Eros Seduced
“Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”
~ David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
For all its talk of love and desire, sex and porn, Freud and libido, it is curious to note that the word “eros” appears just once in Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies:
“Love unites. Eros is what binds, couples, conjugates, foments associations, projections, identifications. ‘Love one another.’ Whoever could have said: ‘Seduce one another?’” (Fatal Strategies 129).
A closer look at this passage reveals an interesting rhetorical move. Baudrillard begins with a pair of definitions, and then, echoing the AB sentence structure, elaborates on those definitions with a pair of sayings. The oddity lies in the fact that without introduction or comment, we suddenly find “seduce” equated with “eros” (as if it were perfectly obvious that “seduce” were the imperative command of the imaginary verb “to eros,” just as “love” is the imperative command of “to love”). This happens so casually and is forgotten so quickly as to be scarcely worth remarking. And yet, a question remains: Why invoke eros at all, if only to leave it behind?
In Passwords, the retrospective overview of his oeuvre, Baudrillard states his belief that words have “a life of their own” and “metaphorize and metabolize into one another by a kind of spiral evolution (xiii).” With this in mind, we might think of “seduction” as having metabolized out of “eros.” The effect of the evolution is two-fold: by implicating seduction, (a word that alludes to the vulgar and profane) with eros (a word bound up with grand theories of civilization) Baudrillard instantly widens the scope of his term; by exchanging eros (a word bogged down with historical baggage) for seduction (a word with little history in this context) he clears the ground for fresh theorizing. “Seduction” is one of Baudrillard’s most important passwords – terms he employs to “enable us to reapprehend things, both by crystallizing them and by situating them in an open, panoramic perspective” (xiv). To give an account, then, of the place of eros in Baudrillard’s conceptual system, to crystallize and situate it, we must divert our attentions to his notion of seduction.
The word “seduction” appears often in Fatal Strategies, but always in different contexts, evoking different shades of meaning. Sometimes it refers to an alternative universe; sometimes, to the exchange between sexes (and even here, there are distinctions to be made between “high” and “vulgar” seduction). Each time the word is pinned down, as it is on many pages, its significance seems clear. But set these definitions alongside one another and “seduction” begins to turn in a kaleidoscope of meaning: it is “fatal”; it is “pagan,” “immoral,” and “perverse”; it is “a form of enigmatic duel” and “a form of violent solicitation or attraction”; it is “a secret distance” and “a game of strategy” based on the “pact, the challenge and the alliance”; it is “a perpetual antagonism that allows the playing out of a rule”; its forms are “aristocratic and conventional”; its forms are “artificial and initiatory”; “it is a game where the bets are never down, an uninterrupted ritual exchange, an infinite escalation of the ante” (Fatal Strategies 129-135; 200). Encountering these descriptions all at once is like hearing a foreign language for the first time. The phrases are beautiful but opaque. One is aware they have meaning in relation to each other, but that meaning does not yield to easy understanding.
There is, however, one concrete observation to be made about the list above, and it holds true for many of seduction’s appearances in Fatal Strategies: the word frequently appears as a “form.” This would account for the term’s protean quality, the many descriptions and definitions just so many ways to fill an empty space. If this is true, if seduction is an empty form, then the correct question to ask might not be: “What is seduction?” but rather: “Where do the boundaries of seduction’s form lie?” The solution is to look outside. To understand the place of seduction in Baudrillard’s conceptual system we must describe what it is not and advance by negation. For, if Baudrillard is anything, he is a philosopher who works by and delights in being against.
Returning to the quotation on page one, we find our first negative definition: seduction is not love. It binds but does not unite. It is a “dual and intelligible form,” while love is “a universal and unintelligible one” (Fatal Strategies 128-129). The distinction here is one of distance, distance as a physical fact and a condition to cultivate. “I prefer this form and its pathos of distance to love and its pathetic rapprochement (128).” Seduction joins two, but never completely; there is always the space between. When that space is breached or dissolved, we are in the realm of love. Whatever economy is at work in seduction, it is an economy à deux.
From here, the going is more difficult. Forms of challenge? Games of strategy? Perpetual antagonisms? Endless antes? Such phrases are as suggestive as they are inscrutable. It is not until we spend time wandering through Baudrillard’s thought that the difficulty becomes clear. To understand seduction and the world it issues from requires one to pull the rug out from the very assumptions underpinning our western civilization and enter “an operative utopia, an attempt to conceive a more radical functioning of things” (Passwords 11). Baudrillard’s seduction is completely opposed to the current order, so our impulse to look to contemporary society (or to contemporary idiom) for points of orientation won’t take us very far. No, if we want to get at seduction, we must not only advance by negation, we must also move forward by going back.
