Baudrillard, "...Or the End of the Social"

 Baudrillard, "...Or the End of the Social"

 .. Or the End of the Social

The social is not a clear and unequivocal process. Do modern societies correspond to a process of socialisation or to one of progressive desocialisation? Everything depends on one's understanding of the term and none of these is fixed; all are reversible. Thus the institutions which have sign-posted the "advance of the social" (urbanisation, concentration, production, work, medicine, education, social security, insurance, etc.) including capital, which was undoubtedly the most effective socialisation medium of all, could be said to produce and destroy the social in one and the same movement.

If the social is formed out of abstract instances which are laid down one after the other on the ruins of the symbolic and ceremonial edifice of former societies, then these institutions produce more and more of them. But at the same time they consecrate that ravenous, all-consuming abstraction which perhaps devours precisely the "essential marrow" of the social. From that point of view, it could be said that the social regresses to the same degree as its institutions develop.

The process accelerates and reaches its maximal extent with mass media and information. Media, all media, information, all information, act in two directions: outwardly they produce more of the social, inwardly they neutralise social relations and the social itself.

But then, if the social is both destroyed by what produces it (the media, information) and reabsorbed by what it produces (the masses), it follows that its definition is empty, and that this term which serves as universal alibi for every discourse, no longer analyses anything, no longer designates anything. Not only is it superfluous and useless - wherever it appears it conceals something else: defiance, death, seduction, ritual, repetition - it conceals that it is only abstraction and residue, or even simply an effect of the social, a simulation and an illusion.

Even the term "social relation" is enigmatic? What is a "social relation," what is the "production of social relations?" Here everything is spurious. Is the social instantaneously, and as if by definition, a "relation," which already presupposes a serious abstraction and a rational algebra of the social - or else is it something different from what the term "relation" neatly rationalises? Does the "social relation" perhaps exist for something different, namely for what it destroys? Does it perhaps ratify, 'perhaps inaugurate the end of the social?

The "social sciences" came to consecrate this obviousness and agelessness of the social. But we must change our tune. There were societies without the social, just as there were societies without history. Networks of symbolic ties were precisely neither "relational" nor "social." At the other extreme, our "society" is perhaps in the process of putting an end to the social, of burying the social beneath a simulation of the social. There are many ways for it to die - as many as there are definitions. Perhaps the social will have had only an ephemeral existence, in the narrow gap between the symbolic formations and our "society" where it is dying. Before, there is not yet any social; after, there is no longer any. Only "sociology" can seem to testify to its agelessness, and the supreme gibberish of the "social sciences" will still echo it long after its disappearance.

For two centuries now, the uninterrupted energy of the social has come from deterritorialisation and from concentration in ever more unified agencies. A centralised perspective space which orientates everything inserted into it by simple convergence along the "line of flight" towards infinity (in effect, the social, like space and time, opens up a perspective towards infinity). The social can only be defined from this panoptic point of view.

But let us not forget that this perspective space (in painting and architecture as in politics or the economy) is only one simulation model among others, and that it is characterised only by the fact that it gives rise to effects of truth, of objectivity, unknown and unheard of in the other models. Perhaps, even this is only a delusion? In which case everything that has been contrived and staged in this "comedy of errors" of the social has never had any deep significance. Ultimately, things have never functioned socially, but symbolically, magically, irrationally, etc. Which implies the formula: capital is a defiance of society. That is to say that this perspective, this panoptic machine, this machine of truth, of rationality, of productivity which is capital, is without objective finality, without reason: it is above all a violence, and this violence is perpetrated by the social on the social, but basically it is not a social machine, it doesn't care a damn about capital or likewise about the social in their equally interdependent and antagonistic definition. This is to say, once more, that there is no contract, no contract is ever exchanged between distinct agencies according to the law - that is all sound and fury - there are only ever stakes, defiances, that is to say something which does not proceed via a "social relation. "

