Auschwitz and the Question of Evil

Auschwitz by Tana Schubert (2014)

tana-jo.deviantart.com 

This week marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, allowing commentators in the news media to put on their most solemn faces, mouth a series of clichés and broadcast all-too-familiar images, thereby constructing a lazy moral narrative around a place and an event that demands and deserves far more than sanctimonious inanity. 

For a start, we need to face up to the fact that, as Baudrillard points out, the Nazi genocide was not the extermination of a people by evil, but, rather, the attempted extermination of evil by a people acting in the name of Love; the murderous outcome of idealism and an insanely logical order.  

Secondly, we must reconsider the piles of rotting corpses and accept that they are, technically speaking from a camp commandant's perspective, besides the point and profoundly problematic. For the final solution essentially aimed not at the monstrous production of dead bodies; rather, it was an attempt to systematically process death and transform wretched human flesh into bars of glistening, pure white soap. As Nick Land writes:

"We simplify out of anxiety when we conflate the mounds of emaciated bodies strewn about the camps at the point of their liberation - the bodies of those annihilated by epidemics during the collapse of the extermination system - with the reduced ash and shadows of those erased by the system in its smooth functioning. The uneliminated corpse is not a submissive element within this or any other 'final solution', but an impersonal resistance to it, a token of primordial community."

In other words, it is only because our bodies are weak and prone to disease - only because our flesh is mortal and life is fundamentally immoral - that fascism of whatever variety can never triumph: Evil makes free.

All Is Forgiven, But Nothing Learnt in The Case of Charlie Hebdo

The so-called survivors' edition of Charlie Hebdo has been published in a print run that numbers in the millions and in several languages, including English and Arabic. What was once a small, struggling, French satirical magazine is now a global phenomenon.

The cover of this eight page issue features a new drawing of Mohammad which, sure enough, has managed to offend and provoke many Muslims - with the more extreme elements, in Pakistan for example, calling for further revenge killings in order to defend the honour of the prophet and punish those who, in their eyes, are guilty of blasphemy and wilfully insulting 1.5 billion people. 

Interesting as this reaction might be, that's not really my concern. Rather, what worries me is not the image, but the text that accompanies the image: above the crying cartoon figure is written tout est pardonné - all is forgiven.

I must confess to finding this outrageously sanctimonious; an attempt by the staff of the magazine to position themselves on the moral high ground by offering their own rather cheap and unconvincing imitation of Christ. They'll be telling us next that the twelve members of staff who died did so that we all might live in a more tolerant, more peaceful, and more loving world. It's a bit rich to say the least.

Equally galling - and further evidence of Charlie Hebdo's arrogance and inability to learn anything of import from what has just happened - is the fact that the figure also holds up a sign saying Je suis Charlie. The fanaticism of the political idealists who produce the magazine blinds them to the fact that, clearly, not everyone subscribes to or identifies with a universal model of secular humanism wrapped in the colours of the tricolore or star-spangled banner.

Charlie Hebdo can only conceive of a future in its own image; it cannot conceive of terrorism as the emergence of a radical antagonism at the very heart of globalization and as a malevolent force that is irreducible to the New World Order. One would suggest that the editors, writers, and cartoonists at the magazine - as well as their supporters - read Jean Baudrillard who, writing in 2002 after the attack on the Twin Towers, argues that the problem is we in the West have grown so powerful, so smug and self-satisfied, that we no longer care even to admit that there remain others in the world who do not share our dreams and our values:

"It all comes from the fact that the Other, like Evil, is unimaginable. It all comes from the impossibility of conceiving of the Other - friend or foe - in its radical otherness, in its irreconcilable foreignness. A refusal rooted in the total identification with oneself around moral values and technical power. ... How can the Other, unless he is an idiot, a psychopath or a crank, want to be different, irremediably different, without even a desire to sign up to our universal gospel?" [62-3]
                                                     
This brilliant - but largely ignored - insight means that Muslims are right to be offended by the cover of the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo - but are offended for the wrong reasons. What's offensive is not a silly little drawing, but the arrogant assumptions and ideological certainties behind it; the inability to contemplate for even one moment that the Islamists "might commit themselves entirely freely, without in any way being blind, mad or manipulated" [67] to their own moral laws, customs, and beliefs.

This kind of offends me too. And although I obviously don't call for the magazine to be burned, or the publishers murdered, I do wish the team at Charlie Hebdo would think about what they do with a little more subtlety and concern.   

 

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Hypotheses on Terrorism', in The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 2003).

Happy to Live in a Soulless World

 Cover art for Jean Baudrillard's Carnival and Cannibal 

(Seagull Books, 2010)

According to Roger Sandall, Disneyfication is the fourth and final stage of what he terms designer tribalism; the way in which a primitive, often savage but nonetheless authentic culture is finally reduced to the level of puerility within the Romantic imagination.

