That fetishization of spectacular weaponry divorces subject from object – a roboticization of life that conveniently justifies imperialism via 90,000 tons of diplomacy.

What no longer exists is the adversity of adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes.

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

In the condition of simulation Baudrillard sees developing from the society of the spectacle, linguistic and ideological oppositions melt together. There is no longer a clear distinction between subject and object, between truth and fiction or between the seeming opponents in political arguments: ‘the two spheres are abolished in an entirely separate reality, or hyperreality, which is that of the media’.13 What we have instead of political debate are false oppositions like that between the Democrats and the Republicans in the US, neither side able to place themselves outside ‘the force of a collective machine presence that propels society’ and has morphed work and market value into ‘fast computerized information exchanges that dissolved human bonds, making capital “transgressive, boundary-breaking, all-eroding”’.14 Shoshana Zuboff usefully names this system of production and social control ‘the apparatus’ and its means of production ‘surveillance capitalism’.15 At present, US surveillance capitalists have undertaken a project that will enmesh the whole earth in tens of thousands of satellites in order to improve the efficiency of the apparatus, making the world itself a material symbol of the system within which we are all trapped.16

In The System of Objects (1968), Baudrillard describes the society of the spectacle in terms of economics and human desire, marrying Marx, Levi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan in an analysis of the current means of production, the apparatus which confines us in its repressive web. Beginning with simple mechanical objects, he charts the divergence of human intentionality and that of mechanical commodities as the social effects grow in a world defined by technical networks of control. Marx predicted that, in a consumer society, social relations would be mainly between the commodities to which we assign market value, compounding the alienation of humans from their work. Baudrillard follows this logic of the society of commodities to compose a psychoanalysis of its human subjects in their ‘spectacular alienation’. Objects, in Baudrillard’s analysis, are receptive of psychological projections, and this results in social contradictions arising between the rationality of technical objects and the irrationality of human desires.

While traditional objects connect to human effort in a reciprocal relationship, like the way an axe or rake extends from the arm and follows its gestures, in technological society humans become detached from their own power and its effects. In ‘the modern order of production, calculation and functionality’, objects become more rational than human beings. Psychologically, this is a phallic order of projection, but also a faecal order obsessed by ‘ordering, classifying and placement’ and requiring ‘absolute conductivity’ – a society we see culminating in the internet. Reciprocity with objects changes to detached control with a tendency for objects, ‘independently of man, to become organized by themselves, to refer to one another’.17 Spectacular alienation has ‘a profound psychophysiological impact’ (59). This ‘organizing of things [forms] a powerful springboard for projection and cathexis’, with unfortunate behavioural results: ‘Modern man, the cybernetician, [is] a mental hypochondriac … obsessed with the perfect circulation of messages’ (28–29). The system of objects has produced a regressive, dissociated and destructive mentality in human culture because human beings suffer from ‘the peculiar anxiety … of obligatory non-involvement, and of the passively observed spectacle of their own power’ (59).18 In such a society, humanity becomes an abstraction in relation to the apparatus. In a totally functional world, ‘the human being becomes dysfunctional, irrational and subjective’, and people project into the system of objects their ‘phantasies stemming from the stupefying efficiency of the outside world’ (60). These fantasies operate irrationally and destructively, especially so in the American system of objects.

The repressed gestural system becomes a functionalist myth, and humans regress into ‘a world of magic, of inferring reality from signs’, fascinated by totemic objects into which they have projected the autonomy of their own consciousness (60–61). Caught in the net of mechanical functionality which operates as a cybernetic symbolic system, people act in an obsessively compulsive manner towards objects and make fetishes of specific objects, such as the TV, antiques, the car. In US culture, one object has become the chief fetish of American devotion within the system of objects: the gun and the skill of the gunfighter – a skill now abstracted from human hands and integrated with the communication network in the drone programme. Phallic projection into the weapon is one psychological basis for the mythological construct that interferes with Americans’ perception of reality, along with the dissociated consciousness caused by the myth of the chosen people in the City on a Hill. Like the car in Baudrillard’s example, the gun serves as ‘a substitute subject endowed with projectile force’ (139) within a functional totality in which technical objects seek to replace human relationships. Thus, Binoy Kampmark sees fetishism and irrationality arising from the drone programme in the form of ‘technological patriotism’.19 Another symptom of the psychological disorder of technological society, ‘foreshadowed by the American model’, is ‘the ever more rapid recurrence of the repetition compulsion’ (143). Turned outward, the fetish religion of America repeats compulsively its rituals of destruction by means and under the logic of the system of the gun. ‘Behind every real object there is a dream object’ (126), and Americans dream the sacred power of the gun.

