Hystericizing the Millennium

Jean Baudrillard

The fact that we are entering on a retroactive form of history, that all our ideas, philosophies, mental faculties are progressively adapting themselves to this model, is quite evident. This may just as well be an adventure, since the disappearance of the end is, in itself, an original or creative situation. It seems to be characteristic of our culture and our history which have no end in sight either as guarantors of an indefinite recurrence, of an immortality pursued in the opposite direction. Up till now, immortality was conceived of as a region of the beyond, an immortality yet to come, today however, we have concocted another type of immortality, one on this side of the fence that incorporates the recession of outcomes ad infinitum.

The situation may be original, but the final result or outcome of things is evidently lost in advance or up front. We will never get to know the original chaos, the Big Bang, and because it is a classified event, we had never been there. We could retain the hope however, of seeing the final moment, the Big Crumb, one day. A spasmodic enjoyment of the end to compensate for not having had the chance to revere the beginning [l'origine]. These are the only two interesting moments, and since we were frustrated with the first one, we invest all the more energy into the acceleration of the end, into the precipitation of things or events towards their ultimate loss, a loss from which we were at least thrown the crumbs in the form of the spectacle. Dreaming of an unprecedented opportunity open to a generation to obliterate the end of the world, which is just as wonderful as being part of the beginning. But we have arrived too late for things to begin, only the end or outcome seems to careen under our sway.

We have been reproached for the atomic age ? but finally [!] we have managed to suspend the equilibrium of terror and have decisively (?) deferred the conclusive event. Now that dissuasion has succeeded, we have to get used to the idea that there is no longer any end, there will no longer be any end and that history itself has become interminable. Consequently, when one speaks of "the end of history", of "the end of the political", of "the end of the social", of "the end of ideologies", none of this is true. The worst indeed is that there is no end to anything and that everything will continue to take place in a slow, fastidious, recurring and all-encompassing hysterical manner ? like nails and hair continue to grow after death. Fundamentally, of course, all this is already dead and instead of a joyous or tragic resolution, instead of a destiny, we are left with an vexatious homeopathic end or outcome that is secreted into metastatic resistances to death. In the wake of all that resurfaces, history backtracks on its own footsteps in a compulsive attempt at rehabilitation, as if in a recompense for some sort of crime I am not aware of ? a crime committed by and in spite of us, a kind of crime done to oneself, the process of which is sped up in our contemporary phase of history and the sure signs of which today are global waste, universal repentance and resentment [ressentiment] ? a crime where the lawsuit needs to be re-examined and where we have to be unrelenting to go back as far as the origins, if necessary, in quest of retrospective absolution since there is no resolution to our fate in the future. It is imperative that we find out what went wrong and at which moment and then begin examining the traces left on the trail leading up to the present time, to turn over all the rocks of history, to revive the best and the worst in a vain attempt to separate the good from the bad. Following Canetti's hypothesis: we have to return to this side of the fatal line of demarcation which, in history, has kept the human separate from the inhuman, a line that we, at some point, have thoughtlessly crossed under the spell and vertigo of some sort of anticipated liberatory effect. Arguably, it is possible that our collective panic in the face of this blind spot of going beyond history and its ends (then again, what are these ends? all we know is that we've crossed them without noticing that we did) tempts us to take hastening steps backwards in order to escape this simulation in the void. To relocate the zone or point of reference, the earlier scene of a Euclidean space of history. This is what the events of Eastern Europe pretended to embark on by way of peoples' movement and the democratic process. The Gulf War was also an effort to re-open the space of war, of a founding violence to usher in the new world order.

All of these instances failed. This revival of vanished or vanishing forms, this attempt to escape a virtual apocalypse is a utopia, in fact the last of our utopias ? the more we try to rediscover the real and the point of reference, the more we sink ourselves into a simulation that has now become shameful and utterly hopeless.

Similar to illnesses which are likely the reactivation of earlier states of the organism (cancer, for example, reproduces an undifferentiated proliferation of primary living cells or, viral pathology, for that matter, in the case of which earlier stages of the biogenetic substance resurge in moments of lapse and when the body loses its immuno-capacity), could we perhaps conceive of history in a similar manner and say that its former stages have never really disappeared as they successively reappear to take advantage of failures or lapses, of the excess that is such a distinctive mark in the complexities of current structures?

These earlier forms, on the other hand, never reappear in their purity as they are unable to escape the destiny of modernity's intensity. Their resurrection, too, is hyperreal. Reinvoked values themselves are unstable and subject to the same fluctuations as fashion or the stock exchange. Reinstatement of earlier borders, of former structures, of the former elite therefore will never attain its identical meaning, i.e., will never be the same it once was. If aristocracy and royalty were to achieve status one day, they would still be "postmodern". All retro-scenarios currently in the making are without historical significance as they are completely enacted at the level or surface of our time, like an overlay of images that cannot affect film in motion. Relapsing events: thawed out democracy, bluffing freedoms, a pre-packed New World Order in cellophane and an ecology, swathed in naphthalene moth balls, the rights of immuno-deficient man ? this will alter nothing in the current melancholy of the century which we will never get over because, in the meantime, it has looped back onto itself only to be freed up again with a different meaning.

