Ethical Value and Negative Aesthetics: Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

Author(s): Bradley Butterfield

Source: PMLA, Vol. 114, No. 1, Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study (Jan., 1999), pp. 64-
77
Published by: Modern Language Association
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 Bradle) Butterf eld

Ethical Value and Negative

Aesthetics: Reconsidering the
Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

BRADLEY BUTTERFIELD, as- Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the one with which we
sistant professor of English at will all now be concerned-a symbolic universe, but one which, through a sort
of reversal of the mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, car, erotic machin-
the University of Wisconsin, La
ery), appears as if traversed by an intense force of initiation.
Crosse, is the author of "En- Jean Baudrillard, "Crash"
lightenment's Other in Patrick

Suskind's Perfume: Adorno and

the Ineffable Utopia of Modern

Art" (Comparative Literature ow THAT PRINCESS DIANA has been sacrificed by her
Studies, 1995). He is working public to the "universe of simulation," literally driven to death
by the very media that immortalized her, Jean Baudrillard's readers no
on a study of postmodern nega-
doubt expect to be told that in some real sense the princess never died,
tive realist fiction and the aes-
that the real tragedy was somehow lost in the hyperreal hype. The entire
thetic turn in twentieth-century
spectacle-the need to know every intimate detail of the princess's death,
philosophy. the various reconstructions of the crash in every medium, and of course
the endless photos, many of persons taking photos-is indeed the most
obscene celebration to date of a celebrity's death and of the media's
power, making the question of the relation between the aesthetic and
ethical spheres a timely one. Perhaps more than the writing of any other
cultural theorist, Baudrillard's bears witness to such phenomena. In the
neoprimitive climate of his "universe of simulation," the Princess Diana
spectacle can be seen as a high-powered symbolic exchange with the
dead and with the power of death through the ritual sacrifice of a media
icon. The question of whether Baudrillard's theory advocates or criticizes
this savage new world lies at the heart of the controversy surrounding
his work, and it is of general importance to those who are concerned with
the relation between theory and ethics. As for a literary analogue to the
Princess Diana phenomenon, J. G. Ballard's Crash was quickly named
by Salman Rushdie in an article titled "Crash" that appeared in an issue
of the New Yorker devoted entirely to the princess's death.' Ballard's

64

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 Bradley Butterfield 65

Crash, written in 1973 and made into a movie in ment culture deems to be the flavor of the day. We
1997 by David Cronenberg, depicts characters who have enough intellectuals in Europe as it is; let the

push their fascination with things like the death of great USA devote itself to the spirit of the Wrights-
bicycle mechanics and the sons of a bishop. The lat-
a celebrity in a car crash to an absurd limit, using
ter's modesty and exquisitely plain prose style would
such events as models for a new form of sexuality
be an example to you-[... ] a model of the spirit of
deriving not from nature and life but from tech-
SF at its best. But I fear you are trapped inside your
nology and death. Princess Diana aside, popular
dismal jargon. ("Response")
fascination with violent deaths and technological
disasters is a major theme in both Ballard's and
The other respondents had not read Ballard's re-
Baudrillard's work, so it is not surprising that the
marks when they wrote, nor had Ballard read theirs.
two names are often associated.
And so the question arises, Who, exactly, is the ob-
In 1991, Ballard and Baudrillard were the center
ject of Ballard's hostility? Is not the "iconography
of a debate staged in Science-Fiction Studies for a
of filling stations [and] cash machines" Ballard's
special issue on science fiction and postmodemnism,
own special terrain? Does Ballard mean to oppose
which featured the first English translation of Bau-
all critical interpretation of his work or just that
drillard's essay "Crash" and of another of his short
laden with "dismal jargon"?4 As Nicholas Ruddick
essays, "Simulacra and Science Fiction."2 Re-
has pointed out, it is conceivable that Ballard's
sponses to Baudrillard were elicited for the issue
anger is misdirected, that its true object is indeed
from N. Katherine Hayles, David Porush, Brooks
Baudrillard (356), the so-called high priest of post-
Landon, Vivian Sobchack, and Ballard himself.
modernism. Ballard's letter suggests, in any case, a
Hayles and Sobchack are explicitly critical of Bau-
sense of dread or Unheimlichkeit-something he
drillard's reading of Crash, a work Baudrillard
has "not really wanted to understand"-concerning
holds as the exemplar of his morally ambiguous
his relationship to Baudrillard. And one can hardly
theory of the postmodem era3-ambiguous not only
blame Ballard, since Baudrillard's critique seems
according to his critics but also in accordance with
to recommend a world that Ballard, coincidentally
his own intentions, which seem to problematize the
in his introduction to the French edition of Crash,
debate. Ballard, in contrast, praises Baudrillard and
maintains is meant ultimately to stand as a warning.
excludes him from perceived intrusions of postmod-
If Ballard and Baudrillard can be shown to have
ern theory into sci-fi's aesthetic sanctuary, though
more in common than critics (or Ballard) would like
Ballard's praise is itself marked by ambiguity:
to believe, however, then it is necessary to question
why one is generally praised while the other is gen-
The "theory and criticism of s-f"!! Vast theories and
erally criticized.
pseudo-theories are elaborated by people with not an
idea in their bones. Needless to say I totally exclude
The "Killer B's," as Brooks Landon calls Ballard

Baudrillard (whose essay on Crash I have not really and Baudrillard,s are perhaps the best representa-
wanted to understand)-I read it for the first time tives of the postmodern incarnation of aestheticism
some years ago. Of course, his Amerique is an ab- in the West-Ballard in a literary tradition with
solutely brilliant piece of writing, probably the most Huysmans, Wilde, Gide, Artaud, and Burroughs;
sharply clever piece of writing since Swift [. . .]. But Baudrillard in a philosophical tradition with Nietz-
your whole "postmodern" view of SF strikes me as sche, Bataille, Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, Lyo-
doubly sinister. SF was ALWAYS modem, but now it is
tard, and Adorno.6 Though such diverse figures
"postmodern"-bourgeoisification in the form of an
should not be reduced to a common equation, all
over-professionalized academia with nowhere to take
do share with Ballard and Baudrillard a preference
its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance is now
for the aesthetic as a mode of existence and inter-
rolling its jaws over an innocent and naive fiction that
desperately needs to be left alone. You are killing us! pretation over bourgeois morality and metaphys-

