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On seduction (and flirting) in the twenty-first century: A communication-

theoretical perspective

Article  in  Communicatio · December 2007

DOI: 10.1080/02500160608537970

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Bert Olivier
Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy
University of the Free State
South Africa.
OlivierG1@ufs.ac.za

On seduction (and flirting) in the 21st century: A communication-theoretical

perspective.

This paper first appeared in Communicatio (South African Journal for Communication
Theory and Research), Vol. 32 (2) 2006, pp. 210-225, and was reprinted in Philosophy and
Communication. Collected essays. London and Frankfurt: Peter Lang Academic Publishers,
2009, pp. 131-152.

Abstract: An attempt is made here to provide an analysis, in communicational terms, of the phenomena
of seduction and (related to it) flirting as it comes across in the present era. This entails answering the
question, whether these two related activities are still the same, historically speaking, as they were in
earlier epochs – for example in the 18th and 19th centuries. Are there indications that they display an
inalienable, characteristic structure, which still undergirds them today, regardless of the extent to which
the postmodern era may differ from preceding ones? And what might such a structure look like in each
case? Focusing on Kierkegaard’s anatomy of seduction in Either/or, a reconstruction of its salient
features is attempted before turning to Zupancic’s pertinent distinction between two types of seduction,
and before examining Baudrillard’s provocative description of seduction in relation to the feminine
principle in contemporary culture. What are the implications of these for flirting as related activity?
And are there indications that the present era modulates these communicational practices in a new or
distinctive manner?

As Einstein has taught us, nothing should be thought of only in terms of spatial
coordinates: length, breadth and depth, as an answer to the question ‘where?’
Everything, in order to be understood, simultaneously has to be considered
temporally, that is, historically, as an answer to the question ‘when?’ Put more
concretely: to grasp something adequately, ask not only what it is, here in this country
or culture, but what it is at this time, in this (postmodern) cultural moment.
The phenomena that interest me here are, first and foremost, seduction, and –
perhaps related, although less represented in the communication-philosophical
literature – flirting, in contemporary culture. How do things stand with these
interpersonal communicational phenomena? Is seduction still what it used to be? And
what was that? Has seduction perhaps been transmuted into something entirely
different from earlier times? Moreover, given that they seem to presuppose a more
generic phenomenon, namely communication between the individuals concerned, is it
possible to articulate the specificity of seduction as a distinctive communicational
phenomenon? And perhaps of flirting? Finally, what could one learn from this about
the current cultural epoch? That is, on the assumption that all human phenomena
display an inalienable temporal-historical dimension, could one perhaps discern in
seduction and flirtation (as they appear today) minor prisms refracting the colours
constitutive of ‘postmodern’ (for lack of a better term) cultural or communicational
practices?
Seduction and flirting presuppose communication. A preliminary
phenomenology of the practice shows that a seducer has to get his or her intent across
to the ‘seducee’, even if it is in devious ways; or perhaps it is more complex: a
seducer could achieve her or his goal of ‘winning’ the object of their seductive
conquest without the other being aware that this process is occurring. In other words,
the ‘victim’, as it were, could conceivably realize that she or he has been seduced,
 2

disempowered as far as their ability to resist is concerned, only when it is too late,
when he or she is hopelessly enamoured of the seducer. Alternatively, the person
being seduced could be quite aware of the fact that it is happening, but simultaneously
he or she would typically be powerless to resist or neutralize the process. This seems
to be what is distinctive about seduction as an interhuman existential-
communicational phenomenon: it happens by way of paralysing the other’s (that is,
the seduced person’s) will, as it were – at least in the sense of his or her affection
being unconditionally won, if not her or his willingness to act according to such
affection for, or surrender to the seducer. It also seems to me that the ways of
communicating seductively with the other share certain characteristic traits, which
may include a ‘simulation’ (that is, pretence) of sincerity and winsome vulnerability,
especially when the latter is combined with a manifestation of strength in other
respects.
What about flirting? As a phenomenon, it seems to be distinct from seduction,
although it could occupy an important position in a seducer’s arsenal of
communicational strategies. In other words, it differs from seduction but is not
incompatible with it. Conversely, while seduction may include flirting as technique,
the opposite is also true: flirting may include or make use of seductive techniques.
The crucial difference appears to hinge on the telos in question – seduction inherently
aims at and finds its culmination in conquest (even if, along the way of achieving this,
the seducer is afforded multiple pleasures which may yield even greater enjoyment
than the sexual triumph concerned), while flirting is its own reward. The latter, to be
experienced by both parties as flirting, yields a certain communicative pleasure that
does not necessarily point beyond itself to something more in the shape of amorous
conquest or surrender (or, if a different idiom is preferred, to mutually consensual
sexual intercourse). But even if flirting is employed as technique by an accomplished
seducer, it remains something distinctive, distinguishable from seduction. Hence, a
seducer may flirt with someone by saying to him or her (at a party, for instance):
‘Hey, when are you showing me your etchings? You seem to have forgotten your
promise!’ The same jocular remark may, however, be made with nothing else at stake
than communicating friendly affection, together with the message that the speaker
finds the other attractive – if things were different in their lives, who knows? By
contrast, the seducer who employs techniques of flirting would typically make such
remarks to test the other’s responses, or – more deviously, to make him- or herself
appear attractive precisely by offering the remark as flirting, in this way deliberately
planting a seed of interest in the other’s mind. This little seed could, depending on the
other’s receptivity (itself determined by multiple factors such as circumstances and
personal temperament), germinate in the future, and if it does, the seducer would be
there to pick the fruits of his or her labours.
For seduction and flirting (and, for that matter, postmodern culture) to be thrown
into relief, the work of a number of thinkers is pertinent, for example that of
Kierkegaard, Baudrillard, Habermas and of Alenka Zupancic. In Either/or, Vol. I
(1971), Kierkegaard provides what must still count as one of the most persuasive
phenomenologies of seduction – a veritable anatomy of the process conceived of as
aesthetic. The latter is an important qualification, in so far as the aesthetic, for
Kierkegaard, is primarily bound up with enjoyment or pleasure in various ways, and
is predicated on the assumption that boredom is the greatest enemy – that which has
to be resisted or banished at all costs. In his investigation into the multiple facets of
the aesthetic way of living he uncovers the perhaps startling insight, that pleasure
which is characterized by immediacy – as in the case of Don Juan (immortalized in
 3

Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni) – does not quite live up to what is required of
aesthetic pleasure, properly speaking, namely reflectiveness (Kierkegaard 1971: 97;
281-296). For the same reason it is not quite appropriate to speak of Don Juan as a
seducer (Kierkegaard 1971: 92-101) – there is too much immediacy in the way that
sensuousness and desire ‘seduce’ (note the scare quotes) the objects of his desire,
which shows that one can speak here, at best, of quasi-seduction. In Kierkegaard’s
words (1971: 97-98):

To be a seducer requires a certain amount of reflection and consciousness, and

as soon as this is present, then it is proper to speak of cunning and intrigues and
crafty plans. This consciousness is lacking in Don Juan. Therefore, he does not
seduce. He desires, and this desire acts seductively. To that extent he seduces.
He enjoys the satisfaction of desire; as soon as he has enjoyed it, he seeks a new
object, and so on endlessly. Therefore, I suppose he is a deceiver, but yet not so
that he plans his deceptions in advance; it is the inherent power of sensuousness
which deceives the seduced…To be a seducer, he lacks time in advance in
which to lay his plans, and time afterward in which to become conscious of his
act. A seducer, therefore, ought to be in possession of a power Don Juan does
not have, however well equipped he may otherwise be – the power of eloquence.

In this passage, which denies Don Juan the title of true seducer, Kierkegaard already
adumbrates the character of the seducer elaborated on under the name of Johannes
(1971: 299-440) in the document called ‘Diary of the Seducer’. Johannes the Seducer,
as he is known, practises the rule of avoiding friendships, and especially love (except
in the ‘aesthetic’, that is, distanced, reflective sense; Kierkegaard 1971: 380), instead
manipulating relationships ‘from a distance’ This ensures the possibility of true
enjoyment, and precludes boredom into the bargain. To heighten enjoyment one has
to plan things carefully, leading an unsuspecting woman into an ambush by
cultivating the appearance of someone who is simultaneously irresistibly interesting
and aloof, in this way attracting the ‘chosen’ victim’s interest and slowly but surely
enticing it until it reaches a veritable summit of desire for the seducer.1
This is what seduction entails: reflectively relishing the judicious manipulation
of someone’s affections with the sole aim of conquering her or his feelings, that is,
winning their passion or love by sleight of hand, as it were. The greater the
persuasiveness of one’s actions and words, the more likely it is, of course, that one
might succeed. What is not said and done is sometimes as important as what one does
and says. These omissions may confer on oneself such irresistible attractiveness –
emotionally, intellectually, physically and morally (which implies unavoidable
insincerity, therefore), – that the person who is one’s selected prey is just as likely as
not to be consumed with desire for this supposed paragon of virtue because of what
she or he knows, as because of what she or he can only guess at. The girl on whom
Johannes’s seductive scheming concentrates, is Cordelia, and the reader witnesses
every painstakingly planned move on the way to the consummating conquest in the
relationship, after which Johannes abandons the hapless girl (see Melchert 1991: 432-
433 for a lucid account and discussion of this). After all, the point of the whole,
drawn-out procedure is to savour and intensify the ‘aesthetic’ enjoyment of the
process optimally. It is very texture of the manipulative process, in every stage of
snaring Cordelia, luring her into the trap of falling hopelessly in love with him, that
interests Johannes and makes of him a paradigmatic seducer. Norman Melchert
describes his modus operandi as follows (1991: 432):
 4

All is planning, arranging, scheming, plotting, and enjoying the results, as one
would enjoy a play at the theater. Johannes is at once the playwright, the actor,
and the audience in the drama of his life. It is not the actual seduction [It would
have been more accurate to say ‘conquest’; B.O.] that matters to him (one
moment of physical conquest is much like another), but the drama leading up to
that moment. That is where the art lies. [And this art, I would argue, is
essentially an art of and through communication. B.O.] That is what is really
interesting.

