From: CTHEORY EDITORS [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 8:00 PM
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Subject: Article 95- Dust Breeding
_____________________________________________________________________CTHEORY
THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 24, NO 3
Article 95 10/10/01 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
Dust Breeding[1]
=============
~~Jean Baudrillard~
Our reality has become experimental. Without destiny, modern man is
left with an endless experimentation of himself. Let's take two
recent examples. The first one, the ~Loft Story~ show,[2] is a media
illusion of live reality. The second one, the case of Catherine
Millet's book,[3] is a phantasmatic illusion of live sex.
The ~Loft~ show has become a universal concept: a human amusement
park combined with a ghetto, solitary confinement (huis-clos), and an
Angel of Death. The idea is to use voluntary seclusion as a
laboratory for synthetic conviviality, for a telegenetically modified
society.
In this space, where everything is meant to be seen (as in "Big
Brother", other reality-TV shows, etc.), we realize that there is
nothing left to see. It becomes a mirror of dullness, of nothingness,
on which the disappearance of the other is blatantly reflected (even
though the show alleges different objectives). It also reveals the
possibility that human beings are fundamentally not social. This
space becomes the equivalent of a "ready-made" just-as-is (telle
quelle) transposition of an "everyday life" that has already been
trumped by all dominant models. It is a synthetic banality,
fabricated in closed circuits and supervised by a monitoring screen.
In this sense, the artificial microcosm of the ~Loft Story~ is
similar to Disneyland which gives the illusion of a real world, a
world out-there, whereas both Disney's world and the world outside of
it are mirror images of one another. All of the United States is (in)
Disneyland. And we, in France, are all inside the ~Loft~. No need to
enter reality's virtual reproduction. We are already in it. The
televisual universe is merely a holographic detail of the global
reality. Even in our most mundane activities we are deep into
experimental reality. And this explains our fascination with
immersion and spontaneous interactivity. Does it mean that it is all
pornographic voyeurism? Not at all.
Sex is everywhere else to be found, but that's not what people want.
What people deeply desire is a spectacle of banality. This spectacle
of banality is today's true pornography and obscenity. It is the
obscene spectacle of nullity (nullite), insignificance, and
platitude. This stands as the complete opposite of the theater of
cruelty. But perhaps there is still a form of cruelty, at least a
virtual one, attached to such a banality. At a time when television
and the media in general are less and less capable of accounting for
(rendre compte) the world's (unbearable) events, they rediscover
daily life. They discover existential banality as the deadliest
event, as the most violent piece of information: the very location of
the perfect crime. Existential banality ~is~ the perfect crime. And
people are fascinated (but terrified at the same time) by this
indifferent "nothing-to-say" or "nothing-to-do," by the indifference
of their own lives. Contemplating the Perfect Crime --banality as the
latest form of fatality-- has become a genuine Olympic contest, the
latest version of extreme sports.
What makes it worse is the fact that the public is mobilized as the
judge of all this. The public has become Big Brother. We are well
beyond panopticism, beyond visibility as a source of power and
control. It is no longer a matter of making things visible to the
external eye. It is rather a question of making things transparent to
themselves, through the diffusion of control into the masses, a mode
of control which by the same token erases the marks of the system.
Thus, the audience is involved in a gigantic exercise of negative
counter-transference (contre-transfert), and this is once again where
the dizzying attraction of this kind of spectacle comes from.
In fact, all this corresponds to the inalienable right or desire to
be nothing and to be regarded as such. There are two ways to
disappear. Either you demand not to be seen (the current issue with
image rights); or you turn to the maddening exhibitionist display of
your insignificance. You make yourself insignificant in order to be
seen as such. This is the ultimate protection against the need to
exist and the duty to be oneself.
But this situation also creates the contradictory demand to
simultaneously not be seen and to be perpetually visible. Everyone
must have it both ways. No ethic or law can solve this dilemma. There
is no possibility to adjudicate between the unconditional right to
see and the unconditional right not to be seen. Complete information
is a basic human rights requirement. And this necessity brings with
it the idea of forced visibility, including the right to be
over-exposed by the media.
Foucault used to refer to self-expression as the ultimate form of
confession. Keeping no secret. Speaking, talking, endlessly
communicating. This is a form of violence which targets the singular
being and his secrecy. It is also a form of violence against
language. In this mode of communicability, language loses its
originality. Language simply becomes a medium, an operator of
visibility. It has lost its symbolic and ironic qualities, those
which make language more important than what it conveys.
