I

Government Alan Mitchell

Miclot 21 April 1995

Void: Screens in Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil

In his collection of essays The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard investigates the role of
screens in contemporary culture. He worries that screens-television screens, movie screens, and
(especially) computer screens-subvert reality through an unending proliferation of images.
The flow of images includes not only still photographs and film, but words which have lost
their orthographic significance and have been reduced to little more than a string of small pic-
tures, each one as meaningless as the next. He argues that television watchers and computer
users have permitted, even encouraged, images on their screens to supplant the reality outside
their windows, and that we would rather stare at a flickering monitor than engage in substan-
tive human relations. Claims that television or computers somehow facilitate meaningful dis-
course, he suggests, disguise these devices' tendency to reflect the thoughts of only the individ-
ual user, rather than the others with whom the user "communicates." In this way, the screen
becomes a sort of mirror, but a mirror which will reflect any reality its viewer desires.
Baudrillard employs literal and metaphoric readings of screens and mirrors to outline the se-
vere disjunction in contemporary life between image and reality. He suggests that before com-
puters, mirrors were the symbolic paradigm of the relationship between Self and Other, be-
. .
tween Subject and Object. Now that computers have come to the fore and radically altered the
way we interact with ourselves and others, screens are a more appropriate representation of
these divisions. But screens have not adopted that role without adapting what they signify.
Baudrillard argues, perhaps rightly, that screens have overcome the opposition between Self
and Other and transformed it into an equation of Self and Same. Such an alteration abnegates
the fundamental notion of interaction, and leaves behind a bleary-eyed, passive computer user
staring at his screen, capable of communicating only with himself. If we agree with
Baudrillard that the foundation of good society is good communication, screens jeopardize good
society by virtue of their annulling the way we relate reality to one another. In such a society
(a society in which we already live, according to Baudrillard), reality gradually, almost im-
perceptibly, recedes behind a screen of insignificant (unsignifying) "virtuality." In his essays,
Baudrillard concerns himself with this tension between reality and virtuality, particularly
the way in which the latter has superseded the former.
The problem of screens begins with the urge towards faster, more efficient communica-
tion in business and government, on both individual and mass scales. Just one generation ago,
person-to-person communication at the workplace was done primarily via postal services. Now,
information, in greater volumes than ever before, is sent via facsimile or modem, and constant
flow of digital information, accessible almost instantly from hundreds or thousands of miles
away. The information cannot be transmitted fast enough for the business world. There is a
never-ending, always-increasing demand for speed: faster computers, faster modems, faster
processing. The result of this obsession for speed is the conclusion that "faster communication"
somehow equals "better communication," that the information being transmitted is of such pri-
ority and significance that it must be available as close to instantaneously as technically possi-
ble. The speed with which data can be transferred comments on its importance and value. In
Baudrillard's vision of the computerized office, "communication 'occurs' by means of a sole in-
stantaneous circuit, and for it to be 'good' it must take place fast" (12). If a business is to be as ef-
ficient as its technology, its human resources must keep the pace of its technical resources. The
cessation of information is, from some managerial viewpoint, the cessation of work. For a com-
puter in such an environment, interaction in excess of what is absolutely necessary slows the pro-
cess, interferes with the flow of other, more important information. As far as the computers are
concerned, "there is no time for silence" (12).The same is true for the employees. As soon as in-
formation comes into their hands or, more likely, on appears on their screen, they must review
it and send it to its next destination. In a stream-lined, efficient environment, there is little
time for careful analysis, consideration, or thought. These actions are extra, burdensome. Lack
of data-movement during analytical reflection is a kind of inactivity, a silence. Baudrillard
maintains that fear of silence in the corporate/technological realm prohibits significant
thought; that to be truly efficient, a worker must mimic his machine, and incessantly receive
and transfer data. He suggests that a corporate mentality trains populations to use computers as
their model for personal interaction. Workers substitute meaningful "relations" for meaningless
"communication," even in their personal lives. As with computers, people are compelled to
provide a similarly constant stream of data, afraid to take a moment to think. "Silence is ban-
ished from our screens. It has no place in communication," he writes (12), suggesting that at all
times, some information must be moving from any individual's computer to another's. Anything
less is inefficient, slow, bad.
The data-glut from the corporate world has been matched by the mass media's own ef-
forts at ceaseless waves of information. Television, especially, prides itself on its ability to
provide uninterrupted programming, much of it so trite or oft-repeated as to be devoid (at least
in Baudrillard's opinion) of meaning. The repetition of the data (in this case, TV shows) is so
frequent and so structurally similar to purportedly different sets of data (other shows), the dif-
ferences erode into insignificance. Even the differences between pictures and words lose their
substance. "Media images (and media texts, which resemble media images in every way) never
fall silent: images and messages must follow one upon the other without interruption" (12-13).
The meaning of the information is sacrificed to its sameness. It as though the lack of silence has

