Baudrillard and Heidegger

[Cross-posted from Ghost in the Wire]

I think that one of the fundamental points of confusion in Heidegger's Being and Time comes when, in analyzing why it is that human beings so often ignore their being or Dasein, choosing the crowd over resolute and authentic existence, thereby voiding the Eigen in Eigentlichkeit.  Heidegger characterizes it this way: Dasein is "dispersed into the 'they' and must find itself."  This dispersal is, for Heidegger, part of the existential structure of Dasein, and as a consequence Heidegger offers no substantive discussion of the means or methods of this dispersal, at least not back in 1927 (arguably the "turn" towards historicity and the forgetting of Being may offer an explanation for it, but that comes some years later).

I think that one productive way to address this question is to consider the overall project of Being and Time, which is really an analytic of the subjectivity of Dasein, even if it distances itself from subjectivity as understood in Western metaphysics.  What I mean is that the investigation of Dasein starts by investigating Dasein itself as the subject of the analysis, and so there remains a bit of an emphasis on the subjectal determination of the world, which I think you can see in the discussion of "thrownness" and the "call of conscience."  Again this changes later, as Heidegger explicitly admits this as a limitation of his early work, altering his analytical emphasis away from Dasein in his On Time and Being, and elsewhere segues from the "call of conscience" to the "call of being."  Still, without necessarily following Heidegger's turn, we can look at this "error" as a productive one.

To do so, we can begin to think a brief bit about Walter Benjamin, whose work had a considerable emphasis on Baudrillard's thought.

Benjamin's most famous essay, his "Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility," tackles an issue that may seem somewhat tangential or secondary for Heidegger: the role of new production technologies in changing the nature of the object.  But of course it's not tangential at all, since the worldliness that Heidegger writes about in Being and Time is, if we believe Benjamin, in part called into question by these new representational technologies.

Take as an example the medium Benjamin discusses most prominently in that essay: film.  With its manipulation of reality via the shifting perspective of the camera and the special effects it enables, the film undoes some of the standards of representation that structure the subject apperception of the object.  Or as Benjamin puts it, film’s “social significance” is “inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.”  By the liquidation of traditional value, he means to imply that these new technologies, and the ease with which they reproduce themselves as representations, ruptures the sense of history that traditional objects of art once engendered.  Benjamin's words:

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from is substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.  Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter.  And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

In other words, for Benjamin the authenticity of an object anchors itself in the object’s aura, “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”  With technologically reproduced objects, the aura is lost, contaminated by the lack of distance between the audience (an ambiguity) and the object.  We might clarify, following Heidegger, that the object becomes more readily present-at-hand; it becomes something like a standing-reserve, constantly put to the work of being available for display.  The dissipation of aura, its loss of proximity, severs the object’s status as a signifier of an historical, cultural tradition and instantiates the object as a signifier of the object’s present political moment.

Obviously we're working with two different senses of authenticity, though those two senses are not that far apart.  Heidegger is talking about the authentic existence of Dasein, its resolute existence, which is for Heidegger a "good," and Benjamin's talking about the loss of authenticity of the object of art, which for Benjamin is also a "good."

Put the Benjamin aside and on hold for a bit, and just let it simmer.  Let's recall that Heidegger spends a lot of Being and Time concerned with the way metaphysics has built up a system of thought that hides the more primordial and fundamental ontological question of Being.  The separation of beings from Being and the myth of objective reality are all rather essential backdrops for Heidegger's project.

So too for Baudrillard's thought, though for different reasons than the early Heidegger.  I think that, and i'll just go ahead and make this clear up front, we can think of Baudrillard's career in many ways as an alternate attempt to deal with the point of confusion identified above in Heidegger.  It does so not by reorienting the analysis such that it privileges temporality over the subjectivity of Dasein, but by displacing any question of the subjectal with the objectal, which is to say that Baudrillard explains the dispersal of Dasein into das Man by exposing the subject's overdetermination by the object.  As Charles Levin explains, in his book on Baudrillard:

No subject can be posited without an object: the object creates the space-time of thought, and its ontic discreteness (its ‘readiness at hand’, as Heidegger might say) serves as the model for the social individual, as both agency and entity – as a thing that wills.  (Emphasis mine.)

