Beyond BaudrillardOriginal language: English
Original publication: January 12 and February 8 2024
Written by: Andrew Haskin
Translated by: N/A
License of this version: N/A
Other language versions: N/A
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CONTENTS
Part One
The scene of traditional Western philosophy as we know it today is composed of two major poles, the subject and the object. Subjects as we know them have active agency and act upon the other pole of the object. Objects have no agency in traditional thought, instead being simply being acted upon by subjects. Now the subject is not necessarily an individual, though it often is, but is rather an object like any other that has agency. A subject is an object that distinguishes itself from other objects by acting upon them beyond the mere logic of cause and effect. While we as individuals are categorized as subjects by this logic, though there are determinists who contest this, we can think up metaphysical situations in which anything can be a subject. All that has to be done is to give an object a sense of control. This paradigm can be traced back long before it was concretely theorized as a dichotomy by philosophers such as Descartes. It can be seen in the very structure of our language. In the structure of a sentence, there is a subject that acts through a verb on an object. The subject has a principle of action in language, without a verb there is simply no subject and thus no sentence. Structurally this means, as Orwell proves that the structure of language affects the way we think in his Politics and the English Language, that the subject-object dichotomy is ingrained in our thought process. Even if philosophically we were to construct a metaphysics that rejects this dichotomy, as so many thinkers of the post-modern milieu have done, the presence of some means of subject and object remains in our very thought process. It is a part of the standard image of thought.
Even if this dichotomy can be traced back so far in our collective consciousness, its philosophical justification is found in the work of the Enlightenment thinker Descartes. The very structure of his cogito, which he places as the basis for being, separates the mind and the body. He writes:
“I easily understand, I say, that the imagination could be thus constituted if it is true that body exists; and because I can discover no other convenient mode of explaining it, I conjecture with probability that body does exist; but this is only with probability, and although I examine all things with care, I nevertheless do not find that from this distinct idea of corporeal nature, which I have in my imagination, I can derive any argument from which there will necessarily be deduced the existence of body.” (Descartes, 1641, pg. 26).
This may be seen as a separation of the subject into the source of agency within the subject, the mind, and that which is the extension of said agency, the body, but this separation of mind and body leads to the conclusion of the metaphysical poles of subject and object. When Descartes uses the ontological argument for god’s existence he concludes that there must be an exterior world, that god would not trick him, thus giving an exterior of objects for the body, in control of the mind, to interact with and manipulate.
Now there have been significant challenges to this dichotomy and Descartes’ particular formulation of it, some of which being provided by Baudrillard himself, all of which deconstruct this particular formulation. Now this deconstruction is certainly justified, the dichotomy is based on faulty foundations and metaphysical essentialism, however, simply discarding it without making constructive use of it ignores so much of philosophical discourse. In particular, there is Baudrillard’s seductive subversion of the dichotomy through his notion of the fatal strategy which posits we take the side of the object in theory. To understand this confusing position, we must first understand what he is reacting against, a vulgar humanism. This humanism emphasizes the human subject as the key pole of this dichotomy, emphasizing its utter control and dominance over objects. It posits the agency of humans as subjects in a world comprised of objects, in other words, it places humanity above the rest of the world. This creates the traditional scene as Baudrillard calls it, where humans through their agency make rational decisions on how to change the world. To him, an esteemed anti-humanist, this is merely a facade created by political scientists to privilege humanity. Baudrillard is not anti-humanist in the mere sense that he rejects the concept of humanity, though he certainly does see it as being lost in the process of the simulacra, rather rejecting the emphasis of subjectivity in any sense. The scene of politics is a facade, but not one that can be simply challenged by revealing it as a facade. Baudrillard writes:
“All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to perceive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. Because these are the same, which can be thought of in another way: formerly one worked to dissimulate scandal—today one works to conceal that there is none.” (Baudrillard, 1981, pg. 15-16).
