Perhaps the most immediate and explicit elucidation of the themes in Jean Baudrillard’s 2010 posthumous book, Carnival and Cannibal, is the front cover illustration. The arresting amalgamation of images portrays a reproduction of an early 20th century minstrel show poster that depicts a white man’s partial face alongside his full likeness as painted in blackface with a superadded masquerade mask. In between the half and full faces are the clothed but bodiless silhouettes of a “fat cat banker” standing on top of a woman in carnival attire on horseback, that is then supported by comic-strip lips. The collage visualizes Baudrillard’s carnival of simulations that then cannibalize the hegemon in its own parody of reality. The book expands upon, and is emblematic, of Baudrillard’s well-known themes concerning simulation, hyperreality, and the forces of globalizing capital. The text comprises of two essays, “Carnival and Cannibal, or the Play of Global Antagonism” and “Ventriloquous Evil” that compliment and blend Baudrillard’s concerns of the early 2000s. Finally, the book can be regarded as a companion piece to another posthumous Baudrillard text, The Agony of Power, in which many of the same themes are explored.
In the first essay that bears the book’s title, Baudrillard invokes modern America and its global influence as a caricature of European origins. He uses Marx’s notion of an initial, genuine history that then repeats itself in a copied, farcical manner. He writes, “we may see modernity as the initial adventure of the European West, then as an immense farce repeating itself on a planetary scale, in all those latitudes to which Western religious, technical, economic and political values have been exported (Baudrillard 3-4). This impetus provides the model of carnival and cannibal that Baudrillard is working within. The carnival that is “carnivalization” is the forced exportation of Western values onto the Global South. Colonialism, missionary evangelization, territorial and resource wars, and globalization are the ways in which Western hegemony influence what it terms, “developing societies.” The ideological power and wealth of the hegemon draw in the Global South that then absorbs and acculturates to globalization. However, in the process of assimilation, the ideologically colonized or rather, neocolonized, begin to undermine and cannibalize their faux benefactors. In addition to being suppressed by dominant power, the carnivalized are made into caricatures of their overseer’s cultures – for example, blackfaced minstrel shows. It is a humiliation of a limited acculturation that both prevents complete acceptance and mocks the colonized. Baudrillard claims that the carnivalized internalize the influences of hegemony and then turn on their oppressors as their representations of Western values are distorted simulations that function to cannibalize. It is in a once removed mimicry of seemingly universal values that cannibalization begins to devour its subjugation, as well as itself. Herein, the heart of the issue is the concept of the universal.
Baudrillard turns to 21st century American politics as exemplary of cannibalization. He states that the US has been carnivalized and has become a caricature of the democracy it so proudly sermonizes. In the guise of leaders like George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the US portray simulations of power, that are in fact, signs of its cannibalization. Baudrillard asserts, “Farces of the Schwarzenegger type may serve as an illustration of any sort of power-structure, even of the way politics works. We may analyse[sic] this as a caricature of democracy, as a grotesque parody of it, which, after it was unmasked, would leave us with the hope of a rational way of exercising power” (12). It is important, here, to indicate the issue of power and its universal ideals that is the issue. In using the US as an example, Baudrillard is merely using the most representative example of power itself. American political figures such as Schwarzenegger and Bush are indicative of the cannibalistic farce “because they are emanations of global power as it is” (13) and not as power as it is idyllically imagined.
This idealization and then universalization of power is an Enlightenment concept, according to Baudrillard. He suggests that it is mostly assumed that intelligence should be in power, as in the so-called “the best and the brightest,” but this is rarely the case. Rather, those in power tend to represent the credulity of their dominion, or even worse, the reverse psychology of bestowing power to the innocuous and unsophisticated so that the dominion may feel an intellectual power over and above that of their leaders. The doomed cycle of carnival and cannibal is the result of the problematic belief in power. Baudrillard makes the bold statement:
"It is power itself that has to be abolished – and not just in the refusal to be dominated, which is the essence of all traditional struggles, but equally and as violently in the refusal to dominate. For domination implies both these things, and if there were the same violence or energy in the refusal to dominate, we would long ago have stopped dreaming of revolution (17-18)."
He goes on to point out the particular weakness in which this power rests, notwithstanding the tightness of its grip, in that politics, economics, and values are old versions of power. The old values are now parodies of themselves in their simulated universalization that seduces the carnivalized Global South. It is the enchantment, the lurid draw of the freedom from domination and the desire to have the kind of power that the North wields, that is the carnivalized simulacrum. An undeniably sad predicament. Baudrillard reiterates that the subsequent cannibalization destroys everything, so that any benefit that the US seems to have in global capitalism will ultimately be devoured by the powerless and their hopes to attain a faulty universal ideal.