Consider a passage from an archetypal novel of the American frontier, The Deerslayer (1841) by James Fenimore Cooper, in which the title character describes his namesake rifle as he bequeaths it to his Indian [Indigenous] companion:

So look well to it, Delaware, and remember that you’ve now to watch over a thing that has all the valie of a creatur’, without its failin’s. … Killdeer will have the love and veneration of your whole people.

Such a device means ‘sartain death’ in the hands of Deerslayer, as he shyly admits, for the Hurons, the renegade natives of the forest.20 The device has the value of a living creature and is worthy of ‘love and veneration’, affection and respect. According to Baudrillard in The System of Objects, technological humans project their autonomous consciousness and ‘power of control’ onto objects with the intensity of a sexual perversion which takes on ‘faith from the mere testimony of signs’ (61n39), a faith in fetish objects which serve as ‘vehicles of our dynamic self-image’ (127). In keeping with Baudrillard’s idea of psychological regression due to the repression of sexual energy in man’s relation to technology, the hero of The Deerslayer replaces a sexual relationship with a symbiotic alliance with a weapon. When Judith asks the leading question, ‘And where, then, is your sweetheart, Deerslayer?’, he answers romantically, ‘She’s in the forest, Judith – hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain’ (129). Later, in his debate with Chingachgook on the relative merits of having a wife and having a rifle, he closes his case for the latter with: ‘And what is a man in the woods, without something to shoot with?’ (428). When Judith, who fancies the hero but must be rejected since she embodies the settlements, proposes to make a gift of her dead father’s rifle, Deerslayer says that the gun and its owner ‘might make what is called a good-looking couple’ (376). At the moment when Judith actually puts Killdeer into Deerslayer’s hands, she is torn with emotion, but he does not notice her feelings for him because ‘his attention [was] drawn exclusively to the rifle’, ‘examining its lock and its breech with a sort of affectionate assiduity’ (425–426). Instead of the courtship she longs for, he speaks only of his ‘gift’ in shooting skill which makes the rifle ‘sartain death’ and him therefore a worthy match for the object that already shares his name. They are meant for each other.

This special device even gives imaginary power to a black man in the racist South of the 1930s: ‘He held it loosely, feeling a sense of power. Could kill a man with a gun like that … They would have to respect him. He raised and lowered it in his hand, marveling at its weight’.21 In Richard Wright’s story, the protagonist fumbles with the gun and shoots a mule, disproving this myth of power, but popular American fiction and film emphasise the (white) hero’s magical skill in handling the weapon:

The gun was a Colt .45, six-shot, and heavy, with an ivory handle. … Duane could draw it with inconceivable rapidity, and at twenty feet he could split a card pointing edgewise toward him.22 In the Southwest of the 1880s the difference between death and glory was often but a fraction of a second. This was the speed that made champions of Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, and Wild Bill Hickok. But the fastest man with a gun who ever lived … was a long, lean Texan named Ringo. (Prologue to The Gunfighter film, 1960)

Often the focus is on the weapon itself, as in the film Winchester ’73 (1950), which follows the travels of that special rifle, and in the television shows of the 1950s and 1960s: ‘Gunsmoke’, ‘Have Gun Will Travel’, ‘Derringer’, ‘Colt .45’ and ‘The Rifleman’, with its Winchester customised for rapid fire. The pattern continues in films such as The Left Handed Gun (1958) and television series such as Dead Man’s Gun (1997–99).

