Remember Baudrillard

"Beyond fascination and the word, there lie enough darknesses and 
existential abysses to satisfy the most serious of minds." - Gottfried 
Benn

In 1972, Jean Baudrillard opens his "Requiem for the Media" with the 
observation, "There is no media theory." He continues: If we are to 
understand media, we must abandon the idea that media establish 
communication. There is no question of an exchange between transmitter 
and receiver; there are only messages. If the media are to be understood, 
they will have to be destroyed first.

A few years later, in a jocular mood, Baudrillard replaces the verb 
"produire" (to produce) by "séduire" (to seduce). From then on, the 
combination of transmission and seduction will provide him with the 
materials to construct a media theory which has freed itself from 
Freudo-Marxism. Media do not aim at satisfying the needs and desires of 
receivers, nor do they produce such subjective needs and desires 
according to a rational scheme. They owe their impact to their sublime 
gift of one-way communication. The stranger the transmitted signs are, 
the more intense their seductive power becomes, and the more fatal their 
effects on public consciousness. Realizing this, Baudrillard takes a 
radical step. He leaves the subject behind with all its alienation and 
insecurity, to defect to the side of the "appallingly strange" object and 
its fatal attraction. "The subject can only yearn; the object alone is 
able to seduce."

In "Fatal Strategies" (1983), his definitive essay, Baudrillard explains 
the mysterious intelligence of this object. Referring to Freudo-Marxism, 
he portrays woman and the masses as classical examples of the object. 
"The masses are not at all the objects of repression and manipulation. 
The masses do not want to be liberated; nor can they. All their 
(transpolitical) power lies in the fact that they are a pure object, that 
is to say: they confront any political coercion to make them speak with 
their silence and their absent desires. Some cardinal problem inevitably 
arises when we analyze the media and the sphere of information using the 
traditional concepts of the subject: willpower, representation, choice, 
liberty, knowledge, and desire. For it is quite obvious that they are at 
perfect odds with the latter, and that the subject, in its sovereignty, 
is completely alienated from them. There is a fundamental disparity 
between this sphere of information and the moral law which governs our 
every action and tells us that we must know what we want and desire. It 
suffices to reverse the idea of a mass alienated by media and to inquire 
how the entire media universe - perhaps even the entire technological 
universe - results from a secret strategy by the so-called alienated 
masses, a secret form of rejection of will, a different, sovereign 
philosophy of unwillingness, a sort of antimetaphysics, the secret of 
which is that the masses (or humanity as such) are really quite aware of 
the fact that they mustn't have an opinion about themselves or the world, 
that they do not need to want, know, or desire a thing."

Because of this radical inertia of the media masses, the "content of the 
media" need to be reconsidered. "The phenomena of mass and information 
are proportional quantities: The masses have no opinion and information 
does not inform them; they continue to feed each other in a monstrous way 
- the orbital velocity of information by no means increases the awareness 
of the masses, only their weight. All the information, the restless media 
activity, the scores of messages are only meant to contain the lethal 
contamination by the masses. Today, the energy of information, media and 
communication is only used to extract some sense, some life from this 
cold, indifferent body, these silent masses who become ever more 
attractive."

With these insights, Baudrillard had realized the conditions for his 
media theory. In order to pose the problem of media, we must abandon the 
classical view of their social function as that of informing the masses. 
We must prevent our media theory from becoming a lower form of energy of 
the media themselves. That is why it does not try to ascribe all sorts of 
(subjective) intentions to the media, but rather allows them their own 
moment, seduction, or fatal strategy. Media theory considers the media an 
object and starts reasoning from there. It challenges the media to render 
their fatal strategies operative within the development of the 
theoretical expositions themselves. "This is how we must look at things: 
in terms of humor."

Media do not answer when approached in a critical manner; they demand the 
same frivolity and irony from their theorists as they have been reared 
on. Before it can defect to the side of the media object, media theory 
must become even more virtual than the media themselves, even more 
unsteady and implausible. To Baudrillard, this implies "something obscure 
and impenetrable," but in fact it amounts to "simply adopting a different 
logic, developing other strategies, giving free play to objective irony. 
This, too, is a challenge that may be absurd and which runs the same risk 
as that which it describes - but the risk must be taken: a fatal 
strategy's hypothesis must itself be fatal."

"Just as the world drives to a delirious state of things, we must drive 
to a delirious point of view." Baudrillard's thinking was originally 
concerned with leaving behind the academic context of his education. This 
he accomplished by declaring the revolt of signs. He claimed that reality 
had disappeared, since everything had come to signify else. Everything 
had become political, a social process with a psychosomatic explanation. 
Signs derived value only through circulation in information networks. He 
described this condition with the word "simulation," a word that, for 
him, would prove a fatal object. The concept allowed him to account for 
everything. He discovered three historical stages: imitation (until the 
19th century), production (until 1950), and simulation, the present 
stage. In this last stage, the truth-falsehood opposition has become 
obsolete. Simulation has more truth than truth itself, because it is not 
a mirror image of reality but a model for it. Regardless of the truth 
value of this observation, his audience kept harping on the question of 
the dialectics of simulation and reality. One book after another, 
Baudrillard found himself obliged to explain to his thick-headed readers 
that simulation means the end of dialectics as well. His strategy was to 
use the word "simulation" so often that people would get completely fed 
up with it - which they did. But the moment they did, the author had 
become one with his concept, and must exit. The same went for keywords 
like sign, simulacrum, fascination, seduction, obscenity, ecstasy and 
implosion. The inevitable result of liberation from Freudo-Marxism was 
the slogan "Forget Baudrillard." By then, he himself had long given up on 
his evangelistic activities as missionary of the silent majorities. His 
masses of readers were free to be as inert as they liked; he didn't need 
them. There could be no question of a new balance between simulation and 
reality, as suggested by the well-intentioned phrase, "media reality." 
"The universe is not dialectic - it is devoted to extremes, not balance; 
to radical antagonism, not synthesis or reconciliation." The publication 
of "Fatal Strategies" signaled the end of Baudrillard's long goodbye to 
outdated patterns of thought, and his discovery of a new theoretical 
space. This is where artists and scientific journalists lost him. From 
now on, to write about Baudrillard's writings meant to construct a new 
theory of your own. Summaries and criticisms are always beside the point. 
Baudrillard comes close to Paul Virilio's approach when he starts 
philosophizing in an anticipatory, evasive fashion. "To survive, groups 
or individuals must never pursue their own properties, interests, or 
ideals. They must always pursue something else, something aside, beyond, 
opposite - like the warrior in Japanese martial arts." The same rule 
applies to writing.

