desiring seduction

one seduction

what is seduction what is it to be seduced it’s not about them winning no not winning or tricking you have to agree right there has to be this agreeing part this complicity they call it you don't just do seduction it's always two you see the duo and the duel like a dance but also a fight never just one person being stronger even if they think they are like baudrillard does doesn't he get lost in his own plans like a maze an emotional maze he makes the plan so he can get lost in it and the one who thinks he's in charge of the game isn't he the first to fall for the story of the plan the tragic story page ninety-eight it says that and isn't that what happens to baudrillard the mirrors show it

and this book seduction this one it's like a turn you see it was working with the things before like symbolic exchange and death the one right before but this was a step it took things seriously but not really it was serious in a funny way ironic like a joke but not a joke taking critique seriously means not taking it seriously see like beyond the boring school stuff it doesn't pretend to be just writing about what's happening out there no it's a dare a challenge it's tricky like the devil playful clever against the big heavy spirit of gravity the political stuff the serious things seduction is when he stopped doing fake sociology the school kind and became fully theory-fiction like making up stories that are truer than the real things

it's a plan made to eat up the parts it started with like a snake eating its tail the words are always running away from themselves it sets things moving effects happen that weren't supposed to happen the text gets lost sometimes like a body in the middle of something really strong a passion it can't think or act right seduction is itself a seduction it's like a secret way things move around a ritual you just get it it has its own rules page eighty-one it's trying to pull theory away from what baudrillard thinks got seduced first the political things the things with meaning the body things the economies of depth and meaning all the serious stuff seduction's magic stops all the body economies the sex stuff the mind contracts and puts in this spinning thing of answering and answering back getting dizzy page eighty-three that's what it does

his older work it was trying to make the mauss-bataille thing about giving things away the gift not the useful stuff real for today's world he's always mad at anthropology the serious kind the mind-stuff psycho-logos the main actors in the story we tell now about who we are and why we're broken baudrillard thinks this is just something the core master class the powerful ones made up a projection it's not the end point of everything he says being a person with your own private secrets that's just the system of money showing its inside part the rule of things being equal like coins real outside stuff that was way back with the old people and giving things away the potlach the kula the symbolic exchange the edge points where the white-man face thinking stops death there baudrillard does this reverse anthropology like looking at civilization from the outside like a fake primitive person seeing the boring rituals the dull white magic of oedipus the family stuff compared to the crazy shaman dances of symbolic exchange

if symbolic exchange isn't talked about much in seduction the book it's because seduction itself has taken its place it's the part that holds baudrillard's favorite thing ambivalence two things at once seduction is the other way not just from reality but also from what baudrillard sees as its mirror images the machine stuff and feminism the ideas of making things desire and power all of them just show a reflection of bourgeois utility the useful things for the middle class a mirror of a time that's gone now the factory time this is second-order simulacra he explains in the essay simulacra and science fiction written around the same time that's the making things order founded on power energy making it real with machines and the whole system of making things a promethean goal always growing expanding getting rid of limits a release of energy forever desire belongs to the dream worlds of that order of simulations ss one twenty-one

baudrillard's kind of hidden attack on deleuze-guattari here goes with his criticisms in seduction about becoming and moving around the nomadic ideas this is against deleuze's logic of sense and also getting ready for a thousand plateaus but nobody is safe seduction just dismisses irigaray and foucault too they are all seen as still doing what he calls in his essay on nihilism the nineteenth century revolution the breaking of appearances something money has already finished doing a long time ago making ready for a postmodern time that's about the breaking of meaning ss one sixty to one sixty-one a time that fits with a system that fixes itself up a cybernetic one immune to the old political tricks it actually needs them to invent new things you can't challenge the system by just not caring about meaning or limits it expects you to mock it it has ways to get you back how can not caring exist in a system that likes it makes it so extreme it can't last it goes back it gets turned off it disappears into the process making copies of its own doubling back limits before you even do it

