21
" [...]It is thus always by virtue of a declination of meaning, or of non-meaning, that existence takes on form - by virtue, that is, of the deflection of something else. We have no will of our own, and the other is never what we would, of our own volition, choose to confront. Rather, the other is an invasion by something from elsewhere, priority given to what comes from elsewhere, seduction by foreignness and the transmission of foreignness. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
22
" The triumph of the transsexual and of transvestitism casts a strange light, retrospectively, upon the sexual liberation espoused by an earlier generation. It now appears that this liberation - which, according to its own discourse, meant the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force, a process especially favorable to the principles of femininity and of sexual pleasure - may actually have been no more than an intermediate phase on the way to the confusion of categories that we have been discussing. The sexual revolution may thus turn out to have been just a stage in the genesis of transsexuality. What is at issue here, fundamentally, is the problematic fate of all revolutions.
The cybernetic revolution, in view of the equivalence of brain and computer, places humanity before the crucial question 'Am I a man or a machine? ' The genetic revolution that is taking place at the moment raises the question 'Am I a man or just a potential clone? ' The sexual revolution, by liberating all the potentialities of desire, raises another fundamental question, 'Am I a man or a woman?' (If it has done nothing else, psychoanalysis has certainly added its weight to this principle of sexual uncertainty.) As for the political and social revolution, the prototype for all the others, it will turn out to have led man by an implacable logic - having offered him his own freedom, his own free will - to ask himself where his own will lies, what he wants in his heart of hearts, and what he is entitled to expect from himself. To these questions there are no answers. Such is the paradoxical outcome of every revolution: revolution opens the door to indeterminacy, anxiety and confusion. Once the orgy was over, liberation was seen to have left everyone looking for their generic and sexual identity - and with fewer and fewer answers available, in view of the traffic in signs and the multiplicity of pleasures on offer. That is how we became transsexuals - just as we became transpoliticals: in other words, politically indifferent and undifferentiated beings, androgynous and hermaphroditic - for by this time we had embraced, digested and rejected the most contradictory ideologies, and were left wearing only their masks: we had become, in our own heads - and perhaps unbeknownst to ourselves - transvestites of the political realm. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
23
" Everything tends to become a satellite - even our brains may be said to be outside us now, floating around us in the countless Hertzian ramifications of waves and circuits.
This is not science fiction, merely a generalization of McLuhan's theory of the 'extensions of man' . Every aspect of human beings - their bodies in their biological, mental, muscular or cerebral manifestations - now floats free in the shape of mechanical or computer-aided replacement parts. McLuhan, however, conceives of all this as a positive expansion - as the universalization of man - through media. This is a very sanguine view. The fact is that all the functions of man's body, so far from gravitating around him in concentric order, have become satellites ordered excentrically with respect to him. They have gone into orbit on their own account; consequently it is man himself, in view of this orbital extraversion of his own functions, his own technologies, who is now in a position of ex-orbitation and ex-centricity. Vis-a-vis the satellites that he has created and put into orbit, it is man with his planet Earth, with his territory, with his body, who is now the satellite. Once transcendent, he has become exorbitate.
It is not just the functions of man's body which, by becoming satellites, make man himself into a satellite. All those functions of our societies - notably the higher ones - which break off and go into orbit, contribute to the process.
Loan, finance, the technosphere, communications - all have become satellites in an inaccessible space and left everything else to go to rack and ruin.
Whatever fails to achieve orbital power is left in a state of abandonment which is permanent, since there is now no way out of it via some kind of transcendence. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
24
" Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety. Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am interested in your cunt' . The same kind of crassness has triumphed in the realm of art, whose mounds of trivia may be reduced to a single pronouncement of the type, 'What we want from you is stupidity and bad taste' . And the fact is that we do succumb to this mass extortion, with its subtle infusion of guilt.
