I am putting makeup on empty space
all patinas convening on empty space
rouge blushing on empty space
I am putting makeup on empty space
pasting eyelashes on empty space
painting the eyebrows of empty space
piling creams on empty space
painting the phenomenal world — Anne Waldman

"Mix and Match: A Furry Bicycle is an Example of a __________"
Of my scant memories from grade-school, I recall drafting a Goosebumps story about a summer camp run by skeletons (themes of stranger danger), and also a moment of perplexity at a bizarre grown-up phrase: "Conversation Piece." That an object (such as a "furry bicycle") might be an occasion to dispense a pithy anecdote prepared in advance struck that child as bizarre. What a way to constrain a conversation to a series of fixed remarks and set-pieces, however amusing. (This, unfortunately, remains the mainstay of so-called conversation-between-adults.) The Conversation Piece as a way of filling empty space — in a situation where the right words aren't at hand.

In more regimented form, this is also what is happening on the blank line of a not-insubstantial number of university papers. The intelligent student, when stumped, fills the page with much that can be said to be true, much that is neither-true-nor-untrue, and, perhaps, a little that is pertinent. (The Visuddhimaggha has a term for work such as this, "Bean-soupery is resemblance to bean soup; for just as when beans are being cooked only a few [stay hard] so too the person in whose speech only a little is true, the rest being false, is called a 'bean soup;' his state is bean-soupery." (The felicitous similarity between the syllables (B.S.) reminds us that The Ancients were already fed up with Bull Shit.).)

Baudrillard, titan that he is, has a nose that knows that something is rotten in the state of Denmark Capital, but his smelling sense is not very precise. Fortunately, he has studied the 'Class Material', so that much of what we get is true-in-part. Some remarks on Digital Capital that are correct, albeit not groundbreaking:

• "From now on, signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real (it is not that they just happen to be exchanged against each other, they do so on condition that they are no longer exchanged against the real)." (48)
• "Today all labor falls under a single definition, [. . .] service-labor." (61)
• "[Wages] are no longer in any proportional or equivalence relation at all, they are a sacrament, like a baptism (or the Extreme Unction)," (64)
• "Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value." (87)
• "Marxism and psychoanalysis [. . .] may yet do each other great collateral damage. We must not be deprived of this spectacle: they are only critical fields." (366) (already passé, but credit where it's due. . .)

But beyond these phrases from the Good Book, we are in a very cold space. Death (violent type), is subsequently presented as the appropriate response to the incessant circulation of signs:

"There is no other alternative; you will never abolish this power by staying alive, since there will have been no reversal of what has been given. Only the surrender of this life, retaliating against a deferred death with an immediate death, constitutes a radical response, and the only possibility of abolishing power. No revolutionary strategy can begin without the slave putting his own death back at stake, since this is what the master puts off in the différance from which he profits by securing his power. Refuse to be put to death, refuse to live in the mortal reprieve of power, refuse the duty of this life and never be quits with living, in effect be under obligation to settle this long-term credit through the slow death of labour, since this slow death does not alter the future of this abject dimension, in the fatality of power. Violent death changes everything," (91)

Certainly, violent revolution without-a-cause (empty teleology/eschatology) is destabilizing to any system, though, more than a focused critique-of-Capital, this section of the text has the character of a critique by smell. Not just the teleology of, "smells bad, throw the whole thing out of the refrigerator," but the imprecision of "I think it's coming from this container," and the instinctual revulsion of, "Stinky!" (A reminder for writers: the extended metaphor is only half as clever as you think it is.)

Violent death, as a gift that cannot be exchanged ("there is no counter-gift") constitutes an empty space (there is nothing after death), but this space is already being filled (in the same way an empty refrigerator continues to stink). Robbe-Grillet notes, "Metaphysics loves a vacuum, and rushes into it like smoke up a chimney; for, within immediate signification, we find the absurd, which is theoretically non-signification, but which as a matter of fact leads immediately, by a well-known metaphysical recuperation, to a new transcendence." Our bright-eyed revolutionary is giving himself over to the violent death act, perhaps for the sake of a 'better tomorrow.' To the extent that this act can be legibly inscribed with the signs of exchange, the violent death is already failing. We arrive at the position from which we hasten a violent death to the end that, "the system must itself itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide," (87) but one less legible than the "taking of hostages" (for exchange) Baudrillard prescribes. To go one level further than this would be to take those we had sought to protect as hostages. (This is already at the level of Kierkegaard's Demonic Dread which, in despair, renounces the ethical.) But just as in Baudrillard's analysis of "systems of totality" which collapse at the moment they triumph and become a total identity, the 'perfected' violent revolutionary act is no longer capable of being performed. The actor-beyond-exchange who is giving up everything --> for the future --> for nothing, is already the post-revolutionary who is cynically asking, "Why can't someone else do it?" — Excepting the (not infrequent) situation of the mental block. (Kierkegaard is also remarking on the man who is humorous because he has gone so far as to die for his cause, which upon further inspection, it appears he didn't believe).

This is perhaps why, in the most significant sentence in the text, Baudrillard pre-emptively walks back his later unequivocal exhortation to violence. In the second footnote to the preface: "Death ought never to be understood as the real event that affects a subject or a body, but as a form in which the determinacy of the subject and of value is lost. " (45) Nowhere else in Baudrillard will we have such a frank admission to playing loose with life that is actually being lived as someone else (e.g. another meaning of Waldman's poem above.) We are already suspicious of the phrase, "Security as Blackmail," (279) which the Sloterdijks and Baudrillards of the world wield against seatbelts and social security. The argument that we are helping the System out of the brutality it deserves (i.e. "the automobile death") is obliterated the by (socialist) maxim that nobody deserves anything (bad), which is already the basis of a more robust response to Capital, and perhaps one better appreciated by those already dead. ( )