Kierkegaard sometimes describes Johannes in ways that suggest something of a

predator in his demeanour: ‘My mind is like a turbulent sea, swept by the storms of
passion…[but]…high on the mast a lookout sits on watch’ (Kierkegaard 1971: 320).
Or: ‘…for though I sit there, visible to everyone in the living room, still I am really
lying in ambush’ (Kierkegaard 1971: 344). Clearly, the seducer’s judgement
concerning the appropriate moment to do something, or say something – as well as
how to do it or say it, what nuance to highlight or to edge towards the background – is
crucial for his or her success – hence the need to be constantly vigilant. What is said
could be said lightheartedly at one time, or flirtatiously at another, or even with great
seriousness or gravity, depending on what it is that she or he wants to communicate,
directly or indirectly, to the unsuspecting object of ‘seductive’ desire. But whatever it
is that is communicated – a flirtatious remark, for example – will always be calculated
to maximize the chances of persuading the other to surrender to the designs of the
seducer. Kierkegaard leaves one in no doubt that the fictional Johannes is
incomparable as far as all these techniques and ploys of seduction are concerned.
Alenka Zupancic, in Ethics of the real – Kant, Lacan (2000: 106), casts
Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of seduction in an interesting light: drawing on Kant’s
‘theory of the act’ and a remark by Lacan on Zeno’s famous paradox concerning
Achilles and the tortoise, she provides the terms for outlining two types of seduction –
a Sadean (from de Sade) and a Don Juanian variety. According to Lacan, it is
impossible for Achilles to ‘catch up with’ the tortoise; he ‘can only pass’ it. What this
means is that catching up would entail the infinite process of approaching the
tortoise’s position, asymptotically, as it were, while passing it involves going ‘too
far’, beyond the tortoise. Zupancic transfers this mathematical reasoning to the
domain of ethics (2000: 106), arguing that it enables us to distinguish as follows:
‘…either one more step is required for the accomplishment of an (ethical) act, or such
an act has already been left behind; either we still have not attained the object (of
desire), or we have already gone beyond it’. The first possibility (of endless
approximation) leads to the Sadean variety of seduction where each new act
ostensibly brings us closer to the object, ‘part-by-part’, but never quite to the point
where we possess the object of seduction as a whole, while the second, the Don
Juanian type, described by Zupancic (2000: 107) as the ‘overhasty pursuit’, allows
one to enjoy multiple numbers of bodies ‘one by one’, without ever enjoying them all.
It is clear that the latter corresponds to Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Don Juan who,
as sensuousness incarnate, seduces ‘immediately’ (without communicational
eloquence), and it seems to me that a similar correspondence obtains between the
Sadean kind of seduction and Johannes the Seducer’s method, which approximates
the ‘whole’ of the object of his desire with painstaking communicative labour,
squeezing every ounce of enjoyment out of the gradual, incremental process of
gaining power over her. Moreover, the Sadean variety of seduction (Johannes’s, that
 5

is), could, in principle, continue in(def)initely, without ever arriving at the telos of
actual sexual possession: here the communicational space of seduction, as in
Achilles’s futile attempt to ‘catch up’ with the tortoise, is infinitely divisible into
micro-interstitial spaces of enjoyment.
What is instructive here is the huge distance that separates the Don Juanian type
of ‘immediate’ seductive overwhelming of the other (which hardly requires any
communication of a verbal kind, but only a kind of sensuous communication, or
communication of sensuousness), and the Sadean species which, by contrast, requires
an immense investment in verbal as well as other kinds of communication (always
with ulterior, strategic motives). The latter communication, moreover, appears to be
infinitely rewarding in a certain sense, given its communicational reciprocity, one side
of which involves the seducer’s reception and ‘sadistic’ enjoyment of the desired
person’s responses to all of his or her communications. Small wonder that Baudrillard
observes (1990: 86):

The game of the seductress involves a certain mental cruelty, towards herself as
well as others. Any affection on her part is a weakness relative to the ritual
imperative. No quarter can be given in a challenge where love and desire are
dissolved. Nor any respite, lest this fascination be reduced to nothing.

In light of the splendid delineation of the constitutive traits of a seducer in the person
of the fictional Johannes, confirmed above by Baudrillard, Kierkegaard demonstrates
that seduction exemplifies what Habermas, in his theory of communicative action, has
described as ‘strategic action’, in so far as it is distinct from ‘communicative action’
(Brand 1990: 15-16). This also draws one’s attention to the fact that seduction is
intricately entangled with power – specifically, the quest for power over another. One
may even regard seduction as a kind of exemplar or paradigm of what it means to
work towards wielding power over another. Why is that? Habermas’s distinction
between these two kinds of communication, or action, makes it clear that, in the case
of what he calls ‘communicative action’ – where interlocutors are willing to articulate
all their so-called ‘validity claims’ (the grounds on which they base what they are
communicating to the other) to each other – there is no covert or overt attempt to gain
power over each other. Instead, there is reciprocity and mutuality in a genuine attempt
to reach understanding and agreement. By contrast, when ‘strategic action’ prevails,
validity claims are either withheld (by one or both parties), or simulated with the aim
of gaining power over the other. This aim or purpose entails disingenuousness, that is,
assumes the form of a hidden agenda, even if it masquerades as genuine
communication or communicative action. Seduction, typically, is predicated on a
hidden agenda – that of conquest.
It is instructive to turn to literature for specific instantiations of seduction at
work, as it were. In John Fowles’s The magus (1977: 21) one encounters the
following passage:

I suppose I’d had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of
sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car – not so
common among undergraduates in those days – and I had some money. I wasn’t
ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows,
is a deadly weapon with women. My ‘technique’ was to make a show of
unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white
rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.
 6

