He
appeared to have abandoned by the 1980s all hope for revolution because
he found that by that time the sign value of commodities had triumphed
absolutely over their use value and their exchange value and man had
become dominated by images: the product of information technology. To
him, "the catastrophe has happened” : the destruction of modernity by
capitalism he noted in the 1970s was then complete. The only “hope” he
could find was to push that trend further in the same direction it was
moving in the expectation that it might collapse by itself owing to the
operation of the law of antinomy. Henceforth, the only option was an “esthetic irony”. In so thinking, he was deeply affected by Alfred Jarry
for whom “pataphysics is the science of the realm beyond metaphysics.
It will study the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the
universe supplementary to this one; or less ambitiously, it will
describe a universe in which one can see—must see perhaps—instead of the
traditional one…is the science of imaginary solutions, which
symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their
virtuality, to their lineaments”( What is Pataphysics? Evergreen Review 13 131-151) His postmodern metaphysics, like Jarry’s pataphysics, is playful, ironical. But unlike Jarry’s Ubu Roi, The Gestures and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, who
tries all sorts of way to master the universe according to his
imaginary designs, ambitions, the reign of the object has commenced and
we had better surrender to their rules. A "fatal strategy" pursues a
course to its extreme, attempting to surpass its limits, to go beyond
its boundaries. Proliferation of information in the media, cells in
cancer, sex in pornography, and the masses in contemporary society are
all fatal strategies whereby objects proliferate, metastasize to
extremes and in going beyond all hitherto conceivable limits, produce
something new and different.” By the 1980s. he found that capitalism is
still able to cope and the radical transformation he expected did not
materialize. But in the 1990s, he seems to think of the possibility of
“immanent reversal” where at the extreme, things will turn In the
opposite direction.
it is possible that many things may disappear in the postmodern era:
production, the real, the social and history and other key features of
modernity. He is always quoting Elias Canetti
: “A painful thought: that beyond a certain precise moment in time,
history is no longer real. Without realizing it, the whole human race
suddenly left reality behind. Nothing that has occurred since then has
been true, but we are unable to realize it. Our task and our duty now is
to discover this point or so long as we fail to grasp it, we are
condemned to continue on our present destructive course” (The Human Province quoted in Forget Foucault 1987
67)(“FF”) To him, there is no hope of our ever changing history:
“Everything happens as if we were continuing to manufacture history,
whereas in accumulating signs of the social, signs of the political,
signs of progress and change, we only contribute to the end of history”
(Year 2000 27) To him, this process constitutes an ecstasy of history
“in the primal sense of that word—a passage at the same time into the
dissolution and the transcendence of a form” (FF 68). For modernity,
history was its substance and ethos: modernity was a process of change,
innovation, progress and development and history was the repository of
our hopes bringing to us democracy, revolution, socialism, progress and
well- being for all. But to Baudrillard,
all this has now disappeared with the end of history, but not
completely. History is barely kept alive in a state of simulation, as a
series of special effects or a toy (FF 68 134). This is the way he
describes it: “ Suddenly, there is a curve in the road, a turning point.
Somewhere, there real scene has been lost, the scene where you had
rules for the game and some solid stakes that everybody could rely on.
(FF 69). For him, there are no longer any stable structures, nexes of
causality, events with consequences, or forms of determination through
which one could delineate historical trajectories or lines of
development. Everything is instead subject to indeterminism and an unpredictable aleatory confluence that produces vertigo.