Stay your hand! Leave us be! Turn your "intelli- ics. The critique of metaphysics, always at stake in
gence" to the iconography of filling stations, cash the aesthetic turn, has since Nietzsche (particularly
machines, or whatever the nonsense your entertain- in France) entailed a paradox that can be stated

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66 Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

succinctly: rejecting all metaphysical first princi- ing that those who counter Baudrillard by insisting
ples, one is left no ground from which to launch a on the continuing existence of real bodies and real
critique of metaphysics (if it is true that there are no suffering are either missing the point or falling for
truths, then it cannot be true that there are no truths).it. Such responses seem too simplistic given the so-
Nietzsche therefore did truth the honor of going in-phistication of Baudrillard's work.
sane, as the story goes, but his mad vision lives on in The paradoxical quality of Ballard's and Bau-
his legacy, whereby ethics, formerly grounded on drillard's prose-both accusative and decadent,
metaphysical first principles (such as good, from "apocalyptic and baroque"9-is aligned with a
which one can deduce evil), is set adrift in the aes- philosophical tradition in which the weak hand of
thetic realm.? Ultimately at issue, then, in a compari- art is played against the strong hand of a suffocat-
son of Baudrillard and Ballard is the question of how ing rationality. Gary Genosko, in Baudrillard and
literature and literary theory are related to the ethical Signs: Signification Ablaze, refers to this quality as
sphere of human relations and social contracts in Baudrillard's "weak tactics":
what is taken to be a universe of simulation-that is,
in an entirely aestheticized, postmetaphysical world. Such textual banditti infest and destabilize magisterial
Can Baudrillard and Ballard be both aesthetes and systems. Weak strokes, as opposed to strong, vigorous
moralists (in an extramoral sense) at the same time? and robust blows, cancel the great biological "power
bar" between life/death by opening the way to a non-
Can ethics or morality be seen as originating in con-
diacritical "unsplit world" or an asemiological, barless
tradiction and aporia rather than in groundedness in
imaginary world of symbolic exchanges unchecked by
the real? It is helpful first to consider the ambiguous
the dichotomania of structural systems. (xx-xxi)
figure of Baudrillard, the true focus of the Crash de-
bate, as well as the reasons Ballard might have to
Within the theoretical frame of late capitalist cul-
dread Baudrillard's company.
ture and its technological services, moral agency is
reduced to coded responses and opinion polls (a
The Scandal of Baudrillard
"dichotomania of structural systems"), and the
province of moral declamation is more often TV
Baudrillard is perhaps the most infamous postmod-
sitcoms and advertising than literature or literary
ern theorist to date, having provoked accusations
theory. Morality is never explicitly thematized in
of racism, sexism, and nihilism from Douglas Kell-
Ballard or Baudrillard, yet one senses in their writ-
ner, Christopher Norris, and others and of outright
ings a critique of late capitalist forms of morality in
perversion and obscenity from Sobchack, who
favor of a deeper sense of personal liberty and jus-
points to her own surgical scars as evidence of
tice through aesthetic revolution:
Baudrillard's insensitivity to real bodies (328).
Hayles and Sobchack fault Baudrillard for having
Revolutions in aesthetic sensibility may be the only
missed the "moral point" of Crash (Hayles 323),
way in which radical change can be brought about in
which for Hayles is the warning that technology's the future. (Ballard, "Revell" 52)
"4drive toward transcendence [. . .] does in fact cul-
minate in flight, a flight to death" (323), and for [T]he revolution is symbolic or it is not a r
Sobchack is simply Vaughan's dangerousness, at all. (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange 205)
which represents the objectifying impulse of post-
modern technology operating blindly beyond the Since moral agency is today constructed and en-
"moral gaze" (329). Despite the near consensus of listed by the great aestheticizing machines of the
opinion against Baudrillard and his reading of times-advertising, politics, entertainment-moral
Crash,8 one feels on returning to his texts perhaps arevolutions must be waged in negative aesthetic
symbolic challenge to take up his argument. Bau- terms and not on the grounds of some religious or
drillard's position seems calculated to provoke hos- other metaphysical first principle.10 For all post-
tile remarks (e.g., "I hope he finds his real beneath Nietzschean thinkers see the preference even of life
the wheels of a truck"), and one cannot help feel- over death as arising from a prejudice rather than a

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 Bradley Butterfield 67

truth. To live without a metaphysical

embodying value
the contradictions, pure and uncompro- sy
to face the facts as Nietzsche saw them: that life is mised, in its innermost structure" ("Cultural Criti-
dangerous; that there are no moral guarantees, only cism" 32). One can say on Baudrillard's behalf,
persons who must relate to other persons. Baudril- therefore, that Ballard fails the negative-aestheticist
lard thus endorses an immoral aesthetic as a way of litmus test by appending a moral to his story, by
reversing Pavlovian conditioning by mass-media speaking what is "[n]eedless to say," whereas Bau-
technologies: "There was a time when immorality drillard does not. Crash does indeed depict a world
was recognized, from Machiavelli to Stendhal, and of total absorption by simulacra, where everything
when somebody like Mandeville could show, in the has always already been mediated, reproduced, or
eighteenth century, that a society could only be revo- represented by the technologies of capitalism (as in
lutionized through its vices, that it is its immorality the case of Princess Diana), and as Baudrillard says,
that gives it its dynamism" (Symbolic Exchange 98). moral judgment resides nowhere in its pages. What
Does Baudrillard advocate immorality in real or in Baudrillard's critique, then, draws criticism that
only in imaginary (aesthetic) terms? Having de- should be leveled at Crash? Is literary theory re-
clared that there is no longer a difference, he cannotsponsible for upholding a moral order in literature,
have it both ways, so he must really mean what he even in texts that are explicitly amoral? What Bal-
says: that one should embrace immoral behavior, not lard seems to fear in postmodern theory's coloniza-
just in art but in life as well. The best of Baudrillard's tion of sci-fi is the imposition of a moral order from
critics, including Douglas Kellner, Christopher Nor- "benevolent outsiders" ("Fictions" 99), yet his hesi-
ris, Steven Best, Gary Genosko, and others, have tation regarding Baudrillard's critique of his work
faulted him for essentially this position-that is, for suggests that Baudrillard's amoral reading hits too
surrendering to an aesthetic nihilism and abandon- close to home. What is Baudrillard's point in writ-
ing all grounds for moral or ethical reasoning. ing theory that emulates fiction? Does such theory
So when Baudrillard argues that the "miracle of pose a threat? If so, to whom?
Crash" lies in its distinct moral flatness-"nowhere The Crash controversy and other points of dis-
does this moral gaze surface, the critical judgment pute with Baudrillard as well may begin to be
that is still part of the functionality of the old world" judged more sympathetically in the light of the
("Crash" 119)-literary critics are quick to point 1992 English translation (Symbolic Exchange and
out that Ballard opposes this view in his introduc- Death) of his L'echanige symbolique et la mort
tion to the French version of Crash: (1976). Those who responded to his "Crash" in
Science-Fiction Studies in 1991-92 do not refer
Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash! is caution- to this work, which Mike Gane asserts is "without
ary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit doubt Jean Baudrillard's most important book" (In-
realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us troduction viii) and which is certainly the key to un-
from the margins of the technological landscape. derstanding the aesthetic turn of Baudrillard's later
("Introduction" 98) style. In L'eichange symbolique Baudrillard first
theorized his opposition to traditional deep-value
Baudrillard is faulted for ignoring this aspect of theories (Marxism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, an-
Crash, its cautionary, moral role, yet Ballard too thropology). Countering Freud's and Marx's the-
later changed his mind on this point (see Gane, Bau- ories of exchange (libidinal and economic), he
drillard's Bestiary 160). One can therefore perhaps proposed a revitalized theory of symbolic exchange,
fault Baudrillard only for abiding by an aesthetic he based jointly on Mauss's illustration of the potlatch,
sees outlined in Crash, a relentlessly negative aes- on Bataille's theory of expenditure, and on a decon-
thetic that does not allow for the possibility of posi- struction of Lacan's symbolic-real-imaginary triad.
tive moral closure. A successful negative work, as For Lacan, the symbolic marks the adult world
Adomo puts it, "is not one which resolves objective of discourse, wherein the subject comes fully into
contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one being as it leaves the narcissistic fantasies of the
which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by
imaginary order to recognize, and be recognized by,