I have no arguments with this, but what Sandall doesn't seem to recognise is that the West has ruthlessly subjected its own culture and history to a similar process - something that Baudrillard was at pains to point out in a late essay entitled Carnival and Cannibal. 

Thus, whilst it's true that the West has obliged non-Western peoples the world over to accept modernity and wear a smiley white face, so too do we figure in this grotesque masquerade, effectively having carnivalized and cannibalized ourselves long before exporting such practices globally. 

The fact is, modernity spares no one: it's a great collective spectacle and swindle wherein "multiracial civilization is merely a trompe-l'oeil universe in which all particularities of race, sex and culture can be said to have been falsified to the point of being parodies of themselves". 

In other words, Western civilization has not triumphed - or, if it has, it has triumphed at the cost of its own soul. Still, this may not be a bad thing ... a soulless future and a disenchanted world may yet be the most beautiful (in its indifference, its irony, and its seductive emptiness). 

And if you think you might prefer to live instead in a world of fundamental values and absolute certainty, of sincerity and sovereignty, authenticity and enthusiasm, then I suggest you pledge allegiance to the Islamic State.

Notes

Roger Sandall writes about Disneyfication and the other three stages of Noble Savagery in an Appendix to The Culture Cult, (Westview Press, 2001), pp. 179-81.

Baudrillard's essay, Carnival and Cannibal, is translated by Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2010). The line quoted from is on p. 9.  

Peep Show Proves We're a Long Way from Wuthering Heights

"We're a long way from Wuthering Heights ..."

With this devastating line, Houellebecq refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and a kind of vital exhaustion - particularly in the bedroom - which characterizes the early 21st century.

Ours is an age in which people continue to fuck and to feign an interest in romance, but their fascination for eroticism is completely artificial and they are, in fact, bored beyond stiffness by the endless orgy in which they find themselves; thus the growing need for pornography, sex toys, and Viagra.

We simply don't feel or even truly understand what fictional lovers such as Cathy and Heathcliff are said to have felt; their passion has become embarrassing and slightly repulsive. We don't want intense emotional commitment; rather, we prefer to fake our own feelings and simply replay old scenarios whilst lacking in any conviction. For us, sex is all about a nostalgic staging of desire and its dispersal. 

Ultimately, all we'll be left with are the signs and simulations of sex circulating via the media creating a world characterized by what Baudrillard refers to as virtual indifference. This will doubtless have many consequences, including the fact that novels, such as Emily Brontë's classic, will become impossible to read, or even talk about in and on our own terms; as evidenced, for example, in Peep Show series 7, episode 3.

Suna no Onna (Sand Woman)

The Woman in the Dunes (1964), dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara

I've always been fascinated by the thought of desert sands and the radical indifference of shifting dunes to any form of moist life, including human life; an unceasing flow of countless particles overwhelming everything in their path.

Baudrillard has provided some lovely descriptions of the desert as an ecstatic form of disappearance and pure geometry. He speaks of their grandeur deriving from negative aridity; places where all high hopes evaporate and the artificial scruples of culture are rendered null and void, leaving only silence.   
 

For other writers, the desert is intrinsically feminine and to be fatally lost in the sand is like being sexually enveloped and suffocated by the love of a good woman. The Japanese author Kobo Abe, for example, explores this erotic-fetishistic theme in his short novel The Woman in the Dunes (1962).

This strangely beautiful and disturbing book tells the tale of an amateur entomologist, Niki Jumpei, who goes on a brief holiday to collect insects that live among the sand dunes, but ends up quite literally trapped in a deep hole alongside a woman whose only task in life is to dig sand. His attempts to escape end in failure and so he learns how to love the woman and accept his fate as a type of human sand-bug. In other words, he learns how to go with the flow and transform a hole into a home.

Abe provides some nice descriptions of the woman, a young widow, the surface of whose skin "was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand ... attractive to look at but hardly to touch."

That said, of course the man does eventually touch her; sometimes with savage violence and at other times with tenderness, as he helps brush or wash the sand from her naked body, from under her breasts, from her buttocks and thighs, and from the dark lips of her vulva. The sex between them is mostly impersonal and as crushing, shapeless and merciless as the desert. As Andrea Dworkin notes:

"The sand, because it is relentless and inescapable, forces an abandonment of the abstract mental thinking and self-involvement that pass for feeling, especially sexual feeling, in men in civilization. It forces the person to live wholly in the body, in the present, without mental evasion or self-preoccupied introspection or free-floating anxiety. ... What [Niki Jumpei] feels, he feels physically. The sand is so extreme, so intense, so much itself, so absolute, that it determines the quality and boundaries of his consciousness ..."

It even gives him an erection, as it trickles in a little stream over the base of his penis and flows along his thighs.  

