Can't Feel My Face, Angela, to which Baudrillard ...

© Robin Blair - Simulacra and Simulation

And I know she'll be the death of me, 

at least we'll both be numb

And she'll always get the best of me, 

the worst is yet to come

... adds a figurative  where  the  object  and  substance  have  disappeared. But let's first delve into the recent past.

Oh what a difference some months make. Four months ago a cocky Greece was successfully viciously assaulted, raped in broad daylight and thrown bleeding into the gutter. The German press applauding, just like they applauded 82 years ago. The European Reich Germany had made its point. You go against our policy of austerity, we crush you, we shut down your banks. The German public just loved it as could be seen in the Sportpalast du jour, the comments section of newspapers. The shakti had spoken. On to business as usual in the country of the Fachkräfte.

Wait a minute, what's that? Strange looking people came trickling in. Then more. Germans learned about some Greek islands perilously close to that disdained country Turkey. What started as a mild wave quickly turned into a stampede. A stampede one would have associated with Bharata 70 years ago. Midnight's Children. Yet this was Europe. "United in diversity".

As that former country became the playground of a benevolent Macedonian woman plying her self-serving trade in Kolkata, the country of refugees' choice in Europe granted itself the luxury of a woman, likewise from the east, whose hallmark was indecisiveness and much admired by her subjects therefore. Confronted with hundreds of thousands, scaremongerers even managed to come up with ever higher numbers every third day, of refugees on her queendoms' soil she followed the playbook of the Mother of Kolkata. Come ye all, my brothers and sisters, 'I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love'. Translated into German: 'Wir schaffen das'.

However, badly miscalculating the generosity of her subjects - a generosity that had already been stretched to its utmost limits with Greece - she was made to learn a widespread displeasure with her handling and admonished for her nebulous grasp of reality. 

Hesitatingly, a trait most becoming to a woman, she made the initiative to a raunchy love affair with a Frenchman of short stature, quickly passed some new immigration laws out of that boudoir when time would allow and topped that off, to the consternation of that short Frenchman one might add, with a Walk to Canossa Turkey for a prostration in front of the local emir, finally culminating in the decision to fast-track deport superfluous human imports on, oh those Germans, military transport planes.

It is here then that an eminent monsieur from France, a country Germany was hitherto at odds with, can shed a wise light on the ineptitude, subsequent chasse patate and other follies of this clumsy and so revered Führer of Teutonia:

When  the  real  is  no  longer  what  it  used  to  be,  nostalgia  assumes its  full  meaning.  There  is  a  proliferation  of  myths  of  origin  and  signs of  reality;  of  second-hand  truth,  objectivity  and  authenticity.  There is  an  escalation  of  the  true,  of  the  lived  experience;  a  resurrection of  the  figurative  where  the  object  and  substance  have  disappeared. And  there  is  a  panic-stricken  production  of  the  real  and  the  referential, above  and  parallel  to  the  panic  of  material  production.  This  is  how simulation  appears  in  the  phase  that  concerns  us:  a  strategy  of  the real,  neo-real  and  hyperreal,  whose  universal  double  is  a  strategy  of deterrence.

(Baudrillard - Simulations and Simulacra)

Baudrillard on Volkswagen #dieselgate

Watergate Volkswagen #dieselgate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality - that is what is scandalous, unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of the Enlightenment up to Communism.

How can capitalist conduct possibly be a scandal? A scandal can not be a scandal when the subject matter works as it is supposed to work. The sudden oozing of morality left and right in the media. Fuck, something besmirched our economic religion, the neoliberal mantra, it somehow managed to seep out into the open. Something that everybody knew was concealed and as long as that was concealed, felt OK. The daily Fritzl.

One imputes this thinking to the contract of capital, but it doesn't give a damn - it is a monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more. 

What the hell were you thinking? Oh you sucker for a benign economy, striving to be number one in the world in that only business you are good at, and how could it possibly be surprising, that one runs the risk of invoking Godwin's Law? You knew, at least you should, full well how unprincipled it works as it kicks you ordinary soul in the guts every day, but you chose to accommodate your qualms by imposing that undying principle, dished out to you ad nauseam, onto yourself as a religious hymn, your personal sukta. That sacred vedic chant of: JOBS. In front of that altar you commit any sacrifice because you are being told.

It is "enlightened" thought that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it. And all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary thought today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capital exploits us, etc." - as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules.

Rules were broken, power misused, your trust belied. 

No! You fell for it.

It is the Left that holds out the mirror of equivalence to capital hoping that it will comply, comply with this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligations to the whole of society (by the same token, no need for revolution: it suffices that capital accommodate itself to the rational formula of exchange).

Your disappointment longs for help, it questions your country's sovereignty as one sorry soul in a comment to a SPIEGEL article bemoaned. Young soul, rest assured, your country's sovereignty is fine and well. Were it not, the USA would send some committee over and they would confiscate those 18 billion buckeroos (or whatever the final tab will be) right away. Hope it makes you feel better.

Other folks from Zerohedge and such waste their time in comparing fines imposed on other car companies on home soil. Sorry, you did not understand the game, there is no equivalence to capital. Certainly none, when a ridiculous conglomerate of states continues to piss off US internet companies based solely on the ground that they have absolutely zippo capacity, intellect and guts to compete. 

Capital, in fact, was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates. It is a sorcery of social relations, it is a challenge to society, and it must be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral or economic rationality, but a challenge to take up according to symbolic law. 

Nothing needs to be added here, but keep this in mind: Capital is a sorcery of social relations.

Watergate Volkswagen was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.

The neoliberal show must go on and each will play his or her part. And you, treasured reader, will be a reliable part of it.

Jean Baudrillard in 'Simulacra and Simulations' (translated by Sheila Faria Glaser)