ’realistic’. Television is only tangentially connected with the realities it seeks to portray as well as contrasting dramatically with the social experience of the viewers; we witness riots, wars and massacres as they occur from the comfort of our living-rooms. However, from these admittedly curious features, Baudrillard leaps suddenly and unjustifiably to the claim that there is no longer any reality. The television screen creates a ’false’ reality and it is in that reality that we now live. However, the television does not create a false reality either in its representation of the world or in its reception by viewers. Television coverage is determined by the cultural norms of the society to which it broadcasts and by those involved in the production of television. Thus any footage is an interpretation of the world and as such it is necessarily limited. It is certainly true that programme makers try to render this interpretation of the world as compelling as possible to attract viewers and to sustain their claims but those images are always and necessarily embedded in social discourse, which is itself related to the historic development of the society. The images are not then free-floating, mere simulacra but, on the contrary, concrete moves in a language game. They refer not so much to the reality of the situations they portray but rather to the society to which they communicate these images. Similarly the viewers of television programmes do not regard these images as empty, referenceless and fragmentary. On the contrary, just as the creation of these images was embedded in the interpretative practice of making sense of the world so do the viewers try to interpret these images in such a way that they will be able to make sense of their world. Whether the programme be a soap opera or news footage, the viewers interpret the images according to their cultural understandings (see, for instance, Fiske and Hartley, 1984; Hall, 1980; Featherstone, 1988: 220-1, 1991: 5, 11), although those understandings are under constant revision in order to make sense of new information. Thus rather than becoming the primary and prior cultural factor in contemporary society, the television is embedded in and dependent upon pre-existing and historically produced understandings and discourses.5 Furthermore, the footage does not exist above and beyond the lives of viewers but, as the briefest autobiographical consideration will reveal, the television is employed as a resource, where new interpretations derived from its footage are used in the renegotiation of social relations and understandings. Viewers discuss what they watch and make use of what they see to make sense of their own lives. The argument for the fundamentally interpretative nature of the television and, therefore, its fundamental unoriginality as a cultural form undercuts Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality at an empirical level. In short, the television just does not represent the ontological transformation of culture which he envisages. The production and consumption of the television operates in the same interpretative manner as the production and consumption of literature, theatre and, indeed, oral story-telling. All these methods of communication have to operate according to the same interpretative norms, typical of all human interaction, for the very reason that they are all primarily linguistic. Baudrillard’s failure to recognize the fundamentally interpretative nature of television suggests some deeper philosophical and, in particular, deeper epistemological shortcomings in his theories. The recognition of Baudrillard’s epistemological weakness brings us to the second, philo- sophical strand of the argument against the notion of hyperreality which will demonstrate that Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality is founded in an unsustainable Cartesianism.

[Daniel de Zeeuw, assistant prof University of Amsterdam, 13 May 2024, "Frontiers," Frontiers,https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1384363/full,]//owen

Rather than seeking to recuperate the ideal of a digital public sphere or lament its demise with the rise of social media platforms, in this paper I seek to identify the dangers of precisely this insistence to imagine the Internet as a public sphere. It is this curious insistence and persistence that, I claim, may feed into precisely those post-truth media dynamics such critical accounts worry about and rally against. The success of viral conspiracy narratives like Pizzagate and QAnon, as well as other forms of mis- and disinformation, hinges not (only) on the absence or distortion of a healthy democratic public sphere, as is typically assumed, but (also) on its persistence as an imaginary in an environment that obeys an altogether different set of logics, namely that of ‘communicative capitalism’ and ‘information warfare.’ Whereas the former has drawn most critical attention in connection to current post-truth dynamics (e.g., the effects of targeted advertising and the role of algorithms in creating polarizing echo chambers and filter bubbles), I will instead focus on the latter. The unique problem and ‘cunning’ of what I refer to as ‘post-truth conspiracism’ is that it draws on idea(l)s of digital publicness to establish its own epistemic legitimacy, as well as derive its unique powers of persuasion, while also mobilizing the full tactical arsenal of information warfare in a global attention economy. The resulting weaponization of digital public sphere imaginaries complicates attempts to recuperate the idea(l) of a digital public sphere as a solution to a ‘polluted’ information environment.

In the above passage, Shelley describes a perfected version of an activity that his readers are supposed to intimately acquainted with. He has in mind the activity of imaginatively adopting another person’s perspective, in a way that somehow engages the emotions of the one doing this imaginative work. I will call this activity ‘empathy.’ Shelley’s claim about empathy’s moral significance, that it is a form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective-taking. It is also the unique source of a particular form of understanding, which I will call humane understanding. Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. In this paper, I focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non-instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but profound need to be humanely understood. Because we respond to others’ very real need when we pursue this sort of understanding of their emotions, empathy is best understood as itself a way of caring, rather than just a means to promote other caring behavior. great instrument of the moral good, is presented not as the conclusion of an argument, but rather as a reminder of what we already know. And it does have the ring of a familiar truth. We tend to think that being empathetic is an important part of being a worthy leader, a good friend, a virtuous person. But exactly what contribution does empathy make to our ethical lives, such that empathy deserves to be counted among the greatest of our moral psychological resources. One enduringly popular answer to this question is that empathy plays a crucial role in generating altruistic concern. This claim dates back to the first wave of interest in empathy, in the mid- to late 18th century, and it continues to be buoyed by major research projects in social and developmental psychology. However, it has also recently come in for criticism from philosophers and psychologists who suspect that empathy might be not just unnecessary for altruism, but also perniciously motivationally distorting. Consider for example the position of social psychologist Paul Bloom. Bloom (2016: 71) argues that we don’t need empathy, “the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does,” to inspire altruistic action. Compassion, a form of feeling for others that does not involve an imaginative emotional experience, can provide the requisite motivational spur. What is more, he argues, we ought to prefer compassion to empathy as a motivational source. Unlike compassion, empathy is objectionably narrow and inevitably biased. We are bound to empathize more fully with people who resemble us, who feel familiar, and who are attractive,and we are not capable of extending our empathetic capacities to everyone who deserves our care. Consequently, Bloom concludes, empathy leads us to care too much for some and not enough for others. 2Many champions of empathy have moved to defend its motivational significance against suchcharges.3 However, the debates over empathy’s status as a source of altruism have tended to over-shadow consideration of some of empathy’s most significant features. Here is what I am going to argue: even if Bloom is right that empathy is narrow and biased, and even if it isn’t needed for securing or sustaining altruistic motivation, people who lack the capacity or willingness to empathize will still be missing out on something critically important to virtuous human life. To get a proper handle on empathy’s moral significance, we have to reckon with how it matters epistemically. I will make the case that empathy is the unique source of a particular form of under-standing, which I will call humane understanding.4 Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. Here, I will focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non-instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but pro-found need to be humanely understood. Because we respond to others’ very real need when we pursue this sort of understanding of their emotions, empathy is best understood as itself a way of caring, rather than just a means to promote other caring behavior. This form of care plays a significant role in a variety of relationships central to human flourishing. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that within the context of some therapeutic relationships, humane understanding is so important that it is literally a matter of life or death. I will begin by expanding on my conception of empathy. Then, I will draw upon the work of Adam Smith to introduce humane understanding. Smith suggests that the capacity to empathize just is the capacity to grasp what he calls the “just and proper” quality of others’ emotions. If we take on board a few reasonable claims about the nature of emotional experience, we will see that Smith is right that empathy affords us a unique appreciation of an important normative feature of others’ emotions. More specifically, when we empathize with others, we directly understand how their emotions reflect the evaluative properties the objects of those emotions appear to have. After explaining what humane understanding is, and how it is connected to empathy, I will look to E.M. Forster’s novel A Room witha View to motivate my proposal about the moral significance of humane understanding.

