MG The first time I read La suite vénitienne/Please Follow Me, I thought it was a technique to allow a man to take on the role of the seducer, a role that was difficult for him. Like in the zodiac clinic you mentioned.2 It is relatively easy for a man to transform into a woman but to transform into a seducer is much more difficult. And it seemed that he took on this role during the two weeks – in appearance, one only follows women; it is rarer to follow men. Men usually follow women in the seduction game and here he is followed. It led me towards this hypothesis.
He is in the position of seduction, not only in terms of appearances, but also because he himself has become a rule of the game. There is a double effacement affecting both of them.
But he does not do anything.
MG True, he is an involuntary seducer. But a woman putting on make-up does not do anything either in a certain way. She dissolves into a rule of the game and then is followed. Of course seductresses have at least a minimum of know-how.
I thought he was seduced, objectively seduced in a manifest process.
MG That is what disturbs me.
By following him, she diverts him since she diverts what he thinks he is experiencing into an obscure consciousness. This diversion is the seduction.
MG Yes, but you have to apply your reversibility principle. She puts him in the position of seducer without his knowledge, whether he likes it or not. The difference with a woman is that he is unaware and at the same time radically feminised.
For you the typical scenario is a man following a woman?
MG The typical scenario of ordinary seduction is two people disappearing into a ritual order. Make-up is one symptom. You enter into a game where one person captures the other’s gaze with no amorous or psychological relationship. There is a common dissolution in the ritual. Here, there is clearly a very different rule imposed at the beginning, but it is not shared. But after the rule is imposed, it seems to me that the man is in the position of the seducer.
I meant seduction as a form. There is nothing sexual or amorous; it is purely fatal. The Other escapes him- or herself sometimes. By following the man, Sophie represents the fact that he thinks he is going somewhere but in fact, more profoundly, he does not know where he is going. She knows, and she translates it. She takes the meaning from the other’s wanderings. Seduction is like that. It means diverting from a direction, from an end. And that is why he became so aggressive when he realised what was happening.
There are two questions: why did Sophie enter into a game like this one, do we need psychological reasons? I would say no but the question itself is uninteresting. And why does she do it on a fatal level with that scenario, a pure game? And why does he become so vindictively angry when he realises it? His reaction is normal, there is no reason to object to it but we can wonder what causes it. What affected him so deeply that his reaction really could have led to murder?
MG I wonder if women suffer from the fact that men are never seducers, that there is no reversibility, that men cannot wear masks. Rather than a primitive psychological reaction, it is a shared suffering by women that men never wear masks.
In make-up, I see masks. Japanese culture is the best example of how women’s make-up in the past was truly a mask. With women as subjects abolished by the mask. The suffering of the mask monopoly was so strong that things reversed and men started wearing women’s masks.
Men were then unmasked beings.
MG The Japanese responded with a culture of transvestites who were first characters with masks. It becomes a game of infinite reflection since women then started to put on make-up like the men who made their faces like women.
In our Western culture, Sophie Calle’s very artificial experiment would be: how can we give a man the seducer’s mask? You set a rule. It is very artificial. But isn’t it like that, this dedication tied to personal suffering: how can one follow a man? Following is the pleasure of seduction for a man, at least as I understand it. You decide that a woman is your destiny and you take on that destiny in total indifference to her physical or psychological being. Pure seduction means saying: ‘You will be her and I will follow you.’ Men have access to this experience but not women.
I don’t know. You are bringing in sexual difference, which I had not put in play.
MG It is not really a sexual difference. I say man–woman to simplify things. It is true that women wear more masks and men are more unmasked. It is like a niche of reversible alterity that is used in male–female roles and is a faint echo of seduction.
I agree about make-up. You could say that Sophie’s trailing disguises the other’s existence or that she doubles it. Make-up highlights things and gives colour. Everyone has his or her own approach. Sophie verifies the most insignificant details doubled in her photos and the text she writes in the margins. Insignificance is doubled by meaning and a massive signification of which it is unaware. It is like make-up or a mask in that the intensification or stereoscoping of things gives him breadth and meaning. Not a meaning that can be decrypted or decorated but an intensity that he did not have.
Could the same experiment work in reverse? Could a man follow a woman following Sophie’s scenario? It might not be as easy since it is not an innocent undertaking. I think it is fatal and in that sense not perverse at all. It is simply fatal. It is the art of putting fate into play, of engaging the complete absence of identity at the base of each and every one of us that is hardly ever revealed because we constantly overcompensate to play with identities. It succeeds in fact in removing the other’s identity and in losing one’s own identity, leading to this fatal stratosphere. It is a game in its purest form with no necessary psychological connotations. We could say that in this game, there is Sophie and what she is but more important is that she reaches something that surpasses herself. She had the genius to stage it and the artificiality [facticité] of her approach must be noted. You can have the idea but it takes something else to put it into action. Maybe the perversion lies there. You can have this strange idea, maybe even write something about it, but enacting it is prodigious. There is certainly an obsession or perversion involved that calls for psychological considerations. You probably can never eliminate perversion completely.