We can find a concrete illustration of this modeling (and an extension of Heidegger’s question concerning technology) in Baudrillard’s early writings on automatism in System of Objects, where automatism is understood as the self-sufficiency of the object.  The object as automation comes about because of and mirrors the desire for ease and lack of responsibility that Heidegger identifies in Dasein’s allegiance to das Man.  Responsibility is lost, and more of the functions of the subject are ceded to the object.  In turn, the object appears less flexible, less functional, a trick that affirms the subject-object dialectic: the subject believes the object is designed to serve (to fulfill a need) while the object assumes responsibility for the subject.  Baudrillard explains:

Automatism amounts to a closing-off, to a sort of functional self-sufficiency which exiles man to the irresponsibility of a mere spectator.  Contained within it is the dream of a dominated world, of a formally perfected technicity that serves an inert and dreamy humanity.

Is this not the same fear articulated by Heidegger’s discussion of the ordering of Gestell (enframing) in his later lectures on technology?  The inert, standing-reserve of humanity—its destiny prefigured by the service of automation.  Automation fulfills the destiny of enframing in the manifestation of the technological object, or to put it in terms slightly more in Baudrillard's idiom, the subject's enjoyment of automation produces the "object as destiny."  Of course, Baudrillard never considers the object to be merely a material entity, even back in 1968, arguing that the object is always already a form, not a content, an argument that will later be fulfilled and taken to its heuristic limits in his arguments about the political economy of the sign.  Since the object is formal, since it is inscribed in a system of cultural significations, and because the object is always in that sense locked in an antagonism with its subject, Baudrillard's insight is to recognize that the object transfigures enframing from merely a way of ordering the world to something like a constitutive existentiale of the subject.  In this sense, its essence is not technological but imaginary; the object defines the subject in relation to the image of itself.  Baudrillard again:

Automatism is king, and its fascination is indeed so powerful precisely because it is not that of a technical rationality; rather, we come under its spell because we experience it as a basic desire, as the imaginary truth of the object, in comparison with which the object’s structure and concrete function leave us cold.

The comfortable familiarity of the automated object lulls us into a subjective complacency, where we equate its action with our own: “At all events, whatever the functioning of the object may be…we invariably experience it as OUR functioning."  The automated object forces a grand misrecognition, a mystification of humanity that redefines human agency as a mastery of technology without realizing that the reliance on automation actually atrophies subjectal agency.  Small wonder then that Baudrillard jovially remarks: “The object is in fact the finest of domestic animals – the only ‘being’ whose qualities exalt rather than limit my person… they all converge submissively upon me and accumulate with the greatest of ease in my consciousness.”

At this point, it's useful to recall Benjamin's discussion of the authenticity of the object, which relates somewhat obviously to the discussion of Baudrillard thus far, in that it is technological reproducibility that makes automation and the rise of the object possible.  But there is a more interesting, though more subtle, way of integrating Benjamin's insight into aura.  I quoted Baudrillard earlier as suggesting that we experience automatism as the "imaginary" of the object. in that the object is experienced primarily neither at the level of the symbolic or the Real.  We're in the Lacanian register here, obviously, but Baudrillard is way too savvy and antagonistic to simply accept Lacan's terminology.  What if the imaginary and the Real also functioned via an auratic economy?  We would need to rethink the relation between the registers.

Lacan, for example, was very clear in thinking that the imaginary first comes about through the encounter with a mirror object that is primarily (alright, exclusively) static.  But if the object is as ascendant as Baudrillard thinks it is, and this is true because of its mechanical reproduction, its automatism, then to a certain extent it becomes ascendant through the collapse of aura; the fall of latter makes possible the rise of the former, so to speak.  And since the object is always already formal, we can rest assured that whatever happens with the imaginary, it will be tainted by the symbolic that governs the object's incorporation.  This is why, still in System of Objects, Baudrillard will describe the object as "in the strict sense of the word a mirror, for the images it reflects can only follow upon one another without ever contradicting one another.  And indeed, as a mirror the object, is perfect, precisely because it sends back not real images, but desired ones."  If the image that the object provides is the desired one, then we might be tempted to think that desire governs perception, and that in this sense, Baudrillard's object is still subjectal in the sense I talked about with Heidegger's analytic of Dasein, and, well, that would be true.  But even back in 1968, he is confident in asserting that the imaginary is in turn determined by the technological and media environment:

