Abstract
M.A.
When fighting against the dominance of instrumental reason, aesthetic consciousness always admitted its allegiance to ‘another state of being,’ i.e., to the explosive break with the continual inertia of linear social development. In the literature written at the turn of the 20th century this was symbolized in the ‘life of danger’ that contrasted with the normality of ordinary bourgeois life. This study shows that Baudrillard no longer believes in ‘another state of being’ with explosive force. In Baudrillard's theory of simulation, the crisis of overproduction in capitalism is to be understood as the total shift of production into reproduction. His position has consequences for the idea of the catastrophic nature of the present social situation and for the aesthetic means with which it can finally be thought. Baudrillard calls the catastrophic effect of the threat emanating from simulation an implosion not an explosion, it results from the fact that under pressure from a merely simulated reality, every social energy is expended internally in the play of signifiers, evaporating in some catastrophic process. His aesthetic fascination with events does not seem to have disappeared completely in the process. For Baudrillard, on September 11 2001, the terrorists countered simulation with simulation itself. This is what makes it a true event. What is unthinkable in this event is the use of death in a staged exchange where a whole culture could be attacked. The attack brings back death to a world that pretends it is not there. If political economy is the most rigorous attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to political economy.
Baudrillard encounters an indifference, a void and death at the heart of thought. This leads to apocalyptic tones. For Baudrillard, one only attains to thought when one interiorizes the limit and displaces it. Thinking no longer works except by breaking down and dismantling itself. For Deleuze, on the other hand, to dissent is to affirm other modes of life. Deleuze constructs an entire philosophy of life – conceived as a philosophy of difference. This enables Deleuze to have an affirmative notion of the aesthetic impulse: the artwork as an unexpected event that actualizes the virtual. The virtual is not a general idea, something abstract and empty, but the concept of
difference (and of life) rendered adequate. The concept of the virtual gives us the time of life. Pure, virtual being is real and qualified through the internal process of differentiation. Being differs with itself. It does not look outside itself for another or a force of mediation because its difference rises from its very core, from ‘the explosive internal force that life carries within itself’ (Deleuze, 1988: 105). Deleuze conceives of a discrete art with metamorphic force. Deleuze, unlike Baudrillard, manages to pull back from the capitalist void and construct a ‘desiring machine’ to manipulate capitalist simulacra.