Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard: It would be a fantasy to cryogenize culture, in order to resurrect it in a hundred years, like Disney in his cryogenic grave. Why not do the same with human beings? They are about to become consumer goods, too, and maybe if we freeze human beings maybe there's a chance in a century they can be resurrected as "real" human beings… Now, why do you try to save culture? As an anthropological reality it generates itself and it perishes by itself. It is a singularity, it has its birth and death, you don't need to attempt to save it. It has its own way. For me it's useless to attempt to artificially perpetuate a system, because culture became a system of values, it's no more an organic, symbolic organization of sociality, now it's a system of market values, but of aesthetic values, not so much economic values. As a system of aesthetic values it is a very antinomic proposition, because culture perishes from this mixture of the symbolic and of values. The symbolic order of culture is not value, value is an economic structure. With infiltration or contamination of signs by an aesthetic circulation, and the rise of cultural goods as aesthetic goods, that's the beginning of the end.

Schirmacher: Exactly because you stockpile it, it's not culture. Culture should die. That's its honor. It's an anthropological event and should not be preserved for eternity, even if it sometimes happens.

Baudrillard: I'm only pessimistic, but you are a murderer. [laughter and applause]

Audience: Isn't difference the key to culture?

Baudrillard: No, we are in a culture of difference, of culture as difference, a multicultural organization. Culture as singularity is more than difference. Difference can be easily organized into a system which generates structure and meaning. Culture as such has no finality, no meaning, it's a symbolic act and in this sense it's beyond differences which are only oppositional structures. Singularity is a symbolic acting, a collective acting. Primitive societies and cultures are not different, they're very singular, it's not the same. Today, all cultures of the world are in multicultural ensembles as differences, together as the megaculture of difference, which is very opposed to the original singularity of culture...

Schirmacher: How do you see subjectivity coming to being? Is it possible still to have an authentic form of subjectivity?

Baudrillard: Why not, but today it would be a perversion. We are in a virtually positive, immanent world, where all is implicated in functional operations, and so on. This arrangement doesn't need a subject anymore, on the contrary, it must destroy subjectivity, and we can see that in this shifting from the subject to the individual. Today we speak always of the individual, the rights of the individual and so on. The individual is not the subject, the subject is over. The individual has no originality, it is a particular molecular fragment of an ensemble, and when you are in this system you are not a subject anymore, you can be individual as an abstract configuration, but you are a pure operation, deducted from the functioning of a system. You are a by-product of the system as individual, instead of a subject with thoughts that generate actions. As a subject you were divided and alienated, of course, a subject is alienated, it is another subject. It effaces the other subjects. The individual has no other, everyone is individual. The other individual is not an other, it has no otherness, no alterity. We try to save subjectivity through intersubjectivity, interaction, but I don't believe in this escape...

Schirmacher: This kind of answers two questions I have here, concerning "What happens in a simulated world where we have freedom from radical uncertainty, is there still a need for questions? After the orgy do we still need to ask questions? What kind of questions would these be?" You say that the content is not important, but the form can help you, you use the form of questioning.

Baudrillard: You take the example of the orgy, "What are you doing after the orgy?" That is a question. There is no answer. The seduction, the paradox, the challenge is in the question itself. But we presuppose that the orgy is over, we are at the end, or beyond the orgy, the orgy as a model of total liberation and integration. After that, there is no more a question of freedom, liberation, and so on, That's all achieved, we are all liberated, liberated of needs, of language, of sex, but what is new after that? Maybe it needs no answer to this question. The orgy was an acting-out of all finalities, it was a model of the liberation of all things, it is a vanishing point. As a vanishing point it is very interesting, because after that we don't know what we are, but it's not very dangerous, to not know what we will and what we want and so on were the categories of Enlightenment and modern man. We are beyond that and maybe it's a chance. We are free from freedom, free from liberation, That's over. Maybe now there's another chance, not for a new servitude... but maybe, maybe unknown models of servitude. We cannot have a radical moral judgment about these alternatives.

Schirmacher: So it's not that we are, as one question has here, "just changing one set of truths for another."

Baudrillard: We are changing our system of values, changing all our identities, our partners, our illusions, and so on. We are obliged to change, but changing is something other than becoming, they are different things. We are in a "changing" time, where it is the moral law of all individuals, but changing is not becoming. We can change everything, we can change ourselves, but in this time we don't become anything. It was an opposition put forth by Nietzsche, he spoke about the era of chameleons. We are in a chameleonesque era, able to change but not able to become. This is our challenge. By an excess of potential changing, any possibility is there, but becoming is not a choice, becoming someone is another fatal strategy. For Nietzsche it would be the sovereign hypothesis. He speaks of four hypotheses. The first one would be inertia, motionless, and so on. The second would be changing, the third one would be history, and the last one is the sovereign one, it is becoming. We are far away from becoming as a symbolic metamorphosis, as the symbolic return of things.

... From Difference And Singularity, Jean Baudrillard

No comments: