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ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 4, Number 2 (July, 2007).
Jean Baudrillard’s Philosophy of Magic1
Dr. Jonathan Smith
(School of Applied Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia).
I. Introduction
Jean Baudrillard can be called “the Sphinx
of contemporary Philosophy” because he has blended the form of an old
metaphysics with the face of a new analysis and asked us testing questions from
those hybrid lips. For example, in Fatal Strategies, the Baudrillard
Sphinx asks: “What if even physical laws, the surest guarantee of the effect of
irreversible causality in the universe, are slipping so gently into the
reversible?”2 His
answers to that question speak of magic, destiny and irony, thereby provoking a
further question (Is he serious?) and highlighting one of his most intriguing
interview statements: “I do not claim to be tremendously serious”, Baudrillard
once told Anne Laurent (1991), “but there are nevertheless some philosophically
serious things in my work”.3
Gleaning a magical logic from the
critique of Causal Law may be one of those “philosophically serious things”,
but most scholars ignore it – despite Baudrillard’s engagement with causal
critique in Fatal Strategies (1983) and his exposition of its magical
corollary in The Evil Demon of Images (1984, 1987). Magic has haunted
Baudrillard’s work ever since he drew attention to it in The Consumer
Society (1970).4
Scholars like Morris, Wernick, Genosko and Rajan have noted how his magic
relates to simulation, seduction and reversibility.5
However, we have neglected to study how he uses the critique of Causal Law,
codified by David Hume, to underwrite a Gnostic philosophy of magic.
This paper will correct that neglect by
arguing that Baudrillard’s “metaphysical turn” – dated by Kellner (1989) to Fatal
Strategies – was shaped by a critique of causation that allowed him to
formulate a metaphysics of magic marked by Manichean Gnosticism.6
II. Hume and Baudrillard: Causal Law Bedeviled
Baudrillard does not mention Hume by name
in Fatal Strategies. However, surely his reference to “the first
revolution” in Science as the “calling into question the determinist principle
of causality” must refer to Hume's critique of Causal Law in A Treatise of
Human Nature (1739)?7 After
all, Hume’s critique was indeed a revolutionary “first”; provoking Immanuel
Kant into writing his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) – a book that
helped move Science beyond Isaac Newton’s dogmatic rules on Causal Law.8
And furthermore: Baudrillard uses Hume’s most salient distinction (i.e. between
Beginning and Cause) for his own critique of causation in Fatal Strategies.9
In Baudrillard's critique, Good and Evil
precede a destined “magical seduction of the world” – a fated world of
reality-as-illusion wherein “everything was subverted from the very beginning”
because it began via an antagonistic intermingling of the original Duality:
“Imagine a good resplendent with all the power of Evil: this is God, a perverse
god creating the world on a dare and calling on it to destroy itself”.10
In this Manichean genesis, Gnostics reckon that sparks of Good were trapped in
us by Evil. However, those sparks can be freed by a meta-rational gnosis or by
magic - to reverse evil creation and restore God to full purity.11
Here, we note from Marcel Mauss’s A General Theory of Magic (1902) that France’s medieval Manicheans (Cathari) were said to be sorcerers who used magic in response
to their 12th century world.12 “Oh
yes, I love the world of the Cathars because I am Manichean”, Baudrillard told Der
Spiegel in 2002, referring to the legacy of Persian prophet Mani (216-276 C.E). Does this mean that Jean Baudrillard is some sort of contemporary Cathari? ‘J.B. at 77’, a simulacrum commissioned to illustrate this paper, is offered here as a way to test that
question.13
J.B. at 77 (Richard
McLean)
For Baudrillard, our subverted world
contains “a possible reversibility of physical laws” and, as such, anticipates
a “de-escalation of rational causes and an inverse escalation of magical
linkage”.14 Is
such a world logically possible? And if it is, how can it be gleaned from Hume:
an Empiricist who was skeptical of metaphysics?
In Book 1, Part 3, Section 3 of the Treatise,
Hume examined that most metaphysical idea of all: Causation. He argued that
Cause and Effect can be thought about separately (without contradiction) and,
furthermore, that a rational distinction can be drawn between Cause and
Beginning. He then used the logical law of Non-Contradiction to show that
Causal Law (i.e. every thing that is, must begin from a cause) cannot be
necessarily true. Why not? Well, because its contrary (i.e. some thing could
begin without a cause) can be conceived without falling into contradiction.15
And yet, this logical point tends to
privilege our Rationality over our Experience of the world. In our experience,
we observe apparent linkages of cause-and-effect (e.g. bombs cause the effect
of damage). Via inductive logic, we assume that such linkages will happen again
in the future. However, as Hume pointed out, this assumption arises from
contingent experience and is based on probability, not necessity. Thus: even
apparent causal linkages, observed often, cannot prove a universal Causal Law.16
Even so, Kant attacked Hume’s critique
for being a kind of parasite that can only live logically by presupposing the
very principle (i.e. causation) whose necessity is denied.17
Kant, however, failed to decisively ‘kill’ Hume’s critique, leaving Isaiah Berlin in The Age of Enlightenment to conclude that: “the failure to provide an
answer to Hume's problem (attempts to do so have filled many volumes) has been
called a scandal to philosophy”.18 And so
we may now ask: does this skeptical scandal allow the possibility of magic to
emerge? Yes, suggests Baudrillard, but before detailing his argument, we need
to discern what he means by “magic”. Here, it is appropriate that we use a source
that he used: Sigmund Freud.
III. Contagious Magic
In The Consumer Society and later
in Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard apparently drew on the essay, “Animism,
Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought” from Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913).