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turned television bandwidth into an infinitely-reduced Babylon, in which everyone speaks the
same language that no one understands. It just might be that silence (so feared by finance and
television executives alike) would lend, if only for a moment, some meaning, some variation, to
the flowing data. A chance interruption, the allowance of silence into the system, might
provide a society of screen-gazers a chance for self-reflection, or even reflection on anything
besides the screen and what lies (elusively) behind it. In a time when everything means
nothing, when an infinite promulgation of signs dizzies and confuses any observer, an instant of
nothingness might mean something. "Silence is... a blip in the circuitry ... that slip which, on TV
for instance, becomes highly meaningful" (13). Baudrillard is concerned that the strategized
construction of a seemingly anarchic proliferation of information into the screens (but not the
minds) of millions of people undercuts the ability of these people to generate their own infor-
mation, to relate interpersonally. Their ability to signify has been hijacked by the airwaves; it
is too much of an effort to "relate" rather than "communicate" using the tropes and conventions
of screens. More deeply, Baudrillard wonders if many of us have not so unfailingly mimicked
our computers that we have ourselves become "satellites" or representations of them, humanoid
screens. Communication has sapped our inclinations to express and to think for ourselves,
leaving a hole where our identity used to be. A cynical, maybe paranoid, Baudrillard contends
that even those occasional glitches in the system that result in a dark screen and silent speaker
are pre-planned in such a way that "confirms ...communication is basically nothing but a rigid
script, an uninterrupted fiction designed fo free us not only from the void of the television screen
but equally from the void of our own mental screen," voids that develop in moments of transition
between silence and noise, tension and release) So pungent is Baudrillard's vision of the viewer
mentally stranded by a dark screen, and his conviction that creativity has been outmoded by
technological agility, he imagines that of all the images to flow across the newspapers and
airwaves in the last ninety years, "the image of a person sitting watching a television screen
voided by a technician's strike will be seen as the perfect epitome of the anthropological
reality of the twentieth century" (13).
There is an element of arrogance-if not elitism-mixed with alarmism in
Baudrillard's provocative commentary. To be sure, first television and then computers revolu-
tionized the way we relate or communicate with others, but one must occasionally question
whether Baudrillard is himself being true to reality, or whether he, too, presents a glorified
vision of reality in order to pitch his product, a theory of confused realities. Baudrillard is
ambiguous as to whether he includes himself in his excoriations of screen-gazers. While we

II think of moments when (usually during live sporting events) my family and I would sit hushed and still in
our living room, staring at a black and silent television screen, waiting for a few interminable seconds to
pass between the end of an advertisement and the appearance of, say, the familiar "rafters" shot at Boston
Garden. Such moments, as they occurred, would arouse a fleeting sensation of guilt.

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might guess he watches less television than the average subject of his critique, we might also
presume he knows whereof he speaks. If Baudrillard is merely indulging in language games,
and is indeed subject to his own criticism because of his representation of a false image, his ar-
gument that the "virtual society" is a fait accompli might be suspect. Even so, he supplies suf-
ficient evidence to support the conclusion that virtuality is at the very least a burgeoning force.
Non-academics do, after all, avidly claim not to watch "much" television, and it would seem
nearly all elites, whether academic, corporate, political, or otherwise, from time to time must
yield to a computer screen. Whether this means our brains are by default empty is still, as ever,
subject to debate.
If we have become as void of meaning as our televisions, perhaps we (like televisions)