Towards the end of the novel, the man attempts to rape the woman whilst the villagers who have imprisoned and enslaved them both in the pit watch from above. But just like his attempts to escape, his attempt to publicly violate the woman (and thereby secure a promise of freedom made by his captors) fails. She physically not only fends him off, but, like the sand, she overpowers him and obliges him to make a final capitulation:

"The man, beaten and covered with sand ... abandoned himself to her hands ... It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body." 
  
Dworkin again provides the best (somewhat romantic and profoundly Lawrentian) reading of this scene:

"In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand - to life moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to the necessities of the woman's life in the dunes - work, sex, a home, the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminated by voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerously unsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions. The superiority of the woman, like the superiority of the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patient endurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthless simplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in her body, not in his imagination."

  
See The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe, trans. E. Dale Saunders, (Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 44-6 and 232. And see Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin, (Basic Books, 2007), pp. 33-4 and 36.

All of Us: The War Poems of D. H. Lawrence

The forgetting of war is itself an act of violence: the extermination of memory and of history. And so it is doubtless right that the UK government should officially commemorate the First World War, which began a hundred years ago in the summer of 1914 and resulted in the loss of almost a million British lives.

But commemoration shouldn't mean the construction of an artificial memory which effaces the real, any more than it should involve the commercial and political exploitation of a past event; what Jean Baudrillard would describe as the capturing of leftover heat from a catastrophic occurrence in order to warm the corpse of the present.

Hundreds-of-thousands of dead soldiers, having marched through the mud in the name of King and Country only to end up buried in mass graves or sent home like Clifford Chatterley more or less in bits, should not now be made to march anew in the name of corporate-media spectacle and enforced public sentimentality. 

The Great War was a tragic historical event with causes and consequences open to critical analysis and it should primarily be remembered as such. If, even as it unfolded, it gave rise to art, it is nevertheless mistaken to transform it into a universal myth or some kind of absolute point of reference that everyone is expected to feel moved by - including those who were not even born in the twentieth century, or whose parents have come from countries and cultures that had nothing to do with the conflict.   

In a sense, therefore, the sequence of thirty-one war poems written by D. H. Lawrence entitled 'All of Us' and published in their full, uncensored form last year for the first time, is unfortunately named: for this sense of consensus or national unity has long-since vanished (if in fact it ever existed).

Nevertheless, the poems continue to speak to some of us and speak powerfully; i.e., without mawkishness, but with a good deal of genuine feeling, including horror and anger as well as deep sorrow and their publication provides a far more fitting memorial than that being planned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which seems to involve the dimming of minds as well as the extinguishing of lights on the home front.

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Women Who Hum Are the Hope of the Future

Un Colibri

The troubling thing about living in a fully digital age is that whilst technology has been consummated, men, women and children have all effectively been disqualified; they have lost not only their independence but also their imagination. For who dares to daydream or fantasise when they have movies on demand; who needs to whistle a happy tune when they are connected to an i-Pod which streams non-stop music into their ears? 

Baudrillard refers to this as a form of existential unemployment and fears that the obsolescence of our species is racing towards a terminal phase in which our fate will no longer be in our own hands, but determined exclusively by machines to which we have transferred decision-making in a symbolic act of capitulation:

"In the end, human beings will only have been an infantile illness of an integral technological reality that has become such a given that we are no longer aware of it ... This revolution is not economic or political. It is an anthropological and metaphysical one. And it is the final revolution - there is nothing beyond it. In a way, it is the end of history, although not in the sense of a dialectical surpassing, rather as the beginning of a world without humans."

- Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), p. 80. 

This pessimistic conclusion contrasts starkly with the laughable idealism of those who retain their faith in the future and believe in the unlimited morphological adaptability of our species and its becoming-cyborg. Faced with an obvious inferiority to their own smart phones, transhumanists accept voluntary servitude; rather than disappear altogether, they choose to be biologically engineered and cloned. In other words, ashamed of their own mortal imperfection, the machine-ticklers are prepared to make themselves sexless and loveless; beings who pass through life knowing nothing of joy or sorrow and whose nights are no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy.  

At this point, as Nietzsche would say, I cannot suppress a sigh and one small hope; a hope that there might still be others in this world like the young French woman I met recently who, when sitting quietly and contentedly in the corner of a book-filled room, thinking her own thoughts, almost inaudibly started to hum ...          

On the Agony of Power II: The White Terror of World Order

Jean Baudrillard by Guillem Cifré

www.artisopensource.net

According to Baudrillard, domination becomes hegemony when the slave internalizes the master. But for this to happen, power must also absorb the negative - and that's problematic. For whilst the negative can certainly be swallowed, it can never be fully digested; rather, it starts to eat away at power from the inside in a cannibalistic manner. Justice is served in the form of auto-liquidation.    