QA Does she strip him of his identity? Does she flee[ce? – Editors] him or X-ray him?3
In principle, it could be anyone. To set up the operation, she needed some information about him but she ended up learning a lot about him. What she learned relates more to the anecdotal, less interesting side of the story. Most of the following took place during Carnival, which is amusing since there were masks everywhere. And Venice is the ideal city for it because it is a labyrinth of secrets where you have the impression that everyone is following someone. It is a very cultured place but its culture has lapsed into secret, its tracks erased. Another remarkable aspect of the story is that it portrayed Venice as a city where all meaning is lost, where all destinations are combined. The city spins around itself in labyrinthine spirals; once you enter it, you find yourself in the situation she provokes or recreates artificially in much greater detail.
MG You might add that in that kind of labyrinth, the only way to avoid encounters is to follow someone carefully without losing sight of him or her. Otherwise, you might always run into the person, which is what happens to Sophie in the end.
Something troubles me in your analysis. You mentioned ways of preserving strains of alterity. You brought in the seduction strain and the discharge or dispensation strain. There is a slow movement between them. In the dispensation strain, in the laisser-faire or ‘letting happen’, I relinquish my will to an Other who, because he or she receives it, gains a status of much more radical alterity. Between this strain and the theme of seduction, it seemed to me, before hearing you or reading you, that there were two separate worlds: the world of slavery or submission and the world of seduction, which could be analysed in Hegelian terms. And here you do not make the distinction.
Is the master the Other of the slave or the slave the Other of the master? In a class, historical or relationship-of-forces context, they are certainly alienated and that is where thought bases itself as a system of alienation. But on the symbolic scale, it is no longer part of a scale of value that we recognise as historical, and is no longer true. They are in a position of mutual seduction or reversibility.
In a hierarchical society, for example, the caste member is not the Other of the pariah and the pariah is not the Other of the caste member. There is no psychological position of alterity since they are both, like in Schnitzler’s example,4 implicated in a successive order of incompatible developments. There is no negotiation and therefore no alienation to surpass or transgress. The two ‘castes’ are perfectly foreign to each other and yet absolutely complicit in the symbolic order, in the succession of phases which is more like an order of metamorphoses since lives play on previous lives. It is more like a cycle of metamorphoses than a phenomenon of alienation or alterity. It is not the question of the Other. It is a highly seductive question because there is a kind of reversibility. The two are completely incompatible but fundamentally reversible since there is an order of progression from one form to another.
It is like myths and metamorphoses. It is interesting to see that in all orders other than our own, it does not exist and there is inclusion whereas our Western order of values postulates potential conflict and opposition between the self and the Other. In practically every other culture, when you read that the Araras are Bororos, that there is a cycle in which Araras and Bororos are involved, where there are no separate identities. There is the becoming-Arara of the Bororos; neither is the other’s Other. They are metaphoric forms, successors in a symbolic order that combines all creatures and in which there is a form of identity mixing, and of seduction. Like Schnitzler explained, there is both total symbiosis and total incompatibility. It functions differently.
Seduction is even involved in the master–slave story. There is no more will. Each delegates his or her fate to the other; the subsequent form can be its own subsequent form. And the next form is not an other, in the psychological sense of the term. It is a fate, which is very different.
In response to a question, I would like to clarify that when I say ‘fatal’ it is not in the sense of a religious fatalism. For me, ‘fatal’ means that there is a recognition of letting believe, letting exist, letting want; a recognition that everything that happens to you comes from an inhuman order. It comes completely from somewhere else. It never comes from your own desire or will, since we do not affect to possess them, but it is true that most cultures are based on that type of thing. If it is not based on properties of the self, on identity, on appropriation of the world, then we are in the laisser-faire or ‘letting happen’ in the noblest sense of the word and not in the ‘making happen’ [faire faire] or ‘wanting to happen’. Our culture, of course, is on the order of ‘making happen’ and ‘wanting to happen’.
This aspect of our culture is one of the tragic elements of the current relationship with Islam. This relationship may be the only situation today where there is true incomprehensibility. The two orders are completely different. For us, the Other is unacceptable and for them, our order is unacceptable. It is not a problem of historical evolution moving towards their quiet acceptance of our order. There is something completely irreducible or insurmountable. Western political psychologies do not take it into account because they cannot understand it.
In letting believe, letting do and letting want, there is a form of affectation. It is not simple. It is less simple than wanting. It is an affectation. There is a science of artificiality, an art of snobbism that says: ‘I am nothing, I let things happen.’
When you say: ‘I want to be a machine,’ it is a pure form of snobbery. It is pure affectation. Yet through this affectation, we can reach the secret of the reproduction of objects and things by letting the world of machines exist, by only adding a little to it. It is one more machine, a little machine that makes the artificiality of all the other machines. Once again we are in the ‘little bit more’. It is the oversignification that we always bring to something. But we let it come; we do not claim to invent or change the world or even to interpret it and give it meaning. There is a great affectation in relinquishing yourself to the obviousness of the world, to the pure metabolic of things, to pure events or to the other’s will.
