Voluntary Servitude

Definition

Voluntary servitude, in Fatal Strategies (1983), is Baudrillard's re-reading of La Boétie's classic problem through the lens of the object and the masses. Rejecting both the alienation model (the subject enslaved against its true desire) and the fear model, Baudrillard argues that obedience secretly contains a fatal disobedience: "obedience, in effect, is a banal strategy, which doesn't need to be explained, for it secretly contains—all obedience secretly contains—a fatal disobedience to the symbolic order." This is the ground of his theory of the masses: "The masses know that they know nothing and they have no desire to know. The masses know they are powerless, and they don't want power." Their passivity ("sovereign lack of will," "a game of irresponsibility, ironic challenge") is a "massive de-volition and withdrawal of the will" — a "strategy of disillusion with their 'own' desire." The book's provocative formulation: "Choice is an ignoble imperative"; "nothing is more seductive… than not to know what it wants, to be at the same time delivered from choice." Baudrillard's offered therapy is not liberation but the "spiral of worsening": "there is no liberation but this one: in the deepening of negative conditions." The concept is his most direct confrontation with a politics of emancipation, and the pivot of the book's "For a Principle of Evil." See the-masses, principle-of-evil, objective-irony, destiny.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "all obedience secretly contains a fatal disobedience"; "Choice is an ignoble imperative"; "the deepening of negative conditions" (1983).
• Étienne de La Boétie (not yet paged) — the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude whose problem Baudrillard reopens.
• Michel de Certeau — the everyday tactics that bear on the same "obedience/disobedience" structure.
• Georg Simmel — the blasé attitude and metropolitan indifference as a cousin of the mass's "un-will."
• Not yet paged: Boethius — the "mystery" of the subject's consent to its own slavery that Baudrillard says remains total.

Related Concepts

• The Masses — the concept's prime case: "the masses… don't want power."
• Principle of Evil — obedience's secret disobedience is the principle of Evil in social form.
• Objective Irony — the delegating subject's "ironic investment."
• Destiny — "Predestination is infinitely superior to the theory of freedom of the soul."
• The Secret — the secret rule stronger than the law.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Evil Genie of the Object" (the masses' anti-will, "Choice is an ignoble imperative," Brummel); "For a Principle of Evil" (obedience's fatal disobedience, the deepening of negative conditions).
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the masses' silence as strategy; "so it goes for voluntary servitude."
• The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1980) — the tactics/strategy distinction as a counterpart.
• 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

• Does Baudrillard's resignification of voluntary servitude liberate the masses or rationalize their subordination? The concept is politically double-edged and the wiki should mark it.
• Is the "fatal disobedience within obedience" a testable claim or a metaphysical one? It shares the unfalsifiability of the principle of Evil.
• How does the concept relate to the wiki's care/everyday materials, where obedience and norm-following are read more benignly (habitus, respectability, homeliness)?