We may take comfort in the fact that even if objects sometimes escape practical human control, they never escape the imagination.  Modes of the imaginary follow modes of technological evolution, and it is therefore to be expected that the next mode of technical efficiency will give rise to a new imaginary mode.  At present, its traits are difficult to discern, but perhaps, in the wake of the animistic and energetic modes, we shall need to turn our attention to the structures of a cybernetic imaginary mode whose central myth will no longer be that of an absolute organicism, nor that of an absolute functionalism, but instead that of an absolute interrelatedness of the world.

Alright, I don't want this post to go on forever, and so I won't go too far beyond the Baudrillard of System of Objects, as all I am trying to highlight at this point is how the early Baudrillard project really does provide a way of explaining how it is that Dasein gets dispersed into the They: the object sucks the subject away by means of a fluid and ever changing imaginary.  The imaginary is both a projection of desire and the product of a system of signification that exceeds the subject, that is determined by the exchange and economy of objects, and that is influenced by the different auratic economies of the technological and media environment.  To this extent, we can really consider Baudrillard one of the more legitimate heirs of Heidegger's project.

Now, I should say that the subjectal residue in early Baudrillard does not survive for very long in Baudrillard's thought.  Less than a decade later, first in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign and then in the brilliant Symbolic Exchange and Death, the code comes to replace and overdetermine the imaginary, and in so doing Baudrillard will largely put to death the Lacanian registers (literally, he'll pose the problem of death in so much as death is always already the imaginary of the real).  And shortly thereafter, he'll follow his own logic in the discussion of the Code and move into the discussion of simulation, simulacra, and eventually end up in his discussion of integral reality.  But all of that comes from an initial project designed to explain the relation between object and subject, and the way that those objects form a system that responds to a particular media ecology, which is, of course, the same ecology that haunted Heidegger's analytic of Dasein.

Comments

[Swifty]

I defy one postmod or existentialist to provide a convincing description or definition of Dasein. Dasein = __________. And I wager even Karl Marx would ask the same.

Posted by: unConDITioned

What's wrong with Heidegger's definition: "Da-sein is a being which is related understandingly in its being toward that being." See Section 12 in _Being and Time_, Part One, Division One, Chapter II; p. 49 of the Stambaugh translation.

[CBR]

>>@ CBR's last post, i'm not clear why the propriety of the term 'subjectal' would depend on establishing that "subject is ontologically prior to world" or on identifying a "res cogitans" in SZ. To say that subject and world are equally constructed out of a situation of involvement which they do not pre-exist is not to say that they are identical. If dispersal into das Man means that Dasein is proximally not itself, its selfhood (or subjectivity) is precisely the goal to be attained - not a pre-existing substrate.>>

Agreed. My coments on both subject as "ontologically prior to world" and "res cogitans" were responses to things KR posted, in the latter case a quote from SZ that I tried to interpret a bit. What's clear is that Dasein is a way of being, not a subject, but it makes something like a subject possible. What sort of subject that would be is not a primary concern of SZ. However, KR's language seems to want to slide into a consideration of Dasein as epistemological subject--and this seems to me to be unfortunate and wrong. Although KR wants to take care not to go the whole way there, the language seems to keep pointing in that direction.

>> Personally, i'd locate the problem with SZ here, since it's not clear how to give a principled account of the selfhood which Dasein doesn't have without positing such a substrate. >>

I'm not sure what you mean by this. You mean SZ doesn't give an adequate account of the subjectivity of dispersed Dasein? I'm not sure why this is a problem.

