Baudrillard 3 : Breakaway and Inertia

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BAUDRILLARD 3:

Breakaway and inertia

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / July 20, 2010

[This is the last of a three part series on the philosopher and social critic Jean Baudrillard, who died three years ago at the age of 77. Go here for Parts 1 and 2.]

Before we leave him, let us follow Baudrillard's thought a bit further here for the hints it may give us about our contemporary situation. In a provocative 1987 article entitled "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened," he takes us astride some fascinating metaphors. While some of the physics may be less than strict, it is worth suspending disbelief, and being open to the poetic truth of his images.

Why has the real disappeared? Baudrillard evokes the "speed of liberation" necessary for a body to escape the gravitational force of a star or planet.

According to this image, we may suppose that the acceleration of modernity, technical, factual, mediatory, the acceleration of all economic, political and sexual exchanges -- all that we denote fundamentally under the term "liberation" -- has carried us at a speed of liberation, such that we have one day...escaped from the referential sphere of the real and of history. (35)

But since all actions have their equal and opposite reactions, at the same time, Baudrillard invokes an "inverse" hypothesis dealing with the slowing down of processes. By relativity theory, great mass slows down time.

Here then is the most important event of our modern societies, the most subtle and most profound trick of their history: the advent, in the very course of their socialization, of their mobilization, of their productive and revolutionary intensification,...the advent of a force of inertia, of an immense indifference, and of the silent power of indifference. What we call the masses. This mass, this inert material of the social, does not arise from a lack of exchange, information, and communication, but on the contrary from the multiplication and saturation of exchange, information, etc. It is born of the hyper-density of the city, of merchandise, of messages, of circuits. It is the cold star of the social and, surrounding this mass, history chills, slows down, events succeed one another and are annihilated in indifference. Neutralized, immunized by information, the masses in turn neutralize history and play(act) as a screen of absorption.(37)

Gridlock. In this view (wave, not photon), progress, history, reason, desire can no longer find their "speed of liberation."

We are already at the point where political and social events do not have sufficient autonomous energy to move us, and thus they unfold as in a silent film for which we are, not individually, but collectively, irresponsible. History ends there, and you may see how: not because of lack of character, nor of violence...nor of events, but of a slowing down, indifference, and stupefaction....[History's] effects accelerate, but its sense slackens, ineluctably. (38)

Baudrillard thinks through -- in microcosm -- the cosmological question of infinite expansion vs. cycles of expansion and contraction. Will the breakaway or the inertia prevail?

Are we, like the galaxies, caught in a definitive movement that distances us one from another at a prodigious speed, or is this dispersion to infinity destined to end, and the human molecules to approach one another according to an inverse movement of gravitation? (38)

It could be that the very energy of the liberation of the species (the demographic, technological acceleration, the acceleration of exchanges in the course of centuries) creates an excess of mass and of resistance which goes faster than the initial energy, and which would thus drag us in an unrelenting movement of contraction and inertia. (39)

Baudrillard offers a third hypotheses about the "vanishing point," the point of disappearance beyond which all ceases to be real, by evoking the technical perfection of stereo. In his listening experience, there is no more music, but rather an impression of something "viscerally secreted in the interior."

The problem of the disappearance of music is the same as that of history: it will not disappear for want of music, it will disappear in the perfection of its materiality.

It is also thus with history, there too we have gone beyond that limit where, as a result of informational sophistication, history as such has ceased to exist. [There has been a] short-circuit between cause and effect,...a radical uncertainty about the truth, about the very reality of the event.

By definition, this 'vanishing point', the point on this side of which there was history, there was music, there was a meaning to the event, to the social, to sexuality,...this point is irrecoverable. Where must we stop information?...We will never know what history was before becoming exasperated in the technical perfection of information, or before vanishing in the multiplicity of codes -- we will never know what all things were before vanishing in the realization of their model.(39)

Unlike the (sophisticated) complainers of the Frankfurt School, Baudrillard seems pleased -- or at least not unhappy -- with all this.

