Deterrence

Definition

Deterrence, in Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (1981/1994), is the master strategy of the age of simulation: the neutralization of the real event in advance, and the substitution for it of a model that governs behaviour without ever being tested. Its paradigm is nuclear deterrence — "Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take place" — but Baudrillard extends it to all "metastable systems": "It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives, it is deterrence that gives them leukemia." For him deterrence is "not a strategy" in the classical sense: it "circulates and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation." Its operation is to preclude "the much greater probability of any real event" — "the balance of terror is the terror of balance" — and its form is involution rather than explosion: "Deterrence precludes war… Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution." Crucial for the wiki's image/architecture clusters, deterrence is equally the logic of Disneyland ("a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real"), of Beaubourg ("a monument of cultural deterrence"), of the media (the medium as a "system of deterrence" rather than surveillance), and of television ("TV itself is also a nuclear process of chain reaction, but implosive"). Deterrence thus names the power-form of simulation: not a cover-up of reality but a machine for preventing the real from occurring. See simulation-hyperreality, precession-of-simulacra, implosion-of-meaning, end-of-the-panopticon.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: nuclear deterrence as the "apotheosis of simulation"; the extension of deterrence to the media, the city, and power (1981/1994).
• Paul Virilio — the adjacent theorist of the military-perceptual apparatus; the "(dis)appearance" of the real event.
• Guy Debord — the spectacle's power-form, which Baudrillard radicalizes into deterrence.

Related Concepts

• Simulation / Hyperreality — the condition deterrence maintains.
• Precession of Simulacra — the mechanism: the model pre-empts the event.
• Implosion of Meaning — the media-side form of deterrence.
• End of the Panopticon — the surveillance-to-deterrence shift.
• Spectacle — the prior theory of image-power.
• Cold War — the historical frame of nuclear deterrence (see also civil-defense).
• Fortress Mentality and Privatised Public Space — the built extensions of the deterrence logic.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — deterrence as dissuasion: nuclear escalation as "the price we pay for pure war"; "Blackmail is worse than interdiction. Dissuasion is worse than sanctions"; and the hostage's suspended terror ("neither dead nor alive"). See the-hostage, transpolitical.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the defining source ("The Precession of Simulacra," "The China Syndrome," "The Beaubourg Effect"): "it is deterrence that gives them leukemia"; "The balance of terror is the terror of balance"; Disneyland as "a deterrence machine"; Beaubourg as "a monument of cultural deterrence"; the coalition of the nuclear and television as cold systems of deterrence.
• War and Cinema (Virilio 1989) — the military-perceptual genealogy: the image's "sway over the object," the derealization of the soldier.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — Rheingold's hyper-realist caution (the Panopticon that denies its own existence) and the carceral-urban security regimes.
• 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 deterrence a genuinely distinct concept or simply simulation applied to power? Baudrillard slides between "deterrence" and "simulation"; the wiki should decide whether the i-Difference is the prevention of the event (deterrence) versus the production of the real as model (simulation).
• Deterrence is defined by what never happens (the nuclear exchange). Can a concept be defined by non-events without becoming unfalsifiable?
• The built register: is civil-defense architecture, the gated community, or the "Ring of Steel" a deterrence apparatus in Baudrillard's sense, or only a security apparatus? (See civil-defense, gated-community, privatised-public-space.)