(Defiance is not a dialectic, nor a confrontation between respective poles, or terms, in an extended structure. It is a process of extermination of the structural position of each term, of the subject position of each of the antagonists, and in particular of the one who hurls the challenge: because of this it even abandons any contractual position which might give rise to a "relation." Exchange of value is no longer its logic. Its logic abandons positions of value and positions of meaning. The protagonist of defiance is always in a suicidal position, but it is a triumphant suicide: it is by the destruction of value, the destruction of meaning (one's own, their own) that the other is forced into a never equivalent, ever escalating response. Defiance always comes from that which has no meaning, no name, no identity - it is a defiance of meaning, of power, of truth, of their existing as such, of their pretending to exist as such. Only this reversion can put an end to power, to meaning, to value, and never any relation of force, however favorable it is, since the letter re-enters into a polar, binary, structural relation, which re-creates by definition a new space of meaning and of power. 7)

Here several hypotheses are possible:

1. - The social has basically never existed. There never has been any "social relation." Nothing has ever functioned socially. On this inescapable basis of challenge, seduction and death, there has never been anything but simulation of the social and the social relation. In which case, there is no point dreaming about a "real" sociality, a hidden sociality, an ideal socialist: this just hypostatises a simulacrum. If the social is a simulation, the only likely turn of events is that of a brutal de-simulation - the social ceasing to take itself as a space of reference and to play the game, and putting an end at last to power, to the effect of power and to the mirror of the social which perpetuates it. A de-simulation which itself captures the style of a challenge (the reverse of capital's challenge of the social and society): a challenge to the belief that capital and power exist according to their own logic - they have none, they vanish as apparatuses as soon as the simulation of social space is undone. 8 This is really what we are seeing today: the disintegration of the whole idea of the social, the consumption and involution of the social, the breakdown of the social simulacrum, a genuine defiance of the constructive and productive approach to the social which dominates us. All quite suddenly, as if the social had never existed. A breakdown which has all the features of a catastrophe, not an evolution or revolution. No longer a "crisis" of the social, but the reabsorption of its system. Without having anything to do with those marginal defections (of the mad, women, druggies, delinquents), which, on the contrary, supply new energy to the failing social. This reabsorption process can no longer be re-socialised. Like a ghost at dawn, its principle of reality and of social rationality simply fades away.

2.- The social has really existed, it exists even more and more, it invests everything, it alone exists. Far from being volatilised, it is the social which triumphs; the reality of the social is imposed everywhere. But, contrary to the antiquated idea which makes the social into an objective progress of mankind, everything which escapes it being only residue, it is possible to envisage that the social itself is only residue, and that, if it has triumphed in the real, it is precisely as such. Litter piling up from the symbolic order as it blows around, it is the social as remainder which has assumed real force and which is soon to be universal. 9 Here is a more subtle form of death.

In this event, we are really even deeper in the social, even deeper in pure excrement, in the fantastic congestion of dead labor, of dead and institutionalised relations within terrorist bureaucracies, of dead languages and grammars (the very term "relation" already has something dead about it, something about death to it).

Then of course it can no longer be said that the social is dying, since it is already the accumulation of death. In effect we are in a civilisation of the supersocial, and simultaneously in a civilisation of non-degradable, indestructible residue, piling up as the social spreads.

Waste and recycling: such would be the social in the image of a production whose cycle has long escaped the "social" finalities to become a completely described spiral nebula, rotating and expanding with every "revolution" it makes. Thus one sees the social expanding throughout history as a "rational" control of residues, and a rational production of residues.

1544 saw the opening of the first great poorhouse in Paris: vagrants, lunatics, the sick, everyone not integrated by the group and discarded as remainders were taken in charge under the emerging sign of the social. This was extended to the dimensions of National Assistance in the nineteenth century, then Social Security in the twentieth century. Proportional to the reinforcement of social reason, it is the whole community which soon becomes residual and hence, by one more spiral, the social which piles up. When the remainders reach the dimensions of the whole of society, one has a perfect socialisation. 10 Everybody is completely excluded and taken in charge, completely disintegrated and socialised.

