Amerique was first published, in French, in 1986. It is a book worth revisiting for entertainment’s sake if nothing else. As he observed then,

The fifties were the real high spot for the US (“when things were really going on”), and you can still feel the nostalgia for those years, for the ecstasy of power, when power held power. In the seventies power was still there, but the spell was broken. That was orgy time (war, sex, Manson, Woodstock). Today the orgy is over. The US, like everyone else, has to face up to a soft world order, a soft situation. Power has become impotent. (107)

Of course the Reagan era was also about making America great again, if not with that precise slogan. Today, America finds itself wondering again about the nature of its power in the wake of a conflict with Iran.

From Baudrillard’s perspective, America’s performance as a hegemony from the first Gulf War onward is theatrical. That is not to say that it wasn’t and isn’t very real and material. Instead, Baudrillard argues that US exercises of force attempt to demonstrate control, but that turns out to be a fantasy. Nevertheless, we continually stage this fantasy as theater, as in the continual violence of the war on terror that demonstrates our “control” of terrorism. Yes, the bombs and the terrorists both exist. But there is also a theatrical, media effect which seeks to add the message that these events mean that we have control/power.

Today’s theater of war is as different from the CNN production of the Gulf War, as our mediascape is from the early 90s world of basic cable. Todays’ theatricality quickly went off the rails. The current war has been as much about the aesthetic appeal of AI Lego slop as state propaganda. It turns out that it is difficult to demonstrate one’s military power via media without sufficient control of the media systems.

With Reagan and Trump we see a recurring conservative fantasy in which the political body seeks to merge with its image while experiencing that very mediation as a threat. Massumi writes on Reagan’s decision to pursue politics, “it is not the fakeness of acting, nor the media hype, that he is objecting to. Hollywood is simply not big enough for him. He needs more space, more friends and observers, a greater variety of relative perspectives through which to circulate as he repeats his lines” (55). It is not that Reagan confuses acting with politics but that he rejects acting as insufficient for the body’s expanded performance through political circulation. The King’s Row amputation scene and the key line Reagan delivers there become memorialized in the title of his autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? He goes on to seek that expanded and reassembled self through public image, national spectacle, and mass media.

Trump encounters a different media scene, and we often observe his mastery of social media. But whereas the American media scene of the 80s and early 90s could be mastered to memorialize and dignify a presidency as a fantasy of control, mastery of social media is algorithmic and always operates in relation to noise and competition, what Deleuze and Guattari term the indisciplines of continuous variation. We shift from “manufacturing consent” to manufacturing dissent. The operation, for good or ill, is no longer about a (faux) incorporation of all into an American body but rather the infection/injection of grievance that disincorporates that body.

This is not simply technologically driven change. As noted above, for Baudrillard, the 80s were already post-orgiastic: “how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance?” (10) Where the Reagan era offered a superficial abstinence of “Just Say No” to sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, the MAGA era is an attempted resuscitation of the orgy. We already had Epstein. And the orgy of the theocratic Christian right. And the orgy of white nationalism.

However these are not Baudrillard’s orgies. He writes, ” In the very heartland of wealth and liberation you always hear the same question: ‘What are you doing after the orgy?’ What do you do when everything is available–sex, flowers, the stereotypes of life and death? This is America’s problem and, through America, it has become the whole world’s problem” (30). These more recent orgies (e.g., January 6th) are orgies of grievance. They rely on the aggrieved energy of participants who feel judged. The point is to restart the orgy through the agitprop of grievance. For MAGA it is restarting the orgy of the American 50s (“when things were really going on”).

Instead, we appear to have rediscovered the 50s of Great Britain and the Suez Canal crisis. The US has run up against the fiction of its power.

Without pushing too much on the suggestiveness, it’s difficult to have an orgy when you are in a “soft situation.” The laser-guided purity of the Gulf War is replaced with the IED and PTSD of Iraq and Afghanistan. As these occupations turned into a global war on terror, we turn to remote killing as terror management. Israel, with US support, engages in “mowing the grass” and other forms of occupational-managerial violence. Across these efforts, there is continual performance of power but control never appears. Unlike a Gulf War (or Cold War) that appears to end, we get feedforward effects that saturate the social field as anger, anxiety, depression, paranoia, cynicism and so on. These affects are not conducive to orgies, but neither are they responsive to the post-orgy schoolmarm.

Baudrillard noted the disappearance of American power in the 80s and America’s holographic hegemony in its wars on terror. While it is tempting to imagine today as hyperreal, that’s the era of The Matrix. Today we have something like operational hyperreality. It’s not only that we can manufacture the hyperreal through media as the precession of simulation. We can now make the precession actionable through generative and agential AI.

Think of operational hyperreality as an effort to update Baudrillard’s hyperreal rather than as a displacement. The hyperreal does not impose its conditions upon us (as ideology or disciplinarity might). The hyperreal furnishes the conditions within which subjectivity recognizes itself as real. Where hyperreality precedes the body with the image, operational hyperreality names the condition in which simulation becomes directly executable: generated, optimized, circulated, acted upon, and folded back into institutional decision, propaganda, targeting, policing, campaigning, and public affect. Operational hyperreality then is an intensification of soft power. Even its impotence is intensified as its demonstrations of power become more omnipresent, its inability to control a world of continuous variation becomes richer.