Serious Zen

Jean Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (1993) is a site of synchronous convergence, an intersection of the examination of the postmodern condition and the embodiment of the very principles it examines. This is an exaggeration, to be certain, but the textual line between interpretation and enaction is anything but clearly demarcated. The sense of indeterminacy is both textual and contextual. The text itself is often a deluge of thinking, an interminable play, a circulation and recirculation, a kind of floating exegesis of culture (especially in the sense with which everything tends increasingly toward the sign). Baudrillard’s position in this is practically inscrutable: if he is being serious it is often ironic, and if he is being ironic it is often serious; but that is the path of the intellect, as is the acceptance of opposition and contradiction. To be sure, he must be vast; he must contain multitudes. Yet, Baudrillard’s text contains that element of negative resistance necessary to supplant a culture bent on positivism–what I would call an anti-superconductivist stance.

This stance is evident in his conception of intangible otherness, that otherness that manifests at the exact moment when otherness is denied and apparently absent. For Baudrillard, this is the state of culture or at least the point to which it is moving: “In a hyperprotected space the body loses all of its defences. So sterile are operating rooms that no germ or bacterium can survive there. Yet this is the very place where mysterious, anomalous viral diseases make their appearance” (62). The moment of the virus’ emergence is the invasion of otherness, a moment predicated upon the extermination of that virus. This kind of mysterious manifestation is becoming more and more common with the AIDS virus, for example, especially with the recent use of protea inhibitors whose effectiveness is measured by blood and lymph node testing. Apparently, the inhibitors are able to reduce the virus to an undetectable state. But progress stops there: individuals taken off the inhibitors see a reappearance and more rapid spread of the virus, more quickly defeating a slowly regaining immune system. This is the specter of otherness, ultimately transparent, ultimately evil. For Baudrillard, this is as good as it gets: virulence signals the possibility of resistance to indeterminate and overdeterminate systems. It is this negative resistance, a sort of stopping of the endless flow of electrical or viral currents, a kind of silence, that opens up the potential for agency. In this way, we might think of Gandhi and ahimsa, the point at which non-violence halts the continual recirculation of violence, the point at which resistance both brings forth and kills off. Baudrillard’s text works much the same in its annihilation of reality in favor of hyperreality, its killing off of aesthetics, sexuality and economics in favor of a transaesthics, transsexuality, and transeconomics. But are not these forms of resistance evil? Yes, but in an ironic sense: evil is the manifestation of seeming impossibility, of that which we thought was dead.

Baudrillard’s theorization of the Other, especially in the latter articles of the text, is often given to gross equivocations and, in some instances, simple misrepresentations. This is especially evident in what I would call the relegation of other cultures to primitive cultures. For Baudrillard, the designation of other cultures is apparently and simply that which is not the West. This resistance to localization, however, is not the positive (or negative rather) kind of resistance we expect. In fact, it fashions the very kind of opposition or difference whose existence was supposed impossible. Moreover, this use of other cultures functions as a kind of displacement, an infinite deferral of the problem of culture. I might be less recalcitrant if Baudrillard were simply to attempt to gauge the effect of the West on other cultures, but his methodology here is one that obtains a sort of curvature (much like the way time might bend back over and upon itself) so that there, those other cultures, reflects back upon here. But, the problem I see, at least in the way Baudrillard frames it, is that there’s no there there: the other, primitive cultures recede into a passive incorporation of the Other, a hospitality that fosters entrance without the threat of contamination. Yet, these other cultures have no way of stopping this entrance since they lack the pretension of subjectivity, the ability for critical denial: “Primitive cultures do not burden themselves with pretensions of this order. Being oneself means nothing to them: everything comes from the Other” (142). Exogenically and endogenically, this is unacceptable. In the first case, this is the worst kind of intellectual colonialism in which Baudrillard imagines other cultures as somehow not existing without the West. In the second case, it simply falls apart. Take, for instance, the case of India (apparently one of the “primitive” cultures) and Hinduism. In Vedic philosophy even the idea of a distinction or difference between self and Other is preposterous–neither gains superiority. We could say the same of Japanese Buddhism. In fact, even in the few instances when Baudrillard attempts to localize, he is apt to misrepresentation. This is especially true in his discussion of Japanese industrialists (143). While the idea that a “god is concealed within each product of technology” may be true, the idea that they then become “autonomous” is specious at best. The result of this process for Baudrillard is an “operational purity” (143), a purity uncontaminated by alienation and automatonization. Here, Baudrillard has it all wrong. The non-existence of an alienated labor force resides in the non-distinction of subject and object; in other words, both subject and object exist simultaneously in an interdependent relationship, the result of which is neither reification or idealization of one or the other. In fact, I am somewhat surprised at this misrepresentation, especially in the sense with which Baudrillard senses a movement beyond the Sartrean Hell of other people, that is, the disintegration of the subject/object dichotomy and binaries in general, an “ecstasy of the same” (58). It is not, of course, that simple.

For Baudrillard, these disintegrations are entangled in the inexorability of technology–the interminable flow of information, prostheses, human cloning–and result in a conflation of binaries that is at once superficial, at once mediated, yet obtaining something comparable to, or reminiscent of, the “mathematical symbol for infinity” (56). However, this infinity is without origin or destination, simply an endless recirculation. Thus, we forego both individuality and objectivity. I think there is a temptation here to see Baudrillard in a mystical context, albeit an atheistic mysticism, a mysticism for which there exists no belief whatsoever in a divine being, but for which there is a sense of transcended individuality (even in the negation of the term itself). But this is a dangerous kind of contextualization given the degree to which experience is mediated by and subservient to forms of technology–the result is a superficiality or hyperrealization of all forms. It is also at this point of conflation that arises the specter of otherness, the evil genie, forever threatening to explode the contiguity of systems. While such an explosion might be a necessary mode of resistance and while it might signal agency, it also means the inevitability of the breakdown of systems, even if those systems have already been broken down. For both the physical body and the body of culture, this explosion would be violent. In some ways, it already is and has been: AIDS and Ebola are forms of localized wars against the body. The moment I fear more, however, is the moment culture blows out, a moment with a surety of precedence and a possibility certainly conceivable.