For example, in Fatal Strategies, he echoes Freud’s account of magic by
noting that the Manichean worldview of the persecuted Cathars was marked by:
“the hypothesis of the derisiveness and the fundamental unreality of the world…
and its corollary, the omnipotence of thought”. And furthermore: “All that
denies and defies the real is certainly the closer for it to making a world out
of thought alone”.19
In his essay, Freud drew upon James
Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), to argue that the category of
contagious magic is really an extreme form of Rationalism, wherein: “Objects as
such are overshadowed by the ideas representing them; what takes place in the
latter must also happen to the former, and the relations which exist between
ideas are also postulated as to things”.20 Freud’s
account of magic as a form of Rationalism resonates with Santamaria’s telling
analysis (1979) of Baudrillard’s method in his texts leading up to Fatal
Strategies and The Evil Demon of Images:
One wonders,
whether Baudrillard’s analysis really breaks with
Western
rationalism or if, on the contrary, it is not one of its most remarkable
blossoms…What we have here is an intemperate and perhaps even perverse
rationalism: the whole work is developed within
the presupposition of dualism…one can situate Baudrillard’s
work
within the long tradition of Gnostic Manichaeism.21
However, to fully appreciate how Baudrillard puts
this method (and its Manichean logic) into magical action, we must examine the
two texts in more detail. In Fatal Strategies, he dares to challenge the
presupposed “irreversibility of the chain of cause and effect” wherein “cause
and effect cannot be considered as equivalent and interchangeable terms”:
Until
now, reversibility has in effect remained metaphysical...But it may now be in
the process of disturbing the physical order and shaking it to its very
foundations. With it disappears the rational principle that prevents the effect
from turning back on the cause to cancel it out; it prevents the effect from
being the cancellation of the cause – or prevents there never having been
causes, but a pure and simple chain of effects. Reversibility kills any
determinist (or indeterminist) principle of causality in ovum, in the egg. And
when I say 'in the egg', I mean it in the sense of the riddle of the chicken
and the egg – which comes first? - the famous aporia of causal linkage; even
the causal order does not escape parodic circularity which is somehow the revenge
of the reversible order.22
One logical consequence of his analysis is this: an
Original Effect could possibly be the very beginning of everything, with other
effects (and apparent “causes”) coming thereafter. In other words, ‘Original
Effect’ can be posited as an alternative to ‘Original Causation’, with both
forms being equally possible, in a strictly logical sense, as metaphysical
postulates.
IV. Thought as Original Effect
By assuming Hume is right, Baudrillard
suggests that if: (a) “cause” and “effect” can be thought of separately (i.e.
as not necessarily related) and if (b) “cause” and “beginning” can be conceived
of as separate concepts without contradiction, then: (c) a causeless effect can
also be coherently conceived. For instance, it is possible that thought itself,
even intermingled good and evil as “the omnipotence of thought”, began as a
causeless effect and then replicated itself into a chain of effects which
became our reality.
In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard
calls this possibility: “the fascinating imagination of a universe entirely
ruled by a divine or diabolical chain of willed coincidences, that is, a
universe where we seduce events, where we induce them and make them happen by
the omnipotence of thought.” He then links this metaphysics of magic to a
formula for Fate which exploits his causal critique: “This is the definition of
fate: the precession of the effects over their very causes. So all things
happen before having happened”.23 Here,
the logical possibility of Thought as fated – yet causeless – Original Effect
carries the corollary of predestined contagious magic, with the effects of
thought beckoning other effects; even reality as a plague of effects.
On the other hand, if Original Causation
is postulated, then we get the conventional order of cause-and-effect: an order
that precludes contagious magic as “a pure and simple chain of effects”. In
other words, Baudrillard’s Causal Critique produces an antinomy of pure reason,
wherein ‘Original Effect’ and ‘Original Causation’ can each generate valid
deductions, but with contradictory conclusions. However, for him, this antinomy
of genesis simply underlines the Manichean ontology of the world:
This
reversibility of causal order – the reversion of cause on effect, the
precession and triumph of effect over cause – is fundamental. You might call it
primordial, fatal and original. It is the reversibility of destiny. It somehow
represents a mortal danger, precisely because it leaves no place for chance
(chance can only be deduced, a contrario, on an order of causality). This is
why our system, essentially Western, has replaced it with another precession,
that of the cause to the effect, and more recently with the precession of
models, the precession of simulacra to things themselves, whose apparition they
conjure up in a different mode. Precession against precession – we need to see
the challenge that opposes the two orders. There is no place for chance here,
that is, for a neutral and indeterminate substance. The world is Manichean; in
it two orders are absolutely opposed. Nothing is determined, but everything is
antagonistic. This is why we have to go much further than a simple crisis of
causality.24
Furthermore, according to Baudrillard, the two orders
of metaphysical precession generate two forms of magic: (1) a mechanical form
based on simulation, wherein before-the-fact models “conjure up” referents; and
(2) a more ancient form arising from original seduction and thus based on the
assumption that: “the world, its reality, is made up only of signs” and that
those signs “do not refer to any sort of ‘reality’ or ‘referent’ or ‘signified’
whatsoever…on the contrary, reality is the effect of the sign”, as he notes in The
Evil Demon of Images.25
Those last few quotes suggest that
Baudrillard’s prelude to magic in Fatal Strategies became a philosophy
of magic in The Evil Demon of Images. In retrospect, this development is
unsurprising. After all, in its initial form as a university lecture and
interview (1984), The Evil Demon of Images was Baudrillard’s first work
after the publication of Fatal Strategies in 1983.26
Now out-of-print, The Evil Demon of
Images (1987) has two accounts of magic woven into its twin texts. A useful
way to understand Baudrillard’s ‘philosophy of two magics’ is to quote passages
from those texts; thereby helping us to read the man “in his own terms”, as Butler recommends.27
