“Transcommunism” is a concept I first developed for my paper delivered at the 2018 Applied Baudrillard Conference. That paper was titled “Transcommunism in the Transpolitical Age,” and it was already interested in the operationalization of the work of Jean Baudrillard.
Baudrillard began, perhaps, as some kind of Marxist or communist. Yet then his thought drifts away from the core concepts of (by now) traditional communist or “leftist” discourses. What then remains of “communism” as a form of politics expressing a kind of agape, or loving tendency toward all in the sphere of action?
If “communism” is a possible response to the question of “politics,” then transcommunism is supposed to be a response to Baudrillard’s concept of “transpolitics.”
It is very important to understand here that Baudrillard elaborated in his 1990 book The Transparency of Evil a conceptual design involving the prefix “trans” which is related to recent ideas of “trans politics” or “trans identity,” but at the same time Baudrillard’s use of this prefix is very different as well.
By “transpolitics,” Baudrillard means that everything has become political. Or, the conceptual sphere of “the political” has grown to encompass everything. Either way, it is no longer meaningful to say that something is political, since giving it this quality doesn’t distinguish it from anything else.
This is related to the philosophical topic of the unity of opposites, where you need the bad in order to appreciate the good, and so on. The state of “trans” in Baudrillard is reached when everything has gone to one side, and therefore the old distinction is no longer applicable.
A similar theme is present in the idea of problems being “dissolved” in the work of Ben Zweibelson. From page 18 of Beyond the Pale:
Dissolution means that one designs a way to transform the system so that in the emergent, new system what was previously seen as a problem is dissolved and thus no longer a major concern. Nevertheless, the new system formation itself will generate problems…
An example Zweibelson might give would be the problem of horse manure on the streets of major cities. This problem was not solved by streamlining waste collection or anything else directly related to the issue. Instead, this problem was dissolved when cars took over from horses.
Now there was no more problem with horse manure because the horses had been displaced. But as Zweibelson notes, the advent of this “superior” transportation method also brought with it many new problems.
To go back to Baudrillard, his idea of “trans” gets used in The Transparency of Evil to talk about transpolitics, transaesthetics, transsexuality, and transeconomics. In a similar way, the prefix means that “everything is X and nothing is X.”
There is actually a lot more design space that Baudrillard never takes up, for example “trans-history.” Maybe this term in particular gets avoided by Jean because there is the constant interplay between seeing the use of symbols as subject to placement in historical time; and yet also how our idea of historical time is constituted through our use of symbols.
This line of thinking will be relevant to another of my concepts coming up, “Semio-Subitocracy,” so keep an eye out for that.
Transcommunism is supposed to be built on this, and is designed to express the idea that everything is communism and nothing is communism.
As for the idea that everything is communism, I build this idea around the idea of primitive communism or symbolic exchange that Baudrillard invokes from time to time. The idea is that at some point we were in a good space of belonging with the universe. Or, if we still radically did not belong, at least our cultural processing of this was superior.
Now, we have this problem that we don’t feel at home here. Our societies address us very impersonally. No one is personally responsible for us except, apparently, ourselves. We don’t feel at home, and we kind of don’t like anyone else, and at the same time we are constantly being squeezed out by the fundamental dynamic of our “societies.”
So, not only are we “alienated” under a finance economy where we are personally responsible for all this ticky-tack bull, but also we distrust and dislike everyone else too much to really want to work with them to change it. On top of which, the whole rigged spiel of it seems to be careening into the ocean, and the whole thing is so stratified that it’s hard to even really know how to try and help stave off disaster.
And of course, you can’t. Disaster is here and is all we have known. We are in transdisaster territory.
The point of the story is that this present situation gives people the dream of a new communism to come. Crucially for me, a dream which long precedes Marx. Religious and spiritual, romantic poetic ideas of communism are also a good wellspring of inspiration.
Of course, this also opens up new problems. Christian communism makes sense, sure, but then what, are we converting everyone to be Christian, too? And what kind of Christian? In other words, religious stories offer the dream of uniting everyone under some terms, for example “We are all God’s children.”