make an effort to portray significance through a screen of our own, one specially adapted to our
needs. We would control what appears on our screen as efficiently as a network controls its pro-
gramming, and our screen (like any network's) would be subject to the whims and tastes of a cer-
tain audience. The screen would determine or reflect our tastes, our goals, our history, how we
interact with others, and how they interact with us. Baudrillard dubs such a screen a look. A
look is an appearance, a means of presentation or more properly, representation through which
we declare our visibility. According to Baudrillard, the Cartesian syllogism of existence
through thought must be reconceived for the latter twentieth century. No longer is it appropri-
ate or significant to argue "I think, therefore I exist" or even "I exist, I am here." Now, questions
of ontology have been reduced to the emergence of the image, in the semantics of a television
program announcing itself. The pathetic, and reductive "I am visible, I am an image-look!
look!" passes for a new statement of self-appraisal. But Baudrillard detects an underlying
passivity even in this weak assessment. The concern is with the "appearing act, not being, or
even being seen" (23). If this last condition-being seen-does not matter to the image person,
and only the initial condition of appearing does, the presumed need for an audience vanishes.
The person becomes a screen with an audience of one, the person himself. What initially ap-
pears to be an act of distinguishing, i.e. establishing a unique "look," ultimately is one of self-
negation, since the look "draws neither attention nor admiration" and has "no particular signif-
icance" (23). The look, or personal screen, involves only the person who created it, and in a
world where "everyone becomes the manager of their own appearance" with surgical precision,
no one has time to worry about what everyone else looks like. The system is, claims
Baudrillard, "no longer founded on an interplay of differences," if only because everyone has
ceased to interplay or notice a difference. This abortive division of Self from Other "no longer
even appeals to a logic of distinction" and therefore conflates the two, as the Self, in its impe-
rial ego-mania, absorbs the Other. Once again, the screen-system leaves an individual capable
of conceiving only of himself. Social constructs, whatever they might value, do not even enter

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into the world of "the look." The preoccupation with image and the systematic destruction of
the concept of the Other causes Baudrillard to wonder, suggesting the alienation of Self to fol-
low, "Am I a man or a machine?" (23).
Just as people were beginning to overcome the division between mind and body, and con-
ceive of themselves as total individual, unsullied by artificial internal divisions, the screen
parlayed their methods of thinking about information into ways of thinking about themselves.
Out of this process came "the look," and out of the look came a new conception of the self-more
specifically, the body-as a perfectible image, and suddenly, we are alienating our bodies from
our minds or selves again. Baudrillard maintains that the manufacture of a look, a way of
mimicking a computer's style of communication, "makes man himself into a satellite" (30).
When enough men become satellites of a system, whole social constructs also break apart from
man and transform into satellites. "Loan, finance, the techno sphere, communication-all have
become satellites," writes Baudrillard (31), meaning that all those functions people created to
ease social life have become irrelevant to it, now that social life has dissipated in favor of the
Self's preoccupation with the self. Baudrillard's depiction draws from McLuhan, but takes him
to extremes. Where McLuhan saw television and other screen-devices as "extensions of man,"
Baudrillard conceives of them as centers of satellite-man's orbit. The computer is not an exten-
sion of man, but man and his screen have become satellites-or representations-of it, and man
has been a willing partner in the process.
The infinite "whitewash" (44) of information and images in which signs are indis-
cernible and, for all intents and purposes, insignificant pushes towards an erasure of all meaning
in social, physical, and historical realms. This is the macro-version of the process in which an
individual surgically removes all traces of negativity from his look, or all silence and inconsis-
tency from his screen. With the aid of signs pouring from the mass media as water from a fire
hose, the system purges itself of "bad information," of the discontiguous or meaningful, until
nothing remains but the same data repeated endlessly in a stream of pure communication. The
process, says Baudrillard, a bit conspiratorially, " vast enterprise of cosmetic surgery," of
removing surface blemishes and reshaping all kinds of discourses. Individual or discursive
identities, Others who have not merged with Selves, are forced into representations that are
duplicated to the point of meaningless, "plunged into a realm of radical uncertainty and endless
simulation" (45). In other words, a system which has not been made insignificant or
"whitewashed," once discovered, will be defeated by the proliferation of inadequate
representations, until the original loses meaning. Violence, for example, a most seditious
system, can be simulated in the mass media until it loses meaning for everyone but its real world
victims. (The fact that violence does have an impact on someone, in a very real sense, does
suggest, contrary to Baudrillard, that it has not been completely whitewashed, unless he means

