Jean Baudrillard - Excerpt from 'Seduction'(1979)
'...total liberty, or total indeterminacy are not opposed to meaning. One
can produce meaning simply by playing with chance or disorder. New diagonals
of meaning, new sequences can be engendered from the untamed flood tides
of desire.... As with chance, we must not underestimate the power of desire
to engender (logical) monsters.
One does not escape meaning by dissociation, disconnection or deterritorialization
. One escapes meaning by replacing it with a more radical simulacrum, a
still more conventional order - like the alphabetical order for Barthes,
or the rules of a game, or the innumerable rituals of everyday life which
frustrate both the (political, historical or social) order of meaning and
the disorder (chance) which one would impose on them. Indeterminacy, dissociation
or proliferation in the form of a star or rhizome only generalize meaning's
sphere of influence to the entire sphere of non-sense. That is, they merely
generalize meaning's pure form, an abstract finality with neither a determinate
end nor contents . Only rituals abolish meaning.'
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