A New Time of Death? 25 Capitalism is organised around market exchanges in which goods are exchanged through the medium of money. The emphasis is often on the fairness of exchange, on the idea that the market-place adjusts prices through competition, and on anonymous exchange where the producers of goods and their consumers are separated in space and time. What has been lost in this market-based exchange is the idea of symbolic exchange. This is a form of exchange which is not based on getting something equal in return for what we spend but exchange as an unbalanced and excessive social process. The classic example of symbolic exchange is that of gift-giving, in particular the Native American practice of potlatch. The word is from the Chinook language and means ‘to give’. It is the name for a ceremonial feast of north- west coast tribes at which the host distributed his possessions as gifts to his guests. These gifts could be material things like blankets and furniture, but also food, and they would win honour for the host. What interested anthropologists in this gift-giving was that it could also seemingly run out of control, with whole villages being made destitute in trying to provide gifts. Capitalism replaces this form of exchange, which is based on social prestige and direct personal relationships, with forms of exchange based on calculation and the anonymity of the market. For Baudrillard this eclipse of symbolic exchange also affected our relationship with death. As symbolic exchange is destroyed, including our exchanges with the dead, so ‘little by little, the dead cease to exist’ (Baudrillard, 1993: 126). Once we had exchanges with the dead, we traded or bargained with them, or made offerings to them. This extends to practices like the Irish wake, when a party would be held while the body of the dead was still in the house to celebrate the life of the deceased. Now, the dead are excluded, we remove them as rapidly as possible to be buried or cremated and mourning rituals have also been curtailed. Baudrillard argues that we can never completely eliminate symbolic exchange or our dealings with the dead. The more we try to exclude the dead the more they return in traumatic forms. Perhaps the modern fashion for zombie films, such as the trilogy of George A. Romero, Night of the Living Dead (1969), Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Day of the Dead (1985), is a sign of this? What is interesting is that in the second film of the trilogy, Dawn of the Dead, the zombies invade that bastion of capitalist culture the shopping mall (although they seem strangely pacified by the muzak!). 26 The Culture of Death What is also interesting is that this film is the one from the trilogy that has recently been remade. In a sense death takes its revenge on us as, for Baudrillard, death can never be fully programmed or contained by the postmodern society of images. The dead resist the process of exchange and cannot be fully integrated into the capitalist economy. This is despite the fact that, as Nancy Mitford pointed out in her 1963 book The American Way of Death (1998), a scathing exposé of funeral home practices, there is a great deal of money to be made in the funeral business. Baudrillard emphasised that this return of the dead would force us to rediscover symbolic exchange or we would be left with a culture that had become terminal. Either we deal with the dead through symbolic exchange, or we become the living dead, like the zombie consumers of Dawn of the Dead. His work is almost a parody of those radical thinkers of the 1960s who tried to find resistance in those who could not be integrated into the system, whether that was women, students, lesbians and gays, petty criminals or African-Americans. It seems as if, for Baudrillard, the dead are the only ones who cannot be integrated! The problem with his model is that it offers no real explanation for why death comes to invade our whole culture. His idea of a radical reversal, when what is excluded returns in a more virulent form, is extremely hard to pin down concretely. This leaves his argument ungrounded and it is no surprise that it has been greeted with scepticism. In comparison, whatever criticisms we might want to make of it, Agamben’s analysis of our exposure to death is more concretely grounded. The increasing exposure to death in modern culture is understood as the result of the act of sovereign power that creates bare life, a life exposed to death. In modern culture this production of bare life has spread because bare life has become the ground of our political identity. Agamben does not regard death as some point of resistance that somehow lies outside our culture. In treating death as a point of resistance Baudrillard is in danger of turning death into some sort of authentic experience where we can find, or recover, our true values. In fact, the exposure to death in modern culture seems to be, as we shall see later in this book, a far more banal and everyday process. Baudrillard’s model does explore our exposure to death in modern culture but it seems to offer no adequate explanation for that exposure. Instead A New Time of Death? 27 it offers something like a magical or metaphysical thinking where what is excluded can only ever return in a more extreme form. Agamben provides an analysis which is more precise but which is also not beyond criticism. If Baudrillard’s thesis has proven controversial and been treated with scepticism then so have Agamben’s claims. In particular, his history of bare life has faced five major criticisms. The first is that Agamben’s theory concerning bare life is not well supported by the historical evidence and that he is selective in the evidence he draws on. Secondly, that Agamben’s history of bare life is too straightforward, too linear, and so doesn’t really deal with the complex nature of the social history of death. Thirdly, that in only studying Western culture Agamben is ethnocentric, and that he excludes evidence from other cultures and tends to treat Western culture as a monolithic whole. Fourthly, that Agamben’s model of biopolitics tends to erase the important distinctions between different political systems, especially between democracies and totalitarian states. And, finally, that he does not consider in enough depth the different experiences of exposure to death, or the fact that this exposure to death is unevenly distributed.

