ABSTRACT
From the articles and books of Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman, which I first came across some decades ago, I have adopted the belief that capitalism has started to change toward unknown horizons and unimagined forms. Unsure of what direction this change is heading, I have explored not only the genesis of capitalism through a radical analysis of Norse mythology (Korstanje, 2015) but also the main limitations of biopolitics. Particularly, I contended with Baudrillard, Foucault and Bauman that, while capitalism was mutating into stricter disciplinary ways, it was doing so in contradiction with their diagnoses. Over recent decades, it is true that a global audience has been captivated by the rise of an atmosphere where disasters, terrorism and virus outbreaks instilled panic into the population. In fact, the problem of ISIS and terrorism has changed geopolitics after 9/11. While terrorists planned their attacks on military targets or celebrities through the 1970s, now mobile civilians are hosted then kidnapped and decapitated in public to expand a veil of terror over many central nations. It is tempting to say that part of the influence of terrorism exerted in the Occident depends on the obsession of Westerners to consume news covering terrorist cruelty. Human suffering such as poverty and hunger, adjoined to violence, has been thematized and visually consumed in tourist circuits worldwide. As we will see in this book, large cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Bombai are visited annually by thousands of tourists who manifest their need to feel how these non-European “Others” are pressed to survive. This opens the doors to the articulation of discourses where the suffering of Others remains as the main criterion of attraction. The same applies for an uncanny custom, the visit to zones of disasters, abandoned jails or spaces of mass death and pain. Jean Baudrillard called this “the spectacle of disaster.” These types of spectacles, instead of producing a pseudo-reality, appear to be conducive to tactics to control the workforce-to mitigate their potential discontent levels to be tolerated as the status quo. No less true is that terrorists saw in leisure-spots or tourist destinations fertile grounds to create political instability, in order for their claims to be accepted. Though terrorism is not the common-thread argument in this book, it is fascinating to see how the system recycles spaces of mass death, suffering and pain such as Ground Zero into a spectacle. This raises a more than
interesting question that guides all my investigation: To what extent has capitalism posed death as its main cultural value?
