aesthetic force in baudrillard and deleuze

8/18/2019 Aesthetic Force in Baudrillard and Deleuze

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AESTHETIC FORCE

IN

BAUDRILLARD AND DELEUZE

By

VANESSA, ANNE-CECILE FREERKS

Dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the

requirements for the degree

MASTER OF ARTS

In

PHILOSOPHY

In the

FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

At the

UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG

SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR J.J. SNYMAN

MAY 2009


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DECLARATION

I, Vanessa, Anne-Cécile Freerks, hereby declare that the work contained in this

dissertation is my own original work and that I have not previously submitted it, in its

entirety or in part, at any university for a degree.


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ABSTRACT

When fighting against the dominance of instrumental reason, aesthetic

consciousness always admitted its allegiance to ‘another state of being,’ i.e., to the

explosive break with the continual inertia of linear social development. In the

literature written at the turn of the 20th century this was symbolized in the ‘life of

danger’ that contrasted with the normality of ordinary bourgeois life. This study shows

that Baudrillard no longer believes in ‘another state of being’ with explosive force. In

Baudrillard's theory of simulation, the crisis of overproduction in capitalism is to be

understood as the total shift of production into reproduction. His position has

consequences for the idea of the catastrophic nature of the present social situation

and for the aesthetic means with which it can finally be thought.

Baudrillard calls the catastrophic effect of the threat emanating from simulation an

implosion not an explosion, it results from the fact that under pressure from a merely

simulated reality, every social energy is expended internally in the play of signifiers,

evaporating in some catastrophic process. His aesthetic fascination with events does

not seem to have disappeared completely in the process. For Baudrillard, on

September 11 2001, the terrorists countered simulation with simulation itself. This is

what makes it a true event. What is unthinkable in this event is the use of death in a

staged exchange where a whole culture could be attacked. The attack brings back

death to a world that pretends it is not there. If political economy is the most rigorous

attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to political

economy.

Baudrillard encounters an indifference, a void and death at the heart of thought. This

leads to apocalyptic tones. For Baudrillard, one only attains to thought when one

interiorizes the limit and displaces it. Thinking no longer works except by breaking

down and dismantling itself. For Deleuze, on the other hand, to dissent is to affirm

other modes of life. Deleuze constructs an entire philosophy of life – conceived as a

philosophy of difference. This enables Deleuze to have an affirmative notion of the

aesthetic impulse: the artwork as an unexpected event that actualizes the virtual. Thevirtual is not a general idea, something abstract and empty, but the concept of


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difference (and of life) rendered adequate. The concept of the virtual gives us the

time of life. Pure, virtual being is real and qualified through the internal process of

differentiation. Being differs with itself. It does not look outside itself for another or a

force of mediation because its difference rises from its very core, from ‘the explosive

internal force that life carries within itself’ (Deleuze, 1988: 105). Deleuze conceives of

a discrete art with metamorphic force. Deleuze, unlike Baudrillard, manages to pull

back from the capitalist void and construct a ‘desiring machine’ to manipulate

capitalist simulacra.


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ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

致志的

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Professor J.J. Snyman

for being so patient with my ubuesque research and also for leading me to my

personnage rhythmique et mon paysage mélodique.

I am thankful for Professor Lötter’s motivation and for Professor MacKenzie’s élan

vital.

Un grand merci à Madame Wilreker pour m’avoir ouvert les voies de l’Art, à Dr. S.

Leissner pour m’avoir permis de réaliser la force de la mise-en-scène française, et à

Professeur A.E. Snyman pour m’avoir montré un chemin dans les labyrinthes

galliques.

http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/%E4%B8%93%E5%BF%83%E8%87%B4%E5%BF%97http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/%E4%B8%93%E5%BF%83%E8%87%B4%E5%BF%97


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One – Force of Destruct ion and Force of Desire

1.1. Introduction 1

1.2. Illusion, Allusion, Collusion 3

1.3. Virtual Ontology 13

1.4. Preview 20

Chapter Two – Death of the Social

2.1. Introduction 26

2.2. System of Objects 29

2.3. Waste 39

2.4. Conclusion 49

Chapter Three – Symbolic Exchange and Terrorism

3.1 Introduction 51

3.2 Symbolic Exchange 53

3.3. Death 67

3.4. Symbolic Violence 77

3.5 Conclusion 87

Chapter Four – Deleuze: The Politi cs of Life


4.2. The Plane of Immanence 91

4.3. Desire and the Social 110

4.4 Capitalist Cynicism 121

4.5. Conclusion 129

Chapter Five – Forces of Sensation

5.1. Introduction 1325.2. Revolution of Desire 135


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5.3. Imperceptible Aesthetics 143

5.4. Francis Bacon 157

5.5. Conclusion 167

Chapter Six – Baudril lard’s Metastasis and Deleuze’s Metamorphosis


6.2. Baudrillard’s System of Objects Revisited 173

6.3. Deleuze’s Plane of Immanence Revisited 187

6.4. Kafka’s minor joie de vivre 189

6.5. Conclusion 199

Bibliography 201


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Chapter One

Force of Destruction and Force of Desire

1.1. Introduction

In the spirit of bricolage, I wish to open the connections between Baudrillard

and Deleuze. By oblique comparison, by analogy, this study seeks to present

the ways Baudrillard and Deleuze are of central relevance to today’s social

and cultural climates. I do not seek to critique Baudrillard but rather push his

forces of negativity to the limit. Baudrillard’s catastrophic view of the social

cannot set forth a point of view from which to justify critique, resistance and

struggle. The only practices he really recommends are total refusal, total

negativity and radical otherness. Following Marcel Mauss and Georges

Bataille’s anthropology, Baudrillard claims that power is based on a propensity

to destroy, disaccumulate, waste and expend. Power by its nature is

reversible and not productive. The oppressed can turn into the oppressors.

For Deleuze, on the other hand, power is a productive, positive and

generative force, and not solely repressive, negative and prohibitive. This is

based on Deleuze’s view of life and desire. Deleuze emphasises the creative

and concentrates on the need to transform our perceptions of the world. He

maintains an optimistic attachment to the political significance of art. For

Deleuze, artistic revolution is not only a matter of destruction, for one is then

left with no relations. Liberation occurs through addition. Art breaks one world

and creates another, and brings these two moments into conjunction to bringsomething new.

Either one sees the art work as always already constituted, determined by the

scene of the existing (capitalist) structure. Or one is more optimistic: the art

work as an event that is truly unexpected. This need not involve a

transcendent aesthetic. Deleuze reconfigurates art as an event that is

immanent to this world, as not arriving from some transcendent plane and nottransporting us there, but as emerging from the realm of the virtual. This is the


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true sense of freedom, an embrace of the virtual that is not limited to the

possibilities that are contained within our present point of view. Perception

must therefore be freed from its location or actualised scene. The virtual is life

in all its imperceptibity. This view of art’s metamorphic power is much stronger

than Baudrillard’s anti-productive void or terrorism.

In Baudrillard, everything circulates around the absence of the real: death.

The object of Baudrillard’s critique holds back and even consumes Baudrillard

himself. He refuses to participate in the game of producing positive solutions.

Baudrillard cannot conceive another regime of discourse outside of the

capitalist simulation structure. For Deleuze, on the other hand, nothing can

step outside the difference of life, for life always has the power to produce

further events of difference. Life is transcendental, which means life has no

ground outside itself. The plane of immanence is the starting point for a

transcendental method that does not accept that life takes the form of some

already differentiated or transcendent thing.

In post-structuralism, everything revolves around the abandonment of

‘transcendence’ – an all-encompassing term for metaphysics, universalism,

and any theory that seeks to think the whole. The desire for transcendence

has a complex genealogy in philosophical thought and political philosophy. All

such logics appear to operate within a space enclosed by a realm of truth that

also corresponds to a particular form of sovereignty. The universal truth

claims of each realm are internally related to its corresponding form of

sovereignty so that post-structuralism engages in a critique of knowledge that

is at the same time a social critique. For post-structuralism, however, there isneither a logic of development to the historical forms that are criticized nor a

new set of truth claims about ‘reality’ to be revealed by the critical knowledge

that is produced. Any such claims concerning a final referent for conceptual

knowledge would reintroduce a transcendent perspective.

