With the Idea That People’s Lives are Arbitrary Trajectories
A strange pride obliges us not only to possess the other, but also to force out his secret, not only to be precious to him, but to be fatal. The voluptuousness of the gray imminence: the art of making the other disappear. A whole ceremony is required for this.
First follow people you meet in the street, at random, for an hour, two hours, brief sequences, disorganized ~ with the idea that people’s lives are arbitrary trajectories, directionless, going nowhere, and for this very reason they are fascinating. The network of the other is used as a means of absenting yourself from yourself. You exist only in the other’s trace, but without his knowledge; in fact you follow your own trace almost without knowing it yourself. It is therefore not in order to discover something about the other, nor about where he’s going, nor a “drift” in quest of some random aleatory course: all this, which corresponds to various contemporary ideologies, isn’t particularly seductive, whereas this enterprise itself depends entirely on seduction.
~Jean Baudrillard
Fatal Strategies (Tr. Philip Beitchman & W.G.J. Niesluchowski) ~ NY : Semiotext(e), 1990 / pg 129
