ABSTRACT
Adorno wrote the above passage more than fifty years before Jean Baudrillard outraged the literal minded with his essay The Gulf War Did
Not Take Place (1995). The title was frequently and glibly parodied, but Baudrillard’s point is perfectly sound. He meant that the Gulf War had been so effectively transformed into an image that people outside the combat zone had difficulty in conceiving it as fully real. In many people’s minds, the war occupied the same ontological category as a video game. We witnessed a similar effect following the terrorist attack of 11 September. When shell-shocked New Yorkers returned home after watching the twin towers burn, they switched on their televisions to find that the event had already been packaged, branded and presented after the manner of a feature film. As Mike Davis puts it in Dead Cities (2002):
In fact, Adorno and Baudrillard are saying exactly the same thing, but there is an important difference between their attitudes. Adorno sees hyper-reality as the conquest of the world by what, mutatis mutandis, we can without exaggeration call ‘Satan’. Baudrillard’s ethical position on hyper-reality is certainly debatable, but he has left ample interpretative room for his followers to revel in its libidinal liberation from logos and telos.
