Chartbook 435: All perversions have their acting out. Reading Baudrillard on the weekend of the attack on Iran.

And then, this morning, for seminar on Monday I find myself reading Jean Baudrillard’s extraordinary Consumer Society, published in 1970 amidst the Vietnam war.

And I can’t get the following section out of my head.

The Consumed Vertigo of Catastrophe

The usage of signs is always ambivalent. Its function is always a conjuring - both a conjuring up and a conjuring away: causing something to emerge in order to capture it in signs (forces, reality, happiness, etc.) and evoking something in order to deny and repress it. We know that, in its myths, magical thought seeks to conjure away change and history. In a way, the generalized consumption of images, of facts, of information aims also to conjure away the real with the signs of the real, to conjure away history with the signs of change, etc.

Reality we consume in either anticipatory or retrospective mode. At any rate we do so at a distance, a distance which is that of the sign. For example, when Paris-Match showed us the secret forces assigned to protect the General [de Gaulle] training with machine-guns in the basement of the Prefecture, that image was not read as ‘information’, i.e. as referring to the political context and its elucidation. For every one of us, it bore within it the temptation of a superb assassination attempt, a prodigious violent event: the attempt will take place, it is going to take place; the image is the forerunner to it, and embodies the anticipated pleasure; all perversions have their acting-out. What we see here is the same inverse effect as in the expectation of miraculous abundance within the cargo cult. Cargo or catastrophe - in both cases, we have an effect of consumed vertigo.

We may, admittedly, say that it is, then, our fantasies which come to be signified in the image and consumed in it. But this psychological aspect interests us less than what comes into the image to be both consumed in it and repressed: the real world, the event, history.

Hard to read this passage today and not think first and foremost of Venezuela. As I argued a few weeks ago, the Maduro heist was precisely the prodigiously violent event that had long been promised.

What characterizes consumer society is the universality of the news item [Ie fait divers] in mass communication. All political, historical and cultural information is received in the