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merely that the practitioners of violence can no longer fully comprehend what violence means,
in which case he would be right.) Baudrillard claims an operation is underway, though he does
not adequately define by whom, to eliminate traces of imperfection in an effort to achieve an
ideal form. This operation is true in the literal sense in cosmetic surgery offices all over the
world, and metaphorically in various approaches to revisionist or contemporary history, and
analogically in our treatment of data in business and government.
On a larger scale, it is true everyday, every time an individual or a media institution
makes an effort to convey reality. If we do not yet entirely accept Baudrillard's postulation
that no one truly desires to relate anything anymore, and consider the case of, say, the nightly
news, we might come to believe that despite their efforts to relate something of significance,
they fail outright. They fail because it is impossible to adequately convey the totality of ex-
periential reality to another sentient being. No matter how many words, pictures, sound bites,
and diagrams one uses to capture a given incident, the experience of having been there, or hav-
ing lived through it, the unique "pleasure of being human" as Baudrillard calls it, cannot be
transmuted in any kind of convincing fashion. Something will, necessarily, be missing. This, it
seems, is a difficult and frustrating notion to accept. Many historians, media moguls, philoso-
phers, and everyday people have wrung their hands, and been able to utter a trite equivalent
of, "You had to be there." This problem is so frustrating that many of these same historians,
moguls, and other people have surrendered to the proximity of images, the nearness of a given
set of images to what they experienced, wish they' experienced, or want to think they experi-
enced. In their own minds, they "remodel things synthetically into ideal forms" (45) to suit the
ready-made images generated by various media and easily disseminable. How it appears on
the computer or television screen is how these people revise the images in their mental screen.
They put an "ideal face, a surgical face" (45) on their memories in order to make them communi-
cable to others; they settle for the image over reality. When enough people do this consis-
tently, for a long enough time, this procedure operates on a cultural level. The screened image
supplants its original signified, in a process Baudrillard calls the "precession of the simu-
lacra." These, he says, are the four successive phases of the image as it overcomes or "murders"
(Baudrillard's term) reality:
• It is the reflection of a basic reality

• It masks and perverts a basic reality

• It masks the absence of a basic reality

• It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

(Docherty, 196).
This is not to suggest that the images or the screens do not exist in a real-world, only that their
relation to reality as a referent has been negated. As such, an image may appear on a computer

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 screen but be so distorted as to mask altogether its initial referent. Baudrillard further main-
tains that with the aid of computers, an initial referent need not ever exist since "images of
anything" are now a possibility" (57). People have become so accustomed to revising memory of
experiential reality to fit conveyable images of it, that actions now are executed as
"operations" which exist to be replaced by images. There are, Baudrillard writes, "no actions
save those which result from an interaction-complete, if possible, with television monitor and
feedback" (46). Events orchestrated for the screen and ready to be revised according to feedback
are the new model for determinism, as what cannot be reduced to communicable data is
"whitewashed" into oblivion. Excessis pushed out. "For content to be conveyed as well as and as
quickly as possible, that content should come as close to as possible transparency and in-
significance" (49). The need for will and thought, inefficient by-products of a lost era vanish
on-screen, where everything is treated in terms of speed and transference and with
"indifference to content" (48). A cycle of operation, image-generation, and image-dissemination
becomes the interminable work of the screen, and interminable ecstasy of the screen's observer.
The viewer of the screen watches this spectacle of reality-rendering, and is lost in it.
He gives himself over to the palatable, communicable image in front of him and ignores the
difficult, infinitely complex other-reality around him. The screen trains him to accept the im-
ages, not to question them, to pour himself into their void. It infuses him with what
Baudrillard calls "static electricity,"2 and what most others call "couch potato-ness" or
"inertia," the force that stultifies the thought processes' and motor control of screen-gazers. The
screen and its play of images do, as Baudrillard suggests, offer "a hypnotic pleasure ... an
ecstatic absorption or resorption of energy" (48).For this reason, we can interpret the screen as a
mental prosthesis, at once cosmetic and functional that shapes our world view as surely as do
eyeglasses and contact lenses. This prosthesis "may be looked upon as a drug" and can be
categorized under the efforts of synthetic remodeling; the screen contributes to "a plastic
surgery of perception," a process which alters not only the image at hand but the comprehension
of images to come, later arrivals to the screen. The surgery so skews perception that,
eventually, satellite operations like communication defeat themselves, and jeopardize societal
functionalism as a whole. The push to efficiency puts at risk more substantive issues of a given
culture. It is the "Hitler /Mussolini/Pinochet made the trains run on time" argument writ large
and it destroys everything in its way. "Good communication-the foundation, today, of a good
society-implies the annihilation of its own content" (49). With the content of "good
communication" goes good information, good knowledge, good relations, all aspects of a good