Such a narrow focus on weapons appears in journalism as well, such as when the left-leaning Harper’s of February 1999 featured an article exhaustively describing the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower as an efficient weapons system engaged in enforcing the embargo on Iraq.23 ‘The Pilot’s Tale’ by Mathew Klam catalogues the ship’s planes, guns, bombs and missiles, focusing on its sheer bulk (seven stories high, four and a half acres in area) and calling it (without irony) ‘90,000 tons of diplomacy’. While praising the competitive camaraderie and glorifying the skills of the pilots, the writer has a clear focus on the many ‘amazing weapons’, such as ‘a Gatling gun on each corner of the ship that can fire fifty rounds a second’ (45, original emphasis) and ‘one missile about ten feet long that weighed 900 pounds’ and contained over 280 cluster bombs (39). Klam quotes a crew member, the gunner, on how ‘the pilots really love to drop these [cluster bombs] and watch them spread’ (39). Klam admires the pilots’ skill and ‘brotherly closeness’; they are like ‘a professional sports team … except that these guys … drop bombs that blow things up and kill people’ (38). Doug’s roommate Barry tells a tale of combat in ‘his very first night mission’ of the ‘Persian Gulf War’ (1991) when ‘Iraqi weaponry had not yet been vaporized’ – that is, the only night there could have been much danger (again, no irony). The pilot ‘dropped his bombs on the target and watched them explode’; on the way back, with ‘four missiles fired at him in a span of ninety seconds, tracking the heat signature of his plane’s exhaust; he dodged and flipped upside-down, spitting out flares and chaff’ (43). Even if it has to be condensed into ninety seconds of one night, Klam celebrates the pilot’s skill with his weapon when ‘his unconscious athleticism married all his senses’ (48), with no account of the victims of those cluster bombs he dropped. The pilot’s life is dangerous; however, the danger is not from any enemy opposition but from training ­ accidents. Of the ten pilots Doug knows who have died in their planes, none were in combat. Throughout the article, there is the full, rich discourse of weapons in their functionality, as in the description of Doug’s plane:

The Hornet can be outfitted from a vast menu of weapons, twenty-five different types of bombs and missiles (it also carries a six-barrel cannon in its nose that shoots 570 rounds of eight inch bullets in twenty seconds). On a typical bombing mission, a hornet will carry air-to-air missiles – Sparrows, Sidewinders – and … will also carry high-tech ‘smart’ bombs with TV cameras in the nose so that they may … be targeted by the pilot (or another pilot nearby, via datalink) into something as small as an open window. But the bulk of bombing is accomplished with general-purpose ‘dumb’ bombs, iron casings filled with explosives. (40)

The theme of the devoted sharpshooter continues in contemporary cinema. In the present context of extrajudicial killings and wilful ignorance of its own international violence, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014) is ‘the film the American public has chosen to represent the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to itself’, based on its high box office (Blackmore, Gorgeous War 207-208). In a study of the branding of war in America, Tim Blackmore shows how the film operates as propaganda. The story takes place in an ahistorical ‘political vacuum where [the soldiers] do not ask for and are not offered reasons for killing on foreign soil’ (208). The plot is a familiar one, with the Texas boy taught to shoot by his father and growing up with extraordinary skills with a rifle. Chris Kyle, the protagonist, is an epigone of Deerslayer and Buck Duane in fiction, but also of Gary Cooper, as the legendary marksman in Sergeant York (1941), and Tom Cruise in Top Gun (1986). Blackburn identifies a sub-genre of such sniper movies, including The Enemy at the Gates (2001) and Shooter (2011), each of which involves a duel between Olympic-level snipers. Others in this heritage include The Sniper (1952) and a Sniper series of films and videos (1993, 2003, 2004, 2011, 2014 and 2016), demonstrating a certain devotion to the theme. In the case of Eastwood’s film, the opponent is Mustapha, ‘a fanatic Muslim’ (208), whom Kyle pursues as ‘the specter haunting Iraq’ (211). Like the liberal commentaries on the murder of Suleimani, the film leaves no doubt ‘that the people Kyle kills [over 150] deserve to die’ (210). Like Buck Duane’s ability to split a playing card and the Lone Ranger shooting the gun out of his opponent’s hand, Kyle wins the duel when he ‘miraculously fires right down the other’s rifle barrel, at once blinding and killing the enemy [and] symbolically smashing the gun’s … artificial eye’, a feat which ‘over the given distances [is] purely fictional’ (209). This is the fantasy of heroic American skill with the gun thrown over the fact of American imperialism, a moving image offered as a way of seeing the unimagined destruction of Iraq and its people. Such films express a dream of the superior functionality of weapons, consistent with American myth and American fetishism.

The Sleep of Reason: Baudrillard’s America

It is no longer the desire of the subject, but the destiny of the object, which is at the center of the world.

—Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication

In Simulations (1983), Baudrillard tells us that ‘the medium itself is no longer identifiable as such’, having merged with the message (i.e. society) (54). The personal computer has intervened in human history, followed by the cell phone and the internet. The psychological effects have been drastic: ‘the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network’.24 The self exists in a closed circuit with the device and so ‘whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction’ (America 35). He sees a pathological condition developing, a disease of language and reason. The mythical status of the internet of things leads to a change in the operation of human expression and comprehension and an obsession with connectivity that makes an imaginary heaven of commodification and consumption. Baudrillard makes us aware of the problem of information technology imitating reality and thereby blocking it and, eventually, replacing it – the map replacing (destroying) the territory being represented.