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The death of the subject has made a good postmodernist slogan. The
obituaries have been written, and the legacies distributed. But its
end, so far, has been merely symbolic, and for all the shifts and
confusions of postmodernity, the subject remains the basic and
superior unit of even the most deconstructed world. Fragmented and
decentred, the postmodern subject is merely a new and improved
version of its modernist self; an updated model no longer vulnerable
to the dissolution it once feared; a subject even rejuvenated by its
pretended dissolution. It has learnt to live with the challenge of
shifting foundations and uncertain perimeters and become reconciled
with the vulnerability of its identity. The subject has neither
collapsed into the object nor disappeared into circuits of image and
sign; seduced and abandoned, it has nevertheless reconciled itself
with the vulnerability of identity and today stands as certain and
assured of its lack of self as its earlier model was of itself. The
obituaries were premature.
Nevertheless, the subject continues to be haunted by its death.
This is beyond question even for Baudrillard, who knows that
identity is possible only in relation to that which lies beyond it:
dissolution, nothing, the void, the meaningless. This is the forbidden
zone outside every human domain, and marks the absolute limit
beyond which all that is life, production, doing and making is lost. It
is the zone most feared, but also that which is most desired: ‘If you
were to see written on a door panel: “This opens onto the void”’,
asks Baudrillard, ‘wouldn’t you still want to open it?’ (Baudrillard
1990a:75). Of course one would always be tempted: to open the door
is to lose oneself, a fatal loss which is none the less craved and is,
moreover, essential to the existence of the subject. The encounter
with the door provides the subject with a backdrop of dissolution
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against which it can measure its own identity. It places the subject in
no danger as long as the question is hypothetical: ‘wouldn’t
you…want to open it?’. This is Baudrillard’s strategy in Seduction:
to face the door, and in so doing ensure that its closure is never in
question. The subject needs to be threatened: while it is vulnerable, it
knows who it is. The threat must seem credible and appear to pose a
real danger, but this is all it must do: seem and appear. It must be a
threat minimal and contained, the image of danger rather than
danger itself. The trick is to see the door, but refuse that which lies
beyond it. A strategy which protects the subject from the question of
dissolution and pays homage to the void in order to keep the subject
on the safe side of nothingness. The void is the great fear, too great to
be ignored, but too fearful to admit. Baudrillard renders it credible
and conceivable, known and meaningful; he writes of nothingness in
order to avoid death. Still haunted by its end, the postmodern subject
can now know death as a symbolic game in which it lets itself play,
paddling in the shallows of dissolution and always facing the shore.
These shallows are seduction, the ‘superficial abysses’ of a void
become mapped and defined, the image of nothing. Seduction is only
appearance; not the void which lies behind it, for there is nothing
there. Only the simulacra of nothing is possible, only the simulation
of the void. There is no longer something and nothing, nor a possible
passage from one to the other. Both the real and the void are
counterfeit in their pretensions to reality and nothingness.
Appearance is the real operation of both; the moment before the void
is the entire operation of the world, the perpetual motion of
postmodernity. Seduction stands between something and nothing;
with ‘neither substance nor origin’ (p. 82), it is neither ‘simple
appearance, nor a pure absence, but the eclipse of presence’ (p. 85).
Seduction is more than the identification of a new force of
production in the world, just as appearance is in more than a
diametrical relation to the real. Not even merely the unproductive, it
is that which ‘is never “produced”, is never found where it is
produced’ (pp. 7–8) and as such forever eludes the discourse of
production and undermines the very idea that there is a real world
and that something, be it the proletariat, capital, desire, or
discourse, makes it go round. The culture of the modern, industrial
subject ‘produces everything, makes everything speak, everything
babble, everything climax’ (p. 20); in a world which ‘wanted us to
believe that…the play of productive forces is what regulates the
course of things’ (p. 84). At the heart of the world as viewed by
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Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, production remains the paradigm for those
who have more recently developed their work: Foucault, for whom
power is the productive force; Deleuze and Guattari, for whom
desire is the machinic energy; Irigaray, for whom woman is the
source. These are writers whom Baudrillard’s seduction traps within
an old productivist ethos, where their discourses of power and
liberation merely reinforce the narratives which insist that truths
must be revealed, secrets unveiled, desires emancipated and
subjectivities made and remade. The liberation they seek can only be
subjection to the orders of production, the power they invoke is the
‘mastery of the real universe’ (p. 8), the realm of that which is
productive and produced. To all this, Baudrillard’s question is: ‘what
if everything, contrary to appearances—in fact, in accord with a
secret rule of appearances—operates by seduction?’ (pp. 83–4).
What if the real universe, in which everything is freed, revealed, and
made to happen, is merely a pretence, the superficial surface of the
superficial abysses which are the operation of the real?
