Page 148

 
The Other Brecht II / Der andere Brecht II 
since they smack of the subjective factor and of dialectics. He 
concentrates instead on the aspect of ritual in ancient religions 
and emphasizes their fallout in ceremonial prescriptions, a 
project far more congenial to his notion of the omnipresent and 
"overabundant order of the signifier." Under the aegis of 
this order the aesthetic strategy of the "endless reproduction 
of a form without content" finds its justification alongside the 
play of fashion, commercials and the ceremonial activities of 
the Rococo court or of a Brahmin's ablutions. Far from testify- 
ing to the hollowness of human endeavor, these strategies are 
endowed with the force to stem the tide of the onslaught of 
information and of meaning in the media or simply to acceler- 
ate the force of implosion. 
    In the marked absence of the dialectic Baudrillard's cata- 
 clysmic description of potentialization does provide a convinc- 
 ing movement out of a stagnant situation. Once the lines of 
 separation have been drawn too neatly around rationalism, 
 value, meaning, truth, etc., what are the stakes remaining for 
 any strategy, however ironic? Perhaps that is why he has 
 chanced upon the concept of potentialization. It is clearly yet 
 another slip into dialectics in its aspect of a transition from 
 quantity into quality. And perhaps Baudrillard's ironic strate- 
 gies of trying to extricate himself from the sticky web of the 
 dialectic only draw him into it more and more thoroughly. This 
 perspective opens interesting avenues of investigation, not the 
 least of which would be a careful account of Brechtian distanc- 
 ing in terms of an ironic strategy. 
    Such a project founders immediately, of course, on the 
notion of a critical subject, which is at the crux of Brechtian 
media theory. Distancing is not just an aesthetic principle: like 
all of Brecht's formal strategies, it very emphatically has a 
political dimension. Although it is a toned-down version of the 
Lehrstiuck and its grand exercise in learning how to be a criti- 
cal subject, it nevertheless enables the subject's critical po- 
tential and thus puts into play the dialectical principle of 
negation. Baudrillard's overriding theoretical concern, on the 
other hand, is his declared antagonism to the dialectic: "What 
I try to do...is to try to get out of the subjectivity/objectivity 
dialectic, in order to reach a point where I can make of the 
system an object, a pure object, one with no meaning whatso- 
ever."' The effect of distance, which Baudrillard concedes to 
the stage, is a thing of the past and has been superseded by 
the relentless flow of images and information to which the 
masses are wired and which has brought about the era of 
148