Flatline_Constructs 4.4 Social Science/Social Science Fiction (How the True World Became a Simulation)

While McHale sees particular textual-authorial features expanding to displace representation, Baudrillard sees representation disrupted by the emergence of a (hyper)fictive plane in which theory is effaced by fiction (and vice versa). But this is precisely not a matter of the “textualization” of reality; Baudrillard is fascinated with Ballard’s Crash precisely because it lacks many of the features of traditional literature. As Baudrillard is quick to notice, in both the Ballard essay and his other essay on science fiction, the expansion of fiction into theory – an inevitable consequence, he thinks, of the emergence of cybernetics – has an ambivalent effect on theory. If theory can no longer be distinguished from fiction – if fiction can perform theory and theory must perforce become fiction – then map and territory are indeed confused, but in a more complicated and interesting way than Borges’ story suggests.

Baudrillard was not the first to herald the new status of fiction. “We live science fiction,” McLuhan had pronounced the end of his 1964 essay on Burroughs (73), anticipating Donna Haraway’s often-cited claim that the difference between science and fiction is becoming an optical illusion and William Bogard’s description of his own work as a “social science fiction”[278], by some two decades.[279]

The becoming-fiction of theory is necessarily accompanied by the becoming-real of fiction. All of which calls for some kind of account of what fiction is – or could be – in cybernetic culture. (One could argue that most of Baudrillard’s oeuvre is devoted to analyzing just this question). Provisionally, it is important to distinguish fiction from Literature, for two principal reasons. (1) Fiction does not come weighed down with the high cultural baggage that literature carries, and (2) fiction is not restricted to text- or even language-based cultural products. (Even a conventional definition of fiction, for instance, would include films).

Certainly, it is now no longer adequate to consider fiction to be on the side of the false[280], the fake or the imaginary. It can be considered to belong to the artificial, once we understand (following the arguments we made in Chapter 1), that the Real, far from being opposed to the artificial, is composed of it. The problem with Baudrillard may be that, by emphasising the “imaginary” aspects of his “pataphysical”[281] project, he too easily lets social-realist critics like Kellner off the hook, allowing them the opportunity to represent and – perhaps ludicrously – to posit themselves as intervening in a “social world” whose existence they continue to believe in, whilst he can be caricatured as striking the pose of a dandy-aesthete, withdrawing into a nihilistic and narcissistic irresponsibility. But Baudrillard’s response to Bogard’s positing of a “social science-fiction” might be that it retains too conventional a picture (or at least remains content to merely blur, rather than shatter that picture) by assuming that either social science, science or be the social can be thought of as at any point in any way distinct from fiction. Baudrillard’s most provocative challenge to social science concerns not only its claim to be a science, but, more radically perhaps, its claim to have a legitimate object of study: i.e. the social itself. One of Baudrillard’s points, of course, is that the social world does not exist apart from its simulation in social theory. For obvious reasons, this quickly spirals beyond the familiar social constructionist position it could appear to be, since the social is not what constructs, but what is constructed, or, as Baudrillard would prefer, simulated, by an intermeshing web of infosystems. [282]

According to Baudrillard, the socius, indeed, survives only as its own simulation through “fabulous fictions” (SED 66) . Baudrillard: “In every field we are tested, probed and sampled; the method is “tactical” and the sphere of communication “tactile”. Not to mention the ideology of “contact,” which, in all its forms, seeks to replace the idea of social relations. A whole strategic configuration revolves around the test (the question/answer cell) as it does around a molecular command-code.” (SED 64) This is not to suggest in any way a dematerialization of power, only that Social Control (control by the socius) has given way to normalization (or hypernormalization) in which such ostensibly participatory fictional processes as opinion polls and surveys play a crucial role. (For a preliminary discussion of this process, see “Cybernetics, Postmodernism, Fiction”, in Chapter 1, above.)

Bogard’s example of the production of profiles provides an excellent example of what is at issue here. As William Bogard expains: “A profile, as the name suggests, is a kind of prior ordering, in this case a model or figure that organizes multiple sources of information to scan for matching or exceptional cases [...] Unlike stereotypes, [...] profiles are not merely ‘false images” that are used to justify differences in power. Diagnostic profiles exist rather at the intersection of ‘actual and virtual worlds, and come to have more ‘reality,’ more ‘truth and significance,’ than the cases to which they are compared. Rather than the profiles resembling the cases, increasingly the cases start to resemble the profiles.”[283] The profile is a prophecy which fulfills itself or, at least, makes any claim about its “accurate” representation of reality undecidable. Since being profiled automatically makes you targeted - by advertisers, the police etc - it is impossible to decide whether the profile solicits behaviour or anticipates it (it precisely puts just this distinction in question). For Bogard, the emergence of such processes indicates a move form control to hypercontrol. Hypercontrol differs from Control primarily through the temporality in (and through) which it operates. In Baudrillard’s terms, “social control by means of the end [...] is replaced by means of prediction, simulation, programmed anticipation and indeterminate mutation, all governed, however, by the code.” (SED 60) DNA and “molecular cybernetics” provide the ominous model for total bio-cybernetic control by “stimulated, simulated and anticipated response” (SED 67): get to the code and you run everything. Cybernetics had always been about anticipation; in order to hit a moving target, the anti-aircraft weaponry Wiener had worked on needed to predict not where the target was at the point when the missile was launched, but where its would be at the point of impact. Hence the slogan of Control is, “Don’t strike where your enemy is, strike where it will be.” Hypercontrol tends towards the production of even tighter feedback loops; its slogan, then, would be “Never strike where your enemy will be, kill its parents.”[284] Cybernetic anticipation is always double-edged; suggesting not only prediction, but determination: “self-fulfilling prophecy” (SED 67), as Baudrillard has it. Yet this process itself makes prophecy moot, precisely because it makes any effective delineation of causal determination impossible: “the whole traditional world of causality” with its “distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the ends and the means” (SS 31) has been superceded by a logic of “code.” White magical capture[285]: to be in the system is already to be processed by it. Baudrillard’s example of this is the opinion poll. The question that concerned opinion in the “political class” worries about - do polls affect voting behaviour? - is unanswerable. “Polls manipulate the undecidable. Do they affect votes? True of false? Do they yield exact photographs of reality, or of mere tendencies, or a refraction of this reality in a hyperspace of simulation whose curvature we do not know? True or false? Undecidable.” (SED 66)[286] Code’s logic as Baudrillard delineates it is not describable in terms of cause-preceding-effect; rather, its logic is one, to speak like Deleuze, of expression[287], in which each “effect” expresses - unfolds - a “cause” from which it is never really distinct, temporally or ontologically. Is DNA the cause of an organism? It is both more and less. [288]

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[278] Bogard, Simulation of Surveillance, 5-24

[279] It might be worth a parenthetical note here making some attempt to unravel what’s at stake in the emergence of the – new? - mode, theory-fiction, particularly as undertaken by the theorist who has been most associated with this type of practice (Baudrillard). We can perhaps most profitably approach this problem by considering the conventional opposition between theory and fiction. Here, theory is on the side of the real and fiction is on the side of the imaginary. This is the opposition Douglas Kellner invokes – or doggedly holds onto – when he complains that “while Baudrillard’s texts are arguably quite good science fiction, they are rather problematical as models of social theory” (Kellner 203); here it is assumed that the flip into a fictional mode automatically means the end of theory. But, if this too-quick opposition is inadequate, what could be meant by the fusion of fiction and theory? Two, inevitably interrelated, possibilities immediately suggest themselves:

1. Fiction as theory. This option further subdivides: (a) Fiction in the form of theory (fiction that uses, or incorporates academic conventions: examples here include T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Nabokov’s Pale Fire). (b) Fiction performing as theory. This, potentially, could include any fiction offering theoretical resources of some kind.

2. Theory as fiction. This is theory presented in the form of fiction. The most well-known exponents of this mode - Nietzsche, Kierkegaard – are hardly new. At its most radical, what is at stake here is more than the disguise of theory as fiction, or fiction as theory, but a dissolution of the opposition itself. Two, related, claims, one descriptive, the other prescriptive emerge from this: (1) all theory is already fiction; and, (2) theory should abandon its assumed position of “objective neutrality”, and embrace its fictionality. But something happens to fiction here; it is no longer, simply, on the side of the imaginary.