It is important to differentiate Baudrillard’s view from standard accounts of revolution. To be sure, this is the position from which Baudrillard emerges. In the early work, The Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard argued that the regime of the code could only be destroyed by a total revolution. ‘Even signs must burn’. Baudrillard’s early work can be read as a call for a Situationist-style overthrow of capitalism through a revolution in the everyday, which breaks the power of the code and of signs. In more recent works, Baudrillard rethinks this view. He claims that revolution is now impossible. Baudrillard makes this claim because of the end of production. Revolution was historically seen as the liberation of the productive energy of humanity from the confines of capitalism. But if production no longer exists, this kind of vision has no hold. Labour has become another sign. There is no tendency for it to liberate itself by moving beyond capitalism. Baudrillard is deeply critical of standard leftist responses to neoliberalism. He criticises revolutionaries of his day for seeking a return to the “real”. He sees this as nostalgia for the previous, Fordist period of capitalism. People seek to get rid of the code, and go back to the earlier kind of simulation. Or they seek to identify something which is not yet signified in the system and which ought to be – for instance, excluded groups who should be included. This actually ties people to the prior forms of the dominant system. For Baudrillard, the weapons of the previous period are already neutralised in the order of the code. Revolution is a casualty of the end of the period of system-expansion. Explosions and revolutions are effects of an expanding order. This expanding order is an effect of the regime of production. But simulation is instead an inward-looking order. It is ‘saturated’ – it cannot expand any further. As a result, explosion will never again happen. It has been replaced by the ‘cold’ energy of the simulacrum. Instead, there is constant implosion. The world is saturated. The system has reached its limits. It is socially constructed as dense and irreversible, as beyond the ‘liberating explosion’. Baudrillard believes that we are past a point of no return: the system can’t be slowed down or redirected to a new end. We are in a ‘pure event’, beyond causality and without consequence, and every effort to exorcise hyperreality simply reinforces it. These are little fractal events and gradual processes of collapse which no longer create massive collapses, but exist horizontally. Events no longer resonate across spheres. It is as if the forces carrying the meaning of an event beyond itself have slowed to a standstill. The London ‘riots’ or the student fees protests, for example, do not turn into generalised rebellions in Britain as perhaps they still might in Egypt or Greece. We are in an era of ‘anomalies without consequences’. But the system will nevertheless come to an end, by other means. Even if people can’t revolt, a reaction is certain. Explosive violence is replaced by implosive violence, arising from a saturated, retracting, involuting system. The system has lost its triumphal imaginary because of its saturation. It is now in a phase of mourning, passing towards catastrophe. Things don’t get transcended anymore, but they expand to excess. Baudrillard sees this as the culmination of a kind of negative evolution. Systems pass through stages: a loose state produces liberty or personal responsibility; a denser state produces security; an even denser state produces terror, generalised responsibility, and saturation. Beyond saturation there is only implosion. Anti-consumerism is another target of critique. Criticising consumer society for doing what it claims to do – for supplanting ‘higher’ virtues with everyday pleasures – is a false critique which reinforces the core myth of consumerism. Consumer society functions as it does, precisely because it does not provide everyday pleasures. Rather, it simulates them through the code. Baudrillard also criticises moral critique and scandal, such as Watergate. He argues that the system requires a moral superstructure to operate, and the revival of such a superstructure sustains the system. What is really scandalous is that capital is fundamentally immoral or amoral. Moral panics serve to avoid awareness of this repressed fact. Similarly, critiques of ideology risk reaffirming the system’s maintenance of the illusion of truth. This helps cover up the fact that truth no longer exists in the world of the code. Since there is no reality beneath the simulacrum, such analyses are flawed.

Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. XF constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position. No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future requires depetrification. XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence. XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given—and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’—neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us—the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology—the sooner it is exorcised, the better. Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible. Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role. The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed by the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates. Beyond the noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labour. Gender inequality still characterizes the fields in which our technologies are conceived, built, and legislated for, while female workers in electronics (to name just one industry) perform some of the worst paid, monotonous and debilitating labour. Such injustice demands structural, machinic and ideological correction. Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is ‘by nature’ a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true that the canonical ‘history of thought’ is dominated by men, and it is male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism—because of this miserable imbalance, and not despite it. There is no ‘feminine’ rationality, nor is there a ‘masculine’ one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender. If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself— and this contradiction can be leveraged. Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be a feminism. XF marks the point where these claims intersect in a two-way dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular.

One way in which structural change is called for can be seen through xenofeminism’s accelerationism. There are multiple versions of and stances on accelerationism but, broadly, accelerationism seeks to dismantle structures through accelerating them beyond their own limits, accelerating the process to the point of destruction (see, for example, Deleuze and Guattari, 1983 [1972], p. 239). The 2013 Accelerate Manifesto by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek (2013), for example, calls for, in part, the accelerated use of technology with the aim of creating machines to do all the work in society, thereby creating a post-work, post-capitalist world. Post-capitalism is a critical feminist aim, as exemplified by the vast number of feminist critiques of capitalism itself.6 The Xenofeminist Manifesto was written, in part, as a feminist response to accelerationism, thus taking and centring post-capitalism as a feminist project while seeking to show the ways in which feminist interventions are needed in accelerationism itself (Piasecka, 2016). Xenofeminism, like many strands of accelerationism, is post-capitalist in its aims. However, being dedicated to a feminist ethics, it is more intersectional than much of accelerationist theory, explicitly noting the need to consider all human needs, including differences such as ‘race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position’ (Laboria Cuboniks, 2015, Zero 0×00, Parity 0×0F). Thus, similar to the Accelerate Manifesto, the Xenofeminist Manifesto states: ‘no more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labour’ (ibid., Zero 0×00). However, unlike the Accelerate Manifesto, the Xenofeminist Manifesto does consider the special role women often play in terms of labour, continuing: ‘no more submission to the drudgery of labour productive and reproductive alike’ (ibid.). Xenofeminism thus takes an intersectional approach to accelerationism, arguing that the universal is made out of the particular and is not built from above but built up from the bottom (ibid., Parity 0×0F). Xenofeminism, like accelerationism, is both anti- and post-capitalist (ibid., Trap 0×0A). As per the Accelerate Manifesto, xenofeminism aims to move beyond the rigid constructions of current left politics and leftist in-fighting. Instead, ‘Xenofeminism seeks to construct a coalitional politics, a politics without the infection of purity’ (ibid., Parity 0×10). Thus, ‘XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated—but have we ever been otherwise?’ (ibid., Zero 0×01). Instead of lamenting alienation, from work and more broadly, xenofeminism celebrates it. Thus, xenofeminism states that ‘the construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation’, for ‘it is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy’, this referring, in part, to the future possibility (and now) of machines doing many of the immediate, manual, domestic and potentially reproductive labour tasks (ibid.). Xenofeminism is not purely ‘tech-positive’, however. Xenofeminism also notes the dark sides to technology and the ways in which it has been used ‘in the exclusive interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few’ (ibid., Interrupt 0×08). However, the manifesto remains positive about the possible futures of technology, noting that there are ‘radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms of technological mediation’ (ibid.). The Xenofeminist Manifesto notes that, although there is an ongoing problem around accessibility, ‘digital tools have never been more widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today’ (ibid.). Xenofeminism, therefore, not only wants to accelerate technology into the post-capitalist world but seeks also to appropriate technology and make it feminist. The dark sides of technology and the ways it has been used up until now do not make technology’s use futile. Rather, the xenofeminists note the need to politicise the techno. Technology, to the xenofeminists, is a tool for revolution: ‘XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world’ (ibid., Zero 0×02). Thus, they note that ‘the real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized’, due to the capitalist ways it has thus far been used (ibid., Zero 0×03). Xenofeminism, therefore, is motivated by the gender blindness of accelerationism but also goes further than accelerationism. As noted above, xenofeminism also takes inspiration from feminist theories of technology, particularly those that see technology as a potential tool for social change (see, for example, Haraway, 2001 [1984]). Xenofeminsim advocates for an activist interest to be taken in technologies at all levels, from ‘domestic labour-saving devices’ (Hester, 2018b, p. 8), to the use of technology to ‘combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmaceutical tools’, to technology’s use in ‘combat[ing] environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labour’ (Laboria Cuboniks, 2015, Zero 0×03). Thus, xenofeminism not only wants to create a post-capitalist world but also seeks to create a more just world within our technomaterial reality. Xenofeminism laments the early days of cyberfeminism when technology was seen as a key way of ‘generating solidarity among marginalised groups’ (ibid., Carry 0×13), noting that technology, now, is having a more negative gendered impact, from social media harassment to issues around identity policing, power relations and gender norms in self-representation in the online culture of images (ibid., Carry 0×13, Zero 0×00). However, the xenofeminists do not believe that such a turn renders cyberfeminism a thing of the past; rather, they declare that ‘the situation requires a feminism at ease with computation’ (ibid., Interrupt 0×07, Carry 0×13). Thus, xenofeminism is more than just trying to deal with the gendered structures and outcomes of technology; it is about urging ‘feminists to equip themselves with the skills to redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the service of common ends’ (ibid., Interrupt 0×07). This reutilisation of technology will not be easy but will, rather, take time, be a process, requiring ‘a feminism sensitive to the insidious return to old power structures, yet savvy enough to know how to exploit the potential’ (ibid., Carry 0×13). Thus, states the manifesto, ‘our future requires depetrification. Xenofeminism is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence’ (ibid., Zero 0×00).

