Jean Baudrillard on culture of bitterness Part 3
But here’s what happens: the acceleration and intensification of all these processes gives rise to indifference and confusion in individuals. The model of this secondary state, when in an atmosphere of universal indifference everyone revolves in its own orbit, like a satellite, can serve as a traffic junction: the paths of motion here never intersect, you no longer meet with anyone, for all have the same direction of motion; So, on the screen of the determinant of speed only those who move in the same direction are visible. Maybe this is the essence of communication? Unilateral coexistence. Behind its facade lies growing indifference and rejection of any social ties.
As a result of the qualitative change that occurs due to the excess of the critical mass, all these over saturated with information and technology and excessively cared for communities begin to generate a kind of feedback energy, a kind of inertia that threatens in the future Cause gravitational collapse. For there is a complete inversion of all aspirations. For all positive aspirations, all drives, including attraction to sociality, are inverted and transformed into negative drives, into indifference. Attraction is replaced by disgust. After all, in an atmosphere of universal communication, satiety with information, transparency of life and promiscuity, the defensive forces of a person are under threat. Symbolic space is no longer protected by anything. The intellectual space of one’s own opinion is not protected by anything. When technology makes available anything, I cannot decide what is useful and what is useless; Being in an undifferentiated world, I am not able to decide what is beautiful, what is ugly, what is good, what is bad, what is original and what is not.
Even my body is not able to figure out what is good or bad for him. In the situation of impossibility to make any decision, any object becomes bad, and the only defense is contradiction. The original uses the psychoanalytic term abreaction (“reaction”) note, Rejection and disgust. This is the body’s immune response, with which it seeks to preserve its symbolic integrity, sometimes at the cost of living. That is why I believe that hatred, representing an excessive form of expression of indifference and rejection of this undifferentiated world, is an extreme manifestation of the organism’s vital reaction. The strong drives and impulses of a positive, selective, attractive character have disappeared. As a result of the action of some mysterious factor, the certainty of tastes, desires, as well as will, has disappeared.
On the contrary, the crystallization of evil will, feelings of rejection and aversion greatly increased. It seems that this circumstance serves as a source of negative energy, it is what causes in us an allergic reaction, which supersedes our desire; Hence our vitally conditioned contradiction to everything that surrounds us Takes, in the total absence of the desire to change anything; This rejection in its pure form. In our time, sympathy has become vague, definitely only a feeling of disgust. Not being able to know exactly what we want, we know what we do not want anymore. Our actions (and even illnesses) are increasingly deprived of “objective” motivation; Most often they come from some form of rejection, which forces us to get rid of ourselves and our energy in any way. Consequently, they are based on a kind of exorcism, and not this or that principle of activity.
This is a new form of exorcism with a magical connotation, an exorcism aimed at oneself, on others, on the Other. This is a new kind of violent spell (no doubt, also symbolic). And, maybe, this is a new form of the principle of Evil? Let us return again to the masses. They seem like a sociological black box in which all goals and objectives, all aspirations are inverted; It is a kind of source of negative static electricity. It is in the masses that we should look for the roots of social rejection and political indifference, so well-known to us. For, as Simmel said, “there is nothing simpler than denial and the broad masses, being unable to set a common goal, find themselves in denial.” It is useless to ask what their opinion is or what their positive will is, they simply do not exist.
They live in the darkness of denial and find their definition in negativity. They are endowed with an indefinite potency, are strong only in their rejection and denial, primarily by denying all forms of culture and organization that are inaccessible to their understanding. They are deeply disgusted with the political regime (which does not exclude conformist views), political ambitions and the transcendence of power. If political choice and political judgments are characterized by passion, then a deep disgust for politics breeds violence. This is the source of hatred, which manifests itself not only in crime and racism, but in the most ordinary indifference. For what has been said applies not only to the masses, but to each individual insofar as he, sitting in his cochlea, closing himself and dissocializing, is itself a mass. If traditional violence was engendered by oppression and conflict, hatred is generated by the atmosphere Close communication and consensus.
Our eclectic culture is the culture of promiscuity of opposites, the coexistence of all possible differences in cultural melting pot. But we will not deceive ourselves: it is this cultural plurality, tolerance and synergy that provokes global contradiction, uterine rejection. Excessive guardianship entails a weakening of defenses and immunity; Antibodies, after being out of work, turn against the body itself. The nature of hatred is the same: like many modern diseases, it stems from self-aggression and autoimmune pathology. We are already struggling to endure the atmosphere of artificial immunity, which reigns in metropolises. We have become like a certain kind of animal, deprived of natural enemies, as a result of which they are doomed to quick extinction or self-destruction. In order to somehow protect ourselves from the absence of the Other, the enemy, unfavorable circumstances, we resort to hatred, which contributes to the emergence of some kind of artificial, pointless adversity. Thus, hatred is a kind of fatal strategy directed against a pacified existence.
Hatred, with all its ambiguity, is a desperate protest against the indifference of our world, and in this capacity it is undoubtedly a much stronger type of communication than consensus or close communication. The distinction between hatred and violence is absolutely clear. Historical violence or violence caused by passionate attraction, has its subject, its enemy, its goal; Hatred does not have anything, it’s a completely different phenomenon. The current transition from violence to hatred is a transition from objective passion to nonobjective. If we want to characterize the main forms of collective passion, collective violence (although such a characteristic will always be arbitrary), the following forms should be distinguished according to their appearance in the history of culture: sacred, sacrificial anger historical violence hatred as pure and undifferentiated, virtual Form of violence.
The latter is, as it were, the third type of violence, coexisting now with second degree violence terrorism (which is more violent than violence, for we do not have definite goals), as well as with all viral and epidemic forms of infections and chain reactions. Hatred is more surreal, more elusive in its manifestations than common violence; This is clearly seen in the example of racism and crime. That is why it is so difficult to combat it with both preventive and repressive measures. It is impossible to destroy the cause of hatred, since No explicit motivation can be found in it. It cannot be immobilized, for nothing moves it; It cannot even be punished, for in most cases it encroaches on itself; It is a typical passion that struggles with itself. Since there is no more room for real violence, violence aimed at a certain object, historical, class violence in our society, it generates virtual, reactive violence. The hatred that can be mistaken for an archaic, primary impulse, paradoxically represents a passion torn from its subject and its goals.