In one sense, the rise of theory-fiction marks the end of literary criticism (and also, concomitantly, the end of “literature” as its object). McLuhan’s essay on Burroughs had emerged in the context of his own drift from literary criticism towards fiction-theory, a process paralleled by Baudrillard’s passage from “Literary criticism to fiction-theory” (6-25). Like McLuhan, “Baudrillard’s intellectual formation was decisively marked by literature, and it is no accident that Baudrillard’s first essays were literary in the traditional sense.” (6) This trajectory is impelled, no doubt, in McLuhan’s case by his intuition that Literature could no longer be studied as a relative autonomy, simply because, in the era of “electric participation” all disciplines – and all fields – tend to collapse. It is perhaps an understatement to say, as Mike Gane does, that “Baudrillard’s challenge is as much to the mode of theorizing as to the substance.” (Mike Gane, “Radical Theory: Baudrillard and Vulnerability”, Theory, Culture & Society, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi – Sage, Vol 12 [1995], 120)

While Baudrillard may not be as rabidly anti-theoretical as the Lyotard of Libidinal Economy – itself another work of theory-fiction – he clearly has a somewhat ambivalent attitude to the practice. Naturally, this involves a change in the mode of his own writing – the move that happens between Symbolic Exchange and Death and Seduction – from a still putatively academic social theory to a fully-fledged theory-fiction that dispenses with the whole machinery of scholarly apparatus (footnotes, references, etc).

[280] Deleuze’s discussion of the “powers of the false” in Cinema 2 notwithstanding.

[281] Baudrillard’s revival of Jarry’s pataphysics – the science of imaginary solutions – is a constant preoccupation in Baudrillard’s work.

[282] See Baudrillard’s famous theses on “the end of the social” in In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.

[283] Bogard, 27 (italics added)

[284] Iain Hamilton Grant, “Burning Autopoiedipus”, Abstract Culture 10,(winter1997), 8

[285] The reference to magic here is far from glib. In fact, it returns us to Weiner’s comments on the complicity of magical process with cybernetics, cited in the previous chapter. Self-fulfilling prophecy is a particularly powerful type of capture-magic. Consider the example of someone who is told, at a seance, let’s say, that they are going to die in the next year. They do in fact die, from what appear to be accidental causes. Has their death been prophesied - or has the prophecy itself affected them - perhaps subtly, at an unconscious level - so that their behaviour has made them more likely to die? It’s undecidable, as Baudrillard would say. Once the loop is closed, we can never know. The prophecy, like the opinion poll, is not causally innocent: it combines anticipation with determination in such a way as to make the distinction between the two impossible to make.

But the only type of true prophecy that is not – to some extent – self-fulfilling would be one wholly independent of the event which it is prophesying. Otherwise, there is always the possibility that the prophecy plays a part in inducing what it foretells. This is a theme well-enough known in Literature, and is a commonplace of tragedy. Neither Oedipus nor Macbeth would suffer the fates they encounter were it not for prophecy. Oedipus’ fate is particularly ironic in that it is his parents’ very attempt to avoid the prophesied events that ultimately brings them about; had they cast him out as a child, Oedipus would recognize his father and mother (and not kill the former or marry the latter). Baudrillard has his own version of this “fatal” narrative: the tale of “Death in Samarkand”, recounted in Seduction. “Consider the story of the soldier who meets death in the marketplace, and believes he saw his making a menacing gesture in his direction. He rushes to the king’s palace and asks the king for his best horse in order that he might flee far into the night from Death, as far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace and reproaches him for having frightened one of his best servants. But Death, astonished, replies ‘I didn’t mean to frighten him. It was just that I was surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow in Samarkand.” (S 72)

[286] In part, Baudrillard is merely re-stating the uncertainty principle, but with a particular – cybernetic – emphasis on feedback. To observe anything is to affect it: “It is not even certain that we can test plants, animals or inert matter with any hope of an ‘objective’ response.” (SED 67) For Baudrillard, though, this already radically undermines not only any hope of “objectively” observing anything, but also any ability to delineate cause-and-effect structures. How do we know we’ve not entered the loop? And it is the cybernetic figure of the loop - what Baudrillard calls “a coding a decoding strip, magnetized by signs” (SED 75) - complete unto itself, cycling around in its own orbit, that is implicit in Baudrillard’s formulations of bio-cybernetic control.

[287] For expression, see Deleuze, Expressionism and Philosophy. Spinoza is the subject of this study, but Deleuze also discusses Leibniz; Baudrillard cites “Leibniz’s binary deity” as the “precursor” of code (SED 4, 57, 59).

[288] One could say that, where Control targets the future, Hypercontrol targets the future by altering (what will have been) its past, except that, by now, the “past”, like every other marker of sequential time, has been liquidated by the system’s “retroeugenics” . There is only the time of the system: “Finality is no longer at the end, there is no more finality, nor any determinacy. Finality is there in advance, inscribed in the code.” (SED 59)