1
" 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
2
" 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
4
" Regarded everywhere as an absolute advance of the human race, and with the seal set on it by human rights, liberation starts out from the idea of a natural predestination to be free: being 'liberated' absolves the human being of an original evil, restores a happy purpose and a natural vocation to him.
It is our salvation, the true baptismal sacrament of modern, democratic man.
Now, this is a utopia.
This impulse to resolve the ambivalence of good and evil and jump over one's shadow into absolute positivity is a utopia.
The ambivalence is definitive, and the things liberated are liberated in total ambivalence.
You cannot liberate good without liberating evil. Sometimes evil even quicker than good, as part of the same movement.
At any rate, what we have here is a deregulation of both. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
5
" In this impossibility of reapprehending the world through images and of moving from information to a collective action and will, in this absence of sensibility and mobilization, it isn't apathy or general indifference that's at issue; it is quite simply that the umbilical cord of representation is severed.
The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn't see you, it doesn't look at you. Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of 'response').
It is this failure of representation which, together with a failure of action, underlies the impossibility of developing an ethics of information, an ethics of images, an ethics of the Virtual and the networks. All attempts in that direction inevitably fail.
All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant performance of the medium.
Susan Sontag tells a good story about this pre-eminence of the medium and of images: as she is sitting in front of the television watching the moon landing, the people she is
watching with tell her they don't believe it at all. 'But what are you watching, then?' she asks. 'Oh, we're watching television!' Fantastic: they do not see the moon; they see only the screen showing the moon. They do not see the message; they see only the image.
Ultimately, contrary to what Susan Sontag thinks, only intellectuals believe in the ascendancy of meaning; 'people' believe only in the ascendancy of signs. They long ago said goodbye to reality. They have gone over, body and soul, to the spectacular. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
6
" It is the same with text, with any 'virtual' text (the Internet, word-processing): you work on it like a computer-generated image, which no longer bears any relation to the transcendence of the gaze or of writing. At any rate, as soon as you are in front of the screen, you no longer see the text as a text, but as an image. Now, it is in the strict separation of text and screen, of text and image, that writing is an activity in its own right, never an interaction.
Similarly, it is only with the strict separation of stage and auditorium that the spectator is an actor in his/her own right.
Everything today conspires to abolish that separation: the immersion of the spectator in the spectacle, 'living theatre', 'happenings'
The spectacle becomes user-friendly, interactive. The apogee of spectacle or its end? When everyone is an actor, there is no action any longer, no scene. It's the death of the spectator as such.
The end of the aesthetic illusion. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
7
" The non-event is not when nothing happens.
It is, rather, the realm of perpetual change, of a ceaseless updating, of an incessant succession in real time, which produces this general equivalence, this indifference, this banality that characterizes the zero degree of the event.
A perpetual escalation that is also the escalation of growth - or of fashion, which is pre-eminently the field of compulsive change and built-in obsolescence. The ascendancy of models gives rise to a culture of difference that puts an end to any historical continuity. Instead of unfolding as part of a history, things have begun to succeed each other in the void. A profusion of language and images before which we are defenceless, reduced to the same powerlessness, to the same paralysis as we might show on the approach of war.
It isn't a question of disinformation or brainwashing. It was a naIve error on the part of the FBI to attempt to create a Disinformation Agency for purposes of managed manipulation - a wholly useless undertaking, since disinformation comes from the very profusion of information, from its incantation, its looped repetition, which creates an empty perceptual field, a space shattered as though by a neutron bomb or by one of those devices that sucks in all the oxygen from the area of impact. It's a space where everything is pre-neutralized, including war, by the precession of images and commentaries, but this is perhaps because there is at bottom nothing to say about something that unfolds, like this war, to a relentless scenario, without a glimmer of uncertainty regarding the final outcome. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
8
" This is why, where art is concerned, the most interesting thing would be to infiltrate the spongiform encephalon of the modern spectator, For this is where the mystery lies today: in the brain of the receiver, at the nerve centre of this servility before 'works of art'. What is the secret of it?
In the complicity between the mortification 'creative artists' inflict on objects and themselves, and the mortification consumers inflict on themselves and their mental faculties.
Tolerance for the worst of things has clearly increased considerably as a function of this general state of complicity.