The worst part of this obscene and indecent visibility is the forced
enrollment, the automatic complicity of the spectator who has been
blackmailed into participating. The obvious goal of this kind of
operation is to enslave the victims. But the victims are quite
willing. They are rejoicing at the pain and the shame they suffer.
Everybody must abide by society's fundamental logic: interactive
exclusion. Interactive exclusion, what could be better! Let's all
agree on it and practice it with enthusiasm! [4]
If everything ends with visibility (which, similar to the concept of
heat in the theory of energy, is the most degraded form of
existence), the point is still to make such a loss of symbolic space
and such an extreme disenchantment with life an object of
contemplation, of sidereal observation (sideration), and of perverse
desire. "While humanity was once according to Homer an object of
contemplation for the Gods, it has now become a contemplation of
itself. Its own alienation has reached such a degree that humanity's
own destruction becomes a first rate aesthetic sensation" (Walter
Benjamin).
Everywhere the experimental takes over the real and the imaginary.
Everywhere, principles of scientific evidence and verification are
introduced. Under the scalpel of the camera, and without recourse to
any symbolic language or context, we are vivisecting and dissecting
social relations. The case of Catherine Millet is another example of
experimental reality, another type of vivi-sexion.[5] In her book,
the sexual imaginary is blown away. All that's left is a principle of
unlimited verification of sexual operations. It is a mechanism which
is no longer sexual.
A double misinterpretation is taking place. The idea of sexuality is
turned into the ultimate reference. Whether it is repressed or it is
displayed, sexuality is at best nothing more than a hypothesis. It is
incorrect to take a hypothesis for a truth or a solid reference. It
may well be that the sexual hypothesis is nothing more than a
fantasy. In any case, it is through its repression that sexuality has
gained such a strange power of attraction. Once it is played out,
sexuality loses its postulated quality. Hence, it is absurd and
misplaced to act it out and to systematically call for sexual
"liberation." One never liberates a hypothesis. And how sad is the
idea of demonstrating sexuality through the sexual act! As if
displacements, deviations, transfers, and metaphors had nothing to do
with sex. Everything is in the filter of seduction, in
~~detournement~. Not the seduction in sex and desire, but the
seduction of playing with sex and desire (le jeu avec the sexe et le
desir). This is exactly what makes impossible the idea of "live sex."
The concepts of live death or live news are just as naively
naturalist. They are all linked to the pretentious claim that
everything can happen in the real world, that everything craves to
find its place inside an all encompassing reality. After all, this is
the essence of power too: "The corruption of power is to inscribe
into reality what was only found in dreams."
The key to the problem is provided by Jacques Henric's understanding
of photography and the image. For Henric, our curiosity with the
visual is always sexual. There's no escaping it. What we always look
for in an image is sex, particularly the female sex. This is not only
the Origin of the World (Courbet) but also the origin of the visual.
So, why not go there directly? Let's take pictures of sex! Let's
surrender fully to the scopic drive! This is a "Real Erotic"
principle, and Catherine Millet's perpetual coital "acting out" is
the equivalent of this principle at the level of the body. Since
everyone dreams of a limitless sexual use of the body, let's go for
it!
No more seduction, no more desire, no more ~jouissance~ even. All we
have is an endless repetition, a general accumulation which marks the
superiority of quantity over quality. Out with seduction! There is
only one question left, whispered by a man in a woman's ear: "What
are you doing after the orgy?" But this question is useless. She can
no longer think past the orgy. She is beyond the end. She has reached
the point where all processes have gone exponential and can only
reproduce themselves ad infinitum. This is what Alfred Jarry
predicted in his ~Overmale (Surmale)~. Once you have reached a
critical point, you can endlessly make love. You have become a sexual
machine. When sex is nothing more than a matter of sex-processing,
then it has reached its exponential, transfinite (transfini) degree.
But this does not mean that it has fulfilled its objective: to
exhaust sex, to go to the end of its process. This is impossible. And
this last impossibility is what is left of seduction and its revenge
(sexuality's own revenge). It's all sexuality has to turn against its
unscrupulous users, unscrupulous about themselves, their desires, and
their pleasure.
"To think like a woman undresses," Bataille used to say. Perhaps, but
Catherine Millet's naivete is to think that people undress in order
to get naked, to reach the naked truth about sex and about the world.