This lies at the basis of Walt Disney's success, the ingenious precursor of a world of ludicrous promiscuity parading all past and present forms, of a mosaic recurrence of all cultures (of future cultures as well which themselves have become recurrent). We were under the belief for quite some time that all this was only imaginary, a derivative or decor of something that was childish and of marginal significance. However, we can catch a glimpse of something already at work here, if only prefigured in the curvature of real things of Disneyworld, which opens up the frightening perspective of being able to go beyond, like in the movies, all of the former stages, to become hypostatized in a definitive youthfulness, refrigerated like Disney himself in liquid nitrogen: Magic Country, Future World, Gothic, Hollywood itself remodeled fifty years later in Florida ? all the past and future revisited in live simulation. Walt Disney is the true hero of deep-freeze, of a utopia of waking up in the future and in a better world. But here's the irony: he didn't foresee the face-about, the volte-face that was to take place between the real and history. And he who believed that he would return in the year 2100 may well, true to his own fairy tale scenario, wake up in 1730, or with the Pharaohs, or even amidst one of his countless primitive scenarios.

But what good is this end of the century for, one may wonder. Well, for the sale of the century. History and the end of history are up for sale. Communism and the end of communism at bargain discount prices. Communism could not have arrived at its historical end now that it will have been sold off, liquidated like layaway stock. Similarly to the Russian army, sold to the four corners of the earth ? an event of unparalleled significance sunk to the banality of a market transaction. All the ideologies of the West are also up for sale; they can be purchased at a low price on all the latitudes of the globe.

In former times, sales followed festivities, today they precede them. We have a similar case in our century: in anticipation of its end, everything must go, everything must be liquidated. We are also discovering that along with the grand sell-out of the Red Army, industrial laboratories are in the process of "discharging" or selling off their human gene pool, genes that are first patented and then commercialized, step by step. There too, everything must go even if it is not known what use these genes may be put to. Things cannot be left to run their natural course, they have to be cryogenized [cryogeniser: Converted to a freezing mixture.] in order to tailor them to a virtual and paltry immortality.

Messianic hope was founded on the reality of the Apocalypse. Today, this has no more substantive reality than the original Big Bang. We will no longer have a right to this dramatic illumination. Even the idea of putting an end to our planet via an atomic clash has become barren and superfluous ? if this no longer holds any meaning for anybody, not even for God, what good is it for? Our Apocalypse is not real, it is virtual. Neither does it belong to the future, its incident is in the here and now. With respect to our orbiting bombs, even though they do not comprise a natural ending, at least we were the creators of them, with the potential, seemingly, to better finish them off. But no, in fact, to better shake off the end. This is the end we have henceforth managed to satellize in the image of all finalities which had once been transcendental but have now become orbital, pure and simple.

From now on, this end will revolve and continue to revolve around us untiringly. We have been surrounded by our own end and caught in the impossible situation of being unable to land it, to have it descend on earth. This is the story or parable of the Russian cosmonaut forgotten in space with no one to welcome or bring him back ? the only particle of Soviet territory that could ironically skim over a deterritorialized Russia. Now that everything has changed down below, he has practically become immortal as he continues to revolve like the gods, the stars, like nuclear waste. As has become the fate of so many events of which he is the perfect example, they all continue to spin endlessly in a space void of information without anyone being able or, wanting to, retrieve them into the space of history. They assume the image of everything that follows its absolute orbital performance and in the course of which their identity is lost on the way. Such is the case of our history that has been lost [or forsaken] along the way as it revolves around and hovers above us like a satellite.

Nostalgia for the lost object? Not even that. Nostalgia was nice in the way it sustained the feeling vis-a-vis things that have taken place and could also branch out to encompass those that could come around again. It was beautiful as a utopia, as an inverted mirror of utopia. Beautiful in the way of never being fully complete, like a utopia never fulfilled. The sublime reference to origin in nostalgia is just as beautiful as the notion of the end in utopia. On the other hand, things stand quite differently when one is confronted with literal evidence of the end (where dreaming of the end is no longer possible), and with the literal evidence of origin (where the dream of origin can no longer persist). Today we have the means to implement our origin as well as our end. Through archaeology, we excavate and exhume our origin; with genetics, we reshape and custom design our original capital; through science and technology, we are already able to operationalize dreams and utopias of the most idiotic kind. We assuage our nostalgia and our utopias in situ and in vitro.