Symbolic integration is replaced by a functional integration, functional institutions take charge of the residue from symbolic disintegration - a social agency appears where there was none, nor even any name for it. "Social relations" fester, proliferate, grow proportionately richer with this disintegration. And the social sciences cap it off. Whence the piquancy of an expression like: "the responsibility of society vis-a-vis its underprivileged members," when we know the "social" is precisely the agency which arises from this dereliction.

Whence the interest of Le Monde's "Society" column where paradoxically only immigrants, delinquents, women, etc. appear: precisely those who have not been socialised; the social "case" being analogous to the pathological case. Pockets to be absorbed, segments which the social isolates the more it spreads. Designated as refuse on the horizon of the social, they thus fall under its jurisdiction and are fated to find their place in a widening sodality. It is on these remainders that the social machine starts up again and finds support for a new extension. But what happens when everybody is socialised? Then the machine stops, the dynamic is reversed, and it is the whole social system which becomes residue. As the social progressively gets rid of all of its residue, it becomes residual itself. By placing residual categories under the rubric "Society," the social designates itself as remainder.

Now what becomes of the rationality of the social, of the contract and of the social relation if the social, instead of appearing as original structure, appears as refuse, and refuses processing? If the social is only remains, it is no longer the scene of a positive process or history, it is simply the scene of a piling up and exorbitant processing of death. It no longer makes any sense, since it is there for something else, in despair of anything else: it is excremental. Without any ideal perspective. For remains are the transcendence of nothingness, they are what is irreconcilable in death, and on them can only be founded a politics of death. Reclusion or preclusion. Under the sign of productive reason, the social has been above all the space of a great Reclusion - under the sign of simulation and deterrence it has become the space of a great Preclusion. But perhaps that is already no longer a "social" space.

It is from the point of view of this administration of refuse that the social can appear today for what it really is: a right, a need, a service, a use value pure and simple. No longer a conflictual, political structure: but a welcoming structure. The limit of the economist value of the social as use value is in effect its ecologist value as niche. The proper use of the social as one of the ways of balancing the exchanges between the individual and his environment, the social as functional ecosystem, homeostasis and superbiology of the species - no longer even a structure, but a substance: the cordial and high protein anonymity of a nutritious substance. A kind of foetal security space helping everywhere to relieve the difficulties of living, providing everywhere for the quality of life, like comprehensive insurance, the equivalent of a wasted life; a degraded form of lubricating, insuring, passifying and permissive sociality; the lowest form of social energy: that of an environmental, behavioral utility. Such is the face of the social for us - its entropic form - the other face of its death.

[ EXCURSUS: The Social, or The Functional Ventilation of Remainders]

The social exists to look after the soaking up of excess wealth which, redistributed to all and sundry, would ruin the social order, would create an intolerably utopian situation.

This reversion of wealth, of all wealth, which formerly was effected by sacrifice which left no room for any accumulation of remainders, is intolerable to our societies. It is by this very fact that they are "societies" - in the sense that they always produce a surplus, remainders - whether it be demographic, economic, or linguistic - and that these remainders must be cleared up (never sacrificed, that is too dangerous: but purely and simply got rid of).

The social exists on the double basis of the production of remainders and their eradication.

If all wealth were sacrificed, people would lose a sense of the real. If all wealth became disposable, people would lose a sense of the useful and the useless. The social exists to take care of the useless consumption of remainders so that individuals can be assigned to the useful management of their lives.

Use and use value constitute a fundamental ethics. But it exists only in a simulation of shortage and calculation. If all wealth was redistributed, of itself this would abolish use value (the same goes for death: if death was redistributed, brought forward, of itself this would abolish life as use value). It would suddenly and brutally become clear that use value is only a cruel and disillusioning moral convention, which presupposes a functional calculation in all things. But it dominates us all and, intoxicated as we are by the phantasm of use value, we could not bear this catastrophe of reversing wealth and of reversing death. It is not that everything should be reversed; just that the remainder should be. And the social is what takes care of remainders.