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68 Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

the other. Entry into the symbolic, however, also among all things, where what is given cannot not
severs the subject from the real, or the material be returned (for to ignore a gift is itself a symbolic
given, which always remains beyond the reach of response), where every gesture initiates a challenge
and an obligation to countergive. Mauss maintains
signification. For Baudrillard, in contrast, "the effect
of the real is only ever therefore the structural effectthat gift economies entail an implicit ethic as
of the disjunction between two terms." The sym- a matter of symbolic distinction conferred only
bolic in his terms, therefore, through mutual recognition and intersubjectivity.
The moral of Mauss's anthropological narrative
is neither a concept, an agency, a category, nor a "struc- is thus summed up in a Maori proverb: "Give as
ture," but an act of exchange and a social relation which much as you take, all shall be very well" (Mauss 71).
puts an end to the real, which resolves the real, and, at One must therefore act not only with one's own in-
the same time, puts an end to the opposition between terest in mind but with the interests of others in mind
the real and the imaginary. (Symbolic Exchange 133) as well. Societies succeed, according to Mauss, only
by "substituting alliance, gifts, and trade for war,
Baudrillard's revolutionary symbolic relies on the isolation and stagnation" (82). Unlike Mauss, how-
idea of an agonistic reciprocity among all agents in ever, who maintains that "this morality is eternal"
exchanges that can be made to enlist the system (70), Baudrillard eschews moral declamation and
against itself, to effect reversals and implosions of deploys the gift solely in aesthetic terms, preferring
terms and forces locked in opposition (appearance/ to maintain his affirmative weakness rather than to
essence, conscious/unconscious, normal/abnormal, lapse back into metaphysical thinking." For along
life/death, etc.). The term death itself is for Bau- with metaphysical first principles, he must renounce
drillard the trope of the symbolic: "Death is always all real foundations for moral judgments. Only as
equally what waits at the term of the system, and hypothetical solutions to hypothetical situations do
the symbolic extermination that stalks the system his pronouncements therefore make sense:
itself" (5n2). And so he asserts, in typically pro-
vocative fashion, "[D]eath itself demands to be ex- The play of simulation must therefore be taken fur-
perienced immediately, in total blindness and total ther than the system permits. Death must be played
ambivalence" (186-87). Through such utterances against death-a radical tautology. The system's own
logic turns into the best weapon against it. The only
has his infamy grown. Yet in a note to his preface
strategy of opposition to a hyperrealist system is pat-
he distinctly warns, "Death ought never to be un-
aphysical, a "science of imaginary solutions"; in
derstood as the real event that affects a subject or a
other words, a science fiction about the system re-
body, but as aform in which the determinacy of the
turning to destroy itself, at the extreme limit of sim-
subject and of value is lost" (5n2). The death drive ulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of
in Baudrillard is therefore not a matter of repressed destruction and death. (Selected Writings 123)
instinct, as in Freud, or even of a universal force
within language, as in Lacan, but, rather, the trope A hyperreal system demands hyperreal revolutions.
for the incipient implosion of all terms valued in But do such revolutions affect our lived realities,
opposition, collectively termed the code. In the however mediated those realities may be? To what
wake of these implosionary tactics Baudrillard extent is the hyperreal real? As Genosko attests,
hopes there will arise, at least in theory, a liber- Baudrillard's "agonistics" forces him to make cer-
ated and continuously creative new set of relations, tain strong and mystical claims on both sides of the
governed not by semiotic or economic codes but metaphysical power bar (real/imaginary), hence his
by a symbolic code, defined as the simultaneous position of "affirmative weakness" (73). Concerning
ex-termination of all terms coded in opposition and Baudrillard's critique of the semiotic order, Genosko
the reinvention of value according to the law of the aptly points out that "[i]f the result of this break and
gift, which he terms symbolic exchange. entry is that signs will have burned, one wonders
When one adheres to the principle of the gift, whether it is possible to signify what one means
one adheres to a fundamental law of reciprocity by the symbolic" (xx). Unlike Kristeva, who sees

