Saturation and retraction, not expansion, now generate violence

Evidence

A whole other violence appears today, which we no longer know how to analyze, because it escapes the traditional schema of explosive violence: implosive violence that no longer results from the extension of a system, but from its saturation and its retraction, as is the case for physical stellar systems. A violence that follows an inordinate densifkation of the social, the state of an overregulated system, a network (of knowledge, information, power) that is overencumbered, and of a hypertrophic control investing all the interstitial pathways. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 247

Categorization

• XREF: This is the direct corrective to Jameson’s dialectical, explosive model of postmodern culture — core to the reader’s stated Jameson-vs-Baudrillard comparison. — connects to: Capacity loss in nondemocratic regimes raises collective violence, as in the post-1985 USSR. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 764; Practiced violence systematically widens to ever-larger victim circles. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 132
• DEEPTHINKING: The shift from explosive to implosive violence as the defining signature of the current order is a dense, paradigm-level claim worth sitting with.