This is the third order simulacra, an image to conceal that there is no reality there. If we are to accept this analysis, as the challenging capital by stating the scandal merely reinforces its relations, we must come to conclude that we must either embrace the object or subvert it through being irrational ourselves. Both are the basis of what Baudrillard calls the fatal strategy, to sleep with the enemy and take the side of the object, of seduction. He takes this position not necessarily out of some rigorously defined logic, but because he believes it will make theory more interesting, and more seductive. Through this approach, Baudrillard rejects the metaphysicians of old in a way so radical, that it challenges the analysis of other post-structuralists. In Forget Foucault, he sets his sights on Foucault and Deleuze, who in their analysis of power and desire respectively only reproduce the old capital analysis of the Marxists. The signs can be exchanged, the concepts only come to prominence now that they have died and become hyperreal. This is not to discard the truth value of both analyses but to say they are too perfect, too metaphysical. Desire has no place in the analysis of Foucault because it can be perfectly exchanged for power, there is no sign value. The micropolitics of Deleuze and Guattari, along with the associated resistance to Biopower seen in Foucault’s later work, only symbolically model the forms they’re resisting on a micro level. The anarchic war of institutions, the global civil war that Tiqqun talks of is itself an anarchy modeling the same anarchic flows of the micro. Baudrillard is the greatest critic of those who seek to make some new metaphysics revolutionary, though the fairness of the criticism can be disputed and will be later on in this text and within the next part.
Regardless, a crucial aspect of Baudrillard’s theory is that the object is by nature seductive. A key basis of this is that he claims the agency of the object, similar to the developments of recent object-oriented ontology and speculative realism. The introduction to Fatal Strategies displays his approach quite well
“In their stead, he seeks to locate a genuine revolution, on a scale or front that we— as the species-centric being par excellence—have not anticipated. Namely, the ‘insurrection of the object,’ which he describes as ‘a silent revolution,' but the only one left now.’ The fate of the object is one strategy which, according to this book, has long languished unclaimed in the Lost & Found office of radical ideas; at least until now. And for this reason alone, it is a useful expansion of agency beyond the rather self-serving principles of the human subject. ‘Only the subject desires; only the object seduces’” (Baudrillard, 1983, pg. 10).
Just as there is desire as an affirmative force in Deleuze, for Baudrillard this affirmative force is seduction. Now of course the desire of Deleuze is not localized to a constrained subject, in fact a key tenet of schizoanalysis is to create new subjectivities, but it is most certainly personal and subjective. Seduction rather takes the claim of agency away from the subject and gives it to objects, giving it dominance over the various subjectivities. Let us draw from modern object oriented ontology for an example. The traditional, subject oriented, approach towards the object can be seen in the chair. Chairs are objects out there that we directly interact with and manipulate. We exchange them as commodities on a market, it is at the mercy of subjectivity and desire. But if we are to take another example with much prevalence across history, the object of gold for instance, we find it is instead the object that dominates these “subjects.” Gold as a motive, or perhaps in its more modern and broad form the accumulation of capital, is one that has fueled the vast majority of wars, of social systems, etc. In its fetishization it seduces individuals into valuing it, it’s sign given an artificial importance. Now one may protest it is still up to individuals to give into seduction, after all the pursuit of gold for gold’s sake is a sacred cause in the stirnerite sense. In Stirner we find that we can throw off the seduction of the object’s cause, instead basing our cause on nothing. But while Stirner’s egoism certainly will be useful in any notion of going beyond Baudrillard’s fatal strategy, seduction is more wide spread the mere world of causes. Rather the holding of conceptions themselves, in our self theory in the sense of For Ourselves! and McQuinn, is itself based on the seduction of different concepts. Take the previously mentioned Baudrillardian critique of Foucault and Deleuze’s affirmative conceptions of power and desire, these in their disappearance become more and more seductive. This disappearance of the concept, the transition through the stages from the real to hyperreal, is the direct root of seduction. As such to investigate how we engage in the fatal strategy and how we might subvert it, we must understand disappearance.
The disappearance of a concept come’s with our categorization of the concept, scientific analysis. In the posthumous work Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, Baudrillard makes the observation that by the precise and categorical analysis of an object we become further separated from what we were trying to conceptualize in the first place. At a certain point the concept disappears, so alienated from the signified that we lose the real. The first object of consideration here is the human, which after Foucault has revealed its historicism, Baudrillard shows its disappearance. Both Foucault and Baudrillard, each prominent French Nietzscheans in their own right, proclaim the death of the human as Nietzsche claims the death of god (though it should be noted that Stirner “killed” this pious atheism in Feuerbach before Nietzsche had even proclaimed the death of god,) yet while Foucault sees this death in the mere theoretical sense Baudrillard claims its full disappearance. His observations on the disappearance of the human can be said to be the radicalization of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, the categorization of humanity has led to the death of its cultural existence. Thus we find his problem with Foucault and Deleuze, their theories are too perfect, they have no exchange value. Their perfection derives from the fact that the affirmative object they study has already disappeared.
