Simulating intelligence

Jean Baudrillard takes a wander through les banlieues and doesn’t like what he sees:

Fifteen hundred cars had to burn in a single night and then, on a descending scale, nine hundred, five hundred, two hundred, for the daily ‘norm’ to be reached again, and people to realize that ninety cars on average are torched every night in this gentle France of ours. A sort of eternal flame, like that under the Arc de Triomphe, burning in honour of the Unknown Immigrant. Known now, after a lacerating process of revision—but still in trompe l’oeil.

But who can blame them? France offers its immigrants “integration,” which is nothing more than an attempt to palm “French” values off onto others:

Integration’ is the official line. But integration into what? The sorry spectacle of ‘successful’ integration—into a banalized, technized, upholstered way of life, carefully shielded from self-questioning—is that of we French ourselves. To talk of ‘integration’ in the name of some indefinable notion of France is merely to signal its lack.

What is so wrong with upholstering Baudrillard does not say. But after giving it careful thought, he’s decided that the root of the problem is not with France, or Europe, but with the West. Or, rather, with the very absence of the West:

This society faces a far harder test than any external threat: that of its own absence, its loss of reality. Soon it will be defined solely by the foreign bodies that haunt its periphery: those it has expelled, but who are now ejecting it from itself. It is their violent interpellation that reveals what has been coming apart, and so offers the possibility for awareness.

What is worth doing, in this desert of the real, remains unclear.