Up till now the car and the house, and various "commodities" have somehow or other succeeded in soaking up the disposable physical and mental capacities of individuals. What would happen if all disposable wealth was redistributed amongst them? Quite simply, the bottom would drop out of their lives - they would lose the fabric and even tempo of a well-tempered economy, lose a sense of self-interest and of purpose. A brutal disequilibrium of the value system would result (a sudden influx of cash is the most rapid and the most radical way to ruin a currency). Or else, as in the affluent society, they would be reduced to a pathological multiplication of use value (3,4, n cars) where in any case this dissipates into a hyperreal functionalism.

All surplus is capable of ruining the system of equivalences, if it is disproportionately poured back into it, and of driving our mental system of equivalences to despair at the same time.l1 Hence there is a kind of wisdom in the institution of the social as a matrix preventing the growth and reversion of wealth, as a medium for its controlled squandering.

In a society incapable of total reversion and committed to use value, there is a kind of intelligence and wisdom in the institution of the social and of its "objective" wastefulness: prestige operations, Concorde, the moon, missiles, satellites, even public works and Social Security in their absurd one-upmanship. An implicit understanding of the stupidity and the limits of use value. The true artlessness is that of socialists and humanists of every shade who want all wealth to be redistributed and that there should be no useless expenditure, etc. Socialism, the champion of use value, the champion of the use value of the social, reveals a total misunderstanding of the social. It believes that the social can become the optimal collective management of the use value of men and things.

But the social is never that. Despite any socialist longing, it is insane, uncontrollable, a monstrous protuberance, which expends, which destroys, without any thought to optimal management. And it is precisely in this way that it is functional, that it fulfils its role (despite what idealists may cry). This is, to maintain a contrario the principle of use value, to save the reality principle by the roundabout but objective route of wastefulness. The social manufactures this privation necessary to the distinction between good and evil, and to the whole moral order in general - a privation absent from the "first affluent societies" described by Marshall Sahlins. This is what socialism does not see and why, by wanting to abolish this privation and insisting on a generalised access to wealth, it puts an end to the social while believing that it is heightening it.

From this point of view the problem of the death of the social is simple: the social dies from an extension of use value which is equivalent to its extermination. When everything, including the social, becomes use value, it is a world become inert, where the reverse of what Marx dreamed occurs. He dreamed of the economic being reabsorbed into a (transfigured) social; what is happening to us is the social being reabsorbed into a (banalised) political economy: administration pure and simple.

It is the wrong use of wealth which saves a society. Nothing has changed since Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees. And socialism can do nothing to prevent it. The whole of political economy has been invented to dissolve this paradox, this maleficent ambiguity of the social functioning. But it has always come to grief, by a sort of secondary functionality. Or else, it is in the process of succeeding and, after having seen the abolition of the political and its dilution in the social, we are in the process of seeing the reabsorption of the social back into the economic -an economy even more political, and lacking in "hubris," an economy of extravagance and excess which would still characterise the capitalist age.J

3. - The social has well and truly existed, but does not exist any more. It has existed as coherent space, as reality principle: the social relation, the production of social relations, the social as dynamic abstraction, scene of conflicts and historical contradictions, the social as structure and as stake, as strategy and as ideal -all this has had an end in view, all this has meant something. The social has not always been a delusion, as in the first hypothesis, nor remainder, as in the second. But precisely, it has only had an end in view, a meaning as power, as work, as capital, from the perspective space of a rational distribution, from the finalised space of an ideal convergence, which is also that of production - in short, in the narrow gap of second order simulacra, and, absorbed into third-order simulacra, it is dying.

End of the perspective space of the social. The rational sociality of the contract, dialectical sociality (that of the State and of civil society, of public and private, of the social and the individual) gives way to the sociality of contact, of the circuit and transistorised network of millions of molecules and particles maintained in a random gravitational field, magnetised by the constant circulation and the thousands of tactical combinations which electrify them. But is it still a question of the socius? Where is sociality in Los Angeles? And where will it be later on, in a future generation (for Los Angeles is still that of TV, movies, the telephone and the automobile), that of a total dissemination, of a ventilation of individuals as terminals of information, in an even more measurable - not convergent, but connected - space: a space of connection? The social only exists in a perspective space, it dies in the space of simulation, which is also a space of deterrence.