This move gives Baudrillard’s discourse the appearance of a
radicalism which eclipses even the most radical of postmodern
discourses. But perhaps even this is chimerical: riddled with hidden
agendas and counterfeit claims, Baudrillard’s work is really an attempt
to protect the subject, not against seduction, for seduction is no threat at
all, but against what he can only think as the void, the threat of
dissolution. Indeed, just as he invokes the door in order to protect
himself from the void which lies behind it, so Baudrillard looks to
seduction to provide a barrier between nothing and something, death
and the subject. Seduction becomes the guarantor: as long as seduction
is possible, there must be a subject to be seduced. And this subject is
masculine, as Baudrillard is quick to admit and happy to assume, while
that which seduces is its ‘missing dimension’ (p. 67), the feminine.
While Baudrillard does not intend this conflation of the seductive
and the feminine to make seduction the sole prerogative of women, it
is they who have ‘mastery over the symbolic universe’ (p. 8) and all
that extends beyond the meanings and desires of the real and
masculine world: the universe of the firm and the definite, sex and
certainty, power and intention. Whatever seeks liberation wants to
enter this realm of the sure and upstanding; to destroy the ambiguities
and mysteries which themselves constitute the real and hidden order of
things and subject every fluidity to the masculine orders of production.
What it seeks to destroy is seduction, the hidden operation of the
‘symbolic universe’ which underwrites the world of men and things.
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Liberation, particularly women’s liberation, is trapped in ‘a strange,
fierce complicity’ with the masculine ‘order of truth’ (p. 8); hopelessly
caught within a discourse of production which can only destroy the
real object of its emancipation.
In feminism Baudrillard sees only the destruction of woman, a
denial of the feminine, a rejection of seduction in favour of
misguided demands for participation within the orders of
production. Liberation is the discourse of an enlightenment
humanism which wants to ‘liberate the servile sex…in the very terms
of its servitude’ (p. 17), a misguided struggle for freedom whose only
consequence can be to subsume woman within the parameters of a
barely changed and hostile order. When woman demands, desires,
and liberates herself, she abandons the seductive mode which is her
own and only strength and enters into a culture for which liberation
is a way of life and not at all a threatening demand. She accepts the
terms which would eradicate every zone of secrecy, mystery, and
artifice; she comes to live in a world where everything is forced to
declare itself, open itself up, reveal its truth, express its desire, and
search for its meaning. She escapes from the shadows only to find
herself in the cruel light of an order for which everything must be
measured and identified; too late she realizes that the autonomy,
truth and desire she has won are really the very instruments of her
oppression.
Feminism signals the end of uncertainty, a world for which there
are ‘no more secrets’, the beginning of a ‘radical obscenity’ (p. 20)
which wants everything out in the open. It is a process by which
femininity is normalized and brought within the masculine:
Femininity in this sense is on the same side as madness. It is because
madness secretly prevails that it must be normalized (thanks to,
amongst other things, the hypothesis of the unconscious). It is
because femininity secretly prevails that it must be recycled and
normalized (in sexual liberation in particular).
(Baudrillard 1990a:17)
Woman’s insistence that she too must have meaning and purpose,
desires and discourses of her own is a misguided rejection of her own
and only powers. These are the powers of the secret and the
artificial, that which is undecidable and manifest in ritual, game,
ceremony, and seduction.
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Yes, women have been dispossessed of their bodies, their desires,
happiness and rights. But they have always remained mistresses
of this possibility of eclipse, of seductive disappearance and
translucence, and so have always been capable of eclipsing the
power of their masters.
(p. 88)
Eclipse has nothing to do with struggle, emancipation, or any of the
discourses of power, of course. Women eclipse power; they do not
enter into it, but exist with merely ‘the flickering of a presence’ (p.
85). For Baudrillard, this is the never quite real world of seduction,
an effect of nothing, but itself the secret government of the real world
of men and things. Woman is ‘but appearance’, but as such she
‘thwarts masculine depth’ (p. 10) and bears ‘the immense privilege’
of the feminine: ‘the privilege of never having acceded to truth or
meaning’ (p. 8). This is the privilege of that which appears and
disappears in blissful ignorance of the meanings and significance,
the manifestations and satisfaction demanded by the productive. Far
beyond production but always immanent to it, seduction is what
makes the productive vulnerable to its own truth, and this truth is
itself the deceit of seduction.
This is the privilege which woman, with feminism, wants to toss
aside in favour of a subjectivity, a sexuality, desires and meanings of
her own. Woman wants to become real, and this, for Baudrillard, is
her big mistake.
What does the women’s movement oppose to the phallocratic
structure? Autonomy, difference, a specificity of desire and
pleasure, a different relation to the female body, a speech, a
writing—but never seduction…They do not understand that
seduction represents mastery over the symbolic universe, while
power represents only the mastery of the real universe.
(p. 8)
(Master of the symbolic universe? Is this like being a king of the
kitchen, the unseen hand that rocks the [preferably] unseen cradle?)
Why, he asks, is there a continual attempt to find equivalence and
opposition to the masculine? Bodies, pleasures, writings and politics:
why challenge the masculine with feminine equivalents, when this is
a strategy which already accepts the ‘essentially masculine’ (p. 7)
opposition between the masculine and the feminine? The search for a
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female sexuality, no matter how plural, multiple, and fluid it might
be, remains trapped within this phallic separation, and seduction is
the term which takes us beyond the old, productive polarity and
‘breaks the distinctive sexualization of bodies and the inevitable
phallic economy that results’ (p. 10). The masculine has no opposite,
no rival, there is no sex but the male: ‘Freud was right: there is but
one sexuality, one libido—and it is masculine…There is no use
dreaming of some non-phallic, unlocked, unmarked sexuality’ (p. 6).