Interface and performance - these are the two current leitmotifs.
In performance, all the forms of expression merge - the plastic arts, photography, video, installation, the interactive screen. This vertical and horizontal, aesthetic and commercial diversification is henceforth part of the work, the original core of which cannot be located.
A (non-) event like The Matrix illustrates this perfectly: this is the very archetype of the global installation, of the total global fact: not just the film, which is, in a way, the alibi, but the spin-offs, the simultaneous projection at all points of the globe and the millions of spectators themselves who are inextricably part of it. We are all, from a global, interactive point of view, the actors in this total global fact. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
10
" In fact, everything that was so much trouble to separate, to sex, to transcend, to sublimate and to metamorphose by distance is today being constantly melded together. All that has been wrested from reality we are in the process of realizing by force - there will always be a technique for laying hold of it and making it operational. 'You dreamed it, we made it.' Everything that was so much trouble to destroy, we are today hell-bent on restoring. What we have here, in fact, is an immense reductionism, an immense revisionism. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
11
" The same acting-out, the same loss of distance and the same fall into the real threatens thought too, as soon as it crosses the demarcation line which is that of its impossible exchange with truth, as soon as it comes to act out truth.
Thought must at all costs keep itself from reality, from the real projection of ideas and their translation into acts.
The Overman and the Eternal Return are, in this way, visions and they have the sovereignty of a hypothesis. If we try to turn them into acts or faits accomplis, they become monstrous and ridiculous.
The same goes for less visionary perspectives, such as biogenetic experimentation on the human species: as a hypothesis, this opens up all kinds of metaphysical and anthropological questions. But if we move from potential mutation to real projection (as Peter Sloterdijk does in his Menschenpark project), we lose all philosophical distance; and thought, in mingling with the real course of things, offers merely a false alternative to the operation of the system.
Thought must refrain from instructing, or being instructed by, a future reality, for, in that game, it will always fall into the trap of a system that holds the monopoly of reality.
And this is not a philosophical choice. It is, for thought, a life-and-death question. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
12
" We must retain for the event its radical definition and its impact in the imagination. It is characterized entirely, in a paradoxical way, by its uncanniness, its troubling strangeness - it is the irruption of something improbable and impossible - and by its troubling familiarity: from the outset it seems totally self-explanatory, as though predestined; as though it could not but take place.
There is something here that seems to come from elsewhere, something fateful that nothing can prevent. It is for this reason, both complex and contradictory, that it mobilizes the imagination with such force. It breaks the continuity of things and, at the same time, makes its entry into the real with stupefying ease. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
14
" A more subtle misconception is that of a hypostasis of evil as indestructible reality, a kind of primal scene, a sort of substratum of accumulated death-drive.
The radicality of evil is seen as that of a naturally inevitable force, associated always with violence, suffering and death.
Hence Sloterdijk's hypothesis that 'the reality of reality is the eternal return of violence'. To which he opposes a 'pacifism that is in keeping with our most advanced theoretical intuitions, a deep-level pacifism, based on a radical analysis of the circularity of violence, deciphering the forces that determine its eternal return'.
A radical analysis, then, to remedy the radical evil.
But can a 'radical' analysis have a finality of whatever kind?
Is it not itself part of the process of evil? "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
15
" Once the great and the good had the privilege of granting pardon. Today, they want to be pardoned in their turn. They take the view that, on the basis of human rights, they are entitled to the universal compassion that had until now been the prerogative of the poor and of victims (in fact we cannot pardon them enough and they deserve all our compassion, not for reasons of rights or morality, but quite simply because there is nothing worse than being in power).
However this may be, they believe they must now stand before the moral tribunal of public opinion and even declare their corruption before it (more or less spontaneously!). They would even accuse themselves of crimes they did not commit in order to gain an artificial immunity as a by-product.
But the cunning of the dominated is even subtler.
If consists not in pardoning them (you do not pardon those in power), nor in inflicting any real punishment on them, but in passing over their little acts of embezzlement and this faked-up spectacle with a certain indifference. And this should leave the politicians very crestfallen, as it is the clear sign of their insignificance for everyone. Some of them have demanded to be judged and found guilty (though they are innocent, of course!). But the 'ordeal' the judges have put the politicians and the big industrialists through has in the end only restored legitimacy, recognition and an audience to people who had lost them.