It is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us any more. In our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable. But for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad, this viscous adherence of opposites. To the extent that this happens, what is on the increase is disgust over the lack of disgust. An allergic temptation to reject everything en bloc: to refuse all the gentle brainwashing, the soft-sold overfeeding, the tolerance, the pressure to embrace synergy and consensus. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
26
" Impossible to find as otherness per se (obviously a dream); but at the same time--- irreducible as a symbolic rule of the game, as a rule of the game that governs the world. The promiscuity and general confusion in which differences exist do not affect this rule of the game as such: it is not a rational law, nor is it a demonstrative process - we shall never have either metaphysical or scientific proof of this principle of foreignness and incomprehensibility: we simply have to accept it.
The worst thing here is understanding, which is sentimental and useless.
True knowledge is knowledge of exactly what we can never understand in the other, knowledge of what it is in the other that makes the other not oneself - and hence someone who can in no sense become separated from oneself, nor alienated by any look of ours, nor instituted by us in either identity or difference. (Never question others about their identity. In the case of America, the question of American identity was never at issue: the issue was America's foreignness.) If we do not understand the savage, it is for the same reason that he does not understand himself (the term 'savage' conveys this foreignness better than all later euphemisms).
The rule of exoticism thus implies that one should not be fooled by understanding, by intimacy, by the country, by travel, by picturesqueness, or by oneself. The realm of radical exoticism, moreover, is not necessarily a function of travel: 'It is not essential, in order to feel the shock [of the exotic], to revive the old-fashioned episode of the voyage. [ ... ] The fact remains that such an episode and its setting are better than any other subterfuge for reaching this brutal, rapid and pitiless hand-to-hand conflict and making each blow count.' Travel is a subterfuge, then - but it is the most appropriate one of all. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
27
" We shall never know now whether Nazism, the concentration camps or Hiroshima were intelligible or not: we are no longer part of the same mental universe. Victim and executioner are interchangeable, responsibility is diffrangible, dissoluble - such are the virtues of our marvellous interface. We no longer have the strength that forgetting gives: our amnesia is an amnesia of the image. Since everyone is guilty, who will declare an amnesty? As for autopsy, no one believes any longer in the anatomical accuracy of the facts: we have only models to work on. Even supposing the facts lay shining bright before our eyes, they would still not have the power to prove or convince. Consider how continual scrutiny of Nazism, of the gas chambers and so on, has merely rendered them less and less comprehensible, so that it has eventually become logical to ask an incredible question: 'But, in the last reckoning, did all those things really exist?' The question is perhaps an intolerable one, but the interesting thing here is what it is that makes it logically possible. And in fact what makes it possible is the media's way of replacing any event, any idea, any history, with any other, with the result that the more we scrutinize the facts, the more carefully we study details with a view to identifying causes, the greater is the tendency for them to cease to exist, and to cease to have existed. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
29
" Once upon a time there was much talk of the apathy of the masses. Their silence was the crucial fact for an earlier generation. Today, however, the masses act not by deflection but by infection, tainting opinion polls and forecasts with their multifarious phantasies. Their abstention and their silence are no longer determining factors (that stage was still nihilistic); what counts now is their use of the cogs in the workings of uncertainty. Where the masses once sported with their voluntary servitude, they now sport with their involuntary incertitude. Unbeknownst to the experts who scrutinize them and the manipulators who believe they can influence them, they have grasped the fact that politics is virtually dead, and that they now have a new game to play, just as exciting as the ups and downs of the stock market. This game enables them to make audiences, charismas, levels of prestige and the market prices of images dance up and down with an intolerable facility. The masses had been deliberately demoralized and de-ideologized in order that they might become the live prey of probability theory, but now it is they who destabilize all images and play games with political truth. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
32