Why would loneliness in the shape of ‘the solitary heart’ be so devastatingly

effective in the seduction of women – that is, in gaining power over their affection, or
perhaps rather: power to evoke their affection? The answer, I believe, lies in
considering that what is communicated to women at, in Baudrillard’s terms, the
superficial level of appearances, is indifference and unpredictability. This,
predictably, evokes interest on the part of the other (here, the woman), coupled with
the belief that, behind the appearance – at a ‘deeper’ level – lies something quite
different, something susceptible to a woman’s ‘healing’ touch (literally and
figuratively). When the piece de resistance is produced, namely the ‘solitary heart’,
the last resistance on the part of the woman is designed or calculated to crumble in the
face of the invitation to penetrate to the deepest level of the seducer’s soul where – it
is erroneously believed – a rescue mission on behalf of the human species is about to
be performed. What happens unexpectedly of course, is that, in the above example,
the woman’s heart or affection becomes ensnared instead; that is, instead of
exercising redemptive, therapeutic power over the man in question, putting him in
touch with his own and others’ feelings, the woman suddenly finds herself
overpowered by her own feelings for the man, who uses this to the fullest extent
possible at various communicational levels. I don’t think these roles are gender-
specific, though – they could easily be reversed, depending on whether men and
women are socialized in traditional ways or not. (Under circumstances where
traditional characteristics are attributed to men and women, respectively, it is often the
case that the inverse of Fowles’s seducer of the ‘solitary heart’ is the case where
women’s seduction of men is concerned: a woman who projects an image of strength,
initiative and independence – of the kind commonly predicated of men – is capable of
snaring a man who feels challenged by these qualities to elicit ‘feminine vulnerability’
on the part of the ‘strong’ woman, who uses this predictable male reaction to her own
advantage.)
What rings true in terms of what was discovered earlier about seduction, is that
the man in Fowles’s example simulated certain attitudes, feelings and existential
characteristics (such as loneliness) for the sake of provoking interest on the part of the
woman. He was engaged in strategic action par excellence, in so far as he kept his true
intentions out of sight to be able to offer the unsuspecting victim the bait of a man in
need of being rescued. The means for communicating this, of course, is language in
the encompassing sense – words, gestures, variations in voice-tonality, facial
expressions, well-timed sighs and groans, and so on – in brief, what Baudrillard refers
to as ‘artifice’. In the history of literature there are few, if any instances where, by
sheer linguistic artifice or persuasion, a seduction succeeds as much against the odds
as in the case of Gloucester (the future, eponymous King Richard III of Shakespeare’s
well-known tragedy) seducing Lady Anne, widow of the prince he has recently
murdered, to the point where she actually accepts the ring he offers her (Shakespeare
1993: 647-649). Those who would argue that this ‘seduction’ of a woman by a man
who is her husband’s killer is nothing less than impossible, should not underestimate
the communicational efficiency of a seducer ‘pushing the right buttons’, as it were –
cannily and timeously alternating between different axiological registers for
maximum effect on the ‘object’ of seduction. The exchange between Gloucester and
Lady Anne moves from the latter saying about her dead husband (1993: 647):

Anne. He is in heaven, where thou shalt never come.

Glo. Let him thank me, that helped to send him thither;
 7

For he was fitter for that place than earth.

Anne. And thou unfit for any place but hell.
Glo. Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
Anne. Some dungeon.
Glo. Your bed-chamber.

Gloucester then switches to a different, but related strategy, namely to invoke Anne’s
beauty.

Glo. …But, gentle Lady Anne…

Is not the causer of the timeless deaths
Of these Plantagenets, Henry and Edward,
As blameful as the executioner?
Anne. Thou wast the cause, and most accursed effect.
Glo. Your beauty was the cause of that effect;
Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep
To undertake the death of all the world,
So might I live one hour in your sweet bosom.

He even goes as far as inviting her to kill him with his own sword, which he hands to
her, and when she hesitates and finally refuses to be his executioner, despite
acknowledging that she wishes his death, he offers to do so himself (Shakespeare
1993: 648):

Glo…This hand, which for thy love did kill thy love,
Shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love…

Gloucester’s (the future King Richard III’s) seductive persistence – or persistent

seduction – finally reaps a rich harvest when Anne consents to wear a ring he gives
her with the request that she do so as proof that he should live in hope of her favour.
No sooner has she departed from the scene, however, than he shows his true colours
(1993: 649):

Glo. Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?

Was ever woman in this humour won?
I’ll have her; but I will not keep her long.

Up to this point we have concentrated on seduction as a communicational

phenomenon in an existential-psychological sense, but it is necessary to go further
than that. Jean Baudrillard (1990) – always ready to go to extremes – effects the
displacement of seduction in a phenomenological, ‘lifeworld’ sense, by making of it a
metaphor which encompasses, not merely a psychological trait of lifeworld-
communication, but the entire domain of cultural practice or activity, or – to put it
differently – compresses everything that may be subsumed under the ‘feminine’ into
‘seduction’. For Baudrillard seduction as figure of the ‘feminine principle’ – not to be
conflated with women in the sense of embodied, living individuals – further marks the
site of simulation, of appearance, superficiality, as opposed to depth. Although it is
not always easy to know exactly what Baudrillard means with his gnomic, elliptical
statements, it seems to me that his argument amounts to the claim that we live in a
time when culture increasingly exhibits the contours of seduction in a structural sense.
 8

This becomes more plausible in light of the fact that he locates seduction in the sphere
of ‘artifice’, of ‘signs and rituals’, and opposes it to power of a certain kind
(Baudrillard 1990: 2):

Seduction continues to appear to all orthodoxies as malefice and artifice, a black

magic for the deviation of all truths, an exaltation of the malicious use of signs,
a conspiracy of signs… Seduction and femininity are ineluctable as the reverse
side of sex, meaning and power.