[unConDITioned]

subject as "ontologically prior to world" and "res cogitans"

That's a problem. Heidegger wants to posit Dasein as ontologically prior to the world, and does not even stoop to the level of Descartes and attempt something like an argument for res cogitans (a priori Mind, Being, consciousness, abstract entities, what have you). There are few arguments in traditional Cartesian or Lockean sense, in Sein und Zeit. It's all suggestion, revealings, vapors. And like Kant (and Descartes, but his problem is different) he assumes he has some grounds for a prioricity, but those are not proven. Kant's argument in the 1st critique for the synthetic a priori is hardly necessary (if the 1st critique falls, a fortiori, so doth Hegel--and most likely Heidegger). Moreover, Kant-- even if he can't prove a synthetic priori--- grants that knowledge, understanding depends on sensation, on objects of perception. Yes there are great differences between Kant and Heidegger, but nonetheless there is an assumption of metaphysical Being which is not proven; and as Carnap realized Heidegger routinely makes claims about concepts (Dasein) which are incapable of empirical observation, or even inference, What is Dasein's dimension? Shape? Magnitude? Bio-chemical characteristics? oops. I wager even Marx hisself would side with the positivists against Gut Herr Doktor Profesor Heidegger.........

Descartes---really the metaphysician qua metaphysician--may at most claim, there is, or appears to be, thinking (which is a bit more elegant than anything Kantians or Hegelians argued). And it appears a bit unlike the physical world. (But Descartes' doubt would not extend to cutting off his arm--or stopping eating.)

[Swifty]

unConDITioned writes: Heidegger wants to posit Dasein as ontologically prior to the world, and does not even stoop to the level of Descartes and attempt something like an argument for res cogitans [end unConDITioned]

Well yes but he does too stoop to the level of Descartes. "Hence the first concern in the question of being must be an analysis of Da-sein. But then the problem of gaining and securing the kind of access that leads to Da-sein truly becomes crucial. Expressed negatively, no arbitrary idea of being and reality, no matter how 'self-evident' it is, may be brought to bear on this being in a dogmatically constructed way . . . " _Being and Time_, Section 5. It's rather Descartes who does not attempt something like an argument for the res cogitans.

[tl]

CBR, thanks for this. i still don't have too much of a problem with Dasein as an 'epistemological subject' - admittedly in its fallen state this epistemological subjectivity is identified with that of das Man (Dasein thinks whatever 'one' thinks) - but that's not to say it disappears altogether. What i was trying to get at was a distinction between two ways we might use the word 'subject':

(1) The idea of an entity which becomes itself in going beyond itself into the world. The term 'subject' isn't perfect for this but i'm not sure what else to use. We can just keep saying 'Dasein', but that tends to annoy people (such as our effervescent colleague unConDITioned).

(2) The idea of a true, ontologically grounded selfhood behind this whole narrative of the self-which-discovers-itself-as-losing-itself.

I think that KR is using 'subject' to cover both of these, whereas CBR wants to keep it for (2) - correct me if i'm wrong. My view is that SZ wants to see Dasein as both on a rhetorical level, but that the actual thought of SZ works as well if not better if you jettison (2) and keep (1). In that sense i'd say "what sort of subject" Dasein is/becomes *is* a concern for SZ. What i think this reading would give us is an account of the self-das Man relation which keeps the dialectic of self-loss and 'authenticity', without the Christian pathos that makes this a once-in-a-lifetime conversion. Also it might help get a handle on the place of the object as zuhanden in this relation. So my question to KR was whether SZ, read in this way, doesn't do a fair amount of the work he sees Baudrillard as doing.

[unConDITioned]

I'm not the biggest fan of Popper, but I tend to think Dasein (and Being and Time) is not capable of being falsified, or even confirmed in any specific fashion (whereas Descartes provides an argument of some sort--the res cogitans claim is at least debatable, if not falsifiable); additionally, Dasein is neither analytically true, nor synthetic--and thus more or less meaningless (-and Dasein, it could be argued, sort of violates Kantian epistemology: it appears to be (though yeah I've have only mastered the cliffsnotes to B & T --perhaps a scanned pic of the puke stained cover might be linked) argument from introspection or revelation---since neither axiomatic [provable via mathematics or logic] nor an empirical claim based on sensation)). And from what I have read Heidegger did have an interest in preserving theology (and often refers to Hegel as well as Kierkegaard), or was it an interest in advancing fascism via some Hegelian quasi-mysticism. Alas, Herr Doktor H. might have realized that Mussolini was a bit more effacacious for that.

[CBR]

(1) The idea of an entity which becomes itself in going beyond itself into the world.