Deleuze and Baudrillard both undermine the central metaphysical and

positivist dichotomies, yet they also draw a line that makes it easy todistinguish between friend and foe. Thought that remains directed toward the


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priority of the identical is charged with having fallen prey to an illusion, be it

necessary (Baudrillard) or an avoidable one (Deleuze) that obscures and

falsifies the originary as well as originless play of difference.1 This study

argues that aesthetics in this kind of post-structuralist context, in their positive

(Deleuze) and negative (Baudrillard) forms, are examples of thought aiming to

preserve the difference of otherness.

Deleuze connects the critique of transcendence to a collectively mediated

experience and to practical-political strategies of resistance without requiring

that the collective embody a transcendent identity. This allows for a theoretical

grasp of socially bonding action and potentials that have a certain universality

without transcendence. Deleuze is a thinker of synthesis, one who masters

the immense proliferation of thoughts and concepts by way of assimilation

and appropriation. Baudrillard is his opposite in this respect, tirelessly

dissolving all the reified thoughts he encounters back into the void from which

they allegedly sprang.

1.2. Illusion, Allusion, Collusion

In his 1952 essay ‘Pataphysics,’ Baudrillard said that ‘the pataphysic mind is

the nail in the tire’ (Baudrillard, 2005: 213). He was only 23 when he wrote this

essay but it introduces many concepts he would work with for the remainder

of his life. The so-called pataphysical was invented by Alfred Jarry, and

occupies the place of a comic intermezzo in fin de siècle French thought.

Jarry's pataphysics or his science of imaginary solutions was a minor and

absurd movement of infinitessimal brevity and it represents an obverse andparodic mirror to the philosophically and scientifically serious (Pefanis, 1991:

9).

Pataphysics reveals that science is not as lucid as it appears, since science

must often ignore the arbitrary, if not the whimsical, status of its own axioms.

Modern science colonises the alterity of the object, leaving no space for poetic

1Although Deleuze considers this possible, he also regards the mask as a means of expression that isindispensable to every new force: ‘A force would not survive if it did not f irst of all borrow the feature ofthe preceding forces with which it struggles ’(Deleuze, 1983a: 5).


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wisdom to speak the truth about nature except through an act of alliance with

such a norm. Poetic wisdom must adopt the values of modern science in

order to state any objective verities. Truth is the best ornament because it has

no ornaments – so science is the best poetry because it has the least poetry.

The irony is that poetry must draw its rules of metaphor from a genre that

rules out metaphor. Science becomes the muse of poetry. Jarry does not

borrow scientific concepts so much as scientific conceits, doing so, in order to

imagine a ‘counterdynamic’ (Jarry, 1965: 253).

Pataphysics supplements metaphysics, emphasising it then replacing it, in

order to create a philosophical alternative to rationalism. Science disappears

when reason would be pushed to its logical extreme. Such a pataphysical

qualification of rational validity is symptomatic of a transition in science from

absolutism to relativism, which can also be characterized as a transition from

modern to postmodern scientific endeavour (Bök, 2002: 20).

Pataphysics valorizes the exception to each rule in order to undermine the

rigidity of science. While a metaphysical science must rule out exceptions,

such exceptions are the rule. Jarry’s anti-metaphysical metaphilosophy

argues that anomalies extrinsic to a system remain secretly intrinsic to a

system. The most credible of truths always evolves from the most incredible

of errors. The praxis of science involves the parapraxis of poetry. Poetry

cannot oppose science by being its antonymic extreme. Poetry must push

reason against itself pataphysically in order to subvert not only the pedantic

theories of noetic truth but also romantic theories of poetic genius. Such poets

might learn to embrace the absurd nature of sophistic reasoning in order todispute the power of both the real and the true (Bök, 2002: 5).

Jarry argues that reality is nothing more than a comparative apperception, an

as if for a disparate collection of different views, each one creating the true for

itself, while opposing every other view (Jarry, 1965: 131). Each perspective is

thus a solipsistic singularity that has no recourse to perceptual consensus.

Pataphysics sees that every viewpoint is dissolute – including its own since noview can offer a norm for all others. Jarry suggests that invisible worlds


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transect our perceived reality at many points across many scales. Jarry

suggests, through pataphysics, that reality does not exist, reality is never as it

is but always as if it is. Reality is quasi, pseudo: it is more virtual than actual; it

is real only to the degree to which it can seem to be real and only for so long

as it can be made to stay real. Science for such a reality has increasingly

become a philosophy of as if , wilfully mistaking possibilities for veritabilities

(Vaihinger, 1966: xvii).

For the pataphysical Baudrillard, the world is given to us as enigmatic and

unintelligible – there is no reason then why we should not attempt to make it,

in our writing or in our art, more enigmatic and more unintelligible. This takes

us to the core of Baudrillard's dissatisfaction with the art world – art's task is to

help us cope with our vital illusion – the fact that we do not know the real,

merely the appearances behind which it hides. All good art for Baudrillard

(and the contemporary British painter, Francis Bacon, is an example)

appreciates this vital illusion that encompasses our existence. In recent years,

art has become entangled with notions of reality. Baudrillard observes that so

much contemporary art incorporates waste and notions of worthlessness. For

Baudrillard, art that has lost illusion is truly worthless. He notes how it is

interesting that art and its market thrive today to the very extent that they

decompose.

Contemporary art for Baudrillard was confiscating banality, waste and

mediocrity. For Baudrillard, art today connects everything to super-high-tech,

super-efficient, super-visual style. No void, no ellipsis, no silence. We are

going more and more in the direction of high definition, that is to say, towardsuseless perfection of the image – which is no longer an image. The more it

becomes real, the more it is produced in real time, the more we approach

absolute definition, or the realistic perfection of the image, the more the

image’s power is lost. The art market is merely a system for aesthetic storage,

exhibition and recreation, where culture no longer offers an illusion, only the

memory of illusion. For Baudrillard, art does not come from a natural impulse,

but from calculated artifice. So it is always possible to question its status, andeven its existence. One has to nullify art in order to look at it for what it is.


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Proclaiming that art is null was not an aesthetic judgment on his part, but an

anthropological problem. It was a polemic gesture towards culture as a whole,

which now is simultaneously nothing and everything.

‘Art is never the mechanical reflection of the positive or negative

conditions of the world; it is its exacerbated illusion or hyperbolic mirror.

In a world of indifference, art can only add to this indifference, by

focussing on the void of the image or the object that isn’t an object

anymore. Thus the cinema of Wenders, Antonioni, Altman, Godard or

Warhol explores the insignificance of the world through the image, and

by its images contributes to the insignificance of the world – they add to

its real or hyperreal illusion. Whereas recent cinema like that of

Scorsese, Greenaway, etc. with its high-tech machinery, and its frantic

and eclectic agitation, only fills the void of the image, and thus adds to

our imaginary disillusion’ (Baudrillard, 2005: 115).

Baudrillard’s provocative and iconoclastic theories are very much in the anti-

foundationalist line of development. In this study, I will be confronting

Baudrillard’s theories in order to demonstrate a particularly extreme version of

the anti judgmental imperative: a version which might be called post aesthetic.

There is an apocalyptic cast to Baudrillard’s thought:

‘For the problem of the disappearance of music is the same as that of

the disappearance of history: it will not disappear for the want of music

it will disappear for having exceeded that limit point, vanishing point, it

will disappear in the perfection of its materiality, in its own special effect(beyond which there is no longer any aesthetic judgement or aesthetic

pleasure, it is ecstasy of musicality and its end). It is exactly the same

with history. Here too we have exceeded that limit where, by

sophistication of events and information, history as such ceases to

exist’ (Baudrillard, 1986: 21).