Meanwhile, the external remnants of negativity - those things which have not yet been swallowed by hegemonic power, or have perhaps already been spat out - mutate into forms of evil that include chaotic weather events and suicide bombers.

The victory of the New World Order is, therefore, only ever apparent. It is obliged to fight a continual war on terror; at a military level, but, also, on a symbolic level as it seeks to liquidate all remaining values and to achieve a humiliating and nihilistic final consensus in which all is revealed as equally worthless and there is literally nothing left to disagree on. Baudrillard writes:  

"The terrorist's potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection. This is the movement of our culture ... truth is always on the side of unveiling ... exhibition, avowal, nudity - nothing is true unless it is desecrated, objectified, stripped of its aura, or dragged onstage."

"This confrontation is not quite a 'clash of civilizations', but it is not economic or political either, and today it only concerns the West and Islam in appearance. Fundamentally, it is a duel, and its stakes are symbolic ... a universal carnivalization ... against all the singularities that resist it." 

Obviously Baudrillard is not advocating the most violent and reactionary forms of singular resistance, but invoking rather the most poetic of possibilities. However, there's still something troubling about his critique of Western modernity; one which is clearly related to a Romantic and irrationalist tradition of German philosophy that would include Nietzsche at his most Dionysian and Heidegger at his most politically compromised.
          

Indeed, I feel compelled to say that I infinitely prefer a demoralized and disenchanted world to one of sacrificial violence and fundamentalism and would much rather live in a hyperreal and extraterrestrial zone that has devoured its own logic and values than in those primitive regions of the world still living under strict religious law and the mythological authority of God.

Better the euphoric banality of the last man than the stupidity and savage cruelty of those who have yet to even enter history, let alone pass through it.

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'The White Terror of World Order', essay in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 67, 69.

  

On the Agony of Power I: From Domination to Hegemony

Design Office with Kim Gordon - Since 1980

I think Baudrillard was right to carefully draw a distinction between traditional types of domination - characterized by the master/slave relationship - and what he terms hegemony; the latter being the terminal phase of the former in which there are neither masters nor slaves, just cybernetic organisms who have internalized the operational rules of the New World Order and mistake this for their freedom and happiness:

"Caught in a vast Stockholm syndrome, the alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized are siding with the system that holds them hostage. They are now 'annexed', in the literal sense, prisoners of the nexus, of the network, connected for better or for worse."

Whereas classical forms of domination imposed a system of values, hegemony relies on the liquidation of all values, including the principle of the real; it is a virtual masquerade and a parody of power. As such, it is beyond criticism. But this doesn't mean we should just accept it. We can still offer what Baudrillard calls a double refusal - i.e. a form of resistance based upon the intelligence of evil. This doesn't involve class struggle or a fight for liberation, it is rather a new type of confrontation specific to the era of hegemony:

"In other words, a confrontation that is no longer precisely political but metaphysical and symbolic in the strong sense. It is a confrontation, a divide that exists not only at the heart of the dominant power, but at the heart of our individual existence."

   

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'From Domination to Hegemony', in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 37, 56. 

  

The Gulf War Is Still Not Happening

And still - rather amazingly to my mind - there are well-read and intelligent individuals who just cannot or will not allow themselves to see what Baudrillard is arguing in his series of short reflections from 1991 on the Gulf War. Individuals such as the libertarian blogger and photographer Brian Mickelthwait, for example, to whom these comments are addressed. 

Contrary to the title of the third of his three articles originally published in Libération and which also became the title of a later book - The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) - Baudrillard is not suggesting that the events in Kuwait and Iraq didn't happen; the violence was in fact all-too-actual. But it was also, for us in the West at least, spectacular and virtual, rather than real, constituting a form of simulated warfare. 

This was certainly the case for those sat in the comfort and security of their own homes who experienced the war in the form of televised imagery and stylized media presentation. But even the US armed forces for the most part did not directly engage in combat with their opponents and suffered few casualties. They too largely conducted the coordinated and choreographed slaughter of Iraqi troops from behind the safety of screens. 

Thus to call the events in the Gulf a war, Baudrillard suggests, is a misnomer; for it was both rehearsed and enacted as a videogame in which the actual violence and atrocity was overwritten by electronic narrative (complete with a missile eye-view of events). There is thus a fatal interdependence established between truth and fantasy; in fact, nothing separates them any longer in the hyperreal orgy of simulation.          

This might have been a controversial view at the time, but it seems today incontrovertible and really rather modest. As for the charge - often made against Baudrillard - that he displays at best casual indifference to human suffering and at worst political and moral nihilism, this is simply ignorant and malicious and, ironically, risks falling into the kind of banality and fraudulence which his critics accuse him of.

In Praise of Stalking (The Case of Sophie Calle)

Stalking - be it of an actual kind in what remains of and passes for the real world, or a virtual activity conducted online - doesn't have a great reputation. Doubtless this is due to the fact that stalking is often related to harassment and intimidation and because it can be not only predatory but creepy in character; no one, it seems, likes to be followed and spied on by strangers (even in a world of Facebook and CCTV).