Masses are similar. Everything happens as if they deferred to someone else – the media or politicians – and gave them the responsibility for interpreting everything. Masses do not interpret. They have no intelligence. They do not seek to understand. They let others interpret and desire for them. It is an extraordinary affectation.
Snobs do the same thing; they do not have their own will. It is like Brummel: ‘Tell me what I like.’ There is the story of his exchange with his valet in Scotland before the lakes. He turns to his valet and asks: ‘Which lake do I prefer?’ He has no need for his own desires. He does not exist. That is affectation.
For us, this process has a negative connotation and is given a completely pejorative value. It is a passive strategy. I do not want to make connections with Eastern philosophies. We can talk about Japan but Japan today. Otherwise, you could find infinite connections to these philosophies which are philosophies of laisser-faire and reversibility.
MG The break with seduction and reversibility is radical in comparison to Hegel’s work. If you reread the first pages of Kojève’s introduction to his reading of Hegel,5 you will see that they posit the axiom of the necessity of putting oneself in the position of being the other’s object of desire in order for the human subject to appear. There is an entire dialectic from which the idea of passivity and reversibility are excluded. It is like the birth of another axiomatic system. All of the analyses that followed accept, at least partially, this Hegelian axiom. The notion of seduction and the reversibility it introduces are therefore something like changing geometries.
Yes, it leads out of alienation, and completely out of all of the greatness and decadence of alienation.
QA Extending the question of activity and passivity, don’t you think there is a gap between a book and an experience? When Sophie Calle records her shadowing with language, she goes beyond the mute experience where there is a reversibility in the order of senses – touching–touched – and things that happen on the level of bodies. Whereas when there is language, there is an account of experience because there is activity, with a reflectability that supposes a way of situating oneself in the world. Then you could understand the reaction of the man who was followed when he says: ‘You are going to record what I am doing.’ You are immediately put in the position of the interlocutor of intersubjectivity, as you said the other day.
That is correct. Do contradictions, paradoxes, or secrets require that there be no trace? At first, I would agree. I would say that a pact was broken, another reason for revenge.
Is writing a total betrayal of secrets or is it possible to slip a little bit of it into a non-aesthetic form? For me, it is not an aesthetic book but a book that remains secret, which keeps a trace of secrets.
I think you are basically correct but should we renounce the possibility of projecting an image of it, of being able to say it? There is certainly a way of saying it, a totally stupid and sacrilegious way to account for it. And there are probably various ways of keeping the secret. In the first things she did, there was a way of circling around the secret without divulging, decoding, or betraying it.
There may be no perfection in this case but the best she has done is nonetheless very close to the secret. The journal she kept during the operation was part of the following; publishing it is obviously something different.
The question raised is where the possibility of speaking about it stops. There must be a possibility of putting fate or alterity in this sense into action or in play, as long as their rules are followed. I think it is possible because otherwise she would never have staged it and would never have followed anyone. If she had not followed him, he would not have had a secret. She positions herself as the other’s fate and she creates pure alterity; she had to do it. In order for someone to be another’s fate, there must be a process of seduction with both total discretion and violence. Violence cannot be taken out; it has to be in play. The rules remain secret. You cannot say what the rule of this game is. She did not say it; she did not know it because she is extremely naïve, she did not look for it. I personally looked for it later but it didn’t add anything. She has great naïveté but is capable of extraordinary artifice.
Translated by Ames Hodges
NOTES
1. This dialogue with Marc Guillaume followed a seminar presentation delivered by Baudrillard as one of a series held in the early 1990s. It also includes two questions from the audience. [Editors]
2. On a number of occasions Baudrillard imagines a ‘fate-lift’ clinic where, instead of a face-lift, you can have your star sign surgically altered, to change your fate. See, for example: Baudrillard, J. (1990), Cool Memories, London: Verso, p. 201; Baudrillard, J. (2003), Cool Memories IV: 1995–2000, London: Verso, p. 48; Baudrillard, J. (2006), Cool Memories V: 2000–2004, London: Verso, p. 11; Baudrillard, J. and Guillaume, M. (2008), Radical Alterity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 114. [Editors]
3. This question is omitted from p. 158 of the original French work: Baudrillard, J. and Guillaume, M. (1994), Figures de l’altérité, Paris: Descartes. [Editors]
4. In the talk preceding this dialogue, Baudrillard quotes from Arthur Schnitzler’s Beziehungen und Einsamkeiten, where Schnitzler writes: ‘We may be able to represent the progress of infectious disease in the human body as the history of a germ species with its origins, apogée and decline. Its history resembles human history; the proportions differ but the idea is the same.’ Baudrillard, J. and Guillaume, M. (2008), Radical Alterity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 127. [Editors]
5. Kojève, A. (1969), Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, New York: Basic Books; originally published in French in 1947: Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Leçons sur la Phénoménologie de l’esprit, Paris: Gallimard. [Editors]
© Semiotext(e). Original publication: ‘Artificiality and seduction’, in J. Baudrillard and M. Guillaume (2008), Radical Alterity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 131–41.