he utopia of a correspondence with the world striven for by classical theory, but never to be achieved, like its ability to reshape the world according to its image, can only come about due to a difference between it and the world, insofar as theory must always also leave something out of the world or something escapes from the world to it: Baudrillard speaks here of the need to acknowledge the illusion of facts-which are what they are, but which are also always what they are not. (Baudrillard 1992b) Just as classical theory and philosophy as representation attempt to establish equivalence between thought/sign and object/real, so too does the system continually attempt to achieve this equivalence. Equivalence here does not mean equality, but a possible transformation, which here proceeds unilaterally from the system, which is characterized by a definite order and constitutive rules, and is not reciprocal. For Baudrillard, on the other hand, radical thought and the real are not at all identical, nor can they be subjected to a representational relation, and it is the unbroken alterity that maintains the tension between the two poles. This tension also ensures the possibility that both thought and the world can become an event. (Baudrillard 1992b: 150) An important problem of theories and philosophies after Hegel is how to think an Other to this system that admits no Other because Otherness is always already its own inner moment or wants to become. One is interested in the Other only insofar as it is an aspect of the logic of the system. The becoming-other of the system is interpreted by Hegel as a negation, which, however, is returned to a negation that secures the identity of the system through reflection. The figure of negation through the surrender to the other and the capture of the other as a return into itself can indeed produce another other, but what remains decisive is the ever-repeating abstract figure of the relation to an other that is recaptured as a distinguished qua negation of negation.
The way out now, for Rex Butler, who has written one of the best books on Baudrillard, is not simply to refute or invent alternatives to Hegel, but to think of what is excluded and precisely does not enable the all-inclusion of the system, this other that must be excluded, however, precisely to ensure that the system has no outside. (Butler 1999: 168) For Baudrillard, the question of alterity always arises within the principle of duality, which is based on regulated opposites, although alterity effectiveness cannot be discussed in classical (restricted-economic) terms. However, Baudrillard states that the integrationist tendency of the system, take for instance the production of identical forms in cloning, today consists in reducing duality to identity and one, in either domesticating or even erasing the other, with the consequence that like can only be exchanged with like, something that for Baudrillard cannot work in the long run because it excludes precisely the other and at the same time introduces an artificial exchange that is based on nothing, or like capital is based on a tautology. Now, when the principles of equilibrium, exchange and causality come into crisis, the system is confronted with the fact that the exchange with the Other becomes impossible, with which it either runs into the implosion trap or is transferred into hypertrophy (of the same from the same). The impossible exchange is to be understood, on the one hand, as the systemic logic that goes to the extreme, and, on the other hand, as an extension of the principle of symbolic exchange that haunts systems (and modern social institutions).
But already with duality, whose rule of the game is indicated by exchange, and without which there can actually be no otherness, doubts arise for Baudrillard, insofar as for him the dual positions also mutually condition and exchange themselves against each other, and thus in their mutual attraction remain integrative parts of the system. Baudrillard is thus confronted with the (UN)compatibility of a fundamental duality and a radical alterity. Despite the simulation hypothesis, however, there remains the radical alterity or nothingness that is brought into play rather than exchanged in Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic exchange despite reversibility (in exchange). Death, illusion, absence, the negative, evil, etc. cannot be subsumed under the law of value and general equivalence. In the system of simulation, however, the Other must not be eradicated or excluded either, but it must be flattened, liberated, recognized and appreciated in the play of differences. The distinction between a form of alterity that is structurally irreducible, neither comparable nor combatable, and a form of difference that is based on the establishment of criteria by which difference is determined, is of central importance. Baudrillard, in reference to alterity, speaks with Klossowski and Nietzsche of the non-interchangeable depth of the human being. If there is a gift, the given of the gift must not return to the giver, it must not circulate and be exchanged, it must not be exhausted by the movement of the circulation of the circle in the form of the return to the starting point. If the figure of the circle is essential, then the gift must remain an economic gift. For Derrida, a strangeness to the circle must be maintained, and in that sense the gift is the impossible. Not impossible, but the impossible. It is in this sense then that Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange is to be understood.
