Our reality has become experimental. Without destiny,
modern man is left with an endless experimentation of himself. Let's
take two recent examples. The first one, the ~Loft Story~ show,[2]
is a media illusion of live reality. The second one, the case of
Catherine Millet's book,[3] is a phantasmatic illusion of live sex.
The ~Loft~ show has become a universal concept:
a human amusement park combined with a ghetto, solitary confinement
(huis-clos), and an Angel of Death. The idea is to use voluntary
seclusion as a laboratory for synthetic conviviality, for a telegenetically
modified society.
In this space, where everything is meant to be seen
(as in "Big Brother", other reality-TV shows, etc.), we
realize that there is nothing left to see. It becomes a mirror of
dullness, of nothingness, on which the disappearance of the other
is blatantly reflected (even though the show alleges different objectives).
It also reveals the possibility that human beings are fundamentally
not social. This space becomes the equivalent of a "ready-made"
just-as-is (telle quelle) transposition of an "everyday life"
that has already been
trumped by all dominant models. It is a synthetic banality,
fabricated in closed circuits and supervised by a monitoring screen.
In this sense, the artificial microcosm of the ~Loft
Story~ is
similar to Disneyland which gives the illusion of a real world,
a world out-there, whereas both Disney's world and the world outside
of it are mirror images of one another. All of the United States
is (in) Disneyland. And we, in France, are all inside the ~Loft~.
No need to enter reality's virtual reproduction. We are already
in it. The televisual universe is merely a holographic detail of
the global reality. Even in our most mundane activities we are deep
into experimental reality. And this explains our fascination with
immersion and spontaneous interactivity. Does it mean that it is
all pornographic voyeurism? Not at all.
Sex is everywhere else to be found, but that's not
what people want. What people deeply desire is a spectacle of banality.
This spectacle of banality is today's true pornography and obscenity.
It is the obscene spectacle of nullity (nullite), insignificance,
and platitude. This stands as the complete opposite of the theater
of cruelty. But perhaps there is still a form of cruelty, at least
a virtual one, attached to such a banality. At a time when television
and the media in general are less and less capable of accounting
for
(rendre compte) the world's (unbearable) events, they rediscover
daily life. They discover existential banality as the deadliest
event, as the most violent piece of information: the very location
of the perfect crime. Existential banality ~is~ the perfect crime.
And people are fascinated (but terrified at the same time) by this
indifferent "nothing-to-say" or "nothing-to-do,"
by the indifference of their own lives. Contemplating the Perfect
Crime --banality as the
latest form of fatality-- has become a genuine Olympic contest,
the latest version of extreme sports.
What makes it worse is the fact that the public
is mobilized as the judge of all this. The public has become Big
Brother. We are well beyond panopticism, beyond visibility as a
source of power and control. It is no longer a matter of making
things visible to the external eye. It is rather a question of making
things transparent to themselves, through the diffusion of control
into the masses, a mode
of control which by the same token erases the marks of the system.
Thus, the audience is involved in a gigantic exercise of negative
counter-transference (contre-transfert), and this is once again
where the dizzying attraction of this kind of spectacle comes from.
In fact, all this corresponds to the inalienable
right or desire to be nothing and to be regarded as such. There
are two ways to disappear. Either you demand not to be seen (the
current issue with image rights); or you turn to the maddening exhibitionist
display of your insignificance. You make yourself insignificant
in order to be seen as such. This is the ultimate protection against
the need to exist and the duty to be oneself.
But this situation also creates the contradictory
demand to
simultaneously not be seen and to be perpetually visible. Everyone
must have it both ways. No ethic or law can solve this dilemma.
There is no possibility to adjudicate between the unconditional
right to see and the unconditional right not to be seen. Complete
information is a basic human rights requirement. And this necessity
brings with it the idea of forced visibility, including the right
to be over-exposed by the media.
Foucault used to refer to self-expression as the
ultimate form of confession. Keeping no secret. Speaking, talking,
endlessly communicating. This is a form of violence which targets
the singular being and his secrecy. It is also a form of violence
against language. In this mode of communicability, language loses
its originality. Language simply becomes a medium, an operator of
visibility. It has lost its symbolic and ironic qualities, those
which make language more important than what it conveys.
The worst part of this obscene and indecent visibility
is the forced enrollment, the automatic complicity of the spectator
who has been blackmailed into participating. The obvious goal of
this kind of operation is to enslave the victims. But the victims
are quite willing. They are rejoicing at the pain and the shame
they suffer. Everybody must abide by society's fundamental logic:
interactive exclusion. Interactive exclusion, what could be better!
Let's all agree on it and practice it with enthusiasm! [4]
If everything ends with visibility (which, similar
to the concept of heat in the theory of energy, is the most degraded
form of existence), the point is still to make such a loss of symbolic
space and such an extreme disenchantment with life an object of
contemplation, of sidereal observation (sideration), and of perverse
desire. "While humanity was once according to Homer an object
of contemplation for the Gods, it has now become a contemplation
of itself. Its own alienation has reached such a degree that humanity's
own destruction becomes a first rate aesthetic sensation" (Walter
Benjamin).
Everywhere the experimental takes over the real and the imaginary.
Everywhere, principles of scientific evidence and verification are
introduced. Under the scalpel of the camera, and without recourse
to any symbolic language or context, we are vivisecting and dissecting
social relations. The case of Catherine Millet is another example
of experimental reality, another type of vivi-sexion.[5] In her
book, the sexual imaginary is blown away. All that's left is a principle
of
unlimited verification of sexual operations. It is a mechanism which
is no longer sexual.