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 Bradley Butterfield 69

prelinguistic (semiotic) flows as causing only tem- his works ought to be read as one reads Ballard's
porary revolutions in the signifying (symbolic) brand of sci-fi: as "an extreme metaphor for an ex-
arena, Baudrillard defines his symbolic revolution as treme situation" (Ballard, "Introduction" 98). The
postlinguistic and postmetaphysical.12 For him ev- element of "what if," the hypothetical, is always
ery referent is fatally mediated, and even a wounded present in Baudrillard, an imagining of a world
leg cannot be called on to issue the truth about its that is perhaps right around the corner. If the sim-
condition beyond representation; thus the ground- ulacrum and the real can be conceived as equal
less new world of simulation, "the one truth with players on the field where meaning is contested,
which we will all now be concerned" ("Crash" 119), a field more and more dominated by mass tech-
must become the starting point for any future ethics. nology, what new strategies might be employed
Instead of returning to the metaphysics of the code, to counter the instrumental simulation deployed
wherein all negative terms are merely the alibis of by conglomerates of power? If simulation can be
their positive counterparts, Baudrillard's notion of pushed to initiate a collapse of the mark between
symbolic exchange aims to turn the system against real and imaginary and an end to the law of value
itself and thereby to establish the grounds for a yet that dictates an omnipresent market morality, could
unknown mode of experience. these events not in turn give way to a new symbolic
How, then, as Genosko asks, can the system be economy, where each is accountable to each accord-
made to "suffer the weight of the symbolic obliga- ing to a fundamental rule of reciprocity that is mys-
tion" (xxii)? Genosko is right that Baudrillard of- tified by the present state of human alienation?
fers little explanation in practical, ethical terms, but Far from promoting the idea that real people do
Genosko's own explanation of the symbolic opera- not deserve compassion, Baudrillard's hypermoral
tion illuminates in it a compelling aesthetic, rather vision is in fact of a world where metaphysical oth-
than ethical, theory: erness (all that is cruelly excised by the rule of the
norm) can no longer be stigmatized as morally infe-
In the agonistic relation of reciprocity which is sym- rior. For instance, though Kellner charges Baudril-
bolic exchange, one must at some point in the recipro- lard with racism,"3 Symbolic Exchange and Death
cal relation take the position of death [... .]. The goal contains a critique of Western metaphysics that is
is, of course, not to die in a revolutionary action, but
implicitly nonracist:
to force the system to kill itself. [... .] The counter-gift
of death functions symbolically by trapping the sys-
Like so many others, the mad, children and the old
tem in the obligatory circuit of returning this counter-
have only become "categories" under the sign of the
gift in kind or with interest. (xxi)
successive segregations that have marked the develop-
ment of culture. The poor, the under-developed, those
Baudrillard means to trap the system or code in a with subnormal IQs, perverts, transsexuals, intellectu-
death exchange that will reverse and thereby de- als and women form a folklore of terror, a folklore of
construct the force of its signification. Taken as an excommunication on the basis of an increasingly rac-
operation of the aesthetic imagination, as in Crash, ist definition of the "normal human." (126)
this concept is far more plausible and potentially
effective as a catalyst of revolutionary experience Metaphysical violence, which functions by exclu-
than as a practical model of everyday behavior. One sion and by the conception of the norm, is for Bau-
could also add that the intended confusion of the drillard the result of a systematic "exclusion of the
ethical and the aesthetic in Baudrillard is what dead and of death" in Western culture since the Mid-
makes his writing ring true to the contradictions dle
of Ages (126). Accordingly, "[f]rom this point on
late capitalism and to the experience of the hyper- the obsession with death and the will to abolish death
real (an inability to distinguish the real from simu-through accumulation become the fundamental mo-
lation). Though one can assume that Baudrillard tor of the rationality of political economy" (146).
does not really believe that there is no difference Death, however, continues to haunt the living, and
between himself (his body and mind) and his im- the more the living order their lives against death, the
age on a TV monitor (see Baudrillard Live 149), larger death looms, demanding to be experienced:

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70 Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

Desire invests the very separation of life and death. perversion), of a strategic organization of life that
starts from death. ("Crash" 113)
[.. .] The symbolic is the inverse dream of an end of
accumulation and a possible reversibility of death in
Exactly where, one wonders, is this new pleasure to
exchange. Symbolic death, which has not undergone
the imaginary disjunction of life and death which is be experienced? Is one meant to seek it out by forni-

at the origin of the reality of death, is exchanged in a cating near accident sites, or will reading Ballard
social ritual of feasting. Imaginary-real death (our suffice? For Baudrillard the two experiences are
own) can only be redeemed through the individual alike in symbolic (post-real-imaginary) terms, so
work of mourning. (147-48) whether real or imaginary death initiates the ex-
change is beside the point. Crash depicts the mode
"Primitives" exchange with death through social of pleasure arising from death not as a repressed or
rituals, through their myths, rites of passage, and unconscious other but as a symbol among symbols:
feasts, all of which "[entail] a considerable differ- "death is manifest at last, and is at last symbolized,
ence in enjoyment: we trade with our dead in a kind where it is only symptomatic in all other formations
of melancholy, while the primitives live with their of discourse" (Symbolic Exchange 228). In the final
dead under the auspices of the ritual and the feast" chapter of Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudril-
(1 34-35) 14 For "primitives," then, death is an as- lard uses the term the poetic to designate symbolic

pect of life, one of many possible states of being exchange as a sort of accident occurring in language:
human. On the symbolic plane of their myths, the
living and the dead exist side by side, differing only In the poetic (the symbolic) the signifier disintegrates
absolutely, whereas in psychoanalysis it endlessly
in status. However,
shifts [. . ]. [T]he psychoanalytic signifier remains
a surface indexed on the turbulent reality of the un-
ltihere is an irreversible evolution from savage socie-
conscious, whereas in the poetic [ ...] it no longer
ties to our own: little by little, the dead cease to exist.
has anything to designate, not even the ambivalence of a
They are thrown out of the group's symbolic circula-
repressed signified. It is nothing more than the dissemi-
tion. They are no longer beings with a full role to play,
nation and the absolution of value, experienced, how-
worthy partners in exchange [. ..]. [T]oday it is not
ever, without the shadow of anxiety, in total enjoyment.
normal to be dead, and this is new. [... .] Death is a (227)
delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. (126)