deleuze-guattari irigaray and foucault they are still tricked baudrillard says by the political idea that there is something real behind the surface waiting to be free like feminism it gets caught up in the power stuff when before it was in charge of the symbolic the world of how things look where baudrillard says everything that really matters happens baudrillard isn't saying there's no real world like people think he's not interested in those simple ideas that belong to the first order simulations no he thinks reality is confusing deadly fatal and already given over to things being made artificial in other words it's already he wants to say like the feminine

two the horror of nothing to see

the mixing up of the feminine and the female that runs through seduction means baudrillard doesn't actually need real women the decorations are enough the make-up and the pretending which is more than just imagining but not something he can't control seduction wants things hidden starting with the female body which following barthes on striptease it thinks is made not sexual at the exact moment it's shown naked m eighty-four so instead of trying to get something he thinks he's found baudrillard gets this comforting ache for what he knows he can never have like the people buying gibson's fake prostitutes the meat puppets he wants to have it both ways bc two twenty feeling pulled between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time which is probably always what that particular game is called bc two twenty

but the game he wants to play is about signs not bodies not flesh he wants to be alone with his signs pretending not to care about her body needing it only to hang clothes on i'll dress you up put make-up on you he tells her you'll be perfect for me but you you have the real power because you know you aren't what you look like the shiny coverings the make-believe that blinds everything that gives the masculine confidence and also the pull of the feminine's power that hasn't been used yet the masculine is certain the feminine is impossible to figure out page eleven

get too close and this whole picture vanishes terrified of things being too close so close you can't tell one thing from another ts thirty-one baudrillard keeps his distance like all the real casanovas he's bored when it's finished when you get what you wanted he likes to be careful with body fluids dim the lights you know what he means always preferring the thrill of the chase he's turned off by too much detail the close-ups of body parts the unflattering ones he calls this obscene it's not just about sex or pornography anyway pornography he says has little to do with sex it's part of wanting everything to be perfectly real high fidelity high resolution stereo-porno pages twenty-eight to thirty-six when you take this wanting for perfect realism to the end it leads the male looking-desire into a dead end that baudrillard sees in the japanese vaginal cyclorama he describes it prostitutes with their legs open sitting on a platform japanese workers in their shirtsleeves allowed to push their noses right up to their eyeballs inside the woman's vagina so they can see better but see what page thirty-one baudrillard is drawn in but finally pushed away confused because for him her sexual organ is the horror of nothing to see a hole in his seeing-lens ts twenty-six why look into it

he asks because not only does he think he's seen everything there is to see he thinks that if you can't see it it must be nothing a zero that's still the zero of not having something the castration thing that has to be hidden on purpose maybe sadly maybe just pretending let's pretend he says fog up the lens a bit let's forget ourselves that if it cannot be seen it must be nothing a zero that is still the zero of castration that must knowingly cynically sentimentally be covered up let's pretend he urges fog up the lens a little forget ourselves

by looking and seeing nothing he's happy knowing that everything he looks for is neatly tucked away in a box finished belonging to the past but the stuff inside wasn't just hidden from his eyes his seeing system wasn't supposed to be the judge of what could be seen actually his not seeing things well was good for her her demands that women do the seduction rituals as webs of how things look allowed the rules of hiding camouflage to be written baudrillard's challenge isn't that hard after all he might think he fills the empty spaces his voids with the tricks of seduction but those holes will always get away from themselves when she isn't showing herself she is sending signals even to herself she's keeping the connections in the loop open for when the important moment comes

the secret baudrillard knows he can't see helps keep things the way they are his status quo but the secret he doesn't know he can't see because he can't see beyond just looking and doesn't try different ways of sensing that secret takes the signs he uses for appearances and turns them against themselves changing the ways of meaning and not-meaning into passwords true names and female signals that just keep coming without rules of language without grammar without sense by changing simulation into process they will make different things happen based on their ability to do things not on their ability to mean

as long as baudrillard refuses to try using his hands to learn how to find his way by touching things things that can be changed things that are close by touching he won't be able to react or even know about communication ways that will keep happening without him he will fail to see that things that look finished inside are actually endless shapes and even then a very specific kind things inside that are clearly marked by where they are and how you look at them can also act in the most unclear ways moving away from their place making fine and spread out webs to escape

