Jean
Baudrillard, notorious French sociologist, cultural critic, and
theorist of post modernity, was born in 1929 in the northern town
of Reims.
Baudrillard
is a thinker who builds on what was being thought by others and
breaks through via a key reversal of logic to make fresh analysis.
He has been influenced by Bataille (who wrote surreally and erotically),
as well as Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, the Situationists and
Surrealism.
Baudrillard's
philosophy centers on the twin concepts of ‘hyper reality’
and ‘simulation.’ These terms refers to the virtual
or unreal nature of contemporary culture in an age of mass communication
and mass consumption. We live in a world dominated by simulated
experience and feelings, Baudrillard believes, and have lost the
capacity to comprehend reality as it really exists. We only experience
prepared realities -- edited war footage, meaningless acts of
terrorism, the destruction of cultural values and the substitution
of ‘referendum.’
* * * * * * * * * * *
The fact
that we are entering on a retroactive form of history, that all
our ideas, philosophies, mental faculties are progressively adapting
themselves to this model, is quite evident. This may just as well
be an adventure, since the disappearance of the end is, in itself,
an original or creative situation. It seems to be characteristic
of our culture and our history which have no end in sight either
as guarantors of an indefinite recurrence, of an immortality pursued
in the opposite direction. Up till now, immortality was conceived
of as a region of the beyond, an immortality yet to come, today
however, we have concocted another type of immortality, one on
this side of the fence that incorporates the recession of outcomes
ad infinitum.
The situation
may be original, but the final result or outcome of things is
evidently lost in advance or up front. We will never get to know
the original chaos, the Big Bang, and because it is a classified
event, we had never been there. We could retain the hope however,
of seeing the final moment, the Big Crumb, one day. A spasmodic
enjoyment of the end to compensate for not having had the chance
to revere the beginning [l'origine]. These are the only
two interesting moments, and since we were frustrated with the
first one, we invest all the more energy into the acceleration
of the end, into the precipitation of things or events towards
their ultimate loss, a loss from which we were at least thrown
the crumbs in the form of the spectacle. Dreaming of an unprecedented
opportunity open to a generation to obliterate the end of the
world, which is just as wonderful as being part of the beginning.
But we have arrived too late for things to begin, only the end
or outcome seems to careen under our sway.
We have
been reproached for the atomic age -- but finally [!] we have
managed to suspend the equilibrium of terror and have decisively
(?) deferred the conclusive event. Now that dissuasion has succeeded,
we have to get used to the idea that there is no longer any end,
there will no longer be any end and that history itself has become
interminable. Consequently, when one speaks of "the end of
history", of "the end of the political", of "the
end of the social", of "the end of ideologies",
none of this is true. The worst indeed is that there is no end
to anything and that everything will continue to take place in
a slow, fastidious, recurring and all-encompassing hysterical
manner - like nails and hair continue to grow after death. Fundamentally,
of course, all this is already dead and instead of a joyous or
tragic resolution, instead of a destiny, we are left with an vexatious
homeopathic end or outcome that is secreted into metastatic resistances
to death. In the wake of all that resurfaces, history backtracks
on its own footsteps in a compulsive attempt at rehabilitation,
as if in a recompense for some sort of crime I am not aware of
-- a crime committed by and in spite of us, a kind of crime done
to oneself, the process of which is sped up in our contemporary
phase of history and the sure signs of which today are global
waste, universal repentance and resentment [ressentiment]
-- a crime where the lawsuit needs to be re-examined and where
we have to be unrelenting to go back as far as the origins, if
necessary, in quest of retrospective absolution since there is
no resolution to our fate in the future. It is imperative that
we find out what went wrong and at which moment and then begin
examining the traces left on the trail leading up to the present
time, to turn over all the rocks of history, to revive the best
and the worst in a vain attempt to separate the good from the
bad. Following Canetti's hypothesis: we have to return to this
side of the fatal line of demarcation which, in history, has kept
the human separate from the inhuman, a line that we, at some point,
have thoughtlessly crossed under the spell and vertigo of some
sort of anticipated liberatory effect. Arguably, it is possible
that our collective panic in the face of this blind spot of going
beyond history and its ends (then again, what are these ends?
all we know is that we've crossed them without noticing that we
did) tempts us to take hastening steps backwards in order to escape
this simulation in the void. To relocate the zone or point of
reference, the earlier scene of a Euclidean space of history.