This dissemination and absolution of value, experi-

Not ignoring the contemporary need to mourn the
enced with enjoyment and without anxiety, is an
dead, Baudrillard suggests that the "primitive" ex-
apt description of what happens in Crash: values
perience of death as a collective celebration of an
implode on every page; the signifiers of the car and
exchange of forces can be achieved today in aes-
the body, of technology and nature, are virtually
thetic terms.
impaled on one another in every description and
It is along these lines that Baudrillard deploys the
are left naked and without sin. Baudrillard is un-
figures of the accident and the poetic. The accident, a doubtedly right when he says, "Nowhere does this
conception borrowed from Octavio Paz, is the site of moral gaze surface" in the text.
a postmodern symbolic exchange with death where Baudrillard's turn from social theory and philoso-
one signifying system breaks through into another phy to aestheticism worries Kellner, who faults Bau-
and thus ruptures the semiotic wall between self and drillard not, as does Genosko, for wanting it both
other, life and death, real and imaginary. In the ways but for fetishizing the side of the imaginary:
world of Ballard's Crash, according to Baudrillard,
Such fetishizing of sign culture finds its natural (and
[tihe Accident is the instigator of a new mode of non- more harmless) home in the fascination with the
perverse pleasure (contrary to the author himself, who realm of sign culture which we call art. I shall argue
speaks in the introduction of a new perverse logic, one that Baudrillard's trajectory exhibits an ever more in-
must resist the moral temptation of reading Crash as tense aestheticizing of social theory and philosophy

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 Bradly Butterfield 71

[... .] in favor of a materiality and its French)

(typically capacity to suffer as sign
the real basisfetish
[that] he was only gradually to exhibit in its full and of ethical behavior. Baudrillard's "techno-body"
perverse splendor as aristocratic aestheticism from the may be only an aesthetic form, but one could also
mid-1970s to the present. (108)
claim that Sobchack's real body is determined as
much by technology and economics as by suffering.
Baudrillard's argument is that the modem world is a If the moral gaze begins with the body (329), ex-
"simulation society" where everything is mediated actly what body is being discussed? Like many of
and thus that the imaginary and not the real must be
Baudrillard's controversial statements after Sym-
the starting point for future revolutionary theoriz- bolic Exchange and Death, the passage cited above
ing. Though Kellner cynically criticizes the linear
can be read in terms of a literal enactment of his
progression of Baudrillard's career from Marxism
aesthetic theory-that is, as a fictional sortie into
to an amoral aestheticism, it is Baudrillard's aesthet-
the moral works of simulation's machinery, a chal-
icism that leads him back to Marx's fundamental
lenge and a "what if" to the modem subject: what if
moral alliance with the weak. Baudrillard's aes-
there is an economy of value that is not political, li-
thetic relies on the idea that simulation is reversible
bidinal, or even linguistic but symbolic? Could that
into the symbolic. By taking the side of the weak
economy not be experienced as revolutionary in
(the imaginary, the abnormal, the perverse, the
aesthetic terms without harming subjective bodies
dead), Baudrillard initiates the symbolic obligation
IRL (cyberspeak for "in real life")? Or is Baudril-
in a gift of death to the system, a simulated Trojan
lard advocating real violence? It seems that readers
horse that once inside causes the system to respond
are seduced into asking the question, for he con-
"in kind or with interest" and thus to self-destruct.
fesses, "I am merely seeking to regain a space for
Genosko provides the system's response when he
the secret, seduction being simply that which lets
asks "how [in reality] the system will be made to
appearance circulate and move as a secret" (Ecstasy
suffer the weight of the symbolic obligation" (xxi-
64). Baudrillard's strategic ambivalence, his affir-
xxii) and thus initiates an exchange that can only
mative weakness, can in this sense be read as what
devolve into the central aporia of aestheticism since
Carroll calls "paraesthetics," which aims not to "re-
Nietzsche (if it is true that there are no truths, then it
ject or ignore theory, but rather to undo the closures
cannot be true that there are no truths).
constituted by theory from within and to develop
Many of Baudrillard's most amoral statements
critical strategies that are capable of pointing to, or
seem calculated to provoke a moral response. For
linking up with, what is 'beyond theory"' (3). Bal-
instance, he writes:
lard too is strategically ambivalent (e.g., in naming
Crash's narrator James Ballard), but from Bau-
Sex is nothing [... .] next to the exchange of all the
drillard one expects truth. What does one do with
signs and wounds of which the body is capable. The
savages knew how to use the whole body to this end, theory that does not distinguish itself from fiction?
in tattooing, torture, initiation-sexuality was only one Hayles and Sobchack are right in pointing out the
of the possible metaphors of symbolic exchange [. ..]. continuing importance of boundaries in the physical
("Crash" 115) world, where distinctions between real and imagi-
nary, true and false are still the basis for most so-
It is easy to see how Sobchack, with a real cancer- cial-that is, ethical-relations. But the boundaries
ous wound in her leg, might find Baudrillard insen- between theory and fiction are not always so clear.
sitive and theoretically "dangerous," a reflection of When theory goes the way of art, what becomes of
"all that's wrong with Vaughan" and with the devil the reality to which theory was thought to refer?
himself (Sobchack 329, 327). In Sobchack's view, One cannot go further than Baudrillard's radical
"Baudrillard's techno-body is a body that is thought aestheticism, which empties reality of all content
always as an object, and never lived as a subject" by proclaiming a totally aestheticized world. One
(327). Sobchack theorizes the subject not in La- can only take a step back into the sobering realm
canian terms of positionality and discourse or in where ethics involves real people, however medi-
Freudian terms of ego instability but in terms of its ated they may be. Yet who can reproach Baudrillard

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72 Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

for occupying the extreme position of aesthetic lib- adult existence, where subjects are defined only by
erty, without which art would lose its negative force' their positionality relative to others vis-a-vis the
and its power to challenge what is accepted as real? rules of discourse. Foster maintains that the charac-
"In a completely sane world," as Ballard dramat- ters in Crash are driven to forsake the symbolic
ically proclaims, "madness is the only freedom!" order, which "can never fulfill the promises of rec-
("Juno" 15), and art, Ballard and Baudrillard agree, ompense," in an effort to reexperience the maso-
is one of the few remaining safe means of achiev- chistic pleasures of "being the focus of parental
ing madness. surveillance, the victim of trauma" as car crash vic-
tims (526, 527). Ballard's characters in Crash and
Reading Crash after Baudrillard Running Wild are therefore driven not by a desire for
freedom but by a perverse desire for bondage and
Much of the critical work done on Crash has taken discipline. For Baudrillard, as I have noted, the
the psychoanalytic perspective, approaching the symbolic plane is the plane not only of discourse
novel as diagnosing an unconscious death wish en- but of discourse and its others, the imaginary and
listed by an insidious technology.15 In an article on the real: "It is the u-topia that puts an end to the
perversion and the failure of authority in Ballard's topologies of the soul and body, man and nature, the
texts, Dennis Foster sees in Crash a vision of how real and the non-real, birth and death." And since
"the rational forms of production, marketing, and the topology of psychoanalysis is itself grafted onto
consumption are dependent on perpetuating a cer- such a disjunction (between the reality principle and
tain perversion" (527). The narcissistic wound, the the unconscious), "the symbolic cannot but put an
inevitable loss suffered by the child as it emerges end to psychoanalysis too" (Symbolic Exchange
from the preoedipal fantasy of union with its mother 133). In symbolic exchange, words and things, the
to become a "symbolized body," leaves a longing in living and the dead all are taken as real and there-

