Ghost in the Wire

He writes:

The ‘problem of Reality’ in the sense of the question whether an external world is present-at-hand and whether such a world can be proved, turns out to be an impossible one, not because its consequences lead to inextricable impasses, but because the very entity which serves as its theme, is one which, as it were, repudiates any such formulation of the question. Our task is not to prove that an 'external world' is present-at-hand or to show how it is present-at-hand, but to point out why Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, has a tendency to bury the 'external world' in nullity 'epistemologically' before going on to prove it. The reason for this lies in Dasein's falling and in the way in which primary understanding of Being has been diverted to Being as presence-at-hand - a diversion which is motivated by that falling itself.

And later, Heidegger continues:

Certainly a grain of genuine inquiry is to be found in each of these [investigations into Reality]; but certain as this it, it would be just as perverse if one should want to achieve a tenable solution of the problem by reckoning up how much has been correct in each case. What is needed rather is basic insight that while the different epistemological directions which have been pursued have not gone so very far off epistemologically, their neglect of any existential analytic of Dasein has kept them from obtaining any basis for a well secured phenomenal problematic.

So in other words, reality does not exist in any verifiable sense, in any objective sense, or at least it cannot be understood to exist without a prior development of the subjectal consciousness of Dasein. A similar conclusion about the state of the Real, perhaps, but with Baudrillard - late Baudrillard - the Real has passed beyond the power of a subjectal reconstitution - no analytic of Dasein can possibly find its remains, much less breathe new life into them. The reason for this, continuing what I noted previously, is that Baudrillard understands the dispersal of Dasein as being completed through the ascendancy of the object, and with that ascendancy the advent of simulacral, modular reality, as well as viral, integral reality. So for Baudrillard, it is not that something is lacking in our analytic or critical faculties, but rather that we are overwhelmed by an excess of analytic and critical faculties. From the Wellek lectures again:

Let us be clear about this: if the Real is disappearing, it is not because of a lack of it - on the contrary, there is too much of it. It is the excess of reality that puts an end to reality, just as the excess of information puts an end to information, or the excess of communication puts an end to communication. We are no longer dealing with the problematic of lack and alienation, where the referent of the self and the dialectic between subject and object were always to be found, supporting strong and active philosophical positions... By shifting to a virtual world, we go beyond alienation, into a state of radical deprivation of the Other, or indeed of any otherness, alterity, or negativity. We move into a world where everything that exists only as idea, dream, fantasy, utopia will be eradicated because it will immediately be realized, operationalized. Nothing will survive as an idea or a concept. You will not even have time to imagine.

I choose that particular quote not only to help differentiate and make clear that Baudrillard is witnessing a different set of operations than is Heidegger, and not only because in doing so he also gets to offer a subtle but powerful rejoinder to Lacan, but because we can see at the end of the quote, after all those operations and discussions of excess, that we are right back to the question of the imaginary and the violence that attends its auratic economy, what Baudrillard somewhat jokingly refers to elsewhere as the "revenge of the crystal," or the revenge of the object.

Back in System of Objects, as I showed previously, Baudrillard has a much more favorable impression of the role of the imaginary, particularly the role it will play in relating the subject to its objects. Indeed, he seems downright optimistic about it. But in the intervening years, with the twists and turns of the 70s political economy period, the evolution of his thought into his 80s thesis on simulacra, and his eventual enriching of that thought with his 90s addition on viral reality (and the related interest in the event and alterity), Baudrillard recognizes that the new imaginary is pretty much dead on arrival. This makes sense if, once again, we remind ourselves of what Benjamin prophesied, that aura collapses when the distance between the object of art and the subject disappears. This is precisely what happens with the imaginary, in that the capacity to imagine encounters the technological possibility of realizing the imagination in something not unlike real time, and in many cases anticipating and overdetermining the imagination before the imaginary even has a chance to work its magic. Hence Baudrillard's conflation of science fiction and the present social and media ecology.

With the imaginary all but eviscerated (and we can provide examples of this in comments, if necessary), Baudrillard claims that a new way of thinking is needed: "To challenge and to cope with this paradoxical state of affairs," he says, "we need a paradoxical way of thinking: since the world drifts into delirium, we must adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of truth, or causality, or any discursive norm. Instead we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events."

I do not want to exaggerate the common ground here, as I am not sure how stretching to do so ever serves a productive purpose, but I do think it worthwhile to at least gesture toward the one particularly obvious possibility, namely that Baudrillard's singularity and uncertainty of the event holds some concordance with Heidegger's Ereignis. Baudrillard's event does have something of an appropriative quality, the snatching back of the Real, the fleeting destruktion of all those layers of smoking simulacra, etc. Still, we should avoid the temptation to go too far in this direction, as again Ereignis signifies an important temporal dimension in Heidegger's thought that is less of a concern in Baudrillard's.

They do, however, share in the belief that there is something in language - that house of Being - that offers itself up to and invites thought. And we should place a special emphasis on the adjectival "poetic" that qualifies Baudrillard's singularity, for it is there that we can see the formation of a question concerning technology in Baudrillard that moves both back to and beyond the one that bears Heidegger's name. This poetic quality of language offers us a chance to do more than simply resign ourselves to being silent witnesses to the perfect crime. Baudrillard puts it this way:

We must say that the strongest resistance to this destructive virtualization comes from language itself, from the singularity, the irreducibility, the vernacularity of all languages, which are actually very much alive and proving to be the best deterrent against the global extermination of meaning. So the game is not over, but no one can say who will have the last word.

