Page 147

 
Roswitha Mueller 
    becoming more commodity than commodity...push to the 
    absolute its division of value. No dialectic between the 
    two.... The only radical and modern answer: potentiate 
    what is new, original, unexpected in the commodity --for 
    example, its formal indifference to utility and value, the 
    preeminence given to circulation.' 
A theoretical explanation for such an advocacy can finally only 
be sought in a leap of faith which resigns itself to the thought 
or even finds enjoyment in it that things will be what they will 
be, regardless of human interference. And, in one more demon- 
stration of his aversion to dialectical thinking, Baudrillard 
neatly separates the notion of chance from that of destiny. 
Unable to conceive of the unity of chance and necessity, he sets 
up destiny, necessity and fatality above chance in a final 
gridlock of predestination. However, his reluctance to tolerate 
contrasting concepts is not extended to the treatment of 
discrete levels of investigation as is demonstrated in his 
mixing of ontology and linguistics which quickly ends in an 
apotheosis of the signifier, the "necessity" superior to all 
arbirary connections (151). And once this "superior necessity"
is established it can act as a conductor to any number of 
registers welded together in rampant analogies: 
    This is the secret of advertising, fashion, gambling, of all 
    the lewd systems that break apart moral energies and 
    liberate immoral energies, those that feed gaily on the 
    signs of things alone, in defiance of their truth. In this 
    they go back to magical and archaic energies which have 
    always gambled on the omnipotence of thought against the 
    power of the real world, immoral energy that shatters 
    meaning....23 
Here Baudrillard is not taking his own advice when he places 
theory, like ceremony and ritual, at the portals of knowledge 
to stand guard against "the viviparous obscenity of the 
confusion of ideas, struggling against the promiscuity of 
concepts.... 
    To be sure, reversibility and potentialization are ancient 
metaphysical concepts, the result of human observation of 
cosmic laws. However, in all of the ancient systems human 
actions are never divorced from these laws; they may be over- 
ridden by them but are nevertheless conceived in relation to 
them. Baudrillard stays far away from these considerations 
147