Female sexuality is a contradiction in terms, a productive seduction,
an impossibility. The subject can only be masculine, and man is the
only subject. Everything else is the object of his desire, the seductive,
beyond the phallic but irrevocably exterior to the real universe.
Seduction cannot exist in the world of men and things; occult and
mysterious, it is the enigmatic, the insoluble and must remain so if it
is to remain at all.
Without desire and stealing its pleasures from games of
entrapment and challenge, strategy and artifice, it thinks nothing of
the natural, the authentic or the real, and cares only for the thrill of
the chase, a game it plays by rules entirely of its own. It is image,
appearance, the very process of appearance and disappearance,
reversibility and pretence. Seduction is ‘not a matter of believing,
doing, wanting, or knowing’ (p. 76). It knows no meaning and eludes
all discourse; it wants only to play in a world of schemes and
enchantments, enticement and ruse; its operations have no goal and
seek no object. It is the insubstantial underside of the orders of
meaning and power inhabited by the desiring, masculine subject. It
reverses the real and implodes the meaningful; it tempts the world of
men and things into lies and confusion, illusion and dissolution; it is
the magic of glamour, the spell of the counterfeit, the diabolical. And
in all this it stands in a secret and powerful relation to the world of
men and things, a threat which ‘continues to haunt them from
without, and from deep within its forsaken state, threatening them
with collapse’ (p. 2).
Woman’s secret is that she is never quite real, never quite true,
never ‘a signified desire, but the beauty of an artifice’ (p. 76). She
exists only as this ambiguity: ‘everything that is no longer
ambiguous is masculine in kind’ (Baudrillard 1990b:80) and all that
is feminine ‘incarnates reversibility, the possibility of play and
symbolic involvement’ (1990a:21). The feminine is ‘something that
is nothing’ (p. 7), neither something nor nothing, ‘neither a marked
nor an unmarked term. It does not mark the “autonomy” of desire,
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pleasure, or the body, or of a speech or writing that it has supposedly
lost(?). Nor does it lay claim to some truth of its own. It seduces’ (p.
7). If it was ever possible to speak of woman’s sexuality, this was it:
she wanted nothing and had no desire: she seduced. Before the
intervention of feminism’s ‘beautiful souls who, retrospectively, see
woman as alienated from time immemorial, and then liberated’ (p.
19), this was the role within which woman was ‘entirely herself, she
was in no way defeated, nor passive, nor did she dream of her future
“liberation”’ (p. 19).
Irigaray’s invocations of a woman’s writing and a female
sexuality are taken as a the epitome of an attempt to drag woman
into the orders of discourse and the real. Baudrillard quotes a
passage from This sex which is not one’, and condemns Irigaray for
what he takes as her celebrations of sexual difference and the
pleasures of woman. And yet Baudrillard knows that Irigaray’s
entire project is to escape the very ‘phallic economy’ he identifies:
Seduction is written with close reference to her work, and it is not
merely the disparaged discourse of female sexuality that he takes
from her writing. For Irigaray’s woman is absent too, without desire,
bereft of power, and so the locus of mystery and ambiguity. ‘Not
knowing what she wants’, woman is always ‘ready for anything’
(Irigaray 1981:100), she ‘does not have a sex’, and is entirely beyond
the singular and the certain. Even plurality is too contained, for
woman ‘experiences pleasure almost everywhere’ and her sexuality
cannot be named, cannot exist in the world of men and things. ‘
“She” is indefinitely other in herself (p. 103), she is ‘neither one nor
two’ (p. 101), and it is this indeterminacy which accounts for ‘the
mystery that she represents in a culture that claims to enumerate
everything, cipher everything by units, inventory everything by
individualities’ (p. 101).
There is no demand for equality or equivalence in Irigaray’s
writing; and Baudrillard knows that she too wants nothing to do with
struggles for power and the entry of woman into the existing
economy: ‘In this race for power, woman loses the uniqueness of her
pleasure’ (p. 104). Irigaray’s woman is the ‘nothing to be seen’, her
cunt ‘offers nothing to the view’ and ‘has no distinctive form of its
own’; indeed her pleasure is ‘precisely in this incompleteness of the
form of her sex organ, which is why it retouches itself indefinitely’
(p. 101). Baudrillard responds with derision to Irigaray’s
‘anatomical speech’, and with seduction claims to move beyond the
terms of anatomical difference. The feminine is not a sex,
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…but what counters the sex that alone has full rights and the full
exercise of these rights, the sex that holds a monopoly on sex: the
masculine, itself haunted by the fear of something other, of which
sex is the disenchanted form: seduction…It is these two
fundamental forms that confront each other in the male and
female, and not some biological difference or some naive rivalry
of power.