Baudrillard believed that art had exhausted itself and he became associated


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with the ‘end of art’ theory.2 Baudrillard claims that every possible artistic form

and function has been exhausted. Furthermore, against Benjamin and

Adorno, Baudrillard claims that art has lost its critical and negative function.

Art has entered all spheres of existence. With the realization of art in everyday

life, art itself as a separate and transcendent phenomenon has disappeared.

Baudrillard calls this situation ‘transaesthetics’ which he relates to similar

phenomena of ‘transpolitics,’ ‘transsexuality,’ and ‘transeconomics,’ in which

everything becomes political, sexual, and economic, so that these domains,

like art, lose their specificity, their boundaries, their distinctness. In this

confused state, there can be no more criteria of value, of judgement, of taste,

and the function of the normative thus collapses into indifference and inertia.

Our society has given rise to a general aestheticization. In contemporary

media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a

spectacle, a transaesthetic object, thereby revealing a further dimension of

the postmodern (Sim, 2000: 87).

In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981), Baudrillard takes

the painting as a signed object (signature) and as a gestural object, the

product of artistic gestures or practices. He sees art as exemplary of how

objects in the consumer society are organized as a system of signs. Art is

subject to the same rules and system of signification as other commodities

and follows as well the codes of fashion, determination of value by the market

and commodification, thus subverting its critical vocation. Modern art is an ‘art

of collusion vis-a-vis the contemporary world. It plays with it and is included in

2 The lament that art has come to an end because its choices have been rendered arbitrary dates back

to Hegel, who claimed in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art that art had now become ‘a freeinstrument,’ and that nothing ‘stands in and for it-self above this relativity any longer’ (Hegel, 1975: 605).Hegel’s aesthetic repealed modernity before it had even begun, thus simultaneously ensuring that theend would have to be repeatedly invoked (Geulen, 2006: 4). Baudrillard believes he can squeezedialectical surplus value from the end: ‘Perhaps a product of pure simulation might manage to become aseduction, a confrontation with the other, an illusion’ (Geulen, 2006: 4). What Baudrillard callssimulation, Hegel termed dramatization. Among the most subtle post aesthetic art theories are thosethat seek to shake off the Hegelian spectre by emphasising the formlessness of the end, for instance byradically temporalising the end. The dictum Hegel arrogantly decreed can be played off against theunending end presumably operative in works of art. In another vein, the end of art is interpretedantiaesthetically as interruption or rupture (Bohrer, 1981: 86). Perhaps the rediscovery of the sublimefollowing Lyotard in the 1980s can be understood as the effort to locate an antiaesthetic moment deepwithin the aesthetic tradition. With the limit category of the sublime, the end reveals itself as aspecifically antiaesthetic counterlogic of art (Lyotard, 1984). In the context of such strategies, the end of

art tends to be called a departure (Bohrer, 1996).


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the game. It can parody this world, illustrate it, simulate it, alter it; it never

disturbs the order, which is also its own’ (Baudrillard, 1981: 110).

Contemporary art had an ambiguous status, halfway between terrorism and

de facto cultural integration. Art’s collusion was affecting society at large and

there was no more reason to consider art apart from the rest. Obstacles and

oppositions are used by the system in order to reinvigorate itself.

Baudrillard is deliberately provocative. For him there are only signs without

referents. He presents us with a realm where reality is nothing other than its

own simulation. This study will engage in the concepts of simulation and

simulacra and hyperreality, but the major reason for tackling Baudrillard is to

discover where his post aesthetics takes criticism. Simulation takes us beyond

foundations. Baudrillard cuts us free from the world of epistemological

commitments and he delivers us into a value-free realm beyond judgement:

’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’ (Baudrillard, 1986: 23).

Baudrillard is not only post aesthetic but also post Marxist. According to

Marxist theory, alienation is a problem to be worked on and overcome in

history. The possibility of social change in Marxist terms is being denied in

Baudrillard with history inexorably accelerating towards its end: ‘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’ (Baudrillard, 1986: 21).

For Baudrillard, the Enlightenment has both failed and collapsed and been

realised, leaving us to wonder what to do next, how can critical thought

continue to operate in the wake of this fully realised utopia? The ‘golden age’

of alienation is over and Western cultures enter a new configuration with the

arrival of simulation processes. Baudrillard identified the dissolution of

relations between subject and object, true and fake in the triumph ofconsumer capitalism. In consumer capitalism, political and cultural events are


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modified so fundamentally that in effect they no longer exist apart from their

mode of representation. Baudrillard sees reality as entirely impregnated by an

aesthetic that has become inseparable from its own image. The fusion of the

real and the imaginary means there is no longer a play of representation

based on clearly demarcated separations: the real swallows its alienated

double and paradoxically becomes at the same time transparent to itself. In

this fusion, the aesthetic dimension enters into reality even into what he calls

the new aesthetic ‘game of reality’ (Baudrillard, 1976: 74).

There is no longer external repression but the installation of new inner

controls. The reality principle passes and the more intimate simulation

principle takes over. This leads Baudrillard to conclude that the principle

struggle of today is not a political but a cultural revolution. Or rather that the

cultural revolution must ‘make itself against the economic-political revolution’

(Baudrillard, 1975:146).

Baudrillard connects the poetic and the utopian vision of culture. For the poet,

the important thing is the immediate realisation of utopia: ’Poetry and the

utopian revolt have this radical presentness in common … the actualisation of

desire no longer relegated to a future liberation but demanded here

immediately’ (Baudrillard, 1975: 165). Time in this conception (symbolic) is

quite different. It is not linear or historical. Utopia in this conception is not to be

regarded as something in the future to be waited for. In Marxist theory, the

actual moment of revolt is only an aspect of revolution. For Baudrillard, every

society is already a complete totality, always already present. Here there is no

room for a theory of alienated essence which will be recovered at some futurepoint. For each person is completely present at each moment (Gane, 1991a:

114).

In Baudrillard, the poetic very much dominates the theoretical. Baudrillard’s

writing is an artistic strategy. Baudrillard refuses to play the theoretical game.

‘In truth there is nothing left to ground ourselves on. All that is left is

theoretical violence. Speculation to the death, whose only method is theradicalisation of all hypotheses’ (Baudrillard, 1993a: 5). The sense of


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detachment that characterises the post aesthetic reflection of Baudrillard

should not distract us from his highly politically motivated anti foundationalist

campaign. The playfulness of Baudrillard is reached by means of some very

serious play indeed:

‘Such is the fatality of every system devoted through its own logic to

total perfection and thus total defectiveness, to absolute infallibility and

thus incorrigible extinction: all bound energies aim for their own

demise. This is why the only strategy is catastrophic and not in the

least dialectical. Things have to be pushed to the limit, where

everything is naturally inverted and collapses. At the peak of value,

ambivalence intensifies; and at the height of their coherence, the

redoubled signs of the code are haunted by the abyss of reversal. The

play of simulation must therefore be taken further than the system

permits’ (Baudrillard, 1993a: 4).

Baudrillard’s work raises the whole problem of how to judge, how to speak

critically in the absence of outside criteria. How is it possible to criticise

capitalism’s mise-en-abîme? Capitalism is a self-legitimising, self-authorising

system, a system that sets the horizons for its own evaluation. For Baudrillard,

there is no point in opposing capitalism, because there is no ‘outside’ to

capitalism. Baudrillard does not directly oppose the capitalist system he

analyses because it is closed, has no other. The very problem this study will

be looking at in Baudrillard’s work is how to think an other to the capitalist

system that has no other, in which otherness is its very object. It is not a

matter of simply refuting or proposing alternatives to capitalism, but thinkingwhat is excluded to allow this all inclusiveness, that other excluded to ensure

it has no other. In Baudrillard, there is a new notion of criticism, one that

works not by evidence, enunciation but by annunciation and prescription.

Baudrillard’s post-structuralism is driven by doubling: thought continues even

in the absence of any external standards of judgement outside the world and

its systems (Butler, 1999: 165).