In his major work on meaning of history, , Baudrillard, using the illustration from the gravitational pull, first emphasized that “acceleration of modernity, of technology, events, and media, of all exchanges — economic, political and sexual — has propelled us to ‘escape velocity,’ with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and history.”[1] This kinetic energy propels every political, historical, and cultural fact into a hyperspace.[2] Within the realm of hyperreality or simulation, there is no meaning, historicity, progress, or purpose. There is no reflection because all concepts are separated from their “critical zone of reference.”[3] “No meaning can withstand acceleration.” “No history can withstand centrifugation of the facts…” The second illustration Baudrillard uses to describe the complex nature of hyper-history or hyperspace and time is not acceleration or speeding up but slowing down. Elaborating on the principle of slowing down, the vanishing of history, and using again the Bing-bang and nature of light illustrations from physics, he claims “History, meaning, and progress are no more able to reach their escape velocity.” Through political and historical inertia, history came to the point of disappearance and indifference, and therefore, we do not speak about history in the linear sense. There is no end of history, the end is the illusion. At the screen of mass media, there is a short circuit between cause and effect; there is no space and time to think of history regarding a sequence of facts and events or regarding progress and purpose. At the heart of news and events, history slows down and disappears like in the heart of pornography, sexuality disappears, or at the heart of new experimentation, science disappears.[4] Potential mass/es are the neutralization of history, “they are a potential residue of all history, meaning, and desire.” Thanks to the media, history experiences deceleration, indifference, stupefaction. Baudrillard concludes: “Deep down, one cannot even speak of the end of history here since history will not have time to catch up with its own end. Its effects are accelerating, but its meaning is slowing inexorably…”[5] Therefore, liberation is a purely artificial process. Fulfilled order of time has no place in this suspense of time. Baudrillard claims that linearity is fictitious and absurd especially for cultures that had no sense of a deferred day of reckoning (Day of Judgment?) and resisted Christianity’s “historical” perspective of salvation/liberation.[6] Grounded in his theory of simulation and simulacra (hyperreality), history becomes only the chaotic mass of performance and performative demonstration of the effects; the age of history as an objective linear and logical presentation of facts vanishes on the screen of cinema, movies, internet, simulative realities, hyperreality…the Last Judgment is coming too late. “For hyperreality rules out the very occurrence of the Last Judgment or the Apocalypse or the Revolution.”[7] It is the story of the Kafka’s Messiah; he arrives too late, time-lag is unbearable.[8] If history is not linear then what is it? It is a “paradoxical process of reversal, reversive effect of modernity, which, having reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all its virtual developments, is disintegrating into its simple elements in a catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence.”[9] The result is retrospective melancholia of living through everything again to correct it; this is remaking a clean history, whitewashing all the abominations; the proliferation of scandals in history makes history itself a scandal…[10] Baudrillard’s critique of the last great myth of linear history and its interpretation (including its end and purpose) has transformed into his simulative reversal (recycling?) of history. Simulation, in this context, is ultimately defined as “irresistible unfolding, sequencing of things as though they had a meaning when they are governed only by artificial montage and non-meaning.”[11] My reflection on Baudrillard’s ideas, in general, resulted in my 2003 Ph.D. dissertation, Asystematic Fragmentarism of Baudrillard’s Criticism (University of Belgrade, Philosophy Department), published as [12] I tried to prove that Baudrillard’s set of dualities or binary oppositions (reality — hyperreality, history — beyond the end of history, etc.) are paradoxical in itself and do not always represent contrasting or opposing concepts but paradoxical compatibility (not either/or but both/and). The idea in this paper is how to use Baudrillard’s illusion of the end of history as a helpful and corrective tool for too self-confident Christian (Adventist) interpretation of linear history, especially in the 21st century — a century of acceleration, digitalization, genetic screening, simulative realities, artificial intelligence (disappearance of a human being), etc. The Church has something to learn in this regard from Baudrillard’s illusion of the end and distrust of purpose and meaning. Proliferation/acceleration of Apocalyptic signs and symbols in the traditional Adventist approach to theology, mission, and evangelism produces the expected historical saturation with the meaning of the end and apocalyptic expectations to the point of indifferent non-meaning. With the delay of the end in the simulative era, we are forced to deconstruct history’s meaning and play with residues or pieces of the original Adventist fervor, messianic passion, and desire for the end. Nothing is forgotten, but it is naturally and forcefully recycled in the process of waiting. Opposing this process would be a denial of “reality.” The result is slowing down, stupefaction and indifference of “silent Adventist masses” that do not care or sometimes dare to attach non-meaning to the linear Apocalypse. When everyone speaks about the revisionistic approach to history to save it, we speak about the modernistic proliferation of the obsolete remnants of “truth”/remnant, with non-meaning for the real world. Regarding expectations, we could not catch up with the idea of the Kafka’s Messiah or at least some type of this “disappointing” Messiah. The end has passed us, and we are left in the void of indifference and empty expectations with non-meaning. We haven’t realized that the Kingdom of God has a surprising, unexpected, recurring, mystical and non-linear dimension that penetrates infinitesimally, and that the real world and our mind make an impact in real, not sublime heavenly humanity. In the virtual world of non-meaning (in rational, cultural, historical sense), we failed to represent and live Christ “virtually” as a potent image of new potential meaning for the “next generation.” Linear Christ has failed us, and we did not recognize his transfiguration into a “simulative” Christ who follows us even into the hyperreality. We expected Him on the front door of apocalyptic reality as projected by the charts; he surprised us at the back door of the simulative apocalypse to reach us wherever we are (in front of the screen, media, news). When history itself becomes its own dustbin (like our planet),[13] we fail to remove our own garbage from the history in which we choke. We should recycle the meaning of history to live at least some of its meanings and save it. We passed the point of rehabilitation and reanimation; we need a new sense of recycled Adventist history in which Christ creates “all-new” not in linear apocalyptic expectation but in the reality of hyperreality even now and here. Spinning in endless recurrence “with Him” is better than the false anticipation of the end “without Him.”