as long as he thinks he was the only one worth keeping the secret from he will keep seeing no other reason for processes that aren't just about how things look than that anatomy is destiny the explanation they gave him in the first place those who won't play his game the one where he at least at first made the rules will be stuck in ways of being kept in a box that they already know the constructionist versus essentialist fight baudrillard likes things in boxes there's a place for everything after all if she won't play with the appearances he can see she will quickly be sent back to where she will be seen to the harsh bright area of pretending women are just naturally like that to where he can keep an eye on you

three closed circuits the mirror of psychoanalysis

baudrillard not caring about the female body also makes him not see his own or rather seduction how he talks about it becomes a way to deal with the sad feelings of a male body economy that won't go beyond getting hard and getting soft beyond high and low and the empty parts the deep places ml thirty-seven to make up for what happens after he finishes he waits delays contact forever if possible this economy hidden in the act of looking sees itself everywhere

i'll be your mirror he says reflect what you are in case you don't know which also means inevitably everything will reflect what he is

seduction slash simulacrum communication is the social world working in a closed circle where signs copy a reality you can't find page one sixty-three baudrillard's circles are sealed tight you can't go beyond them fight them with logic or just not care they just collapse in on themselves over and over pulling information into black holes that suck everything in and send nothing back making holes in the process that baudrillard quickly fills with seduction before something much less clear creeps in everything that might happen is planned for reality is a diagnosis everything is already decided

doors with known outsides boxes with secrets that are limited these little flirts with the outside are quickly brought back in as the social world working inside a closed circle where signs copy a reality you can't find page one sixty-three baudrillard knows there are feelings he can't handle as long as his body is sealed from the openings he hasn't found yet but these things that come in are the points in another game one he doesn't know the rules for as long as they are made of what he dismissively calls carnal or physical desire

from the other side of the mirror irigaray often asks a question how did the woman end up inside his obsessive circling motions that only look at himself with no way in to what is clearly an argument that just goes around and around she has always been good at spotting a sealed loop the clear tendency of a system that protects itself to turn forever in its own path always coming back to the same spot in the circle where it would already have been put to keep every system in order including strangely enough its own s two sixty-seven

even though baudrillard often hinted at it the final melting away of the one who sees subject and the thing seen object into the circuit is always stopped the feminine acts like the break in the circuit it's still the object of a process that even though it's supposed to be endless without terms as the later baudrillard would say it always throws back the idea of man as the one who acts for baudrillard as long as there is seduction there must be someone to be seduced and this person is masculine as baudrillard quickly admits and is happy to be while the thing that seduces is its missing part the feminine es ninety so that's who he is she says you want me to keep confirming you are who you are so you can lose yourself again and again ml fifty-six her job is always to give the male back to himself sg one fifteen to turn the game that's supposed to be open into a closed system that only refers to itself tied to a male subject who is saying he exists even as he pretends to give up in a state of blissful relaxation he wants to watch himself disappear forever fatal strategies small doses of destroying yourself that cancel each other out my death is everywhere my death dreams symd one fifty-eight

baudrillard insisting that seduction should never be from crazy attraction or feelings connecting is a clever plan that makes sure he keeps his cards close his inherent blindness to how unpredictable things are means many of her moves will seem to fit into his rough simple boxes but for the ones that refuse to make sense and fail to announce they mean nothing he has made another box the void the hole that at any point is burned out by the return of the flame of any sign the meaninglessness that makes seduction's unexpected charm it also waits page eighty-four

in seduction baudrillard's earlier dances with death become a flirtation with this void a not-quite fatal fascination with everything about being a subject being wiped out completely it's a trick he's used for a long time it saves him the trouble of having goals that move on their own it's a way of marking out the area because if it should run out at least he knew the terror of the dark inside long before he got there

