The Transpolitical

Definition

The transpolitical is Baudrillard's term, in Fatal Strategies (1983), for the mode of disappearance of the political, the social, the historical, the body, and every other scene — a "transparency and obscenity of all structures in a destructured universe." "The transpolitical is the transparency and obscenity of change in a dehistoricized universe, the transparency and obscenity of information in a universe emptied of event… of the social in the masses, of the political in terror, of the body in obesity and genetic cloning… The end of the secret — the irruption of transparency." It is "the mode of disappearance of all of that (it is no longer the mode of production but the mode of disappearance that excites us); it is the malicious curvature that puts an end to the horizon of meaning." Its periodization: "The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness, and revolution. The era of the transpolitical is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence." Where everything becomes political or social, the category reaches its maximal extension and "marks a point of banalisation… the beginning of the transpolitical sphere that is first of all that of their disappearance." Its typical figures — the obese, the hostage, the obscene, the masses — are "figures of an exacerbated indifference." The concept is the book's umbrella for the social/political half of its argument, as ecstasy and simulation are for the semiotic half. See obscenity, anomie-and-anomaly, the-masses, the-hostage, catastrophe.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "the transparency and obscenity of all structures in a destructured universe"; "the malicious curvature that puts an end to the horizon of meaning" (1983).
• Edward W. Soja — the wiki's urban register of the transpolitical's "dehistoricized" space; the Exopolis and the Simcity as its built corollaries.
• Michel Foucault — the panopticon and biopower, whose era Baudrillard declares ended (see end-of-the-panopticon).

Related Concepts

• Obscenity — the transpolitical's aesthetic register: over-representation, the loss of the scene.
• Anomie and Anomaly — the transpolitical's periodizing distinction (law vs. norm).
• The Masses — "the only transpolitical condition."
• The Hostage — "the only transpolitical act is terrorism."
• Catastrophe — the transpolitical event: "an event without consequences."
• The Secret — what the transpolitical dissolves.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "Figures of the Transpolitical"; "the transparency and obscenity of all structures in a destructured universe"; "The era of the transpolitical is that of anomaly"; the obese, the hostage, the obscene.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the spatial corollaries (the Exopolis, the Carceral Archipelago, SimCity) of the dehistoricized metropolis.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the media-transparency condition of "no more media in the literal sense."
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the 'Figures of the Transpolitical' read as the social's self-surpassing: terrorism and hostage-taking not as armed struggle but as the moment "where we can see the constitutive limits to the social" (p. 89); the security system's three stages ending in "panic and terror" (FS, 37); "it is impossible to say which comes first here: terrorism or the social" (p. 92); and the conclusion that "Terrorism seduces the social" — "It is by appearing not to follow the social that terrorism makes the social follow it" (p. 93). See the-hostage, seduction, double-strategy.

Open Questions

• Is the transpolitical a diagnosis of contemporary politics or a self-fulfilling rhetoric? Its evidence (terrorism, polls, obesity) is dated to the early 1980s.
• Does the concept leave any space for political agency? Baudrillard's transpolitical figures are all defined by their disappearance — even the "transpolitical act," terrorism, "has no meaning or political efficacy."