The second order of simulacra raises the level of control by attempting to restrict the play of appearances and impose a higher order of equivalence. This is achieved through production as both economic/ industrial practice and linguistic, referential practice, ‘the principle of operativity’ (Baudrillard, 1993a: 54). While the first order functions through a general equivalent at the external level of form, the second order finds a general equivalent within class or market relations: the exchange of commodities in terms of economic exchange-value. Industrially produced or ‘serial’ signs exist without symbolic obligations. Further, as the ultimate ‘origin’ or reference of such objects is simply not an issue for mass produced objects, ‘The extinction of the original reference alone facilitates the general law of equivalences, that is to say, the very possibility of production’ (1993a: 53). Signs characteristic of the second order are ‘crude, dull, industrial, repetitive, echoless, functional and efficient’ (1993a: 57) where signs of the first order were ‘magical, diabolical, illusory... enchanting’. The second order of simulacra is highly unstable, indeed ‘ephemeral’, because it almost immediately shades into the third order: Serial production gives way to generation through models . . . all forms change from the moment that they are no longer mechanically reproduced, but conceived according to their very reproducibility... from a generative core called a model. Everything changes with the device of simulation. (Baudrillard, 1983: 21) The status of the sign is transformed again with the third order of simulacra: representation tends to be replaced by simulation. Simulation is distinct from representation because signifiers lose their attachment to signifieds (the mental ‘construction’ of meaning inside our heads) as meaning is generated by relations between signifiers (‘models’) rather than in our reflective or ‘inner’ dialectical thought processes. Further signs (or rather pre-modelled signifiers) are disarticulated from referents because models do not have referents. Even if we assert that ‘referentiality’ is only ever an illusion generated by the apparatus of language (as Baudrillard does; see 1981: 143–63), the situation is transformed by the proliferation of signifiers lacking even an illusory referentiality (2005d: 67–73). For example, the meaning of the term ‘Gucci’ is determined by relations among other signifiers such as ‘Prada’, ‘Timberland’, ‘Marks and Spencer’ and the like. Any ‘referent’, such as a sweatshop factory complex in the Third World, is bypassed by the play of signifiers: ‘sexy’, ‘chic’, ‘rugged’, ‘good value’ etc. These constructions are models without direct or stable reference. Further, many signifiers, particularly virtual or computer-generated images, render the notion of the referent entirely meaningless. Most of us are familiar with the virtual signifier ‘Lara Croft’, but when this simulation was simulated by the celebrity signifier Angelina Jolie, the latter, already improbably proportioned, was digitally enhanced to resemble more closely the former. It is meaningless to search for the ‘real’ world referent of either ‘Lara Croft’ or ‘Angelina Jolie’: both are brands, sets of modelled signifiers designed to circulate through the corporate media/entertainment loop. Representation does not cease or become impossible, indeed it even remains dominant, but, Baudrillard contends, simulation becomes increasingly prevalent. Without the stable equivalence of sign–referent and signifier–signified, meaning becomes highly unstable, and binary distinctions implode, reverse or become radically uncertain in their meaning(s). The binary oppositions that structured the second order, and enabled the very opposition between the real and its representation upon which the notion of the ‘real’ depends, become increasingly volatile and uncertain. Baudrillard develops brief and somewhat repetitive examples with the oppositions of true/false, beautiful/ugly, art/anti-art, therapy/anti-therapy. The meanings attaching to the first or privileged term are changing and unstable – just what constitutes truth, beauty, art? In the era of simulation the second or negative pole of the opposition is deployed to energise or revivify the oppositions by feeding into the first term, rather than opposing it. For example, the fashion industry draws upon what was formerly considered ugly to generate new or alternative notions of beauty. In the past decade we have seen extreme thinness, ‘heroin chic’ and clothes that look worn, ripped or dirty. These strategies supplement the tried and tested, the routine and hackneyed, and actually protect the meaningfulness of the very principle of fashion and the possibility of capturing and promoting ‘the beautiful’, so maintaining its ‘reality’ and allowing more and more fashion to be produced and consumed. In another favoured example, Baudrillard insists that psychiatry, and the therapy industry generally, received an injection of new life from the anti-psychiatry lobby of the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than diminishing psychiatry as a branch of knowledge, the critiques produced by the anti-psychiatry movement associated with R. D. Laing and others were incorporated and actually expanded and nourished the discipline of psychiatry. The critiques acted like an inoculation, making the discipline stronger, resistant to further critique and somehow more . . . real. The terms of binary oppositions come to have a ‘tactical’ role in the third order. Neither term is really distinctive; instead they operate together to maintain or simulate ‘reality’. Yet this tactical operation actually increases the instability of meanings: in time the energy of the oppositions or distinction is weakened to the point where their supposed referents can no longer be retrieved. In other words, beauty and ugliness, art and anti-art, true and false become indefinable – this is the. By attempting to secure the ‘real’ and reality, signs are pushed into hyperreality. Once the binary oppositions weaken, losing their distinctiveness, the object takes its revenge. The object eludes attempts at codification and becomes what Baudrillard terms ‘transpolitical’ (1990b: 25–70).