From this more culturally nihilistic approach, Baudrillard proposes the fatal strategy in its totality. The fatal strategy is an approach towards theory that aims to create more seductive theory, it takes the side of the object. Instead of seeking to subvert seduction, though there is an object oriented subversion in his conception of reversibility, he seeks to amplify it. This strategy is a key influence towards the modern analysis and praxis, or rather anti-praxis, of accelerationism. Accelerationism is less of an ideology and more of a system of analysis, one pioneered by Land and the CCRU. While some posit acceleration as a liberatory process or at least one with the potential of liberatory futures, Land in his analysis is far more fatal. He recognizes no escape, and while for a time he held the sensibilities of a leftist that soon faded away with his new alignment with the neoreactionary current. This accelerationism in both its fatalism and sleeping with the enemy, taking capital’s side, must be countered with a resistance to Baudrillard himself. His approach must become the crucial area of contention for any liberatory project.
For many upon reading this approach may be relieved, sick of philosophies that present a potential liberatory outside. This is what Baudrillard intends, he views the fatal strategy as the only revolutionary potential left, all others seduced by conceptions that have disappeared. Yet for many others there may be a sense of disappointment, a sense of being trapped within our cultural totality. If we are to theorize in good faith, we cannot put our hope back into a humanism or any revolutionary perspective of old. Rather as Baudrillard proposes the insurrection of the object we must propose an insurrection against the duality itself. We must realize the real of subjectivity and affirmation. This is not to affirm subjects, but to engage in a self affirmation that refuses to be subjectified in a Foucauldian sense. We can claim a real of subjectivity because we are immanent to our own being before any observation of culture. As we pointed out briefly earlier, we can see from Stirner that it is up to us to be seduced in the first place. It is out of our individual creation and affirmation that we become seduced. The issue of desire and power is that they become universalized, and became aspects of the cultural sphere. To save the we must localize affirmation to subjectivity, where we can then engage in insurrectionary affirmation. Baudrillard certainly shows the simulacrum of the social, but by locating resistance in the terrain of the subjective a way out becomes clear.
Part Two
The scene of traditional Western philosophy as we know it today is composed of two major poles, the subject and the object. Subjects as we know them have active agency and act upon the other pole of the object. Objects have no agency in traditional thought, instead being simply being acted upon by subjects. Now the subject is not necessarily an individual, though it often is, but is rather an object like any other that has agency. A subject is an object that distinguishes itself from other objects by acting upon them beyond the mere logic of cause and effect. While we as individuals are categorized as subjects by this logic, though there are determinists who contest this, we can think up metaphysical situations in which anything can be a subject. All that has to be done is to give an object a sense of control. This paradigm can be traced back long before it was concretely theorized as a dichotomy by philosophers such as Descartes. It can be seen in the very structure of our language. In the structure of a sentence, there is a subject that acts through a verb on an object. The subject has a principle of action in language, without a verb there is simply no subject and thus no sentence. Structurally this means, as Orwell proves that the structure of language affects the way we think in his Politics and the English Language, that the subject-object dichotomy is ingrained in our thought process. Even if philosophically we were to construct a metaphysics that rejects this dichotomy, as so many thinkers of the post-modern milieu have done, the presence of some means of subject and object remains in our very thought process. It is a part of the standard image of thought.
Even if this dichotomy can be traced back so far in our collective consciousness, its philosophical justification is found in the work of the Enlightenment thinker Descartes. The very structure of his cogito, which he places as the basis for being, separates the mind and the body. He writes:
“I easily understand, I say, that the imagination could be thus constituted if it is true that body exists; and because I can discover no other convenient mode of explaining it, I conjecture with probability that body does exist; but this is only with probability, and although I examine all things with care, I nevertheless do not find that from this distinct idea of corporeal nature, which I have in my imagination, I can derive any argument from which there will necessarily be deduced the existence of body.” (Descartes, 1641, pg. 26).
This may be seen as a separation of the subject into the source of agency within the subject, the mind, and that which is the extension of said agency, the body, but this separation of mind and body leads to the conclusion of the metaphysical poles of subject and object. When Descartes uses the ontological argument for god’s existence he concludes that there must be an exterior world, that god would not trick him, thus giving an exterior of objects for the body, in control of the mind, to interact with and manipulate.