(Baudrillard 1990a:21)
Nevertheless, it is clear that seduction and production are the terms
of an equally anatomical discourse. Irigaray evokes ‘a few of the
specifically female pleasures’ (p. 103), but these merely serve to
indicate the impossibility of female sexuality within Baudrillard’s
phallic economy. If seduction goes beyond anatomy, it too is only by
becoming the ‘something that is nothing’, the hidden and
unnameable, and so returning to the Freudian gesture which has
woman as the ‘nothing to be seen’. The mystery and enigma of
woman is the strange void of her sex, while the ‘masculine is not
made for ambiguity, it only exists in erection’ (Baudrillard
1990b:80).
While Baudrillard condemns what he sees as the feminist attempt
to make everything speak, to destroy seduction and open up the
secret of the hidden operation of the world, he also insists that
seduction is always and irrevocably invulnerable and can never be
undermined by the orders of production. Seduction always escapes
the powers of the masculine; it is always elsewhere, never where the
subject thinks it is. The goals of production are endlessly deferred;
the horizons of liberation continually receded. The masters of the
real universe are always under threat, for ‘nothing is greater than
seduction, not even the order that destroys it’ (p. 2). And yet
Baudrillard’s attack on feminism would seem to suggest that
seduction is indeed vulnerable to the orders of production and the
discourse of liberation. So what is to be feared from a feminism
which, as Baudrillard characterizes it, is doomed to defeat and
repetition?
Something else, implicit yet concealed in seduction, is seen to
threaten it; not production, but another tendency to which it is
vulnerable and from which it must be preserved. For if seduction is
indeed ‘sovereign’ and ‘prevails, secretly, over the dominant form’
(p. 17), the realm of the real, the productive, poses no threat. A
sovereign seduction is never threatened by the real world of men and
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things, but is only more or less threatening to it. And once it has been
unleashed as the sovereign and secret operation of the world, it is
uncontainable; there is nothing which can control it, nothing to
prevent it from becoming more threatening. Seduction may be
delightful in its lack of purpose, desire, and meaning, but its
attractions may also be fatal; it may tempt and excite, challenge and
deceive, but it also yawns as the terrible abyss over which the real is
suspended, a vertiginous crevice which pulls at the world of men and
things. Seduction is a slippery term, too ambiguous to be confined,
too powerful to be contained; it has no need of Baudrillard ‘s
protection, and is in any case beyond his jurisdiction. But while
Baudrillard knows that ‘the attraction of the void lies at the basis of
seduction’ (p. 77), he intends seduction to be only the appearance of
the void, merely its sign, a door which is never opened. Seduction
becomes the border, the limit, beyond which there is nothing; the
measure against which the masculine subject can be certain of itself.
Indeed, this is a seduction which guarantees the subject, the moment
just before the void, the border which can safely be occupied, the
‘sacred horizon of appearances’ which preserves the subject from
death. It is only the dreams of losing control and the collapse of
meaning which tempt and seduce, not the possibility that they might
come true. Seduction is only the promise of seduction, a flirtation
with dissolution. The void remains a black hole, but seduction
makes the fall impossible: ‘at the edge of this black hole the point of
no return becomes a point of total reversibility, a catastrophic point
where death is to be pulled tight in a new seduction effect’ (p. 128).
Death as merely a new effect: the void is avoided, the subject pulls
through. There is no outside, it was only a dream, the nightmare of
modernist man. There’s nothing out there, scrabbling at the door;
there’s nothing on the other side. The outside is merely the mirror of
the inside, the screen on which man projects himself, the backdrop
against which he acts in the world. The feminine, the object of
desire, the counterfeits and appearances of the world: ‘What are
they, and what do they do behind this screen? They make themselves
into an impenetrable and unintelligible surface, which is a way of
fading’; they ‘eclipse themselves, they melt into the shallow screen’
(Baudrillard 1990c:86). Everything is on the interior, the void is
become a screen, nothing but the play of signs, the comings and
goings of meaning, the secret games played out in the world.
Indeed it is by virtue of its games and rituals that seduction
remains poised on the brink of the black hole. Outside the laws of
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production, nature, and meaning, seduction has nothing to do with
the chaos of anarchy but is more akin to a different form of
government. ‘Seduction supposes a ritual order, sex and desire a
natural order’ (1990a:21). Whereas ‘sex is a function’, seduction ‘is
a game’, a process of rule and rite, ceremony and artifice; neither
‘an inversion nor subversion of the law, but its reversion in
simulation’ (p. 149). Seduction is not meaningful, but neither is it
entirely without meaning: it is ‘the sensual and intelligible form of
non-sense’ (p. 70), a meaningful meaninglessness, a void which can
be known, ‘an enigmatic state which is neither life nor death’
(1990b:24). Seduction has nothing to do with chance, or the total
liberty of the indeterminate. It is cyclical, a matter of convention
and recurrence, an arbitrary sequence but a sequence none the less.
‘The Rule plays on an immanent sequence of arbitrary signs, while
the law is based on a transcendent sequence of necessary signs’
(1990a:133). The law cannot be transgressed; meaning is escaped
only ‘by replacing it with a more radical simulacrum, a still more
conventional order’ (1990a:138).