the novel's characters for the repressed, "nonsymbol- fore as equal players in acts where a fundamental

ized body." Foster asserts that "the alternative to this law of reciprocity, not of language, dictates the

recognition is to disavow loss and to seek a repeti- value of each to each. The main difference between

tion of the crash, a return to that traumatic moment the Lacanian and the Baudrillardian readings of

of subjection and enjoyment" (526). Ballard's chief Crash is that in the former fragmented subjects

insight in Crash, according to Foster, is that seek respite from the symbolic (the world of signs)
by re-creating prelinguistic, masochistic fantasies
around car crashes, whereas in the latter they seek in
[t]he car and the camera provide the coherent body that
the contemporary subject lacks, the image of power and each crash an exchange of sexual energies with the
independence human beings aspire to, and advertising, dead and entry into a symbolic realm that no longer
politics, and entertainment insinuate these productions values distinctions like conscious/unconscious,
into current habits of language and consumption, shap- normal/perverse, and living/dead in opposition.
ing individuals' capacities for pleasure. In this way the Though there is not room here for a detailed ex-
perverse and the political become intertwined. (527) plication of Crash, a few examples will suffice to
demonstrate the relevance of Baudrillardian crit-
Though I could not agree more concerning the in- icism to the book. First, there is the issue of sim-
strumental capacity of simulation technologies and ulation, brilliantly played on throughout Crash.
their propensity to enlist the thwarted desires of James's world of advertising and automobiles has
fragmented subjects, I must take issue with Foster's become so unreal to him that he feels "the crash [is]
persuasive Lacanian reading of Crash, if merely to the only real experience [he has] been through for
show the Baudrillardian alternative. For Lacan both years" (39). In an effort to rediscover and maintain
consciousness and the unconscious are not merely this experience, he allies himself with Vaughan,
"structured like a language"; they come into being who is able to reproduce photographically every
only in language as well (Skura 355). The symbolic, aspect of the crashes the two frequent. Slowly sim-
which he equates with language, is the world of ulations begin to displace their originals. For in-

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 Bradl/y Butterfield 73

stance, Elizabeth Taylor is dressed with "simulated By a terrifying paradox, a sexual act between us would
wounds" (108) and placed behind the wheel of a be a way of taking her revenge on me. (72)

"crashed Citroen" on the set of James's commer-

cial, and Seagrave is dressed as Taylor's stunt dou- I had celebrated in her husband's death the unity of
our injuries and my orgasm. (75)
ble, "a nightmare parody of the actress, far more
sinister than the cosmetic wounds at that same mo-
ment being applied to her" (110). When Seagrave, It is as though a redemptive principle is at work in

dressed as Taylor, dies in a crash with a former TV the symbolic demands of the car crash that necessi-

actress, James notes that, for Vaughan, "Seagrave tates a sexual response:

had pre-empted that real death which Vaughan had

Vaughan had articulated my needs for some positive
reserved for himself. In his mind, from that acci-
response to my crash. (102)
dent onwards, the film actress had already died"
(187). Simulation is also thematized in car crashes
The translation of these injuries in terms of our fan-
at an auto show's "Recreation of a Spectacular
tasies and sexual behaviour was the only means of re-
Road Accident," which turns into a real crash when
invigorating these wounded and dying victims. (190)
the simulation fails (85-86); and in the scenes at
the Road Research Laboratory, where a crowd of
Sex, like the spectacle of the crash, appears "as if
spectators take "on the appearance of mannequins"
traversed by an intense force of initiation" ("Crash"
while a car full of mannequins crashes head-on into
119)-that is, by the transformative principle of the
a motorcycle driven by a crash dummy named Elvis
gift in symbolic exchange.
(122). Read after Baudrillard, such scenes seem to
The implosions and reversals of sex, death, and
illustrate (or perhaps to parody) his theory of simu-
technology throughout the book can also be seen as
lation as the dominant or "fourth order" of value
examples of the poetic in Baudrillardian terms:
production ("Precession" 6).16
"her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the man-
Second, Ballard plays throughout Crash on Bau-
ufacturer's medallion, his semen emptying across
drillard's notion of a neoprimitive symbolic ex-
the luminescent dials" (8). In such passages signs
change with death in the form of the accident. of the body and technology, of nature and culture,
Scenes of car crashes are depicted as orgiastic cele- of sex and death impale and envelope one another.
brations for the spectators and as initiation rites for Though still representational-Ballard's prose is
the victims: not poetic in Baudrillard's strong sense of "the in-
surrection of language against its own laws," which
This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were can only devolve into nonsense-the world such
members of a congregation leaving after a sermon passages represent is one where signs perform their
urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and
death rites: "Far from reinforcing the signifier in its
strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate
being, repeating it positively, this metamorphosis
the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most
of its scattered members is equivalent to its death
unlikely partners. (157)
as such, to its annihilation" (Baudrillard, Symbolic
Exchange 198, 199). The entire narrative, for that
Symbolic exchange with death is also approximated
matter, can be conceived of in terms of such a fun-
by the sex acts performed in cars, such as those be-
damental breakdown in the semiotic process. Rob-
tween James and Helen, who seek in their couplings
ert Caserio, for example, notes that
to reciprocate the symbolic demands of Helen's
sacrificed husband:
the deadpan earnestness with which Ballard and
"Ballard" present Crash makes it impossible for the
My first brief journey to the accident site had raised reader to determine if the novel is, after all, a joke.
again the specter of the dead man and, more impor- [... .] The wavering between seriousness and play
tant, the notion of my own death. (58) cannot be resolved, and so the case for the total

