Preliminary Sketches for a Baudrillardian Hermeneutics of the Mass Shooting
“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” So said Andre Breton, the founder and leader of the Surrealist movement.
But this simplest Surrealist act, for the modernist, is always a mere thought, a provocation, a means to an end. Breton, like all the modernists, was still stuck in the stage of representation (Vorstellung): Breton’s quote is merely a thought, an image — like Magritte smoking his pipe. The idea of a mass shooting, its representation, its symbolization, is meant to shock, but not to be made real. And indeed this shock is evoked through a suspense which is only made possible by the fact that the mass shooting never actually materializes.
But we’re past all that now. Mass shootings, of course, have become something of a new norm in America. But it’s not that Breton’s idea has simply become real without further ado; a much more complex evolution has taken place. The mass shooting, once actualized, doesn’t represent or refer to anything at all (unlike, say, the terroristic violence of the ideological fanatic, with his demands, his explicit motives, his ends-which-justify-the-means, etc.) — hence the bewilderment which lingers like cold air, and always, inevitably, the question: why? The actualized mass shooting thus becomes a pure simulation, a relation without referent, an idea without content, a representation that does not hide or obscure the truth, but a truth that hides the fact that there is none (sort of like the graffiti scrawled on the concrete planes of urban landscapes, the meaning of which is entirely inaccessible to anyone but the author — and perhaps not even to the author himself). It is thus, in a certain sense, a fool’s game to attempt to unmask the idea of a mass shooting, since it dissimulates the fact that there is nothing behind it.
Mass shootings aren’t always the result of extremism in the traditional sense (although they can be, and perhaps they are more often than not; for example, we have seen a variety of mass shooters motivated by racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc.). Extremism, where it remains, is only this holdover from modernism, a modernism which attempted to bring the Good to its absolute extreme and, in doing so, brought about the most extreme Evil (holocausts, gulags, nuclear bombardment, etc.). By contrast the postmodern mass shooting, if it is a form of extremism, is the result of an extreme loss of hope, in which there is no Truth, no Good, no Telos, and no End (hence the extermination which results: note the etymology of ex-termination, which could imply action outside of an end). In line with postmodernism, the mass shooter thus takes, not the Good or the Evil, but the non-Good and the non-Evil (the ultimate indistinguishability between Good and Evil) to its logical extreme. It is this maximal lack of hope, this ultimate desperation, which leads to an urge to quake, to gnash, to kill, and to kill indiscriminately. And the indiscriminate nature of some of these attacks is no coincidence: whereas the modernist still wants to “kill all the normies,” the postmodernist has absolutely no qualms about who dies (just as the postmodernist’s universal tolerance allows him to have no qualms about who “succeeds”). Hence, suicide is almost always the final act of the mass shooter. And the potency of his suicide lies precisely in its ambiguity: we can never question whether the ends justify the means because he enacts a means without end.
Yet there always remains the sneaking suspicion that the mass shooter sees something “wrong” with the world. But his position is not taken up on the level of ethics: whereas the modernist is disenchanted with reality for not living up to his moral standard, the postmodernist is disappointed with the fact that reality remains at all, baffled as to why everything hasn’t already disappeared. And so while the modernist terrorist fights his battle in the trenches of the ethical, the postmodernist mass shooter elevates his war to the level of the ontological. Mass shooters aside, the postmodernist in general takes up a similar stance even during his most banal engagements. Opening up his navigation app, he sees a blue line which traces his future path, representing his trip to him before it happens, before it becomes real, as if his real self were chasing, always two steps too late, its virtual projection. The trip happens in advance — in the same way that a signing bonus pays you before the start of a new job. And when the postmodernist gets to his destination, a restaurant lets say, and sees that it is closed despite his navigation app telling him otherwise: he isn’t disappointed that the app wasn’t updated, but rather that reality hasn’t kept up with it — or, more precisely, he is perturbed that reality stubbornly remains. It is almost as if reality itself had already vanished, with only its map, its model remaining. And isn’t this just the zero-grade of the solipsistic mindset of the mass shooter? He holds a resentment towards reality, not for its failure to match some sort of standard, but for its vestigiality, a reality which keeps going on despite its own disappearance into a simulation, into virtuality, into hyperreality.
The mass shooting is the cancer of a reality in old age, this overgrowing of reality beyond its own end, its own limit, its own telos: a hypertely of the real, this organism whose cells have begun multiplying out of control and with no purpose. Is it also by mere chance that the mass shooting epidemic has occurred hand-in-hand with another epidemic: obesity? America is a country which eats beyond its need for nutrition, a population which just keeps on eating. And we all know the health effects. Again, we go beyond an end, outside of it, and we are ex-terminated for it. But perhaps a better analogy can be made with autoimmune diseases: in the case of mass shootings, the very people whom we might least expect, some of whom we may even expect to protect us, turn against us in the most violent way possible — just as with autoimmune diseases in which the immune system begins to implode and attack the human body, an immune system which has overgrown itself, which has gone beyond its end, hyperimmune (like the military-industrial complexes leftover after the Cold War, which must go on despite having no significant adversaries and so implode in on themselves, turning against themselves in a sort of financial and authoritarian hypertely). And perhaps it should be added that the exact causes (and therefore cures) of most autoimmune diseases remain an enigma for epidemiologists.
Andre Breton’s quote and our recent history demonstrate that true thinking is done in Europe, but its actualization happens in America: Breton’s thought of senseless mass murder was actualized here in the States. Even Jean Baudrillard, upon crossing the pond, was struck by exactly this peculiarity of our culture: “What is thought in Europe becomes reality in America — everything that disappears in Europe reappears in San Francisco!” (Baudrillard, America, page 81). As could be expected, Baudrillard does not necessarily mean this as a compliment. He goes on:
This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal — life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the bodies and the cars so fluid, the hair so blond, and the soft technologies so luxuriant, that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life, to counteract the hyperreality of everything here .
— Ibid. page 116
Thus are the dreams of the postmodernist (from banal fantasies about future VR tech to the most violent thoughts of mass murder and suicide), fantasies at which even the most fanatical terrorist would shudder. But Baudrillard is a European — for him, these are merely dreams. Only in America do they become (hyper)real.