2Before kindergarten, I would be entranced by the magical tendency of a fresh Kleenex to remain attached to
the television screen, by force of the screen's static electricity, the same force I thought responsible for making
my small hand flicker in the dark when I waved it rapidly back and forth, back and forth between my face and
the screen.

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 society forfeited in the name of corporate efficiency. If Baudrillard persists in being alarmed, it
is for strong reasons. The predominance of the phrase, now (appropriately) cliche, politically
expedient should give some idea of the quest for efficiency in government domains, and of the
valuable components of a system lost in the process. Baudrillard asks us to note that "even the
term 'society' has lost its meaning" (49) in the midst of a citizenry of screens, too concerned with
the spectacle of insignificant data to fret over the price of their own efficiency, namely the
increasingly conspicuous recession of "knowledge" into "information."
This recession occurs because of a general desire to turn information over to machines,
rather than process it in our own minds and develop knowledge. The realization that there is
simply too much information stuns us into a passivity towards information and thought, and
pushes us toward a belief that if we cannot process all of it, we should not process any of it. If
there were a way to turn all that information into discrete units or facile images, then we could
feel comfortable with it. The purpose of computers might be described as the management and
storage of precisely this kind of information. Machines and reluctant learners, then, match per-
fectly. "By entrusting burdensome intelligence to machines, we are released from any responsi-
bility to knowledge," (51) and the responsibility, such as it is, fades into nothing, excess
trimmed by a computer more efficient than we could hope to be. Once the data is in the ma-
chine,3 we can manipulate it, play with it, watch it wrap into itself, explore its own permuta-
tions without concerning ourselves with what it signifies in the real-world. The data, already
. abstracted once, can be abstracted yet again, and again, until it loses altogether its relation to
reality. We can take time to project our own thoughts and musings on to the data; perhaps it is
personal information, or numbers, or conversation. Idly, we let the data worry about itself, en-
joying its detachment from the life-world. Gradually, we grow as intrigued with this informa-
tion as we had with the image on television. The data mutates into an image, a hypnotic pat-
tern of broken signifiers. "What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipu-
lating them, people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to the thought it-
self" (51). Real thought, thought that matters and can have some active effect on life, is under-
cut by the idle gaze of a screen-watcher, as he begins the process (in yet another way) of replac-
ing his living reality with a world of images and detached data. This second world mimics the
first, offering signs and information that were familiar sights in reality, but now have been
codified and translated into communicable, commutable forms of information. The user's
(rapidly becoming a too-active noun) agency diminishes, and his "thought is put on hold indef-
initely" (51). He ceases to be a true agent and, in love with his screen, devolves into
Baudrillard's Virtual Man, who "makes love via the screen" (52). Having spent so much time
with his screen, the Virtual Man can no longer think for himself, desire for himself, will for

31suspect all data is in some machine, somewhere. Lurking.