V. The Anticipation of Reality by Images
In his lecture at the University of
Sydney (25 July 1984), Baudrillard ran the risk of sounding like a sorcerer by
making this audacious claim in light of Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) famous
essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936):
Above
all, it is the reference principle of images which must be doubted, this
strategy by means of which they always appear to refer to a real world, to real
objects, and to reproduce something which is logically and chronologically
anterior to themselves. None of this is true. As simulacra, images precede the
real to the extent that they invert the causal and logical order of the real
and its reproduction.28
This bold claim can be read as an extension of his
point in Fatal Strategies about “the precession of models, the
precession of simulacra to things themselves, whose apparition they conjure up
in a different mode”. And he didn’t stop there. Trading once more on the
implications of Hume’s critique of Causal Law, he asked his audience:
As for
the anticipation of reality by images, the precession of images and media in
relation to events, such that the connection between cause and effect becomes
scrambled and it becomes impossible to tell which is the effect of the other –
what better example than the nuclear accident at Harrisburg, a ‘real’ incident
which happened just after the release of The China Syndrome?29
Shortly thereafter, Baudrillard answered his own
question by coyly contending that the coincidence between film and reality can
be readily interpreted by referring to contagious magic:
Without
examining any magical links between simulacrum and reality, it is clear that The
China Syndrome is not unrelated to the ‘real’ accident at Harrisburg, not
by a causal logic but by those relations of contagion and unspoken analogy
which link the real, models and simulacra: the induction of the nuclear
incident at Harrisburg by the film corresponds, with disquieting obviousness,
to the induction of the incident by TV in the film. A strange precession of a
film before the real, the most astonishing we have seen: reality corresponding
point by point to the simulacra…the real so arranged itself, in the image of
the film, as to produce a simulation of catastrophe.30
This daring application of Freud’s theory of magic to
contemporary media and events is consistent with Baudrillard’s antinomy of
genesis in Fatal Strategies. He gives “relations of contagion” their
metaphysical due, together with the also acknowledged “causal logic”.
VI. Reality Is The Effect of the Sign
It is not until “An Interview with Jean
Baudrillard” that we see his first exposition of contagious magic in a Gnostic
mode. When interviewed by Cholodenko, Colless and Kelly at the Bondi Hotel in Sydney on 12 August 1984, he interpreted the Manichean tradition as a magical matrix
premised on a metaphysics of Original Seduction or “the logic of illusion”:
What
the heretics posited was that the very creation of the world, hence the reality
of the world, was the result of the existence of the evil demon. The function
of God, then, was really to try to repudiate this evil phantom – that was the
real reason why God had to exist at all….(so) according to Manichaeism, the
reality of the world is a total illusion; it is something which has been
tainted from the very beginning; it is something which has been seduced by a
sort of irreal principle since time immemorial. In this case what one has to
evoke is precisely this absolute power of illusion – and this is indeed exactly
what the heretics did. They based their theologies on the very negation of the
real. Their principal and primary convention was that of the non-reality, hence
the non-rationality, of the world. They believed that the world, its reality,
is made up only of signs – and that it was governed solely through the power of
the mind. This idea of the world as being constituted only by signs is, if you
like, some sort of magic thinking – and indeed it was condemned as such.31
Here, it is all: “according to”; “the heretics”;
“them” etc. However, later in the interview, Baudrillard apparently identifies
with this worldview and gives us a personal exposition of its magical form:
In the
world which I evoke, the one where illusion or magic thought plays a key role,
the signs evolve, they concatenate and produce themselves, always one upon the
other - so that there is absolutely no basic reference which can sustain them.
Thus they do not refer to any sort of ‘reality’ or ‘referent’ or ‘signified’
whatsoever. So in this situation what we have is the sign alone; and it is the
power which is proper to the sign itself, it is the pure strategy of the sign
itself that governs the appearance of things…In other words, for me the sign
is, if you like, without recourse. There is no basic reserve, no ‘gold
standard’ to the sign – no basic reserve of reference from which the sign can
be recovered or accommodated. On the contrary, reality is the effect of the
sign. The system of reference is only the result of the power of the sign
itself.32
Then, towards the end of the interview, Baudrillard
clarifies the difference between the “two magics” by locating them in a
metaphysical history that distinguishes Manichean magic from “post-illusion” or
simulated magic:
There
is an historical evolution, which begins and also culminates with the phase
where signs, as I said, lead from one another according to the logic of
illusion. So this was indeed a first stage – not necessarily a chronological ‘first’
stage but certainly a logical one. And then the phase of rationality followed,
with the production of the reality-effect by the sign…Is this evolution an
historical one? I do not think it is. It is, rather, a metaphysical one: the
universe of the media which we are currently immersed in is not the magical
universe or the cruel universe which we had at an anterior stage, where the
sign was operational purely on the basis of its own functioning as sign. With
the advent of the media, it seems to me that we have lost that prior state of
total illusion, of the sign as magic. We are, in other words, in that state of
‘hyperreality’ as I have called it…It is as if we are now in a shameful and
sinful state, a post-illusion state.33
VII. The Magic of Nonexistence
Now, that is a remarkably singular
history of signs as magical forms, but it also suggests a contradiction within
Baudrillard’s philosophy of magic. We know from Burkitt’s The Religion of
the Manichees (1925) that Manicheans work towards the gradual reversal of
reality: a reversal back to when Good (Light) and Bad (Darkness) were
co-infinitely pure forms instead of being intermingled as the Evil world.34
However, if reality-as-illusion must be overcome, why is Baudrillard’s “post-illusion
state” also “a shameful and sinful state”?