Okay, who’s God? Okay, whose God?
And who’s “we”?
Transcommunism is basically the idea that primitive communism never went anywhere.
Baudrillard contemplates in “Carnival and Cannibal” a revision of his view of “the system” and “the symbolic.” See page 28 (page 19 of the PDF). Whereas before, he considered that “the system,” which he at times calls “semiocracy” (this is a constituent concept of the aforementioned “semio-subitocracy”); he considered that this system tried to expel the symbolic.
Our special and personal relationship to one-of-a-kind objects given to us by people we really know and care about is going away in favor of a more commercial relationship. Not a meaningful handmade gift, but a game console, for example. Not a meaningful politician, but whoever focus groups tend to favor.
That was the idea anyway. Now, Baudrillard is saying that “the system” actually assumes a high symbolic importance. I went over this in my last article.
My idea of Transcommunism builds off of this by positing that, of course, symbolic exchange never went anywhere. Baudrillard has written elsewhere that “there have only ever been symbolic stakes.”
This perspective emphasizes the symbolic importance of an infrastructure of gift-giving and obligation even within “alienated” society. A whole host of informal economies exist in order to respond to challenges unanswered by the official market. I have heard sermons preached about this idea, that everywhere people are helping each other, and that the world could never go on without this. (I can imagine Frank Wilderson III, noted anti-fan of “the world,” going like, yeah, those people should stop helping “the world” happen.)
At the same time, this theme of “everything is communism” is also highly metaphysical. To bring in a strained metaphor from physics, consider the idea of entangled particles. They undergo a certain process together, and then they influence each other instantly, faster than the speed of light. In “real time,” to pick another concept subject to design by Jean Baudrillard.
For example, from The Perfect Crime:
Fortunately, the objects which appear to us have always-already disappeared. Fortunately, nothing appears to us in real time, any more than do the stars in the night sky. If the speed of light were infinite, all the stars would be there simultaneously and the celestial vault would be an unbearable incandescence. Fortunately, nothing takes place in real time. Otherwise, we would be subjected, where information is concerned, to the light of all events, and the present would be an unbearable incandescence. Fortunately, we live on the basis of a vital illusion, on the basis of an absence, an unreality, a non-immediacy of things. Fortunately, nothing is instantaneous, simultaneous or contemporary. Fortunately, nothing is present or identical to itself. Fortunately, reality does not take place. Fortunately, the crime is never perfect.
Well, transcommunism also in a high-metaphysical way could suggest that maybe the crime is perfect after all. In other words, we do live in “real time.” The physics metaphor would be, some spooky things at the beginning of time mean that all particles are entangled together. They really all do affect each other instantly, and so in some sense in addition to a one electron universe we would have a one-everything universe.
This opens up the idea of a spiritual community of all sentient beings that everyone simply belongs to. We can think here of tendencies of universal salvation and apocatastasis which suppose that in the future everything will be reconciled together.
This seems great, until you realize that this universal beloved community—which basically exists now, even if its full completion is only destined to come at a later time, it is already pre-legitimized by the fact that this completion will come—this community doesn’t get you anything. This is a wonderful community of love that both enslaved people and slavers belong to, murderers and their victims, pampered well-off people and those deprived of the basic necessities of life.
And on the second hand, even with this idea of a promised fulfillment of the community, which is not just of people but of souls, remember, so that obligations can continue to be fulfilled after the death of someone, retroactively bringing the requisite honor to their lives, for example—even with the promise of a good end, the question again is: on whose terms?
Are we all doing well because we all accept Jesus? Or maybe because we all see ourselves as proletarian and decide that all of our collective and individual self-interests consist in abolishing class distinctions, which we all understand in the same way?
Or even, again, saying that we don’t need terms to make this happen, it just already is destined and basically already structures everything. There is nothing we have to do to make communism happen in this sense, it is the communion of all sentient beings along with everything else. Again, it doesn’t immediately seem to help you do anything or make anyone feel any better.
