In the article “The Postmodern Theatre of the Ukrainian Counter-Offensive,” published by the New Statesman on September 25, 2023, Philip Cunliffe challenges the prevalent understanding of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. He claims that, instead of being a meaningful military operation, it has been nothing more than a staged media spectacle. This spectacle portrays a battle between realism and Western idealism and is driven primarily by conceit and self-deception. Cunliffe suggests that Ukraine’s counter-offensive is purely an engineered simulation whose motivations include justifying financial support to Ukraine while boosting the profits of arms companies and bolstering russia’s war narrative. To give the article the thinnest of veneers of intellectual rigor and insight, he makes use of Jean Baudrillard’s hyperrealism (developed most fully in Simulacra and Simulation, especially in the essay “The Precession of Simulacra”) in an attempt to describe how media-saturated simulation has blurred the reality of the Ukrainian military operations. By parroting Baudrillard’s assessment regarding the 1991 Gulf War, Cunliffe concludes that Ukraine’s counter-offensive simply did not take place.
Though it is anything but clear how Cunliffe understands this “take place,” Baudrillard’s phrase, taken from the title of his series of essays published under the collective title The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, encapsulates a profound critique of the ways contemporary conflicts (and not only conflicts) are experienced and understood. With this phrase, Baudrillard meant to challenge traditional, naïve notions of war and reality. The phrase itself was never intended to strictly deny the occurrence of any particular physical event during the war. Instead, Baudrillard deployed it as a philosophical proposition or provocation even, albeit one that remains thoroughly philosophical.
Baudrillard argued that the Gulf War—as experienced via mass media by most people worldwide—was so heavily influenced by the media, simulations, and symbolic representations that it became a hyperreal scenario. What we might call the physical or real war, that is, the war as it occurred on the ground, was overshadowed and distorted by its representations to the extent that the two seemed disconnected. The true nature of the conflict, as it unfolded, was, Baudrillard suggested, lost in the hyperreal spectacle created by the war’s mediatization. In his analysis, he highlighted how such events can be filtered, pre-interpreted (or, to use David Wojnarowicz’s phrasing, pre-invented), and, if we extrapolate, sometimes manufactured (à la wagging the dog and astroturfing). The phrase underscores the idea that the Gulf War was, for many, primarily a televised, simulated event rather than a tangible, lived experience. Regardless, even at his most cavalier, Baudrillard would never have been so callous as to thoroughly disarticulate a hyperrealist scenario or symbolic function from real human suffering.
Much like Michel Foucault’s often overlooked assertion (from “Body/Power” in Power/Knowledge) that “In fact nothing is more material, physical, corporal than the exercise of power,” Baudrillard understood that the really real (at least what we designate as such) unceasingly predicates the symbolic. Or conversely: there is no symbolic meaning without some grounding in physical reality. As Baudrillard made clear in his analysis of the relationships among the symbolic, the actual, and the phenomenal in “Requiem for the Twin Towers” (from The Spirit of Terrorism), symbolism in and of itself does not diminish or negate physical reality but always co-constitutes and is co-constituted by it.
By calling into question the validity of our perceptions and experiences in a world permeated by media representations, Baudrillard’s hyperrealist analytic has still broader implications for our understanding of contemporary conflicts as well as of the nature of reality in the age of acute disinformation. Baudrillard continues to challenge us to critically examine the role of media, simulations, and symbolism in shaping our understanding of the world, to thoughtfully examine the gap between reality and the hyperreal spectacle that surrounds it online or in the discourse.
Within the framework of Baudrillardian hyperreality, Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe stands out as capturing the sometimes indistinguishable threshold between reality and its own simulation, between the physical world and its symbolic representations. In the play, we watch a man, the protagonist, being put on display, physically manipulated by a director through his assistant. Seemingly stripped of all autonomy and reduced to a mere object, the protagonist comes to embody the barren, bland reality of the real. His clothing and tufts of hair are described as being the color of ash; his hands, as “crippled” and “clawlike.” Making the designation protagonist all the more ironic, he is the only character who does not utter a word. Through him, Beckett highlights the loss of agency and the fragmentation of subjectivity, conditions that, according to Baudrillard, arise from within the hyperreal. The protagonist’s seeming inability to speak or act independently underscores the ever-increasing influence and control by dominating forces and their manipulation of meaning and signification by way of media, technology, and discourse.
The metatheatrical performance that takes place on stage seduces and implicates the audience’s attention. We come to see the protagonist more as a prop than a character or person, and this in turn foregrounds both the necessity as well as our inability to be ethically responsible before, and for, the protagonist. Our guilt in facing such a display, such a spectacle, stubbornly remains available for consumption as entertainment while we ourselves are still incriminated in its manufacture.
But Beckett’s play emphasizes the enduring importance of authenticity and genuine human experience. The protagonist’s struggle to assert his humanity in the face of manipulation, objectification, and dehumanization speaks to our fundamental desire for connection and expression that even now resist the seductions of mere simulation and representation. Within the realm of hyperreality, where meaning at times appears stripped away, existential questions and the quest for significance persist.
Catastrophe shows how reality can be transformed into a staged, simulated spectacle where individuals lose agency and become passive objects, controlled by external forces. Yet as the play progresses—indeed, as the play comes to an end—the protagonist resists his own objectification. His sole, final act of resistance (the raising of his head, the fixing of his eyes on the audience) can be understood as a rejection of the passive, spectatorial roles that individuals within hyperreality are often assigned. Catastrophe indicates that there is still the potential for agency and resistance, as well as a deep-seated desire for some version of authenticity. In effect, Beckett reasserts the term catastrophe not as disastrous event that befalls the passive human but more literally as the very over-turning or bringing-down of systems of manipulation and oppression.
For Palestine.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Trans. Paul Patton. Bloomington: U of IN P, 1995.
—. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of MI P, 1994.
—. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. New ed. Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 2003.
Beckett, Samuel. The Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove P, 1984.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972 – 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas, and is essays editor at Minor Literature[s]. His series Better Shopping Through Living will appear monthly. He sees that the once great marketplace of ideas is now nothing more than an abandoned mall overrun by raccoons.
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