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

Text File | 1994-05-09 | 12KB | 288 lines

THAWING OF THE EAST
Jean Baudrillard

Hurray! History has been resuscitated! The
end or final outcome for the turn of the
century is on the march. Everyone gets a
breather from the idea that history, which
was momentarily choked under the grip of
totalitarian ideology, can assume its more
charming side now that the barrier has been
lifted on the countries of Eastern Europe.
The realm of history is finally reopened to
an unforeseen movement of people and to their
thirst for freedom. Contrary to the
depressive mythology that generally
accompanies the turns of the century, this
particular one seems to have inaugurated a
bright, fresh new start of the final process,
a novel hope and a fresh kickstart to go and
place our bets. In the background though, all
the portentous omens of the end of history
still loom. How could one possibly question
this >bright< reality and vitality when so
many relevant events have been happening
right under our nose?

On a closer look however, the event is a bit
more mysterious because of its much closer
affinity to a nonidentifiable "historical"
object. What an extraordinary episode, this
thawing of the countries of the East, this
thawing of freedom! But what becomes of
freedom once it is thawed out? A dangerous
operation that may produce some rather
ambiguous results (besides the fact that one
cannot deepfreeze again what has been thawed
out). The USSR and the nations of the East
compartmentalized in deepfreeze were the
testing ground, an experimental milieu for
freedom since they were sequestered or
confined and placed under extreme pressure.
The West is but a guardian patrolling the
depot for freedom and Human Rights. If ultra
deepfreeze was the distinctive negative mark
of the East, the ultrafluidity of our western
world poses an even greater risk since under
the pressure of freeing up and liberalizing
all morals and opinions, the issue of freedom
simply can no longer be raised. It is
virtually resolved. In the West, freedom or
the Idea of Freedom died a beautiful death:
we all had a chance to take a good look at it
in all the recent festivities performed in
its name. In the East it was assassinated,
but no crime is ever perfect. It will be very
interesting to observe, experimentally, as
the remains of freedom resurface, how they
will be resuscitated now that all of
freedom's signs have been effaced. We will
see whether it can jumpstart the process of
reanimation, of a rehabilitation >post
mortem<. Thawed freedom may not be the most
gainly sight. Might it turn out that all it
has left is a haste to feverishly negotiate
(the purchase and sales of) cars and electric
appliances, indeed to turn psychotropic and
pornographic, in other words, transform
itself immediately into western fluidity or,
in yet other terms, to reverberate from one
end of a history of deepfreeze to a history
of ultrafluidity and circulation at its polar
extreme? What is fascinating in the events of
the East is certainly not to see them
rallying in a docile manner in support of a
convalescing democracy and thereby providing
it with renewed energy (and new markets),
rather it is the telescopic portrayal of two
particular modalities of the end of history:
one with a frozen outcome in concentration
camps, the other where, to the contrary, the
end is accomplished in a total and
centrifugal expansion of communication. A
final solution in both cases. It is also
possible that the thawing of Human Rights may
be the socialist equivalent of the
"depressurization of the West": a simple loss
of energies in the western void, impounded to
the East over a half century.

The intensity of the events may be
misleading: if the zeal of the countries of
the East merely aimed at deideologization and
was driven by an eagerness to imitate liberal
countries where all freedoms have long been
traded for the technical comforts of life,
then we would certainly know the value of
this freedom and may well never be found a
second time. History never gives a second
serving. On the contrary, - and this is the
unforeseen aspect for us in the West (the
Good too has to go once the Evil empire
collapses!) - this thawing of the East could
prove to be harmful in the long run and, like
carbon gases in the higher layers of the
atmosphere, may create a political greenhouse
effect, a rewarming of human relations on the
planet through the melting down of Communist
ice fields and thereby flood the shores of
the West. It is rather bizarre that while we
certainly doubt the possibility of a
catastrophe in climate that would melt the
ice fields, democratically we download all
our power into aspirations at the political
level.

If, at that time, the USSR had thrown its
stock of gold on the world market, it would
have completely destabilized the market. If
the countries of the East begin to circulate
the incredible stock of their refrigerated
freedom, they too would destabilize the
feeble metabolism of western values which no
longer desire that freedom take on the form
of action, instead they configure it as a
virtual and consensual form of interaction,
not as drama but as the universal psychodrama
of liberalism. A sudden shot or injection of
freedom as a live relation, as violent and
active transcendence, as >Idea< would be
devastating to our climatized redistribution
of values. Yet this is what we require of
them: the idea of freedom in exchange for its
material tokens. A perfectly diabolical
contract where some risk losing their soul,
other their comfort.