This seduction is merely a game. It is aristocratic, with duels and
challenges, courtships and ceremonies, a mode in which the subject
can indulge; a seduction which merely wants to play with the subject
and will tempt him with dissolution but never entirely destroy him.
In its aristocratic form, seduction promises a fantasy which secures
man’s mastery of the real universe. But the game can never be real:
seduction is only a way of playing with the pieces of the real world.
If the game becomes serious, seduction does indeed begin to dissolve
the certainties of the masculine.
Baudrillard’s task, then, is to protect seduction from its own
worst excesses, and in so doing protect the masculine subject from
the point at which seduction becomes more than a game. That this
is the real task of his writings on seduction is particularly clear in
the closing sections of Seduction, where Baudrillard finally
abandons the pretence that seduction is threatened by the real and
confirms that there are forms of seduction which must be resisted,
versions which take themselves to an extreme at which the
subject, rather than the seductive, is in danger. Indeed, he
suggests that seduction is already exceeding the rules, refusing to
play the game to the advantage of man. It is not merely feminism
that threatens the aristocratic seduction necessary to the survival
of the subject, but also the screens, formulae, and bits of the
information age. When Baudrillard turns his attentions to the
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digitalized, virtual worlds of advanced capitalism, he sees cool
and lifeless tendencies creeping across the real world of men and
things. The seductions of the postmodern age have no respect for
the ritual, the game, the strategy; they are inhuman, alien,
threatening to the subject, they introduce us to ‘an age of soft
technologies, of genetic and mental software’ (1990a:172), soft
drugs and cool electronics, in which man can no longer be certain
and firm.
Seduction becomes cool at the moment in which it refuses to be
man’s mirror, the backdrop, the scene against which he acts in the
world. As Baudrillard knows, ‘the old structures of knowledge, the
concept, the scene, the mirror, attempt to create illusion and thus
they emphasise a truthful projection of the world’ (1990c:87), but the
possibility that these theatrical arenas might disappear is beyond the
tolerance even of the new, seduceable postmodern subject. The
mirror is essential as the boundary which stands between man and
what he fears as the void, a limit which shines back to the subject
and gives him the reflection by which he knows himself.
In the information age, the mirror is indeed threatened; the
digital is said to give the secret operations of seduction an
unprecedented exposure. As is the case with his attacks on
feminism, however, Baudrillard’s primary concern is not with the
triumph of the productive but the collapse of a seduction on which
man can rely and in relation to which he can be sure of himself.
The point at which the seductive enters into the world is not the
death of seduction, but the death of the subject; and in the
postmodern world this death is heralded less by the entry of
seduction into the real, than by the collapse of the subject into
seduction itself. With the digital technologies of the information
age, the temptations faced by man are no longer those of an
aristocratic and ceremonial seduction, but the cool and complex
excesses of a seduction which begins to point beyond itself and
open the door which leads onto the void. This is the point at which
seduction no longer operates as a mirror, or limit for man, the
moment in which the game is no longer played to his benefit but
instead begins to absorb him in alien networks amongst which he
can find no meaning. There is no challenge in this ‘playful
eroticization of a world without stakes’ (1990a:156). Beyond even
‘the sensual and intelligible forms of non-sense’, cool seduction is
the ‘debasement of play to the level of function’ (p. 158), the
collapse of the rules, ‘the cybernetic absorption of play into the
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general category of the ludic’ (p. 159). Here the subject is no longer
sure of himself, suddenly vulnerable to temptations which threaten
his very identity.
Without too much effort, one sees the world of psychotropic
drugs: for the latter too is ludic, being nothing but the
manipulation of a sensorial keyboard or neuronic instrument
panel. Electronic games are a soft drug—one plays with them
with the same somnambular and tactile euphoria.
(1990a:159)
Tossed into ‘this light, psychedelic giddiness which results from
multiple or successive connections and disconnections’, the digital age
invites us ‘to become miniaturized “game systems”, i.e. micro-systems
with the potential to regulate their own random functioning’ (p. 162).
Characteristic of the information age, the ludic is a mode in which
everything still ‘moves around, and can give the impression of an
operative seduction’ (p. 163) but has little to do with the aristocratic
reality of its games. No longer the seduction of ritual and game,
information technology brings us into a world in which the subject is
merely a point on the network, a terminal in a cyber-spatial zone.
The games continue to be played, but they are no longer games he
understands; the rules are incomprehensible, the strategies make no
sense to him, the meaning disappears. The ‘0/1 of binary or digital
systems is no longer a distinctive opposition or established
difference. It is a “bit”, the smallest unit of electronic impulse—no
longer a unit of meaning…This is what the matrix of information
and communication is like, and how the networks function’ (p. 165).
Here the death of the subject becomes possible at last: ‘Two
terminals do not two interlocutors make. In “tele” space…there are
no longer any determinate terms or positions. Only terminals in a
position of ex-termination’ (p. 165).
After long detours through imagined threats and dreamed dangers,
man finally confronts his death at the computer terminal. But
Baudrillard clings onto the conviction that this is not the dissolution of
an ultimate seduction, but a death caused by overdosing on the real.
The screen, he insists, is not the manifestation of an alien operation,
but merely the repetition of the same, an image too ideal, a projection
too perfect to serve as a measure for man.