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Baudrillard does not oppose the perfection of capitalism or technological

development of art, he does not propose some empirical reason why it is not

perfect. On the contrary, Baudrillard entirely agrees that capitalist hyperreality

has no limit – but this only leads to a completely different explanation of the

one it gives itself. For instance, technological, hyperreal art leads to the end of

art, or this limitlessness is only possible because of the end of art. Art pushed

too far leads to the end of art.

Baudrillard’s work is an endless elaboration of the necessity for aesthetic

illusion. It is this that must be grasped first of all about his work. Although the

real is only ever a function of its system (as music today can only be heard

through technology) there still remains a certain real left out of any attempt of

the system to speak of it (just as any real music is left out of technology). This

real might be understood as the very difference between the original and the

copy, what the original and the copy both resemble and what therefore allows

them to resemble each other. It is this real that Baudrillard speaks of

throughout his work, beneath all the different names he gives for it (death,

symbolic exchange, fatal object, reversibility, illusion, terrorism).

It is this real excluded by any attempt to speak of it that is the limit to every

system – it is the Platonic paradox that Baudrillard means by the real. The

work of Baudrillard endlessly reproduces the paradox first stated in Plato’s

Cratylus. For Plato, the point was that when two things resemble each other

too closely they no longer resemble each other anymore. There is no longer a

relationship of original to copy but two separate originals. The copy only

resembles the original in so far as it is different from it. The relationship ofresemblance is paradoxical, therefore in that it cannot be pushed too far

without turning into its opposite: a bad imitation is a good imitation and a too

good imitation is a bad imitation. There is a limit to the technical perfectibility

of music, a point beyond which it cannot go except at the risk of no longer

reproducing music. Beyond this point, technology no longer resembles its

music, but only itself. It would no longer resemble its music, but would be only

a simulacrum of it (Butler, 1997: 51).


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This is Baudrillard’s constant argument. For Baudrillard, the only strategy is

one of reversibility: the basic codes of a system must be pushed to the point

where they begin to turn upon themselves, to produce the opposite effects

from those intended. By pushing capitalism to its furthest extent, Baudrillard

hopes that it is at this point that it cannot complete itself. Baudrillard wants to

discover an internal limit, a limit which the system is not prevented from going

beyond, but which it cannot go beyond. This is Baudrillard’s theory: by

imitating nothing, by following only its own rule, it is able to catch a system

that similarly owes nothing to anything, is completely able to account for itself.

Baudrillard’s point is that each system he analyses creates its own reality.

Against the undeniable hypotheses of the social, Baudrillard’s writing hopes to

oppose an equal hypothesis which somehow doubles the social, is able to

explain how it arises for reasons absolutely different from the ones it gives

itself.

For Baudrillard, the true key to this world is this fundamental illusionality. For

him the world can resemble itself, can realise itself only because of an

otherworldy explanation: the very difference between the world and itself, the

real and its copy. It is this point – already two – at which absolute

resemblance and absolute difference come together (death, reversibility,

terrorism) that Baudrillard means by the real. For Baudrillard, it is the

unrepresentable, the unthinkable that is the most real thing in the world. It is

the vital aesthetic illusion which saves us from the disillusionment of the world

(Butler, 1997: 62).

In different ways, post-structuralists like Baudrillard, argued that the origin ofstructures is unrepresentable. Representation already relies on a given

structure; we represent life through language, so we cannot represent the pre-

linguistic origin of language. For structuralism, then, we always remain within

structure, within a system of representation out of which we can never step.

Baudrillard sees radical thought and the radical use of language as being

foreign to any resolution of the world in terms of objective reality and its

deciphering. Baudrillard stops thinking in terms of ontology, because ontologyteaches us that what appears to us is natural and inevitable. Things cannot be


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otherwise. Baudrillard teaches us that if we think of life solely as what appears

to us, if we think of what appears to us as exhausting our possibilities, we are

already hedged into and committed to conformism.

1.3. Virtual Ontology

Deleuze agrees with this diagnosis, but not with the cure. Deleuze constructs

an ontology that is concerned with becoming and experimentation. Deleuze

attempts to think our own subjectivity differently. Deleuze’s ontology is

productive, it is not a final answer. It is the opposite. An ontology of difference

is a challenge to recognize that what is presented to us is only the beginning

of what there is. We are never finished with living, there is always more. The

alternatives of contentment (I have arrived) and hopelessness (there is

nowhere to go) are two sides of the same misguided thought: that what is

presented to us is what there is.

Like Baudrillard, Deleuze replaces the practical and rational view of reality

that we derive from everyday experience, with a philosophical speculative

account of reality. A central element of this new account is that the human

being is not presented as a conscious centre of action and belief. In the

philosophical tradition, the concept of the subject grants precisely such a

privileged role to the human being and to self-conscious thought. Deleuze’s

philosophy, like Baudrillard’s, is therefore a critique of the subject. Yet the

Deleuzean critique is not a straight forward attack or rejection. His philosophy

constructs different and quite sophisticated arguments to show that what the

philosophy of the subject takes as an origin or as a basic premise (self-consciousness, individual freedom) is in fact derived from or produced within

a larger process bearing no resemblance to subjective experience. In

Deleuze’s account of reality, the human being occupies a limited place as a

process unfolding amidst other processes to which it is subordinated and with

which it also interacts.

Central to Deleuze’s conception of reality is a philosophy of signs andsignification, or semiotics. Signification is here neither a mental occurrence


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nor a mere social convention. Signification is neither mental, material nor

social. Signification has its own unique place in reality, its own ontological

status. Deleuze argues that from the point of view of this special ontological

status of signification, we can gain a very different conception of the psyche,

of political power, of social and cultural practices. Deleuze constructs a

metaphysics and a semiotics in his early work and then applies these

metaphysical and semiotic principles within the sphere of a general and

formal social theory. The application of semiotics to a general theory of the

mind, politics and culture is the joint project of Deleuze and his collaborator,

the psychiatrist and political activist Félix Guattari, in the two volumes of

Capitalism and Schizophrenia ( Anti-Oedipus, 1977 and A Thousand Plateaus,

1987).3

The initial metaphysical intuition of Deleuze is very simple: the vital forces that

can be activated in thought are controlled by an ordering and filtering system

which imposes on reality a determinate logical structure. We can go beyond

this logical structure if we produce thoughts that are sufficiently abstract to

think reality outside of representation. Deleuze’s general account of what it is

to be, or ontology, therefore leads to a perspective on human life that is in

conflict with conscious experience. However, Deleuze also seeks to replace

this conscious subject with another subject, defined by its passage through

time, its creative potential rather than its conscious experience (Due, 1999: 9).

The problem of structuralism, to which Deleuze's post-structuralism is a

response, is the question of the emergence or genesis of all those structures

with which we use to explain life (such as language, culture, meaning). Wethink, experience and speak through language, but how can we think the

origin of language? To really respond to the problem of representation, we

need to think the forces that produce any system of representation. Deleuze's

3 The connections between Deleuze's separate writings and his collaborations with Guattari are verycomplex and not always clear or consistent; it would be impossible to draw them out in any detail here.If anything, it is the combination of Deleuze's foundational work in the history of philosophy withGuattari's psychiatric and political involvements that gives their work together its particular intensity and

interest. I draw on both Deleuze and Guattari, whether separately or together.


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method is directed against representation, the idea that there is a static or

meaningless world that is then ordered or represented through culture

(Colebrook, 2002b: xxxv).

Signs are not uniquely human. All life is a plane of interacting signs. We are

confronted by a world of signs and codes: systems and series of biology,

genetics, history, politics, art and fantasy. And each series of signs creates its

own lines of difference: genetic differences, chemical differences and so on.

And all these specific modes of difference are made possible by pure and

positive difference: a ‘differential power’ that for Deleuze is life itself. There is

not a simple and undifferentiated life that we then differentiate through signs,

representations or languages. The signs of a culture are the effects of more

profound differences. We should try to grasp how signs and differences

proliferate. Art has a distinct power – opposed to common sense, which works

with already given signs and conventions – it is the creation of new signs,

which will allow us to think the emergence of difference. Art presents singular

differences: the very being of colour, sound, tone or sensibility. Art affirms all

those differences that allow meanings to appear.