Now there have been significant challenges to this dichotomy and Descartes’ particular formulation of it, some of which being provided by Baudrillard himself, all of which deconstruct this particular formulation. Now this deconstruction is certainly justified, the dichotomy is based on faulty foundations and metaphysical essentialism, however, simply discarding it without making constructive use of it ignores so much of philosophical discourse. In particular, there is Baudrillard’s seductive subversion of the dichotomy through his notion of the fatal strategy which posits we take the side of the object in theory. To understand this confusing position, we must first understand what he is reacting against, a vulgar humanism. This humanism emphasizes the human subject as the key pole of this dichotomy, emphasizing its utter control and dominance over objects. It posits the agency of humans as subjects in a world comprised of objects, in other words, it places humanity above the rest of the world. This creates the traditional scene as Baudrillard calls it, where humans through their agency make rational decisions on how to change the world. To him, an esteemed anti-humanist, this is merely a facade created by political scientists to privilege humanity. Baudrillard is not anti-humanist in the mere sense that he rejects the concept of humanity, though he certainly does see it as being lost in the process of the simulacra, rather rejecting the emphasis of subjectivity in any sense. The scene of politics is a facade, but not one that can be simply challenged by revealing it as a facade. Baudrillard writes:
“All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to perceive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. Because these are the same, which can be thought of in another way: formerly one worked to dissimulate scandal—today one works to conceal that there is none.” (Baudrillard, 1981, pg. 15-16).
This is the third order simulacra, an image to conceal that there is no reality there. If we are to accept this analysis, as the challenging capital by stating the scandal merely reinforces its relations, we must come to conclude that we must either embrace the object or subvert it through being irrational ourselves. Both are the basis of what Baudrillard calls the fatal strategy, to sleep with the enemy and take the side of the object, of seduction. He takes this position not necessarily out of some rigorously defined logic, but because he believes it will make theory more interesting, and more seductive. Through this approach, Baudrillard rejects the metaphysicians of old in a way so radical, that it challenges the analysis of other post-structuralists. In Forget Foucault, he sets his sights on Foucault and Deleuze, who in their analysis of power and desire respectively only reproduce the old capital analysis of the Marxists. The signs can be exchanged, the concepts only come to prominence now that they have died and become hyperreal. This is not to discard the truth value of both analyses but to say they are too perfect, too metaphysical. Desire has no place in the analysis of Foucault because it can be perfectly exchanged for power, there is no sign value. The micropolitics of Deleuze and Guattari, along with the associated resistance to Biopower seen in Foucault’s later work, only symbolically model the forms they’re resisting on a micro level. The anarchic war of institutions, the global civil war that Tiqqun talks of is itself an anarchy modeling the same anarchic flows of the micro. Baudrillard is the greatest critic of those who seek to make some new metaphysics revolutionary, though the fairness of the criticism can be disputed and will be later on in this text and within the next part.
Regardless, a crucial aspect of Baudrillard’s theory is that the object is by nature seductive. A key basis of this is that he claims the agency of the object, similar to the developments of recent object-oriented ontology and speculative realism. The introduction to Fatal Strategies displays his approach quite well
“In their stead, he seeks to locate a genuine revolution, on a scale or front that we— as the species-centric being par excellence—have not anticipated. Namely, the ‘insurrection of the object,’ which he describes as ‘a silent revolution,' but the only one left now.’ The fate of the object is one strategy which, according to this book, has long languished unclaimed in the Lost & Found office of radical ideas; at least until now. And for this reason alone, it is a useful expansion of agency beyond the rather self-serving principles of the human subject. ‘Only the subject desires; only the object seduces’” (Baudrillard, 1983, pg. 10).