An answer lies in the Manichean paradox
that concerns him: illusion now (magic) must manipulate illusion then (original
seduction) to fulfill Fate. Or: “the logic of illusion” (magic) must play with
“total illusion” (the effects of original seduction) in order to complete the
reversibility of Destiny.35 This
out-seducing of the Evil Principle would be very difficult in a “post-illusion
state”. Thus, for an active Manichean, it would indeed be “a shameful and
sinful state” – i.e. the state of being entangled within reality-as-illusion
without recourse to magic for liberation. Yet, we must ask: contagious magic
may be possible, but how can it possibly ‘reverse reality’? Baudrillard
suggests an answer in his review of Calvino’s novel, The Nonexistent Knight.
In this early work, Baudrillard suggests
that reality-reversal may involve a final, terrible magic: “the magic of
nonexistence” or our disappearance into “a schema of radical alienation”.36
It is a theme that echoes in The Evil Demon of Images, where disaster
movies are said to mask a metaphysical desire:
Our
desire is rather for something which no longer takes place on a human scale,
for some anterior or ulterior mystery: what will the earth be like when we are
no longer on it? In a word, we dream of
our disappearance and of seeing the world in its inhuman purity (which is
precisely not the state of nature).37
In short, Baudrillard’s penchant for “the omnipotence
of thought” (and the reversal of causal order) may be a way to evoke pure God
and beckon back into being a pre-human epoch when Good wasn’t entangled with
Bad.38
Thus, in an echo from The Evil Demon of Images
in The Perfect Crime (1996), he evokes a magic of reversal and
disappearance in a Gnostic mode:
What is
the most radical metaphysical desire, the deepest spiritual joy? Not to be
there, but to see. Like God. For God, precisely, does not exist, and this
enables him to watch the world in his absence. We too would love, above all, to
expunge man from the world in order to see it in its original purity. We
glimpse, in this, an inhuman possibility, which would restore the pluperfect
form of the world, without the illusion of the mind or even that of the senses.
An exact and inhuman hyperreality, where we could at last delight in our
absence and the dizzying joys of disincarnation. If I can see the world after
the point of my disappearance, that means I am immortal.39
Even so, there are missing links in the logic. In all
of this, he fails to show: (a) how the magic of disappearance can be deduced
from Original Effect and (b) how Destiny can be deduced from his presupposition of Dualism.
Baudrillard’s texts about reality-reversal
thus fail to form a fully coherent philosophy of magic. Even so, a Sphinx in
his work still whispers this testing question: Are these texts code for the
magic of nonexistence and, if so, are they one of his most “philosophically
serious things” – a contemporary Cathari cryptogram for endura or sacred
suicide?40
An answer may be sought by studying
Baudrillard’s idea of Disappearance as challenge and analyzing its role in the
duel between existence and being that marks his Dualist logic as a Manichean philosopher
seeking God.41
Jonathan Smith lectures in Philosophy at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He is currently seeking a postdoctoral position (teaching and
research) that will allow him to continue his interest in Baudrillard Studies.
He has recently joined the Editorial Board of IJBS.
Endnotes:
1 A draft of this paper was read on 6
September 2006 at Engaging Baudrillard: An International Conference, University of Wales (Swansea), 4 – 6 September 2006. I thank those who heard the paper and
probed it with questions, especially Mike Gane, who noted links between the
paper and elements of Baudrillard’s own conference paper, “On Disappearance”:
read later that same day, in Baudrillard’s absence, by Professor Gane.
2 Jean
Baudrillard. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W.G.J.
Niesluchowski and edited by Jim Fleming. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999:164. An
answer calibrated to magic, irony and destiny as “absolute necessity” (page
150) is suggested by Baudrillard via his critique of chance, probability and
causality as models marked by contingency and calculation. See: Fatal
Strategies, pages 144-166, especially pages 150-154 and 164-166.
3 Jean Baudrillard. “This Beer Isn’t a Beer: Interview with
Anne Laurent”. Translated by Mike Gane and G. Salemohamed. Mike Gane (Ed.). Baudrillard
Live: Selected Interviews. London: Routledge, 1993:189.
4 Jean Baudrillard. “The Miraculous
Status of Consumption” in The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures.
Translated by Chris Turner. London: Sage, 1998:31-36.
5 For insights into magic, seduction
and simulation in Baudrillard’s thought, see: Meagan Morris. “Room 101 or A Few
Worst Things in the World” in A. Frankovits (Editor). Seduced and Abandoned:
the Baudrillard Scene. Glebe: Stonemoss Services, 1984:93-96; 103-104. Also
see: Andrew Wernick. “Post-Marx: theological themes in Baudrillard’s America”. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (Editors). Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism
and Religion. London: Routledge, 1992:68-69. For a discussion of magic and
seduction in Baudrillard and Pierre Klossowski, see: Gary Genosko. Baudrillard
and Signs: Signification Ablaze. London: Routledge, 1994:31. And for
salient comment on how magic relates to reversibility, pure appearance and
Manichaeism, see: Tilottama
Rajan. “Baudrillard and Deconstruction”. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 1, Number 1, January 2004.
http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/rajan.htm
6 Douglas Kellner. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to
Postmodernism and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989:154. Thirteen years before magic “went
metaphysical” for Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies (1983), he had
compared it with the logic of consumption. He was, however, careful to keep
magic grounded in empirical reality and couched in Marxian terms:
Consumption is governed by a form of magical thinking; daily
life is governed by a mentality based on miraculous thinking, a primitive
mentality, in so far as that has been defined as being based on a belief in the
omnipotence of thoughts (though what we have in this case is a belief in the
omnipotence of signs)…This does not mean that our society is not firstly,
objectively and decisively a society of production, an order of production, and
therefore the site of an economic and political strategy. But it means that
there is entangled with that order an order of consumption, which is an order
of the manipulation of signs. To that extent, we may draw a (no doubt
venturesome) parallel with magical thought, for both of these live off signs
and under the protection of signs (See: Jean Baudrillard. The Consumer
Society: Myths and Structures (c 1970). Translated by Chris Turner. London: Sage, 1998:31-33).
