107
" LIVE OR DIE': the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we really have no choice between life and death. If you live, you live, if you die, you die. It is like saying 'be yourself, or don't be!' It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic. You could read it to mean that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal. Following the model of 'payor die!', 'your money or your life!', it would become ' your life or your life!'. Stupid, again, since you cannot exchange life for itself. And yet there is poetic force in this implacable tautology, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood. In the end, the lesson of this graffiti is perhaps: 'if you get more stupid than me, you die! "
― Jean Baudrillard , America
108
" WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY? "
― Jean Baudrillard , Miti fatali. TwinTowers, Beaubourg, Disneyland, America, Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, Guerra del Golfo, Madonna, Jeans, Grande Fratello (Comunicazione e società)
109
" Between the race of microbes and the race of humans there exists a total symbiosis and a radical incompatibility. One cannot say that the microbe is other to man: the two are never opposed in their essential natures, and they do not confront one another in any real sense; they are linked together, however, and this interlinking is, as it were, predestined: no one (neither men nor bacilli) can imagine things being any other way. Nor is there any clear line of demarcation, because this link is reproduced over and over ad infinitum. So perhaps after all we shall have to conclude that otherness is located here: that the absolute Other is indeed the microbe in its radical non-humanness - a being of which we know nothing, and which cannot even be deemed different from us. The microbe as the hidden form which alters everything - and with which no negotiation or reconciliation is possible. Yet we are quickened by the same life as the microbe, and the race of microbes will perish along with the human race: we share the same destiny. One is reminded of the worm that has a sort of alga living in its stomach, without whose help it can digest no food.
This is a fine arrangement until the day the worm takes a notion to devour the alga itself. And it does so - but dies as a result (without even digesting it, of course, because the alga is no longer there to help it to do so). "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
110
" The fervour accompanying these events may be deceptive. If it expresses nothing more than the zeal with which the countries of the East are casting aside the bonds of ideology, or if it is a mimetic fervour - a tribute, as it were, to those liberal countries where all liberty has already been traded in for a technically easy life - then we shall have found out definitively what freedom is worth, and that it is probably never to be discovered a second time. History offers no second helpings. On the other hand, it could be that the present thaw in the East may be as disastrous in the long term as the excess of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, that it may bring about a political greenhouse effect, and so overheat human relations on the planet that the melting of the Communist ice-sheet will cause Western seaboards to be submerged. Odd that we should be in such absolute fear of the melting of the polar ice, and look upon it as a climatic catastrophe, while we aspire with every democratic bone in our bodies to the occurrence of just such an event on the political plane.
If in the old days the USSR had released its gold reserves onto the world market, that market would have been completely destabilized. Today, by putting back into circulation their vast accumulated store of freedom, the Eastern countries could quite easily destabilize that very fragile balance of Western values which strives to ensure that freedom no longer emerges as action but only as a virtual and consensual form of interaction; no longer as a drama but merely as the universal psychodrama of liberalism. A sudden infusion of freedom as a real currency, as violent and active transcendence, as Idea, would be in every way catastrophic for our present air-conditioned redistribution of values. Yet this is precisely what we are asking of the East: freedom, the image of freedom, in exchange for the material signs of freedom.
This is an absolutely diabolical contract, by virtue of which one signatory is in danger of losing their soul, and the other of losing their creature comforts. But perhaps - who knows? - this may, after all, be the best thing for both sides.
Those societies that were formerly masked - Communist societies - have been unmasked. What is their face like? As for us, we dropped the mask long ago and have for a long time been without either mask or face. We are also without memory. We have reached the point of searching the water for signs of a memory that has left no traces, hoping against hope that something might remain when even the water's molecular memory has faded away. So it goes for our freedom: we would be hard put to it to produce a single sign of it, and we have been reduced to postulating its infinitesimal, intangible, undetectable existence in a (programmatic, operational) environment so highly dilute that in truth only a spectre of freedom floats there still, in a memory every bit as evanescent as water's. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
111
" Machines produce only machines. The texts, images, films, speech and programmes which come out of the computer are machine products, and they bear the marks of such products: they are artificially padded-out, face-lifted by the machine; the films are stuffed with special effects, the texts full of longueurs and repetitions due to the machine's malicious will to function at all costs (that is its passion), and to the operator's fascination with this limitless possibility of functioning.
Hence the wearisome character in films of all this violence and pornographied sexuality, which are merely special effects of violence and sex, no longer even fantasized by humans, but pure machinic violence.
And this explains all these texts that resemble the work of 'intelligent' virtual agents, whose only act is the act of programming.
This has nothing to do with automatic writing, which played on the magical telescoping of words and concepts, whereas all we have here is the automatism of programming, an automatic run-through of all the possibilities.
It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which produce in the 'creative artist' this vertige of interactivity with his own object, alongside the anxious vertige at not having reached the technological limits of his possibilities.
In fact, it is the (virtual) machine which is speaking you, the machine which is thinking you. "
― Jean Baudrillard , Screened Out
112
" The end of this history saw the banality of art merge with the banality of the real world - Duchamp's act, with its automatic transference of the object, being the inaugural (and ironic) gesture in this process. The transference of all reality into aesthetics, which has become one of the dimensions of generalized exchange...
All this under the banner of a simultaneous liberation of art and the real world.
This 'liberation' has in fact consisted in indexing the two to each other - a chiasmus lethal to both.
The transference of art, become a useless function, into a reality that is now integral, since it has absorbed everything that denied, exceeded or transfigured it. The impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else whatever. Given this, it can only exchange itself for itself or, in other words, repeat itself ad infinitum.