He further argues that, if psychoanalysis is predicated on sexuality as the domain of

the masculine (which is why, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, woman has no
place in the symbolic sphere of language; Baudrillard 1990: 6-7; Lee 1990: 177-178),
and seduction as the ‘strength of the feminine’ functions at the level of appearance –
specifically of the simulacrum as image or appearance without referent or underlying
reality – then it follows, for Baudrillard (1990: 7), that it constitutes ‘an alternative to
sex and power, one that psychoanalysis cannot know because its axiomatics are
sexual’.
While I believe that he may be challenged on the latter claim regarding
psychoanalysis – given that (Lacanian) psychoanalysis itself opens the way for a
‘feminine’ transformation of society or ethics (Copjec 2002: 38-40),2 something that
cannot be pursued at length here – Baudrillard seems to me to be correct in his
assessment of contemporary culture as a culture preoccupied with appearances or
surfaces (simulacra), and, more importantly, that the very structure of cultural
dynamics today displays the logic of seduction. Crucially, I also believe that this
‘logic’ is analogous to, and materially – at the level of cultural consumption –
involves the very communicational-psychological anatomy uncovered earlier in this
article. What has changed, however, seems to be that there has been a shift of
‘seductive’ dynamics and ‘communications’, if not intent and capacity, from people to
socio-economic, technological and cultural practices, especially in the domain of
advertising and branding communication – the fact that so many Communication
Studies departments put heavy emphasis on what is euphemistically called ‘corporate
communications’, testifies to this.
What Baudrillard calls ‘cold seduction’ (1990: 162) also testifies to this shift.
Writing of ‘television’s cold light’, Baudrillard contrasts the ‘mesmerizing’ TV
(pseudo-) image with that of cinema, which ‘is still endowed with an intense
imaginary…’ He continues (1990: 162):

All this belongs to the ludic realm where one encounters a cold seduction – the
‘narcissistic’ spell of electronic and information systems, the cold attraction of
the terminals and mediums that we have become, surrounded as we are by
consoles, isolated and seduced by their manipulation.

It is no accident that this is reminiscent of Adorno (1978: 284), who noted, decades
ago, the seductive effect of the technological apparatus on human beings – to such an
extent that listening or the capacity to listen to music had ‘regressed’, while attention
was increasingly focused on the reproductive apparatus itself, among other things that
detract from the act of listening to music. As for what Baurillard terms the ‘ludic’
(1990: 157-163), it seems to follow the same logic as his claim that Disneyland exists,
in order to hide the fact that all of America is Disneyland – itself mimicking
Foucault’s contention, in Discipline and punish (1995: 301), that there is ‘no outside’
 9

to the ‘carceral’ society (that is, prisons exist to hide the fact that all of contemporary
society is a prison). Hence, for Baudrillard the ‘ludic’ (homo ludens: playing human)
means that the difference between play and other, distinctly recognizable activities
has made way for a generalized ‘play’ (1990: 158):

American television …with its 83 channels is the living incarnation of the ludic:
one can no longer do anything but play – change channels, mix programs and
create one’s own montage (the predominance of TV games is merely an echo, at
the level of content, of this ludic employment of the medium).

Hence his association of the ‘ludic’ with electronic games such as computer chess,
information systems, terminals, screens of all kinds, consoles and keyboards, all of
which are the manifestations of the ‘suppleness and polyvalence of combinations’
(1990: 163) in the networks within which postmodern humans live their lives. ‘Play’
in the everyday sense has become pervasive, and there is something apocalyptic about
his remark, that in the guise of the ‘ludic’(1990: 163):

…it is the cold seduction that governs the spheres of information and
communication…Seduction/simulacrum: communication as the functioning of
the social within a closed circuit, where signs duplicate an undiscoverable
reality. The social contract has become a ‘simulation pact’ sealed by the media
and the news…seduction here connotes only a kind of ludic adhesion to
simulated pieces of information, a kind of tactile attraction maintained by the
models.3

This is Baudrillard at his most elliptic and cynical (or at least pessimistic): the ludic
structural dynamics of contemporary culture is like a spider’s web imprisoning us all,
but within it we ‘adhere’ or ‘stick’ to exchangeable and interchangeable signs,
according to a principle of exchange (in an economic sense, too) which constitutes the
functioning of ‘society’. We are seduced by an impersonal constellation of forces.
And because this ludic realm is all there is – for Baudrillard, as for Foucault, there is
no outside (significantly, Bret Easton Ellis’s American psycho [1991] similarly ends
with the words: ‘THIS IS NOT AN EXIT’) – ‘cold’ seduction comes with the
territory. Gone is the thrill – except for a simulated one – on the part of Johannes the
Seducer witnessing his manipulative schemes coming to fruition in the gradual but
inexorable surrender of Cordelia to his will. One could imagine an electronic game
called ‘Seduction’, modelled on this inventive tale by Kierkegaard. And its seduction
of the imaginary players at its controls would be of a piece with the spell of ‘cold
seduction’ cast on all the denizens (us) of this media, information- and
communication-systems cyber-realm.
Before the advent of television’s (and the computer’s) cold seduction, there was
the seduction of and by cinema, of course, which was (and to a certain, lingering
degree still is) qualitatively different from the former. It is not difficult to agree with
Baudrillard (1990: 95) that ‘cinema’s power lives in its myth’, 4 and that, ‘at the heart
of the cinematographic myth lies seduction – that of the renowned seductive figure, a
man or woman (but above all a woman) linked to the ravishing but specious power of
the cinematographic image itself’. Baudrillard sees this – cinema as myth – as the
only phenomenon worthy of the appellation ‘myth’ in an era lacking the capacity to
produce ‘great myths or figures of seduction comparable to those of mythology or art’
(1990: 95). Cinema gave us ‘the only important constellation of collective seduction
 10