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74 Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

ambiguity-and for the postmodernism-of Bal- tracted labor camps throughout the underdeveloped
lard's text is a strong one. (303) nations. To make art or criticism in such a world,
one must engage the interested signs of an estranged
Colin Greenland also points out the strength in and alienated reality. If the material body remains
Ballard's ambiguity: the last stable referent-"an accumulation strategy,"
as David Harvey has suggested and as Sobchack
Readers who can cope with the paradox by emulating would likely agree-if all things can still be reduced
Ballard's ironic entertainment of unacceptable ideas to a body which itself remains irreducible, then the
are thereby forcibly detached from the landscape of object of critical theory might simply be to trace the
signs. This disenchantment is conducive to demystifi- signs of capital to the physical bodies of workers
cation and enlightenment, and at least a step towards
and to offer those bodies as evidence against class
freedom of understanding and choice in the world we
injustice. However, most people probably already
seem to have made. (120)
believe in the physical suffering of the global prole-
tariat, and most are still alienated from the means to
Such readings are in keeping with Baudrillard's
do anything about it. This situation makes it neces-
revolutionary pronouncements concerning the es-
sary to come at the problem not by way of the body
sential aestheticism and negativity of Crash, its
but by way of the sign and makes art important for
amoral perspective and its refusal to resolve con-
philosophy. In a world dominated by immeasur-
tradictions, as Adorno puts it, "in a spurious har-
able simulacra despite the continued existence of
mony." In the words of the narrator, Crash offers
the body, Ballard's and Baudrillard's aestheticism
'a unique vision of this machine landscape, an in-
claims social relevance by demonstrating in guer-
vitation to explore the viaducts of our minds" (54),
rilla fashion interventions whereby one fiction is
however insane they may be. Ballard (the charac-
played against another as a means of challenging
ter?) would thus agree with Melville's Ishmael,
the darkest secrets and silent hopes of the social
who says, "[I]t is but well to be on friendly terms
imaginary. Aestheticism thus gains its power to
with all the inmates of the place one lodges in"
challenge the universe of simulation by remaining
(30), but Crash in fact goes further, taking the most
unapologetic to its norms and moral standards, and
horrific and prevalent mode of modern death-"a
on this point Ballard and Baudrillard are again in
pandemic cataclysm institutionalized in all indus-
agreement with Adorno:
trial societies that kills hundreds of thousands of
people each year and injures millions" ("Introduc-
This is not the time for political works of art; rather,
tion" 98)-and turning it into a collective sexual politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art,
rite, a textual marriage of life and death, sex and and it has penetrated most deeply into works that pre-
technology. Is there a moral to this story? sent themselves as politically dead.
(Adomo, "Commitment" 93-94)
Cyborg Society and Negative Aesthetics
Whereas ethical or just relationships among beings
Both Ballard and Baudrillard would agree with remain the implicit utopia of such works, a politi-
Donna Haraway that the age of the cyborg, where to cally dead society is negated only through such
be human is to be partly machine, has arrived: hu- works' politically dead form, through the negation
man beings are not wholly themselves without the of negation. "Affirmative culture" remains the hall-
diverse technologies, from the contact lens to the mark of an omnipresent culture industry, the "in-
automobile, by and through which they live. Each sufferable kitsch" Adorno remarks in American
of these technologies, however, is traversed by the consumer society ("Position" 30). And yet the uni-
ideologies of multinational capitalism, most evi- verse of simulation, in all its banality, is never po-
dently through the various distinctions of lifestyle litically dead for those who own and exploit the
and status invested in every commodity, distinctions media's means of production. The climate of the
that tell nothing of commodities' origins in subcon- late twentieth century is largely manipulated and

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 Bradley Butterfield 75

determined by what Adorno might have termed bly linked" (188). Opposing the will of theory to
instrumental simulation. Baudrillard writes little categorize the ethical and anesthetize the aesthetic,
about this interestedness of simulacra, about the Baudrillard's negative theory, or what Carroll calls
powers behind the omnipresence of advertising, and paraesthetics, aims to displace and transform both
one wonders to what extent any literary work can and to enact the very aporias that are the wellspring
effectively reverse those powers' hold on con- of an extramoral sense-that is, of an ethics origi-
temporary reality. Imaginative, negative works like nating in a space with no closure.
Ballard's Crash can nevertheless offer hypotheses
about the world unauthorized by political or eco-
nomic interests. In this light, an amoral aestheticism
can hardly be seen as inimical to leftist political pri-
orities or to ethical advancement in general. Notes
Comparing Baudrillard and Ballard may not
help resolve the question of the relation between 'Crash is narrated in the first person by a character named
James Ballard, a producer of television commercials who is in
ethics or theory and literature, but it does compel a
an accident on his way home from work one day. He and the dri-
rethinking of one's relations to both. Perhaps want-
ver of the other car are badly injured, and a passenger in the
ing to protect an "innocent" fiction from a "guilty" other car, the driver's husband, is killed. While convalescing in
theory (or vice versa), Ballard and the other re- the hospital, Ballard gains a heightened awareness of the sexual
spondents in Science-Fiction Studies call into ques- possibilities of his environment. He meets the other driver, Dr.

tion expectations of literature: is it expected to Helen Remington, who is undergoing a similar transformation.
and the two begin an affair, having sex only in cars, preferably at
remain outside morality or to represent morality?
the accident site. The key character in the novel is Vaughan,
And which side is theory on, given Baudrillard's "nightmare angel of the expressways" (84), who follows Bal-
purposeful blurring of the boundaries? Baudrillard lard, photographically documenting his accident and his sexual
tends to affect these tugs-of-war wherever he goes: transformation in clinical detail. A one-time computer specialist,

between reality and imagination, good and evil, Vaughan was "one of the first of the new-style TV scientists",
his research involved "the application of computerized tech-
true and false, theory and fiction. His objective lies
niques to the control of all international traffic systems" (63).
beyond these dichotomies, but he can only get be- Since a motorcycle accident, however, Vaughan has dropped out
yond them by going through them. Playing the of public life to pursue a sinister experiment concerning the re-
devil's hand, he seduces the reader into place at the lation between sex and the automobile. Obsessed especially with

other end of his rope, hoping to pull the reader into the sexual possibilities of the car-crash deaths of famous per-
sons, he drives a Lincoln of the type Kennedy was shot in and
his abyss. What Ballard fears in the "theory and
plans his own sex death in a head-on collision with Elizabeth
criticism of s-f" is not theory's abyss, however, but Taylor, who is acting in one of Ballard's commercials. Ballard
the inertia brought on by its moral reductions, and Remington join Vaughan and his crew, and Vaughan tries to
which spell death to the "spirit of SF." Ballard ex- convince Ballard to introduce him to Taylor. However, Seagrave

empts Baudrillard, whom he intuits has seen the (Vaughan's stunt-driving disciple) preempts Vaughan's plans by
dying in a crash while dressed as Taylor; the copy death makes
truth of his book: that it is meant to be unapologeti-
the real one seem superfluous to Vaughan. After having sex with
cally amoral, that as an artist Ballard too plays the both Ballard and Ballard's wife, Catherine, at different times in
devil's hand. If Baudrillard may be included among Ballard's car, Vaughan steals the car and dies in a crash meant to
Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida as one of the be with Taylor's limousine. Ballard assumes Vaughan's identity,