Hence the strange confusion that prevails in the political sphere. For there is in the fact of this universal compassion a deep disturbance of symbolic regulation. Everywhere today we see the tormentors (pretending to) take the victim's side, showing them compassion and compensating them (as in Charles Najman's film La memoire est-elle soluble dans l'eau ... ?). This may perhaps resolve things on the moral plane, but it aggravates them at the symbolic level. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
16
" Despairing of an aim, salvation or an ideal, we invent for ourselves the easiest solution: happiness.
Here again we begin with utopia - the ideal of happiness - and end in achieved happiness, the highest stage of happiness. The same abreaction to integral happiness as to integral
reality or freedom: these are all unbearable.
In the end, it is the opposite form of misfortune, the victim ideology, that triumphs.
Being incapable of accepting thought (the idea that the world thinks us, the intelligence of evil), we invent the easiest solution, the technical solution: Artificial Intelligence.
The highest stage of intelligence: integral knowledge.
This time the rejection will arise perhaps from a resistance on the part of things themselves to their digital transparency or from a failure of the system in the form of a major accident.
Against all the sovereign hypotheses are ranged the easiest solutions.
And all the easiest solutions lead to catastrophe. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
17
" When truth and reality were made to take lie-detector tests, they themselves confessed to not believing in truth and reality.
We are all agnostics.
There were those who believed in God and those who did not.
There are those who believe in reality and those who do not.
And then there are the reality agnostics who, though not rejecting it in an absolute sense, reject belief in it: 'Reality (like God in the past) may perhaps exist, but I don't believe in it.'
There is nothing contradictory or absurd in this.
It is the enlightened refusal to let oneself be caught in the trap of a reality that is fetishized in its principle, a reality that is itself caught in the trap of the signs of reality.
Is there such a thing as a naked, original reality, anterior to the signs in which it is made manifest?
Who knows? The self-evidence of reality has a shadow of retrospective doubt hovering over it.
However this may be, the agnostic is not concerned with this hinterworld or this original reality; he confines himself to reality as an unverifiable hypothesis, to signs as signs, behind which might also be hidden the absence of reality. (Their profusion in fact ends up voiding them of their credibility.) "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
18
" Only with our modern civilization did we find ourselves forcibly inducted into this individual existence. Of course, we fight to retain this 'inalienable' right, and we are naturally driven to win it and defend it at all costs. We demand this freedom, this autonomy, as a fundamental human right and, at the same time, we are crippled by the responsibility that ends up making us detest ourselves as such.
This is what resounds in the complaint of Job. God asks too much: ''What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? And that thou shouldest set thy heart upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle? '
This leaves us subject to a contradictory twofold requirement: to seek an identity by all possible means - by hounding the identities of others or by exploring the networks - and to slough off identity in every possible way, as though it were a burden or a disguise.
It is as though liberty and individuality, from having been a 'natural' state in which one may act freely, had become artificial states, a kind of moral imperative, whose implacable decree makes us hostages to our identities and our own wills.
This is a very particular case of Stockholm Syndrome, since we are here both the terrorist and the hostage. Now, the hostage is by definition the unexchangeable, accursed object you cannot be rid of because you don't know what to do with it.
The situation is the same for the subject: as hostage to himself, he doesn't know how to exchange himself or be rid of himself. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
19
" It is, in fact, no longer exactly a struggle between good and evil. It's a question of transparency.
Good is transparent: you can see through it.
Evil, by contrast, shows through: it is what you see when you see through.
Or alternatively, evil is the first hypothesis, the first supposition. Good is merely a transposition and a substitute product: the hypostasis of evil.
Good definitively scattered among the figures of evil.
Anamorphosis of good.
Evil definitively scattered among the figures of good.
Anamorphosis of evil.
It is only through the distorted, disseminated figures of evil that one can reconstitute, in perspective, the figure of good. It is only through the dispersed and falsely symmetrical figures of good that one can reconstitute the paradoxical figure of evil.
As it is only through the dispersion of the name of God in the labyrinth of the poem that you can sense the original figure running through it. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
