Forces of Life: Instrumentality, Power, and Freedom

The articles by Jean Baudrillard and Karl Marx investigate the relationship between production, consumption, and individual freedom. They both examine the oppressive nature of a consumer society and, within its context,  locate the binary relationship between human needs and their fulfilment. While Marx views production as the driving force of a capitalist society and focuses on individual’s alienation from the fruits of his/her labor, Baudrillard emphasizes the constitutive function of consumption, as driven by constructed human needs. He objects to the notion of homo economicus by claiming that “The whole discourse on consumption, whether learned or lay, is articulated on the mythological sequence of the fable: a man, ‘endowed’ with needs which ‘direct’ him towards objects that ‘give’ him satisfaction. Since man is really never satisfied (for which, by the way, he is reproached), the same history is repeated indefinitely, since the time of the ancient fables” (38-39). In other words, Baudrillard recognizes that the more we can have, the more we want, while at the same time arguing that the need we feel “is not a need for a particular object as much as it is a ‘need’ for difference (the desire for social meaning)” and thus, our “satisfaction can never be fulfilled” (48).

György Pálfi’s Taxidermia connects these notions of individual subjugation to forces of consumerism with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological view of the human body (rather than consciousness) as the primary site of human cognition. For Pálfi’s characters, body becomes a site of negotiation between three forces of life: instrumentality, power, and freedom. Everything they do is viewed from the subject-object perspective of mediation. Body as a perpetual condition of experience delineates all parts of Pálfi’s triptych.

The first tableau, abstracted from any particular political or historical details, portrays Morosgoványi Vendel’s balancing act between private intimacy and public regulation. Army as a form of oppression (and an extreme case of placing state’s power structure over individual freedom) disables Morosgoványi Vendel’s ability to fulfill his sexual needs: the fire of his solitary moments is put out by the ice-cold encounters with his lieutenant, Öreg Balatony Kálmán. The specific historical context of Hungarian communist era becomes irrelevant since the focus is on universal dangers of an oppressive totalitarian regime, which invades individual autonomy, dignity, and the most private sphere of human sexuality. Human individualism is brought down to the level of one’s body, which in turn becomes the last frontier of freedom.

Following this formula of state--individual irreconcilability, the second story echoes Baudrillard’s notion of satisfaction that can never be fulfilled. Here, however, the individual lacks agency to oppose the machine of the totalitarian system and ends up acting contrary to his/her instincts (eg. the pregnant woman eating 20 kilos of caviar). Pálfi’s Hungary combines the elements of the Soviet Union’s obsession with control, authority, and emotional (and physical) disarming of its citizens with the grotesque eating contests (consumptionism par excellence) taken from the American consumer society . Food, eating, and the eater lose their basic meaning and function and become subjugated to the totality of the situation, in which individual finds himself/herself.

Lastly, the third story portrays human body negotiating the tragic choices of self-oppression and external objectification. In the end, Lajoska’s self-control becomes his distorted means of power. It is not sex or food, which  Lajoska seeks to control. His final piece of taxidermy becomes the quintessence of capitalist perversion and degeneration of the individual: human body loses its dignity and constitutive function. The taxidermy statues were supposed to mimic human body, but in the end it is Lajoska’s human body that becomes the reflection of the statue - a produced object.