The seductions of technology (2)

To grasp what Jean Baudrillard in his book Seduction (1990) understands by “seduction” where technology is concerned, one has to take note, first, of the way he displaces seduction: instead of employing it in a “lifeworld” sense, he transforms it into a metaphor which encompasses, not merely a psychological trait of lifeworld-communication, but the entire domain of cultural practice. To put it differently, he compresses everything that may be subsumed under what he calls the “feminine” into “seduction’.

If this seems like gobbledygook, recall that the word “seduction” denotes the process through which someone gains erotic power over someone else, usually by means of subtle, well-placed signs (verbal as well as physical) that reflect the seducer’s desirability, so that the seducee is drawn to the seducer like a moth to a candle flame. For those who remember the film Dangerous Liaisons where John Malkovich plays the seducer par excellence opposite Michelle Pfeiffer as the seducee, this will sound familiar. Now, the point about Baudrillard is that he shifts the scene of seduction from something that happens between people to something that crucially involves technology.

For Baudrillard seduction as figure of the “feminine principle” — not to be conflated with real, living women — further marks the site of simulation, appearance, or superficiality, as opposed to depth. Although it is not always easy to know exactly what Baudrillard means with his gnomic, elliptical statements, it seems to me that his argument amounts to the claim that we live in a time when culture increasingly exhibits the contours of seduction in a structural sense.

It therefore seems that there has been a shift of “seductive” dynamics and “communications”, if not intent and capacity, from people to socio-economic, technological and cultural practices, especially in the domain of advertising and branding communication — the fact that so many communication studies departments put heavy emphasis on what is euphemistically called “corporate communications”, testifies to this.

What Baudrillard calls “cold seduction” (1990: 162) also testifies to this shift. Writing of “television’s cold light”, Baudrillard contrasts the “mesmerising” TV (pseudo-) image with that of cinema, which “is still endowed with an intense imaginary … ” He continues:

“All this belongs to the ludic realm where one encounters a cold seduction — the ‘narcissistic’ spell of electronic and information systems, the cold attraction of the terminals and mediums that we have become, surrounded as we are by consoles, isolated and seduced by their manipulation.”

It is no accident that this is reminiscent of Adorno, who noted, decades ago, the seductive effect of the technological apparatus on human beings — to such an extent that listening or the capacity to listen to music had “regressed”, while attention was increasingly focused on the reproductive apparatus itself, among other things that detract from the act of listening to music. As for what Baudrillard terms the “ludic”, it seems to follow the same logic as his claim that Disneyland exists, in order to hide the fact that all of America is Disneyland — itself mimicking Foucault’s contention, in Discipline and Punish, that there is “no outside” to the “carceral” society (that is, prisons exist to hide the fact that all of contemporary society is a prison).

Hence, for Baudrillard the “ludic” (homo ludens: playing human) means that the difference between play and other, distinctly recognisable activities has made way for a generalised “play” (1990: 158):

“American television … with its 83 channels is the living incarnation of the ludic: one can no longer do anything but play — change channels, mix programmes and create one’s own montage (the predominance of TV games is merely an echo, at the level of content, of this ludic employment of the medium).”

Hence his association of the “ludic” with electronic games such as computer chess, information systems, terminals, screens of all kinds, consoles and keyboards, all of which are the manifestations of the “suppleness and polyvalence of combinations” in the networks within which postmodern humans live their lives. “Play” in the everyday sense has become pervasive, and there is something apocalyptic about his remark, that in the guise of the “ludic” (1990: 163):

” … it is the cold seduction that governs the spheres of information and communication … Seduction/simulacrum: communication as the functioning of the social within a closed circuit, where signs duplicate an undiscoverable reality. The social contract has become a ‘simulation pact’ sealed by the media and the news … seduction here connotes only a kind of ludic adhesion to simulated pieces of information, a kind of tactile attraction maintained by the models.”

(In passing, it is worth noticing that, in Salman Rushdie’s extraordinary novel Fury (2001) one encounters several descriptions of the totalising “ludic” realm as conceived by Baudrillard.) This is Baudrillard at his most elliptic and cynical (or at least pessimistic): the ludic structural dynamics of techno-dominated contemporary culture is like a spider’s web imprisoning us all, but within it we “adhere” or “stick” to exchangeable and interchangeable signs, according to a principle of exchange (in an economic sense, too) which constitutes the functioning of “society”.

