THE HANDSTAND

OCTOBER 2002

The French philosopher Baudrillard looks aghast at the world of the individual - this individual who is a product of the negation of physical work,and the negation of spiritual and cultural life. The individual who may have no desire for social life, but is immersed in a seemingly endless enquiry into whims of the moment, health, and the search for an obsession that will carry the one enterprising individual to seek an excellence, or an enterprise that none other can emulate, envy or endure. Ralph Fiennes is a typical example.Victoria Beckham another.Alternatively the TV provides your ordinary Joe and Molly with this experience. Of a recent "jungle" in Australia, a letter to the Press revealsthe fraudulent nature of this:"These people were not in any peril - all the dangers of wild life had been taken away.Not only has the area been cleaned of natural wild life, but stages were built, lighting hauled in, crews set up camp." All this in a secret world of the rain forest with a thriving eco-system entirely free from man until now... "These over indulged nobodies had food delivered to them...and these people had no knowledge of how to co-exist in this environment and no right to be there." Meantime the newspapers prattle about the dangers of eating insects and wading through snake infested waters - and horror of horrors one contestant "felt I was going brain-dead in there." Here is a picture of Darren Day on the snake search - was he assured that harmless snakes were all that he would encounter? And what are the "deadlier dangers lurking in the forest" that Martin Cruddace of the Guardian deems potential cause of costly legal action.

"Our reality has become experimental. Without destiny, modern man is left with an endless experimentation of himself." Baudrillard discusses the "telegenetically modified society", television an observation post for those who cannot yet dispense with the exhausted idea that humans live in a community. He describes The Loft Story as "a media illusion of live reality", where the tatters of a convivial sense contrives to share in the solitude of another person.The victim of space and the choices of a living human collude together, but unable to acknowledge anything other than the self-conscious flairs of spontaneous histrionics the observer and the observed have only a mirror reflection to share.A mirror of such banality that it is difficult to pass through everyday life without covertly watching the other, any other, as though a filmed gesture will be repeated by a hand that cannot be grasped. The individual in everyday life becomes the victim or the master of moments that mean nothing, that have no individuality beyond the spasmodic interference of the unexpected chance event that might surprise life in a deathlike ambience. The artform of the house turned inside out that won a Turner Prize is thus understood.Outside but inside....

"We are already in it"..."the televisual universe is merely a holographic detail of the global reality"

Such "amusement parks", as Baudrillard describes them are more pernicious than Disneyland; he believes this phenomenon to be an obscenity of the banal, a pornographic quest within the mental fantasies of the television addict. Every moment might reveal in a spontaneous pause the observance of a perfect object, or an impervious mood, representative of the catatonic pause in global being where we can be saved from destruction, fear, loss or death. Immersed in this mirror of identity we become as dust in a gust of air, we adopt a kind of guilty folly of aimless movement, rapid words and glances."It also reveals the possibility that human beings are fundamentally not social." - you may even begin to look at your own life in such a way as to find out, perhaps, what other people notice about it, mirrored in extremes of observation that bring about a virtual self, a meaningless insignificance isolated for observation only.

"It is rather a question of making things transparent to themselves, through the diffusion of control..." This sentence is perhaps one of the most frightening conclusions he comes to. Devoid of control but deluded, as judges we surrender our free existence to a screen of mockery. Private moments are forever abandoned and thus a great solitude descends on the inner life and dangerously distorts or disfigures the hand that reaches....reaches toward a fascinating movement of grasping or giving; hiding or revealing, manipulating or breaking... the final polarisation of every trivial thought that builds existence..

"This is the ultimate protection against the need to exist and the duty to be oneself...."An invisible will that is only visible in the very fact that nothing-to-do or nothing-to-say no longer indicates either suppression or stupidity. Nothing-to-do has decided there is nothing-to-say.