To wish to communicate some truth about war, to seek to represent it, to insist on explaining it or even justifying it (or one’s opposition to it) may be an ethical gesture. But to communicate, to seek and give meaning, or indeed to want to represent war (even by way of the immediacy or “real-time” effect of digitalized media) is still about thickening its fog. The representation of war, whatever form it takes, will never be much more than endless information/ prognostication, all the more so since war will never take place (since it will always already have taken place). Thus, seeking to make sense of war through/ as representation will always be a matter of describing a pathology without disease. Only proliferated symptoms will be made visible and granted significance in the flow of information and the desperate quest for meaning. Symptoms of a proliferated war without a core, a meaning, a purpose, or a subject are everywhere around us. They make up our mediatized universe of war and/ as terror. They are both the substance and appearance relayed by digital technologies and media on behalf of a demos that itself has become the medium, a network that processes and distributes images and events. As Baudrillard writes, “Every event today is virtually inconsequential, open to all possible interpretations, none of which could determine its meaning: the equiprobability of all causes and of all consequences” (Baudrillard, 2008: 36). It is indeed in this manner that war gains its momentum and virulence. Not to recognize this representational virulence, and further to demand that war reveal an origin, a cause, a responsibility, or indeed a subject or object that could grant it meaning is to reproduce its fog and, possibly, to acquiesce to its violence. After all, there is no such thing as a benign representation or appearance (of war, or anything else, for that matter). The various attempts at representing, explaining, justifying, or making sense of war and its violence, often in traditional referential geopolitical terms, are involved in an infinite splitting of what war must be or mean as much as they are concerned with a deepening and widening of the violence/ virulence of its (global) representation. In its dissolution/ dissemination through political analysis, war reveals its violent representational forms. On the one hand, analytically dissolved and disseminated, war becomes unlocalizable, thus, in a way impossible to contain. It can no longer “take place.” On the other hand, although it can no longer be waged in one place, it still must proliferate its effects virally and virulently. Representationally unhinged from any object (and reifying no particular subject or, rather, all sorts of subjects at once), war can no longer be geopolitically maintained, cultivated, and made use of by way of any of the (modern) categories that once sought to give it gravity: geography, ideology, morality, sovereignty, domination, or history. Thus, war becomes strategically useless even if, tactically, it betrays the violence or virulence of representation everywhere it is found. Just like in the image of terror/terrorism, all we witness, then, is panic. Panic war is a “floating reality… where we live on the edge of ecstasy and dread” (Kroker, Kroker, and Cook, 1989: 14). Ungrounded, strategically indifferent, and yet representationally effective and virulent, panic war no longer stands in as the “substantial event” of time/ history, as the referential hinge that allows passage from one human epoch to the next. Today, Janus, the God of passages, transitions, and attributions of meaning in time, may still be worried about war. But Janus must now fixate his gaze in all directions (thankfully, today’s Janus is likely to have access to YouTube…). The once mythologized and later romanticized uniqueness of Janus’ bioptic talents has been transmuted into an impossible requirement of omniscience, omnivoyance, and omnipresence. The temple of Janus, which was once a symbolic spatial conduit for the inertia of time, has collapsed under the weight of an indifferent, perhaps more catastrophic, inertia: the inertia not of war’s violence (counter-actable through peace), but rather of the violence of war’s representation (that knows no bounds and no antagonisms). War no longer takes place in order to mediate time or to usher in a strategic (political) change through conflict. Perhaps it never really did. Rather, as representation, war tactically preserves and perpetuates violent conflicts and a propensity for doing away with things (starting with meaning) through a kind of digital/informational immanence (today’s preferred version of representation or mediation).

To propose the infinite ecstatic progress (of capital) as the only horizon is the same as inviting everyone to wait for Godot. Since we are modern, we live in times of the end or according to Baudrillard even after the end. Not that history has come to an end, but that it has no end in the sense of a finality, is up for debate in the course of eliminating an expectation horizon. The absence of a new future, which radically differs from the present, configures an end time of present, past, and future in contiguity.4 We live for tomorrow and know that there is no new tomorrow. We want to move, always and everywhere, to charge ourselves with energies, to become faster and faster and to grow ecstatically into the infinite, yes to multiply our human capital congenially. That's probably why the enslaving robot is waiting for us. And there will always be someone, even if he has been locked up in his robotized bunker for 200 years and feeds on jelly and virtual sex, who will then say: “This is freedom”. But even such end-time dreams, which the disaster porn fabulates around the clock today, are nothing more than simulacra. Even the apocalypse is over, says Baudrillard, it is today the precession of the neutral and the indifference (Baudrillard, 1994: 160). One should add, but also the precession of ecstasy (of more and less): Nothing is possible anymore, because nothing is impossible anymore. This shows the retreat of an unpredictable, black, and new future, but at the same time points to the abundance of a risk-future. The operative condition of the speculative present seems to be the inherent uncertainty of the future. Any extrapolations into the future through calculation and financial speculation mean that strategies and designs that are made in the present, the unpredictability and uncertainty in calculable risks are transforming, and these risks continue to increase with the disintegration of the new future. The accelerating speculation and concentration of capital and the irreversible climate collapse reduce a truly new future to a null point and/or to the continuation of the already existing dynamics of a risk future. The historically founded formations and systems themselves pose risks for the future (for example, extreme inequalities in access to income and wealth, food insecurity, combustion of carbon dioxide, etc.). The future present that actually occurs remains unknown, but is determined in the present by the iterative calculation of a series of mainly financial risks, which in turn must remain subordinate to incalculable eventualities. In contrast to the time schemes of the linear chronology of progressive modernity (past → present → future) or the thesis of an infinitely extended present without a future (dystopias), the future present that will occur proliferates in the scheme of a present future that financially calculates the future as a risk. Nevertheless, for the speculative present future (of capital), which tries to include the future present, the premise of every historically realized future remains the unknown future present, which, however, by virtue of the present future, which is that of financial risk production, should at least be calculated. The fact that the present future, which calculates the future, wants to include the historical future present, but itself must assume an unknown new future that has not yet taken place, leads to a speculative time complex that displaces the time orders of both the forward movement of progressive modernity and the metastable present without a future, which each prioritize positive and negative semantic overdeterminations of the future present. The recurring calculations of the risk exposures of financial capital are an explicit operationalization of contingency. The exposure of the present to the future qua risk is on the one hand a retroaction of the unknown future on the present, on the other hand the risk exposure is the way in which the historical future present is generated according to the calculations of the present future, even if the latter is configured by the unknown future. The permanent calculation of risks in the future (speculation) is then a settlement and limitation of the abundance of future that affects the composition and semantics of the historical present, including a new and black future.5 At the same time, however, what Baudrillard calls the “spiraling cadaver of humanism” continues to proliferate: Even in the (always hypothetical) succession of humanity, the future will be human in posthuman discourses. Most current posthuman narratives, even those that refer to the development of a radical otherness of AI as an intended or unintended consequence of human strategies, are still modern versions of extinction fables that are rooted in the foundations of human rationality. No future is still a future—often a very specific one, fantasized to retroactively determine the current system. Thus, most narratives of posthumanism remain merely mutations of traditional Western religious narratives, intersected by modern progress mythologies in which humanity becomes the creator of the machine to which it develops itself: the DNA of what Baudrillard calls “the metaphysics of the code”. The stochastic movement of evolution is coupled to the project of biotechnological control. Such evolution is, as Baudrillard says, indistinguishable from a socially and historically determined program. Indeed, world capitalism seems to have entered a paradoxical, accelerating, and at the same time exhausting panic mode or a deadly excess in which the ecstasy of the Over as over-accumulation and over-speculation meet the destructive activities of capital, especially with regard to the capitalization of nature and the creation of a global surplus population. In