That we leave history in order to enter into simulation...is not at all a despairing hypothesis, unless one speaks of simulation as a higher form of alienation. Which I will certainly not do. History is precisely the place of alienation, and if we leave history, we also leave alienation (not without nostalgia, one must say, for that good old dramaturgy of subject and object.)

But we can offer the hypothesis that history itself is or was only an immense model of simulation....I speak of the time in which it unfolds, of this linear time where events supposedly succeed one another from cause to effect, even if the complexity is great. (41)

Baudrillard sees no liberating local language games, but

massive comportments of retreat, of the suspension of the historic will, including the apparent inverse obsession of historicising everything, of achieving everything, of memorizing everything of our past and that of other cultures. (43)

Wandering through underground shopping malls, he senses

societies which entomb themselves behind their prospective technologies, their stocks of information and in the immense alveolate networks of communication where time is finally annihilated by pure circulation -- these generations will never perhaps awake, but they don't know it. (43)

Nevertheless, he does not complain. His positive evaluation of America stands alone amidst the howling and jeering of other cultured Europeans:

The US is a beautiful example of this immoral energy of transformation [directed] toward and against all systems of value. Despite [Americans'] morality, their puritanism, their obsession with virtue, their pragmatic idealism, everything there changes irresistibly according to an impulse which is not at all that of progress, linear by definition -- no, the real motor is the abjection of free circulation. Asocial and still untamed today, resistant to every coherent project of society: everything is tested there, everything is paid for there, everything is made to have value there, everything fails there. Western music, various therapies, sexual "perversions", buildings in the east, the leaders, the gadgets, the artistic movements, all pass by in succession without stopping. And our [European] cultural unconscious, profoundly nourished by culture and meaning, can howl before this spectacle. Nevertheless, it is there, in the immoral promiscuity of all the forms, of all the races, in the violent spectacle of change, that resides the success of a society and the sign of its vitality.

What do we do with all this oddball stuff?, or Baudrillard's Conception of the Role of Theory

It's not a question of ideas -- there are already too many ideas!

Baudrillard calls for nothing -- and no action.

And indeed it would be hard to call for anything else since, in Baudrillard, "critical theory faces the formidable task of unveiling structures of domination when no one is dominating, nothing is being dominated and no ground exists for a principle of liberation from domination." Baudrillard's writing seems to be for him

simply an act of defiance, a game. But it seems to me to be the only enthralling game. At the same time, it's often an act of provocation. Perhaps the only thing one can do is to destabilize and provoke the world around us.

Is he modest, or what?

We shouldn't presume to produce positive solutions. In my opinion this isn't the intellectual's or the thinker's task. It's not our responsibility. It might occur, but it will only come about by reaction. I've the impression that if energy still exists, it is reactive, reactionary, repulsive. It needs to be provoked into action. One should not attempt to inaugurate positive solutions because they will immediately be condemned -- so they're virtually a waste of energy. In other words, one needs to make a kind of detour through the strategy of the worst scenario, through the paths of subversion. It's a slightly perverse calculation, perhaps. But in my opinion it's the only effective option -- it's the only way that a philosopher or thinker can, as it were, become a terrorist.

The secret of theory is that truth doesn't exist. You can't confront it in any way. The only thing you can do is play with some kind of provocative logic. Truth constitutes a space that can no longer be occupied. The whole strategy is, indeed, not to occupy it, but to work around it so that others come to occupy it. It means creating a void so that others will fall into it.

Much of Baudrillard's "perverse calculation" is a corollary of an amazing insight:

The false is resplendent with all the power of the true, that is art;...inversely the true ...is resplendent with all the power of the false, that is obscenity.

Art, the antithesis of obscenity. There's an idea for the Evangelical Right!

When one says it is the false which is resplendent with the power of the true, it means that the true, by having this kind of aura placed on it, can never be found simply by looking for it. The only strategy is the reverse one! You only reach the true, the beautiful -- supposing that that is what is wanted -- by passing directly to the inverse....Indeed, there is a radical contradiction in pretending to find the truth where one is looking for it...which is our morality. Happily, art does not partake of that self-contradiction. It knows very well that illusion is the sole route to get somewhere if something is to be found...It is very fundamental.