(from video, Gary Hill)

In addition to the negation the reaction - the human right to be observed - the anxiety that no one knows your inner thoughts, your true identity. Thus the media photograph of every detail exposed by the chance turn of a photographer, a witness. The lightning strike of the inner mood written on the human face, divulged from the prosaic smile, the naked body. Surely, surely... we once had something there to hide?... the banal beauty of breasts, or a man's jockstrap....??? Poor fools of time and fashion catastrophies who may be seen but have the idea that a law can protect their privacy. Language that has "simply become a medium, an operator of visibility." Language... it has "lost its symbolic and ironic qualities,qualities that make language more important than what it conveys." The death of poetry and literature.

This latter conclusion illustrates the fear that has been constantly surfacing since television invaded the homes and rooms and even the vehicles of modern life. Radio which had encapsulated not only the messages of the terrors of a newsbulletin, but also the fables of story, myth and description has given way to the invasion of the visible talking-head, the eyes watching you, the mouth moving through a pattern of words and now with this new intrusion - another's existence within yours which you must be able to control by judgement, to reflect in connivance with your neighbours or workmates, and witness as no other than yourself. "Everybody must abide by society's fundamental logic: interactive exclusion...." The contradictory vice of the willing victim.

Humanity's "own alienation has reached such a degree that humanity's own destruction has become a first rate aesthetic sensation"(Walter Benjamin). There is no more reality - it becomes difficult or even impossible to comprehend and there is no more imagination. Everything terminates in "visibility - which, similar to the concept of heat in the theory of energy, is the most degraded form of existence".

Baudrillard then goes on to examine Catherine Millet's book about her sexual experiment, "a phantasmatic illusion of live sex", "another type of vivi-sexion". Imagination is "blown away....all that is left is a principle of unlimited verification of sexual operations...a mechanism...."

Here his argument becomes more aggressive because of the truth that this "live-sex,""live-life", or death are possibilities derived from a craving, a "pretentious claim that everything can happen in the real world, a desire that must find its place inside an all encompassing reality...and this is the essence of power too" and the corruption of power. He observes that only through repression has sexuality gained "such a strange power of attraction"...."And how sad is the idea of demonstrating sexuality through the sexual act !"This is a "Real Erotic" principle, and Catherine Millet’s perpetual coital 'acting out' is the equivalent of this principle at the level of the body. Since everyone dreams of a limitless sexual use of the body, let’s go for it!"

(Francesco Clemente "Midnight Sun")

With this final paragraph I leave Baudrillard to say it all - "Without a pause the naked climax of the neglect of truth descends to an excess of indecency. The fashionable naked torso from the media world, the star, the model and the girl next door dispenses with the enigma of dress, the enigma of private relationships governed by a secret. Millet believes that the naked body achieves truths 'about sex and about the world', it is poised within appearance as the inevitable cause of seduction. The naked body reveals visual stimuli that must be shared everywhere in order to approach truth, truth that has already, in this case, been eradicated by repetition.","Cruelty is the same everywhere. Going back to Duchamp, we can sum it all up as a case of "dust breeding".

Notes

A translation of "L'Elevage de Poussière," Libération, May 29, 2001. The title is borrowed from one of Marcel Duchamp’s works (1920). "Dust Breeding" is also the title of one of Man Ray’s photographs.

^2. Loft Story is the latest reality-TV sensation in France. The premise of this "Big Brother" like real-time game show on the M6 network is to lock 11 young French adults (in their early twenties; there are 6 men and 5 women) for ten weeks in an apartment with 26 round-the-clock surveillance cameras. They are constantly being filmed, and on the day the show airs on M6, viewers vote to eject one of the tenants (similar to the "Big Brother" show on US and British television). The idea is to end up with two participants, a male and a female, who will win a $407,000 house, but only if they can stay together for another 6 months under the 24 hour a day surveillance of the live-cams (Translator’s note).

^3. Catherine Millet is an art critic and art philosophy scholar who recently published La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M. (The Sexual Life of Catherine M.) (Paris: Seuil, 2001), a pornographic autobiography. In this book, the narrative is nothing but a succession of extremely graphic sexual acts. The book presents itself as an unmediated pornographic scene where the sexual imagery is privileged over narrative coherence (Translator’s note).

Original essay translated by François Debrix, Miami ( c.theory.net)
Review: JBraddell.