DP Tool Club 15/CD_ASCQ_15_070894.iso/vrac/postmo.zip/REVER.BAU

Text File | 1994-05-12 | 8KB | 170 lines

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Reversion of History

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Somewhere in the course of the eighties of the
twentieth-century, history took a turn in another
direction. Once it passed its apogee in time, once
it reached the peak of the curve in its evolution,
its solstice of history, a sliding back of events
set in, an unfolding of inverted meaning. As in
the case of cosmic space, historical space-time
would also have a curvature.  By way of the same
chaotic effect in time as in space, things go
faster and faster as they approach their
culmination, just like the flow of water speeds up
mysteriously as it approaches the waterfall.
In the Euclidean space of history, the fastest
route from one point to another is a straight
line, the one of Progress and Democracy. This
however only pertains to the linear space of the
Enlightenment. In our non-Euclidean space of the
end of the century, a malevolent curvature
invincibly reroutes all trajectories. The
phenomenon is doubtlessly linked to the sphericity
of time (visible on the horizon of the end of the
century just like the earth is visible on the
horizon at the end of the day) or to the subtle
distortion of the field of gravity.
Segalen says that on an Earth become a sphere,
every movement distancing us from a point also
brings us closer to that same point. This is true
with respect to time as well. Every noticeable
movement of history brings us imperceptibly closer
to its antipode, indeed to its point of departure.
This is the end of linearity. Viewed from this
perspective, the future no longer exists. And if
there is no future, neither is there an end
anymore. *And yet this is not what is meant by the
end of history.* What we have to deal with is a
paradoxical process of reversion, a reversal of
effect with respect to modernity which, having
reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all
its virtual developments, disintegrates into its
rudimentary components through a catastrophic
process of recurrence and turbulence.

By means of this retroversion of history to
infinity, through this hyperbolic curvature, the
century eludes its own end. By way of this
retrospective effect of events, we escape before
our own death. Metaphorically speaking therefore,
we will not even attain to the symbolic end of
things, the symbolic culmination of Year 2000.

Can we avoid this retro-curvature of a history
that backtracks on its footsteps and effaces its
own traces; can we sidestep this fatal asymptote
which in some way rolls back modernity in the way
one rewinds a tapedeck? We are so accustomed to
viewing all films over and over again, the
fictitious ones as well as those pertaining to our
lives; we have been so thoroughly contaminated by
a retrospective technique that we are quite
capable, under the blow of contemporary vertigo,
to rethread history as one threads a film wrong
side up.

Have we perhaps, propelled by the vain hope to
evade our "abiding in our present destruction", as
Canetti says, given ourselves up to a
retrospective melancholy in order to relive and,
make up for, everything; to relive for the sake of
elucidating (as if the shadow of psychoanalysis is
cast over all our history - as if the same events,
the same circumstances were reproduced in nearly
the same terms; as if the same wars broke out
between the same people, and; all that had been
stolen would resurge as if moved by an
irrepressible fantasy so that the *oeuvre* itself
would be perceived as the form of the unconscious,
as primary process at work); are we to invoke all
past events for the sake of comparison, to re-
teach everything in terms of process? A delirium
with process has quite recently gotten hold of us
and, at the same time, a seizure or delirium with
responsibility, precisely because it is becoming
increasingly elusive. To remake history proper -
to whitewash all the monstrosities: underlying the
proliferation of scandals there is a vague
(res)sentiment that history itself, too, is a
scandal. A retro-process that will steer us to a
delirium with/of origin, to this side of history,
to a conviviality driven by instincts (*animale*),
to the primitive niche, which is already the way
things stand in the ecologic flirt with an
impossible origin.

The only way to avoid this, to cut the chord tying
us to this recession and obsession, is to place
ourselves straightaway on an alternative temporal
orbit, to leave our shadow, the shadow of the
century, to take an elliptic short-cut and go
beyond the end by not allowing it time to take
place. This, at least, will help preserve what
remains are left of history instead of subjecting
it to a harrowing revision and then dispense it to
those who will do an autopsy on the cadaver the
way one does an autopsy on one's childhood in
never-ending analysis. This would at least provide
us with the possibility of retaining the memory
and glory, and under the auspices of revision and
rehabilitation we could begin cancelling each and
all the events that have come before, forcing them
to repent.

If we could circumvent this moratory of the end of
the century, this retarded culmination of things
which, strangely enough, resembles a labour of
mourning, a misdirected or misfired (*rate*)
labour of mourning that wants to review, re-write,
restore and facelift everything in order to
produce, seemingly in a paranoiac fervour
(*elan*), a perfect book-keeping of the end of the
century, a universally balanced budget, democracy
everywhere, complete eradication of all conflicts
and, if possible, the dismissal of all our
memories of all "negative" events - if we could
forego or desist this venture in bleaching, in
international varnishing for which all nations of
today are vying to conspire, if we could spare
ourselves this democratic extreme-ity (*extreme-
onction*) from where the New World Order speaks,
we would at least be left with events that have
preceded us with their glory, their character,
their meaning, their uniqueness. Consequently, we
are so much in a hurry to mask the worst of our
deposit into our account (everyone is secretly
afraid of the appalling balance we are about to
carry over and offer to the Year 2000) that there
remains nothing of our own history at the end of
the millennium, nothing of its illumination, of
its factual violence. If there is any distinct
trait to the event, that which in fact comprises
the event and hence has value in history, is its
irreversibility, i.e., that there is something in
it that always exceeds meaning and interpretation
- which is exactly the opposite of what we see
today: all that has happened in this century in
terms of progress, of liberation, of revolution,
of violence is currently under a well-meaning
review process.

The question is this: is the movement of modernity
reversible, and is this reversibility itself, in
turn, irreversible? How far can this retrospective
activity, this dream of the end of the millennium
go? Isn't there a "wall of history", analogous to
that of sound and speed, from which its abjuring
(*palinodique*) movement cannot steer clear?

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Translated from Jean Baudrillard, L'Illusion de la
fin: ou La greve des evenenments, Galilee: 1992.
Translation by Charles Dudas, York University.
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