What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation - the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea of art remains intact. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
113
" The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art.
That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn.
No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction.
No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology.
And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modem and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
114
" Borges - his blind face like an Aztec woman's, that old shyster of metaphor, across whose open eyes pass flashes of magnesium without affecting him. The blind always seem to be holding their heads out of water. Yet they are gifted in unreality and cunning. I am sure he knows down to ten people how many are there to hear him, simply by listening, by sensing. The lecture is hopeless, but it is a sacrificial ceremony. The listeners are overwhelmed by the intelligence of this man whose cunning ploy is to make it seem as though he were speaking from beyond the grave, as if he were already dead. His muffled, syncopated, barely audible voice condemns the others to silence in the same way as he is condemned to the night. All the metaphors he uses are those of the night, including the thousand and first night, the finest since it is one added to eternity. He is without doubt also in his eighty-four-and-first year - i.e. he has one foot in eternity. There reigns all about him an ironic and cruel affectation. I don't know what animal he resembles. He has a soft spot for the tiger. Put a tiger in your liltrary and take away its sight: that's Borges. In this vegetation of Californian academics' soft encephalons, his silences carve lethal spirals. Since he can no longer see the world, he quotes it. His speech is one long quotation. ' Life itself is a quotation ', he says. "
― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories
116
" The risibility of our altruistic 'understanding' is rivalled only by the profound contempt it is designed to conceal. For 'We respect the fact that you are different' read: 'You people who are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all you have left' . (The signs of folklore and poverty are excellent markers of difference.) Nothing could be more contemptuous - or more contemptible - than this attitude, which exemplifies the most radical form of incomprehension that exists. It has nothing to do, however, with what Segalen calls 'eternal incomprehensibility' . Rather, it is a product of eternal stupidity - of that stupidity which endures for ever in its essential arrogance, feeding on the differentness of other people.
Other cultures, meanwhile, have never laid claim to universality. Nor did they ever claim to be different - until difference was forcibly injected into them as part of a sort of cultural opium war. They live on the basis of their own singularity, their own exceptionality, on the irreducibility of their own rites and values. They find no comfort in the lethal illusion that all differences can be reconciled - an illusion that for them spells only annihilation.
To master the universal symbols of otherness and difference is to master the world. Those who conceptualize difference are anthropologically superior - naturally, because it is they who invented anthropology. And they have all the rights, because rights, too, are their invention. Those who do not conceptualize difference, who do not play the game of difference, must be exterminated. The Indians of America, when the Spanish landed, are a case in point. They understood nothing about difference; they inhabited radical otherness. (The Spaniards were not different in their eyes: they were simply gods, and that was that.) This is the reason for the fury with which the Spaniards set about destroying these peoples, a fury for which there was no religious justification, nor economic justification, nor any other kind of justification, except for the fact that the Indians were guilty of an absolute crime: their failure to understand difference. When they found themselves obliged to become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of the universal concept, they preferred mass self-immolation - whence the fervour with which they, for their part, allowed themselves to die: a counterpart to the Spaniards' mad urge to kill. The Indians' strange collusion in their own extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
118
" Each of us lives by setting traps for the other. The one and the other live in an endless affinity, an affinity which endures until prostration decides the issue.
Everyone wants their other. Everyone has an imperious need to put the other at their mercy, along with a heady urge to make the other last as long as possible so as to savour him. The opposing logics of the lie and the truth unite in a dance of death which is nothing but pure delight at the other's demise. For desire for the other is always also the desire to put an end to the other (albeit, perhaps, at the latest possible moment?). The only question is which one will hold out the longest, occupying the space, the speech, the silence, the very inner world of the other - who is dispossessed of himself at the very moment when he becomes one in his difference. Not that one kills the other: the adversary is simply harassed into desiring, into willingly acceding to his own symbolic death ... The world is a perfectly functioning trap.
An otherness, a foreignness, that is ultimately unintelligible - such is the secret of the form, and the singularity, of the emergence of the other. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
120
" If the body is no longer a site of otherness but of identification, then we have urgently to become reconciled with it, repair it, perfect it, turn it into an ideal object. Everyone treats their bodies the way men treat women in projective identification: they invest them as a fetish, making an autistic cult of them, subjecting them to a quasi-incestuous manipulation. And it is the body's resemblance to its model which becomes a source of eroticism and 'white' seduction -- in the sense that it effects a kind of white magic of identity, as opposed to the black magic of otherness.
This is how it is with body-building: you get into your body as you would into a suit of nerve and muscle. The body is not muscular, but muscled. It is the same with the brain and with social relations or exchanges: body-building, brainstorming, word-processing. Madonna is the ideal specimen of this, our muscled Immaculate Conception, our muscular angel who delivers us from the weaknesses of the body (pity the poor shade of Marilyn!).
The sheath of muscles is the equivalent of character armour. In the past, women merely wrapped themselves in their image and their finery -- Freud speaks of those people who live with a kind of inner mirror, in a fleshly, happy self-reference. That narcissistic ideal is past and gone; body-building has wiped it out and replaced it with a gymnastic Ego-Ideal -- cold, hard, stressed, artificial self-reference. The construction of a double, of a physical and mental identity shell. Thus, in `body simulation', where you can animate your body remotely at any moment, the phantasy of being present in more than one body becomes an operational reality. An extension of the human being. And not a metaphorical or poetic extension, as in Pessoa's heteronyms, but quite simply a technical one. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Perfect Crime