produced by modern times, that of film stars or cinema idols’ (1990: 94), and quite
consistently, having linked seduction with the feminine principle, he claims that idols
– even male film idols – are always in principle feminine, although it is arguably the
case that the ‘biggest stars’ were always women. It is not difficult to understand what
Baudrillard is getting at here – when one scrutinizes the glossy photographs of film
stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Rock
Hudson, James Dean and Gregory Peck – no matter how masculine the roles they
played – there is a veneer of seductive ‘femininity’ in the suave smoothness and
agelessness of their appearance. This is the case to an even greater degree with female
stars such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Lee
Remick and Jane Russell. And the more recent the stars, the more this aura of
seductiveness, captured in the kind of photographs found in books on the history of
the cinema, is diluted, if not absent – perhaps, as Baudrillard (1990: 162) reminds us,
because cinema is ‘increasingly contaminated by television’, which, as part of the
apparatus of ‘cold seduction’, lacks the mythical dimension of cinema.
At any rate, what one learns from these reflections on cinema (and all the
devices from which, by contrast, a cold seduction emanates), is that no apparatus
which functions decisively in the transmission of signifiers of a certain type – in the
case of cinema, sound- and visual images qualitatively different from those
transmitted by television or the computer monitor – is innocent in communicational
terms. The film projector does not only transmit information, but iconic
configurations with a specific communicational effect, involving seduction through
images imbricated with mythic significance. And clearly, in the case of television and
the computer, the effect – though still seductive in a qualitatively distinct manner – is
not one bathed in the mysterious glow of the cinema. Instead, Baudrillard’s
interpretation of the latter gives one the impression that the ‘cold’ seduction that
operates here, seduces through a kind of mesmerization or fascination. Perhaps this is
why he claims that we are standing at the beginning of ‘an era of fascination’ (1990:
158), where the ‘intensity’ proper to playing computer games, or watching a soccer
match on television, for example, belongs to a fundamentally different affective
register than older types of games, like monopoly or the actual soccer match as
perceived by spectators next to the field. ‘Don’t think that they are the same match’,
Baudrillard reminds one (1990: 160), ‘one is hot, the other [the televised match] cool
– one is a game, with its emotional charge, its bravado and choreography, the other is
tactile, modulated (play-backs, close-ups, sweeps, slow motion shots, different angles
of vision, etc.)’. And any communications theorist or practitioner who thinks that
these are merely different ways of imparting information regarding the ‘same’ event,
is sorely mistaken – the ‘meaning’ of each of these distinguishable phenomena, which
cannot, moreover, be separated from the emotional or affective charge that
accompanies it like a comet’s tail, is distinct, as the preceding discussion shows.
Lest this claim should come across as being cryptic, let me hasten to explain
what I mean from a different angle. Fredric Jameson (1993: 10-16) has observed that
postmodern culture is characterized by a ‘waning of affect’ – something which he
connects to, among other things, the replacement of the supposedly securely ‘centred’
liberal (bourgeois) humanist subject of modernity by the fragmented postmodern
subject. But whereas Jameson is referring, in the first place, to cultural products such
as visual artworks, this claim may be made in a more concrete, social and
communicational sense as well: in the present era people seem less capable of
‘feeling’ or affect in an enduring sense, the sense encountered in the 19th century
English novel, for instance, where the very anatomy of a person’s subjectivity was
 11

articulated in affective terms.5 In the place of this, what is typical of human emotion
today is captured well in Lyotard’s term, ‘intensities’ (Jameson 1993: 16) or perhaps
what is commonly termed ‘rushes’, or perhaps ‘superficial emotion’ – in fact, as
several scholars of the postmodern have pointed out (already alluded to earlier), a
preoccupation with surfaces, superficiality or ‘flatness’ is one of the hallmarks of
postmodern cultural practices (Jameson 1993: 12; Olivier 2002). Is this not perhaps
why flirting – unless in the service of seduction – seems to be a far ‘safer’ option
today, because it does not involve the (on the one hand feigned, on the other felt)
depth of feeling or the attempt at eliciting commitment so typical of seduction. After
all, we live in the time of ‘the temporary contract…in the professional, emotional,
sexual, cultural, family, and international domains…’, as Lyotard has observed
(quoted in Harvey 1990: 113) – in such an era the labours of the patient seducer of
Kierkegaard’s Johannes-type would appear to be redundant, while flirting conceivably
paves the way for the kind of athletic sexual encounters sans feeling or commitment
that seems to be the rule in contemporary society. This corresponds to Allan Bloom’s
(1988: 122-132) remarks on his perception of American students’ evident incapacity
(or unwillingness?) to love someone (in the place of which they ‘have relationships’),
even if they live together (‘intimately’) for the duration of their university studies.
One could therefore say, it seems, that seduction in the existential-psychological
sense of communicating a certain intent – spurious or insincere, with an ulterior
motive – to another person (the ‘object’ of seduction), seems to be relatively unlikely,
or rare, in a postmodern culture where ‘deeply felt’ feelings are not encouraged,
compared to earlier eras (judging by the kind of evidence adduced here; see note 2).
To this one may add that it seems to be the rule that, in contemporary culture,
people’s feelings are ‘superficially’ manipulated – seductively at that – by a culture
industry unscrupulously intent on only one thing: to wield power over consumers’
willingness to open their purses. To this end the most seductive means – or, in
Baudrillard’s terms, ‘artifice’ – is employed; means of communication which, like
every seductive ploy on the part of Johannes the Seducer or Valmont, aims at securing
the surrender of the objects of seduction, in this case consumers. There are even
prestigious awards for the advertisements or commercials (many of them promoting
the most seductive merchandise of them all, the ones bearing brand names) which
excel at the art of seduction in various ways: sexy seductive, intellectual-seductive
(ABSOLUTely seductive), charming seductive, clever-seductive, humorous
seductive, ironic-seductive, power-dressing seductive, and so on. In a culture where
one is surrounded, most of the time, by artifacts and merchandise seductively
packaged in communicational terms by some of the sharpest intellects serving the
economic paradigm of the day (many copywriters at advertising agencies are also
poets and artists, at least potentially), is there any place left for ‘good, old-fashioned’
seduction à la Johannes or Valmont (see note 1)?
In his book, Coercion (1999: 1-25), Douglas Rushkoff elaborates on the many
strategies employed by advertisements, advertisers and branding campaigns to
‘coerce’ consumers into buying their products. These strategies, he argues – pointing
to many concrete instances – are designed carefully and painstakingly, on the basis of
thoroughgoing market and consumer-psychological research, to refine ways and
means of ‘persuading’ would-be buyers into buying – so much so that they are always
one step ahead of consumers. Those consumers who believe that they are immune to
the run-of-the-mill advertising ploys because of their own putative sophistication, are
‘hoist by their own petard’, as it were, when they encounter commercials or
advertisements suitably witty, ironic or intellectually sophisticated – something that
 12