This is what the events of Eastern Europe pretended to embark
on by way of peoples' movement and the democratic process. The
Gulf War was also an effort to re-open the space of war, of a
founding violence to usher in the new world order.
All of
these instances failed. This revival of vanished or vanishing
forms, this attempt to escape a virtual apocalypse is a utopia,
in fact the last of our utopias - the more we try to rediscover
the real and the point of reference, the more we sink ourselves
into a simulation that has now become shameful and utterly hopeless.
Similar
to illnesses which are likely the reactivation of earlier states
of the organism (cancer, for example, reproduces an undifferentiated
proliferation of primary living cells or, viral pathology, for
that matter, in the case of which earlier stages of the biogenetic
substance resurge in moments of lapse and when the body loses
its immuno-capacity), could we perhaps conceive of history in
a similar manner and say that its former stages have never really
disappeared as they successively reappear to take advantage of
failures or lapses, of the excess that is such a distinctive mark
in the complexities of current structures?
These
earlier forms, on the other hand, never reappear in their purity
as they are unable to escape the destiny of modernity's intensity.
Their resurrection, too, is hyper real. Reinvoked values themselves
are unstable and subject to the same fluctuations as fashion or
the stock exchange. Reinstatement of earlier borders, of former
structures, of the former elite therefore will never attain its
identical meaning, i.e., will never be the same it once was. If
aristocracy and royalty were to achieve status one day, they would
still be 'post-modern.'. All retro-scenarios currently in the
making are without historical significance as they are completely
enacted at the level or surface of our time, like an overlay of
images that cannot affect film in motion. Relapsing events: thawed
out democracy, bluffing freedoms, a pre-packed New World Order
in cellophane and an ecology, swathed in naphthalene moth balls,
the rights of immuno-deficient man -- this will alter nothing
in the current melancholy of the century which we will never get
over because, in the meantime, it has looped back onto itself
only to be freed up again with a different meaning.
This
lies at the basis of Walt Disney's success, the ingenious precursor
of a world of ludicrous promiscuity parading all past and present
forms, of a mosaic recurrence of all cultures (of future cultures
as well which themselves have become recurrent). We were under
the belief for quite some time that all this was only imaginary,
a derivative or decor of something that was childish and of marginal
significance. However, we can catch a glimpse of something already
at work here, if only prefigured in the curvature of real things
of Disney world, which opens up the frightening perspective of
being able to go beyond, like in the movies, all of the former
stages, to become hypostatized in a definitive youthfulness, refrigerated
like Disney himself in liquid nitrogen: Magic Country, Future
World, Gothic, Hollywood itself remodeled fifty years later in
Florida -- all the past and future revisited in live simulation.
Walt Disney is the true hero of deep-freeze, of a utopia of waking
up in the future and in a better world. But here's the irony:
he didn't foresee the face-about, the volte-face that was to take
place between the real and history. And he who believed that he
would return in the year 2100 may well, true to his own fairy
tale scenario, wake up in 1730, or with the Pharaohs, or even
amidst one of his countless primitive scenarios.
But what
good is this end of the century for, one may wonder. Well, for
the sale of the century. History and the end of history are up
for sale. Communism and the end of communism at bargain discount
prices. Communism could not have arrived at its historical end
now that it will have been sold off, liquidated like layaway stock.
Similarly to the Russian army, sold to the four corners of the
earth - an event of unparalleled significance sunk to the banality
of a market transaction. All the ideologies of the West are also
up for sale; they can be purchased at a low price on all the latitudes
of the globe.
