Baudrillard: Quotes

Seduction

"It is difficult to say what constitutes the scene of the body. We can at least say this: it is where the body is in play, and particularly where it plays itself, where it escapes into the ellipsis of forms and movements, into dance, where it escapes its inertia, into gesture, where it is unbound itself, into the aura of looking, where it makes itself into allusion and absence—in short, where it offers itself as seduction" (51).

“What makes you exist is not the force of your desire . . . , but the play of the world and seduction; it is the passion of playing and being played, it is the passion of illusion and appearance, it is that which comes from elsewhere, form others, from their face, their language, their gestures—and that which bothers you, lures you, summons you into existence; it is the encounter, the surprise of what exists before you, outside of you, without you—the marvelous exteriority of the pure object, of the pure event, of what happens without you having anything to do with it” (172-173).

Vulgar commodity: “Raised to the power of absolute commodity, it produces effects of seduction” (149).

“The work of art—a new and triumphant fetish and not a sad alienated one—should work to deconstruct its own traditional aura, its authority and power of illusion, in order to shine resplendent in the pure obscenity of the commodity.  It must annihilate itself as familiar object and become monstrously foreign” (149).

“Shine” of foreignness not of repression or alienated object or of haunting quality, but it shines “out of some secret dispossession; it glows with veritable seduction that comes from elsewhere, from having exceeded its own form and become pure object, pure event” (149).

The source of this perspective for Baudelaire is “the spectacle of transfiguration of the commodity in the Universal Exposition of 1855” (149).

Wit

"In order for there to be seduction, signs or words must thus function without knowing it, as in the Witz.  Things must be absent from themselves, and words must be meaningless" (169).  

Game Theory & Fatal Strategies

Game theory helps understand how play works in the fatal strategy space.  We can't use its logic or its probability calculations, but we can use the tension it predicts and formalizes between players and groups of players.  Game theory gives us the analogy of the narrative that can be applied to real-world situations, catastrophe's, etc.  And fatal strategies give us the theory to move into the space of play and do something else with it (in part II).


The Absolute Commodity

The absolute object is one that is worthless, whose quality is a matter of indifference, but which escapes objective alienation in that it has made itself more of an object than the object—this is a fatal quality.

     This escalation to the limit . . .–responding to alienation on its own terms . . .--is found prefigured in the absolute commodity, according to Baudelaire. Art (the work of art), confronted in modern times with the challenge of the commodity does not, nor should it, look for its rescue in a critical denial . . . , but rather in outbidding the very formal an fetishized abstraction of commodities, under the enchantment of exchange-value—becoming more commodity than commodity, since even farther from all use-value. (146-148)

Chance vs. Fatality
 
Logic of Baudelaire: work of art becomes one with fashion, advertising – work of art that bewilders in its venality, mobility, . . . chance, vertigo—a pure object of marvelous commutability, since, the causes having disappeared, all effects are virtually equivalent” (148).

 “What happens accidentally takes on a meaning and intensity that we no longer assign to rational occurrence. In an overdetermined world, chance is the creator of special effects” (184).

"Chance itself is a special effect; it assumes in the imagination the perfection of the accident” (184).

Spectacle

“the immoral principle of the spectacle, the ironic principle of Evil” will save us (226).

Appearance

"We will not be looking for change, and will not oppose the fixed to the mobile; we will look for the more mobile than mobile: metamorphosis . . . We will not distinguish the true from the false, but will look for the falser than false: illusion and appearance" (25-26).

Ceremony

“The form opposite to love would then by observance: wherever a rule and a game are reinvented, love disappears.  Compared to the regulated and highly conventional intensities of the game or the ceremony, love is a system of freely circulating energy.  It is therefore charged with a whole ideology of liberation and free circulation; it is the pathos of modernity” (134).

The “ceremony is the equivalent of fatality. . . . An ecstatic connection like that of the game: ceremony has no meaning, it has only esoteric rule.  It has no end, since it is initiatory” (203).

“In it we find the definitively factitious and conventional order of the world exalted, the occult objectivity that shines behind the subjectivity of appearances” (203).

“The ceremony puts an end to this occultism of subjectivity” (203).

Liquidation of Metaphor

“The liquidation of metaphor, this precipitation of the sign into brute, senseless matter, is a thing of murderous efficacy. It is of the same order as the meaningless event, the catastrophe, which is also a blind reply, without metaphor, of the world as object to man as subject” (153).

Theory

“Theory is just like ceremony” (217).  “Ceremony is always sacrificial” (217).

”There is perhaps one fatal strategy and only one: theory” (219).