" Thus every individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is a total confusion of types. Sex is no longer located in sex itself, but elsewhere - everywhere else, in fact. Politics is no longer restricted to the political sphere, but infects every sphere economics, science, art, sport ... Sport itself, meanwhile, is no longer located in sport as such, but instead in business, in sex, in politics, in the general style of performance. All these domains are affected by sport's criteria of 'excellence', effort and record-breaking, as by its childish notion of self-transcendence. Each category thus passes through a phase transition during which its essence is diluted in homeopathic doses, infinitesimal relative to the total solution, until it finally disappears, leaving a trace so small as to be indiscernible, like the 'memory of water' . "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
33
" Unemployment, too, has taken on new meaning. It is no longer a strategy of capital (the reserve army of labour). It is no longer a critical factor in the play of social relationships - if it were, since the danger level was passed long ago, it would necessarily have sparked unprecedented upheavals. What is unemployment today? It too is a sort of artificial satellite, a satellite of inertia, a mass with a charge of electricity that cannot even be described as a negative charge, for it is static: I refer to that increasingly large portion of society that is deepfrozen. Beneath the accelerating pace of the circuits and systems of exchange, beneath all the frenzied activity, there is something in us - in each of us - that slows down to the point where it fades out of circulation. This is the inertia point around which the whole of society eventually begins to gravitate. It is as though the two poles of our world had been brought into contact, shortcircuiting in such a way that they simultaneously hyperstimulate and enervate potential energies. This is no longer a crisis, but a fatal development - a catastrophe in slow motion. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
34
" We live in a culture which strives to return to each of us full responsibility for his own life. The moral responsibility inherited from the Christian tradition has thus been augmented, with the help of the whole modern apparatus of information and communication, by the requirement that everyone should be answerable for every aspect of their lives. What this amounts to is an expulsion of the other, who has indeed become perfectly useless in the context of a programmed management of life, a regimen where everything conspires to buttress the autarky of the individual cell.
This, however, is an absurdity: no one can be expected to be entirely responsible for his own life. This Christian-cum-modern idea is futile and arrogant. It is also a utopian notion with no justification whatsoever. It requires that the individual should transform himself into a slave to his identity, his will, his responsibilities, his desire; and that he should start exercising control of all his own circuitry, as well as all the worldwide circuits that happen to cross paths within his genes, nerves or thought: a truly unheard-of servitude.
How much more human to place one's fate, one's desire and one's will in the hands of someone else. The result? A circulation of responsibility, a declination of wills, and a continual transferring of forms. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
35
" Whatever it may be that comes to us from elsewhere, even the worst exploitation, the very fact that it comes from somewhere else is positive. This is why alienation has its advantages, even though it is so often denounced as the dispossession of the self, with the other treated in consequence as an age-old enemy holding the alienated part of us captive. The inverse theory, that of disalienation, is equally simplistic, holding as it does that the subject merely has to reappropriate his alienated will and his alienated desire. From this perspective everything that befalls the subject as a result of his own efforts is good, because it is authentic; while everything that comes from outside the subject is dubbed inauthentic, merely because it does not fall within the sphere of his freedom.
Exactly the opposite position is the one that has to be stressed, while at the same time broadening the paradox. For just as it is better to be controlled by someone else rather than by oneself, it is likewise always better to be made happy, or unhappy, by someone else rather than by oneself. It is always better to depend in life on something that does not depend on us. In this way I can avoid any kind of servitude. I am not obliged to submit to something that does not depend on me - including my own existence. I am free of my birth - and in the same sense I can be free of my death. There has never been any true freedom apart from this one. The source of all interplay, of everything that is in play, of all passion, of all seduction, is that which is completely foreign to us, yet has power over us. That which is Other, that which we have to seduce. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
37
" The most beautiful of all photographs are those taken of savages in their natural surroundings. The savage is always confronting death, and he confronts the lens in exactly the same manner. He does not ham it up, nor is he indifferent. He always poses; he faces up to the camera. His achievement is to transform this technical operation into a face-to-face confrontation with death.
This is what makes these pictures such powerful and intense photographic objects. As soon as the lens fails to capture this pose, this provocative obscenity of the object facing death, as soon as the subject begins to collude with the lens, and the photographer too becomes subjective, the 'great game' of photography is over. Exoticism is dead. Today it is very hard indeed to find a subject - or even an object - that does not collude with the camera lens.