It seems to me that sense 1) works for Heidegger but Dasein in the mode of authenticity does not return to itself, so it doesn't become itself. In other words, Das Man is the "who" or the "self" of everyday Dasein, which only gets individuated by confronting its own limit in the form of death. This is NOT a once-in-a-lifetime conversion; Dasein is at first AND FOR THE MOST PART dispersed in Das Man. In other words, inauthenticity is never shed like a snake's skin, but underlies and characterizes all comportment. We learn in division II part IV, in contrast to the at times (at least seemingly) axiological language of Division I section 28, that even ordinary memory and daily function is dependent on inauthenticity---if I am going around shattering myself on my death all day, I can't even function. The knowledge of the situation Dasein gains is basically an ethical knowledge--authenticity won't help me decide whether to change my oil, or steal a base. Furthermore, resolute Dasein must be ready to give up its resolution in the Augenblick--in other words, authenticity must always be wrested anew from inauthenticity, and is never a fait accompli. And all comportment, realistically, relies on a certain acceptance of knowledge, tradition, even prejudices--the authentic self does not create ex nihilo, but grasps its thrown inauthenticity in an authentic way. That's why authenticity is an existentiell modification of inauthenticity, which is our basic mode. So inauthenticity is NOT exactly coterminous with something like technological thinking in the later Heidegger--but that's because it pertains to the individual first and foremost, and then we have to ask "What individual? CBR won't let us have a subject." So if that's what you mean by "subject"--that which must be wrested from Das Man and thus must, in a sense, have always already been there--OK. But this is NOT an epistemological subject, or really a "subject" in any of the usual senses, and its relation to "objects" is a function of tradition, history, prejudice, and perhaps chance. This relation to beings ("objects") does not explain, but is explained by, inauthenticity.

"Subject" is a loaded term--there could be ontological, epistemological (these two may be identical), sexual, political, social subjects--who knows what else. I would say that Dasein--authentic or inauthentic--is never a subject, but a way of being that, in the case of authenticity, allows for certain types of subjectivity to occur. But as I say this, I get the feeling you're still going to say I'm missing something, and I'm not sure what that is.

Of course there is some sense of selfhood in dispersed Dasein, but this turns out to be a false echo of other voices. I would suggest that if this sounds impossible, that's because (although Heidegger doesn't say this) it's just as imnpossible for Dasein to exists completely inauthentically as it is for it to exist completely authentically--I'm always addressed by my own necessity to some extent. Therefore, I'm always capable of some sort of subjectivity. But since Dasein is the WAY I am, not "what" I am--since this is an existential, not categorical, determination--there is no need for Dasein itself to be a subject, and it isn't.

[tl]

>> authenticity must always be wrested anew from inauthenticity, and is never a fait accompli ... authenticity is an existentiell modification of inauthenticity, which is our basic mode >>

Yes, absolutely. Nonetheless, it is a modification which reveals the truth of Dasein's own selfhood to it: "But because Dasein is lost in das Man, it must first find itself. In order to find itself at all, it must be 'shown' to itself in its possible authenticity" (SZ 268). I don't think we're really in disagreement here though. The issue (I think) is the genesis of Dasein's dispersal, which i would trace back to being-in-the-world itself - Dasein's concern with the zuhanden entities around it already constitutes a dispersal of its selfhood into the world, and the more egregious forms of 'levelling' carried out by das Man are just further refinements of this constitutive dispersedness. So when you say "[Dasein's] relation to "objects" is a function of tradition, history, prejudice, and perhaps chance", this is true of any particular relation, but not of the structural possibility of relatedness. Whether you see this as a 'way' of being (the 'possibility' side) or a 'what' (the 'structure' side) strikes me as fairly slippery, so i'm keen to preserve a notion of 'subjectivity' which is capable of operating on both sides.

Now, authenticity involves Dasein's grasping its futurality as possibility without letting it congeal into a particular objectual engagement - "The closest closeness which one may have in Being towards death as a possibility, is as far as possible from anything actual" (SZ 262). In authenticity Dasein apprehends its constitutive movement beyond itself as such (what i described a minute ago as its structural possibility of relatedness), rather than fleeing towards the object term of the relation as in everyday life. So if we think in terms of 'the subject' as some form of reification or actualisation of Dasein's being (e.g. a res cogitans), it will always by definition miss the point; what i'm suggesting is rather that we think in terms of 'subjectivity' as relating to the structure of projection which underlies both authentic and inauthentic being, in different ways.