In conclusion,
Transcommunism is supposed to be a concept that helps think about what it would mean to apply Baudrillard’s ideas to politics. In actual fact, I am mainly interested in a few snippets of Baudrillard, where is he is saying how “the system” is an attempted response to the world existing without our having been consulted, and to all the uncertainties and things beyond our control.
In this sense, then, coming up with “a novel political strategy” (see Transparency)—or transpolitical style, more like—has to do with appreciating the basic symbolic coordinates of our situation and then thinking through the various forms of simulation and stylistic design which are possible in that environment.
This paper is also notable for introducing an innovation on the idea of transparency. Somewhere called by Baudrillard “the only ritual we have left,” transparency can get a bad rap. People want to see government transparency, but at the same time people want a lot of privacy, like people have a bunch of stuff they don’t want anyone else to know.
Going back to the idea of us all being entangled together, part of some cosmic “unity” (“DONT [impose your predicates of universalism'] ON ME”), the thing is that really there is no way to keep secrets. “The universe” knows what you did, and we are all “the universe.” So in a way, it’s okay, if you hadn’t done what you had done, nothing else would be the way it is. We have complex gratitude for these various existences we have, so everything can be accepted.
But you also are denied a kind of “being special” because everything is just doing what it is doing.
It’s in that vein that I really came to like the line from “Everywhere” by Michelle Branch: “Turn it inside out so I can see/ the part of you that’s drifting over me.”
In my paper on transcommunism, I suggest that the impulse to “reveal secrets” should be read in the context Baudrillard gives in Seduction that “the" secret” lies outside that which can be revealed. In other words, we should be very mindful of what we are doing and not doing when we “reveal information.”
What Baudrillard means here by “the secret” is related to the revelation of “the secret complicity” we are all engaged in that he references in Carnival and Cannibal. The ultimate secret is something non-expressible, like again, our co-embeddedness and co-creation of the whole reality plane that we think we are operating in.
All of the details of information we might collect, hide, and reveal are just facets of this greater secret. We can even be thinking about how from this perspective “God,” “the Absolute,” etc., in other words, WE, must keep our real nature a secret from ourselves. This is the only way that these “details” of our lives make any sense or carry any symbolic weight.
So, in my paper I am basically calling for greater transparency as a matter of policy. I in principle support the leak of any information to any person, and I also support people’s “dirty secrets” being revealed for the possible benefit of those who are mistreated by them. This is kind of an edgy thing, as I in principle support all “government” or “corporate” whistleblowers and spies and double-and triple-agents. The Atomic spies are big heroes, and we need more people like that now.
I sort of see myself as that in trying to make the social field more transparent for people. My style is also transparent in itself, since I don’t edit, and I’ll do a little self-revelation now and then to keep things really nice and grounded.
I’m at the end of the paper and I realized I didn’t spell out the “nothing is communism” side of transcommunism. Basically, if everything is this kind of “ontological communism,” where we are communing with all living beings because we were just all created in harmony with some kind of order, then there is no “political movement” which can represent this unity, since everything is an expression of it. This is kind of like shirk in Islam. If you are claiming that your kind of communism or even your form of political Islam, for example, is the special embodiment of the creative principle behind everything, then you are dishonoring everything else which is equally so.
We can also say that transcommunism destitutes some of the conceptual conditions of possibility of communism. We can easily deny the public/private distinction, for example, and again be in a position to say that, well, “private property” suddenly is an incoherent concept—we enter a kind of transprivacy where everything and nothing is “private.” At this point, capitalist and communism can cease to become meaningful political concepts.
So the question is raised, to what extent is this project about reimagining what it takes to do something like communism under the conditions of Baudrillard’s transpolitical? Or is this whole exercise just a way to keep exploding out conceptual use and “boxing out” a discursive universe?
I would say in closing that to this point two points of practice have been collected:
Churning through concepts, always replacing key terms with other ones; the point is not to get too reliant on one given framing
Make things more transparent; the point is to do what’ s novel, so what’s known to one should be known to all. The bulk of design experimentation should be going into what makes it more possible to be transparent. We know then that some aspects of the problem space will “dissolve,” and further complexities will begin…