"Theory can be no other than this: a trap laid with the hope that reality 
will be naive enough to fall into it." In "The Transparency of Evil" 
(1990), Baudrillard no longer considers the media worthy of analysis. The 
media belonged to the "orgy of liberation" raging since the 1960s, which 
has now come to an end, thank goodness. If, before, he discerned a 
"trilogy of values" - utitility value, exchange value, and structural 
value, analogous to the historical stages of imitation, production and 
simulation - he now adds a fourth level. Value has entered its fractal 
stage, in which a sort of epidemic of values, a general metastasis has 
broken out. Every single thing has become valuable; value steers towards 
its maximum circumference and may indeed be expected to leave the earth 
soon. This outbidding of all previous affairs takes place within what 
Baudrillard calls the "extreme phenomena," which he denotes by adding the 
prefix "trans-": transaesthetics, transsexuality, transpolitics, 
transeconomy, transtrans. Because all resistance has vanished, we are 
suddenly faced with superconductive events. A medical discovery like AIDS 
can become a global phenomenon in no time.

Baudrillard's strategy is to stop pointing at the simulative character of 
the media age. He no longer practices radical negativism, but starts 
looking for radical difference. His theories can no longer be translated 
back into sociological jargon - the only language still recognized by 
journalists. "Eclectic Paranoiac, Pharaonic Hypochondriac, Typical 
Troglodyte, Hepatic Brute, Pathetic Libidinous, Glossolaliac Ambidexter, 
Soft Exophtalmiac, Inverted Cerebrospinal, Recycled Tetracyclic" ("Cool 
Memories II"). In his aversion to media culture, Baudrillard places his 
bets on the secret power of the Foreign, which he had previously 
localized within the object. He opposes the principle of the clone, of 
the asexual and monomatic multiplication of the same which characterizes 
the information era, by the principle of the radically exotic. The earth 
has become so round that to depart from point A means to head for point 
A. Tourism: to travel is always to tour the globe. If the other once was 
the accursed part, now it is that which we are unable to retrace, because 
we are only looking for deviations from the familiar and can no longer 
see things that have fuck-all to do with it.

The absolutely exotic resides beyond all differences. It represents the 
"outside," which may be a temporary resident of every symbolic order, 
every culture, but is never on equal terms with it. Whenever the other is 
integrated into a culture, it is exterminated by it (Baudrillard uses the 
current Western absorption by Japan as an example); whereas it is exactly 
from outside that our thinking, our insights and seductions, derives. 
Free will is a second-rate affair; the foreign alone is at first hand.

What, then, exactly is the foreign? Baudrillard summarizes the dogma of 
the information society as: "Why talk to one another when we're 
communicating so well?" We have become radically exotic: total strangers. 
Hell (unlike in Sartre's day) no longer consists of other people, but of 
our inevitable communication with them. On the far side of communication, 
other people look each other in the eyes, revealing the secret: "that 
through which we escape ourselves." In the world after the media, it 
becomes possible to think further again. Baudrillard concludes "The 
Transparency of Evil" with the words, "The other is that which enables me 
to avoid repeating myself to infinity."

Baudrillard's devotion to the radically different is not a maneuver to 
turn his back on the world, but a strategy to resist topicality. He keeps 
intervening - when the frozen freedom behind the Iron Curtain begins to 
melt, when the commemorative current of the fin de siècle sets in, or 
when Heidegger is turned on his head. These interventions culminated in 
his diatribe, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place." During Desert Storm, 
Baudrillard, like Paul Virilio, witnessed his coming-out in the 
international media as the fashionable philosopher of simulation and 
virtuality. His success did not stop him from maintaining that "this 
nonwar is a continuation of the absence of politics by other means." In 
this virtual war without antagonists, "information" was "like an 
unintelligent missile; it never hits its target (nor, regretfully, its 
antimissile), it crashes at random or disappears into the void ..." 
Information = War. The more directly transmitted the event is, the more 
couched in information and inaccessible it becomes. "The only reason we 
watch live broadcasts is that we hope the event will turn information 
upside-down."

Beyond the fascination evoked by this inert spectacle, Baudrillard, with 
sudden concern, discerns the outlines of a conspiracy. The stiff 
challenge Saddam Hussein had posed to the West had all the 
incomprehensibility of the absolutely exotic. The Gulf Non-War was not so 
much designed to exterminate, but to domesticate such deviations from the 
rule. The other was so forcibly eradicated from the world in the name of 
democracy, human rights, and planetary consensus that "soon, Order will 
reign; a New World Order in which nothing happens, nothing exists, and 
nothing offers a motive or challenge." It is interesting that the last to 
resist this order should be Islam - "behind which, however, hide all 
cultural forms that still reject the West." No one can predict which side 
will win. But, as Baudrillard expressed his hope in March 1991, "The 
further the global consensus extends its hegemony, the greater the risk - 
or fortune - of its sudden collapse."
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