Consider Zinedine Zidane’s head butt and dismissal in his final game and World Cup final 2006: “it was almost as if a great Shakespearean actor, playing King Lear at the National Theatre for the last time, interrupted his final soliloquy by punching the dead Cordelia and then announcing his life-long hatred for producers, directors and – especially – the paying public” (Smith, 2009:28) The butt was a “decisive, brutal, prosaic, novelistic act: a perfect moment of ambiguity under the Berlin sky, a few dizzying seconds of ambivalence, where beauty and blackness, violence and passion, come into contact and provoke the short-circuit of a wholly unscripted act…Zidane’s act knows not the aesthetic categories of the beautiful or the sublime, it stands beyond the moral categories of good and evil, its value, its strength and its substance owing only to their irreducible congruence with the precise moment in time at which it occurred” (Toussaint, 2007: 12). For Baudrillard it was a singular exhibition of indifference to global power. It was “a stunning act of disqualification, of sabotage, of ‘terrorism’. By blighting this ritual of planetary identification, these nuptials between sport and planet, by refusing to be the idol and mirror of globalization in such an emblematic event, he is denying the universal pact that permits the transfiguration of our sad reality by Good and allows billions of unidentified human beings to find an identity in the void (the same sublimation operates in the sacred illusions of war)…And it was, indeed, stigmatized as an act of desertion, but, as such, it also became simultaneously a cult gesture: by passing from the peak of performance to the peak of dysfunction, to the thwarting of Good in all its splendour, it suddenly pointed up the Nothingness at the heart of globalization…And all this by a simple act that is not in any sense a gesture of revolt…Certainly the most glorious (and most elegant) ‘scandal’ we have been afforded for many years. It is a ‘blow’ by which everyone can be said to have lost the World Cup. But isn’t that better than having won a victory for globalization itself?” (Baudrillard, 2010b: 78).

I am ambivalent about Baudrillard. I enjoy reading him and often discover useful insights, but I think he tries too hard to be profound or at least sound profound. In the end, he is a second rate thinker. Whenever I read him I keep thinking of Wittgenstein: "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." Some write in a peculiar style to try to create an effect in a reader as Foucault does. However, Baudrillard IMO is not one of those writers. Anyway, typical Baudrillard.

He discusses what has become of photography with the rise of digital media and the fact that digital media does not have to have a referent in the 'real' world and what all that means for humanity. ( )