Art presents us with the power of presentation as such. It might seem that

such instances give us the exhaustion or end of art, where art can no longer

do anything but refer to itself. But Deleuze argues that the form of self-

reference needs to be understood in terms of its potential, or its ‘justification’.

If there can be a play within a play or a character remembering or an object

reflected – this is because there can only be the original – the first play or the

initial character – because life as such is the power to create, to be more thanitself. Art within art or images within images just show what has always

marked art: the power of opening the virtual from the actual. Art brings the

virtuality of life to presence. Life is not something that is fully given. Life is a

potential for multiple creations. Practical relations to the world mostly reduce

infinite becomings to a closed set of functions; we map an ordered world of

relations from a stable but repeatable view point. Art, however, repeats the

events of this actualised world in order to release the further power that wasnot brought to actuality (Colebrook, 2006, 84).


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Deleuze's project of immanence redefines and reaffirms perception. The

illusion of transcendence – that there might be some external point from which

life could be judged – is tied to the problem of point of view. Throughout his

work Deleuze refers to the ways in which western philosophy has privileged a

certain ‘optics’. Western thought begins from a subject who views the world,

assuming a strict distinction between viewer and viewed. There is a world,

which is then perceived from a number of viewpoints, and these

representations of the world can be assessed according to their correctness.

Western thought thereby produces a proper order or sequence for thought.

The world is actual and original, and this is followed by representations or

copies, which are virtual and secondary. Deleuze makes important responses

to what he refers to as this ‘dogma of representation’ (Colebrook, 2002b:

161).

Deleuze’s project of immanence abandons the idea that one point of being

could provide a point of judgement or foundation for being as a whole. This

means that any connection of beings would be serial not ordered or

sequential. A series is necessarily multiple and divergent. A series never

converges into some fixed harmonious unity. A series expands perception

beyond the human viewer into the universe in general. A linear evolution

subordinates becoming to some final end; one looks back and sees all the

changes leading up to one’s own development. From the point of view of the

present, the past is only presented as a sequence of ordered conditions or

causes. But Deleuze sees the whole universe as perceptive: responses,

creations and mutations cannot be explained in terms of the present or interms of the human point of view.

The past is not some process that culminates in the present human being. It is

a virtual whole of possibilities that can be retrieved and activated. To affirm life

means affirming all those changes that go beyond intention, recognition and

meaning. Art is an attempt to think in an untimely manner. This is the true

sense of freedom, to embrace the virtual that is not limited to the possibilitiesthat are contained within our present point of view. The virtual is Deleuze’s


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concept of life as the power to differ, it is possible to perceive life as difference

– not life that then changes and differs but life as the power to differ.

Deleuze maintains a passionate and optimistic attachment to the political

significance of art. For Deleuze, any genuinely creative activity has a political

significance, precisely because such activities trace new pathways in the

brain, rather than allowing the ‘most basic conditioned reflexes’ to prevail. The

task of the artist is not to recognise the world, but to explore all its virtuality.

This commitment to what one might call a politics of perception is a constant

in Deleuze’s work.

Deleuze’s metaphysics of virtuality is the basis of the visionary politics that he

proposes. Thought for Deleuze involves the construction of a virtual universe

of images, rather than the contemplation of a world, which pre-exists thought.

In Deleuze’s books on cinema, thought and perception are matters of speed

and slowness. There are three orders of speed: there is the infinite speed of

the virtual image, which is unthinkable in human terms; then there is the

speed of the actual image which is imperceptible in human terms; finally,

there is the slowness of representation, which can be perceived in human

terms. The (crazy) possibility of constructing works of art which attain these

imperceptible or unthinkable speeds is the cornerstone of Deleuze’s

aesthetics. Art has the potential to go beyond the representational limitations

of human perception and move into the realm of the virtual (Marks, 2003:

117).

Antonin Artaud, for example, talks of bringing cinema into contact with the‘innermost reality of the brain’, which fragments the thinking subject and

allows thought to think itself (Deleuze, 1989: 167). This form of cinema might

be considered as exploring the virtual possibilities of thought and perception.

Such cinema achieves ‘self-movement’ or ‘automatic’ movement (ibid). It

gives rise to the conviction that it can act directly on the nervous and cerebral

system, producing a shock to thought, a new flow of thought. Deleuze’s

privileging of such non-narrative modern cinema is not reducible to a Frenchavant garde fantasy for the shock of the new, the resistant and difficult. It is


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grounded on a philosophical commitment to understanding how systems of

signs emerge.

To ‘resist’, in Deleuze’s terms, is to refuse to have one’s possibilities for life

and creativity curtailed, to create something new: it is to go beyond the ‘piety’,

as he puts it, of recollection (ibid). Resistance is a key theme in Deleuze’s

work, it involves the refusal to be judged, and the refusal to be forced back on

one’s own identity and individuality. Resistance means making contact with

the forces which compose an individual. Resistance is about the capacity to

direct oneself through perceptions or relations. Theory relates to society in

and through immanent relations or desires. Revolution is not about destroying

external political and economic institutions, as well as internal conventions

and expectations, for one is then left with no relations. Instead revolution

occurs by bringing in the unexpected amendments, by borrowing strategies

from elsewhere (Goodchild, 1996: 4).

There are no true or false presentations, there are just simulations. Any move

of thought or social relation is desirable so long as it deterritorialises, leaves

known territory – old or new conventions, because they have become just

that: coagulations of thought and relations – behind. Capitalism creates

relations between workers that are temporary and the sites of production

separate workers from their environment. Everything becomes mobile:

images, consumer products and people are cut off from their conditions of

production and circulate globally. Deleuze and Guattari call this

deterritorialisation. Their views differ from capitalism insofar as they do not

see deterritorialisation as merely a means for the increase of capital. Nor dothey see deterritorialisation as an end in itself. They wish not to extend

relations but to intensify social relations. Extension organises the world

spatially. Extension synthesises the world according to presuppositions or

intentions. An intensification of relations is an increase in the number of parts,

dimensions, connections (Goodchild, 1996: 3).

Intensity will not be produced by a sterile group of objects. This involvesextracting terms from their social and cultural contexts that render them sterile


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and inactive and assembling them into a constructive machine that is capable

of producing something. Production does not repeat predetermined

processes; the machine is singular and its product is entirely new. This

product can then react back upon and affect its conditions of production,

becoming a component of further machines. The politics of desire acts directly

on the unconscious but can only do so by acting directly on its own social

context at the same time. Theory is an attempt to think otherwise, to explore

new relations, new subjectivities. Instead of tearing away from truth to show

that ultimately there is no essence apart from her veils, one adopts the signs

of truth in order to fabricate something else, even if this is a further patchwork

of veils and signs. Deleuze and Guattari move away from the mere suspicion

of truth and pose the problem of philosophy through the power of relation and

desire.

Desire is not primarily sexual and they reject the idea that it naturally tends

toward the formation of a fixed or centred subjectivity. Desire produces real

relations, connections, investments within and between bodies. In this sense,

Deleuze and Guattari (1977: 30) say ‘desire produces reality’. Desire is not

constituted by the ever-renewed and impossible attempt to regain a lost object

of satisfaction. The point is to deny that unsatisfied desire is the essence of

desire. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire is constructivist.

Desire permeates all social relations, penetrates the body at a sub-individual

level, and implements an immediately political investment of the body within

larger circuits of action and production. Deleuze explicitly aligns his

conception of desire with Nietzsche’s conception of life as the will to power. Abody will increase in power to the extent that its capacities to affect and be

affected become more developed and differentiated. Deleuze follows Spinoza

in calling such capacities to be affected the ‘affects’ of a body. These

correspond to the transition of the affected body from one state to another.