Baudrillard posits three possible scenarios of how the end might happen in “The Year 2000 Has Already Happened “ (Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds) Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America)(“YTHAH”):
1. theuniverse is expanding so quickly from the acceleration of its speed to
such an extent that it will eventually vanish “into a hyperspace where
it loses all meaning (YTHAH 36)
2. if
society and the masses reach a state of absolute passivity and boredom,
history will implode into a state of inertia and stagnation owing to the law of entropy (YTHAH 37)
3. entities
will stop being what they were because they have reached technological
perfection e,g, music as we know it will disappear because of the
perfection of
stereophonic sound and likewise other phenomena could similarly
disappear as they become perfected and we may leave the “real” of
history for that of simulated history. (YTHAH 40)
He
thinks that we may enter into a futureless future in which no decisive
event will happen because all is finished,perfected and doomed to
infinite repetition: the eternal recurrence of the same. He sees our frenetic
attempts to gather and circulate information and to record historical
events as symptomatic of a desperate awareness that there is no more
history to come, that we are frozen in a glacial present in which time
is annihilated (YTHAH 43). He concludes: “It remains for to accommodate
ourselves to the time left to us, which is seemingly empties of sense by
this reversal. The end of this century is before us like an empty
beach.” (YTHAH 44) Francis Fukuyama from a conservative point of views, has also written an article entitled “The End of History”
in 1989 in which he suggested that Western liberal democracies having
won over communism, will be the perfect model which will supersede all
other political model and that be the end of history. But before that,
the eternal return has already happened for Baudrillard: he is
now repeating what he previously wrote e.g. in Cool Memories (1987), he
repeats in slogan form his favorite ideas and he too seems to have
reached a dead end. But it is not as bleak as it may
sound. He says that “We leave history to enter simulation…This is by no
means a despairing hypothesis, unless we regard simulation as a higher
form of alienation—which I certainly do not. It is precisely in history
that we are alienated, and if we leave history, we also leave
alienation.” (The year 2000 ed. F Grosz et al(eds) Future+Fall: Excusions into Postmodernity 1987 23)
True
to his perception of the breaking down of the boundaries between image
and reality, between facts and documentary and news and entertainment , Baudrillard thus presents a new method of analyzing society in his most famous book, America,
(1987 E 1988 )(“A”) written in the form of a travelogue in which he
explains “unreality” of American culture, catching glimpses of it
through his whirlwind tour of America, deliberately not allowing himself
enough time to become bogged down by the 'depth' of American social
reality. He calls this method 'pure traveling' and says that in this way
the banality of American culture can display itself. He says that the
point is not to write the sociology of the car; the point is to drive.
That way you learn more about this society than all academia could ever
tell you. For him, America is a desert, a vast cultural void where the
real and the unreal are merged so completely that all distinctions
between them have vanished altogether. People model their “real” lives
upon some other created or invented fictional character and they play
out their whole lives as if it were part of a film or soap opera.
Shakespeare’s view that “All life is stage” has become “reality”.
Despite appearances to the contrary, he is not trying to pass a moral
judgment about contemporary culture, nor to condemn it. For him, the
boundaries between good and evil are now so blurred that such an
exercise is a waste of time and is destined to fail. To Baudrillard,
contemporary subjects, fleeing from “the desert of the real”, and
exposed to “the ecstasy of hyperreality” or the “ecstasy of
communication”, are no longer afflicted with the modern pathologies like
schizophrenia or paranoia. They exist in “a state of terror which is
characteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things, a
foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate him,
meeting with no resistance, and no halo, not even the aura of his own
body protects him. In spite of himself, the schizophrenic is open to
everything and lives in the most extreme confusion.” (A 27). In
this ecstasy of communication, the subject is in close proximity to
instantaneous images and information, in an over-exposed and transparent
world, becoming himself “ a pure screen a pure absorption re-absorption
surface f the influent networks” (A 27)In May 1989, Baudrillard
made a keynote address to the first conference in America devoted to
himself under the title “Transpolitics, Transexuality and
Transethetics”” to summarize his current positions and to suggest some
new points of departure. He thinks that all possibilities in art,
sexuality and politics are exhausted and recommends assuming a
“delirious point of view” adequate to the “delirious state of things”.
In talking about transesthetics, he says: “It is commonlyheld that the
avant- garde no longer exists, whether this avant-garde is sexual,
political or artistic; that this movement which corresponds to the
linear acceleration of a history, to an anticipatory capacity and
henceforth of a radical critique in the name of desire, in the name of
revolution, in the name of liberation of forms, that this revolutionary
movement has come to a close. Essentially, this is true. This glorious
movement which is called modernity did not lead us to a transmutation of
all values, as we had once dreamed, but to a dissemination and
involution of value which resulted in a state of utter confusion for us.