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himself. The surgery to eradicate negativity and distinction continues imperceptibly as the
mental prosthesis of the screen figuratively grafts itself to his brain and to his libido, abetting
his already crippled faculties, and supporting a "species without capacity for thought" (52).
Before he knows it, the once human aspects of Virtual Man dissipate into the screen, breaking
apart piece by piece.
If Baudrillard errs in his assessment of virtual manhood, it is only by degree. At the

very least, the first signs of dependence on screens become manifest each time the power goes
out, the cable system crashes, or a hard drive refuses to spin up. All of these temporarily leave
us without information, but not without knowledge or even (in most cases) essential information,
yet they each incite varying levels of tension and anxiety, an anxiety which is not eased until
service resumes or the screen brightens once again with the play of images. But even with the
resumption of service, perhaps we should not be so quick to rejoice. Screens, by their nature, can
provide only inadequate versions of reality that tempt or lull us into believing in their connec-
tion to reality. That connection does not, for the most part, exist, even in the most material
terms. When a computer or television analyzes the data fed into it, the data is already encoded
in binary terms-a series of ones and zeroes that come together to form an image or word.
This differs from the way information used to be processed, namely by an analog
method which, as the name suggests, through the use of waves and frequency was actually
analogous to what was occurring in the real world. For Baudrillard, this difference is best cap-
tured in the comparison of the mirror (an analog form of a representation) and the screen (a dig-
ital one, generally). "We [once] lived in a world where the realm of the imaginary was gov-
erned by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by theatre, by otherness and alienation. Today,
that realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks"
(54). Film projectors (their role now having been taken over and distorted by television) cast
light in analog waves which would tell communal audiences something about their world.
Record players would play back music with a warmth akin to the warmth in a sepia-toned
photograph. One difference between analog and digital is that the former will transmit all the
information available-all the light, all the sound, even all the interference. A compact disc
of music or a laser disc version of a film have been cosmetically altered to remove those el-
ements of reality which are discontiguous; all the ones and zeroes that do not fit have been cut
away with surgical precision, even if those ones and zeroes had a real-world counterpart in
sound or light. Hence, listeners complain that certain CDs lack the "mood" or "intimacy" of
their vinyl version of the same album. What the CD really misses is a chunk of reality. The
digital's push to break down reality does not end with the music industry. According to
Baudrillard, computers break "linguistic, sexual, or cognitive acts down to their simplest ele-
ments and digitiz[e] them so that they can be resynthesized through models" (52). This process

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results in a new digital model being touted as reality, but quite clearly the string of binary num-
bers invariably leaves out something, perhaps something intangible, but something real. The
continual resynthesis of these models gradually erases the significant source of the simulation
until it, too, falls into meaninglessness.
Screens cannot substitute for reality any better than they can stand in for humans. They
cannot truly create anything, only adapt it. By contrasts, human artists will create from their
imagination a new and unique work, representative in some mysterious way, of some part of the
life-world. Computers do not have imagination, but mere warehouses of images from which
they draw a particular image which is then adapted, broken apart, and reassembled as a user
watches, amazed by the apparent spectacle of thought. Baudrillard worries that this cache of
images has supplanted the imagination, and has become a model for itself. If this is the case,
he implies, the role of the human artist, now, is nothing more than dead image-storage. People,
rather than employing their imagination, will provide only endless repetitions of the same
images, ignoring the passion and excess which once made them human. Like computers, they
will lack "excess functioning which contributes to the pleasure of being human" (53). By this
excess functioning, Baudrillard seems to mean-literally and figuratively-sex. That no
computer or screen can enjoy sex (but only give the illusion of it) proves to Baudrillard that "all
machines are celibate" (53).
If we allow that machines are, by necessity, celibate, and all they can do is operate
withfu and for themselves, we should also accept Baudrillard's' proposition that "celibacy of
machine mandates celibacy of Telecomputer Man," since Telecomputer Man's "relations" or
communications are only with and through his Telecomputer, which does nothing more, argues
Baudrillard, than "offer him the spectacle of his own brain at work" (53). In other words, when
Telecomputer Man stares at his screen, he projects whatever visions and desires he has left onto
the screen, and lets the images seep into his mental screen, replacing what once was there with
a computer-synthesized model. The screen in front of him exchanges data with the screen in
head until both share exactly the same information. His attempts to communicate with the
Others become nothing more than a communication with himself, because he sees what he
writes and the responses seem generated by his screen, which is virtually grafted into his mind
and sense of self. Communication with the Other reduces to communication with Self or Same.
"The Other, the interlocutor, is never really involved: the screen works much like a mirror, for
the screen itself as a locus of the interface is the prime concern," writes Baudrillard, noting that
the mind of the user never gets beyond the screen, never really connects with that Other user.
The users thoughts merely reflect off the screen and back into his mind. The notion of
interaction via screens, for Baudrillard, is little more than a hollow myth, in which people
have confused relating with one another with exchanging data with one's Self. As with the