For Baudrillard, the fall of man was not into sin, but into sense. Or, put the other way around, it was a fall out of non-sense, a lurch away from the enigma at the heart of existence. Baudrillard’s term for this enigma is “impossible exchange,” the idea that “the uncertainty of the world lies in the fact that it has no equivalent anywhere; it cannot be exchanged for anything” (Impossible Exchange 3). He believes any philosophical project, in fact, any thought tout court, must begin here, “within the instability of thinking, with the unknown beneath the world” (7). This is why his work often looks to ancient cultures for inspiration. In their use of myth and ritual to define themselves in relation to “the unknown beneath the world” (variously characterized as death, absence, the negative, evil, or, in Bataille’s terminology, “the accursed share”), Baudrillard sees a precedent for his own theoretical project; a project devoted to acknowledging the presence of radical uncertainty and affirming the deep and difficult truth of life’s illusory nature (illusory, because inexchangeable against whatever might prove its reality).
We moderns, however, exist on the other side of a rupture. We reject radical uncertainty and endeavor to escape from it or explain it away. Baudrillard wonders aloud how this came to be: “From where could there have originated the crazy idea of revealing the secret, exposing the bare substance, touching the radical obscenity?” (Fatal Strategies 138). His own answer takes two forms: the rise of the Christian God and the privileging of the Western subject. In Baudrillard’s eyes, the seemingly opposed traditions of Christianity (faith) and Western philosophy (reason) are fundamentally related in their mutual intolerance of the enigmatic. The outcomes of this intolerance have differed, but both traditions have sent humanity in pursuit of ideals based on a false picture of the world.
In the case of Christianity, intolerance of the enigma took the form of an idealized escape. They invented a God and his love to provide “the only possible absolution for an impossible universe” (130). Baudrillard views this invention as no more than the act of a “crazy imagination . . . the wildest projection of a universal principle of attraction and equilibrium” (129). In other words, a wish for release from uncertainty and suffering made theory of everything. The arrival of Christ, who “begins wanting to love and to be loved” signals the end of seductive pagan ritual and the beginning of the Christian law of love (131). But this law, which commands us all to aspire to oneness with the One, has no real meaning beyond the metaphoric expression of a yearning to be released from the radical uncertainty conjured by impossible exchange. “Eins ist keins. Einer ist keiner”[1] (Cool Memories 64).
Whereas Christianity and its law of love can be understood as an attempt to escape the enigma, to abolish the uncertainty of non-meaning by hiding in a meaningless metaphor, our other great Western tradition, the one founded by Plato’s Socrates, can be understood as an attempt to tame the enigma, to abolish the uncertainty of non-meaning by extending meaning’s reach across the universe. This was Socrates’ optimistic delusion. By bringing the enigmatic world under rational concepts, and subjecting those concepts to the steady application of dialectical reason, he would pave the way to freedom from suffering and uncertainty. This project instituted another law, the law of value, which strove to bring the Kingdom of God down to earth in the realization of an entirely positive world (Impossible Exchange 13). Baudrillard sees the law of value as deriving from the same mistaken understanding of the cosmos as Christianity’s law of love:
“Why privilege the position of the subject . . . Because the subject has an economy and a history which is quite reassuring; it is the equilibrium between a will and a world . . . the balancing principle of the universe, and again this is quite reassuring, for then it is not delivered up to the multiple, monstrous and fascinating universe, the cruel and aleatory universe of seduction come from out of the blue” (Fatal Strategies 142).
The passage teaches us something new about seduction. It is not only a dual form of relations separated by an uncollapsible distance, but also the tendency towards imbalance within those relations. This imbalance is inherent to a universe which, having come from Nothing out of the blue, is not given to equilibrium and value, but rather, to asymmetry and illusion; “illusion, being par excellence the art of appearing, of emerging out of nothing” (Impossible Exchange 10).