The only trick here, generally speaking, is to be ignorant of how one's subjects live. This gives them a certain aura of mystery, a savagery, which the successful picture captures. It also captures a gleam of ingenuity, of fatality, in their faces, betraying the fact that they do not know who they are or how they live. A glow of impotence and awe that is completely lacking in our tribes of worldly, devious, fashion-conscious and self-regarding people, always well-versed in the subject of themselves - and hence devoid of all mystery. For such people the camera is merciless. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
38
" On closer inspection, however, the event in question turns out to be rather more mysterious, rather more of an unidentified 'historical' object. The thawing out of the countries of the East is without doubt an extraordinary turn of events. But what exactly happens to freedom when it is defrosted? Such an operation must be a hazardous one, its outcome uncertain (quite apart from the fact that you are not supposed to refreeze what you have once defrosted). The USSR and the Eastern bloc constituted not just a deep-freeze for freedom but also a laboratory, an experimental environment in which freedom was isolated and subjected to very high pressures. The West, on the other hand, is merely a museum - or, more accurately, a dump - for freedom and the Rights of Man. If deep-freezing was the distinctive (and negative) mark of the Eastern universe, the ultra-fluidity of our Western universe is even more disreputable, because thanks to the liberation and liberalization of our mores and beliefs, the problem of freedom can simply no longer be posed. Rather, it is virtually resolved. In the West, freedom - the Idea of freedom - has died its fine death; all the recent commemorations have clearly shown that the idea of freedom is gone. In the East it has been murdered - but there is no such thing as the perfect crime. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
39
" The celibacy of the machine entails the celibacy of Telecomputer Man. Thanks to his computer or word processor, Telecomputer Man offers himself the spectacle of his own brain, his own intelligence, at work. Similarly, through his chat line or his Minitel, he can offer himself the spectacle of his own phantasies, of a strictly virtual pleasure. He exorcizes both intelligence and pleasure at the interface with the machine. The Other, the interlocutor, is never really involved: the screen works much like a mirror, for the screen itself as locus of the interface is the prime concern. An interactive screen transforms the process of relating into a process of commutation between One and the Same. The secret of the interface is that the Other here is virtually the Same: otherness is surreptitiously conjured away by the machine. The most probable scenario of communication here is that Minitel users gravitate from the screen to telephone conversations, thence to face-to-face meetings, and ... then what?
Well, it's 'let's phone each other', and, finally, back to the Minitel - which is, after all, more erotic because it is at once both esoteric and transparent. This is communication in its purest form, for there is no intimacy here except with the screen, and with an electronic text that is no more than a design filigreed onto life. A new Plato's retreat whence to observe shadow-forms of bodily pleasure filing past. Why speak to one another, when it is so simple to communicate? "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
40
" All that remains is the Object as a strange attractor. The subject is no longer a strange attractor. We know the subject too well; the subject knows himself too well. It is the Object that is exciting, because the Object is my vanishing point.
The Object is what theory can be for reality: not a reflection but a challenge, and a strange attractor. This, potentially, is the way to go in search of otherness.
There are two methods of getting beyond alienation. Either disalienation and the reappropriation of oneself - a tiresome process, without much prospect of success these days. Or the other extreme - the path of the absolute Other, of absolute exoticism. This alternative path leads to an exponential defined elsewhere, virtually, in terms of total excentricity. It goes beyond alienation but in the same direction - to what is more other than the Other, to radical otherness.
The duality of otherness implies an unchallengeable metamorphosis, an unchallengeable supremacy of appearances and metamorphoses. I am not alienated. Rather, I am definitively other. No longer subject to the law of desire, but subject now to the total artifice of rules. I have lost any trace of desire of my own. I answer only to something non-human - something inscribed not within me but solely in the objective and arbitrary vicissitudes of the world's signs. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