Whether you find this notion of 'subjectivity' useful is a matter of taste & context; i think it's more philosophically satisfying per se, but also that it helps with the argument in the original post. Viz., perhaps it's here that something like a Benjaminian 'aura' emerges: insofar as authenticity involves a kind of freeing of Dasein's self from the objectual world, it also frees the object (as phenomenon) to show forth the truth of its own being. (Thus, roughly, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', although i haven't got it to hand.) That is, the zuhanden objects with which everyday Dasein is concerned are (if not technically reproducible) at least endlessly replaceable - but Dasein's coming face-to-face with its own being would also reveal the object's uniqueness. (How you then relate SZ's account of equipment to the later stuff on technology is a chestnut to which i don't have an answer.)

[unConDITioned]

Authenticity: a psychological concept. Or, rather one cannot establish that authenticity, and Dasein itself are not psychological and cognitive; and there is a related semantic issue--indeed specifying the extension of the Dasein concept (if not most or all of Heidegger's jargon), however distasteful existentialists or postmods might find such a mundane task, is rarely if ever undertaken. Herr Doktor H. sidesteps cartesian issues--and arguments (say, in regards to a prioricity, if not theology)--merely by positing Dasein. Instantiate "God" for Dasein, and consider the comments of Hobbes, rustic skeptical knave, in regards to Descartes's theo-ontology: one cannot make meaningful statements about concepts or entities that one knows (via observation, or via axiom) nothing about (do we have clear knowledge of Dasein [or God]?), or at least that cannot be adequately defined (not merely what Dasein might refer to--but the scope of the concept).

[CBR]

Yeah, I agree with this last post. Dasein does have to "free" the objects, and there's a certain way that this depends on Dasein's becoming individuated in authenticity, so if that's the sense you and KR want to use "subjectal" or whatever, I guess that's OK...but it seems like the language wants to slide into something else. And it's not the way "subject" is used in ordinary discourse, whether philosophical or everyday.

I think it surprising that Heidegger himself never addressed the relation of zuhandenheit and his later technology stuff...

[CBR]

More thoughts:

For Heidegger, subject/object is one particular modality of the relationship between self and world that is possible on the basis of Dasein's disclosedness. This modality is the one that takes the subject as hypokeimenon or substrate that acts as guarantor of the existence of things, which stand over against (gegen-stand) the subject. This doesn't take into account anything like social or political or interpersonal subjectivity.

It seems like your (tl, also KR?)use of "subject," however, is actually closer to Heidegger's than to any of the latter. This seems to be based on a certain reification of Dasein as a structured thing. Heidegger does speak of it this way to a certain extent, but wants us to keep in mind that to talk of a structure of Dasein is to give a formal indication that points to a way of being, or an "existential." One of the existentials of Dasein is world. On the basis of this existential, there is also the "world," i.e. this or that world. But this doesn't mean that world is part of a subjective structure. Rather, there is no world where there is not a way of existing structured like Dasein. On the basis of this ontological structure, there can be something like a "human being" or a self. This self can be understood as a subject, so it's impossible to understand the existential structure from which the self emerges as a subject.

On the other hand, in SZ the existential movement of Dasein culminates in an event of individuation, i.e. it results in a single self. In that sense, "Dasein" is an existential structure that implies individuality. Nevertheless, II V gives us a picture of geschick, a collective destiny that is not the sum of individual fates. This has an awful lot to do with how beings are revealed, and also how something like a subject comes to be formed. It doesn't seem to me that this process is particularly driven by one side of that pole more than another. So I don't think the answer to why there are certain "objects," for Heidegger. is any particular conception of subjectivity.

[tl]

Interesting. i like this picture of a subject/object dyad emerging from disclosedness (Ereignis / clearing, for the late Heidegger). But still, Dasein as subject seems to have the possibility of turning back to this originary event of disclosedness and understanding it, without thereby annulling its own subjectivity. So Dasein would be at once a term of the (subject-object) relation, and the event of relatedness, in a kind of Merleau-Pontian 'fold'-type structure.

And i take your point that explaining any particular objectual engagement requires thinking about social & historical subjectivity, which i haven't done. Presumably this is where KR brings in the Baudrillardian 'imaginary'.