To think is to experiment; thus to think is to risk. But then what does ‘to risk’ mean? I would say to risk is to undergo unforeseen consequences. If to think is to experiment and consequently to risk, then ‘thinkers’, intellectuals, are risky individuals… But what do they risk nowadays? Is thinking today into our life or even better, is life itself a thinking event? Or are these two terms still separate, reproducing thus restricting oppositional structures that actually do not risk anything?
These are some of the questions that my paper will bring into the fore. Starting from Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘impossible exchange’ and relating it to a conceptualization of postmodern thinking as being unable to be exchanged and thus as not being risky, I will hold for a thinking that will acquire a symbolic character - which means a social character- and which will aim at the creation of new assemblages that in turn will embrace and bring into contact all kinds of bodies: human and non-human , material, spiritual, real and imaginary. Such assemblages then will blur dichotomies that still persist in the present society.
In our society, experimentation and risk are seen as a sign of stupidity, idiocy and irrationality, and the word ‘risk’ is one of the most hatred words together with death; actually, very frequently the two find themselves in a causal relation. Is our society - whose ‘reality principle’ is based on a rigid distinction of life-death, real-illusion, organic-inorganic, and which declares ‘safety’ and ‘stability’ as the highest social and moral ideals - willing to encourage the experimental, irrational, risky and dangerous thinking? But on the other hand, how does it prevent it? How, in other words, is ‘security’ assured?
I would say by the creation of an imaginary Other, a visible or invisible ‘enemy’, a terrorist, a real or unreal element that ‘haunts’ us and always constitutes a threat. Hence, the other is there for us only to battle it, to defeat it and conquer it; however, not to eliminate it. Because then we will not be able to define ourselves, to draw the lines of our territory: borders will have no meaning, if the other is not at the opposite side to put a threat on us. Therefore, our connection with the other does not constitute a Deleuzean assemblage: the meld of the one into the other, which although does not annihilate their disparate existence, it puts them into a process of mutual becoming and transformation, as the result of a ‘risky’ exchange.
But according to Baudrillard, in contemporary society exchange is impossible, since the symbolic order -that characterized primitive societies- has been replaced by our ‘reality principle’ and thus, symbolic exchange has been replaced by the value- exchange system. The ‘symbolic’ for Baudrillard (1993:133) is:
“ neither a concept, an agency, a category, nor a ‘structure’, but an act of exchange and a social relation which puts an end to the real, which resolves the real, and, at the same time, puts an end to the opposition between the real and the imaginary”.
In his work, entitled ‘The Symbolic Exchange and Death’, Baudrillard argues that the extradition of the dead from the world of the livings, signals a transition from the gift-exchange system of the primitives to the individualistic meaningless exchange of contemporary society. Baudrillard draws on Marcel Mauss’ work ‘The Gift’ for his definition of the primitive order. Accordingly, the primitive order is the order based on a gift-exchange system[1]- the potlatch- which is a total system of giving, based on reciprocal obligations of giving and receiving, and on mutuality.
“… everything – food, women, children, property, talismans, land, labour services, priestly functions, and ranks – is there for passing on, and for balancing accounts. Everything passes to and fro as if there were a constant exchange of spiritual matter, including things and men, between clans and individuals, distributed between social ranks, the sexes and the generations”. (Mauss,1990:14)
Hence the symbolic is a logic of circulation and exchange, articulated symbolically, which means socially as everything is brought under the jurisdiction of the group in order to be exchanged; even death itself. Consequently, the extradition of death marks the replacement of the symbolic order by our ‘reality principle’; the latter being constituted by a series of notions like ‘reality’, ‘objectivity’, ‘materiality’, ‘body’. The definition of these notions is rather exclusionary, as they are based on the exclusion of the other, the imaginary term. Therefore, life gets its value and meaning from the extradition of death, man is defined by its excluded imaginary that is woman, and so on. For Baudrillard, the archetype of these oppositional structures is the primary separation of life and death and hence the ‘real’ is the effect of this disjunction.