the course of its expansive capitalization, the capital economy possesses a strangely phagic drive, as it prefers to always feed and over inflate itself further, insofar as finiteness is conceived as a limit that can be exceeded per se; the capitalist economy, in its omnipresent excess, seems to be driven by a desire for dissolution at the same time, which is an expression of a latent death wish that at least suspects the nullity of the self-generated void (in order to finally find a “redemptive” fusion with infinity).6 In restricted economies (Bataille), where the generation of surplus value and financial returns dominate, however, the over can only be consumed in catastrophic events such as wars, devalued as capital in crises (or expropriated) or calculated. An economy that is filled with ever more demands and promises of payment for the future, which probably cannot be fulfilled, is a grotesquely inflated economy that will not be able to waste or unload the accumulated abundance and garbage within it. The current economic, social, and geopolitical disturbances, tensions, and conflicts, for which the term “poly-crisis” is used, point to a catastrophic capitalism, think for example of global financial capital and its bubble formations, the debt and inflation, Russia's invasion into Ukraine, which must be read against the backdrop of the conflict between the USA and China,7 the Covid-19 pandemic, or also climate change. Even the term “disaster capitalism” (Callinicos) is now coming up. Nouriel Roubini has listed a whole series of factors that could trigger catastrophic dynamics in world capitalism beyond poly-crises: an inflation surge that forces central banks to a draconian tightening of monetary policy, leading to an unsustainable rise in interest rates; pandemics that are worse than COVID-19; a corporate debt crisis resulting from a credit crunch when interest rates rise; a new real estate bubble that bursts; a geopolitical shock like the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, which escalates and intensifies, leading to a further increase in commodity prices and inflation; the rising risk of another global recession and a return to protectionism or an economic and political decoupling between the USA and China, steering the two countries towards a geopolitical collision (Roubini, 2022). Currently, tensions between China and the USA in the Taiwan conflict are intensifying. An attack by China on Taiwan would be the beginning of a long crisis. The world would divide even more into blocks that are for or against China. The West would have to impose further sanctions, supply chains would collapse. It would be the beginning of a qualitatively new form of a highly technologized war. Not to be left unmentioned regarding these diverse polycrisis processes is the tendency towards new forms of state fascization and a new fascism.8 And finally, climate change could lead to new wars over water and unforeseen waves of migration.

In their Panic Encyclopedia from 1989, the authors Kroker, Kroker, and Cook interpret the phenomenon of the excess as a sign of ecstasy, saturation, and exhaustion. They list: “overfished, overrated, overcommunicated, overloaded with brands, over-aestheticized, over-medicated, surveilled, over-virtualized, over-medialized.” (Kroker et al., 1999: 13) Today, it is particularly the speculative capitalization, which—inseparably linked with the rise of networked computers1—as a result of ecstatic escalation excesses has led to the excess “over”: Too much capital, but also too many images and too many signs, which neutralize any historical sense and exercise a white censorship through excess. This kind of simulation through excessive reality overload, which in turn can lead to reality denial,2 triggers a new escalation of obesity (Baudrillard), which eventually becomes visible in all kinds of waste: nuclear waste, chemical waste, and industrial waste, but also the excess of opinions, laws, and texts, which drift like cadavers in the stream of decay and the pernicious. When Marx wrote, that capital is dead labor, whose function in the continuous and vampiric absorption of living labor exists, and that it as a vampire lives all the better, the more living labor it absorbs, then Marx had only a very faint idea of how capital with its expansion over two hundred years could generate a monstrous auto-cannibalism, in the course of which it wants to absorb everything forever, until it eventually inflates itself to death (and destroys the earth). We live today in a state of prolonged wakefulness and the ubiquitous and multiple work without a time limit. We enjoy the ever-accelerating excesses of over-information and delight in the voracity of electronic links, accept the obesity of the social body and the abundance of the derivative, drift deliriously through the high-speed economy and are mutants of satellite communication—we are caught and trapped in a hysteria of attention, where all aspects of acceleration, which indicate that at least a part of the world's population in the Global North is in permanent transit and mobile, meet decelerated scenarios, in which the surplus population in the Global South remains trapped in immobility. However, instantaneously, people are almost everywhere on the globe connected in 24/7 mode, seamlessly integrated into the ever denser networks of communication, information, and media representation, and they are fascinated by the scenario of media banality, which today underpins the real pornography, the real obscenity of triviality, indifference, and flatness, when we immerse ourselves in the delusional exhibitionism that characterizes social media, where quantity prevails over quality. All the over-information, which materializes in images, videos, and texts, becomes a tradable commodity, which tech capital extracts and capitalizes as data. All data are credit data. All differences (of content) are considered equivalent, or, to put it another way, any specific meaning dissolves in the ecstatic and infinite data stream. Difference equals indifference, so is nowadays the magic formula. This kind of rigid formatting goes back to an accumulation regime of financial capital, which in its short-term nature trades the excess of numbers, practices the ecstasy of speculation and at the same time must promise successful management of constantly present risk possibilities, no matter on which underlying values the insurances now refer. There is now a 24/7 non-stop operation of global production and circulation processes to report—the globe mutates into a networked and continuously open financial, trade, shopping and production center, with an excess of derivatives, products, things and information (and garbage) (Crary, 2013: 23). In the last instance it is speculative capital that cannibalizes even the number, to spit it out undigested as over-more, and it is in its peculiar emptiness the zero, which multiplies the fiction of always more (10, 100, 1000 etc.). Speculative capital finally short-circuits the structures developed in mathematics as socio-economic logic—its form of movement is, as will be shown, that of the empty over-more. Daniela Gabor has pointed out that contrary to expectations after the financial crisis of 2008, the hegemony of the global financial system has further solidified has, leading to what is aptly called the Wall Street consensus, which has revised and revived the neoliberal Washington consensus (Gabor, 2021). To anticipate one thing here: Capital also suffers sui generis from a lack, namely the lack of surplus value or the more that determines the lack. There is also a lack of money, insofar as there is always a lack of purchasing power for outstanding goods and services. Thus the annual GDP as the total money value of all goods and services produced in the economy shows a surplus over the total wage and salary payments. These payments including the purchasing power of companies are always too low to absorb all goods. The gap between the purchasing power of households and companies and the outstanding market prices can be partly closed by households, companies, and governments receiving low-interest loans from commercial banks. The lending of commercial banks is the main way in which new money enters the economy.3 This means that most money is provided by private banks through credit creation and not by the central banks. If no one were to go into debt in this way anymore, capitalism would immediately collapse. If it has become impossible to turn all the circulating money into to dissolve real goods or services, then money must always generate more money and credit must always generate more new credit. Debt repayment is then the infinite postponement of the redemption of payment promises, which always requires further loans. The postponement thus manifests itself in chains, multiplications, and proliferations, with no one knowing in the end who owes whom what (Röttgers, 2022: 146). It is not money itself, but alongside industrial capital, it is fictitious and above all speculative capital, which creates the problem of the excess of debt. However, it is also necessary to limit this again. In 2019, approximately 17 trillion US dollars were in circulation in government and private bonds with terms of up to ten years and negative nominal returns (the lenders pay the borrowers money so that they take out loans). Thus, today we are also dealing with an abundance of money that is circulating faster and faster, especially on the financial markets. Rapid progress, which in reality is Virilio's rapid standstill, is a figure of endlessly accelerating movement that has no goal because there is no end, and no end because the goal is missing. The “end of history”, which Alexandre Kojève sometimes identifies with Napoleon, sometimes with the French Revolution, sometimes with communism, coincides with the capitalist modernity itself, whose “progressive thought” still perceives itself as infinite, as an uninterrupted final sprint of the seemingly new, leading to nothing or everything, depending on how you look at it. Precisely because there is no end in this sense anymore, we enter an endless crisis, into the infinite exhaustion of processes that nevertheless continue (Baudrillard, 2002: 50) (Kojève's mistake was mainly in the assumption that the post-historical man would live in harmony with nature, without suspecting that he could trigger a catastrophe of cosmic dimensions).

