Tennessen


meaning, of power, of truth, of their existing as such,
of their pretending to exist as such. Only this reversion
can put an end to power. ." (Baudrillard 1983: 70).
In other words, ritual systems of obligation--and these
can range from a particular manner of speaking, like
slang, to the ceremonial language of Haitian voodoo
ceremonies--are liberating (and subversive) practices.

 People and societies tend to make order out of
chaos by dividing the world into opposing entities like
raw and cooked, sane and mad, proper and improper, and
so forth. They place limits and boundaries and talk
endlessly about what are legitimate transgressions of
those limits. One function of ritual, in fact, says
another contemporary French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu,
is "to make licit. .unavoidable transgressions of the
boundary" (Bourdieu 1977: 124). But transgression is
tricky business. It is inefficient to merely talk
outside the limits of propriety--a priest, for example,
can not speak with much authority outside of his parish.
True linguistic resistance, on the other hand, like
ritual, crosses boundaries and plays on the lack of
distinction between true and false.

 If we agree that everything depends on one's under-
standing of terms which are never fixed but are
reversible, if all that is needed to reverse the facts
is a slight manipulation of appearances, as Baudrillard
insists, then it is indeed a futile activity to set up
one meaning or one category over against another. Yet
traditional resistance, in the media especially, has
always been to reinterpret messages according to a
group's own code and for its own ends. A more devastating
resistance, however, will seduce. Seduction, as
Baudrillard calls this reversibility of meaning,
corrupts truths. It is a "magie noire de detournement
de toutes les verites," a black magic which reroutes
truths and plays on unspoken implications, producing
not alternate meanings but ambiguous ones instead
(Baudrillard 1979: 23). These meanings can be reversed
or denied at will, disclaimed at the slightest sign of
withdrawal or refusal. Like the Creole language which
goes about things in a roundabout way, in a circle, we
might say, seduction maintains "uncertainty about
intentions that hesitate between playfulness and