The crux of theory for Baudrillard, then, is on the one hand to make an immanent statement or an immanent description/analysis of a system that follows its inner logic including a constant integration of the Other to the bitter end, thus adding nothing to the system qua theory and yet completely reversing it, thus showing that the system is impossible without this Other, which the system, however, also seeks to make impossible. (Ibid.: 154) Beyond description, then, the theory nevertheless keeps pushing toward an event in the system that it apparently merely describes. It is a theory that provides a description of the system by speaking of it in terms of reality, and at the same time a prescription of the system that indicates that it either excludes or cannot capture the real. Baudrillard’s own complex position is that he must write simultaneously outside and inside the systems of simulation. (Ibid.) Thus, in a sense, he is always writing theory-fiction. He must speak against the systems in the name of the real, and he must simultaneously simulate or „double“ them. (Ibid.: 119ff.) Baudrillard must represent something and at the same time know that it is not to be represented. So, on the one hand, Baudrillard does have to name an outside that the systems try to exclude; on the other hand, he has to realize that he cannot name this outside because, on the one hand, every outside is apparently only an effect of the system itself, and on the other hand, a positive identification of the outside would only mean a relapse into romanticism. There is apparently a conformity of the world with the system, which consists in the fact that it can only be seen with its image. But if the system distances itself from the real with increasing perfection, this also means that it becomes more real than ever before, it just creates reality effects in permanence. It becomes more real than real, that is, it produces a hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself as reality. We will come to the distinction between the real and reality. Even the description of the present world as a simulation world or at least as the tendency of a world-simulation, which is also a gain of knowledge, turns into a fictitious gain, if the simulation world does not allow an outside and appropriates the gain. A groundless becoming in virtuality now occurs (Röttgers 2021: 374), with reality and virtual reality becoming increasingly indistinguishable; simulations or virtual reality now manage and process their codes and their processes at least tendentially without subjects, i.e., self-acting. Even the future is still virtually generated and is truer than a contingent present. In this process, future is not annulled because it is absent or used up, but because there is too much future, too much risk, to secure one future – over any other. At the same time, Baudrillard must continue to think what is excluded by the system itself.
Thus, it is necessary to develop a „double strategy,“ namely, the ability to keep both strands in mind at the same time. When Baudrillard tries to think the outside of the systems of simulation, he must, on the one hand, target this outside as the impossible (it cannot be positivized: one cannot form an image of it), this outside that they actually exclude; on the other hand, he must recognize that he cannot name this outside also because any outside is only an effect of the system itself. On the one hand, he must think what is outside or different from the system of simulation; on the other hand, he must think what is excluded by the simulation, insofar as it integrates every outside precisely. (Butler 1999, 23-24) Translated into the language of systems theory, this means that the system, which stands for the distinction, communicates the inside/outside distinction inside, or, to put it another way, every view of the system is its view, but it separates itself from the not-itself at the same time, although this is only ever possible through an internal operation. For Peter Fuchs, autopoiesis equals Derrida’s différance. For Derrida, the stratagem of différance already combines the medial forms of displacement and difference: the first „moment“ is here constituted by the second. This is by no means a difference constituted by fixed positive terms (whose presence is thus presupposed); rather, différance emphasizes difference and the powers of an activity to postpone something until later, to account for time and forces in an operation. But the différance itself still neutralizes the active aspect of being active and thus actually announces a new medial form, which does not contain a concept, but rather only provides the possibility for any conceptual system. If the concepts are constituted by the différance, then they mutually redirect each other to necessarily produce a not complete determination, indeed an indetermination, that is, a displacement of identity that delays or postpones any presumed identity of the concept to itself, or, to put it differently, one speaks of a concept that never arrives. The différance is always only crossed out that which presents the present, and thus it exists beyond the categories of being and non-being. (Cf. Fuchs 2001: 121) As always the same autoreferential process, capital generates the topology of the social by imposing the exterior as far as possible into its interior; it synthesizes the exterior by trying to bind and integrate any exogenous conflicts and tensions in order to possibly still capitalize on them. If the multiple registers of exteriority are bound, we are dealing with capital as extimacy (Ibid.: 103), a system in which every exterior circulates as its exterior within its interior. However, this cannot succeed. Systems can think about themselves and integrate, but precisely in the form of autopoiesis, which cannot erase the mode of incompleteness and that of incomplete information. They can treat themselves as object or as subject, but only in the incompleteness that characterizes the (paradoxical) self-reference of subjects. That which the system apprehends as self and as integration is, fundamentally, partial, although as apprehension is total for the system, since it sees only what it sees, and does not see what it does not see.
For example, it shows that an observer in the torus space or Möbius strip, if one thinks in spatial dimensions, can reach every space place, but cannot cross any boundary, but always touch it only from the other side. Thus the inside/outside distinction becomes fragile. One must go now from a two-dimensional space also into the three-dimensionality, thus into the depth.
Systems which can no longer make the distinctions internally are, for Peter Fuchs, unjects which have the property of having no property. At this unject every metaphor of totality breaks down. The system communicates precisely when content and meaning are dispensed with, except that meaning says something. This comes close to Baudrillard’s thought that the system of simulation the differences it makes are those of indifference. But can such a fluid system exclude the other or radical alterity by integrating it?
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