3.

Jean Baudrillard

Pataphysics of the year 2000

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real.

Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening
since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our
task ,would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would
'be forced to abide in our present destruction.
Elias Canetti

Various plausible hypotheses may be advanced to explain this

vanishing of history. Canetti's expression 'all mankind suddenly left
reality' irresistibly evokes the idea of that escape velocity a body
requires to free itself from the gravitational field of a star or planet.
Staying with this image, one might suppose that the acceleration of
modernity, of technology, events and media, of all exchanges -
economic, political and sexual - has propelled us to 'escape velocity',
with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the
real and of history. We are 'liberated' in every sense of the term, so
liberated that we have taken leave of a certain space-time, passed beyond
a certain horizon in which the real is possible because gravitation is still
strong enough for things to be reflected and thus in some way to endure
and have some consequence.
A degree of slowness (that is, a certain speed, but not too much), a
degree of distance, but not too much, and a degree of liberation (an
energy for rupture and change), but not too much, are needed to bring
about the kind of condensation or significant crystallization of events we
call history, the kind of coherent unfolding of causes and effects we call
reality [le reel].

Once beyond this gravitational effect, which keeps bodies in orbit,

all the atoms of meaning get lost in space. Each atom pursues its own
trajectory to infinity and is lost in space. This is precisely what we are
seeing in our present-day societies, intent as they are on accelerating all
bodies, messages and processes in all directions and which, with modern
media, have created for every event, story and image a simulation of an
infinite trajectory. Every political, historical and cultural fact possesses a
kinetic energy which wrenches it from its own space and propels it into a
hyperspace where, since it will never return, it loses all meaning. No
need for science fiction here: already, here and now - in the shape of our
computers, circuits and networks - we have the particle accelerator
which has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all.
So far as history is concerned, its telling has become impossible
because that telling (re-citatum) is, by definition, the possible recurrence
of a sequence of meanings. Now, through the impulse for total
dissemination and circulation, every event is granted its own liberation;
every fact becomes atomic, nuclear, and pursues its trajectory into the
void. In order to be disseminated to infinity, it has to be fragmented like
a particle. This is how it is able to achieve a velocity of no-return which
carries it out of history once and for all. Every set of phenomena,
•whether cultural totality or sequence of events, has to be fragmented,
disjointed, so that it can be sent down the circuits; every kind of
language has to be resolved into a binary formulation so that it can
circulate not, any longer, in our memories, but in the luminous,
electronic memory of the computers. No human language can withstand
the speed of light. No event can withstand being beamed across the
whole planet. No meaning can withstand acceleration. No history can
withstand the centrifugation of facts or their being short-circuited in real
time (to pursue the same train of thought: no sexuality can withstand
being liberated, no culture can withstand being hyped, no truth can
withstand being verified, etc.).
Nor is theory in a position to 'reflect (on)' anything. It can only tear
concepts from their critical zone of reference and force them beyond a
point of no-return (it too is moving into the hyperspace

ef simulation), a process whereby it loses all 'objective' validity but

gains substantially in real affinity with the present system.
The second hypothesis regarding the vanishing of history is the
opposite of the first. It has to do not with processes speeding up but
slowing down. It t~o comes directly from physics.
Matter slows the passing of time. To put it more precisely, time at
the surface of a very dense body seems to be going in slow motion. The
phenomenon intensifies as the density increases. The effect of this
slowing down will be to increase the length of the light-wave emitted by
this body as received by the observer. Beyond a certain limit, time stops
and the wavelength becomes infinite. The wave no longer exists. The
light goes out.
There is a clear analogy here with the slowing down of history when
it rubs up against the astral body of the 'silent majorities'. Our societies
are dominated by this. mass process, not just in the demographic and
sociological sense, but in the sense of a 'critical mass', of passing beyond
a point of no-return. This is the most significant event within these
societies: the emergence, in the very course of their mobilization and
revolutionary process (they are all revolutionary by the standards of past
centuries), of an equivalent force of inertia, of an immense indifference
and the silent potency of that indifference. This inert matter of the social
is not produced by a lack of exchanges, information or communi-cation,
but by the multiplication and saturation of exchanges. It is the product of
the hyperdensity of cities, commodities, messages and circuits. It is the
cold star of the social and, around that mass, history is also cooling.
Even~ follow one upon another, cancel¬ling each other out in a state of
indifference. The masses, neutralized, mithridatized by information, in
turn neutralize history and act as an ecran d' absorption.* They
themselves have no history, meaning, consciousness or desire. They are
the potential residue of all history, meaning and desire. As they have
• The French is retained here, since to translate this by the English
term 'dark trace screen' would be to forfeit the connection Baudrillard
wishes to maintain with the idea of absorption.

