The Disappearance of Objects in "Surmodernity": From Object-images to Meta-objects

This article examines various modes of disappearance of objects from modernity to the latest stage of postmodernity. From the loss of the aura to the proliferation of fractal images, whether it be in literature, contemporary art, or daily life, objects undergo a series of mutations (object-signs, image-objects, objectimages, meta-objects) that lead to a new kind of obscenity in which "jouissance" 'pleasure' is released into the madness of a vision obdurated by pathos and panopticism. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol20/iss2/3 The Disappearance of Objects in "Surmodernity ": From Object-images to Meta-objects Dominique D. Fisher University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill In times of "surmodernity" where simulacra assume an appearance of reality, where novelty turns into the mere repetition of the same, the status of contemporary objects becomes extremely complex, if not entirely illusory.' What then defines the specificity of objects-or object-signs-in a world highly dominated by screen culture a world perhaps already eclipsed by hyperrealism, and now, by virtual reality?2 At this stage of simulation, can objects even exist? The extreme velocity of thi diffusion of information on a planetary scale has already put into question the very existence of events and images. As images paradoxically attempt to achieve a greater effect of reality, they dissolve into a mere nuclear succession: "An image is no longer sufficient as proof of reality; others are necessary to reinforce it: there where reality has disappeared, images proclaim that they exist because they themselves reproduce reproductions," writes Youssef Ishaghpour (31). Similarly Jean Baudrillard has demonstrated that, in fact, the Gulf war never really happened and, in the same line of thought, that the year 2000 may well never arrive: "history has disappeared because we will never be able to detach [it] from [its] model of perfection, which is at the same time [its] model of simulation, of [its] forced assumption in a transgressed truth, which is also [its] point of inertia and [its] point of no-return" (Kroker 40).3 This "post-historical" condition not only reverses progress into routine and immobility, but expands to encompass a trivialization and cultural obliteration of the very means by which we apprehend everyday life. Language itself takes on the appearance of atomized advertising discourse. Marc Auge, using the example of newsletters printed by travel agencies, 1 Fisher: The Disappearance of Objects in "Surmodernity": From Object-image Published by New Prairie Press 324 STCL, Volume 20, No. 2 (Summer, 1996) asserts that history and exoticism function as quotes in a written text (138). The homogenization of information, history, and spectacle has reduced images, language, and objects to atoms of a sole signifying process of sameness within the make-believe. It is now clear that postulating the end of the object alongside the disappearance of aura and history does not suffice to explain the status of the object in "surmodernity." Indeed, Roland Barthes had already anticipated the end of the object in his study of RobbeGrillet. Contrary to classical objects, objects in Robbe-Grillet's work, whether taken from the urban environment or from "ordinary surroundings," are bearers of silence. For Barthes, it is precisely this silence that "establishes the object's limit: this slice of tomato in an automat sandwich, described according to RobbeGrillet's method, constitutes an object without heredity, without associations and without references, a stubborn object rigorously enclosed within the order of its particles, suggestive of nothing but itself, and not involving its reader in a functional or substantial elsewhere" (15). Before Robbe-Grillet, Walter Benjamin had already shown that modernity had dismissed the object from its aura and, therefore, from its interiority as well as its exteriority. Void of its referent, the object in modernity ceases to acquire a symbolic value. Bearer of a multiplicity of meanings, the object is allegorized and its mode of reproducibility corresponds to the circulation of value (as a pure value of exchange) specific to a capitalist system. De-objectified (de-chosifie) and de-formalized, the modern object merges into theatricality.° The object in modernity tends to dissolve into a network of broken lines that allow for the infinite multiplication of space. Examples of this are to be found in Edvard Munch's painting of the scream in which the "dialectic of loops and spirals" creates a structural equivalence between pictorial and auditory signs so as to fuse them into a new visible medium, that of the "scream running through nature."' Similarly, in Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire's quest for a new poetic prose aims to level musicality and images by attempting to undo figures and objects into a new rhythmical entity, something Mallarme later puts into practice.6 In modernity, objects inscribe themselves into a fragmentary system of representation (the mode is fetishistic: the part for the whole) and their mode of inscription remains unsteady: the promotion of their optical dimension generates an infinite circulation of signs from one mode of representation to the other, as in Tableaux parisiens.7 This is not only applicable, of course, to the artistic or 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 20, Iss. 2 [1996], Art. 3 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol20/iss2/3 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1393