And yet, is it not possible that we might understand stalking not in terms of physical and psychological abuse, but rather as a fascinating instance of neo-courtly love in an age after the orgy ...?

For it is certainly the case that many stalkers feel a strong and genuine bond of affection for the person they choose to secretly shadow and, in essence, there's a striking similarity between medieval erotico-spiritual practice and this illicit postmodern phenomenon: both are a highly specialized expression of a love that is all too human and yet transcendent; passionate and yet restrained; true and yet founded upon fantasy. 

The stalker, whilst accepting the independence of the object of their desire, nevertheless attempts to bring themselves to the attention of the latter by various means and often goes to extraordinary lengths in order to prove the seriousness of their ardour and commitment. They may or may not be hoping for sexual intimacy, but this hardly seems to be the point and it would be mistaken, I think, to posit this as the ultimate goal; there are certainly easier ways to get a date or get laid, even for the most incompetent or inadequate of would-be lovers. 

        

Indeed, in certain cases of stalking there is no sexual motive involved at all: consider the famous case involving French conceptual artist, Sophie Calle. Here is an example of a woman stalking a man - known as Henri B. - without having any particular interest in him and certainly no erotic aspirations or expectations. It was Calle's indifferent determination to follow Henri B., without motive or any identifiable type of psychoses or neurotic compulsion, that made her story so intriguing to Jean Baudrillard, who - as we shall see - interprets her actions in terms of his theory of seduction (i.e. an ironic and fatal game of hide-and-seek to do with power, appearance, reversibility, loss of will, and being led astray). 

For those of you who don't know this case, the facts are these:

After stalking several strangers through the streets of Paris, Calle met Henri B. at a party. He told her he was travelling to Italy the following day and so Calle decided to go to Venice herself and track him down. After phoning round a large number of hotels, she finally found him. Then, suitably disguised, she spent the next few days following Henri B. around the city; photographing his movements and encounters with others and recording details in a diary alongside her own musings. 

Eventually, Henri B. spotted and confronted his stalker and the game was effectively over - although Calle still contrived to arrive back in Paris at the same time as her object in order to get one last secret picture of him disembarking from the train on which he had made his way home. She eventually published the black-and-white photographs accompanied by a text as Suite vénitienne (1983).

The book also included a typically insightful essay by Baudrillard entitled 'Please Follow Me' which contains the following passage on the seductive joy of becoming-other and becoming-object:

"To stalk the other is to take charge of their itinerary; it is to watch over their life without them knowing it. It is to ... relieve them of that existential burden, the responsibility of their own life. Simultaneously, she who follows is herself relieved of responsibility for her own life as she follows blindly in the footsteps of the other. And thus a wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancellation of each existence, in the cancellation of each subject's tenuous position as a subject. Stalking the other, one replaces them, exchanges lives, passions, wills, transforms oneself in the other's stead. It is perhaps the only way one can finally find fulfilment."


Note: An English edition of the Calle/Baudrillard work, trans. Danny Barash and Danny Hatfield, is available from Bay Press (1988). 

  

Selfies and the Rise of the Look Generation

Early selfie by Anastasia Nikolaevna (1914)

Typically taken with a smart phone or webcam and then posted onto a social media website, the selfie is very much a contemporary phenomenon. 

This is not to say that it is entirely without precedent or lacking history. In fact, human beings have long enjoyed making and circulating photographic images of themselves and selfies have existed in non-digital form ever since the days of the Kodak Box Brownie. Thirteen year-old Anastasia Nikolaevna, for example, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, was one of the first girls to take her own picture, which she then mailed to a friend in 1914.

And so I have no wish to add my voice to those that suggest the selfie is evidence of either the empty narcissism of today's youth, or a sign that they have been pornified and suffer from low self-esteem. I understand the arguments put forward by concerned commentators, but fear that they often collapse into precisely the sort of moral hysteria that greets everything to do with technology, sex, and the play of images.

But what is worth pointing out is how Jean Baudrillard anticipated the rise of the selfie thirty years ago and nicely identified what is unique about this disenchanted form of mannerism, or pose without purpose.

In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Baudrillard discussed what he termed the 'Look Generation' and argued that we were rapidly moving towards a world in which it would be impossible to speak of alienation or inauthenticity; a world in which individuals could no longer hope "to come into existence in and through the eye of the other, for there is no longer a dialectic of identity" [41].

In such a world, everyone is required to make themselves visible as an image, but without worrying too much about being (or even being seen). It's all about the utopia of the look, rather than the empire of the gaze. In proliferating and posting a huge number of self-taken images - including explicit images - Baudrillard doubts there is even any desire to seduce; "for this would require that appearances were carefully worked on, stylized, according to a strategy of diverting the other in order to harness their gaze and lead them into loss" [41].