Baudrillard’s guarded
sympathy for magic is thus quite evident in The Consumer Society. Three
years later he defended magic (as symbolic exchange) against Godelier’s “vulgar
re-writing of magic” in Marxian ink. See: Jean Baudrillard. The Mirror of
Production. Translated by Mark Poster. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975:81-84. Later (in Seduction, 1979), Baudrillard
noted: … “the power of the insignificant signifier” and its magical
implications – an insight that helped him set up his philosophy of magic in Fatal
Strategies and The Evil Demon of Images. In particular, within Seduction, Baudrillard
anticipated his account of Manichean magic in The Evil Demon of Images
by noting that magic trades on seductive “signs without referents” (See: Jean Baudrillard.
Seduction (c 1979).
Translated by Brian Singer. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990:74; 75-76).
Furthermore, Baudrillard anticipated his ‘causal critique, thus
magic’ argument in Fatal Strategies and The Evil Demon of Images
by arguing that: “Magic…has nothing to do with linear relations of cause and
effect”. See: Jean Baudrillard. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990:139.
7 Jean Baudrillard. Fatal Strategies. Translated by
Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski and edited by Jim Fleming. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999:163. For another intimation of Hume’s critique and its
influence, see page 145.
8 E.g. Rule 2: “To the same natural
effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes”. See: Isaac
Newton. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (c 1687).
Translated by Andrew Motte and revised by Florian Cajori. Volume 34 of Great
Books of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica / The University of Chicago, 1952:270-271.
9 Jean Baudrillard. Fatal
Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski and
edited by Jim Fleming. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999:162. Here, Baudrillard
implies that a beginning can even precede a cause.
10 Ibid.: 151, 183, 10. See also: Jean Baudrillard. “Forget
Baudrillard” in Forget Foucault/Forget Baudrillard. Translated by Phil
Beitchman, Lee Hildreth and Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987:98.
Faced with this provocative hypothesis, we can argue about whether Baudrillard
is writing as a “metaphysician” or a “pataphysician”, after Alfred Jarry
famously defined pataphysics as: “the science of imaginary solutions”.
Baudrillard reckons both terms apply to his work, so a solution may rest in
Kellner’s suggestion (1989:162) that pataphysics is “a specific type of
metaphysics”. For a discussion by Baudrillard of these two related terms, see:
Nicholas Zurbrugg (Ed.). Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artifact. Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1997:41-42 and “Forget Baudrillard”: 81-91.
Faced with
new scholarly interest in his Manichean penchant, Baudrillard has apparently tried
to step back from it, insisting that: “The idea of evil as a malign force, a
maleficent agency, a deliberate perversion of the order of the world, is a
deep-seated superstition”. See: Jean Baudrillard. The Intelligence of Evil
Or the Lucidity Pact.
Translated by Chris Turner. Oxford: Berg, 2005:160.
Here, it is useful to
compare such atypical disclaimers with Baudrillard’s otherwise consistent
expositions of Manichean metaphysics. For further textual examples of such
work, see: Jean Baudrillard. The Evil Demon of Images. Translated by
Paul Patton, Paul Foss and Philippe Tanguy. Sydney: Power Publications,
1987:44-46; Jean Baudrillard. The Ecstasy of Communication. Translated
by Bernard and Caroline Schutze and edited by Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988:71-75; Jean Baudrillard. Impossible Exchange.
Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2001:90-102; and: Jean Baudrillard.
Fragments: Conversations with François L’Yvonnnet. Translated by Chris Turner with a Foreward by Mike
Gane. London: Routledge, 2004:59-60.
11 Hans Jonas. The Gnostic Religion: the Message of the
Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963:
226-236; 44-45. Baudrillard also notes this magical tradition of
reality-reversal; hearing its echo in contemporary consumer society:
We know that, in its myths, magical thought seeks to conjure
away change and history. In a way, the generalized consumption of images, of
facts, of information aims also to conjure away the real with the signs of the
real, to conjure away history with the signs of change (See: Jean Baudrillard. The Consumer
Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Sage, 1998:33).
12 Marcel Mauss. A General Theory
of Magic. Translated by Robert Brain. London: Routledge, 1972:38. Runciman,
however, reckons: “Though the Dualist Tradition had its gnosis, it was not an
occultist religion…Catharism had nothing to do with Magic”. See: Steven
Runciman. The Medieval Manichee. London: Cambridge University Press,
1947:179; 187. Jonas,
however, notes the role of Gnostic magic in liberating God from Evil. See: Hans
Jonas. The Gnostic Religion: the Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings
of Christianity, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963: 44-45. Baudrillard (1987:44)
apparently intervenes in this dispute by insisting that Manichaeism involves
“some sort of magic thinking”.
13 Jean Baudrillard. “This is the
Fourth World War: The Der Spiegel Interview with Jean Baudrillard”. Translated
by Samir Gandesha and with Introduction by Gary Genosko. International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, January 2004.
http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/spiegel.htm
“J.B. at
77”, was commissioned by Jonathan Smith and first displayed at the Engaging
Baudrillard conference to illustrate a reading of this paper. Drawn by Richard
McLean [richie@richiemclean.com],
“J.B. at 77” was conceived as an interpretation of: (a) Baudrillard’s admission
that: “Oh yes, I love the world of the Cathars because I am Manichean”; (b) his
related idea that: “Duality is primary. It is the original form – as difficult
to conceive as the hypothesis of Evil” and (c) his contention that: suicide is
“the form of subversion itself” when facing “death-control” by Church and
State. See: (a) endnote 13; (b) Jean Baudrillard. Impossible Exchange.
Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2001:90 and (c) Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic
Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant and with Introduction
by Mike Gane. London: Sage, 1993:174-175.
14 Jean Baudrillard. Fatal Strategies. Translated by
Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski and edited by Jim Fleming. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999:163;152; 148-151. For a cogent overview and analysis of
Reversibility in Baudrillard’s oeuvre, see: Gerry Coulter. “Reversibility:
Baudrillard’s ‘One Great Thought’”. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 1, Number 2, July 2004.
http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol1_2/coulter.htm
15 David Hume. A Treatise of Human
Nature: being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into
moral subjects. Edited with an Introduction by D. G. C. Macnabb. London: Collins, 1962:124-126. To illuminate Baudrillard’s apparent use of Hume’s salient
distinction between beginning and cause, I note the following passage:
It is a general maxim in philosophy, that whatever begins to
exist, must have a cause of existence....But here is an argument, which proves
at once, that the forgoing proposition is neither intuitively or demonstrably
certain. We can never demonstrate the necessity of a cause to every new
existence, or new modification of existence, without showing at the same time
the impossibility there is, that anything can ever begin to exist without some
productive principle; and where the latter proposition cannot be proved, we
must despair of ever being able to prove the former. Now that the latter
proposition is utterly incapable of a demonstrative proof, we may satisfy
ourselves by considering, that as all distinct ideas are separable from each
other, and as the ideas of cause and effect are evidently distinct, it will be
easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment, and existent
the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a cause or productive
principle. The separation therefore of the idea of a cause from that of a
beginning of existence, is plainly possible for the imagination; and
consequently the actual separation of these objects is so far possible, that it
implies no contradiction nor absurdity; and is therefore incapable of being
refuted by any reasoning from mere ideas, without which it is impossible to
demonstrate the necessity of a cause (Hume, Treatise, Book One, Part
Three, Section Three).
16 Ibid.: 133-140 (Treatise,
Book One, Part Three, Section Six). Hume made similar points in Parts One and
Two of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Of facts
founded on apparent cause-and-effect, Hume noted: “The contrary of every matter
of fact is still possible because it can never imply a contradiction” (Enquiry,
Part One). See: A.K. Bierman & James A. Gould (Editors). Philosophy for
a New Generation. New York: Macmillan, 1977:292-293.
17 (a) Hume’s
analysis persuaded Kant to re-think Causation; understanding it anew as our
pragmatic assumption (or transcendental presupposition) about the world, rather
than insisting upon it dogmatically as a necessary force within the world. (b)
Kant also argued that causal critique cannot be validly used for metaphysical
speculation “outside all possible experience” because such thinking generates
contradictions (antinomies).
For (a)
see: Immanuel Kant.
“Transcendental Doctrine of Method”, Chapter One, Section Two of Critique of
Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1950:
606-612. For (b) see: Ibid.:409-415 (“The Third Antinomy of Pure
Reason”) and page 483. For a summary critique of Hume’s arguments, see: Ibid.:44-45
(Part Two of “Introduction’”):
The very concept of a cause so manifestly contains the
concept of a necessity of connection with an effect and of the strict
universality of the rule, that the concept would be altogether lost if we
attempted to derive it, as Hume has done, from a repeated association of that
which happens with that which precedes, and from a custom of connecting
representations, a custom originating in this repeated association, and
constituting therefore a merely subjective necessity. Even without appealing to
such examples, it is possible to show that pure a priori principles are
indispensable for the possibility of experience, and so to prove their
existence a priori. For whence could experience derive its certainty, if all
the rules, according to which it proceeds, were always themselves empirical,
and therefore contingent? Such rules could hardly be regarded as first
principles (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Introduction”).
18 Isaiah Berlin. The Age of
Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979:185.
19 Jean Baudrillard. Fatal
Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski and
edited by Jim Fleming. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999:80-81. See also: pages 74,
148 and 160-161. And for his early use of Freud’s concept, see: Jean Baudrillard. The Consumer
Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Sage, 1998:31.
20 Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo. New York: Vintage, 1946:111. See also: 98-110.
21 Ulysses
Santamaria. “Jean Baudrillard: Critique of a Critique”. Translated by Jeremy
Macdonald. Critique of Anthropology. Volume 4, Numbers 13-14,
1979:192-193. Here, we
note that Santamaria’s salient “presupposition of dualism” charge is confirmed
by Baudrillard's own reference to “my trancendental Manicheism” – see: Jean
Baudrillard. Fragments: Conversations With François L’Yvonnet.
Translated by Chris Turner and “Foreward” by Mike Gane. London: Routledge,
2004:81. For an analysis of Baudrillard’s long engagement with Manichean
Gnosticism, see: Jonathan Smith. “The Gnostic Baudrillard: A Philosophy of
Terrorism Seeking Pure Appearance”. International Journal of Baudrillard
Studies, Volume 1, Number 2, July 2004.
http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol1_2/smith.htm
22 Jean Baudrillard. Fatal Strategies. Translated by
Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski and edited by Jim Fleming. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999:84.
23 Ibid,:160-161. Here, Baudrillard’s
apparent argument can be expressed in a syllogistic form: If (a) Thought is
Original Effect and (b) Fate is effect-preceding-cause, then (c) Fate is
Thought or: Fated Thought as thoughts preceding events as their ‘cause’. In
other words: some sort of ‘magic’. See also: Jean Baudrillard. The Evil
Demon of Images. Translated by Paul Patton, Paul Foss and Philippe Tanguy. Sydney: Power Publications, 1987:43-52.
Here, Baudrillard’s suggestion that Thought (as Original
Effect) implies predestined contagious magic can be illuminated by Hickey’s
useful distinction between Fate and Destiny:
Fate is a force or power that consciously or blindly imposes
a rigid necessity upon all occurrences in advance of their happening… Destiny
is not different from Fate but rather is Fate operative in individual
instances; however unlike Fate; destiny does not preclude a rational motive for
that which is destined, although its rationale may not be perceived (See: J.T.