flatters their self-image sufficiently to prod (or seduce) them into buying. Think of
ABSOLUT Vodka, again, as a brand that appeals to the pseudo-intellectual yuppie,
with its clever variations on the theme of ‘absolute’ (ABSOLUT Picasso, for example,
presupposes the recognizability of the cubist motif framing the ABSOLUT brand, and
functions flatteringly in relation to someone who ‘recognizes’ its formal
appropriateness; accordingly, ABSOLUT Hockney would differ from the former in
formal terms). Rushkoff also draws attention to the way in which shopping malls are
designed as far as entrances and exist are concerned: the former enjoy maximum
visibility, while the latter are often cleverly hidden or seductively camouflaged by
display windows and other ways of making merchandise conspicuous. The aim is
obvious, namely to expose consumers optimally to the sight of as many potentially
appealing products as possible, while they are searching for the exit.
Isn’t this also a matter of artifice – ABSOLUT seduction, here in the service of
capital? And is a corresponding consumer-flirting conceivable? Not, it seems to me, if
the ultimate goal is optimal profit. Unless, analogous to what was said earlier about
interpersonal flirting is also the case here, namely that flirting may occupy a kind of
strategic, preliminary position, with the ultimate end of seduction in mind, ‘flirting’
with consumers would be relatively pointless in terms of capital’s raison d’etre. As
Baudrillard has put it (1990: 176): ‘With a vague collusion between supply and
demand, seduction becomes nothing more than an exchange value, serving the
circulation of exchanges and the lubrication of social relations’.
What has been discovered in the course of this article, which has focused largely
on a consideration of seduction in various communicational contexts (and only
marginally on flirting, given the discovery that there seems to be far less on flirting to
be found in the literature than on seduction) could be summarized by drawing
attention to the fact that, what was first encountered as seduction in interpersonal,
communicational terms, eventually made way for seduction at a very different level,
namely that of the structure of contemporary culture and structural (including
technological) dynamics. This much has to be admitted, I believe, in light of these
insights: the type of culture one lives in foregrounds certain possibilities,
communicational and otherwise, and correspondingly, relegates others to the
periphery of actualizable options. These options (such as those referred to in notes 3
and 5) are never completely out of reach of human beings, but some of them are
encouraged in a certain kind of culture’s very communicational fabric and
technologies (as can be clearly seen today), while others are discouraged. Today, for
example, the affective register that was conspicuous in the 19th century – and reflected
in the literature of the time (see note 5) – is no longer ‘encouraged’ by postmodern
culture, except in the kitschified, sentimentalist sense that pervades soap operas and
pulp romance novels. And if Baudrillard is right that contemporary, postmodern
culture itself exhibits ‘seductive’ traits – that we live in an age of ‘soft’ seduction – at
the expense of seduction of the personal kind practised by Kierkegaard’s Johannes the
Seducer and by the nobleman Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons (see note 1), one might
express the hope that this does not adumbrate (or worse, manifest) the fading away of
those communicational capacities that are – or were? – recognizably human.

References

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listening. In: Arato, A., & Gebhardt, E. (Eds.) The essential Frankfurt
School Reader, pp. 270-299. New York: Urizen Books.
 13

Baudrillard, J. 1990. Seduction. Tr. Singer, B. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Bloom, A. 1988. The closing of the American mind. How higher education has
failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students. London:
Penguin Books.

Brand, A. 1990. The force of reason. An introduction to Habermas’ Theory of

communicative action. London: Allen & Unwin.

Copjec, J. 2002. Imagine there’s no woman. Ethics and sublimation. Cambridge,

Mass.: The MIT Press.

Easton Ellis, B. 1991. American psycho. London: Picador.

Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. Tr. Sheridan,
A. New York: Vintage Books.

Fowles, J. 1977. The magus. A revised version. London: Triad/Panther Books.

Frears, S. (Dir.) 1988. Dangerous liaisons. Warner Bros.

Harvey, D. 1990. The condition of postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hurst, A. 2005. Convergences in Lacanian and Derridean Readings of Freud’s

Death Drive. Paper presented at Conference of the International Society of
Theoretical Psychology, Cape Town, South Africa (June).

