Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
43
BAUDRILLARD LIVE
DG/DS And where does writing stand now, that old technology that has
wrought many changes in its time and that you still use? Doesn‘t it function in
the mode of proliferation?
Yes, and nobody quite knows how to hold it back. It seems that we have
crossed a certain boundary, and that a certain self-regulation that used to
come into play, even biologically, in relation to the species, no longer
operates. There is now a possibility of limitless proliferation in a world that
has lost all sense of perspective, where sight, distance and judgement have
been lost. And judgement is no longer needed in a world that is simply there,
immanent, realized.
At the limit the effect of something written is nil today. I can choose not to
go on writing because I am not caught up in a coercive culture that compels
a writer to write, and an intellectual to think. I began to write when I wanted
to, and I will stop if it ceases to be worthwhile. I need a challenge myself,
there’s got to be something at stake. If that is taken away, then I will stop
writing. I’m not mad. At a given moment, however, you cause things to exist,
not by producing them in the material sense of the term, but by defying them,
by confronting them. Then at that moment it’s magic. And it’s not only
writing that functions like that. I don’t know if we have a relationship with
other people in terms of desire, but we certainly have one in terms of
44
BEYOND ALIENATION…
DG/DS Could you tell us where you stand with regard to psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalysis has become useless, a burden. It satisfies a sort of dizziness
for explanations, for self-obsession and for reproducing itself. The word was
one of the fundamental tools of analysis, then everything began to spin
round, and here too there was a delirium of conceptual production, which got
more and more sophisticated. Curiously, it has ceased to have any effect. I am
not talking about psychoanalysis in its early days. But I do criticize the
present-day variety because everything that’s at stake must go beyond it and
cause it to shatter.
DG/DS In Fatal Strategies we don’t know what geographical space you allude
to, whether it’s a planetary space or not.
I don’t talk about people in the sociological sense. The masses are not locatable
in terms of population, they are not the sum of locatable individuals. It’s the
mass effect, the mass forms that I analyse, and which, somewhere, no longer
produces any difference. This something which is there but which doesn’t
produce any difference is an extraordinary challenge to symbolic order of any
kind, be it political, social or whatever.
My analysis, if you put it back into a realistic, geographical frame of
reference, is not going to apply more or less well to such and such a model. It
is a logical hypothesis of radicality, and it was inspired by the so-called
developed countries, particularly the United States. But the Third World is also
totally caught up in this explosion of effects, this loss of causality, this
proliferation, as in demography for example. It is impossible that one part of
45
BAUDRILLARD LIVE
DG/DS You write that people don’t seek collective happiness, but rather
ecstasy and the spectacle. What do you mean by that?
I don’t know what people are looking for. They have been taught to look for
things like happiness, but deep down that doesn’t interest them, any more than
producing or being produced. What interests them is rather something that
belongs to the realm of fascination, of games, but not in the frivolous sense.
The world is a game. Rituals are regaining their importance, and what is a ritual
if not a rule of the game, another type of relationship, not of forces, but of
metamorphoses? People can sometimes cling passionately to extremely harsh
and cruel logics but not for work, retirement, social security.
Ritual didn’t exist in savage times only to disappear in our modern age and
to be reborn as a revival of some archaic process. It has always been there, and
it isn’t only against reality that one struggles. That’s the whole problem. If the
world is reality, then effectively the logic is one of a transformation and a
realization of the world, and that’s all. But if the world is also illusion,
appearance, then that is mastered in another way. There are different logics,
different rules, and I believe that nobody has forgotten and nobody has
renounced that game. Fashion, for instance, is a continuing collective passion,
putting aside any perspective, and you can’t say that it is archaic. All
transformation of things into spectacle: it is this function of simulation which
is perhaps what really makes them work, not their rational and economic
mechanisms (dispositif).
If Soviet society really functioned in accordance with its system of values,
its bureaucracy, its ideology, it would have crumbled a long time ago. This
society exists and no doubt will exist for a long time because what works is the
game of bureaucracy. Derision is internal to its functioning. It doesn’t really
run on its bureaucracy, because the people wouldn’t survive in that case. Italy
also functions on derision for the real state of things, which is a state of
political and economic confusion. There is a collective complicity, an
agreement that all should continue on a lower plane (état second). The real
social bond is a pact which is the contrary of the social contract, a symbolic
pact of allurement, complicity, derision. That is why socialism is not possible:
it wants to bring everything back to the social contract and eliminate this sort
of avoidance (détournemeni), this second game, this secret complicity, this
pathology of social relationships where all people’s imagination and passion is
exercised in the double games of the maintenance of fiefdoms and territories.
The socialists are not the only ones to make mistakes. It is simply that they
are the only ones who want to make reality transparent, and extirpate all the
46
BEYOND ALIENATION…
irrationalities, including all the signs and images which are vehicles for the
effects of derision. If they managed to eliminate all that they would put an end
to society’s survival. But fortunately people work against the grain of any
political system which, in appearance, represents the others and makes itself
obeyed. In fact, the rule of the game is more secret than that: everything goes
on in an ambience of profound derision, and somewhere the murder of that
symbolic class is achieved. Everything that has conferred upon it power, status,
prestige must be destroyed, killed.
47
BAUDRILLARD LIVE
so naive about this. They think that if you ask people about their sexual
behaviour they’re going to tell you the truth. In fact, it’s impossible to know
what it is.
DG/DS There’s been talk about trying to liberate us from lots of things, but in
the end it turned out not to be that which is interesting.
The effect of rupture is always interesting. The liberation of productive forces
did get people to work. All the revolutions have been liberations in that sense.
They shattered the old structures in order to capture people’s potential energy
with a definite aim in view. The hair-brained liberation that people dreamed
about in 1968: in the sense that things would be free to become anything at all,
to contain their own purpose, that is the aesthetic vision of liberation. But in
reality all liberations have always led to servitude at another level.
DG/DS You often allude to biology, you talk about cloning and the genetic
code. But you seldom allude to neurophysiology, the biology of the brain,
which the media are making a big noise about. What do you think about this
upsurge of interest in the neuronal?
I think it’s grotesque. I have nothing to do with such truths. It’s going in the
same direction as everything else, and it’s a more subtle, more miniaturized
terminal. It doesn’t interest me. What I’m interested in is myth. With this
proliferation in miniaturization, this pyramidalization of things which renders
everything else useless, one can nevertheless ask oneself what a body is. If
everything boils down to a definition, either by genetic code or by the brain,
the body becomes useless. It’s vertiginous! But at least we are still free to
consider it an aberration. I am tempted to think this through right to the end; to
see what is going to happen at the far limit of these aberrations and of the
pathology of the modern world. Is this world irredeemably lost? I don’t know.
It is so functionalized that everything you might call game, illusion, even
language itself, risks remaining caught up in it. However, let’s not indulge in
complacent catastrophism; things develop by themselves, perhaps, and to
apply to them pseudo-moral ideas of humanist deontology—a discourse that
has existed ever since there was science and technology—that won’t change
anything at all.
And then, there will always be a way of playing with the systems,
dataprocessing included. We have the impression that this computer network
is all-powerful, and that virtually, in ten years’ time, the world will be
computer-run (telematise). But it won’t happen like that, because things
don’t operate only at the level of their realistic evolution. Take the exact
sciences: the further they advance in hyper-detailed realism, the more the
object of study disappears. The more they hunt the object of study into the
inner recesses of its real existence, the more it eludes them. That is my only
hope.
48
BEYOND ALIENATION…
49