In the second essay, “Ventriloquous Evil,” Baudrillard expounds on the notion of unilateral power with the disappearance of oppositions. He begins with a dyadic strategy analyzing, in comparison, domination and hegemony. He notes that while they are both forms of power that are easily confused, they nonetheless, are very different. Domination is a power that is defined against a lack of power, in that, it is what it is not – which is the dominated. This dialectic is mutually dependent because the dominator needs the dominated to be effective. There is no domination without this imbalance of power. Hegemony, on the other hand, does not need an opposition like the dominated. Rather, it is a form of power that administers an indirect control through influence that obviates any noncooperation. It institutes use value in a unilateral system that only maximizes the processes of production. The definition that Baudrillard provides expresses the way in which invalidation is a substantive means of control:
"[T]he hegemonic form tends quite simply to liquidate its opponents, regarding them as worthless, eccentric and residual. A style not of oppression and alienation, but of excommunication of everything that doesn’t fall within this sphere of integral performance and exchange. A style of foreclosure of a delinquent minority – exactly parallel to the theological position which contends that Evil does not exist (38)." Thus, it follows that good does not need to exist because there is no antithesis to know a difference. Hegemony is the obliteration of difference.
Baudrillard proclaims that hegemony is an unstoppable movement of history. It is natural, in a sense, and its control is inescapable. Its movement diffuses and abstracts in a manner that can be comparable to the ways in which modern technological platforms and global capital influence and then disembody the real. Invoking a theological tone once again, Baudrillard writes, “that all things hasten towards their abstraction, thereby obeying a frantic desire to escape their materiality” (42). Global capital has become a reality in its production of real materiality and has grown to dissolve its material world into an increasing abstraction, that he terms, “a self-referential spiral” (ibid), or “the tautological spiral” in The Agony of Power. As capital, or rather technological global capital, facilitates the disappearance of the realm of the real, so too will it aid the disintegration of the subject. Baudrillard states that this is apparent in global capital’s constant pursuit of deregulation. Without embodiment, or structures to contain this accelerating process, notions such as, knowledge, freedom, history, and ultimately agency, are weakened to the point of submission. It will be “a diffuse, floating, insubstantial subjectivity that is an immense reverberation surface for a disembodied, empty consciousness” (46). This is the point wherein there is no difference to serve as reference so that everything is “self-referential” and narcissistic.
This gradual creeping of hegemony produces a capitalism in which all evaluative measures and decisions have no frame of reference outside of hegemony. This is to say, things and concepts that are material or abstract are understood in an evaluative sense related to capital. The flow or process that is capitalism is the medium to which all value is measured against. To reinforce this notion of hegemonic structure, Baudrillard introduces some artistic perspectives. Quoting Robert Musil’s 1943 novel, A Man Without Qualities, he iterates, “under ideal conditions man would no longer experience anything at all privately and the comforting weight of personal responsibility would dissolve into a system of formulae for potential meanings” (50). Baudrillard relates this to a kind of fundamentalism of a technocracy that has no base and is always mobile. Another prescient voice comes from Don Delillo’s 2003 novel, Cosmopolis, “All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There’s no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself” (53). This is the simulative system that has consumed or dematerialized the relationship of good and evil. It is an ethics that is always truthful and always good.
The title of the essay derives from this lateralized exclusivity. The truthful good is much better at reproducing itself because it is not evil. However, with the collapse of difference there is only the good without prohibition. Everything is internal so that something can only know itself by way of its own voice, like an echo within. This is Baudrillard’s concept of ventriloquism. He elaborates that this concept, derived from the hegemony of global capital, comes from a certain arrogant communication that bypasses any negative criticism of itself. This, he suggests, is the cynicism of modernity that is constantly bolstering itself and deriding an opposition in the same instance. In effect, this ventriloquism removes the capacity of disapproval. It pacifies through disengagement of critical action and thought. The hegemony is the force of working, indifferently or not, to exhaustion to then be relieved with distractions like entertainment or addiction. It becomes a banal celebration of reduced competency that he likens to stupidity. Of this phenomena he states, “As soon as Good rules and claims to embody the truth, it is Evil that comes through” (62).
In this hegemony, everything is almost reduced to a singularity. What is not, is noncooperation that cannot be put to use through any means. To not participate is to be an outcast and is unthinkable in many senses of the word. This is due to the control of meaning and truth in the self-relational echo of ventriloquism. In a counterintuitive fashion, Baudrillard describes the constant desire to uncover meaning, to fashion everything known and unknown into signification, a “Promethean perspective of unlimited growth” (70). It is here that detractors of Baudrillard’s so-called nostalgia for the real will be disappointed. For he argues that the hegemonic pursuit of definitive meaning hampers a certain kind of intelligence that is beyond classification. He asserts: “All that is concealed must be revealed; everything must be reducible to analysis. Hence the whole effort (particularly since the death of God, who restrained this attempt to break open the natural world) leads to an extension of the field of meaning (of knowledge, analysis, objectivity and reality)” (71). Baudrillard is suggesting that too much meaning as a consequence of technology and science can be a contaminative phenomena that pollutes any access to enigma. As in his use of Nietzsche’s death of God, the eclipse of religion by secularization has erected a barrier to enigmatic thinking of that which can be mysterious. Baudrillard asks for a new kind of antagonism that attempts to rejuvenate the outcast soul at the core of power.