Can we fight
DNA?
Benjamin Noys
(University of
Chichester, United Kingdom)
All dissent must be of
a higher logical type than that to which it is opposed.1
The
death of Jean Baudrillard could be taken as sign that we can finally put his
work behind us and close the book on his singular theoretical path. We no
longer, so the story would run, have to deal with his provocations, his dire
prognostications, and the nagging anxiety of deciding whether we are dealing
with a “genuine” thinker (one of his merits was to put that last category into
crisis). The seduction of Baudrillard’s writings, which owed a great deal to a
tone (a Stimmung) that mixed together ecstasy with “coolness”, was
always reversing into repulsion. To have done with Baudrillard, to inflict on
him a second (symbolic) death, indicates a resistance to something that marks
the entirety of Baudrillard’s oeuvre: the constant attempt to inscribe a form
of dissent that would be of a higher logical type. It is this attempt that
gives a sense of pathos to his work. Each new form of dissent Baudrillard
identified at once, as he so lucidly recognised, became available to potential
simulation. It is the singular repetitiveness, and yet also movement, in his
texts that was the trace of his evasive flight from this fate. On the one hand,
Baudrillard could always be taken as having succumbed to pessimism in the face
of the mutational capacities of the “system” – which, more and more for him,
took the form of the obscene proliferation of life itself. On the other hand,
Baudrillard practiced a resistance to this vitalism through the very
limit-forms of life: death, the viral, the fatal, and the catastrophic.
Against
the injunction to “Forget Baudrillard” I want to suggest that he was a writer
of the tendencies of the present, and often in advance of them. He always wrote
in the closest proximity to the worst of those tendencies, to pursue a
catastrophic or fatal strategy. Baudrillard’s cold scepticism is the obverse of
the kind of optimism we find in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who put their
faith in the tendencies to achieve a rather anachronistic liberation of life
and desire.2
Welding production to life itself they leave us everywhere caught-up in an
Empire that will, supposedly, provide the means for its own self-transcendence.
Although Baudrillard made his name as one of the most vehement critics of
Marxism I think we find in him a more acute awareness of the Marxist
alternative of “socialism or barbarism” – which is not some future choice but a
choice always taking place. Without socialism there is only barbarism. It might
well be that he welcomed such barbarism, or appeared to do so. This is what,
for me, gave his work a real sense of disgust for existence such as it is. He
posed his work not on the side of life, as productive and excessive force of
liberation, but against life as production. Baudrillard foresaw the very
inscription of power at the level of the code of life itself.
He
left us with little hope that we could fight DNA. Certainly he had no hope in
the class struggle as a solution, although for many Marxist critics this was
the symptom of the defeat of revolutionary hopes excited by May 1968. It was a
strange kind of defeatism that never gave up trying to find another form of
dissent. The mutations of capital that parasitized revolution left Baudrillard
trying to find another operator that could exceed capital: Symbolic exchange,
seduction, fatal strategies, banality, the Object, and so on. The difficulty
was that these seem to become increasingly detached from any real-world
reference, to protect them from the invasive mutational forces of life. Worse these
operators somehow seemed to rely on an unspecified reversal encoded within the
tendencies Baudrillard was tracking (“But where danger is, grows the saving
power also” Hölderlin).3
This left him in an ironic proximity to those very forms of Marxism, such as
Hardt and Negri’s, which posit a traversal through the “liberation” of capital
toward the “full” liberation of communism. The danger that grows here is of
forever remaining in a quiescent acceptance of capital in the ever receding
presence of the revolution; even if, as for Baudrillard, this will no
longer take place under the sign of “revolution” but as some absolutely new and
catastrophic reversal.
Despite
this danger, Baudrillard’s trans-politics registered a sense of crisis in the
political and the rise (as false “solution”), of what the French call ‘Pensée
unique’ – the market fundamentalism which tries to dictate that there is,
in Margaret Thatcher’s words: “no alternative”. What I think Baudrillard’s
writing gave to this situation was a sense of its farcical misery – certainly
for those of us who came to political maturity within its ambit. What other,
perhaps more sober readers, found excessively melodramatic or even laughable in
Baudrillard seemed, to me, a discourse perfectly suited to the ambient dread of
the 1980s. When broadcasters kindly simulated the effects of nuclear attack in
forensic detail, the right-wing press railed against peace protesters and trade
unionists, and popular culture celebrated glossy images of consumption, to come
across Baudrillard in the Semiotext(e) little black books during the late 1980s
was to feel a sense of bewilderment and relief. Still now those books seem
strange to me, with their references to the Baader-Meinhof, Mogadishu, and the
nihilistic inertia of the “masses” in hyper-conformity. Encrypted in their
pages is all the horror that has since unfolded itself.
Baudrillard
said he wrote theory-fiction. This new genre has often, and justifiably, been
correlated with science-fiction. I want to make another suggestion, that
Baudrillard is one of the few true writers of horror theory-fiction. It is
striking that such horror is fairly unusual in the history of thought. When we
find horror in philosophy it is often only a moment to be surpassed, as in
Plato’s allegory of the cave or Hegel’s writing on the Terror. With Baudrillard
we dwell in horror, and like all great horror writers this dwelling is not
without its humour. What became increasingly clear was that this was a horror
at life, a new kind of cool and sardonic nihilism – unlike the resignation of
Nietzsche’s passive nihilism or the heroism that haunted Nietzsche’s assumption
of active nihilism. I like to imagine some future library, or other form of
information storage, in which Baudrillard’s books are filed alongside the
fiction of Thomas Bernhard and Thomas Ligotti, the early films of David
Cronenberg and John Carpenter, the graphic works of Savoy, and the music of
Merzbow, Whitehouse, Throbbing Gristle, and a selection of Black Metal. The
file will read: “Horror, prophetic – late 20th century”.
Endnotes
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