This is a preliminary “response” to “The Russia File” using Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations.
So, let me begin my attempt:
All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another; where there is no longer any active or passive. It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that as principle of political reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can be maintained (including, of course, “objective” analysis, struggle, etc.). But if the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates at the end of the cycle having benefiting everyone and been scattered in all directions.
(Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard)
In the context of Foreign Affairs and the essay “The Russia File,” it is difficult to identify the origin of simulation. Are the nations the simulation? Is the publication the simulation of an ‘objective and independent’ discourse within that spiralling nation-state? Or are the very readers, who continually reinterpollate themselves into a simulated environment. It is in fact impossible to identify an origin, because there is none; the origin has collapsed on itself and negated itself too many times to be recovered.
“The Russia File,” is an example of the failed attempts at political illusion. Its self-defined purpose is a matter of attempted illusion, of attempted goals, demands, and necessities for continued American domination of Russia, and ultimately, a continued capital domination(though it has already eroded itself from the core, outward, since there never was an “America,” there was only capital):
Russia’s institutionally amorphous political landscape also stands in the way, for neither the current diarchy… nor the broader semiauthoritarian power structure is stable…Then there is Russia’s conflicted profile…This underlying tension leaves its leaders either unwilling or unable to compose a clear vision of Russia’s place and role in the world.
(“The Russia File,” Robert Levgold)
What Levgold means (or does not mean) to say is the uncontrollable failure of simulated American (or Western, whatever) power. [In fact, the whole magazine is a hollow idol divined in the hopes of resurrecting "the American moderate-left;" an urgent call to bureaucracy... if all advice, if all urgency is attended to, what is the immanent disaster? It is clear that we are the immanent disaster, attempting a controlled implosion.] In terms of Amero-centric capitalism, concentrated ona frenzy for reform, Levgold cannot place Russia in any compartment of the simulated “world order” because the article does not *see* the world order as it exists.
Levgold’s incessant (though undesired) oscillation between tired political rhetoric and an incomplete euphemistic portrait of today’s Cold War is due to his misunderstanding of his own simulated exercise in truth within the greater simulation of American political discourse. The failure of his “anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model… is what each time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory- are all true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle…” (Baudrillard 372). This essay reaches out beyond the model of proper globalism, nationalism, and capitalism, and inevitably turns in on itself in a collapse. In a phrase, Levgold’s attempts at outlining the “true relationship” between America and Russia are ultimately disconnected from the reality of economic relationships by shrouded semblances of leadership, capitols, and consumption.
This piece is not political. It attempts a political stand. It places its “demands,” and yet there are no stakes, for there is no nation-state, nor are there summits, nor threats:
Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.
(Baudrillad, 372)
Essentially, Levgold’s scattered lists of political to-do’s, surface reasoning (I think there’s a lot more to be said for the fundamental outlier of Russia’s political history versus America’s than for the energy rapport the two nations “might, should, would” enjoy, when in fact they are the same thing. Only these rapports are merely regenerated images of the former… of the producer posited against (and dominated by) the consumer.) does little more than leave the reader with a confused grimace:
It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.