Affects are intensive, they are not objectifiable or quantifiable. The

proliferation of intensities in art disrupts the unified viewing subject. It is the

power of art to produce disruptive affects that allows us to think intensities,and to open lines of movement to differences in kind.


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1.4. Preview

This study does not seek to systematise or freeze a deleuze-baudrillardian

connection or be a self-confirming representation. I therefore proceed in

piecemeal fashion. This dissertation begins at Chapter Two, in which I will

show that for Baudrillard, the theorist of today confronts a sociality which

mimics a mere model of itself – a culture cynically living the ideal of its own

electronic image, a hyperrealism and a hypersociality (in which what is

artificial is indistinguishable from what is real). I outline the simulated system

of equivalences (sign value, exchange value and use value). I will make

reference to Baudrillard’s use of Alfred Jarry’s farcical pataphysical Ubu,

whom Baudrillard sees as the definitive hypostasis of capitalism. A system is

‘ubuesque’ due to its hyperplastic spiral into what is more real than the real.

As a figure of the social, Ubu comes to absorb everything, leaving no

remainders, just as the social, in progressively eliminating by absorbing all of

its residues, itself becomes residual. The social system begins to develop

programmes out of its own 'living waste' in search of new bases of legitimacy.

In Chapter Three I will show that Baudrillard abandons social theory. He

refers to theory as, among other things, a ‘mode of disappearance’. Theory no

longer represents or mirrors the real, but rather must be the pataphysical

intensification of its object. For Baudrillard, this calls for a ‘theoretical violence’

– a stylistic excess whose function is to be as ‘extreme’ as the object itself. In

the intensification of writing, theory renounces its distance and merges with its

object. Baudrillard’s notion of ‘challenge’ has metaphysical andanthropological resonances. Baudrillard assumes that pre-capitalist societies

are governed by forms of ‘symbolic exchange’ similar to Bataille’s notion of

general economy and Mauss’s gift and counter-gift. Baudrillard returns to

symbolic societies as his revolutionary alternative to capitalist values and

practices. Symbolic exchange is ambivalent, non-equivalent and non-

reductive. Gratuitous gift-giving, sacrifice and destruction stand outside the

logic of capital which tries to control and profit from every aspect of life.


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In reaction to the events of September 11 2001, Baudrillard pushed his fatal

strategy further by claiming that the sacrifice and death of the Islamic

terrorists were the ultimate event against capitalism. For Baudrillard terrorists

create a void around themselves, a vacuum of non-meaning. Terrorist acts

cannot be understood as grounded in the objectives of the terrorists; that is at

the level of content of their demands. Baudrillard completely empties Islamic

terrorism of any characteristics or qualities other than of pure disruption. Islam

is defined in terms of what it is not.

In Chapter Four I will move on to Deleuze’s concept of life. There are three

qualities that characterize life in Deleuzian thought: positivity, productivity, and

incorporeality. Productivity is the creative aspect of life. Incorporeality means

that life must be thought temporally if it is to make any sense; and here

Deleuze's debt to Bergson is profound. Chapter Four will navigate through

Deleuze's early work to discern a powerful, progressive evolution: Bergson,

Nietzsche, Spinoza. These philosophers form a foundation for Deleuze's

thought. Deleuze's work, however, does not stop with a revalorization of this

alternative tradition: He selects what is living and transforms it, making it

adequate to his concerns. In this way, he both makes the history of

philosophy his own and makes it new.

Deleuze's ontology is grounded in the conceptions of difference that he

discovers in Bergson and Spinoza. Bergsonian difference defines, above all,

the principle of the positive movement of being, that is, the temporal principle

of ontological articulation and differentiation (the virtual or duration).

Opposition, Deleuze claims, is too crude a notion to capture the nuances thatmark real differences. In the Spinozian context, the positivity of being is

characterized by its singularity and its univocal expression. The singularity of

Spinoza's being is not defined by its difference from an other, from nonbeing,

but rather by the fact that being is different in itself.

Deleuze constructs a concept of life on the basis of Spinoza (univocity),

Bergson (the virtual or duration) and Nietzsche (will-to-power or desire). Eachone envelops a possibility of life, expresses a particular point of view on life,


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differentiates in its own way, the indeterminate element of life. And in its own

way, resolves the problem of living. Life obeys a logic of internal difference.

There is no identity to life nor is there life in general, there are only

differentiated ways of living (and ways of thinking that envelop ways of living)

Life exists only in being differentiated, in its internal difference, or that which

affirms itself only in differing from itself.

Chapter Four will also show that Deleuze's politics are based on his concept

of life as internal difference. The struggle to promote life – to promote positive

difference, production of the real, and a fluid incorporeality of events – is

pursued against a background which is that of life itself. What Deleuze values

is life, its unfolding and its various concrete realizations. But in valuing life, the

question arises of why there would ever be a politics, and political struggle, in

the first place? If everything is already positive, then what is there to revolt

against?

Deleuze values life, yet he does not value everything that is actual. It is not

the same to affirm life in its temporality and to affirm everything that occurs

within this temporality. What is at issue, if the need for a politics is to become

manifest, is how it is that negativity is introduced into life. How is it that life can

admit of negativity, death, or repression, if it is pure positivity and productivity

in its principle? If negativity comes later, as Deleuze's anti-dialectical position

insists, then how does it come? In the book on Nietzsche negativity arises in

the question of how active forces can become reactive, when active forces

are the only ones that act. In Anti-Oedipus, written with Guattari, it appears as

the question of how desire can desire its own repression.

Desire, or life, exists only within the context of a determinate social situation.

In that social situation, there are forces that work against life, but not by

repressing it from the outside. The problem of repression or negativity is not

that it comes to bear upon life from something which is not life, but that it is a

possibility internal to life itself as it unfolds under determinate social

conditions.


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Life, although naturally fluid, can produce that which blocks production; it

produces anti-production. All other negativity, repression, and death follows

from this.

Deleuze and Guattari have given many names to the types of interventions

that attempt to release life. The most well known of these is the line of escape

or flight. In conceiving the line of escape, what are commonly called political

structures must be understood not in the spatial metaphor of structure but in

the temporal metaphor of coding or axiomatizing. Flows of life are coded, they

are constrained into precise networks which act like channels to divert them

along specific routes and in specific directions. Kinship rituals in ‘primitive

societies’ are ways of coding sexual production (production of pleasures as

well as of children). And ‘overcoding’, a state process, is a way of making the

various codes in different sectors of a given society ‘resonate’ together.

Finally, in capitalist societies, flows which are no longer subject to traditional

forms of coding are axiomatized, administered by broad constraints that

regulate whole areas of experience rather than specific flows. The regulations,

formal and informal, of investment banking provide an example of axiomatized

flows of money.

Deleuze and Guattari see cynicism as a structural effect of a social machine

in which axioms replace codes. In capitalism power is indifferent to the

intentions of its rulers. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the defining

characteristic of capital is not simply the difference between being ruled by

individuals or abstractions, but by being ruled by abstractions produces and

presupposes its own particular form of subjectivity. Money is not simply aquantity, a unit of measure, but a complex relation.

Lines of flight are flows that break with both the axioms and the codes of a

given society in order to create new forms of life that are subversive to the

repressions of that society. They do not flow along regulated pathways, but

are instead ‘transversal’ to them, cutting across them and using elements

from them in the process of producing something new, different, and mostimportant, alive. It would be a mistake to say that the productions of a line of


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flight are prohibited by the society it arises from; its productions have probably

never been considered for prohibition by that society. Instead, a line of flight

subverts life's attachment to the negativity of repressive social constraints. A

line of flight is not an escape from society. It is an escape from the negativity

of determinate social conditions within a society. For Deleuze, life is the core

of reality; the negativity that must be escaped is derivative.

