Rise Of The Void Towards The Periphery

Jean Baudrillard

As a watermark of unexpected, but also in view of other unforeseen events, the idea
was conceived at the dawn of the nineties among a few friends to set up an Agency
that would be invisible, anonymous and clandestine, Stealthy Agency, equally
labelled as:

ANATHEMATIC ILLIMITED
TRANSFATAL EXPRESS
VIRAL INCORPORATED
INTERNATIONAL EPIDEMICS

Seeking to hunt down unreal events with which to disinform the public, it itself
has remained unreal. In this sense, it perfectly fulfilled its role, as it managed
to escape all radar detection to become a unique formula that is never virtual.

What this implied is that there were no longer ideas that had anything to do with
facts - this was the "utopia" of the sixties and seventies - that there were no
longer any actors involved in events, no intellectuals occupied with meaning.
Instead, there was an insignificant upheaval of events, lacking real actors and
authorized interpreters: action [l'actio] simultaneously disappeared with the
auction [l'auctoritas]. All that remains are "current events", a kind of
cinematographic "action", an "auction", i.e., the price-tagging of the event in an
overbid of information. The event is taken up not only in action but in speculation
and, eventually, in a chain reaction that links facticity to extremes in such a
manner that no interpretation can be rejoined to it.

Simulation is precisely this irresistible unfolding, this linkage of things as if

they had a meaning, so that they are no longer controlled or regulated except by
artificial montage and non-sense. It is the putting up for auction of the event
through radical disinformation, the price-tagging of the event instead of gambling
with it, instead of investing in the stakes of history. If, on the other hand,
should there be a stake in this, it remains occult, enigmatic, and resolved in
events that have never really taken place. And I am not talking about ordinary
events, but of the events of the East [Eastern Europe], of the Gulf War, etc. What
the Agency otherwise specifically aimed at was to oppose this simulation with a
radical dissimulation, to lift the veil from this non-happening of events. It has
also occultized and enigmatized itself in their image in order to open up and clear
to the way to a particular void, to a certain non-sense - unlike the media which
remains relentlessly bent on filling up all interstices. Its aim was to manoeuvre
itself in the void of events like Chuang-Tzu's butcher proceeds in the interstitial
void of the body. This surreptitious, sly intervention in the meaning of the void
against grotesque infatuation with information and the political scene, evidently
could not amount to more than a dream and because of its assumed occult and
enigmatic nature, it ended up not taking place like the events themselves. It fell
into the same black hole, into the same virtual space as the non-events which it
should have addressed (secretly however, and without anyone knowing, it remained
operational in the image of these new events which were either mediatized or not).
An apparently insolvable paradox. The idea, though, is not dead.

Stealthy Agency responded to the strike of events, to the strike of history. Like
history, it, too, subscribed to absent events, looking for a way to furnish the
most exact non-information on the absence of events; on this illimited strike with
respect to the occupation of history; on void space over which the phantoms of
Power still hover, similar to the empty space of Work strikers occupy in a factory,
over which the phantom of Capital continues to hover.
It is as if the events had adopted the vocabulary of the order of strike. Step by
step, everything forsook and defected from its time reconfiguring itself into a
present/current void where only a visual psychodrama of information was left
lingering behind. And this strike of events brings with it the lock-out of history.
The fact that events no longer generate information [rather, it is the other way
round], prompts incalculable consequences. All the negative work disappears on the
horizon of the media precisely in the way that labour disappears on the horizon of
capital. There too, relations become inverted: it is no longer labour that serves
the reproduction of capital, it is capital that produces and reproduces labour. An
enormous parody of the relations of production.

This deregulation of effects and causes no longer raises or incites critical

consciousness, only singular objective irony. The Agency therefore had to withstand
not only the temptation of information with respect to events on strike, it also
had to abstain from offering a critical discourse so that it could capture the
originality of this non-event which is that of objective irony. The radical irony
of our history is that things no longer happen, everything has an air about it -
contrary to the traditional cunning of history that made sure essential changes
were produced without any air about them.

One only has to contemplate how the events of Eastern Europe had been taken at face
or cash value, with their weight-in-gold freedom and "democratic values", or how
the Gulf War spawned its weight-in-gold of human Rights and the New World Order.
How, in fact, these events were priced beyond their value, at the scene of which
history became similar to that of an art auction or bazaar today. In opposition to
this speculative inflation which leaves everyone enervated, overexcited and
indifferent, tetanic [convulsive] as well as apathetic, with respect to the
gidouille of events, worthy of the name The Great Gidouille1 of History, one had to
come up with a form of ironic deregulation of information, a form of idle writing
in response to the idling facticity of our times while at the same time with a
subtly catastrophic form that would correspond to the reckoning or redemptive
nature of the end of the century. One had to recover amidst the strike of events
the filigree or watermark of dissuasion, the deceptive form that guides the nullity
of our times.

Dissuasion is a rather particular form of action: it is that which causes something

not to happen. This governs the period we presently live in, which is not so much
interested in producing events as it is to ensure they do not take place, and all
this performed with an air or under the auspices of an historical event. Or, it
could be that certain things took place instead of others which did not. Dissuasion
also touches on war, history, the real, the passions. It allows for (!) strange
events which do not in any way advance history, instead play it backwards by
wedding an inverse, unintelligible curvature to our sense of history (i.e., that
one cannot have any sense of history unless one falls in line with what is being
forwarded as historical sense); one that no longer discloses any negative power
(progressive, critical, revolutionary), consequently their only negativity would be
the fact that they would not have happened. Disturbing.

The realm of dissuasion extends over the past as well. It can obliviate all
certainty of facts and testimonies. It is able to destabilize memory just as well
as it can destabilize all foresight. This is a diabolic power intent on burning
passage to the real act of the event or, if it is allowed to take place, if, in
fact, it did take place, would destroy its credibility.

