Jean Baudrillard, In Conversation with Guy Bellavance//1983// (Subject, Object, Thing), Documents of Contemporary Art

Jean Baudrillard: one of the most influential French philosopher, sociologist, political commentator, cultural theorist and photographer. known best for his critiques of contemporary, media, history, and technological ideas, as well as his formulation of methods such as simulation and hyperreality.

Born: July 27, 1929, Reims, France

Died: March 6, 2007, Paris, France

In Conversation with Guy Bellavance//1983 // System of the objects

Jean Baudrillard The Banality of the masses and the speechless majorities is all character of the ambience. But it still inhabits a mortal artifice: in additional words, it is something strange for itself, inescapable, also mysterious, a native type of fatality. It is something at the core of the regularity, at the vital core of the order, for example like its point of inertia, its obstructed spot. This epistolizes to my interpretation of the fatal (yet there can be none). For all this function of the masses, mass art, Beaubourg (the core Pompidou), etc, is the ultimate purpose of banality. Of course, my work used to rotate around these subjects. But take it as it was the class of fatality that takes a method of stimulation to their conclusion and that produces the ‘mass’ object.

On the other hand, temptation is a fatal artifice for me as well, it is the exceptional or most excellent state of sort of fatality – something quite unusual, let us say from the cliché of sex, but a risk of different system, a delighted method; yet, when it comes to the artifice of the masses, it is, in fact, more disillusioned. But the fatal can incorporate both features. To put it clearly, they have no familiarity: there is always something like cynicism behind the fatal. It is not a tragic, inadequate or poetic type of fatality, nor it is a spiritual fatalism: it is something subtle. And it is not even the personal irony – there is no subject after it. Possibly the foremost age of subjective irony or radicality has now has come to a conclusion. It would be the end of a time in which all philosophy had a stake and the origin of a type of objective irony.

It seems to me that there exists something behind the strategies like irony with reverence to finalities: not refusal or finalities, not a transgression or stringent end, of tragedy, but an ironic variation of everything from the perfections always supervised by the problem. The paradox for me would be nearly an anti-interpretation: isn’t this the mystery, but conceivably the most visible one… of objective contradiction?

Bellavance: It is the revenge of the object?

Baudrillard: it is, yes, it is what I have stated, ‘ the retaliation of the crystal’ and in fact, I sprang out from that. What is a crystal? it is the object, the transparent object, the real experience, something no longer with any particular origin or demise, to which the subject would like to associate an origin and an end yet it has none and which today maybe begins to give story of itself, possibly there is now the probability that the object will say something to us, but above all the probability that it will retaliate itself.

I was quite happy to see it in a nearly ardent form, for it may be that objects have enthusiasm as much as subjects do: outbursts not unlike artifice, sarcasm, indifference_indifferntial and inertial outbursts, which are in immediate contradiction to those stimulant and finalists outbursts of the subject for instance desire, the need for pleasure. on the other hand, the object is more likely indifference. Also, like passion but to my understanding it is like an astonishing one. That prevails to be investigated I have not done that yet, but if I do maybe it would be a system of object-passions, of the object passion, of objective outbursts.

Bellavance: It is clear that your relationship to the object has shifted considerably since Le Systeme des Objects (1968)

Baudrillard, It has changed completely, it is no more the concern, however as a kind of evidence to this fascination with objects. it is the same course, but what actually interests to me and there is an ambiguity in this, too – is to be totally engaged in objects, to have originated from objects, from a fascination with them. Of course, the dilemma was not instantly one of the objects. It was simply a method of advancing beyond them, But in the terminal, it was nonetheless a deviation from objects and so end up in, the object.

The interpretation of the system of the objects, in any case, was nevertheless a roundabout method of seizing the uncertain, the argumentation of subject-object. There is a method at work here but something distinct all the same, there is another philosophy clearly than the alterity of the object, division by the object. These are already exhausted problematics. The struggle to understand the object as the system previously went a little towards agitating a conventional view of everything. Though eventually, this summary went off in another direction.

Bellavance: This object that you talk about appears to be a quasi-subject. It is not entirely passive. And it represents many things.

Baudrillard: No, it is not submissive and yet in a mind, it is not a subject that it has imagined. It is without imaginary, but this is its strength, domination. Because it is not discovered in a system of prominence classification: the speculum scene, passion or whatever. The goal without passion. It is what in a sense escapes passion and so belongs to the system of destiny. In my theory, there are only two things either its desire or it is destiny.

Bellavance: It is without negativity as well?

Baudrillard: Yes, It is without negativity.

Bellavance: It is always in Prime?

Baudrillard: yes, assuredly. But here it combines up with several of the modern drifts., not the quest for positivism, but for positivity, for the immanence of everything. For example With Deleuze, even though we are surely very far distant, there is precisely the same search, one that goes away despite the most primitive classification of opinions to determine what exists, there, what the object has to tell us, what the system as such has to tell us, Could it really have no native processes?

Bellavance: What specifically do you propose by this enthusiasm for potentization and strengthening, this genuine than the genuine, this more appealing than the beautiful, these conditions that have entirely grasped the vitality of their opposites?

Baudrillard: A fiction… I do not know Some might even say it is mystical. I do not think so because there is no universal law here. It although remains a hoax, and so there must a rule of movement, which prevents combination or a kind of amalgamation of things. on the opposite, these enhanced outcomes stand out in literal diversity to other things, specifically those things which relate to the status of the mirror, correspondence, and the image. it is rigorously beyond the imaginary. It is also a hyperreality in that sense because such intensification is equivalent to a character of absolutization. So primarily as soon as it is taken, as a rule, it becomes something that crosses into comprehensive objectivity – not objectivity in the systematic function, but, as the other would say advanced ‘ objectivity’.

That could be kind of revenge. We have established the object in the form of an object: the subject has dedicated itself to it as an object, but with all the shields. Object flees this sort of pit, this strategy which refers to the subject, by registering into radial objectivity. It really flies the method of decoding and understanding at this time. The dilemma is a fraction like identifying if this thing that fascinates me is a modern digression or uncertainty, or if it is conclusively a question of epistemologies. I consider it is both.

For me, there is a frequently mystical measurable extent of a particular kind, or an anti-metaphysical one, which amounts to the identical thing. Though my concerns lie in the exceedingly modern combination: not a common casualty, nor even the object of epistemologies or conception. Primarily, I am not a scholar, in the discernment of being involved in discussions or terminology. Such a thing does not elude me. But I do not rise out from that. It is not what I plan to do. That is why it works, what fascinates me is to establish our from contemporary fissionable situations: from object-positions, or alike from artifices of the masses. They are the Vicissitudes of modernity or postmodernity, I have no intention but those which are our portion. Even at the inception ‘ the system of objects’ was although something that had never been presented within other cultures. Here we might have a distinct destiny.