Instead of the symbolic then, everything today is material, and in this sense ‘real’ and ‘objective’. The objective and real character of our system derives solely from the reverse act of exchange, which is the act of accumulation, and whose logic leads to the “total accumulation (which) is the total impossibility of symbolic exchange, that is death”[2]. And it leads to death in the sense that the impossibility of exchange means the death of the social, which is the dissolution of a social order, in which its members communicate and relate to each other through social relations that are based on the act of symbolic exchange.
More specifically, what characterizes our system of exchange is that everything is expressed in terms of everything else, and thus is interchanged with everything else, following the model of economic exchange. Contrary to the symbolic exchange then, our exchange is “a system of equivalences(…) between two terms as abstract as in economic exchange”[3]. Baudrillard, contrasts the notion of equivalence, as the exact copy, replica, equivalent value, to that of the primitive double, which is conceived as partnership, as an integral part of the subject :
“The double (…) is a partner with whom the primitive has a personal and concrete relationship, sometimes happy, sometimes not, a certain type of visible exchange (word, gesture and ritual) with an invisible part of himself” (Baudrillard 1993: 141).
The primitive then is not a split subject. His relationship with his double is a non-alienated one: he exchanges with his shadow as with an original, living thing, since the shadow does not constitute a reflection of the body, or an alienated part of the subject, but “one of the figures of exchange”. Hence, in primitive order, each part of the body -whether it is human (a body-part/an organ) or linguistic (a word)- becomes autonomous and singular and thus is capable of exchanging and connecting. Therefore, the primitive double puts an end to binaries that demand the submissive equivalence of the one term into a whole: e.g. the submission of the organ to the organism, or of the word to the code of language. Consequently, our exchange-value system, as an exchange of equivalences, replaces the exchange of difference with the exchange of sameness.
Thus, for Baudrillard the present system struggles for security and perfection, achieved through the absolute identity, the sameness. In this way, it eliminates the confrontation that the real is something else, rather than itself. So we have created a self-contained world that validates and legitimates its own self with its own terms, based on the illusion of an objective reality.
Within a society of sameness, thinking constitutes also an impossible exchange and consequently, it is not experimental, creative and risky. Being also trapped into dualistic structures that far from evoking difference they confirm sameness, thinking has to choose either to be ‘positive’, socially useful, politically correct, conservative; or negative, dangerous, anarchic, terrorist, revolutionary. In-betweeness is unacceptable: we have to choose our territory or we don’t exist. And the two territories do not communicate/exchange with each other, but they exist only to reaffirm each other. If however thinking manages to remain in-between and refuses the logic of either/or - if, in other words, it does become a nomadic thinking that moves endlessly from one territory to another, then it is possible to end up working like a ghost, which although exists, nobody sees it, since it cannot have any real effects; and by this I mean social effects. But how has thinking ended up being meaningless, safe, indifferent? How has this impossibility of exchange on the level of thinking managed to pass unnoticed, or even worse, it is celebrated as the liberation of thinking from repressive principles and gods?
Being Foucauldian in my notion of power I will reformulate the question in the following way: what are the games of power in terms of thinking that exchange risk with security, movement with immobility, difference with sameness, exchange with accumulation? Following Foucault’s argument about the reversibility of discourse, which means that a discourse can work as both power and resistance, I will argue that the postmodern discourse and more precisely, one interpretation of it - which is strongly related to the present spirit of the society of impossible exchange- has contributed to the deduction of the elements of experiment and risk from thinking…
More specifically, I believe that what we call “postmodern thinking” in its rather vulgar version, has often been adopted as the way to demythologize language and thinking, to take off all their symbolic and political function; in other words, to produce the alienation of the real from language, and more generally from the sign, as according to Baudrillard:
“The sphere of the real is itself no longer exchangeable for the sphere of the sign… The real no longer has any force as sign, and signs no longer have any force of meaning” (Baudrillard 2001:5).