unfurled in our modernity, all these fine things have stirred up a

mysterious counter-phenomenon, and all today's political and social
strategies are thrown out of gear by the failure to understand it.
This time we have the opposite situation: history, meaning and
progress are no longer able to reach their escape velocity. They are no
longer able to pull away from this overdense body which slows their
trajectory, which slows time to the point where, right now, the
perception and imagination of the future are beyond us. All social,
historical and temporal transcendence is absorbed by that mass in its
silent immanence. Political events already lack sufficient energy of their
own to move us: so they run on like a silent film for which we bear
collective irresponsibility. History comes to an end here, not for want of
actors, nor for want of violence (there will always be more violence), nor
for want of events (there will always be more events, thanks be to the
media and the news networks!}, but by deceleration, indifference and
stupefaction. It is no longer able to transcend itself, to envisage its own
finality, to dream of its own end; it is being buried beneath its own
immediate effect, worn out in special effects, imploding into current
events.
Deep down, one cannot even speak of the end of history here, since
history will not have time to catch up with its own end. Its effects are
accelerating, but its meaning is slowing inexorably. It will eventually
come to a stop and be extinguished like light and time in the vicinity of
an infinitely dense mass ...
Humanity too had its big bang: a certain critical density, a certain
concentration of people and exchanges presides over this explo¬sion we
call history, which is merely the dispersal of the dense and hieratic
nuclei of previous civilizations. Today we have the reversive effect:
crossing the threshold of the critical mass where populations, events and
information are concerned triggers the opposite process of historical and
political inertia. In the cosmic order, we do not know whether we have
reached the escape velocity which would mean we are now in a
definitive state of expansion (this will doubtless remain eternally
uncertain). In the

human order, where the perspectives are more limited, it may be that
the very escape velocity of the species (the acceleration of births,
technologies and exchanges over the centuries) creates an excess of mass
and resistance which defeats the initial energy and takes us down an
inexorable path of contraction and inertia.
Whether the univ.erse is expanding to infinity or retracting towards
an infinitely dense, infinitely small nucleus depends on its critical mass
(and speculation on this is itself infinite by virtue of the possible
invention of new particles). By analogy, whether our human history is
evolutive or involutive perhaps depends on humanity's critical mass. Has
the history, the movement, of the species reached the escape velocity
required to triumph over the inertia of the mass? Are we set, like the
galaxies, on a definitive course distancing us from one another at
prodigious speed, or is this dispersal to infinity destined to come to an
end and the human molecules to come back together by an opposite
process of gravitation? Can the human mass, which increases every day,
exert control over a pulsation of this kind?
There is a third hypothesis, a third analogy. We are still speaking of
a point of disappearance, a vanishing point, but this time in music. I shall
call this the stereophonic effect. We are all obsessed with high fidelity,
with the quality of musical 'reproduction'. At the consoles of our stereos,
armed with our tuners, amplifiers and speakers, we mix, adjust settings,
multiply tracks in pursuit of a flawless sound. Is this still music? Where
is the high fidelity threshold beyond which music disappears as such? It
does not disappear for lack of music, but because it has passed this limit
point; it disappears into the perfection of its materiality, into its own
special effect. Beyond this point, there is neither judgement nor aesthetic
pleasure. It is the ecstasy of musicality, and its end.
The disappearance of history is of the same 9rder: here again, we
have passed that limit where, by dint of the sophistication of events and
information, history ceases to exist as such. Immediate high-powered
broadcasting, special effects, secondary effects, fading and that famous
feedback effect which is produced in acoustics by a source and a
receiver being too close together and

in history by an event and its dissemination being too close together

and thus interfering disastrously - a short-circuit between cause and
effect like that between the object and the experimenting subject in
microphysics (and in the human sciences!). These are all things which
cast a radical doubt on the event, just as excessive high fidelity casts
radical doubt on music. Elias Canetti puts it well: beyond this point,
nothing is true. It is for this reason that the petite musique of history also
eludes our grasp today, that it vanishes into the microscopies or the
stereophonics of news.
Right at the very heart of news, history threatens to disappear. At
the heart of hi-fi, music threatens to disappear. At the heart of
experimentation, the object of science threatens to disappear. At the
heart of pornography, sexuality threatens to disappear. Everywhere we
find the same stereophonic effect, the same effect of absolute proximity
to the real, the same effect of simulation.
By definition, this vanishing point, this point short of which history
existed and music existed, cannot be pinned down. Where must stereo
perfection end? The boundaries are constantly being pushed back
because it is technical obsession which redraws them. Where must news
reporting end? One can only counter this fascination with 'real time' - the
equivalent of high fidelity - with a moral objection, and there is not
much point in that.
 The passing of this point is thus an irreversible act, contrary to what
Canetti seems to hope. We shall never get back to pre-stereo music
(except by an additional technical simulation effect); we shall never get
back to pre-news and pre-media history. The original essence of music,
the original concept of history have disappeared because we shall never
again be able to isolate them from their model of perfection which is at
the same time their model of simulation, the model of their enforced
assumption into a hyper-reality which cancels them out. We shall never
again know what the social or music were before being exacerbated into
their present useless perfection. We shall never again know what history
was before its exacerbation into the technical perfection of news: we
shall never again know what anything was before disappearing into the
fulfilment of its model.