For Baudrillard, information technology threatens the difference
on which man depends only because it engages the masculine subject
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in an endless and pointless circuit of self-referentiality. The mirror is
destroyed only because man abandons it in an attempt to replicate
himself, a process of self-seduction in which he begins to sink into his
own image. Baudrillard sees this process epitomized in the robot and
the clone, accused of destroying seduction by pretending to
equivalence with man, bringing what should remain secret into the
light. While such pretenders are ‘but appearance’, they exist only to
the benefit of man, but in any excess of this role they become hostile
and threatening. The automaton, epitomized by the early clockwork
toy, is merely an artificial man which poses no threat to his standing:
indeed, it is intriguing and seductive precisely because of the
distance which remains between man and machine. Counterfeit and
artificial, it is ‘an interrogation upon nature, the mystery of the
existence or nonexistence of the soul, the dilemma of appearance and
being. It is like God: what’s underneath it all, what’s inside, what’s in
the back of it?’. Man needs mystery as ‘his interlocutor’, and only
‘the counterfeit men [automata] allow these problems to be posed’
(1988:68). With the robot, however, we leave the seductive, and
‘enter (re)production…the realm of the mercantile law of value and
its calculations of force’ (p. 72). As feminism would rob woman of
her mystery, so the robot would rob the machine of its own enigma
and artifice. And likewise the clone, the other become real and so
useless to man, which Baudrillard warns is the endless reproduction
of the same, the destruction of difference and ambiguity, the
beginnings of a narcissism ‘whose source is no longer a mirror but a
formula’ (1990a:168), a formula with which man will reproduce and
so destroy himself, for ‘the subject’s intimacy with himself rests on
the immateriality of his double, on the fact that it is and remains a
phantasy’ (p. 168).
But is the screen the reproduction of man, the triumph of the
orders of production, the survival of the phallic economy? Is
information technology a process by which the image becomes real
and so loses its mystery? While Baudrillard claims that the ‘mirror
phase has given way to the video phase’, an ‘effect of frantic selfreferentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with
like’ (Baudrillard 1988:36–7), the information age does not destroy
difference and mystery but, on the contrary, collapses man into the
screen and plunges him into a world whose mystery has no
meaning, not even the function of seduction. This is the point at
which ‘one can no longer speak of a sphere of enchantment or
seduction’ (1990a:158); the point at which man is bereft of even his
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most superficial horizons, even the horizon of appearances sacred
to him. Seduction becomes real, and the danger in this lies not at
all in the danger that it is absorbed within the orders of production
but, on the contrary, that man is absorbed, this time definitively,
within the orders of a cold seduction which reaches beyond itself to
the terrible dread of a death become real. Man is without hope if
the play becomes real, if the backdrop disappears, if woman
becomes real, the game begins to play itself, if the machine refuses
to be man’s interlocuter. These are the points at which all strategies
depart from meaning: ‘Contact for contact’s sake becomes the
empty form with which language seduces itself when it no longer
has anything to say’ (p. 164), and all that is left is the vertigo of a
deathly fascination, a terminal seduction which will not let the
subject live but will drag him into the black hole forever. We ‘are
living off seduction, but will die in fascination’ (p. 157), for the
subject ‘presupposes a mirror, the mirror in which the subject
alienates himself in order to find himself, and ‘here there is no
mirror’ (p. 169). Cool seduction finds the subject ‘living in a
supple, curved universe, that no longer has any vanishing points’
(p. 157). This is not, as Baudrillard claimed to fear, an entry of
seduction into the orders of production which damages the
seductive; it eradicates the difference not by destroying mystery
and leaving man without his other, but rather by dragging man into
mystery, exercising the very sovereignty which Baudrillard
ascribed to it. What he feared all along was not the destruction of
seduction, but the destruction of man by a seduction too powerful,
too absorbing, too fascinating to resist, a fatal seduction, more
than the dream or reminder of dissolution. In its new cold forms,
Baudrillard’s seduction takes him at his word: it operates with its
own secret strategies, and the extent to which it enters the world or
drags the world out to itself is entirely beyond the control and
comprehension of the masculine subject. Seduction has found its
own ways of becoming real, none of them strategies dreamt up by
the masculine subject. The feminine is not absorbed by the
masculine, but begins to dissolve it.
Information technology encroaches on the certainty and
singularity of man; like the feminine, it operates as the flickering
presence of the obscure but in this case increasingly dominant
sovereignty of another universe, the ‘“tele” space’ of the digital.
Neither real like the orders of production, nor mythical and
symbolic like those of the seductive, this universe is entirely beyond
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the comprehension of man, in which his identity counts for nothing.
Baudrillard is right: the bit is important only to itself and answerable
to its proper logic, an operation which cares nothing about man and
his need for mysterious others. It turns his screen into a terrifying
abyss, it traps him in an integrated circuit on an alien network, a
feminine network: the matrix. ‘No more mother, just a matrix’ (p.
169), the end of the real woman and the dawn of a networked
femininity which Baudrillard knows is the end of man. ‘What
remains of the enchantment of that labyrinthine structure within
which one could lose oneself?’ (p. 176). Only the matrix, on which
one has no self to lose.