Thus, words/signs don’t carry any more a substance, a meaning, they don’t weigh on us; therefore, they fail to leave a mark, a trace, an affect. And this is mainly due to the loss of their double, of their antagonistic other with whom they would exchange; instead of a double that challenges them and thus forms and transforms them, words refer/carry within them equivalences, which means references, meanings that are circulated and exchanged as easily and inconsequentially as any commodity in the market; in other words, words are for consumption. Hence, they remain the same in their ostensibly multiplicity, since they exist for us in order to be consumed – in multiple ways I must admit- but not in order to create multiple and dangerous doubles for exchange that in turn will put words into a process of ‘becoming’. Exchange is defined by Deleuze as the passing of something into the other; a process which results in transformation, and in the consequent ‘becoming’ of both terms (‘What is Philosophy?’, p.109)- hence exchange in Deleuzean terms is strongly linked to the notion of ‘becoming’, which is always double. Thus the emptying of the signifier by an antagonistic signified, makes exchange in language impossible, mainly on three interrelated levels: on the level of the sign itself, on the level of its relation with other signs, and finally, of its relation with the social and the real. Consequently, signs, thinking through signs and the real have ceased to become, which means to come about as ‘becomings’, and instead have reached the fixed and final status of being.
Therefore, when I have mentioned earlier that words lack a substance -with all the risk to be criticized for essentialism, or rigid structuralism- I did it not in the sense of an essence, of a fixed signified that traps and limits the signifier. Words don’t carry a substance anymore, in the sense that they don’t carry, transmit, communicate strong feelings, ideas, meanings, deriving from the act of exchange solely, and not from a supposed inheriting nature. Thus, words don’t produce affects and effects, since they can no longer be symbolically exchanged, which means they have ceased to have a social impact. Rather, they are mere tools of a communication, which fails to challenge, displace, prod us. Language then has become a means/ a code for the exchange of information; and consequently, both language and thinking are de-politicized, since the meaning(s) the words carry may be unstable, free-floating, freer, but at the same time, they are neutral, being already ‘normalized’ within our thinking, our mind and our soul. It seems that once again, like in many of our liberationist attempts, we have confused freedom with a ‘secure’ and leveling anarchy; we have released thinking from universal truths and principles, only to transform it into something neutral, indifferent, inconsequential.
“ The large system of information relieves the masses of the responsibility of having to choose. They are no longer involved in a process of subversion or revolution, but in some gigantic devolution from an unwanted liberty… I think we begin to realize how much terror lies at the heart of the paradise of communication. Beyond that, events are inconsequential, and that is even more true for theories”. (Baudrillard 1987:114)
Under such conditions, we (researchers, academics, theorists) happily accept to enter into this postmodern game of free signifiers and abstract ideas, because far from constituting a risky game for courageous players, it works as the reassuring strategy that protects us from shocking, challenging and provocative meanings that may harm us and put us in risk, mainly in two ways: firstly, by threatening to replace our sense of ‘being’ with a scaring ‘becoming’ (an exchange always carries the risk of transformation); secondly, by requiring from us to take a social responsibility and consider the social and political implications of our thinking; or, in other words, to confront what Derrida calls ‘the trial of undecidability’[4]in which thinkers/intellectuals have to decide and choose whether to sacrifice otherness/difference for the more general demands of the community, or vice versa, depending on what weighs more each time. Therefore, the deconstruction of fixed linguistic structures has not always be seen as the entering into a more difficult but certainly more interesting and hopeful game. On the contrary, it has been seen as the destruction of the danger and the risk as such, by transforming the game into a simulation, where we know that we don’t risk anything, since there is nothing to lose. Every sign works like an equivalence, a simulacra, that has lost its ‘shadow’, its double, its antagonistic partner, or rival of exchange. Signs thus mean nothing by meaning everything.