Jameson, F. 1993. Postmodernism. Or, the cultural logic of late capitalism.

New York: Verso.

Kierkegaard, S. 1971. Either/or. Vol. I. Tr. Swenson, D.F., & Swenson, L.M.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Lee, J.S. 1990. Jacques Lacan. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts

Press.

Melchert, N. 1991. The great conversation. A historical introduction to

philosophy. London: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Olivier, B. 2002. Modernity, modernism and postmodernist film: Surfaces in

Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct. In: Projections: Philosophical themes on film.
Second, enlarged edition, pp. 111-126. Port Elizabeth: University of Port
Elizabeth Publications.

Rushdie, S. 2001. Fury. London: Jonathan Cape.

Rushkoff, D. 1999. Coercion. The persuasion professionals and why we listen to

what they say. London: Little, Brown and Company.
 14

Shakespeare, W. 1993. The tragedy of King Richard the Third. In: The complete
works of William Shakespeare, pp. 644-685. Ed. Craig, W.J. London: Henry
Pordes.

Tornatore, G. (Dir.) 1988. Cinema Paradiso. Miramax Films.

Zupancic, A. 2000. The ethics of the real. Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso.

Notes.
1
Apart from Kierkegaard’s Johannes the Seducer the archetypal seducer is embodied in the character
of the Vicomte Valmont from Laclos’s novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, ‘celebrated’ in various films
based on the novel, the best known of which is probably Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons of 1988.
For a discussion of Valmont in relation to the Marquise de Merteuil (his ‘original’ lover) and Madame
de Tourvel (whom he sets out to seduce and succeeds, against the odds), see Zupancic 2000: 107-121.
2
Joan Copjec (2002, especially pp. 38-40) argues that it is precisely the feminine principle which
enables one – man or woman – to resist the extremes of ideology (the belief in the attainability of some
whole or plenum) and of hysteria (the ‘cutting up’ of social, cultural and ethical options by way of
never-ending criticism or opposition) by adopting the paradoxical Lacanian position of what Andrea
Hurst (2005) has termed, following Copjec and Lacan interpretively, ‘feminine sublimation’, according
to which one should affirm or love the partial, the fragmentary, the particular as if it were a whole. I
realize that this is the briefest of references to what she achieves in this book, and that it cannot
possibly do justice to its richness in terms of psychoanalytical theory – suffice it to say that it is
recommended for anyone interested in this problematic. See also in this regard Andrea Hurst’s (as yet
unpublished) interpretively highly original paper, ‘Convergences in Lacanian and Derridean Readings
of Freud’s Death Drive’ (2005), for an admirably lucid account of what is at stake here. At any rate,
both Copjec and Hurst make it very clear that, contrary to Baudrillard’s apocalyptic (and rather
theatrical) contention, psychoanalysis – especially its Lacanian variety (there are many different
‘psychoanalyses’) – is anything but passé.
3
In Salman Rushdie’s extraordinary novel, Fury (2001) one encounters several descriptions of the
totalizing ‘ludic’ realm as conceived by Baudrillard. One of them concerns the impact that the central
character, Professor Malik Solanka’s fiction of the ‘Puppet Kings’ on the imaginary planet of Galileo-I
– a paradigmatic narrative of the revolt of cyborgs against their creators (and one encountered in many
forms, for example in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, itself based on a literary work) – has on
consumer society. The following excerpt illustrates my point (Rushdie 2001: 225):
Once again, Solanka’s fictional characters began to burst out of their cages and take to the streets.
From around the world came news of their images, grown gigantic, standing many storeys high on
city walls. They made celebrity public appearances, singing the national anthem at ball games,
publishing cookbooks, guest-hosting the Letterman show. The leading young actresses of the day
vied publicly for the coveted leading role of Zameen of Rijk and her double, the cyborg Goddess
of Victory.
The interesting thing about this particular fiction (within a fiction) is that the global ludic mania is
here not primarily ‘driven’ by television or radio or even film, but by a website – a communications
medium that not only constitutes the ideal space for the ‘playing’ unleashed by Solanka’s story to
take off, as it were, but which is at once the prime generator of capital that is invariably, in this age,
linked to the ludic realm as the ubiquitous principle of exchange value.
4
Baudrillard’s claim concerning the ‘mythical’ status of cinema is eloquently embodied in Guiseppe
Tornatore’s beautiful and cinematically paradigmatic film, Cinema Paradiso (1988), which narrates the
events in the principal character’s (Salvatore’s) life against the captivating backdrop of the cinema
theatre, the ‘Paradiso’, in a Sicilian town providing a mythical, paradisiacal space of fantasy for the
townspeople as a substitute for the Church which, in earlier times, had offered them a similarly
(religious) mythical space.
5
Consider, for example, the novels of Jane Austen, where the friendships and loves between the many
individuals who populate her narrative spaces are invariably articulated in the register of a wide
spectrum of feeling(s). In the media-saturated context of the early 21st century, where the superficial
communicational exchanges, accompanied by hollow expressions of eternal devotion (to be rescinded
and replaced by different ones two chapters later) in an endless procession of soap operas confront one
endlessly on television, one is struck especially by a certain ‘authenticity’ of the feelings embodied in
these novels. Here is an exemplary passage from near the end of the narrative of Pride and prejudice
(1967, based on the 3rd edition of 1817):
 15

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced
herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand, that her
sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make
her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply
produced was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion,
as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been
able to encounter his eyes, she might have seen how well the expression of heart-felt delight,
diffused over his face, became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told
her of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made the affection every
moment more valuable.

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