Maybe this curvature implying that things have neither meaning nor a linear end is
nothing but a depression in the meterological sense of the term - the void we feel
may not be due to defection in meaning or memory but would perhaps be retraceable
to a strange attraction that had come upon us from somewhere. Could it be that this
lifelessness or catatonia that we are living is to be interpreted inversely, not in
the sense of a void abandoned by the ebb of past events, but as a void owing its
effect to aspiration, to the suctional pull of a future event, to the proximity of
a factual mass which, through anticipation draws to itself all the oxygen that we
breathe, brutally depressurizing thereby the social, political, cultural and mental
sphere?

Pataphysic hypothesis, that of anti-gravity, of anti-density, of a science of

imaginary solutions that arise beyond physics and metaphysics. In Gestes et
opinions du docteur Faustroll, Jarry had already described the profile of this
strange attraction that stems from the reversal of the principles of physics:
"Science today founds itself on the principle of induction: most people have most
often seen this phenomenon preceded or followed by that one, and conclude that
that's the way it will be forever ... But instead of declaring the law of falling
bodies towards a centre why wouldn't one prefer that ofthe rise of the void towards
the periphery, the void conceived of as unity of non-density, a hypothesis much
less arbitrary than the one that opts for a concrete unity of positive density".

An inverse attraction of the void, instead of the full attracting the full. This is
perhaps what would give our events this particular colour, this taste or, rather,
this vapidity. At the moment of their arrival they have already become vanishing
events with little meaning, if any, as they already come to align themselves with
the void. In opposition to the old physics of meaning: a new gravitation, the true
and only attraction of the void - undoubtedly the most fundamental natural law.

This would certainly explain the anomalies, including the mental universe and the
field of "psychology". Our forms of action therefore, instead of being bearers of
positive pulsion, are much more conveyors of expulsion and repulsion, i.e., the
centrifugal mobility of particles that seek their liberation from density - to
rejoin what? A mysterious periphery of space, an anti-gravity. Would this be the
way to escape the heavy form, the gravity of "desire" conceived of as positive
attraction, i.e., through a much more subtle eccentricity of seduction which would
be, to take up the old cosmogonies that never lacked in charm, elusive beauty, out-
of-body, much lighter molecules that only know of one way out, that of the void
(like poetic language where every particle finds its resolution in anagrammatic
resonance).

As for the new events, one could say that they plough a void in front of themselves
as they go along, wherein they also get swallowed up. It seems that everything
jostles ahead in a haste to be forgotten. These events leave no place for
interpretation, if not for all interpretations simultaneously, and where they skirt
all the intent of meaning and the heavy/weighty attraction of a continued history
as they enter on the light orbit of a discontinued history. They arrive faster than
their shadow - unforeseen for the most part - however, do not have any
consequences. Meteoric events that bank on the same chaotic inconsequence as do the
formation of clouds. With respect to the events of Eastern Europe therefore, one
gets the impression of a long and sustained negative accumulation accompanied by a
sudden resolution as the obvious and instantaneous conclusion of operations that
are beyond our grasp. Under these conditions and with respect to events that are
nevertheless significant, there is a strange taste left in the mouth of a deja-
arrive, a retrospective development where one cannot see anything worthwhile with
respect to its future. Our only astonishment is not to have foreseen it; our only
regret - the inability to draw consequences from it. The screen of history changes
with the same excessive and untimely rhythm as do natural phenomena.

One gets the impression that events are hurled headlong in isolation, all on their
own as they abruptly and unforeseen get diverted to the point of their flight,
i.e., to the peripheral void of the media. Just like physicists are no longer in
the possession of the particle except for a vision of its trajectory on a screen,
neither are we any longer in possession of pulsating events, except for a
cardiogram, nor of representation or memory, except for an (unimaginative)
encephalogram, nor of desire or jouissance, except for psychodrama and a cathodic
vision.

This is somewhat like procreation in vitro: the embryo of a real event is

transported into the artificial uterus of information where many orphan, fatherless
and motherless, foetuses are delivered. The event is entitled to the same
procreative practices as birth, to the same euthanasic practices as death.

We are unquestionably indebted to this physically pleasing sensation: the sentiment

that collective or individual events are plunged into a hole of memory. This
debility, no doubt, is due to a movement in reverse, to this parabolic curve
interjected into the space of history. For the past cannot represent itself, it
cannot be reflected upon unless it prods us in another sense, i.e., with respect to
some sort of future or other. Retrospective is solidary with prospective that
allows for something to be depicted as surpassed, as stolen and therefore as having
taken place. If, by way of a strange revolution, we set out on the course of
inverted meaning and get involuted in this dimension of the past, we will no longer
be able to represent ourselves. The extension of memory would curve or bend and
make a black hole out of every event. We live through this subjectively in the
sudden loss of our memories, through the rupture in the continuity of names, faces
and familiar forms. With respect to this kind of catastrophe of memory, we are not
talking about natural forgetting nor of unconscious repression. Focus is on an
inversion of this field of temporal gravitation which no longer allows signs of the
past to be bearers of a specific mass, of a nuclear mass necessary for their
retention, nor of a mirror of the present in which they could be reflected. The
holes in memory are a bit like what has become of the ozone layer, where our
protective screen breaks down or disintegrates. Or maybe they are simply not big
enough to be engulfed in a way that it could start swirling to unfetter the light
particles from the heavy ones, enlarging and deepening the black hole from where
dead bodies would release or free up their aerial substance as in the case of Dante
and Giordano Bruno. It is in an absolute void that the absolute event takes place.
The void therefore can only be relative in view of the fact that death has remained
virtual.