Transpolitical Conditions: From Scene to Obscene

Like Virilio, Baudrillard deals consistently with the notion of speed and catastrophe, and his assessment of what he calls the transpolitical has much in common with Virilio's dromosphere.  Furthermore, Baudrillard's claim that the disaster's symbolic energy is even more powerful than its material destruction reinforces the instruction to approach our accident as a sign.

Pompei

Baudrillard's treatment of the Pompei ruins serves as a helpful relay in this regard, particularly his engagement with the materiality of the scene ("the fold of a toga on a body buried beneath the ashes," etc.) and the moment of his insight on "the mental effect of catastrophe" (i.e., "stopping things before they end, thus maintaining them indefinitely in the suspense of their apparition") (42-3).  For Baudrillard, Pompei has the feel of the "vertigo of a missing dimension" and the "hallucination of an added dimension," which he likens to--maybe this is his most pataphysical sentence--a "precise vision of submerged trees living at the bottom of an artificial lake over which you pass while swimming" (43).

Pompei enables Baudrillard to move from the catastrophe to a further abstraction: the obscene.  The obscenity of catastrophe is a matter of excrescence and anomaly: superfluous proliferation, or "ascension to extremes related to the absence of rules" (55).  His examples include obesity, pornography, the masses, and information overload.  And yet, his cursory definition of pataphysics (something we know he admires) resembles his description of these ecstatic forms (things we know he detests).  He tells us that pataphysics ("this logical going beyond, this escalation") begins when a system "enters live into noncontradiction, into its own exalted contemplation, into ecstasy" (33).  Like the obscene, pataphysics (and fatal strategies) seems to thrive on fascination (cool) rather than passion (hot)--the indeterminate fate of the object rather than the determined will of the subject (94).

As we prepare to exhibit our accidents and our fatal strategies, I think an important factor in the production of our images will be to distinguish between the metaphysics of the scene and the pataphysics of the obscene--and to enact the latter in the design of our exhibits.  The problem with the naturalistic theatrical scene, as Baudrillard points out in his ramblings on the history of theatre, is that the actor's gesture has become oversignified by stereotypical "social antagonisms and psychological conflicts" (86).  A "hysteria of causality" consumes every tableaux presented by the naturalistic scene--the meaning of every action is restricted to (or traced back to) plausible origins in social circumstances or individual psychology/motives.  A pataphysical tableaux of the accident would therefore not feed into this hysteria of causality, especially if the exhibit strategy is attune to the fate of the catastrophe, which is "more eventful than the event--but an event without consequences, one that leaves the world in suspense" (36).