There is an important distinction to be made between the two terms within a dialectical system (e.g. good and evil or ugly and beautiful) and the two terms meant by Baudrillard’s concept of “duality.” The former are imagined as symmetrical and ultimately reconcilable in a unified system; the latter posit an irresolvable antagonism between asymmetries which are not the mirrors of each other, which are not even comparable to one another, and which do not progress but simply reverse, endlessly, from one term to the other: from something to nothing, from life to death, from good to evil, and back again.
Duality, antagonism, radical uncertainty, and illusion: these related phenomena describe another order of things; one that stands against, or more accurately, runs beneath our world of production and our frameworks of value. In this order, time is not linear, but cyclical; relations are not equivalent, but ambivalent; value is not accumulative, but reversible. This is the parallel universe of seduction.
In search of proximate examples of human activity animated by seduction, Baudrillard turns to anthropology; in particular, to Marcel Mauss’s study of gift exchange in the potlatch ceremony of the Pacific Northwest Indians (Baldwin). A potlatch was an enormous feast thrown by a member of a tribe who wanted to have his rank recognized. During the celebration, the member in question would offer his goods up for sacrifice as if they were perishable foods. Ceremonial objects were broken and tossed in the sea; in some instances, whole houses were burned. (Hyde 9) From the perspective of commodity exchange, such a practice is undoubtedly be “wasteful.” But this is only true when viewed through the eyes of the consumer. In gift exchange, it is the transaction that consumes the object, and the increase is measured in the sacred – or, in Baudrillard’s term – symbolic realm. Potlatch is not concerned with the use-, exchange-, or even sign-value of the objects sacrificed. In fact, the ceremony performs an act of violence against the very notions of value and meaning in order to détourn objects into the symbolic – the seductive act par excellence.
A gift given in the symbolic realm is not strictly an object. It is given from someone to someone else, and inseparable from the concrete relations of that specific exchange. This giving seals a kind of pact between two persons, an enduring singular association. Lewis Hyde describes the difference between this kind of exchange and one that takes place in the market: “A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis: you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body” (9).
The gift also sets up an obligation that calls forth a counter gift. The goal here is not to “equal” the original offer by settling accounts according to some abstract contract (impossible, as we are not in the realm of equivalence) but rather, to exceed the original gift and shift the weight in the other direction. Baudrillard diverges from Mauss in his interpretation of this back and forth. Whereas Mauss sees gift exchange as essentially positive social act cementing the bonds of a larger group, Baudrillard sees in as something more cruel and antagonistic. In his language, the initial gift is a “challenge” with the power to humiliate a rival. The counter-gift must be returned with interest in order to regain power (Clarke 38). Once this symbolic exchange is set in motion, the only course of action is to continue reciprocating in a pattern of one-upmanship, raising the ante forever, or at least until death. Gift and counter-gift move, like all Baudrillard’s dualities, in an endlessly reciprocal, reversible exchange.
But what if we don’t want to play? Uninterrupted exchange till death is quite the commitment. For the Indians of the Pacific Northwest there was no choice. Nor was choice desirable. In fact, the very concepts of choice and desire are out of place in this context. The rites of potlatch belong to alternate order of fate, destiny, and obligation. A member of the tribe could no more reject the challenge of a gift than reject the world as it appeared to him.
Fate and destiny: two more concepts animating the sphere of seduction. Having turned our back on Christianity, Socratic wisdom, and political economy, we must turn our back once more, this time on Freud and his libidinal economy. For Freud, the purpose of life is to seek happiness and minimize pain; an endeavor that boils down to “a problem of the economics of the libido.” (Freud 54). Freud’s vision of a world fueled by individual desire presupposes “a being for whom everything will basically happen from the inside, in an essentially individual process, and nothing from the outside in a dual process” (Fatal Strategies 174). And this, according to Baudrillard, is pure fantasy. Existence, like the world itself, is something “allotted to us in a reciprocal arrangement which is the golden rule” (Impossible Exchange 84). World, other, object: they all precede us and think us before we think them. They also survive us. Life is but an instant of being “in a linked succession of forms” (84). That is what the cultures that have disappeared understood, and this is what their rituals enacted.
“Ceremony is the image of destiny” (Fatal Strategies 210). The deeper significance of potlatch, and indeed of all seductive rituals, is the opportunity they provide humans to partake of an experience that mirrors our destiny. It’s all there as a universe in miniature: the initiation that conjures the appearance of an arbitrary world; the asymmetries and antagonisms of a secret dual relation; the endless raising of stakes without end or aim; all of it the meticulous creation of a “non-space” formed to reflect the ineluctable rules of existence. To enact these rituals is to affirm our place in the great chain of being and experience a “subtler freedom.” Not the “natural freedom” of the roaming will, but that “supernatural freedom” that “has about it more an immediate collusion with the world” (Impossible Exchange 66).
