Manipulation

Definition

Manipulation, in Fatal Strategies (1983), is Baudrillard's name for the soft technology of power in the transpolitical era — governance by blackmail rather than interdiction, by solicitation rather than command. "The entire sphere of manipulation is of the same order. Manipulation is a soft technology of violence by blackmail. And blackmail always functions by taking hostage a parcel of the other, a secret, an affect, a desire, a pleasure, his suffering, his death." Its characteristic form is the suspended threat: "In dissuasion it is no longer, 'Don't do that,' but rather, 'if you don't do it…' And it stops there." Crucially, for Baudrillard manipulation is symmetric, not unilateral: in a poll or an interview "the one who asks the question has no more autonomy… There can be no strategy on his part; there is manipulation on both sides." The concept thus belongs with his theory of the hostage and his critique of voluntary servitude: power no longer dominates a subject but solicits a response, and the object answers with its own ruse. See the-hostage, transpolitical, voluntary-servitude, objective-irony.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "Manipulation is a soft technology of violence by blackmail"; "manipulation on both sides" (1983).
• Michel de Certeau — the strategy/tactic distinction that Baudrillard's "manipulation on both sides" destabilizes.

Related Concepts

• The Hostage — blackmail's object.
• The Transpolitical — the regime in which manipulation replaces law.
• Voluntary Servitude — the obedience exploitation manipulates.
• Objective Irony — the object's answer to manipulation.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — "Figures of the Transpolitical": manipulation as soft technology; "manipulation on both sides"; blackmail and dissuasion.
• 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

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