Hickey. “Fatalism” in Paul Kevin Meagher (Ed.). Encyclopedic Dictionary of
Religion (Volume F-N). Washington: Corpus Publications, 1979:1323.
For those who reckon that thought must necessarily have a
thinker, see: Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by
R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 2003:46-47:
When I analyze the event expressed in the sentence ‘I
think’, I acquire a series of rash assertions which are difficult, perhaps
impossible, to prove – for example, that it is I who think, that it has to be
something at all which thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on
the part of an entity thought of as a cause, that an ‘I’ exists, finally that
what is designated by ‘thinking’ has already being determined – that I know
what thinking is…A thought comes when ‘it’ wants, not when ‘I’ want; so that it
is a falsification of the facts to say: the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the
predicate ‘think.’ It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely that famous old
‘I’ is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an assertion, above all not an
‘immediate certainty’ (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 16 and 17).
24 Jean Baudrillard. Fatal Strategies. Translated by
Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski and edited by Jim Fleming. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999:162.
25 Jean Baudrillard. The Evil Demon of Images.
Translated by Paul Patton, Paul Foss and Philippe Tanguy. Sydney: Power
Publications, 1987:44; 47.
26 Fatal Strategies has been re-released by Semiotext(e)
and MIT Press in 2006.
27 Rex Butler. Jean Baudrillard: The Defense of the Real.
London: Sage, 1999:162.
28 Jean Baudrillard. The Evil Demon of Images.
Translated by Paul Patton, Paul Foss and Philippe Tanguy. Sydney: Power
Publications, 1987:13.
29 Ibid.:19. Earlier Baudrillard had explored
this very point:
Reality we consume in either anticipatory or retrospective
mode. At any rate, we do so at a distance, a distance which is that of the
sign. For example, when Paris-Match showed us the secret forces assigned to
protect the General [de Gaulle] training with machine-guns in the basement of
the Prefecture, that image was not read as ‘information’, i.e. as referring to
the political context and its elucidation. For every one of us, it bore within
it the temptation of a superb assassination attempt, a prodigious violent
event: the attempt will take place, it is going to take place; the image is the
forerunner to it, and embodies the anticipated pleasure (See: Jean Baudrillard.
The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Sage, 1998:33).
30 Jean Baudrillard. The Evil Demon of Images.
Translated by Paul Patton, Paul Foss and Philippe Tanguy. Sydney: Power
Publications, 1987:20-21.
33 Ibid.: 49-51. Here, there are two sides to the sign: a duality
of Seduction (pure sign)/Simulation (sign + referent).
34 F.C. Burkitt. The Religion of
the Manichees. London: Cambridge University Press, 1925:4-5; 17-18; 39-40;
63-64.
35 Jean Baudrillard. The Evil Demon of Images.
Translated by Paul Patton, Paul Foss and Philippe Tanguy. Sydney: Power
Publications, 1987:49; 44; 45-48. See also: Jean Baudrillard. Fatal
Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski and
edited by Jim Fleming. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999:152-154; 165-166.
36 In his exegesis of this Calvino
novel, Baudrillard notes “the magic of nonexistence” as a “metaphysical” and
“serious” matter; a “sign of purity” involving “the duality of consciousness”.
See: Jean Baudrillard. “The Novels of Italo Calvino” (c 1962). Translated by
Sophie Thomas in Gary Genosko (Editor). The Uncollected Baudrillard. London: Sage 2001:13-15.
37 Jean Baudrillard. The Evil Demon of Images.
Translated by Paul Patton, Paul Foss and Philippe Tanguy. Sydney: Power
Publications, 1987:26.
38 For a suggestion of this possibility see: Jean Baudrillard. The
Evil Demon of Images. Translated by Paul Patton, Paul Foss and Philippe
Tanguy. Sydney: Power Publications, 1987:38-39. The theme of seducing or
challenging God back into being is also explored in Baudrillard’s “Forget
Baudrillard” in Forget Foucault/Forget Baudrillard, translated by Phil
Beitchman, Lee Hildreth and Mark Polizzotti. New York; Semiotext(e), New York, 1987:124-125. Also see: Jean Baudrillard. The Ecstasy of Communication.
Translated by Bernard and Caroline Schutze and edited by Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988:69.
For a
nuanced analysis of this aspect of Baudrillard’s thought, see: Andrew Wernick.
“Jean Baudrillard: Seducing God” in Phillip Blond (Editor). Post-Secular Philosophy:
between philosophy and theology. London: Routledge, 1998:346-364. Among
other things, Wernick addresses the ‘Baudrillard: metaphysician or
pataphysician?’ debate by noting this about the man’s penchant for Manichean
dualism: “His flirtation with Manichean symbology is (to use a term he borrows
from Jarry) ‘pataphysical’: a hypothesis of an evil demiurge running the world
which is faithful to a certain (darkly ironic) experience of it, and which is
essayed to see what features of our current condition this might illuminate.
Yet it is a flirtation that is seriously intended, and Baudrillard does not
mask the perversity of the strategy which it emboldens him to espouse” (pages
357-358).
39 Jean
Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1996:38.
40 In French History, starting with
Charlemagne (742-814 C.E.), there is a long tradition of expertise in
cryptography or “the science of secret communication”, with cryptograms or
“texts in code or cipher” being invented, published or deconstructed in France
during the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Modern periods. Throughout those
centuries, cryptography was frequently used by (and against) those regarded as
heretics, with Blaise de Vigenere, François Viete and M. Antoine Rossignol
being famous exponents of the science. See: John Laffin. Codes and Ciphers:
secret writing through the ages. London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964:2; 19-30;
42-45; 120-121.