A double misinterpretation is taking place. The
idea of sexuality is turned into the ultimate reference. Whether
it is repressed or it is displayed, sexuality is at best nothing
more than a hypothesis. It is incorrect to take a hypothesis for
a truth or a solid reference. It may well be that the sexual hypothesis
is nothing more than a fantasy. In any case, it is through its repression
that sexuality has gained such a strange power of attraction. Once
it is played out,
sexuality loses its postulated quality. Hence, it is absurd and
misplaced to act it out and to systematically call for sexual
"liberation." One never liberates a hypothesis. And how
sad is the idea of demonstrating sexuality through the sexual act!
As if displacements, deviations, transfers, and metaphors had nothing
to do with sex. Everything is in the filter of seduction, in ~~detournement~.
Not the seduction in sex and desire, but the seduction of playing
with sex and desire (le jeu avec the sexe et le desir). This is
exactly what makes impossible the idea of "live sex."
The concepts of live death or live news are just as naively
naturalist. They are all linked to the pretentious claim that
everything can happen in the real world, that everything craves
to find its place inside an all encompassing reality. After all,
this is the essence of power too: "The corruption of power
is to inscribe into reality what was only found in dreams."
The key to the problem is provided by Jacques Henric's
understanding of photography and the image. For Henric, our curiosity
with the visual is always sexual. There's no escaping it. What we
always look for in an image is sex, particularly the female sex.
This is not only the Origin of the World (Courbet) but also the
origin of the visual.
So, why not go there directly? Let's take pictures of sex! Let's
surrender fully to the scopic drive! 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!
No more seduction, no more desire, no more ~jouissance~
even. All we have is an endless repetition, a general accumulation
which marks the superiority of quantity over quality. Out with seduction!
There is only one question left, whispered by a man in a woman's
ear: "What are you doing after the orgy?" But this question
is useless. She can
no longer think past the orgy. She is beyond the end. She has reached
the point where all processes have gone exponential and can only
reproduce themselves ad infinitum. This is what Alfred Jarry predicted
in his ~Overmale (Surmale)~. Once you have reached a critical point,
you can endlessly make love. You have become a sexual machine. When
sex is nothing more than a matter of sex-processing,
then it has reached its exponential, transfinite (transfini) degree.
But this does not mean that it has fulfilled its objective: to exhaust
sex, to go to the end of its process. This is impossible. And this
last impossibility is what is left of seduction and its revengem
(sexuality's own revenge). It's all sexuality has to turn against
its unscrupulous users, unscrupulous about themselves, their desires,
and their pleasure.
"To think like a woman undresses," Bataille
used to say. Perhaps, but Catherine Millet's naivete is to think
that people undress in order to get naked, to reach the naked truth
about sex and about the world. People take off their clothes to
be revealed (pour apparaitre). But not to be revealed in their nakedness
like truth (can anyone still
believe that truth remains when its veil of secrecy is lifted?)
but to join the realm of appearances, of seduction. That's totally
different.
The modern, disenchanted interpretation of the body
as something which cannot wait to be undressed and of sexuality
as a desire which wants to be acted out and find pleasure is misconstrued.
Cultures which privilege masks, veils, adornments affirm the opposite:
the body is a metaphor. The genuine objects of desire and pleasure
are
the marks and signs that pull the body away from its nakedness,
its naturalness, its "truth," and the entire reality of
its physical presence. Everywhere seduction pulls objects away from
their truths (including the truth about sexual value). When thought
lifts its veil, it is not in order to be seen naked or to reveal
a secret buried for a long time. Thought lifts its veil to reveal
the body as a definite enigma, as a secret, a pure object whose
mystery will never be solved and has no need to be discovered.
Under these conditions, an Afghan woman hidden behind
a moucharabieh window[6] or another woman covered with a metallic
net on the cover of ~Elle~ present contrasting alternatives to the
image of Catherine Millet's wild virgin. It is the opposition between
an excess of secrecy and an excess of indecency.
In a sense, this kind of indecency, this radical
obscenity found in ~~Loft Story~, is yet another veil. It is a final,
unremovable veil which remains after all previous covers have been
lifted. We want to reach the extreme, attain the paroxysm of exhibition,
achieve total nudity, find absolute reality, consume live and raw
violence (au direct et a l'ecorche vif). We'll never succeed. It's
impossible! The
fortress of obscenity cannot be brought down. But, paradoxically,
such a lost quest helps to resurrect the basic rule of the game:
the rule of the sublime, the rule of secrecy, of seduction (always
tracked down through the endless lifting of covers).
So, why not propose a reverse hypothesis (opposed
to the idea of voyeurism and collective stupidity)? Why not suggest
that what people want, what we all want in our quest which inevitably
stops in front of the fortress of obscenity, is precisely to gain
the sense (pressentir) that there is nothing to see, that we'll
never find the final clue? What we want is to verify (by negation)
the ultimate
power of seduction. This is a desperate search, but experimental
reality is always desperate. What ~Loft Story~ claims to prove is
that human beings are indeed social beings... but nothing is so
sure. What Catherine Millet claims to demonstrate is that she is
a sexual being... which is not a sure thing at all. What these experiments
confirm is merely the presence of the conditions for the experiment
(simply pushed to their limit). The system is perhaps best decoded
through its excesses, but it is the same system everywhere. Cruelty
is the same everywhere. Going back to Duchamp, we can sum it all
up as a case of "dust breeding."
Notes
1. A translation of "L'Elevage de Poussiere,"
~Liberation~, 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).
4. The French sentence reads: "L 'exclusion
interactice, c'est le comble! Decidee en commun, consommee avec
enthousiasme."
5. Baudrillard's play on vivisection and sex.
6. Moucharabiehs are the thick wooden windows found
in Middle Eastern countries. They allow outside light to filter into
the room while preventing outsiders from seeing inside.