The masked (Communist) societies are
unmasked. What is their face like? As for us,
where the mask has been lifted quite some
time ago, we have found rather ironically
that now that we no longer have masks, we
have no faces either. We are also without
memory. We look for it in water where there
is no trace, hoping (that Benveniste doesn't
hold it against me) that there is something
left even though traces of the molecules have
disappeared. As for our freedom: we would
have a tough time coming up with some kind of
a sign for it and have postulated it in an
infinitesimal (inappreciable), impalpable,
undetectable existence - in such a highly
diluted milieu (of programming and
operationalizing) that only its spectre is
able to loom in our memory.

The resources of freedom have run so dry in
the West (an example would be the
commemoration of the Revolution) that we have
to hope with all our might in the aftermath
of the East which is now opened up and
uncovered. However, once this stock of
freedom is freed up (the Idea of freedom
having become as rare as natural resources),
what else could one expect if not that the
superficial energy of exchange will intensify
on all markets, precipitated by collapse of
differential energies and values.

What does Glasnost signify if not an
accelerated and secondhanded retroactive
transparency of all the signs of modernity
(which is nearly a postmodern remake of our
original version of modernity) - of all the
confounded positive and negative signs, i.e.
not only with respect to Human Rights but
also of crimes, catastrophes, accidents of
which there is a joyous upsurge in the ex-
USSR since the liberalization of the regime.
Indeed, what had always come under censorship
is now being rediscovered as the reappearance
and celebration of pornography and
extraterrestrials and of everything else
taking place. Voila the experimental
dimension of this global thawing: what we see
is that crime, atomic or natural
catastrophes, earlier repressed, now take
their place at the table of Human Rights,
(religion and fashion, too, no exceptions) -
as we are given a good lesson in democratics.
As a matter of fact, what we see reappearing
is all that we are - all banners and emblems
extolling their carriers as universally human
and resurging in a kind of hallucinatory
ideal, in the return of the repressed,
bringing with them the worst, the most banal
of a western "culture" worn thin and which,
henceforth, will no longer be contained by
boundaries or frontiers of any kind.
Consequently, it is the hour of justice for
this culture, as it was for savage cultures
around the world and it is difficult to say
we have learned from their example. The irony
in the way things stand today is that we
might be the ones who one day will be forced
to relish the memory of Stalinism now that
the countries of the East no longer remember
it. We should keep the memory of this tyrant
in deepfreeze under whom the movement of
history froze stiff since this icy age also
takes place under the auspices of a universal
patrimony.

These events are quite remarkable in another
sense. They compel us to ponder and ask
ourselves questions at this bend or turning
point in history, questions pertaining not to
its end or outcome (which is still part of
the fantasy of a linear history), but to its
turning back on itself, its systematic
termination or effacement. We are in the
process of obliterating the whole twentieth
century. We are steadily deleting, one by
one, all the marks of the cold war, maybe
even the evidence of the Second World War as
well as those concerning all the political
and ideological revolutions of the twentieth
century. The reunification of Germany and
numerous other events are inevitable, not
just in terms of jump starting history ahead
of time, but with respect to a rewriting of
the whole twentieth century which we will be
largely engaged in during the last ten years
of the end of the century. On the course that
we are moving, we will shortly return to the
Germanic Holy Roman Empire which is perhaps
the illuminating point of this end of the
century, the real meaning of this
controversial formula called 'the end of
history'. The process we are presently caught
up in is a kind of enthusiastic mourning to
facelift all the pivotal events of the
century, to whitewash or bleach everything as
if all that has taken place in it (the
revolutions, the division of the world, the
genocide, the violent transnationality of the
States, the nuclear tension) - a brief
history in its modern phase - was none other
than an imbroglio without an exit or a
curtain to go down on it as everyone was put
to the task of dismantling this history with
the same eagerness and excitement with which
it was set in motion. Restoration,
regression, rehabilitation, reactivation of
old borders, of old differences, of
particularities, of religions, resipiscence
(repentance, recognition of errors and return
to a sound state of mind) affecting even the
level of morals - it seems that all the
hallmarks of an acquired freedom over a
century are beginning to subside and may end
in fading away, one by one: we are in the
midst of a gigantic process of >revisionism<,
not an ideological revisionism but a revision
of history itself and are in haste to get
there before the turn of the century -
perhaps swayed by the secret hope that with
the new millennium we may be able to get a
crack at starting anew, from point zero?!
Only if we could restore everything to its
initial state! How far and where will this
resorption, this facelifting take us? It may
happen very, very fast (as the events of the
East show us) precisely because what we are
dealing with isn't just any kind of
construction but a massive deconstruction of
history which itself, in turn, takes on a
viral and epidemic design or form.

__________________
Originally published in French as part of
Jean Baudrillard, L'Illusion de la fin: ou La
greve des evenements, Galilee: Paris, 1992.
Translated by Charles Dudas, York University,
Canada.