We are therefore in an impossible situation, unable to dream either of a past or of a future state of affairs. The situation has literally become definitive ? not finite, infinite, or defined but de-finitive, i.e., deprived of its end, pilfered. Consequently, the distinctive sentiment of the definitive, with its pull towards a paradisaic state of affairs, is melancholy. Whereas in the case of mourning, things find their end and, with it, the possibility of an eventual return, in melancholy we no longer hold on to the premonition of the end or of a return, all we are left with is the resentment [ressentiment] of disappearance. It's a bit like the twilight [crepuscular] profile of the turn of this century, the double-faced Gestalt of a linear order, of progress on the one hand, of regression of goals and values, on the other.

To oppose this movement in both directions at once, there is the utterly improbable, and certainly unverifiable, hypotheses of a poetic reversibility of events and the only proof we have of it is the possibility of this in language.

Poetic form is not far removed from chaotic form. Both of them disregard the law of cause and effect. If, in the theory of Chaos, we substitute sensitive reliance upon initial conditions for susceptible dependency upon final conditions, we enter upon the form of predestination, i.e., that of destiny. Poetic language itself abides in predestination, in the imminence of its own end, and thrives on the reversibility of the end in the beginning. In this sense, it is predestined ? an unconditional event without any signification or consequence, one that flourishes singularly in the vertigo of its final resolution.

Although this is obviously not the form of our current history, there is, nevertheless, an affinity between the immanence of poetic unfolding and the immanence of our current chaotic progression as events themselves are without any signification or consequence, and because effect stands in for the cause, we have arrived at a point where there are no longer any causes, all we are left with are effects. The world presents itself to us, effectively. There is no longer any reason for it, and God is dead.

If all that remains are effects, we are in total illusion (which is also that of poetic language). If effect is to be found in the cause, or the beginning is in the end, then the catastrophe is behind us. This is the exclusive privilege of our epoch, i.e., the reversal of the sign of catastrophe. This liberates us from all possible future catastrophes, and also exempts us from all responsibility pertaining to it. An end to all preventive psychosis, no more panic, no more remorse! The lost object is behind us. We are free from the Last Judgment.

What stems or follows from all of this is some sort of poetic and ironic analysis of events. Against the simulation of a linear history "in progress", we must privilege these rekindled flames, these malignant curves, these light catastrophes which cripple empires much convincingly than major shakeups could ever do. Anastrophe versus catastrophe. Could it be that deep down there may have never been a linear unfolding of history, there may have never been a linear unfolding of language? Everything moves in loops and curls, in tropes, in inversion of meaning, except for numeric and artificial languages which, for this very reason, have neither of these. Everything takes place in effects that short-circuit (metaleptic) causes, in factual Witz, in perverse events, in ironic turnarounds, except for a rectified history which, properly speaking, cannot be such.

Couldn't we transpose onto social and historical phenomena language games like the anagram, acrostic, spoonerism, rhyme, strophe or stanza and catastrophe? And not only the stately figures of metaphor and metonymy but instantaneous, childish and formal games, sundry tropes that comprise the delicacies of a vulgar imagination? Are there social spoonerisms, an anagrammatic history (where meaning is dismembered and dispersed to the four winds of the earth, like the name of god in the anagram), rhyming forms of political action, events that can take on either this or that meaning? The palindrome, [A word, verse or sentence that reads the same backwards as forwards. Ex.: HannaH.] this poetic and rigorous figure of palinode [recantations] would do well to serve in this time of retroversion of history with a burning lecture (perhaps Paul Virilio's dromology could eventually be replaced with a palindromology?). And the anagram, this minute process that picks up the thread of language, this poetic and non-linear convulsion of sorts ? makes one wonder whether there is a chance that history would lend itself to this poetic convulsion, to such a subtle form of return and anaphore and which, should the anagram yield beyond meaning, allow for the pure materiality of language to shine through and also show beyond historical meaning, the pure materiality of time?

This would be the enchanting alternative to the linearity of history, the poetic alternative to a disenchanted confusion, to the chaotic oversupply of current events.

Concurrent with this going beyond history is our entry into pure fiction, into the illusion of the world. The illusion of our history yields up and accedes to a space of a much more radical illusion of the world. Now that the eyes of the Revolution and on the Revolution are shut; now that the Wall of Shame has been demolished, now that the lips of dispute are sealed (with a sugar-coated history stuck to our palate); now that the spectre of communism, i.e., that of power no longer haunt Europe, no longer haunt the memories; now that the aristocratic illusion of origin and the democratic illusion of the end increasingly drift apart ? we no longer have the choice to advance, 'to abide in our present destruction', nor to withdraw, only a last ditch effort to confront this radical illusion.