We are seduced by an impersonal constellation of forces. And because this ludic realm is all there is — for Baudrillard, as for Foucault, there is no outside (significantly, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) similarly ends with the words: “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT”) — “cold” seduction comes with the territory. Gone is the thrill — except for a simulated one — on the part of Kierkegaard’s Johannes the Seducer (in Either/Or I) witnessing his manipulative schemes coming to fruition in the gradual but inexorable surrender of Cordelia to his will.

One could imagine an electronic game called “Seduction”, modelled on this inventive tale by Kierkegaard. And its seduction of the imaginary players at its controls would be of a piece with the spell of “cold seduction” cast on all the denizens (us) of this technocratic media- information- and communication-systems cyber-realm we call the world. If “seduction” involves “power over”, then people today have been, and still are being, seduced by technology.

Before the advent of television’s (and the computer’s) cold seduction, there was the seduction of and by cinema, of course, which was (and to a certain, lingering degree still is) qualitatively different from the former. It is not difficult to agree with Baudrillard that “cinema’s power lives in its myth” — eloquently embodied in Giuseppe Tornatore’s beautiful and cinematically paradigmatic film Cinema Paradiso (1988) — and that, “at the heart of the cinematographic myth lies seduction: that of the renowned seductive figure, a man or woman (but above all a woman) linked to the ravishing but specious power of the cinematographic image itself”.

Baudrillard sees this — cinema as myth — as the only phenomenon worthy of the name “myth” in an era lacking the capacity to produce “great myths or figures of seduction comparable to those of mythology or art”. Cinema gave us “the only important constellation of collective seduction produced by modern times, that of film stars or cinema idols” (1990: 94), and quite consistently, having linked seduction with the feminine principle, he claims that idols — even male film idols — are always in principle feminine, although it is arguably the case that the “biggest stars” were always women.

It is not difficult to understand what Baudrillard is getting at here — when one scrutinises the glossy photographs of film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, James Dean and Gregory Peck — no matter how masculine the roles they played – there is a veneer of seductive “femininity” in the suave smoothness and agelessness of their appearance.

This is the case to an even greater degree with female stars such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Lee Remick and Jane Russell. And the more recent the stars, the more this aura of seductiveness, captured in the kind of photographs found in books on the history of the cinema, is diluted, if not absent — perhaps, as Baudrillard reminds us, because cinema is “increasingly contaminated by television”, which, as part of the technological apparatus of “cold seduction”, lacks the mythical dimension of cinema.

At any rate, what one learns from these reflections on cinema (and all the devices from which, by contrast, a cold seduction emanates), is that no apparatus which functions decisively in the transmission of signifiers of a certain type — in the case of cinema, sound and visual images qualitatively different from those transmitted by television or the computer monitor — is innocent in communicational terms. The film projector does not only transmit information, but iconic configurations with a specific communicational effect, involving seduction through images imbricated with mythic significance.

And clearly, in the case of television and the computer, the effect — though still seductive in a qualitatively distinct manner — is not one bathed in the mysterious glow of the cinema. Instead, Baudrillard’s interpretation of the former gives one the impression that the “cold” seduction that operates here, seduces through a kind of mesmerisation. Perhaps this is why he claims that we are standing at the beginning of “an era of fascination”, where the “intensity” proper to playing computer games, or watching a soccer match on television, for example, belongs to a fundamentally different affective register than older types of games, like monopoly or the actual soccer match as perceived by spectators next to the field.

“Don’t think that they are the same match”, Baudrillard reminds one (p 160), “one is hot, the other (the televised match) cool — one is a game, with its emotional charge, its bravado and choreography, the other is tactile, modulated (play-backs, close-ups, sweeps, slow motion shots, different angles of vision, etc)”. And anyone who thinks that these are merely different ways of imparting information regarding the “same” event, is sorely mistaken — the “meaning” of each of these distinguishable phenomena is distinct, as the preceding discussion shows. Moreover, neither can such meaning be separated from the emotional or affective charge that accompanies it like a comet’s tail, nor from the technical means of its dissemination, in the case of film, television and computer screens.

Anyone interested in reading on this in the broader context of seduction, can read my article: “On seduction and flirting in the 21st century: A communication-theoretical perspective.” Communicatio (South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research), Vol. 32 (2) 2006, pp. 210-225.