Jean Baudrillard In the Shadow of the Millennium (Or the Suspense of the Year 2000) The perfect symbol of the end of the century is (or was rather) the numerical clock at the Beaubourg (Centre Georges Pompidou) in Paris. There, the race against time was measured in millions of seconds. The Beaubourg clock illustrates the reversal of time characteristic of our contemporary modernity. Time is no longer counted from its point of origin, as a progressive succession. It is rather subtracted from the end (5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0). It is like a bomb with delayed effect. The end of time is no longer the symbolic completion of history, but the mark of a possible fatigue, of a regressive countdown. We are no longer living according to a projected vision of progress or production. The final illusion of history has disappeared since history is now encapsulated in a numerical countdown (just as the final illusion of humankind disappears when man is encapsulated in genetic computations). Counting the seconds from now to the end means that the end is near, that one has already gone beyond the end. By the way, the clock's own fate at the Beaubourg was interesting too. It was taken down six months ago and placed in a safe where it continues to work until the end. But nobody can see it. It is as if political authorities were afraid of what could happen if we were able to see the end of this live (living) countdown (it was replaced with a billboard on the Eiffel Tower, but this one only marks down the days until the millennium, which is far less dramatic). They were perhaps afraid of a sudden millenarian panic. Who knows? It may also be that the real time of contemporary life can no longer deal with chronological time. No matter what the reason was, the clock has disappeared, and this really looks like an attempt to undercut the advent of the Year 2000, a way of recalling it and sending it back to the warehouse to ward off its potential effects. At the Beaubourg, the Year 2000 will not take place. We're waiting for the Year 2000 and holding our breath at the same time. No matter which event we are referring to - internet, globalization, Europe, the single currency, cloning, scandals - the only important outcome at the century's end is precisely that: the end of the century. It is only thanks to the end of the century that all the other events can be held in suspense. It is the only event that can produce unpredictable effects. It is in fact a non-event, but a fateful non-event, caused by some sort of numerical magic. There is a magical expectation which is no longer that of God's Kingdom as in the Year 1000. But it is still millenarian, that is to say, beside or beyond history. We are already in the anticipated void of the Year 2000, in its shadow, as if it were an approaching asteroid. Just as any electoral deadline freezes political life a year ahead of time, so does the shadow of the millennium which creates an empty vortex that swallows the entire century. It revises all historical requirements to the point of erasing the very marks of history (and of the 20th century). We dig in the archives. We settle old accounts. We revive memories (including the memory of the Year 2000 in anticipation, as if it had already taken place). We launder and purify to desperately try to end the century with a politically correct balance sheet. This is by and large a question of historical purification. The entire 20th century is on trial. And this is new. None of the previous centuries did that. What they did was history. What we are doing is history's trial. In a sense, we do not believe in the Year 2000. When people talk about plans, platforms, predictions for 2005, 2010 or 2020, we do not really believe them. This is not the future, this is fiction. This is another world because, for us, the symbolic break in time creates a symbolic break in the mind. The only thing we try to imagine is how to get rid of our history which weighs so much and then start all over again. And we dream of any event that would come from outside, from another history. Such a fantasy, such a secret conjuration of the millennium could shift things around. Something is imminent, we can feel it. And it is neither political nor economic. It is about pure time, the numerical purity of time and its symbolic deadline. Even if predicted, the event is unpredictable. It is a potential accident. It is already called a real catastrophe for the programming of millions of computers worldwide. We are in the wake of an event that not only sucks up the future but already spits out the signification of current events, and, at times, regurgitates memory and history. Behind the question of the Year 2000, the more general problem is that of the end, of what is beyond the end or, on the contrary, of the retrospective movement caused by the proximity of the end. Are we at the end of history, beyond history, or still in an endless history? How to jump over the shadow of the millennium? How to jump over one's shadow (particularly when it is gone; similar to Peter Schlemihl's hero, we've sold it to the devil)? How to go through the century when we are caught in an indefinite work of mourning, in the mourning of the events, the ideologies, the violent situations which marked this century? How to surpass the century when none of its problems have been solved? Apologies, trials, memorial services give the impression that we are trying to rewind (repasser) the film of the 20th century, that we are straining (repasser) all past events through the filter of memory, not to give them meaning (which they have lost in the course of time), but to launder them. Laundering (cleansing) is the primordial activity of the century's end: dirty history, dirty money, corrupted consciences, polluted planet. Laundering as in the hygienic purifying of the body, but also as in the ethnic and racial cleansing of populations. We are jumping into the abyss of a regressing history, falling for the nostalgia of a revised and resubmitted past, and, in so doing, we are losing the imagination of the future. That's why several years ago I came up with the notion that the Year 2000 would not take place. It would not take place simply because this century's history has already ended and we are in the process of constantly reliving it. Metaphorically speaking, we'll never be in the future. Our millenarianism has no tomorrow. The millenarian spirit of the Year 1000 was experienced as an immense fear. But at least it foreshadowed a parousia and the advent of God's kingdom. Today, our prospects are grim and uncertain. What is left of millenarian expectations is a reverse countdown. [Let me open a parenthesis to talk about the question of prediction and its failure. As you know, I had announced that "the Gulf War did not take place." Contrary to traditional prophets who always predict that something will happen, I had announced that something would not happen. I am the opposite type of prophet. In any case, prophecies are always wrong. What the prophets announce never takes place. So, when I say that something will not take place, it will then take place. The Gulf War did take place. And the Year 2000 will in all likelihood take place too. But a prophecy does not talk about reality, just as a promise is never intended to be kept. The prophecy calls for the end; it talks about what is beyond the end. It incants the advent of the end at the very moment that things take place (dans le deroulement meme des choses)]. In a countdown, the time that's left until the end has already been counted. So, we are living time and history in a sort of past-comatose state. This causes an endless crisis. It's no longer the future that is ahead of us, but the impossibility to end it all and to see beyond the end. As the memory of the future, prediction vanishes in exactly the same amount as past memory does. When everything can be seen, nothing else can be foreseen <1>. What's beyond the end? Well, beyond the end, there is virtual reality, that is to say, the horizon of a programmed reality in which all our physiological and social functions (memory, affect, intelligence, sexuality, work) gradually become useless. Beyond the end, in the era of the transpolitical, the transaesthetic, or the transsexual, all our desiring machines first become tiny mechanisms of spectacle, and finally turn into celibate machines which exhaust all their capabilities in an empty vortex, as in Duchamp's work. The countdown is the code for the automatic disappearance of the world. What's left to be done when everything is already calculated, subtracted, realized in advance? Our problem is no longer what to do with real events, with real violence, but what to do with events that did not take place, that never had the time to take place? No longer the question: what are you doing after the orgy, the orgy of history, of freedom, of modernity? But rather: what are you doing when the orgy no longer takes place? In fact, one has to wonder if modernity itself even took place. Was there ever such a thing as progress, as the advent of freedom? The linear progression of modernity and technological innovation is broken. The long thread of history has become an inextricable knot. And the last big "historical" event, the collapse of the Berlin wall, simply marked history's great repentance. Instead of moving toward new prospects, history is bursting into distant splinters which are but the reactivation of events that we thought had occurred a long time ago. Beyond the Wall of Time (our asymptotic end), we only find broken lines that break in all directions. That's what globalization is. With globalization, all [human/social] <2> functions are expanded in a void. They are spread out on a planetary scale which becomes a more an...
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