In Chapter Five I will move specifically to art’s line of flight. For Deleuze it is

the artist who sees the limit of the liveable (exhausts the ‘lived’). The artist

lives what was enveloped within lived experience, yet nevertheless was not

lived through (the virtual). Art expresses something other than itself: life in all

its imperceptibility. In art, sight is potentialized, raised to a second power. In

its ordinary employment sight is separated from what it can do. Sight regains

its power when it sees the invisible or imperceptible, or when what cannot be

seen is perceived: the invisible enveloped in what is seen not as a hidden

world beyond appearance but animating sight itself from within appearance,

or what one sees. I will show that for Deleuze, Francis Bacon, as a painter of

forces or sensations, shows an experience of the body that leads one beyond

the phenomenological lived body to the chaotic body without organs. This

means deforming organised forms of conventional representation. Bacon

paints the body, the figure of sensation as opposed to the figurative body of

conventional representation.

The body with organs is a virtual state of being, an unorganised level of life.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that the image of the organism is really opposed

to desire. Desire must be understood to embody the power of metamorphosisor differential reproduction, which is the condition of creativity in culture as

well as in nature. Social production stabilises, identifies and codes the flow of

pure becoming and differentiation. I show the various historical stages of

Deleuze and Guattari’s political theory of desire and how each stage has its

own dominant form of synthesis. The first synthesis is that of connection

(primitive society). Then there is the second synthesis of disjunction (State).

Then there is the third synthesis of conjunction (Capitalism).


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These syntheses are important because art is itself composed of these

syntheses. The problem for art is to create a desiring machine that

synthesises flows of desiring production that forms multiple connections,

disjunctions, conjunctions and thereby produces and sustains movement. The

artwork establishes syntheses between elements that in themselves do not

communicate, and that retain all their difference in their own dimensions. This

requires passive synthesis. Art establishes ‘transversals’ between the

elements of multiplicities, but without ever reducing their difference to a form

of identity or gathering up the multiplicity into a totality. Deleuze and Guattari

describe the movement of desire, but they also speak at length of the ways in

which movement is blocked, encoded, channelled into circuits that are limited

in their connections, exclusive in the disjunctions and fixed in their

conjunctions.

In the concluding synthesizing chapter I shall emphasize that for both Deleuze

and Baudrillard resistance is not opposition; it constantly accompanies power.

For Baudrillard it is the spiral of intensification, the raising of the power that

counts. The massive logic of the capitalist system can only be resisted by

redoubling capitalism back against itself in a movement of hyperconformist

simulation. Baudrillard’s critique rests upon an allegorical mode of reading

and writing. Allegory, as defined by Walter Benjamin, ‘is appropriated

imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them' (Owens,

1980a: 69). Benjamin saw the critical yield of the allegorical way of seeing.

The task of criticism is not to conjure up the appearance of the world ‘as it

really was,’ restoring a false totality to it, but to collaborate with the corrosive

effects of the passage of time. Deleuze has a more affirmative notion of theaesthetic impulse. Art must be thought as the expression of possible worlds.

Deleuze can always hear a song to life in the artists he admires, such as

Franz Kafka, however violent or intense their work. With Deleuze there is no

resigned and pessimistic cult of death. It is to this cult of death in Baudrillard

that I now turn.


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CHAPTER 2

Baudrillard: Death of the Social

2.1. Introduction

Baudrillard totalizes the social.4 The present, he claims, serves as testimony

to a perfect socialization; the social expanded to infinity. What emerges most

powerfully from this is Baudrillard’s sense of the pathology of society.5 At the

very moment of totalization, the social attempts to extend the sphere of social

relations to residual groups on the margins of society in order to normalize

and institutionalize society's relations with what lies outside its boundaries(the so-called remainder). After the inclusion of that which has previously

remained at the margins of the social, the social totality (which survives and

grows only through its capacity to generate and administer to marginal

elements) reverts back on itself and designates itself as the (sole) remainder.

In Baudrillard’s view, the social leaves nothing unscathed. It transforms

everything it draws into its dynamics and thereby turns everything into someform of waste that has to be assigned a social utility and social function. This

process of the production and redesignation of waste not only defines the

essence of the social but to give a meaning to wasted lives (which now

includes everyone), to assign a use-value to what has been rendered useless

(society as a whole) – that, for Baudrillard, is the face of the social today.

However, Baudrillard is not content to leave us with this almost indelibly

oppressive characterization of the social. He takes it one step further. This

4Baudrillard's notion of the ‘social’ cannot be precisely defined, although the general way in which heemploys the term is fairly clear. For reasons essentially having to do with economy of style, henominalizes the adjectival form of the word as a convenient gloss for an entire range of key terms in thesocial scientific lexicon, e.g. -social structure, social relation, social class, social institution, socialexchange, social interaction, social theory, etc., which taken together with related concepts comprisethe master discourse on society.5Durkheim also emphasizes the pathological features of industrial society and vividly discusses thenegative effects of the high-velocity circulation of bodies, ideas and commodities. Mike Gane(1991a:199-203) usefully compares the two thinkers but concludes (1991a:201-2) that a majordifference ultimately divides them: ‘Durkheim locates himself (not without some hesitations) in theflawed, unfulfilled, or rather incomplete project of the culture of organic societies, in the project for a

sociology as a science of society. Baudrillard is based in primitive symbolic exchange, and develops aform of sociology which is best described as transtheoretical, a form of resistance from the irrational anda theoretical fatwa against the modern and postmodern system’.


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face has ‘disappeared’.6 In presenting this paradox of an almost tactile

oppressive regime, which is either unrecognizable or invisible (or both),

Baudrillard points to another disturbing characterization of contemporary

social formations.

For Baudrillard, the web of social relationships, which is the empirical ground

and reality principle for a uniquely sociological enterprise, has collapsed into a

homogeneous mass.7 This is the product of a social process, yet can no

longer be identified with any particular social subject or object. As a result, the

social field today is purely simulated. This is the outcome of a cultural levelling

effect created by modern technologies. The social no longer serves to

designate or analyze anything. This is what we are seeing today – a generalawareness that the social realm is, and has always been, only a delusion. The

existence of a socius, the critico-empirical postulate of a social order based on

symbolic reciprocity and companionship, is no longer even a question.

For Baudrillard, contemporary culture is fascinated by extremes. In a culture

of electronic reproduction, television has become more true than the true;

computer models are more real than the real, fashion is more beautiful thanthe beautiful, catastrophe is more eventful than the event and the mass is

more social than the social. This is the wasteful excess of a culture where the

faster everything goes, the less anything seems to go anywhere. The reaction

to all this is a desperate attempt to redeem a meaning for life, work and

communication that have become useless and meaningless. Baudrillard

compares present society with the irreversible growth of a cancerous cell in

6 Baudrillard's style presents the first and most difficult obstacle for anyone more accustomed to thelinguistic conventions of Anglo- American social theory. Rarely does he take the time to define histerms-the social, mass, disappearance, etc. with any degree of precision or construct detailedarguments in support of his position. His mode of expression is intentionally elliptical, declarative,replete with poetic allusions, and marked by abrupt transitions. As Mark Poster (1988: 7) has noted,Baudrillard has a tendency to simply proclaim his insights and make light of apparently contradictoryconclusions which can be drawn from his remarks. Baudrillard does this intentionally, with fullawareness of what he is doing. 7 ‘Mass’ is another of Baudrillard's terms which is impossible to define precisely. He does claim,although not always consistently, that he is not referring to the conventional meaning of the term incritical social theory, viz., the working classes. Similar to his use of ‘the social,’ ‘mass’ often functions asa gloss, and occasionally as a punning device, for a number of related concepts within the socialsciences-mass culture, mass society, etc. The primary connotation of the term, however, appears to be

physical, as when Baudrillard speaks elliptically of the ‘black hole’ of the mass, which absorbs all theenergy of the social. The images Baudrillard often wishes to convey with the term are those ofrandomness, implosiveness, fragmentation, and entropy.


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which all attempts to control the decay only result in intensifying it until social

life finally exhausts itself, collapsing from its own weight and inertia.