For him, we live in a consumer society wherein traditional Marxist analysis fails to capture the status of objects. Commodities post-1945 have a communicational structure that can only be captured by a semiotics that relies not on a referential model akin to Charles Peirce, but rather a differential one like Saussure. Baudrillard's semiotics combines aspects of Freud and Saussure to show how in the commodity, word and image is related to desire, rather than use value or utility. Symbols provide the codes that differentiate one consumer product from another. Upon consumption, symbols then transfer meaning from the product to its consumer. Moreover, as a poststructuralist, the free-play of this semiotics is potentially endless, and provides the consumer with a strong sense of freedom and self-determination within the hyperreality of the new semiotic condition of consumer society. It is hyperreality because in Baudrillard's system one cannot get outside of the fantasies and desires generated by consumer consumption within the system of objects. In Baudrillard's economy of signs, individuals are not making consumption choices based on tastes in a marketplace of products. Rather, consumer objects are codes that function within a system of signs. Following Saussure's principles, signs become meaningful only when differentiated from other signs—not by reference to an external reality. Within this system of signs, consumer objects are able to generate desire without corresponding to need or use value. For Baudrillard, the mode of production of a society requires an expansion of consumer consumption in order for it to be reproduced. The dependency of the reproduction of the mode of production on the reproduction of the act of consumption thus becomes a new development in capitalism. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), Baudrillard works out a poststructuralist theory of language that can supplement Marxism. In Saussure, the signifier and the signified are distinct and are only arbitrarily related. Signs then take on value through their relationship with other signs in the system. Baudrillard, however, argues that we should reverse Saussure's process, that is, we should begin [End Page 87] our theory of language from the combination of the signifier and the signified replete with systemic value. To do otherwise is to use the signified as an excuse to render signifier and signified as distinct. For him, political economy mirrors Saussure's separation of signifier and signified before their combination in the sign by its separation of use value from exchange value before their combination in the commodity. "By giving the Sr [Signifier] and the Sd [Signified] 'in equivalence' as constitutive agencies (instances) of the sign," comments Baudrillard, Saussure's theory of the sign "veils the strategic apparatus of the sign, which rests precisely on the disparity of the two terms and on the fundamental circularity of the dominant term" (Simulacres 156). He then explains in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign: The Signifier-Referent is taken for an original reality, a substance of value and recurring finality through the supporting play of signifiers … Similarly, use value is given as origin and purpose (finalité), and needs as the basic motor of the economic cycle—the cycle of exchange value appearing here as a necessary detour, but incompatible with true finalities … In reality, this moral and metaphysical privilege of contents (Use Value and Signifier-Referent) only masks the decisive privilege of form (Exchange Value and Signifier). (156) Baudrillard argues that the political economy of the sign needs to keep use value and exchange value together in the commodity, rather than make use value into a "mask" or excuse for exchange value. This reversal of the theory of the sign not only undermines structuralism, but it also undermines Marxism by radically altering its theory of the commodity. Ultimately, Baudrillard not only rejects structuralism, but also Marxism. He offers in its place a theory of the sign as the mode of signification within capitalism. From The Mirror of Production (1973) onward, Baudrillard regards his critique of the political economy of the sign not as supplementing Marxism, but rather replacing it. Moreover, Baudrillard regards Marxism not as a critique of capitalism, but rather as its highest form of ideology. In addition, he believes that his own critique of the political economy of the sign is sufficiently distanced from Marxism in order to provide capitalism with a proper critique. One of the differences between Baudrillard's semiology and those of Saussure and Roland Barthes is that he provides a diachronic account of the formation of language usage, whereas their accounts are primarily synchronic. His diachronic account begins with pre-industrial society, where he says there were signs attached to referents and that the referents of these signs were subject to reversal. This began to change however in the Renaissance, which for him is the historical period when "the sign" emerged. For Baudrillard, the rise of capitalism was a reflection of these [End Page 88] changes in modes of signification. By the late twentieth-century, the sign became completely separated from the referent. Signs are now more like traffic signals, that is, they emit a meaning but it is not a meaning to which one responds linguistically: the code tells us that red light means stop and that nothing more needs to be said in response to this signal. This code extracts signifieds from the social and recirculates them in media such as television as floating signifiers. The code itself might be regarded as the entire system of political economy including the rules through which the sign values of commodities are produced and regulated. In 1976, Baudrillard published Symbolic Exchange and Death (L'échange symbolique et la mort), where he challenged Marxist theoretical tradition by favoring symbolic exchange over economic exchange. For Baudrillard, the symbolic exchange of precapitalist societies is much less limited than the economic exchange of capitalist and socialist societies. Rather than emphasizing the values of utility, production, and instrumental rationality, Baudrillard instead argues that we should look to the values of giving, expenditure, and sacrifice. In part, these latter values are derived from the anthropology of George Bataille, which Baudrillard argues posits an alternative form of economy that replaces the capitalist imperatives of labor, savings, and utility with ones derived from the pleasure humans find in things such as waste, sacrifices, expenditure, and festivities. Through Bataille, Baudrillard comes to view humans as characterized by an excess of drives, needs, fantasies, energies, and desires, which is a way very different from the one envisioned by Freud and psychoanalysis.