The space of simulation confuses the real with the model. There is no longer any critical and speculative distance between the real and the rational. There is no longer really even any projection of models in the real (which is still equivalent to the substitution of the map for the territory in Borges), but an in-the-field, here-and-now transfiguration of the real into model. A fantastic short-circuit: the real is hyperrealised. Neither realised, nor idealised: but hyperrealised. The hyper real is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model. Anticipation, deterrence, preventive transfiguration, etc.: the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real.

That is clear in some of its subtle, tenuous, imperceptible features, by which the real appears as more true than the true, as too real to be true. The task of all media and information today is to produce this real, this extra real (interviews, live coverage, movies, TV-truth, etc.). There is too much of it, we fall into obscenity and porn. As in porn, a kind of zoom takes us too near the rea1, which never existed and only ever came into view at a certain distance. Deterrence of all real potentiality, deterrence by meticulous reduplication, by macroscopic hyperfidelity, by accelerated recycling, by saturation and obscenity, byabolition of the distance between the real and its representation, by implosion of the differentiated poles between which flowed the energy of the real: this hyperreality puts an end to the system of the real, it puts an end to the real as referential by exalting it as model.

It also puts an end to the social in the same way. The social, if it existed with second-order simulacra, no longer even has the opportunity to be produced with third-order ones: from the beginning it is trapped in its own "blown up" and desperate staging, in its own obscenity. Signs of this hyperrealisation of the social, signs of its reduplication and its anticipated fulfillment are everywhere. The transparency of the social relation is flaunted, signified, consumed everywhere. The history of the social will never have had time to lead to revolution: it will have been outstripped by signs of the social and of revolution. The social will never have had time to lead to socialism, it will have been short-circuited by the hypersocial, by the hyperreality of the social (but perhaps socialism is no more than this?). Thus the proletariat will not have even had time to deny itself as such: the concept of class will have dissolved well before, into some parodic, extended double, like "the mass of workers" or simply into a retrospective simulation of the proletariat. Thus, even before political economy leads to its dialectical overthrow, to the resolution of all needs and to the optimal organisation of things, before it would have been able to see whether there was any basis to all that, it will have been captivated by hyperreality of the economy (the stepping up of production, the precession of the production of demand before that of goods, the indefinite scenario of crisis).

Nothing has come to the end of its history, or will henceforth any more, for nothing escapes this precession of simulacra. And the social itself has died before having given up its secret. 12

Nevertheless let us tenderly recall the unbelievable naivety of social and socialist thinking, for thus having been able to reify as universal and to elevate as ideal of transparency such a totally ambiguous and contradictory - worse, such a residual or imaginary - worse, such an already abolished in its very simulation -"reality": the social.

NOTES

1. This is akin to the bitterness of the extreme-left, and its "intelligent" cynicism towards the silent majority. Charlie-Hebda for instance: 'The silent majority doesn't give a damn about anything, provided that it snoozes through the evening in its slippers ... Mind you, if the silent majority keeps its trap shut, it is because when all is said and done, it makes the law. It lives well, it eats well, it works just as much as is necessary. What it asks of its leaders is to be fathered and secured just enough, with a little daily dose of imaginary danger."

2. There the analogy with Freud ends, for his radical act results in a hypothesis, that of repression and the unconscious, which again opens up the possibility, widely exploited since then, of producing meaning, of reintegrating desire and the unconscious in the partition of meaning. A symphony concert ante, in which the relentless reversion of meaning enters the well-tempered scenario of desire, in the shadow of a repression which opens up the reverse possibility of liberation. Whence comes the fact that the liberation of desire could so easily take over from the political revolution, making good the failure of meaning instead of deepening it. Now it is not a tall a question of discovering a new interpretation of the masses in terms of libidinal economy (the conformity or "fascism" of the masses reduced to a latent structure, to an obscure desire for power and for repression which would possibly feed off a primary repression or death drive). Such is the only alternative today to the failing Marxist analysis. But it is the same, with one more twist. Formerly the destiny of revolution held back by sexual bondage was palmed off on the masses (Reich); today it is a desire for alienation and for bondage, or else a kind of ordinary micro-fascism as incomprehensible as their virtual drive for liberation. There is no desire for fascism and for power any more than there is for revolution. Last hope: that the masses have an unconscious or a desire, which would allow their re-cathexis as bearer, or instrument of meaning. Desire, reinvented everywhere, is only the referential of political despair. And the strategy of desire, after having been tried out in the marketing industry, is today polished up further in its revolutionary promotion in the masses.