In former
times, sales followed festivities, today they precede them. We
have a similar case in our century: in anticipation of its end,
everything must go, everything must be liquidated. We are also
discovering that along with the grand sell-out of the Red Army,
industrial laboratories are in the process of "discharging"
or selling off their human gene pool, genes that are first patented
and then commercialized, step by step. There too, everything must
go even if it is not known what use these genes may be put to.
Things cannot be left to run their natural course, they have to
be cryogenized [cryogeniser: Converted to a freezing
mixture.] in order to tailor them to a virtual and paltry immortality.
Messianic
hope was founded on the reality of the Apocalypse. Today, this
has no more substantive reality than the original Big Bang. We
will no longer have a right to this dramatic illumination. Even
the idea of putting an end to our planet via an atomic clash has
become barren and superfluous - if this no longer holds any meaning
for anybody, not even for God, what good is it for? Our Apocalypse
is not real, it is virtual. Neither does it belong to the future,
its incident is in the here and now. With respect to our orbiting
bombs, even though they do not comprise a natural ending, at least
we were the creators of them, with the potential, seemingly, to
better finish them off. But no, in fact, to better shake off the
end. This is the end we have henceforth managed to satellize in
the image of all finalities which had once been transcendental
but have now become orbital, pure and simple.
From
now on, this end will revolve and continue to revolve around us
untiringly. We have been surrounded by our own end and caught
in the impossible situation of being unable to land it, to have
it descend on earth. This is the story or parable of the Russian
cosmonaut forgotten in space with no one to welcome or bring him
back - the only particle of Soviet territory that could ironically
skim over a deterritorialized Russia. Now that everything has
changed down below, he has practically become immortal as he continues
to revolve like the gods, the stars, like nuclear waste. As has
become the fate of so many events of which he is the perfect example,
they all continue to spin endlessly in a space void of information
without anyone being able or, wanting to, retrieve them into the
space of history. They assume the image of everything that follows
its absolute orbital performance and in the course of which their
identity is lost on the way. Such is the case of our history that
has been lost [or forsaken] along the way as it revolves around
and hovers above us like a satellite.
Nostalgia
for the lost object? Not even that. Nostalgia was nice in the
way it sustained the feeling vis-a-vis things that have taken
place and could also branch out to encompass those that could
come around again. It was beautiful as a utopia, as an inverted
mirror of utopia. Beautiful in the way of never being fully complete,
like a utopia never fulfilled. The sublime reference to origin
in nostalgia is just as beautiful as the notion of the end in
utopia. On the other hand, things stand quite differently when
one is confronted with literal evidence of the end (where dreaming
of the end is no longer possible), and with the literal evidence
of origin (where the dream of origin can no longer persist). Today
we have the means to implement our origin as well as our end.
Through archaeology, we excavate and exhume our origin; with genetics,
we reshape and custom design our original capital; through science
and technology, we are already able to operationalize dreams and
utopias of the most idiotic kind. We assuage our nostalgia and
our utopias in situ and in vitro.
We are
therefore in an impossible situation, unable to dream either of
a past or of a future state of affairs. The situation has literally
become definitive - not finite, infinite, or defined but de-finitive,
i.e., deprived of its end, pilfered. Consequently, the distinctive
sentiment of the definitive, with its pull towards a paradisaic
state of affairs, is melancholy. Whereas in the case of mourning,
things find their end and, with it, the possibility of an eventual
return, in melancholy we no longer hold on to the premonition
of the end or of a return, all we are left with is the resentment
[ressentiment] of disappearance. It's a bit like the
twilight [crepuscular] profile of the turn of this century,
the double-faced Gestalt of a linear order, of progress on the
one hand, of regression of goals and values, on the other.
To oppose
this movement in both directions at once, there is the utterly
improbable, and certainly unverifiable, hypotheses of a poetic
reversibility of events and the only proof we have of it is the
possibility of this in language.