The selfie is simply saying: I exist, I am here, I am an image, look at me, look, look! This may or may not be a form of narcissism, but what it certainly involves is "exhibition without inhibition, a kind of ingenious publicity in which each person becomes the impresario of their own appearance, of their own artifice" [41].

The Look Generation, concludes Baudrillard, have discovered a new and ironic form of passion; "that of being devoid of all illusion about their own subjectivity ... about their own desires ... fascinated by their own metamorphosis" [41] into electronic and ephemeral images lacking in any particular significance. Lovers of selfies no longer worry about the social logic of distinction (as found, for example, in fashion pictures taken by professional photographers) and they no longer believe in coded difference, such as gender. Rather, they simply play with it; just as they play with singularity "without falling into dandyism or snobbery" [42].


See: Baudrillard Live, ed. Mike Gane, (Routledge, 1993), pp. 41-2.  

No-Pan Kissa

Whatever the problematic sexual politics of such places, there was something undeniably charming about the Japanese coffee shops known as no-pan kissa that flourished in the 1980s, where the waitresses wore short skirts without underwear and served drinks and snacks to customers fascinated by what they saw reflected on the mirrored floors. 

Alas, such establishments rapidly declined in number as their owners made the fatal error of moving ever-further in the direction of naked truth and full-exposure: this trend terminating in the vaginal cyclorama wherein nude women would sit on the edge of a platform with their legs apart, inviting their male admirers to closely inspect their genitalia. 

As Baudrillard writes, all forms of seduction and traditional striptease pale before this spectacle of absolute obscenity and visual voracity that goes far beyond erotic playfulness towards extreme pornographic idealism. The men who pay to push their faces between open thighs and stare with mortal seriousness, never smiling or trying to touch, are participants within an orgy of realism.

The cunt, meanwhile, made monstrously visible, has simply become another empty sign in a hypersexual realm of simulation. That is to say, the object of desire is itself lost in close-up just as myopic voyeurs end by staring themselves blind. Without a little distance and ambiguity, a little secrecy and even, yes, a little romance (i.e. a metaphorical dimension) there can be no gaze, no seduction, and no sex.

Obscenity means nothing other than that the body and its sex organs are literally and often brutally shoved in your face; there is, says Baudrillard, a total acting out of things that ought to be subject if not to privacy, then to dramaturgy, a scene, a game between lovers.  

 

Film Kills (2): On Images, Objects and Speculative Realism

In a digital age, the making, distribution, and consumption of images is perhaps our most fundamental activity. It deserves, therefore, to be carefully thought about from a philosophical perspective and, for me, Jean Baudrillard does a better job than most at this. 

For Baudrillard, iconography is not innocent. In fact, it plays a complicit role in what he terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs.

Ironically, in this world of simulacra and simulation the image can no longer even imagine the real, because it has itself become the real: "It is as though things had swallowed their own mirrors and had become transparent to themselves ... full in the light and in real time ... forced to register on thousands of screens" [1] in high definition.

When this happens, we pass beyond representation towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is "uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect" [2]. People who indecently expose themselves in this game of cyber-exhibitionism are left without secrets, without shadows, without charm. They become, if you like, ghosts in the machine, forced to confront the possibility that life can no longer be experienced except within the emotional parameters of Facebook. 

But maybe, when everything has finally been put on view, we'll realise that there was nothing to be seen after all. Maybe, those who live by the image will die by the image. And maybe we'll find a way to overcome our own narcissistic and voyeuristic image-fetishism; to smash a great hole in the Universal Screen and experience the wild chaos that lies beyond in the world of objects and actual entities.

Doubtless, this will require a certain innocence on our part and the development of what has been termed speculative realism. That is to say, a philosophy that insists there is more to the world than a play of appearances and that objects have a mind-independent reality; i.e. they exist regardless of whether we are thinking or observing them.

Iconographers and idealists believe there is a permanent correlation between reality and its representation. They become sceptical about anything outside the world of their own making - it is unthinkable, they say, that the unfilmable might exist! And yet, things-in-themselves do exist and there's a mysterious, partly invisible or withdrawn world of such things that constitute a reality that is completely indifferent to our existence and vain attempts to conceptualize it.

Why vain? Because the attempt to visualise and transcendentally guarantee the world in a manner entirely for our own convenience, is fundamentally an attempt to deny reality in all its inhuman and malevolent reality. An image is thus always a kind of anthropocentric conceit, or caricature. That's why a photograph of a horse, for example, is not the same as an actual horse that we might feed sugar lumps to, or be kicked in the head by: "the camera can neither feel the heat of the horse ... nor smell his horsiness", it merely captures "one dreary bit of ... his static external form" [3].