The above stated view of present day society causes problems for a theory

about such a society. For Baudrillard, simulation closes off forever the

possibility of an ideological critique of social theory, precisely because such a

critique cannot itself break free from the assumption of the reality principle of

the social. Baudrillard sees distinct types of simulation. In the first type, the

reality principle, which makes possible a distinction between a state of affairs

– notwithstanding its absence – and its representation, remains intact. In the

second type, the reality principle itself disappears; simulation winds up

‘mistaking’ reality with its reproduction. Better, rather than simple reproduction

(or even reduplication), what is involved in later stages of simulation is the

perfect substitution of signs of the real for the real itself – the real, in other

words, simulation is elevated to the status of a copy without an original. For

Baudrillard, it is the third phase, which inaugurates the space of simulation

proper, while the fourth marks its perfection. In the third phase, the image

masks the absence of a basic reality, whilst the fourth phase bears no relation

to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

Simulation proposes the system on the basis of a certain other but simulation

in the end always seeks to master this other. This chapter will show how

Baudrillard’s simulated and totalised social puts forward an ‘other’ but what is

realised is that this ‘other’ only exists because of the social, only leads to a

growth in the system. This is the ability of the social to prove itself via the

remainder . The social exists to take care of the useless consumption ofremainders so that individuals can be assigned to the useful management of

their lives. In Baudrillard’s total system, utility is the dominant principle but it

exists only as simulation. According to Baudrillard, the economic is born when

what the object 'is', is assumed to reside within it, it has an essence; when the

object attains its value in accordance with an abstract code that enables its

relation to other objects to be ascertained through a logic of equivalence

which in turn obtains its rationale from the ideology of utility and use value;and when the individual emerges as a 'subject' whose relation to the world of


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objects is articulated primarily through the ideology of need. From this critical

viewpoint, the notion of the 'individual' emerged.

This chapter will proceed as follows: I will first outline the simulated system of

equivalences (sign value, exchange value and use value) and then show how

the system safeguards itself by developing many means of waste and

controlled squandering. I will make reference to Baudrillard’s use of Alfred

Jarry’s farcical plays. This is not meant as comic intermezzo or relief. Rather,

Baudrillard’s parody intensifies his apocalyptic vision of the totalized system of

objects.

2.2. System of Objects

Baudrillard’s teacher, Henri Lefebvre, in his Critique of Everyday Life (1992),

had turned sociology to the ordinary domestic world, to the objects that

surround us. It was important for Lefebvre to analyse these things exactly

because their ideological effects were so easily overlooked or taken for

granted. His argument was that in consumer society commodities become

abstracted, and thereby alienated or estranged, from real human contexts,

and that needs and desires become manipulated by power. Lefebvre critiqued

everyday society in order to restore an authentic relationship between subject

and objects and make objects more responsive to actual needs (Poster, 1979:

253).

Lefebvre’s Marxist approach wanted to believe in the true value and meaning

of objects and the possibility of unalienated needs and desires with regard tothem. In capitalism, exchange value functions to mystify use value, because

the labor process disappears from view leaving a pure object of consumption

determined solely by a price. For Marx labour is a necessary condition,

independent of all forms of society; it is an external nature-imposed necessity.

Without which there can be no material exchanges between man and nature

and therefore no life. The problem for Marx was that capitalism obscured the

objective value of labour, so that workers earned less than their labour wasobjectively worth and were thus exploited. Marxism convinces men that they


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are alienated by the sale of their labour. In the Marxian schema, use-value –

the glorious autonomy of man’s simple relation to his work and his products –

is the nemesis of abstract exchange and the promise of a future resurgence

beyond the fetishism of money and the market. Marxists, like Lefebvre, tried

to locate and rediscover a natural relation to use value undistorted by

capitalist exchange value. Lefebvre’s critique leaves the assumptions of use

value and the ideology of needs intact (and in fact more firmly reconstitutes

them) (Poster, 1979: 280).

Roland Barthes (with whom Baudrillard would later collaborate and teach)

wanted to break with Lefebvre’s Marxist approach. Barthes’s Mythologies

showed how relationships with objects are always mediated by the sign.

Objects are not to be seen in terms of use and function but in terms of

communication. Objects form a certain language within which such values as

use and function are merely rhetorical. There is not some underlying

denotation to the object, but only an endless succession of connotations

(Barthes, 1972: 116).

Baudrillard inherits these two contrasting approaches of Lefebvre and Barthes

toward the everyday object. In System of Objects (1996), Baudrillard attempts

to fuse the anti-abstractionism of Lefebvre and the abstractionism of Barthes.

Like Barthes, for Baudrillard every object becomes connotation (of a

denotation). For Baudrillard the modern world is to be grasped in an analogy

with 'generalized hysteria'. Understanding and reading the world of needs and

objects literally will fall into the traditional error of treating the symptom only to

find another reappearing in a different site. A way of approaching the issue isto imagine that there are two quite different languages, which interpenetrate:

the logic of objects is a vast paradigm 'through which something else speaks'

(Baudrillard, 1988: 45). Yet what is spoken from the deeper language is

realized as a 'lack' which cannot be satisfied at the surface. Just as with the

hysteric, 'this evanescence and continual mobility reaches a point where it

becomes impossible to determine the specific objectivity of needs' (ibid.,45).

‘In the hysterical or psychosomatic conversion, the symptom, like the


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sign, is (relatively) arbitrary. Migraine, colitis, lumbago, angina, or

generalized fatigue: there is a chain of somatic signifiers which the

symptom 'walks' along – as there is an interlinking of object/signs, or

object/symbols, along which walk, not needs … but desire, and a further

determination, that of unconscious social logic’ (Baudrillard, 1970: 107,

295-296).

Baudrillard attempted to achieve a non-essentialist notion of fetishism as a

theory of ‘the perverse structure that perhaps underlies all desire’; thus

transformed it might become, he hoped a genuine analytic concept

(Baudrillard, 1981: 90). If fetishism exists, it is fetishism of the signifier,

leading to the manipulation not of the concrete commodity but of the abstract

sign. For example, money fetishism is not a fetishism for a substance but for

the abstract system in its systemic fascination. For Baudrillard, one of the

consequences of the object’s entry into the field of the sign is that just like the

individual elements of language, no object has any meaning in itself but in its

relationship with other objects. The very system of objects precedes the

possibility of any single object. Consumers do not so much directly desire any

specific object as desire only in a competitive relationship with others, as

mediated by the social signs of status and prestige. We desire only another’s

desire (Butler, 1999: 27).

The fundamental paradox of the sign on which the system of objects is based,

is that if the comparison opened up by the sign (the fact that every object can

be compared to another, that our desire is given to us by way of another)

means that everything can be consumed, that nothing is outside the system ofconsumption, it also means that nothing can be consumed, that everything is

outside the system of consumption, in so far as we actually never consume


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anything as such but only insofar as it resembles the desire for another.8 The

fact that everything can be compared in terms of the sign means that there is

nothing outside consumption, it also means that nothing is actually consumed

because it is only consumed as something else. The fundamental limit of

consumption is that in the very act of consumption something goes missing;

the very thing i.e. the sign that allows and forces us to consume also means

that we cannot, that there is nothing to consume. We only consume the myth

of consumption. Baudrillard emphasizes much more than Barthes the inherent

abstraction of the system of objects. Yet at the same time Baudrillard also

wants to speak like Lefebvre against a system of objects, to show in the end

why there is no such thing as a system of objects, why any description of the

system of objects cannot be divorced from a critique of that system’s practical

ideology (Baudrillard, 1998: 316).

With Lefebvre, Baudrillard wants to show what is excluded from this system of

objects, what the limit is to its organization through signs. The system of

objects is the most complete expression of function; function is only possible

in the form of the sign. The System of Objects shows that function and use

are no longer real but only effects of the sign, only rhetorical values within the

system of objects (and that they were perhaps like this from the beginning).

Nature becomes naturality and function becomes functionality. Functionality is

the lynchpin of the system: ’Every object claims to be functional like every

regime claims to be democratic’ (Baudrillard, 1996: 89).

aesthetic force in baudrillard and deleuze

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