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 predominance of the look, people's screens cease to individuate people and instead, dehuman-
ize them. "An interactive screen transforms the process of relating into a process of communica-
tion between One and the Same" (54). In this new equation, there is no room for the Other. The
One is absorbed in himself, buried in his screen. "Otherness is surreptitiously conjured away by
the machine," conjured away not only because of the self-absorption or spectacle of thought, but
also because being on a vast computer network forces one to abstract the millions and millions of
users who sit, somewhere, staring at their own screens, staring at their own thoughts. These
users cannot be converted so easily by one person into digital information: each must do it for
himself. For the individual, those millions of users out there are abstracted first into one binary
digit-I, or the Other-and then spirited away into the other binary digit: zero. The original
user then conceives of himself as the One, the only One, and merges with the endless stream of
data which so fears silence it cannot process the only sign of silence in a binary system: a zero.
We can metaphorically interpret the unceasing flow of media images and data as nothing more
than an infinite series of ones pouring into the screen and brain of every user. The ones, repeated
without variation to the point of meaninglessness, are only given significance by the pres~nce of
that which they fear most, silent zeroes. Until a zero, a glitch in the system, a mistake, gets
through, the ones are nothing more than white noise, an unsignifying, uniform, infinite presence
of sound. This flow is a kind of death for the user, an entry into a world where all information is
the same, where all data means nothing. Don DeLillo frames this death metaphor in his novel
White liJoise. "What if death is nothing but sound? Electrical noise. You hear it
forever .... Uniform, white" (DeLillo, 198). The life of the screen, as embodied in the constant
flow of visual noise, is the death of the screen-watcher's humanity, because he loses the
ability to discern meaning and Otherness. Following Baudrillard's line of thought on
aesthetics, if everything is Self, nothing is. All that is, is Sameness.
The world which once" divided one into two" now multiplies One by One, producing the
same. It is an age of duplication, not division, in which a computer network connects a person
only to another version of himself, represented by his own thoughts on the screen. Gone are the
days when "otherness and alienation" were problems which plagued Modern Man. Baudrillard
wryly suggests that there is no need for alienation, now that only the Same exists, "Why speak
to each other, when it is so simple to communicate?" (53), he asks. Communication is nothing
more than the confluence of data between two screens: one on the desk, one in the head.
Baudrillard maintains that this problem is so pervasive, "the interactivity of humans has
been replaced by the interactivity of screens." In his first novel, Americana, DeLillo theorizes
that the ideal university employing the ideal mode of communication would consist of a half-
million students who, on the first day of classes, would be videotaped as an audience.
Elsewhere, the same day, a technician would videotape a professor's lecture. The following

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day, in a room containing two televisions and two video cassette recorders, the two televisions
would be made to face each other, and the two tapes would be played simultaneously, one in
each VCR. The professor would have his ideal audience; the student's the ideal professor; the
school, the ideal communication (DeLillo 1989). Real human problems a society based on
screens-pain, violence, suffering-are ignored in favor of the spectacle of thought. Although
this may not be entirely true today, the signs are there. Media imagery forces us to abstract the
pain of others to such a degree it only rarely affects us in a meaningful fashion. The difference
is minor between ignoring another's pain altogether and watching it for a few minutes on televi-
sion.
The screen at once puts the image in front of us but keeps it an insuperable distance
away. We cannot actually touch the image on our computer or television screens: we can touch
only the screens. An effort to go beyond the screen, to break through it, in a physical sense,
might puncture the glass but leaves us as far from the image as we ever were. Unlike a work of
plastic art in a museum or a stage play in a theater, the screened image cannot be broken or in-
terrupted. It is there, staring back at us from behind the sheer class, a prisoner in its own cell, a
boy in the bubble, and we cannot reach it. Our relationship with the screened image is wholly
visual. Efforts to touch the image or reify it will inevitably fail. This is hard to accept, espe-
cially when we have been lured into the belief that the image is reality. In White Noise,
DeLillo discusses the unbearable distance between the observer and the screen, even when the
screen displays a figure of one knows intimately, such as a spouse. A man watches his wife on
television and remarks,