Poetic
form is not far removed from chaotic form. Both of them disregard
the law of cause and effect. If, in the theory of Chaos, we substitute
sensitive reliance upon initial conditions for susceptible dependency
upon final conditions, we enter upon the form of predestination,
i.e., that of destiny. Poetic language itself abides in predestination,
in the imminence of its own end, and thrives on the reversibility
of the end in the beginning. In this sense, it is predestined
-- an unconditional event without any signification or consequence,
one that flourishes singularly in the vertigo of its final resolution.
Although
this is obviously not the form of our current history, there is,
nevertheless, an affinity between the immanence of poetic unfolding
and the immanence of our current chaotic progression as events
themselves are without any signification or consequence, and because
effect stands in for the cause, we have arrived at a point where
there are no longer any causes, all we are left with are effects.
The world presents itself to us, effectively. There is no longer
any reason for it, and God is dead.
If all
that remains are effects, we are in total illusion (which is also
that of poetic language). If effect is to be found in the cause,
or the beginning is in the end, then the catastrophe is behind
us. This is the exclusive privilege of our epoch, i.e., the reversal
of the sign of catastrophe. This liberates us from all possible
future catastrophes, and also exempts us from all responsibility
pertaining to it. An end to all preventive psychosis, no more
panic, no more remorse! The lost object is behind us. We are free
from the Last Judgment.
What
stems or follows from all of this is some sort of poetic and ironic
analysis of events. Against the simulation of a linear history
"in progress", we must privilege these rekindled flames,
these malignant curves, these light catastrophes which cripple
empires much convincingly than major shake-ups could ever do.
Anastrophe versus catastrophe. Could it be that deep down there
may have never been a linear unfolding of history, there may have
never been a linear unfolding of language? Everything moves in
loops and curls, in tropes, in inversion of meaning, except for
numeric and artificial languages which, for this very reason,
have neither of these. Everything takes place in effects that
short-circuit (metaleptic) causes, in factual Witz, in
perverse events, in ironic turnarounds, except for a rectified
history which, properly speaking, cannot be such.
Couldn't
we transpose onto social and historical phenomena language games
like the anagram, acrostic, spoonerism, rhyme, strophe or stanza
and catastrophe? And not only the stately figures of metaphor
and metonymy but instantaneous, childish and formal games, sundry
tropes that comprise the delicacies of a vulgar imagination? Are
there social spoonerisms, an anagrammatic history (where meaning
is dismembered and dispersed to the four winds of the earth, like
the name of god in the anagram), rhyming forms of political action,
events that can take on either this or that meaning? The palindrome,
[A word, verse or sentence that reads the same backwards as forwards.
Ex.: HannaH.] this poetic and rigorous figure of palinode [recantations]
would do well to serve in this time of retro version of history
with a burning lecture (perhaps Paul Virilio's dromology could
eventually be replaced with a palindromology?). And the anagram,
this minute process that picks up the thread of language, this
poetic and non-linear convulsion of sorts - makes one wonder whether
there is a chance that history would lend itself to this poetic
convulsion, to such a subtle form of return and anaphore and which,
should the anagram yield beyond meaning, allow for the pure materiality
of language to shine through and also show beyond historical meaning,
the pure materiality of time?
This
would be the enchanting alternative to the linearity of history,
the poetic alternative to a disenchanted confusion, to the chaotic
oversupply of current events.
Concurrent
with this going beyond history is our entry into pure fiction,
into the illusion of the world. The illusion of our history yields
up and accedes to a space of a much more radical illusion of the
world. Now that the eyes of the Revolution and on the Revolution
are shut; now that the Wall of Shame has been demolished, now
that the lips of dispute are sealed (with a sugar-coated history
stuck to our palate); now that the spectre of communism, i.e.,
that of power no longer haunt Europe, no longer haunt the memories;
now that the aristocratic illusion of origin and the democratic
illusion of the end increasingly drift apart -- we no longer have
the choice to advance, 'to abide in our present destruction',
nor to withdraw, only a last ditch effort to confront this radical
illusion.
