In Seduction, Baudrillard outlines a societal progression from [Rule/ritual/duality] to [Law/social/polarity] to [Norm/???/digitality]. He examines the role of seduction and the various forms that it manifests in these three models. Seduction is a phenomenon that is most at home in the era of Rule, and when it appears in the era of Law, it essentially pulls signs away from their truth. This effect can be radical, catastrophic and deadly.
The [Law/social/polarity] era is the era to which one will probably relate the most easily. This era, comprised generally of the law, psychoanalysis and the common causality (cause/effect) of everyday society, wants us to believe that some sort of truth (or meaning or significance) underlies everything. Through the Law one can find some sort of universal “objective recognition (134).” The meaning is set, and is just a matter of interpretation. However, Baudrillard says, because the Law is just a “sign” standing for a “hidden truth, it results in repression and prohibitions, and thus the division into a manifest and a latent discourse. (132)” It is characterized by a relation of polarity which creates the “perspectival space” of Law ( 155).
In this era, in order to achieve any sort of understanding of the truth, and to feel any value in one’s life, one must be productive. Production deals with the “real.” While seduction is composed of illusion and appearance, production is founded in capital/economy and is determined to make everything materialize, make everything visible, make everything “real” (46). Everything that is “real” has a value that is exchangeable for the value of other real objects. Baudrillard says that the “real” is simply a stockpiling of “dead matter, dead bodies and dead language (46).” Transactions are rational and reasonable based on the value of the objects involved. “Production only accumulates, without deviating from its end. It replaces all illusions with just one, its own, which becomes the reality principle (84).” Production is tied into traditional power structures because what is real has value, and to have value is to have power. Baudrillard refers to this as “relations of force (46).”
This foundation on a seemingly universal, transcendent meaning makes the Law linear: there is a progression toward something, some meaning, some goal, some “determinate finality (132).” Baudrillard also calls this “irreversible” and says “we grant meaning [value] only to what is irreversible: accumulation, progress, growth, production (47).” Even in the production of “liberation,” for example through the women’s liberation movement, we have in fact simply turned reversible, seductive concepts (such as the “feminine”) into irreversible ones. “Value, energy and desire imply irreversible processes – that is the very meaning of their liberation (47).” The “liberation” of things such as sex, speech and desire has only served to give them meaning, thus value, thus power and finality. It has made them irreversible, stripping them of their seductive properties.
The Law “is an instance based in an irreversible continuity” and “involves constraints and prohibitions (131).” Conversely, the Rule “concerns cycles, the recurrence of conventional procedures,” and involves “obligations.” Seduction invokes the era of Rule by pulling signs away from their truth/value/productive “reality.” The Rule era is a circular, ritual, gaming space in which there is no need for interpretation or production: there is simply an inherent understanding, and it is about play, and perpetuating play. The energy that keeps the game going is based on challenge and the stakes involved with that challenge, such as placing a bet. “In gambling, money is seduced, deflected from its truth…money is no longer a sign or representation once transformed into a stake (139).”
The game is dominated by a relation of duality, of two or more reversible elements. It replaces the “meaning” of reality with a set of rules which Baudrillard says is a radical simulacrum. “The Rule plays on an immanent sequence of arbitrary signs, while the Law is based on a transcendent sequence of necessary signs. (131).” These rules could include using the alphabet as a method of organization, or playing with chance. The ritual is such a set of rules which have no “meaning” that get at any truth, but are instead a series of arbitrary actions. There is no cause-and-effect in ritual. “Only rituals abolish meaning. (138)”
While one interprets the Law because it is a text and must be given meaning, a rule has no subject and does not need to be deciphered. A rule simply needs to be observed. “One neither believes nor disbelieves a rule – one observes it. (133)” By pulling signs away from a path of progress, seduction reverses irreversibility: it forces reversibility back into circulation, back into play.
It is impossible to “represent” seduction because the distance between the real and its double, the distortion between the Same and the Other, the interpretation between the sign and its meaning, is gone. The signs do not have any latent meaning, they simply appear as the signs that they are. “Narcissus bending over a pool of water, his image is a surface that absorbs and seduces him, which he can approach but never pass beyond (67).” The image in the water is an excess sign with no reality behind it. It is “an absence of depth,” a “superficial abyss (68).” Baudrillard says that “To seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion. It is to be taken in by one’s own illusion and move in an enchanted world. (69)” This is the seduction that turned Narcissus away from the “truth” of his own self, and thus turned others away from their truths.
