Catastrophe

Definition

Catastrophe, in Fatal Strategies (1983), is Baudrillard's term for the event without consequences — the form events take once "the meaning of history is over," in contrast to the pre-modern "crisis," which was still the disorder of causes. "Once the meaning of history is over, once this point of inertia has been passed, every event becomes catastrophe, becomes an event pure and without consequence (but that is its power)." Baudrillard's etymology is literal: "Catastrophe in the literal sense: the inflection or curve that has its origin and end coincide in one, that makes the end return to the origin and annul it, yielding to an event without precedent and without consequences — pure event." "The catastrophe is the maximal brute event, here too more eventful than the event—but an event without consequences." The concept's key discriminations: "Unlike the crisis, which is only the disorder of causes, catastrophe is the delirium of forms and appearances"; "It is never causes but rather appearances that, when they link themselves up, lead to catastrophe." The seismic is its characteristic contemporary form — "catastrophes take on the form of their culture" (New York = King Kong/the blackout; Los Angeles = the horizontal fault) — and Pompei is its mental archetype: "This is the mental effect of catastrophe: stopping things before they end, thus maintaining them indefinitely in the suspense of their apparition." The concept is the temporal counterpart of hypertely and inertia. See hypertely, transpolitical, chance, destiny, appearance-and-disappearance.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "every event becomes catastrophe, becomes an event pure and without consequence"; "catastrophe is the delirium of forms and appearances" (1983).
• Elias Canetti — the "blind point" beyond which history stops being real; the catastrophe as the passing of that point.
• Paul Virilio — the accident, speed, and the "integral accident" as the wiki's neighbouring catastrophe theory.
• Not yet paged: David Ruelle ("sensitive dependency of initial conditions") — the chaos-theory counterpoint Baudrillard resists.

Related Concepts

• Hypertely — catastrophe is where hypertelic systems end ("catastrophe in slow motion").
• Inertia — "Revenge and denunciation of speed in inertia."
• The Transpolitical — the catastrophic event is the transpolitical event ("an aberration of no consequence").
• Chance — catastrophe is the abolition of causes, not their random distribution.
• Destiny — the catastrophe is a fatal, non-causal linkage of appearances.
• Appearance and Disappearance — catastrophe as "the spontaneous connection of appearances."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "Ecstasy and Inertia": the point of inertia, the event without consequence, the seismic form, Pompei; "unlike crisis… catastrophe is the delirium of forms and appearances."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — implosion rather than explosion as the mode of abolition.
• The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Virilio 1991) — the accident/terminal-speed register.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is "catastrophe without consequences" a coherent concept, or a paradox? Baudrillard's examples (Pompei's second earthquake, the seism warning) are deliberately parodic.
• Does the concept make a politics of catastrophe impossible (there is nothing to do), or does it point to the only remaining act (the ceremony, the challenge)? Test against the wiki's climate-change-and-architecture and sustainability-and-ethics debates.