3. The notion of "critical mass," usually associated with the process of nuclear explosion, is reapplied here with reference to nuclear implosion. What we are witnessing in the domain of the social and of the political, with the involuntary phenomenon of the masses and the silent majority, is a kind of inverse explosion by the force of inertia - this also has its point of no return.

4. It is no longer even a question of the production of the social, for then socialism, indeed capitalism itself would be equal to the task. In fact, everything changes with the precession of the production of demand before that of goods. Their logical relationship (between production and consumption) is broken, and we move into a totally different order. which is no longer that of either production, or consumption, but that of the simulation of both, thanks to the inversion of the process. At present, it is no longer a question of a "real" crisis of capital. a crisis Attali thinks can be treated by a little extra social or socialism, but of quite a different mechanism, the hyperreal. which no longer has anything to do with either capital or the social.

5. Same configuration as for black holes. Veritable stellar tombs, their field of gravity is so huge that even light is trapped, satellised, then absorbed in them. They are, therefore, regions in space from which no information can come. Their discovery and their being taken into consideration therefore imply a kind of overturning of every traditional science and knowledge procedure. While the latter is always based on information, the message, the positive signal (some "meaning"). conveyed by a medium (waves or light). here something different appears whose meaning or mystery revolves around the absence of information. That no longer transmits, that no longer responds. A revolution of the same order comes into play with the taking into consideration of the masses.

6. L'effet Beaubourg, Paris, 1977 (Ed. Galilee).

7. The same goes for seduction. If sex and sexuality, such as the sexual revolution turns them into, are really a mode of exchange and production of sexual relations, seduction on the other hand is contrary to exchange, and close to challenge. Sexuality has precisely become a "sexual relation," it can be talked about in these already rationalised terms of value and exchange, only by ignoring any form of seduction - just as the social only becomes a "social relation" when it has lost any symbolic dimension.

8. But defying the social can take the reverse form of a renewed outbreak of the social simulacrum, of social demand, of demand for the social. Anexacerbated, compulsive hyperconformity, a much more pressing demand for the social as norm and as discourse.

9. See, in L'Echange symbolique et la mort, the three levels of residue: value in the economic order, phantasm in the psychic order, signification in the linguistic order. So one should also add here the residual status of the social in the ... social order.

10. See the case of the Guayaki or the Tupi-Guarani: whenever such residue appears, it is drained off by messianic leaders into the Atlantic, in the form of eschatological movements, which purge the group of its "social" residue. Not only political power (Clastres) but even the social is averted as disintegrated/ disintegrating agency.

11. This system of equivalences is not necessarily linked to the political economy of capital. The equilibrium between work and its remuneration, between merit and enjoyment, is perhaps, beyond any bourgeois ethic, a measure of oneself, and a form of resistance. Should something come your way without equivalent, the blessing may be mixed. Holderlin's madness came to him from this prodigality of the Gods, from this grace of the Gods which overwhelms you and becomes fatal if it can't be redeemed or counterbalanced by some human equivalence, from the earth, from toil. Here there is a sort of law which has nothing to do with bourgeois ethics. More familiar to us, witness the fatal disorder in people overexposed to wealth and to good fortune -thus those customers in a large store who were offered to help themselves to anything they wanted: pandemonium broke out. Or again those wine growers to whom the State offered more money to pull out their vines than they could get by working them. They were much more destructured by this unexpected subsidy than by any traditional exploitation of their labor power.

12. Fourth hypothesis: The implosion of the social into the masses. This hypothesis is akin to hypothesis 3 (simulation/deterrence/implosion) in another form. It is developed in the main text.