So, with this, the situation becomes novel once again. The fact that
we are leaving history to move into the realm of simulation is merely a
consequence of the fact that history itself has always, deep down, been
an immense simulation model. Not in the sense that it could be said only
to have existed in the narrative made of it or the interpretation given, but
with regard to the time in which it unfolds - that linear time .which is at
once the time of an ending and of the unlimited suspending of the end.
The only kind of time in which a history can take place, if, by history,
we understand a succession of non-meaningless facts, each engendering
the other by cause and effect, but doing so without any absolute
necessity and all standing open to the future, unevenly poised. So
different from time in ritual societies where the end of everything is in
its beginning and ceremony retraces the perfection of that original event.
In contrast to this fulfilled order of time, the liberation of the 'real' time
of history, the production of a linear, deferred time may seem a purely
artificial process. Where does this suspense come from? Where do we
get the idea that what must be accomplished (Last Judgement, salvation
or catastrophe) must come at the end of time and match up with some
incalculable appointed term or other? This model of linearity must have
seemed entirely fictitious, wholly absurd and abstract to cultures which
had no sense of a deferred day of reckoning, a successive concatenation
of events and a final goal. And it was, indeed, a scenario which had
some difficulty establishing itself. There was fierce resistance in the
early years of Christianity to the postpone¬ment of the coming of God's
Kingdom. The acceptance of this 'historical' perspective of salvation,
that is, of its remaining unaccomplished in the immediate present, was
not achieved without violence, and all the heresies would later take up
this leitmotif of the immediate fulfilment of the promise in what was
akin to a defiance of time. Entire communities even resorted to suicide to
hasten the coming of the Kingdom. Since this latter was promised at the
end of time, it seemed to them that they had only to put an end to time
right away.
The whole of history has had a millennial (millenarian) challenge to
its temporality running through it. In opposition to

the historical perspective, which continually shifts the stakes on. to a

hypothetical end, there has always been a fatal exigency, a fatal strategy
of time which wants to shoot straight ahead to a point beyond the end. It
cannot be said that either of these tendencies has really won out, and the
question 'to wait or not to wait?' has remained, throughout history, a
burning issue. Since the messianic convulsion of the earliest Christians,
reaching back beyond the heresies and revolts, there has always been
this desire to anticipate the end, possibly by death, by a kind of seductive
suicide aiming to turn God from history and make him face up to his
responsibilities, those which lie beyond the end, those of the final
fulfilment. And what, indeed, is terrorism, if not this effort to conjure up,
in its own way, the end of history? It attempts to entrap the powers that
be by an immediate, total act. Without awaiting the final term of the
process, it sets itself at the ecstatic end-point, hoping to bring about the
conditions for the Last Judgement. An illusory challenge, of course, but
one which always fascinates, since, deep down, neither time nor history
has ever been accepted. Everyone remains aware of the arbitrariness, the
artificial character of time and history. And we are never fooled by those
who call on us to hope.
And, terrorism apart, is there not also a hint of this parousic
exigency in the global fantasy of catastrophe that hovers over today's
world? A demand for a violent resolution of reality, when this latter
eludes our grasp in an endless hyper-reality? For hyper reality rules out
the very occurrence of the Last Judgement or the Apocalypse or the
Revolution. All the ends we have envisaged elude our grasp and history
has no chance of bringing them about, since it will, in the interim, have
come to an end (it's always the story of Kafka's Messiah: he arrives too
late, a day too late, and the time-lag is unbearable). So one might as well
short circuit the Messiah, bring forward the end. This has always been
the demonic temptation: to falsify ends and the calculation of ends, to
falsify time and the occurrence of things, to hurry them along, impatient
to see them accomplished, or secretly sensing that the promise of
accomplishment is itself also false and diabolical.
Even our obsession with 'real time', with the instantaneity of

news, has a secret millenarianism about it: cancelling the flow of

time, cancelling delay, suppressing the sense that the event is happening
elsewhere, anticipating its end by freeing ourselves from linear time,
laying hold of things almost before they have taken place. In this sense,
'real time' is something even more artificial than a recording, and is, at
the same time, its denial - if we want immediate enjoyment of the event,
if we want to experience it at the instant of its occurrence, as if we were
there, this is because we no longer have any confidence in the meaning
or purpose of the event. The same denial is found in apparently opposite
behaviour - recording, filing and memorizing everything of our own past
and the past of all cultures. Is this not a symptom of a collective
presentiment of the end, a sign that events and the living time of history
have had their day and that we have to arm ourselves with the whole
battery of artificial memory, all the signs of the past, to face up to the
absence of a future and the glacial times which await us? Are not mental
and intellectual structures currently going underground, burying
themselves in memories, in archives, in search of an improbable
resurrection? All thoughts are going underground in cautious
anticipation of the year 2000. They can already scent the terror of the
year 2000. They are instinctively adopting the solution of those
cryogenized indi¬viduals plunged into liquid nitrogen until the means
can be found to enable them to survive.
These societies, these generations which no longer expect anything
from some future 'comil}g', and have less and less confidence in history,
which dig in behind their futuristic technologies, behind their stores of
information and inside the beehive networks of communication where
time is at last wiped out by pure circulation, will perhaps never
reawaken. But they do not know that. The year 2000 will not perhaps
take place. But they do not know that.