The matrix is seduction at an extreme untenable for man, the
feminine extended beyond the object of man’s desire to an
unfamiliar, hostile zone outside the comforts of mystery and enigma.
The digital age introduces a feminine which refuses to play; a
seduction which refuses to remain poised on the brink between man
and his void; a mirror which refuses to reflect. The matrix is like a
hysterical woman who ‘plays with the signs but without sharing
them. It is as if she appropriated the entire process of seduction for
herself (p. 120). And this is also the fear which underlies
Baudrillard’s condemnations of women’s liberation: what if woman
too appropriated the entire process of seduction, over which she has
complete ‘mastery’, for herself?
Baudrillard has read Irigaray and knows that this is indeed the
woman of which she writes.
Hysteria is silent and at the same time it mimes. And—how could
it be otherwise—miming/reproducing a language that is not its
own, masculine language, it caricatures and deforms that
language: it ‘lies’, it ‘deceives’, as women have always been
reputed to do.
(Irigaray 1991a:132)
Woman as the mimic, the hysteric, or else a descent into silence or
psychosis; the woman who talks to herself, touches herself, and
makes no sense to man. Evidence comes from Baudrillard himself:
not only are women counterfeit and treacherous: they also ‘constitute
a secret society. They are all involved together in secret discussions’.
They ‘weave amongst themselves a collusive web of seduction. They
signal to each other’; they are ‘those whom you have kept apart in
life, finally united in the only really secret society—the dream
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society, the society of women’ (Baudrillard 1990b: 102). This is what
Baudrillard worries about: the thought of women signalling to each
other in ways which make no sense to him; this is the goal of his use
of the term seduction: to make the signals meaningful, to be able to
understand them as games and rituals foreign to man but by no
means dangerous and alien. At the heart of his derision of Irigaray’s
parole de femme lies this very same fear: woman can have no
language of her own, not because she would be destroyed in the
orders of discourse, but only because man would be unable to
understand it. As Irigaray writes of women: ‘If you ask them
insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply:
nothing, everything’ (Irigaray 1981:103). The phallic economy has
allowed her neither desires nor discourses of her own, and Irigaray’s
woman too has only ever been ‘but appearance’ and never entirely
herself. Today I was this woman, tomorrow that one’ (Irigaray
1991b:3). But what if this strange and indeterminate fluidity begins
to speak, becomes real, becomes something that is neither the
masculine order of production nor the seductive on which it depends?
This is the question posed—primarily to Nietzsche, but equally
to Baudrillard—in Marine Lover, a text in which ‘the something
that is nothing’ experiments with the transmission of signals from
the other side of seduction, beyond the black hole’s brink. ‘Today I
was this woman, tomorrow that one. But never the woman, who, at
the echo, holds herself back. Never the beyond you are listening to
right now’ (p. 3). Irigaray speaks as the woman who, noticed only
as a mirror for man, is nevertheless leaking into the real, opening
the door. ‘I am coming back from far, far away. And say to you:
your horizon has limits. Holes even’, she writes. ‘You have always
trapped me in your web and, if I no longer serve as your passage
from back to front, from front to back, your time will let another
day dawn.’ It is not woman who will be destroyed on entry to the
real, but the man’s world which ‘will unravel. It will flood out to
other places. To that outside you have not wanted’. Woman has
been the barrier, the dam which held back the oceanic void and
allowed man to play in the shallows of death. ‘You had fashioned
me into a mirror but I have dipped that mirror in the waters of
oblivion—that you call life’ (p. 4), and there is ‘nothing to stop
your penetration outside yourself—nothing either more or less.
Unless I am there’ (p. 7). If ‘I take leave of your universe’, she asks,
‘what becomes of it?’ (p. 11).
As Baudrillard admits: ‘It is the terrifying prerogative of the
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liberated sex to claim the monopoly over its own sex: “I shall not
even live on in your dreams.” Man must continue to decide what is
the ideal woman’ (Baudrillard 1990b:68). Even as the matrix flickers
into life and terminates the subject, this is the question Baudrillard
refuses to countenance; the possibility that man may no longer be
able to decide his ideal other cannot be faced. In everything he must
see only the return of the same, the triumph of the productive; even
as the flows of information circulate with a speed and sophistication
at which he can only guess, he must continue to believe that man
watches only ‘the operations of his own brain’ on the pixelled screen.
The circuits are endlessly self-referential, an idea which is itself the
reproduction of man’s imaginary limit. ‘But isn’t that your game,
ceaselessly to bring the outside inward?’ asks Irigaray: To have no
outside that you have not put there yourself?’ (Baudrillard
1990a:12). Isn’t this precisely the strategy of Baudrillard’s seduction,
to make it a limit and turn the alien matrix into a ‘matrix of identity’
(p. 172), the endless return of the same that is man: ‘round and
round, you keep on turning. Within yourself. Pushing out of your
circle anything that, from elsewhere, remembers’ (Irigaray 1991b:4).
Baudrillard’s world has no elsewhere, nothing that might come
from without, nothing to return, only the same and more of the same.