Today we have lost touch with ritual, though “the vital appearance of illusions” (to quote Baudriallard quoting Nietzsche) is as necessary as it ever was. “Nothing has changed fundamentally, and even with us moderns, it is still the world which thinks us. The difference is that today we think the opposite” (Impossible Exchange 84).
We think the opposite. We believe ourselves to be autonomous beings, making our libidinal investments, administering our desires, and distributing our energies, all in the service of our will, our freedom, our liberty. But these ideas, which belong to a “wholly a nineteenth-century imaginary of energy and economy” make no allowance for the possibility that our desires could come from somewhere else, that our lives could happen in collusion with what happens to them (Fatal Strategies 172). Thus, they are founded on false premises. “What makes you exist is not the force of your desire . . . but the world of play and seduction” (172).
It is now possible to round out our portrait: Seduction is a dual form of relations separated by an uncollapsible distance. Nothing escapes this dual form, though everything denies it. The two terms of the form are antagonistic, tending towards imbalance. What animates this imbalance, what sets it in motion, is the fatal challenge the second term issues the first, which unsettles the latter and throws it into the realm of appearances and reversibility.
To see how this operates in the context of our own lives, we must loosen our grip on the desiring subject and pass on to the thought of the seductive object. We must believe in the “fatal strategy” of objects that make something happen to us before we think we make things happen to them. Finally, and most certainly ironically, we must see that to account for seduction in Baudrillard’s conceptual system means dispensing with accounting altogether. Seduction is the force that upends all accounts, suspends all meaning, détourns all identity. Its weapons are coincidence and surprise, not cause and effect. Somewhere between subjective desire, with its erotic economies, and objective chance, with its measurable probabilities, is the symbolic realm where seduction plays; a realm beyond accounting. It is, however, still possible to speak of a spiritual economy of playful gambling, although here the only “account” we can give is of its form (dual) and its direction (infinite escalation). Ultimately, all accounting belongs to a world of scarcity or surplus, and seduction exists in an altogether different sphere: the reversible, symbolic, infinite universe of forms.
Does this mean we do not desire? Is seduction no more than the cold machinations of an unknowable fate? Not exactly. Though desire we may (and desire we do) the question is a bit of a canard. Baudrillard’s eros-seduced-away-from-eros has nothing to do with the realm of biology. He is explicit on this front: “We can agree with Lacan. There is no sexual rapport” (Fatal Strategies 139). Sexual desire is no more than an imaginary representation. All that is real is your own pleasure, and the only place that takes you is away from the other, deep into yourself. What binds in the physical realm – the realm of desire – is imaginary, and belief in the “truth” of such bonds is the opposite of seduction. It is obscene.
Let’s return to eros. Has this unaccountable account done anything to help us reapprehend the term? Admittedly, the word has been notoriously slippery throughout the history of civilization, but most every thinker takes for granted that it begins with sexual desire and proceeds from there; a formulation that can be summed as:
Eros = Sexual Desire + ?
Baudrillard’s notion of seduction seduces eros away from this core assumption, performing an act of disidentification, a détournment of the term’s very being. In imagining a new formulation, we might remove the “plus,” replace it with a “pause,” and put it in play (putting in play being the root of all illusion). So the new formula becomes:
Eros Seduced = Sexual Desire paused . . . and put into play.
[1] One thing is nothing. One single person is no one.
Bibliography:
Baldwin, Jon. "Potlatch Politics – Baudrillard’s Gift." International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 9.3 (2012). International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 9, Number 3 (October 2012) Potlatch Politics – Baudrillard’s Gift Jon Baldwin (London Metropolitan University, UK). Web. <http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-baldwinart.html>.
Baudrillard, Jean, and Chris Turner. Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000. New York: Verso, 2001. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean, Philip Beitchman, W.G.J. Niesluchowski, and Dominic Pettman. Fatal Strategies. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Semiotexte, 2008. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean, and Chris Turner. Passwords. New York: Verso, 2003. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean, and Chris Turner. Impossible Exchange. New York: Verso, 2001. Print.
Clarke, David B. Consumer Society and the Post-modern City. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage, 1983. Print.