Chance

Definition

Chance, in Fatal Strategies (1983, "The Fatal, or, Reversible Imminence"), is Baudrillard's great foil: the modern, statistical, causal order that he argues was invented — and whose opposite, fatality, is the world's true course. "The only chance there is is the one we've artificially produced by the liquidation of forms. Chance never existed… There is no void, and for there to be chance there must be a void." Where causality rules, chance is the residual randomness of disconnected elements; but for Baudrillard this neutral, indifferent world is a product of reason's dismantling of appearances: "Reason seeks to break the incessant cycle of appearances. Chance—the possibility of indeterminate elements, their respective indifference, and, in a word, their freedom—results from this dismantling." The book's counter-thesis is that "everything bursts with connection, seduction; nothing is isolated, nothing happens by chance—there is total correlation." Chance is thus not the truth of the world but "the purgatory of causality, where souls are waiting to be given back their bodies, where effects are waiting for their cause." It arrives, historically, with the void and the vacuum (Pascal, Torricelli), and its emblem is the gambler, who "doesn't believe in chance but only in Luck" — "no one gives up on destiny; this is why no one believes in statistics." The concept is the negative against which destiny, ceremony, and reversibility are defined. See destiny, reversibility, ceremony-of-the-world, catastrophe.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "Chance never existed"; "Chance is the purgatory of causality"; "no chance will ever abolish fate" (1983).
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — "the excess of the signifier" as the non-random, magical order against chance.
• Friedrich Nietzsche — the "game of dice with the universe" and the Eternal Return that Baudrillard re-inflects.
• Blaise Pascal (not yet paged) — the wager and the discovery of chance/vacuum, named as the origin of modern neutrality.
• Not yet paged: Torricelli, David Ruelle (chaos theory), A. Verdet — the scientific registers Baudrillard engages.

Related Concepts

• Destiny — chance's opposite: "The fatal is absolutely opposed to the accidental."
• Reversibility — "reversion and reversibility" over "law… or chance."
• The Ceremony of the World — "Desire and chance are stricken from the ceremony."
• Catastrophe — catastrophe is "not… chance or indeterminacy" but the linkage of appearances.
• Fatal Strategies — chance is the "banal strategy" the fatal strategy opposes.
• The Masses — "the involuntary humor of polls"; "no one believes in statistics."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Fatal, or, Reversible Imminence": "Chance tires me.—God"; "there is no chance"; the gambler's Luck; chance as the purgatory of causality; Pascal/Torricelli.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the determinacy/simulacra frame.
• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the earlier fascination with models, series, and chance in the object-system.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Baudrillard's dismissal of chance depends on a strong claim ("there is no void") that contradicts modern physics. Is the concept an ontology or a rhetorical antithesis?
• The gambler is the concept's hero. Does the wiki's material on play, games, and the rule of the game (Perec, Carley, Huizinga) support or contest the reading?
• Is "no one believes in statistics" an empirical claim? The wiki should keep it flagged as an assertion, not a finding.