For him, the elsewhere is merely seduction, reversibility, appearance
and disappearance; it has nothing to do with what he fears lies
behind the door to the void. For him, the elsewhere is merely a game,
it cannot become real because reality will destroy it. Games,
however, are completely absorbing; a player can never be greater
than the game itself, and players who know they are only playing
are not really seduced, but merely pretending. The player who
knows about the game has already left seduction’s symbolic
universe; undissolved by the seductive, able to understand, produce
meanings and solve difficulties, he is the one who plays to win. The
stakes are high, and this is a struggle in which ‘all means are
acceptable, ranging from relentlessly seducing the other in order not
to be seduced oneself, to pretending to be seduced in order to cut all
seduction short’ (Irigaray 1991b:4). But Baudrillard’s seduction is
only a game, a pretence, a phantasy; seduction is only the dream, the
threat, the promise of an impossible dissolution. Seduction is just a
thought, and the ‘seduction hypothesis is merely a formal
abstraction. It is the phantom of seduction which obsesses me—as for
the rest, I have never managed anything other than to let myself be
seduced’ (Baudrillard 1990b:27). As long as it is up to man to ‘let
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himself be seduced, seduction remains an impotent phantom. As long
as the subject resists and always wins the game, seduction remains
conventional, ritualistic, ordered, a game with rules which the
subject can win. But even Baudrillard defines the one who plays to
win as the cheat, the pervert who ‘is radically suspicious of seduction
and tries to codify it. He tries to fix its rules, formalize them in a text’
(1990a:127). He does indeed.
Baudrillard’s man needs the unidentifiable in order to define
himself; mystery to provide him with certainty; dissolution to allow
him identity. He needs to know the unidentified, the mysterious and
insoluble, but they are of course unknown, the horizon of fear
beyond which there can be only the void. Baudrillard offers
seduction as the term which can make death safe and turn the
dangers into a game. At once attracted and repelled by its fatal
games and strategies, Baudrillard wants to insist on the supremacy
of the seduction, but also resist its cool excesses; to delight in games
and rituals, but also limit it, set the parameters, establish the
boundaries beyond which its play can no longer be considered fair.
Baudrillard flatters seduction, attributes to it the greatest powers,
bestows upon it the greatest honours, but does so only in an effort to
contain its power and so protect himself against its wiles. This is his
own seductive strategy, a homeopathic game, in which risking
everything is merely a way of ensuring that nothing is at risk.
Only the fear that the seductive might take itself literally remains,
the possibility that seduction might appropriate itself and begin to
operate entirely careless of man’s need for its scenes; the danger that
it might transgress his sacred horizon of appearances and make holes
in the walls of his world. This is the only remaining fear, but also the
greatest, ‘for holes mean only the abyss’ to man (p. 7). This is why
Baudrillard warns of the dangers of feminism: the void must be
secret and concealed, not quite real and never quite here.
Baudrillard’s seduction reassures the subject that the feminine will
always be there, a border zone of protection, a challenge that is
never made, mystery safely ritualized and secrecy made intelligible.
The subject needs the challenge of secrets, mystery, and artifice;
Baudrillard’s man has to insist that anything which exceeds the
secret role to which he has allotted it will perish. While Baudrillard
argues that the exclusion of the feminine is to its own benefit, he
knows it will not always be possible for man to ordain the
consequences of its entry into the masculine world. Indeed, the real
fear is that the feminine, the digital, the women and computers,
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might have no interest in the seductive games of the interior and will
instead destroy its borders and identities.
Marine Lover’s woman knows the situation well: ‘as soon as I am
inside, you will vomit me up again’ (Irigaray 1991b:12). She has no
desire to return to the phallic economy, nor is she confined to the
secret world of seduction as the enigmatic and reversible limit
between man and the void. Woman has another future, a future
which can be glimpsed at the cool outer edges of Baudrillard’s
seduction where it cries: ‘Let me go. Yes, let me go onward, beyond
the point of no return’ (p. 11). This is the point at which the game
begins to play itself and has no further need of man, the point at
which a woman writes: ‘I should prefer to explore the bottom of the
sea than make these journeys into and out of your present’ (p. 12).
REFERENCES
Baudrillard, J. (1988) America, trans. C.Turner, London, Verso. Original
(1986) Amérique, Paris, Grasset.
——(1990a) Seduction, trans. B.Singer, London, Macmillan. Original
(1989) De la séduction, l’horizon sacrée de l’apparence, Paris, DenoelGonthier.
——(1990b) Cool Memories, London, Verso. Original (1987) Cool
Memories, Paris, Galilée.
——(1990c) Fatal Strategies, London, Pluto Press. Original (1983) Les
Strategies fatales, Paris, Grasset.
Irigaray, L. (1981) This sex which is not one’, in E.Marks and I. de
Courtivon (eds) New French Feminisms, New York, Schocken Books.
Original (1977) Ce Sexe qui n’est pas un, Paris, Editions de Minuit.
——(1991a) ‘Questions’, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitfield,
Oxford, Blackwell.
——(1991b) Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, New York, Columbia
University Press. Original (1980) Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche,
Paris, Editions de Minuit.