This confusion expresses itself, first and foremost, by our inability
to grasp anew the principle of an esthetic determinacy of things, might
it be political or sexual.” Transesthetics refers to the process in
which esthetics permeates the economy, politics,culture and everyday
life and thus loses its autonomy and specificity.Everything now appears
is an esthetic sign and all esthetic signs co-exist in a situation of
indifference and esthetic judgement becomes impossible: “We are all
agnostics when it comes to art: we no longer have any esthetic
convictions we do not profess any esthetic doctrine or we profess them
all (which is the
case of the agnostic toward religion)”. Within the art market, prices
have become so exorbitant that they too no longer signify relative
values of the works but simply point to an “ecstasy of value” in which
value, like cancer, metastasizes uncontrollably all boundaries and
limits.Previously
he postulated a natural stage of value, a mercantile stage of value and
a structural stage of value which creates a society of simulation,
after these three stages in the history of simulacra and value, he
claims that we are now entering a new “fractal stage of value.” To the
first [stage] corresponded a natural referent and value evolved in
reference to a natural use of the world. To the second correspond a
general equivalent and value evolved in reference to a logic of
merchandise. To the third corresponds a code and value unfurls itself in
reference to an ensemble of models. To the fourth stage which I will
call the fractal stage or also, the viral stage, or still, the
irradiated state of value, there is no longer a referent at all. The
value irradiates in all directions, filling in all interstices, without
bearing reference to anything whatsoever except by way of mere
continuity.” At this fractal state, there isno longer any natural
equivalent of value, nor any structural equivalent that can be
calculated as one did the price or sign value of commodities. Rather,
there remains only: “ a sort of epidemic of value, a general metastasis
of value; a sort of proliferation and problematic dispersal. In order to
be rigorous, one should not use the word value any longer since this
kind of gearing up and chain reaction nullifies all evaluation. It is
once more the same as in microphysics. The reckoning of value in terms
of beautiful or ugly, good or evil, true or false is as impossible as
the simultaneous calculus of a particle’s speed and position. Each
particle follows its own movement, each value or fragment of value
shines momentarily in the sky of simulation, then disappears into the
void, according to a broken line which will only cross other lines
occasionally. It is the very schema of fractals and it is the present
schema of our culture.”
In
regard to transexuality, he says that there will be a “fractal
multiplication of body images” in which individuals can combine any
number of models in a new body that erases previous divisions of race,
class, gender or specific looks citing the example of Michael Jackson
who lightened his skin and undergone plastic surgery to diminish racial
differences between black and white and who has also scrambled gender
differences between male and female by combining appearances and
behavior traditionally associated with both sexes. Transvestites and
transsexuals who undergo sex change operations are also examples of
transexuality in the new age of fractals. We are currently in what he
calls “the post orgy state of things” after everything is liberated,
everything is possible, utopia is realized, everything can and has been
done, and all we can do is to assemble the fractal pieces of our culture
and proceed to its extremities, to its hypertelos beyond previous
boundaries and limits. The postmodern condition is thus for him a play
with all of the forms of sexuality, art, and politics, combining and
recombining forms and possibilities, moving into “the time of
transvestism”. “In fact, the regime of tranvestism has become the very
basis of our institutions. One will find it everywhere: in politics, in
architecture, in theory, in ideology, even in science (it would be very
interesting to analyze transvestism in scientific theories, in art and
on the chessboard of politics.”