Was she dead, missing, disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret self, some two-dimen-
sional facsimile released by the power of technology~ ... A strangeness gripped me, a sense
of psychic disorientation ... Her appearance on screen made me think of her as some distant
figure from the past, some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. If
she was not dead, was I? (Delillo, 104).
The narrator goes on to describe the trouble his infant son has discerning the image of Mommy
from Mommy. "Wilder approached the set and touched her body, leaving a handprint on the
dusty surface of the screen.... [When the TV was turned off] the small boy remained at the TV
set, within inches of the dark screen, crying softly, uncertainly, in low heaves and swells"
(DeLillo, 105). What DeLillo calls the "animated, but also flat, distanced, sealed-off, time-
less" image, Baudrillard merely calls "virtual." The two authors refer to the same phe-
nomenon, a unattainable, untouchable "tele-image-an image located at a very special kind of
distance which can only be described as unbridgeable by the body." (55) The distance between
the spectator and the image, and the corresponding distance or "void" between the image and
the screen has no parallel in reality. Though, like DeLillo's Wilder, "we draw ever closer to
the surface of our screen" (Baudrillard's words), expecting to merge with it at any moment, we
never do. The screen distances us. "The image is always light-years away" (55). In the days

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when mirrors governed the realm of the imaginary, back when there was a realm of the imagi-
nary, we could bridge the distance between our bodies and language, our bodies and art, our bod-
ies and the mirror.4 The functional aspects of our life were grounded in reality. Now, finance,
communication, language, sexuality, have all been abstracted, removed from us, hidden behind
a screen. The screen is "at once too close and too far away: too close to be true (it lacks the dra-
matic intensity of the stage) and ... too far away to be false" (55). Somewhere in this void be-
tween too far and too close, between electronic screen and mental screen, there is a new kind of
life-world, "a dimension that is no longer quite human" (55),in which we have given up a piece
of our humanity in favor of a perceptual prosthesis, the screen.
The screen is a device that masks the Other from the Self, that eradicates distinction
and empathy, that distances us from the beautiful and forces us to form abstractions from the
real. Its potential to enlighten, to educate, to bring together have been subverted by a populace
all too willing to be efficient, but not willing enough to relate reality to one another. Perhaps
people see in the screen the supposed liberty-free utopia Baudrillard attacks toward the end of
his essay on "Xerox and Infinity": "Surely the success of all these technologies is a result of the
way in which they make it impossible even to raise the timeless question of liberty. What a
relief! Thanks to the machinery of the virtual, all your problems are over! You are neither
subject or object, no longer either free or alienated-and no longer one or the other: you are the
same." (58).There is, to many, a comfort in sameness, a lack of worry. Those nagging feelings of
alienation and otherness which led to the early and miserable deaths o'f so many modern
artists need not afflict us in a world of screens, mainly because, according to Baudrillard, there
is no alienation, and there are no artists. The screen has eliminated both, allowing us to "leave
the hell of other people for the ecstasy of the same" (58). The spectacle of thought enraptures,
hypnotizes us: reduces us.

6891 words

4Compare extending your finger to touch your reflection in the mirror with extending your finger to touch a
duplicate image on (in) a computer screen. The former responds, reflects, is analogous to your activity in the
real-world. The latter does not respond, is removed, does not seem so close. This split is also reflected in the
fantasy world of art. Where once a child might leap through her mirror to discover another world, now
characters (for example, in Lawnmower Man, Ghost in the Machine, and Total Recall) find alternate
(virtual) reality behind their computer screens. Screen worlds, invariably, are more frightening than the land
through the looking glass.

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Sources

Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. New York: Verso,
1993.
"The Evil Demon of Images and The Precession of the Simulacra" Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed.
by Thomas Docherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Delillo, Don. Americana. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Delillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Kawin, Bruce. Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978.

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