Notes on Passwords

"Alongside commodity value there exist moral or aesthetic values which operate, for their part, in terms of a set opposition between good and bad, between the beautiful and the ugly . . . It seemed to me, however, that there was a possibility for things to circulate differently, and other cultures did indeed offer the image of a form of organization in which the transcendence of value, and with it the transcendence of power, was not established, since it is on the manipulation of values that that transcendence is constituted. It was a question of attempting to strip the object - but not just the object - of its status as commodity, to restore to it an immediacy, a brute reality which would not have a price put on it. Either a thing is 'worthless', or it is 'priceless'; in either case we are dealing with what cannot be evaluated, in the strongest sense of the term. From that point on, the exchange that can be effected operates on foundations that are no longer of the order of the contract - as in the usual system of value - but of the pact. There is a profound difference between the contract, which is an abstract convention between two terms or individuals, and the pact, which is a dual, collusive relation."

-- Baudrillard, Passwords - "Value"


The chapters "Obscenity" and "The Transparency of Evil" distinguish the fact that revealing-all or total sight becomes obscene, as in pornography, whereas something which is secret, which is not visible, takes on an evil disposition in light of its lack of transparency. Once again the limits of visibility are the restricted areas, the outer limits of itself.


"But if our world is indeed inventing a virtual double for itself, we have to see this as the fulfillment of a trend that began long ago. Reality, as we know, has not always existed. We have talked about it only since there has been a rationality to express it, parameters enabling us to represent it by coded and decodable signs.
In the virtual, we are no longer dealing with value; we are merely dealing with a turning-into-data, a turning-into-calculations, a generalized computation in which reality-effects disappear. The virtual might be said to be truly the reality-horizon, just as we talk about the event-horizon in physics. But it is also possible to think that all this is merely a roundabout route towards an as yet indiscernible aim.
There is a positive fascination today with the virtual and all its technologies. if it genuinely is a mode of disappearance, this would be an - obscure, but deliberate - choice on the part of the species itself: the decision to clone itself, lock, stock and barrel, in another universe; to disappear as the human race, properly speaking, in order to perpetuate itself in an artificial species that would have much more efficient, much more operational attributes. Is this what is at issue?"

-- Baudrillard, Passwords - "The Virtual"