his alternative to capitalist production and communicative interaction:
playing with appearances, a game with feminism, advocating artifice,
appearances, play, rituals, or stylized mode of thought, agame with its
own lures, snares and charms as the “ecstasy of the object” continue to
expand in power
and influence: the real become more real than in TV, the beautiful
become more beautiful than in fashion, and sex more sexual than in
pornography. Everything become more transparent, more explicit, nothing
hidden, displaying what he calls “excresence” (croissance &
excroissance), “ex” meaning putting out, “excreting” means expanding
more and more goods, services, messages, demands etc., surpassing all
rational ends in a spiral of uncontrolled growth andreplication but with
acceleration and proliferation, comes eventually inertia,the subject
becomes exhausted, and fascination with the object turns into apathy,
stupefaction and inertia; all boundaries between inside and the outside,
the private and public, the transparent and the hyperreal of the object
world are obliterated as fascination and seduction go by. If there are
no universally agreed upon objective personal, social, intellectual,
religious, spiritual or moral values and no “meta-narrative” or dominant
ideology or worldviews are now possible in the postmodern world, we
must create our own, fully aware of how limited, partial and context
dependent their validity must be. One of the ways of doing so is through art. Thus in his book The Perfect Crime (1996), Baudrillard
turns detective in order to investigate a crime which he hopes may yet
be solved: the 'murder' of reality. To solve the crime would be to
unravel the social and technological processes by which reality has
quite simply vanished under the deadly glare of mediated 'real time'. However, Baudrillard does not lament
the disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as
'the most important event of modern history', nor even to
meditate upon the paradoxes of reality and illusion, truth and its
masks. The book is a penetrating examination of crucial features of the social, political and cultural life of the 'advanced democracies' in the late twentieth century. There he examines the depredatory effects of the oppressive transparency on our social and cultural lives, of the relentless positivism of our scientific and instrumental rationality and the ruthlessness of modern logic and also
of the fate of the attempts of those who still stubbornly cling on to
some kind of “universal”,” objective”, “rational” modernist values ,
including at the deepest level, what they regard as metaphysical values
about what they would like to think of as “truth” and as “reality” .
In
his next book, the Transparency of Evil, 1993 (“TE”),he talks of
transethetics, transpolitics, transexuality, transeconomics so that
everything loses their specificity as they become more popular and
expand. The result is a confused condition where there are no more
criteria of value, of judgement, of taste, and the function of the
normative thus collapses in a morass of indifference and inertia: “Talk
about art is increasing even more rapidly” (TE 14). The power of art, as
adventure, as negation of reality, as redeeming illusion, as another
dimension etc –has also disappeared. Art is everywhere but “there are no
more fundamental rules” to differentiate art from other objects and
there are “no more criteria of judgement or of pleasure.” (TE 14). In
the contemporary society, people are indifferent to taste and manifest
only distaste: “tastes are determinate no more. “It is often said that
the West’s great undertaking is the commercialization of the whole
world, the hitching of the fate of everything to the fate of the
commodity. That great undertaking will turn out rather to have been the
esthestization of the whole world—its cosmopolitan spectacularization,
its transformation into images, its semiological organizations”(TE 16).
In the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an
image, a sign, a spectacle, a transesthetic object—just as everything
else also becomes trans-economic,trans-political, and trans-sexual. This
“materialization of esthetics” is accompanied by a desperate attempt to
produce ever more images and artistic objects. But this “dizzying
eclecticism” of forms and pleasures produces a situation in which art is
no longer art in theclassical or modernist senses but is merely image,
artifact, object, simulation, or commodity, with the price of artwork
constantly escalating and sky-rocketing in lines with commercial
decisions. Though he agrees with certain Marxist social analysis that
pre-modern societies are organized around religion, mythology and tribal
organization, such analysis is inadequate because their analysis is
based on production, not consumption and failed to take into account the
sign value of products/commodities. Man’s consciousness (perception,
understanding) dominated increasingly by his psychological and social
needs which are satisfied by production of virtual reality of simulation
of simulacra in the form of coded information by media, newspapers,
general and specialist periodicals, films, television, spectacles,
concerts, computer or video games, music videos with blurring of
boundaries between reality and illusion, news and entertainment.
Baudrillard
is a prolific writer. But he is not a careful writer. He often picks up
phrases, metaphors borrowed from science and uses them in a very
idiosyncratic way, without explaining why they are appropriate in the
particular context in which he uses them. He may have some good insights
into various phenomena in the contemporary world, but he seldom
elaborates on how they may further be developed and although he made
various suggestions on how we may deal with the problems brought by the
postmodernist phase of late capitalism, he stops there, without any
concrete details as to how they may be put into practice. He is much
better in his early than his later writing in which he merely repeats
himself. At the end of the day, he is more a cultural critic than a
professional philosopher.
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