So thinking -under these ‘new’ rules- plays with concepts, notions, definitions with no consequences and thus with no responsibility: it aims at describing, contesting, analyzing, synthesizing in a ‘smart’ and original way, but really avoids the risk to experiment and to create something new: an antagonistic other, that will break the established “semiological screen”[5] of equivalences, the “white wall” of sameness that protects us from any intrusion from the ‘outside’. This is not an attempt to underestimate the significance of critical and analytical thinking, but to contest their status when they become an end of themselves. As Deleuze argues:
“ The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the overman, the overcome, the overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility”(Deleuze,1983).
I would go further and add that the point of critique is ‘another possible world’, echoing thus Marx when he said: “The philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it”[6]. Change thus will be the result of an active/transformative thinking of doubles, which forms assemblages with social and individual bodies, feelings, senses, concepts, ideas. Within these assemblages nothing remains stable, fixed, untouched; this does not mean that the components of the assemblage fade out, disappear or die; on the contrary, in their connection they become-other, different, and thus delineate the ‘lines of flight’ towards a radical, experimental thinking and thus towards a radical being, or better becoming.
Thus thinking experiments, only in so far as it risks itself; and it risks when it connects/exchanges with other(s). This corresponds to a courageous practice that is not self-referential and thus unchallenged and protected (like the ‘reality principle’ of our society). It corresponds to an active force that creates powerful concepts, emotions, ideas that are not eternal, fixed and stable; on the contrary, they are negotiable, changeable, willing to be exchanged and to make connections. Instead then of celebrating the politically neutral free play of signifiers and abstract thinking, I suggest we should see this game through different lenses: as a dangerous, risky, political, but still, more interesting and hopeful game of connections. Rather than being afraid of labels such as modernist, postmodernist, romantic, essentialist, feminist, anti-feminist, I believe we should first and foremost take the risk of moving in-between them, and thus of letting our thinking and ourselves connect with the other and become-other all the time, as according to Foucault, “intellectual work is related to what you call “aestheticism”, meaning transforming yourself” (Foucault, 2000:130). Through connections then, words will have effects, will acquire the force of sacrificing, hurting, harming, destabilizing, but also caressing, touching, inspiring. Although we may not be sure about its result (since it is a game and not a procedure), we will at least experience the anxiety, the excitement and the joy of creating and transmitting something new, through which we also become something other. Consequently, this becoming-other will lead us closer to others, since the fixed boundaries of subjectivity and disciplinary thinking will dissolve.
Therefore, my answer to Baudrillard’s pessimistic remark that “the uncertainty of thought lies in the fact that it cannot be exchanged either for truth or for reality”(2001:3), will be the Deleuzean assertion that today’s truth is the new[7]. So, thought will cease to be uncertain and thus weak and reactive, and instead will become active, risky and experimental, if it aims at and exchanged for the new, within a newly conceived notion of exchange.
Baudrillard, J. (1987), Forget Foucault; and Forget Baudrillard: an interview
with Sylvere Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e).
Baudrillard J.(1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage,1993.
Baudrillard J.(2001) Impossible Exchange, London: Verso, 2001.
Deleuze, G. (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze & Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans, Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis,
Derrida, Jacques, ‘Limited Inc,(inc. ‘Aferwards’), ed. Graff, trans. Weber, Envanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1998, p.210.
Foucault, M. (2000), The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, volume I, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow (ed.), Penguin Books.
Marx,Karl (1845) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in D. MacLellan (eds ) , Karl Marx:
Selected Writings Oxford University Press , 2000.
Mauss, M. (1990) The Gift- The form and reason for exchange in archaic
societies, London: Routledge, 1990.
[1] See M.Mauss, The Gift, Routledge, London, 1990.
[2] See Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage, 1993, p. 146-7.
[3] Baudrillard J. Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage, 1993, p.171.
[4] Derrida, Jacques, ‘Limited Inc,(inc. ‘Aferwards’), ed. Graff, trans. Weber, Envanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998, p.210.
[5] Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans, Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. 179.
[6]Marx, Karl (1845) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in D. MacLellan (eds ) , Karl Marx: Selected Writings Oxford University Press , 2000.
[7] Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans, Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. 179