French Nietzscheans who practice what Carroll driving in Vaughan's car with Catherine and plotting their own
stylized technological sex deaths. The work is punctuated
calls paraesthetics, then Carroll's conclusion ap-
throughout by a grotesque commingling of technological and bi-
plies here as well: "The task of paraesthetic theory ological signifiers: for example, "He examined the vomit stain-
is not to resolve all questions concerning the rela- ing the lapels of his jacket, and reached forward to touch the
tions of theory with art and literature, but, rather, to
globes of semen clinging to the instrument binnacle" (9).

rethink these relations and, through the transforma- 2Baudrillard's critical essay "Crash," originally published in
France in 1981, appeared in Science-Fiction Stuidies with the
tion and displacement of art and literature, to recast
title "Ballard's Crash."
the philosophical, historical, and political 'fields' 3Hayles and Sobchack write to defend what they see as the
-fields with which art and literature are inextrica- moral content of Crash against Baudrillard, who sees the work

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76 Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

as representative not of a moral but of a symbolic universe. In "Mauss points to an aesthetic of gift giving as well: "every-
their eyes, Baudrillard is a "really dangerous" aesthete who wel- thing, food, objects, and services, even 'respect,' as the Tlingit
comes simulation and all that comes with it (Sobchack 329), say, is a cause of aesthetic emotion" (79).
whereas Porush, who focuses not on "Ballard's Crash" but on 12Cf. Derrida: "Emancipation from this language must be at-
"Simulacra and Science Fiction," sees Baudrillard as a moralist tempted. But not as an attempt at emancipation from it, for this
who fears the loss of the real still embodied by the text (325). In
is impossible unless we forget our history. Rather, as the dream
this vein Armstrong has also remarked on Baudrillard's over- of emancipation. Nor as emancipation from it, which would be
dramatizing the loss of the real in some of his "stupid diatribes" meaningless and would deprive us of the light of meaning.
against simulation. Whether Baudrillard's work is read as pro- Rather, as resistance to it, as far as is possible" (28). Baudrillard
or antisimulation-Baudrillard invites both responses-one
seems to desire such emancipation from "the light of meaning,"
could argue that his ambivalence represents precisely what Bal- pushing beyond metaphysical language and the law of value.
lard loathingly fears in the term postmodernism. Perhaps Bal-
13Kellner has interpreted Baudrillard's ambiguous satire
lard, who has written, "We live inside an enormous novel. [. ...]
"What Are You Doing after the Orgy?" as "shamelessly racist
The writer's task is to invent the reality" ("Introduction" 98), is
and chauvinist" (184), but when Baudrillard writes of new
not ready for a world where even theory becomes fiction.
African dictators, "Black is the embarrassment of White. The
4Ballard has in fact more than once directed his acerbic wit
obscenity of blackness gambles and wins against the obscenity
against "that faceless creature, literary criticism," noting that
of whiteness. [. . .1 The West will be hard pressed to rid itself of
"[a]lmost all the criticism of science fiction has been written by
this generation of simian and prosaic despots, born of the mon-
benevolent outsiders, who combine zeal with ignorance, like high-
strous crossing of the jungle with the shining values of ideol-
minded missionaries viewing the sex rites of a remarkably fertile
ogy," he can also be read as satirizing the view he is representing,
aboriginal tribe and finding every laudable influence at work ex-
in the style more of an Alfred Jarry than of an Adolf Hitler-i.e.,
cept the outstanding length of penis" ("Fictions" 99-100).
as attempting the reversal and implosion of such worn-out oppo-
5Landon, who also includes William S. Burroughs as a "Killer
sitional values rather than the domination of one by the other.
B," is the only critic in the Science-Fiction Studies special issue
'4Hefner takes Baudrillard to task for his loose usage of the
who is sympathetic to Baudrillard's essay.
term primitive and for the lack of anthropological precedent be-
6In a study of French Nietzscheans that is closely related to
hind his notion of symbolic exchange. Hefner quotes Clifford
my concerns, Carroll surprisingly never mentions Baudrillard.
Geertz's remark "Know what he thinks a savage is and you have
However, his description of a "critical or a para- aesthetics" as
the key to his work. You know what he thinks of himself" (109),
"a critical strategy that assumes, in some sense, the perspective
which suggests that the historical precedent for symbolic ex-
of 'art' to counter the limitations of theory" fits Baudrillard per-
change is less important than the meaning the concept has for
fectly (3). I use the term aestheticism to designate the same gen-
Baudrillard.
eral criteria, nevertheless heeding Carroll's warning that "[i]f
'art' is to function critically and indicate a movement 'beyond 15See, e.g., Foster; Lanz; Ruddick. For an inverse Freudian
theory,' it must also move 'beyond art' and function outside of reading of Crash, see Caserio; for him, Vaughan is a representa-

all forms of aestheticism" (4). Baudrillard's aestheticism, based tive of Eros (not death), who inspires suicide and murder until

on what I term a negative aesthetics, does not hypostatize the love at last defeats even death (302-03).

aesthetic but, rather, sets it in motion to challenge theoretical ju- 161n Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard delineates four
risdictions. Baudrillard aims purposefully at the moral works of orders in "the successive phases of the image": "it is the reflec-
literary theory as if to create the types of aporias that mark the tion of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound re-
beginning of any postmetaphysical ethics. ality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no
7For Adorno this paradox meant that mimesis, the lost original relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simu-
model for ethical relations, lives on negatively through the expe- lacrum" ("Precession" 6).

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