Seduction can most easily be seen when things do not try to confuse themselves with the real (things with meaning), but instead use play and artifice to mimic and exceed the effects of the real. Things are seductive when they undermine the world’s apparent factuality. For example, trompe l’oeil exists only in the realm of appearances, mimicking the third (missing) dimension: by creating the illusion of the third dimension, one thinks there is more reality than there really is. Thus there is an excess of appearance. Thus there is appearance with no reality behind it. And this is the secret of seduction: signs with no reality behind them, devoid of the “latent meaning” that the Law model wants. “Seduction is a radical surprise borne of appearances, from a life prior to the mode of production of the real world (64).”
Another example of seduction is that of the Barcelona drag queens, who wear women’s makeup and clothing, but keep their moustaches and hairy chests. Again, there is an excess of appearance. There are more signs than there is reality, again pointing to the irony of too much reality. The signs of the drag queens make the claim that “femininity is naught but the signs with which men rig it up…It is a challenge to the female model by way of a female game. (14)” The artifice is greater than the reality, implying that “the female is nothing, and that this is her strength. (14).” That is, the feminine exists in the signs but there is no reality behind the signs.
Politics, too, Baudrillard says, have a seductive space and are always potentially reversible. The locus of political power, he suggests, “is itself perhaps only an effect of perspective. (65)” Politics “is not a real activity but a simulation model whose manifest acts are but actualized impressions. (65)” The strength of the Pope, the Grand Inquisitor and the Jesuits, he says, came from the fact that they knew that God did not exist (66). It was their secret. (The secret is not the same thing as the unconscious, which is part of psychoanalysis.) These figures were simply the excess of a reality that wasn’t there, like trompe l’oeil’s third dimension or the wigs worn by Barcelona drag queens.
But Baudrillard does not leave us here, in the social of the Law, with seduction waiting to pull us back into the ritual of the Rule. He says we have moved into an era of the Norm, the ludic. Out of the ritual’s dual relations, out of the social’s polar relations, we move into the matrix’s digital connections, that of data processing. The 0/1 binary “is no longer a distinctive opposition or established difference. It is a ‘bit,’ the smallest unit of electronic impulse – no longer a unit of meaning, but an identificatory impulse. (165)”
This era, characterized by electronic game theory, is a world of sequences and non-relational space. “Most of our exchanges are regulated by game strategies; but the latter, defined as a capacity to foresee all of one’s opponent’s moves and check them in advance, renders all stakes impossible. Game theory describes the ludic character of a world where, paradoxically, nothing is at stake. (158)” The ludic is about making connections, about detective work, about the network. Play in the ludic era is a function (play therapy, play school, play as vital function). It is “the very opposite of that passion for illusion which once characterized it (158).” Without any stakes, without any challenge, this cannot be seduction. It is fascination. Baudrillard also calls it soft seduction and self-seduction, “an empty declaration formed of simulated concepts. (174)”
It may seem similar to the experience that Narcissus had with his reflection in the pool, but this is simulated and not at all the same. “This narcissism, whose source is no longer a mirror but a formula, is a monstrous parody of the myth of Narcissus. A cold narcissism, a cold self-seduction, without even that minimal distance necessary for the experience of oneself as an illusion. The materialization of the real, biological double in the clone cuts short the possibility of playing with one’s own image and, thereby, playing with one’s own death. (168)” In this sense, seduction is obscene. It has no secrets or phantasies, it is neither attractive nor dangerous.
In ritual/Rule seduction, there is no distance between oneself and Other, but oneself/Other is unique among a series of freed signs. In Norm, oneself/Other is still collapsed together, but is no longer unique. It is simply one oneself/Other in a series.
Baudrillard uses cloning as an example of this. “An industrial object in a series does not ‘mirror’ the identical object that succeeds it. The one is never a mirage, an ideal or danger for the other. At most such objects can be added up, for they have not been engendered sexually and are not aware of death. (169)” We will proceed “no longer by reproduction, but by pure and simple repetition. (171)” Cloning is representative of “the irreversible tendency” to expel drives, to make everything interior exterior. This includes sex, anguish, subtle pleasures. Baudrillard calls this, via Querzola, the “bionic mirror stage.” He says we are a “digital Narcissus instead of a triangular Oedipus.”
Baudrillard makes a comparison of his progression from ritual/social/digital to Benjamin’s progression of art in his Origin essay. Art begins with a status of ritual object, becomes a cultural or aesthetic form, and finally gives way to a political form. So, too with seduction, and Baudrillard says it has become “the informal form of politics (180).” It is the form of networks.
He concludes that seduction is destiny. “Anatomy is not destiny, nor is politics: seduction is destiny. It is what remains of a magical, fateful world, a risky, vertiginous and predestined world. (180)” In our current world of “non-sense,” “simulation is its disenchanted form, seduction is its enchanted form.” It is still possible to wager on seduction.