In French
Philosophy, the notion that suicide is “philosophically serious” can be traced
to Camus’ opening contention in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): “There is
but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging
whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental
question of philosophy”. Camus, of course, repudiated suicide in favour of
living passionately with meaninglessness or The Absurd, but he also noted “the
record of Gnostic effronteries and the persistence of Manichean currents” in a
positive fashion while commenting on The Absurd in light of Church control over
heresy, life and meaning. See: Albert Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus.
Translated by Justin O’Brien and with Introduction by James Wood. London: Penguin, 2000:11; 59-63; 102-103.
Turning to
Baudrillard: his stated desire in The Perfect Crime to: “not to be
there, but to see. Like God” and to “watch the world in his absence” etc., is
entirely consistent with his dualistic critique, in Symbolic Exchange and
Death (1976), of the dialectical power-over-life-and-death assumed by
Church and State. In the latter, Baudrillard argues that life and death need
not be understood as a binary opposition (i.e. Life/death) because death is not
necessarily dialectically subordinate to life. And if that is the case, then
death isn’t necessarily exchangeable for some greater good or value, such as
“millions of war dead” (for example) being converted into the “gold” of
National pride or the reward of Heaven. Baudrillard’s critique includes a
defense of suicide as “the form of subversion itself”, even “a prefiguration of
the abolition of power”. See: Jean Baudrillard, “Political Economy and Death”
in Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant and
with Introduction by Mike Gane. London: Sage, 1993: 175; 125-194; 144-154.
Furthermore,
Baudrillard’s analysis of suicide as a liberating anti-power form is consistent
with the dualistic logic of the endura, as practiced by the Cathari. According
to Baudrillard, those Manicheans interpreted the world as “an antagonistic
duality, a here and a there, of good and evil” and thus sought an “achieved
perfection in the inseparability of body and soul…which made a joke of the
Church’s power of death”. See: Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange and Death.
Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant and with Introduction by Mike Gane. London: Sage, 1993:145.
Thus, in
endura, the Cathari apparently sought to be ‘happy ghosts’: pure spirits
detached from the body, yet retaining carnal consciousness. With this dualist
paradigm (and French cryptography) in mind, we can now ask: Does our supposed
desire to: “expunge man from the world”; to “delight in our absence and the
dizzying joys of disincarnation”; or even to: “Not to be there, but to see”
etc., amount to a cryptographic anticipation of endura by someone who has said:
“Oh yes, I love the world of the Cathars because I am Manichean”? See: Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect
Crime. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1996:38 and Jean Baudrillard. “This is the Fourth
World War: The Der Spiegel Interview with Jean Baudrillard”. Translated by
Samir Gandesha and with Introduction by Gary Genosko. International Journal
of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, January 2004.
http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/spiegel.htm
Without
clear evidence of systematic encrypting, our question here works chiefly as a
speculative (or pataphysical) device. Even so, these Baudrillard texts may
indeed be cryptographic of endura, but in a poetic/metaphorical sense derived
from their dual form. After all, a noted historian of the Dualist tradition has
argued that the presupposition of dualism leads to a valorization of suicide.
Runciman (1947) argues that endura is the enacted corollary of Gnosticism’s
dual form: “The doctrine of Dualism leads inevitably to the doctrine that
race-suicide is desirable…Mankind should die out, that the imprisoned fragments
of Godhead should return to their home”. See: Steven Runciman. The Medieval
Manichee. London: Cambridge University Press, 1947: 158-159; 175; 179.
Andrew Wernick appears to discern something of this syndrome in Baudrillard’s
work: “Baudrillard’s thought has a Manichean, even gnostic, strain. The subject
must die in order to triumph over the powers of the world.” See: Andrew
Wernick. ‘Post-Marx: theological themes in Baudrillard’s America’. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (Editors). Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism
and Religion. London: Routledge, 1992:63.
For an
analysis of sacred suicide, including the Cathari ritual, see: David Chidester.
Salvation and Suicide. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991:133-134:
“When the entire world
is perceived as fundamentally impure, suicide may present itself as a ritual
means of achieving purity through a final, absolute detachment from the world.
This seems to have been the intent behind the practice of ritual suicide, the
endura, among the Cathari who flourished against official church persecution
during the twelfth century in southern France. Holding a strict Manichean
dualism that regarded the world as a region of defilement, the Cathari elect,
or perfect, would resort to ritual suicide, usually through self-starvation but
sometimes through the more rapid means of poison or opening the veins, in order
to remove themselves from the world.”
41 See: Jean Baudrillard. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. New York: St Martin’s Press,
1990: 142-144; Jean
Baudrillard. The Evil Demon of Images. Translated by Paul Patton, Paul
Foss and Philippe Tanguy. Sydney: Power Publications, 1987: 38-39; and Jean Baudrillard. “Forget Baudrillard” in
Forget Foucault/Forget Baudrillard. Translated by Phil Beitchman, Lee
Hildreth and Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987:122.
See also:
Jean Baudrillard’s “On Disappearance” – his as yet unpublished paper – (translated
by Chris Turner) for Engaging Baudrillard: An International Conference, University of Wales, Swansea, 4-6 September 2006. When Baudrillard fell ill and could not
attend the Conference, his paper was read by Mike Gane in the final Plenary
Session (6 September 2006). Professor Gane’s reading was followed by five
interpretations of it (Mark Poster, Douglas Kellner, Rex Butler, Andrew Wernick
and Gary Genosko). During this period of interpretation, Professor Wernick
noted (among other things) that “On Disappearance” is marked by a Manichean
ethos.
© Jonathan Smith and International Journal of
Baudrillard Studies (2007)
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