so covering up the dissolving into pure process the absolute as not one a confusing storm of things touching that you can't even feel baudrillard still has to believe in objects that are solid and clear accepting the quiet work of death as what's needed to stay definitely a subject ts one fifteen his deep commitment is to a sad cybernetics of balance whose limits he relies on as a deadly strategic check to the supposedly endless energy of promethean man the one who strives yet baudrillard's model of the system correcting itself object getting revenge and the accursed share the part that has to be lost his favorite strategy of turning things around always keeps him inside the very thing he's criticizing staying at the level of just mocking things passively nihilism instead of actually doing active anti-oedipal stuff the first and second good things schizoanalysis does are pretty much the same deleuze-guattari point out you can't destroy the oedipus family drama stuff without at the same time creating connections with the outside

baudrillard knows about this criticism but he answers by attacking the people who say it new lines of meaning new sequences can be made from the wild floods of desire as in certain philosophies the molecular or intensive philosophies which say they are breaking down meaning by spreading it out connecting things up and the random movements of desire page one thirty-eight at one moment i truly wanted to write a kind of mirror of desire as there had been the mirror of production bl fifty-eight but in spite of himself or because of himself it's still the mirror of psychoanalysis that baudrillard shows without desire what is seduction but a strange reflection of the three psychoanalytic rules pleasure death and reality tp one fifty-four like the psychoanalysts baudrillard thinks about the possibility of desire that isn't just about making babies or even sex but also like them he kept the important things tp one fifty-five the principle of things staying the same ts one fourteen appearing now not as pleasure or death but as ambivalence and turning things around the same as a reality principle but its way of controlling things has become the ironic and the tragic

in the end though following a circle around points that are already set can only happen if the speed is the same and the pressure is constant it's good for a woman that the spinning of a cycle soon gets close to a whirl because then it might start living on its own getting the speed that baudrillard stopped with just thoughts of seduction speculation spins faster and faster as it pushes bores drills into a volume that is supposed to be solid still s two thirty-eight

four openings

yet what about seduction itself because as a process it's much bigger than what's written about it for irigaray these circles that always come back to where they started aren't what they look like for the female zero the vulva the circle never finally closes up like a ring because of this her nothing is actually his everything indeed the cutting off of the hiding must surely show how big the threat she poses is as she waits fills reflects his image she is making the ways of a different seduction one that goes beyond what baudrillard's little game is about

he watched zeros pile behind a meaningless figure on the monitor bc two seventeen

finally baudrillard is pulled into the circuitries that spread out beyond the ones he is stuck in himself because they have always given him a challenge that he cannot in the end as he predicted fail to take on he knew beforehand his destiny and he who believes himself the game's master isn't he the first victim of the strategy's tragic myth and yet for a while he keeps trying not to he is of course too late like any sad figure he has become more and more caught up in his fated destiny exactly because he was trying to avoid it life is just a lottery like any real casanova he has fallen for her tricks

baudrillard rightly announces that the cycle of seduction cannot be stopped and he briefly sees the full damaging consequences of this process there is no active or passive way in seduction no subject or object no inside or outside seduction plays on both sides and there is no frontier separating them page eighty-one yet when faced with the chance that reality itself might become seduction that process might take over parts that were clear before he pulls back the edge of his circuit to make sure the system won't need too much energy that it will keep going without a connection to the outside

scared and fascinated baudrillard always said the object would get revenge by refusing to be useful pretending to like the idea but then the object was only one of her many faces faces already scattered into x number of places that are never gathered together into anything she knows of herself s two twenty-seven this not being complete this ability to keep becoming something else while stopping his every try to think of her as definitely nothing this is her state of cyclical discontinuity s two thirty as the source of newness you can't see the nourishment baudrillard's game ideas ignored the break or pause in the cycle she is in places of intensity the parts of the cycle period or otherwise that aren't necessarily about making another one