People take off their clothes to be revealed (pour apparaitre). But
not to be revealed in their nakedness like truth (can anyone still
believe that truth remains when its veil of secrecy is lifted?) but
to join the realm of appearances, of seduction. That's totally
different.
The modern, disenchanted interpretation of the body as something
which cannot wait to be undressed and of sexuality as a desire which
wants to be acted out and find pleasure is misconstrued. Cultures
which privilege masks, veils, adornments affirm the opposite: the
body is a metaphor. The genuine objects of desire and pleasure are
the marks and signs that pull the body away from its nakedness, its
naturalness, its "truth," and the entire reality of its physical
presence. Everywhere seduction pulls objects away from their truths
(including the truth about sexual value). When thought lifts its
veil, it is not in order to be seen naked or to reveal a secret
buried for a long time. Thought lifts its veil to reveal the body as
a definite enigma, as a secret, a pure object whose mystery will
never be solved and has no need to be discovered.
Under these conditions, an Afghan woman hidden behind a moucharabieh
window[6] or another woman covered with a metallic net on the cover
of ~Elle~ present contrasting alternatives to the image of Catherine
Millet's wild virgin. It is the opposition between an excess of
secrecy and an excess of indecency.
In a sense, this kind of indecency, this radical obscenity found in
~~Loft Story~, is yet another veil. It is a final, unremovable veil
which remains after all previous covers have been lifted. We want to
reach the extreme, attain the paroxysm of exhibition, achieve total
nudity, find absolute reality, consume live and raw violence (au
direct et a l'ecorche vif). We'll never succeed. It's impossible! The
fortress of obscenity cannot be brought down. But, paradoxically,
such a lost quest helps to resurrect the basic rule of the game: the
rule of the sublime, the rule of secrecy, of seduction (always
tracked down through the endless lifting of covers).
So, why not propose a reverse hypothesis (opposed to the idea of
voyeurism and collective stupidity)? Why not suggest that what people
want, what we all want in our quest which inevitably stops in front
of the fortress of obscenity, is precisely to gain the sense
(pressentir) that there is nothing to see, that we'll never find the
final clue? What we want is to verify (by negation) the ultimate
power of seduction. This is a desperate search, but experimental
reality is always desperate. What ~Loft Story~ claims to prove is
that human beings are indeed social beings... but nothing is so sure.
What Catherine Millet claims to demonstrate is that she is a sexual
being... which is not a sure thing at all. What these experiments
confirm is merely the presence of the conditions for the experiment
(simply pushed to their limit). The system is perhaps best decoded
through its excesses, but it is the same system everywhere. Cruelty
is the same everywhere. Going back to Duchamp, we can sum it all up
as a case of "dust breeding."
Notes
1. A translation of "L'Elevage de Poussiere," ~Liberation~, May 29,
2001. The title is borrowed from one of Marcel Duchamp's works
(1920). "Dust Breeding" is also the title of one of Man Ray's
photographs.
2. ~Loft Story~ is the latest reality-TV sensation in France. The
premise of this "Big Brother" like real-time game show on the M6
network is to lock 11 young French adults (in their early twenties;
there are 6 men and 5 women) for ten weeks in an apartment with 26
round-the-clock surveillance cameras. They are constantly being
filmed, and on the day the show airs on M6, viewers vote to eject one
of the tenants (similar to the "Big Brother" show on US and British
television). The idea is to end up with two participants, a male and
a female, who will win a $407,000 house, but only if they can stay
together for another 6 months under the 24 hour a day surveillance of
the live-cams (Translator's note).
3. Catherine Millet is an art critic and art philosophy scholar who
recently published ~La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M.~ (The Sexual Life
of Catherine M.) (Paris: Seuil, 2001), a pornographic autobiography.
In this book, the narrative is nothing but a succession of extremely
graphic sexual acts. The book presents itself as an unmediated
pornographic scene where the sexual imagery is privileged over
narrative coherence (Translator's note).
4. The French sentence reads: "L 'exclusion interactice, c'est le
comble! Decidee en commun, consommee avec enthousiasme."
5. Baudrillard's play on vivisection and sex.
6. Moucharabiehs are the thick wooden windows found in Middle Eastern
countries. They allow outside light to filter into the room while
preventing outsiders from seeing inside.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Translated by Francois Debrix, Miami.
Francois Debrix teaches International Relations at
Florida International University in Miami.
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