Without getting too tangential, I think this emphasis on the singularity of language is important to understanding late Baudrillard, particularly the Vital Illusion text, but also his later Cool Memories, his Impossible Exchange, even the Lucidity Pact. As such, this later version of Baudrillard is not simply extending his analysis of the Code or the "ecstasy of communication," and so, contrary to some reviews, Vital Illusion remains an important signpost pointing to a departure in Baudrillard from some of his previous, more totalizing claims about linguistic and semiological codes.

At this point, though, as much as I think the specter of Heidegger floats giddily in the background, the nod should actually be more in Jacques' direction than in Martin's. The Baudrillard of the 90s, who formulates the perfect crime thesis side by side a renewed interest in the question of alterity and the whitewashing of history coincides with the later Derrida work touching on similar themes (I'm thinking specifically of Derrida's more messianic tomes), and the question of alterity is particularly pressing, though again I think one thing that this Baudrillard is doing particularly well is making sure we understand that alterity is not just about other people (hear that, Levinas?) but about the world, its history, its objects, and everything else. To that extent, he'll redefine the subject object relation later in the same lecture by noting casually that:

Simply, the object is what escapes the subject - more we cannot say, since our position is still that of the subject and of rational discourse. At any rate, we cannotrely on the pretext of an insufficient development of the scientific, intellectual or mental apparatus. The apparatus has given all that it can give; it has passed beyond its own definitions of rationality... It is the event horizon, as they say in physics, beyond which nothing makes sense and nothing at all may be discovered.

In redefining the object as the thing that escapes the subject, two differentiations are noteworthy. The first, which is most relevant to this post, is the departure from Heidegger, who as I quoted earlier, believes that we cannot address the question of reality without a prior determination and analytic of Dasein. The second, which is more subtle, is a preemptive repudiation of the Lacanian reading, which would say in effect that Baudrillard is describing the object as the real and the subject as the symbolic. Baudrillard is doing far more than that; he is making the case not just that the reality of the object exceeds the symbolic of the subject, but rather that there is a point at which the symbolic of the object directly saps the Real of the subject. The idea of the event horizon, after all, is the point after which one cannot escape the gravity of a black whole; everything passing beyond this point, even time itself, continues its journey until it collapses into a singularity. The object toys with us, in this regard, and the belief in the Real, as that thing that resists symbolization completely, misunderstands how it is that the symbolic object currently produces the myth of the Real, the reality principle.

The good news, from Baudrillard's perspective, is that this radical alterity, which is also the form of a radical, internalized secrecy, and which we see through language's resistance to virtualization, may actually point the way out of hyper- and integral- reality, or at least to the possibility of minor ruptures. "In this sense," he says, "the Perfect Crime is an hypothesis of radiant optimism."

Now, now, you're thinking, this sure sounds vaguely familiar. Isn't this just like that moment in "Question Concerning Technology," where Heidegger finishes up announcing the utter bleakness of our technological age, only to jump up, quote Holderlin, and announce the possibility of the saving power? Baudrillard cites Holderlin at this point as well, "But where the danger is, grows the saving power also," but goes on to write:

It applies today - with the caveat that, as the evil genius of modernity has changed our destiny, Holderlin's phrase must be reversed: the more the saving power grows, the greater the danger. For we are no longer victims of an excess of fate and danger, of illusion and death. We are victims of an absence of destiny, of a lack of illusion, and consequently of an excess of reality, security, and efficiency... But it seems that something resists this irresistible trend, something irreducible. And here we might quote, as a counterpart to Holderlin's phrase, this very mysterious sentence of Heidegger: "When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of mystery."

The express turn to Heidegger is remarkable here, as it reads Heidegger against Heidegger, a reversal of the saving power that craves insecurity and danger over sheltering and salvation. Some of this is merely semantic gamesmanship on Baudrillard's part, obviously, in that Heidegger is hardly advocating a more secure revelation of Being, but the reversibility that Baudrillard is employing is meant, in part, to be a game. This is the benefit of taking that question of Dasein's dispersal through Benjamin and into the object, rather than, as Heidegger does, as a question of temporality, historicity, and forgetting. The saving power for Heidegger is still largely reflective: in the horrors of technology we can recognize the enframing, its challenging of nature, and transformation of the world into standing-reserve. In a way, like fish out of water, we do not recognize the value and importance of Being, we do not hear its call, until we are sufficiently removed from it, and technology enables that, even as it hides Being from us. Heidegger's account is powerful, but ultimately a bit limited, in that it retains a sort of mythic hope of phenomenological transcendence, an act of recognition. But for Baudrillard, what we might call the "danger power" is similar but not identical: we can recognize in the death of the real the possible immortality, regeneration, or invulnerability of language itself, of the poetic singularity of that language. It is the internal heuristic limit of virtualization/realization, what amounts to its reversibility, that makes possible the chance of escape, and a renewal of alterity, and this seems to be the case no matter our failure of recognition. Instead, contrary to physics, every once and a while the world snatches something of that singularity back from beyond the event horizon. The subjectal task is not then one of critical or ontological recognition, but to accelerate the journey into the unknown:

The only justification for thinking and writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes. Here, beyond the discourse of truth, resides the poetic and enigmatic value of thinking. For, facing a world that is unintelligible and problematic, our task is clear: we must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic.

This seems both too simple and too difficult, and I think it a good place to stop, if only to let that simple impossibility keep a bit of its secret to itself.

Next time, Baudrillard on Heidegger's Nazism.