it's no wonder baudrillard can refuse to notice because the short moments when the cycle breaks when things pull back before activity can start again they are synced to the measurements of a different space-time one where her patient waiting and careful pulling back would open the space for a future and become full of the energy that was held back in a process of holding on that builds up in this way the second chronological order would be created le two nineteen the object turned female might beat baudrillard at his own game but she doesn't want to go back to the start for a second round she will treat the mess of his failed plans not as trash to look through but as things to throw away on the way somewhere else to where new movements and rhythms can appear right away before things get stuck into two sides again

taken beyond baudrillard then isn't seduction always about programmes that do more than their instructions women you can't find of desire in the end baudrillard saying desire isn't important is wrong if baudrillard is always criticizing deleuze-guattari it's because he's been fooled by how they hide they used a technique he himself has described a lot simulation anti-oedipus pretends to be like the desire revolution of the sixties and marxism so it can go beyond them just as irigaray pretends to be like essentialist feminism for similar reasons in both cases baudrillard is taken in by how things look confusing a complex fluid movement with a simple celebration of random chance that he can easily dismiss the idea that the world of things is subject to a molecular and objective disorder the same disorder that is idealized and glorified in the molecular vision of desire this assumption is insane page one forty-six

it is not from some libidinal investment some energy of desire that the seductive passion gets its intensity but from gaming as pure form and form purely as formal bluffing page eighty-two true but only when it's caught turned against itself does desire invest just as baudrillard wants desire plays games and the matrix or plane of consistency is a grid where things are born defined by axes and vectors gradients and thresholds it is a row of doors not a homogeneous surface tp five oh eight desire as deleuze-guattari say over and over is never just some mixed-up flow of energy waiting to be free just as production isn't the production of an object fundamentally desiring-production describes the opposite things breaking down into process schizoanalytic desire doesn't want to be released it is tension-in-itself a cybernetic balance

and so is seduction once it's freed from baudrillard putting it back into the subject-object way of thinking the challenge is set but never by a contract made beforehand it will set its own tasks given one after another by teasing and coaxing that you can't help but answer why does one respond to challenge the same mysterious question as what is it to seduce s eighty-two always really about agreeing without a subject a type of fixing things that isn't about balance but which produces continuous regions of intensity made so that they have no outside end point any more than they allow themselves to build towards a climax tp one fifty-eight seduction is definitely about cyberotics it must really be an open game with rules inside it where the slightest caress may be as strong as an orgasm tp one fifty-six instead of being a game that ceaselessly brings the outside inward ml twelve seduction would then become a field of immanence that is not internal to the self but neither does it come from an external self or a nonself rather it is the absolute outside that knows no selves because interior and exterior are equally part of an immanence in which they have fused tp one fifty-six

only rituals abolish meaning page one fifty-eight baudrillard insists yes but starting with the idea the real equals the artificial it is desire that is always producing rituals manners of being or modalities as produced intensities vibrations breaths numbers tp one fifty-eight

similarly irigaray copies his rules to get him out of the argument boxes can be seen to hold secrets even when the contents got out a long time ago and found their way to the future this is the beauty of the play of appearances just as these escape acts need ways to figure them out methods of simulation that act like one thing and then do another they also need bodies that are particularly good bodies that baudrillard with his dislike of touching and his fear of the body cannot possibly imagine these bodies are not cosmetic for how they look and for play nor are they invested in the destiny of sexual organs even though as baudrillard himself acknowledges these are already many more complicated than the one instead they build fake things obvious lies they do alternate signalling systems and turn their every surface into zones of eroticism

five what can a female body do

all of this baudrillard misses now when a raw obviousness of male sex that's just about looking is spreading across the screens of culture today baudrillard's sadness that the sexual has triumphed over seduction page forty-one has some power but having identified in symbolic exchange and death the phallus as the general equivalent for all representations of the body that you look at symd one oh one to one oh four baudrillard cannot see that to get away from the phallic control would require giving up his empire of signs the only place where the phallus can ever be in charge

continuity demands that baudrillard recognize it has always been the matrix nonstratified unformed intense matter fusionability as infinite zero tp one fifty-three one fifty-eight yet he doesn't want to know even if sometimes he is pulled out here saying outside seduction about desire that isn't tied to making babies symd one fifty-eight and a body without organs and the pleasures of organs ss one eleven but in the end he is always pulled back to the signs bataille he complains in symbolic exchange and death is too biologistic symd one fifty-eight just as irigaray is criticized in seduction for supposedly bringing back the freudian idea anatomy is destiny page nine

