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••• William Merrin •••

pass over into the absolute evidence of the real’ (ibid.: 29). If, in pornography, this
process leads, as Baudrillard says, to ‘the devastation of the real’ (ibid.: 31), then its
consequences for a ‘pornographic culture par excellence’ are clear (ibid.: 34).
In Fatal Strategies ([1983] 1990c), Baudrillard escalates again this picture of the pro-
duction of the real to chart the exponential growth of our communicational systems,
and their ‘metastatic’ processes – their growth, like cancer cells, beyond their own
meaning, limit, form and finality, into a superfluous production and useless excres-
cence, as a form of ‘death’ haunting the living, he says (ibid.: 32). The potentializa-
tion of all processes results, Baudrillard argues, in the ‘obscene’ – the end of the
symbolic ‘scene’ and its meaning in the obviousness, visibility, and transparency of
the world (ibid.: 50–70), and in a schizophrenic subject unable now to define the lim-
its of their own being against this ‘absolute proximity’ of all things, absorbed now
within the circuit of communication (ibid.: 69–70). Baudrillard calls this order the
‘transpolitical’ (ibid.: 25), a state representing the generalization of categories to their
‘ecstatic’, ‘pure and empty form’ (ibid.: 9), their disappearance as determinant forms,
and their pure simulation in the commutation and circulation of value. In The
Transparency of Evil ([1990] 1993c) this ‘orbital’ circulation becomes the basis of a
fourth order of simulacra – the ‘epidemic of value’, a ‘fractal mode of dispersal’ in
which value ‘radiates in al directions’ (ibid.: 4–6). Modernity’s ‘liberation’, therefore,
is again (see 1996a: 18) exposed not as a real emancipation, progress, or realization
of transcendence, but as a productive materialization and unleashing that leads only
to simulation, indeterminacy, and our own ‘inescapable indifference’ (1993c: 4).
This escalation allows Baudrillard to develop both his analysis and examples of
these processes, but it is also an important strategy in opening the space for the dis-
covery of new forms of the symbolic and its internal and external resistance to this
system. Thus a society devoted to the productive materialization of the world in all
its ‘positivity’ – in its self-evidence, technical, operational perfection, and ‘aseptic
whiteness’ – a society expunging all negativity, expelling all symbolic violence,
otherness and evil in ‘a vast campaign of plastic surgery’ (ibid.: 45) in favour of a
‘vacuum-sealed existence’ (ibid.: 61), becomes vulnerable, at the point of its sterile,
overprotection, to its own ‘internal virulence’ and ‘malignant reversibility’ (ibid.:
62). Anomalous, viral pathologies, such as AIDS, cancer, terrorism, drug addiction,
and computer viruses (ibid.: 67), are produced within and by this system itself, as
forces of ‘evil’, that is as symbolic forces of ‘reversibility’ (ibid.: 65), that homoeo-
pathically save us at least, Baudrillard claims, from the greater threat of perfection
(ibid.: 68). For total positivity and ‘prohylaxis’ are ‘lethal’ he says, as ‘anything that
purges the accursed share in itself signs its own death warrant’ – that of its own,
unlimited, catastrophic development (ibid.: 106). Thus, having expelled evil we can-
not respond to its adoption, by Iran, for example, as ‘the absolute weapon’ against
‘all western values’, as a means of ‘symbolic violence’ we are now defenceless against
(ibid.: 81–8).
Thus, it is in non-Western societies that Baudrillard finds an external symbolic
force challenging the West: a force of ‘radical otherness’ or ‘alterity’ that the West has
historically tried to exterminate by its reduction to ‘difference’, an Enlightenment,
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