Even at its best, cinema never really encounters the world; it just puts a filmy-imaginative veneer over reality, or what might be described as a "luminous but impoverished plane of explicit awareness" [4].

The good thing is that herein lies hope: for what we learn from this is that the world is inexhaustible and objects virtually indestructible, because essentially unknowable. The image kills - but only partly; it deadens, but does not make dead. And so for all the attempts to dissolve the world and rid it of substance, objects (including human beings) stubbornly refuse to be abstracted away or transmuted into pure light and colour. 

Ultimately, matter returns in all its solidity and menace and the object extracts its revenge.

Notes:

[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996), p. 4.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner, (Berg, 2005), p. 94.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, (CUP, 1992), pp. 127, 128.

[4] Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, (Zero Books, 2010), p. 112.

On Myth

Henri Matisse: Icarus (1947)

I recently heard someone point out that the wax holding Icarus's wings together would not have melted if he flew too high, because, as a matter of fact, it gets colder at altitude not hotter.

I know this is spectacularly besides the point, because, being a myth about hubris and a young man's folly, it is not meant to be read as a scientific account of early experiments in human aviation. Having said that, I understand how the temptation to prick the bubble of myth by simply speaking the truth and pointing to amusing inaccuracies and unverifiable bits of nonsense can sometimes be difficult to resist.

And, personally, I have no time for those critics who regard the 'disenchantment' of the world by the Enlightenment as a regrettable error and call for a radical re-mythologization.

When I see the new mythologists standing before the world of virtual reality and information technology articulating arguments that fundamentally still rely upon the language of Romanticism, I am reminded of those agrarian idealists who at the beginning of the industrial era sought to revive values associated with the rapidly disappearing feudal past and encourage people to take up handicrafts once more.

Postmodernity enables us to do many things - including the decoupling of thought from its dead relationship to old forms of thinking - but it does not allow us to simply reterritorialize upon a model of ancient culture and society, rediscovering their narratives as our own. Ultimately, life today no longer corresponds to a mythological framework and myth has simply lost its power to shape plausible identities (unless you happen to be a religious fundamentalist of some variety or other).

Ultimately, I agree with Baudrillard here: having passed beyond both the physical and metaphysical worlds we enter into a pataphysical era - but not a new mythological age. Things today no longer have an origin, an aim, or any end; they develop neither logically nor symbolically, but chaotically and randomly.

And I agree also with Voltaire, that grand seigneur of the spirit as Nietzsche calls him, who was of the opinion that the study of myth is an occupation for blockheads.

The Human Body Does Not Exist

Chelsea Charms (2009) 

I have been thinking again of Marc Quinn's sculptures of individuals who have magnificently transformed their flesh, their sex, and their humanity via techniques including plastic surgery, hormone treatment, and cosmetic enhancement (tattooing, piercing, skin bleaching, etc). 

If fascinating and rather beautiful as neo-classical objects - particularly those worked in marble of Thomas Beatie and Chelsea Charms - they nevertheless fail to amaze as much as the real bodies upon which they're based. Ultimately, those who have turned themselves into living works of art have little need for statues to be erected in their honour.

That said, Quinn's work nevertheless succeeds in obliging the viewer to consider important questions not simply to do with biology, gender, and sexual artifice, but also celebrity and race: the Michael Jackson pieces, for example, remind us that he was the first truly transracial as well as transsexual superstar - "better able even than Christ to reign over the world and reconcile its contradictions", as Baudrillard put it.

Perhaps understandably, Quinn was keen at the time of his exhibition (SS 2010) that it not be thought of as simply a postmodern freak show. But surely it was the physical abnormality and inherent queerness of his subjects that prompted Quinn to ask them to pose in the first place and Catman, Dennis Avner, now sadly deceased, happily worked within this tradition as a performer.

For me, the only illegitimate response came from those who insisted that the point of Quinn's exhibition was to show that, despite everything, we're all the same under the skin. 

A Transpolitical Afterword

To my surprise, I discovered last night at a wine bar in St James's, that there are still intelligent people in the world prepared to discuss politics as traditionally understood and practised, despite the fact that we have entered a transpolitical era. They might not have been entirely sober when doing so - but they were almost certainly serious.

For one reason or another, they seemed unprepared to accept - or, in some cases, incapable of accepting - what the radical confusion of formerly fixed and distinct political categories, ideologies, and identities might signify. It was as if the last forty years had changed nothing at all. Or as if Baudrillard had never written a word!

However, like it or not, we are rapidly approaching what the latter describes as the zero point of politics; a stage in which everything that formerly held truth and value in the political sphere has been emptied of all sense. Not that this marks the end of history, or the end of man; rather, it simply results in the interminable illusion of the end and the simulation of phantom events on the world stage broadcast in real time on 24-hour news channels.