but it is never a matter of that far from it destiny the judgments of god has traditionally ordered the body of the woman to be made into ideal representations you can look at in the end it is baudrillard whose thinking depends on a certain biology since even his signs are built upon a process like biological reproduction for which they pretend disdain irigaray's careful explorations meanwhile make theory able to respond to a body that is only just starting to open up

it is rarely asked what a body can do even less has been asked about what a female body that is already wild and stirred up can do it is almost too much to think about the possibilities of cosmic activity within the five to seven days of an exposed menstrual cycle or of the feelings of female desire that aren't connected to making offspring but the ritual act of baudrillard being taken under by the flows of his own system escaping suggest that these questions can only be answered not just in theory but in an experimental practice a cyberotics whose programme is to change the unfeeling layer of what we see and think into sensitive tissue that can sample things

though he would be the last to realize it there is a desire named baudrillard it is something a little like masochism in its fascination with agreements rules artificial limits in its recognition that pleasure is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the positive process tp one fifty-five anyway it looks for plateaus flat areas baudrillard himself talked about how pointless it was to assume things have a final reason for being games that to the disappointment of the players would find an apparent end and need to be started again the games he prefers go on forever and cannot be kept to chosen social bodies their resources and playing fields are not in one place and responsive to pretty much anything that crosses their path such universal gaming makes it impossible to explain social behavior in terms of being useful or having a goal if means are taken to happen without looking towards their ends then like any unfinished job sex must be taken to occur without looking towards reproduction in seduction baudrillard set loose activities he may still not know about open systems that never close women who never reach his chosen ends woman who will never wait for his lingering gaze preferring instead to stay in switching themselves on running auto-affection

and when irigaray talks about female-to-female desire in when our lips speak together this cannot be simply dismissed as a call for women to be separate rather by defining desire as the flatlands where the body with organs cannot go she completely flips the phallic stupidity of the simple question that asks what do lesbians do this is not about keeping men out but about demanding of them that they become something else that they lose the pleasure of the organ to find a desire that can never belong to them or to any one the essentialism which baudrillard holds against irigaray as if woman could be separated out as an abstract quality she must want and then keep with a wanting man following soon after

yet its practice is a continuous operation never finished never stopped for long enough for such a clear separation to happen irigaray's woman always the careful copycat is able to use the female stereotype so much it might spin back into a white man face to where it escapes the social world it is in now so it can get back in on a path not yet mapped out through a zone that isn't about having an identity

in a body where a womb is free to move desire doesn't have to be committed to sex or pleasure she will instead invent a new erotics no longer kept in the bed or the marital home her supposed essential identity finds no place to live in a body refusing definition by its shape its use or organs it becomes a strange object like any other piece of mess from a simple social world detached from a body that creates and produces from a body both not fixed and not known since it refuses to stay the same over time the potential cannot be predicted because it is only partly seen among the ongoing interactions that happen between the body and the environment that makes it the essentialist accusations against becoming woman are thus immediately calmed because built into the process is an absolute dependence on specific conditions there is therefore no essential female beyond the circumstances that act upon her

there are sex organs more than those of one but there are also erogenous zones that are not sexual areas of the body where desire that isn't about offspring can grow this is a female body spread out not committed fully to pleasure making babies or means with an end a body sorted according to how it takes in broken particles neither essentially female its resources are much more than that of a recognizable woman nor about the play of signs a glitch in the system a break in the circuit an example of volume without a clear shape no wonder deleuze-guattari were so confused there are women on the other hand who tell everything sometimes in awful technical detail but one knows no more at the end than at the beginning they have hidden everything by speed by being clear tp two eighty-eight

endless secrecy but no more hiding no male-ordered mystery a labiarinth a confusing coiling spiral new flesh can you feel it