ABSTRACT
Baudrillard evidently endorses this scenario. He too posits the present as an epoch in which the real, as the referent of any representation, has disappeared. But, he remarks, ‘Canetti’s wish is a pious one, even if his hypothesis is radical. The point he refers to is by definition impossible to find, for if we could grasp it, time would be given back to us.’ The void into which we have fallen is epistemological as well as political. The classical categories of understanding founder in a world in which effects precede causes and the territory comes after the map. Perhaps, indeed, the confounding is originary, and all that has happened in the fateful but unlocatable rupture to which Canetti refers is the final dissipation of the Enlightenment illusions (about subject/object, cause/effect, rational praxis, etc.) that were holding the void at bay. Nor can we hope to redeem things through some future radical intervention, that is, by effecting ‘a deceleration which would allow us to come back into history, the real, the social’. For ‘beyond this point there are only inconsequential events (and inconsequential theories), precisely because they absorb their sense into themselves. They reflect nothing, presage nothing’ (Baudrillard 1990a: 16-17). From a redemptive standpoint the diagnosis is even bleaker than in the earlier laments of the Frankfurt School, whose depoliticised echo Baudrillard is sometimes taken to be.1 The founding project of social emancipation has not merely been deferred, but rendered unthinkable. Thus for Baudrillard there is no aufhebung along the way of contemporary critique, only deepening nihilism; no great refusal, no successor to the proletariat, no aesthetic dimension, indeed no transcendentalist element or force surviving in the culture, and only the simulation of a political sphere within which corrective strategies-even if conceivable-could (not) be deployed. Wisdom, today, begins with recognising that the stasis of an ever-developing capitalism is forever where we are.