Henceforth, attempts to do politics, or discuss politics, are increasingly doomed to failure. And if many people don't bother to vote, it's not because they are apathetic or cynical, but, for the most part, indifferent to a system in which it has become impossible to believe. Parliament, I'm afraid, is beginning to resemble a huge HMV store: a place that holds no great interest and serves no real purpose. 

Revenge of the Immortals

One of the more controversial ideas that Baudrillard put forward was the final solution, by which he referred to the extermination of sex and death and the return of humanity to a desexualized, non-individuated state of being prior to our becoming mortal and discontinuous.

Thanks to recent scientific advances, this dream of becoming-amoeba, or, as it is more commonly called, cloning, is no longer simply the stuff of fiction or neo-Platonic fantasy. There seems to be a general acceptance of the fact that we are about to be replaced either by machines, or a new species which will be sexless and immortal. No one seems particularly troubled by the prospect of a transhuman future and, ironically, whilst we speak endlessly about the right to life, it is the right to death that is being taken from us. 

In a crucial passage, Baudrillard notes: 

"Contrary to everything we ordinarily believe, nature first created immortal beings, and it was only by winning the battle for death that we became the living beings that we are. Blindly, we dream of defeating death and achieving immortality, whereas that is our most tragic destiny, a destiny inscribed in the previous life of our cells."

     - Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2001), pp. 27-8

Relating his theories of evolution and cloning not only to the history of Western metaphysics, but also to modern sexual politics, Baudrillard argues that by dissociating erotic activity from procreation and reproduction from sex, fucking is increasingly regarded as a useless function; just as gender differences become irrelevant. 

Death too, it seems, is fated to become a useless function and, in the longer term, something inconceivable. Perhaps the time will come when the beings who come after us will try to understand something of our joys and sorrows by simulating a virtual experience of mortality; perhaps they will long nostalgically for nights shaken with terror and ecstasy and for what Houellebecq terms the possibility of an island.   

On the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dickon Edwards, by Sarah Watson

In a brilliant and typically gnostic manner, Baudrillard observes: 

"In the end, all figures of otherness boil down to just one: that of the Object. In the end, all that is left is the inexorability of the Object, the irredeemability of the Object."

                           - The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996), p. 172

And so, at the close of Dorian Gray, all that remains is the picture. Having fulfilled its symbolic destiny and  taken its revenge, the portrait hangs upon the wall in immaculate triumph. Dorian lies dead because he mistakenly surrendered up all his secrets. But the picture-as-object remains an insoluble enigma outside of human reflection. 

Stare long enough at any image and it is not you who looks at it, but it which looks into you. Such is the abysmal nature of art: it exposes the illusory and superficial nature of subjectivity. Ultimately, despite all his crimes, passions, and perversities, Dorian bores us. The truth of the matter is that after many centuries of tedious and often painful self-confession and analysis, we know all that there is to know about the soul of man. There are no more mysteries of the human heart left to explore.

So it is that only the object excites our interest, as it leads us away from psychology towards a speculative materialism concerned not with feelings and desires, but the alien world of things, forces, and strange phenomena. We can forget human being and being human - or forms of literary analysis that talk endlessly about character and agency. 

It was - to reiterate - the picture of Dorian Gray that was the source of all that was most curious in Wilde's book. Only in the picture and in the actual events of the novel as events, were elements of genuine queerness assembled; not in the bi-curious world of Dorian, Basil and Lord Henry. 

And so, next time you take a picture of a friend or loved one, be honest enough to admit that what really excites you is the resolution of the image rather than their stupid smiling face. Dare to acknowledge that today, for us, identity is not something divided against itself as it was for the Victorians who worried endlessly about the beast or the queer within, but something to be produced, multiplied, circulated, broadcast, and consumed. 

For this is not an age of full-length portraits, or even mirrors. It is, rather, an age of screens and photoshopped personas encountered on-line. And so, if you really want to know all about someone, don't bother looking into their souls, or fingering their sex, just check out their Facebook profile and there they are in all their obscenity. 

Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels

Ivonne Thien: Thirty-Two Kilos (2008)

Ours is an anorexic culture, writes Baudrillard; that is to say, a size-zero culture of self-loathing, bulimia, and the ecstasy of emptiness and organic annihilation. 

Ivonne Thien's digitally altered photographs of models wrapped in medical bandages were intended to both illustrate this and, at the same time, offer a point of resistance to the use of  underweight (and often underage) girls in the fashion industry.

She was inspired to create the series of fourteen pictures, entitled Zweiunddreißig Kilo, after her attention was drawn to the proliferation of pro-ana websites that argue for anorexia as a lifestyle choice and dispute the belief that it is actually a life-threatening medical condition. 

Ironically, however, her photos themselves have now become sources of 'thinspiration' to many within the pro-ana community. One suspects that Baudrillard won't be spinning in his grave at this all-too-predictable development, but perhaps gently smiling ...