Just as there is desire as an affirmative force in Deleuze, for Baudrillard this affirmative force is seduction. Now of course the desire of Deleuze is not localized to a constrained subject, in fact a key tenet of schizoanalysis is to create new subjectivities, but it is most certainly personal and subjective. Seduction rather takes the claim of agency away from the subject and gives it to objects, giving it dominance over the various subjectivities. Let us draw from modern object oriented ontology for an example. The traditional, subject oriented, approach towards the object can be seen in the chair. Chairs are objects out there that we directly interact with and manipulate. We exchange them as commodities on a market, it is at the mercy of subjectivity and desire. But if we are to take another example with much prevalence across history, the object of gold for instance, we find it is instead the object that dominates these “subjects.” Gold as a motive, or perhaps in its more modern and broad form the accumulation of capital, is one that has fueled the vast majority of wars, of social systems, etc. In its fetishization it seduces individuals into valuing it, it’s sign given an artificial importance. Now one may protest it is still up to individuals to give into seduction, after all the pursuit of gold for gold’s sake is a sacred cause in the stirnerite sense. In Stirner we find that we can throw off the seduction of the object’s cause, instead basing our cause on nothing. But while Stirner’s egoism certainly will be useful in any notion of going beyond Baudrillard’s fatal strategy, seduction is more wide spread the mere world of causes. Rather the holding of conceptions themselves, in our self theory in the sense of For Ourselves! and McQuinn, is itself based on the seduction of different concepts. Take the previously mentioned Baudrillardian critique of Foucault and Deleuze’s affirmative conceptions of power and desire, these in their disappearance become more and more seductive. This disappearance of the concept, the transition through the stages from the real to hyperreal, is the direct root of seduction. As such to investigate how we engage in the fatal strategy and how we might subvert it, we must understand disappearance.
The disappearance of a concept come’s with our categorization of the concept, scientific analysis. In the posthumous work Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, Baudrillard makes the observation that by the precise and categorical analysis of an object we become further separated from what we were trying to conceptualize in the first place. At a certain point the concept disappears, so alienated from the signified that we lose the real. The first object of consideration here is the human, which after Foucault has revealed its historicism, Baudrillard shows its disappearance. Both Foucault and Baudrillard, each prominent French Nietzscheans in their own right, proclaim the death of the human as Nietzsche claims the death of god (though it should be noted that Stirner “killed” this pious atheism in Feuerbach before Nietzsche had even proclaimed the death of god,) yet while Foucault sees this death in the mere theoretical sense Baudrillard claims its full disappearance. His observations on the disappearance of the human can be said to be the radicalization of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, the categorization of humanity has led to the death of its cultural existence. Thus we find his problem with Foucault and Deleuze, their theories are too perfect, they have no exchange value. Their perfection derives from the fact that the affirmative object they study has already disappeared.
From this more culturally nihilistic approach, Baudrillard proposes the fatal strategy in its totality. The fatal strategy is an approach towards theory that aims to create more seductive theory, it takes the side of the object. Instead of seeking to subvert seduction, though there is an object oriented subversion in his conception of reversibility, he seeks to amplify it. This strategy is a key influence towards the modern analysis and praxis, or rather anti-praxis, of accelerationism. Accelerationism is less of an ideology and more of a system of analysis, one pioneered by Land and the CCRU. While some posit acceleration as a liberatory process or at least one with the potential of liberatory futures, Land in his analysis is far more fatal. He recognizes no escape, and while for a time he held the sensibilities of a leftist that soon faded away with his new alignment with the neoreactionary current. This accelerationism in both its fatalism and sleeping with the enemy, taking capital’s side, must be countered with a resistance to Baudrillard himself. His approach must become the crucial area of contention for any liberatory project.
For many upon reading this approach may be relieved, sick of philosophies that present a potential liberatory outside. This is what Baudrillard intends, he views the fatal strategy as the only revolutionary potential left, all others seduced by conceptions that have disappeared. Yet for many others there may be a sense of disappointment, a sense of being trapped within our cultural totality. If we are to theorize in good faith, we cannot put our hope back into a humanism or any revolutionary perspective of old. Rather as Baudrillard proposes the insurrection of the object we must propose an insurrection against the duality itself. We must realize the real of subjectivity and affirmation. This is not to affirm subjects, but to engage in a self affirmation that refuses to be subjectified in a Foucauldian sense. We can claim a real of subjectivity because we are immanent to our own being before any observation of culture. As we pointed out briefly earlier, we can see from Stirner that it is up to us to be seduced in the first place. It is out of our individual creation and affirmation that we become seduced. The issue of desire and power is that they become universalized, and became aspects of the cultural sphere. To save the we must localize affirmation to subjectivity, where we can then engage in insurrectionary affirmation. Baudrillard certainly shows the simulacrum of the social, but by locating resistance in the terrain of the subjective a way out becomes clear.