Herein lies the ultimate demise of socialism or any other grand theory that, however well-intended, seeks to achieve a particular goal, be it liberation or enslavement.

There is a terrible self-contradiction in the social as we envisage it -- or in socialism which proposes indeed the frontal realization of the social, and I would not say without perversion but without any intelligence -- that never do things promote themselves like that -- in a straight line which would lead from their origin to their end. Happily, things are more subtle than that.

We have already heard "That people want to be told what they want is certainly not true; it is not clear either that they really want to know what they want, or that they desire to want at all." Baudrillard continues:

The whole edifice of socialism is based on that assumption. They start from the fact that this is what people ought to want, that they are social in the sense that they are supposed to know themselves, know what they want. I think we have pressed beyond that point, beyond truth, beyond reality.

So no more Mr. Fixit. Social theory, at least

maintains absolutely no relation with anything at all; it becomes an event in and of itself. We can no longer fix the way things are going...Strictly speaking, nothing remains but a sense of dizziness, with which you can't do anything.

And thus we can understand Baudrillard's evolution from academic, Marxist sociologist to postmodern artist, playing with falsehood "resplendent with all the power of the true." Though I worry about Baudrillard being nothing but a jester, I read him with a strong sense of lurking enlightenment. The stakes are profound.

Appraising the unappraisable Baudrillard

Everything I write is deemed brilliant, intelligent, but not serious. There has never been any real discussion about it. I don't claim to be tremendously serious, but there are nevertheless some philosophically serious things in my work!

His critics are merciless, seeing his "speculative spontaneity" as "grossly undertheorized."

It is inconceivable that any collectivistic political programme can emerge from this practice.

[Baudrillard's] rhetorical 'play' and 'caprice' may well disrupt restricting intellectual ethics or conventions, but seldom suffice to inaugurate radically new alternatives to dominant practices.

Certainly, his aestheticist view of the world can be problematical. Who could have watched the Challenger explosion, and then say

It was extraordinary: a sort of symbolic victory that only the Americans could afford! That fantastic burial in the sky! They've revived our appetite for space. Offering themselves the luxury of such disasters. What a way to go! Simple endings are without interest; they're flat and linear. The really exciting thing is to discover orbital space where these other forces play.

Are we to take such a man seriously? We can grant him his "voluntary stance as a marginal oppositional figure." And we can still be inspired by his enthusiasms:

Even if things are not really at their end, well! Let's act as if they were. It's a game, a provocation. Not in order to put a full stop to everything, but, on the contrary, to make everything begin again. So you see, I'm far from being a pessimist.

But most of all, I think we have to value the extraordinary originality of his angle on the contemporary world. How remarkable his attack on what Foucault terms the "abundance of things to know: essential or terrible, marvelous or droll." As Foucault concludes, there are still "too few means to think about all that is happening."

Baudrillard adds immeasurably to those means. I would certainly agree with Nickolas Zurbrugg, a most critical critic, in saying

There is frequently something profoundly engaging and inspiring in Baudrillard's idiosyncratic attempts to grapple with those issues which he finds most challenging and most at stake. Compared with the unadventurous ways in which other cartographers of postmodern culture carefully sift elementary shifts within the familiar shallows of twentieth-century discourse, Baudrillard's finest "virtual' descents into uncharted contemporary depths offer models of passionate engagement with the most crucial developments within the postmodern condition.

As to whether hyperreality is truly the new mode of postmodernism, I can only quote my wife, Donna, who the other day called an airline, and pressed 1 to speak to a representative.

"The human I talked to this morning," Donna reported, "asked 'What did it say on the automated system?'"

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

Also see:

• "Marc Estrin: The Genius of Jean Baudrillard" by Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / June 29, 2010
• "Baudrillard 2 : Postmodern Democracy and the End of History" by Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / July 5, 2010

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Baudrillard 2 : Postmodern Democracy and the End of History

BAUDRILLARD 2:

Postmodern democracy
and the end of history

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / July 5, 2010

"The Balance of Terror is the Terror of Balance." (60)

[This is the second of a three part series on the philosopher and social critic Jean Baudrillard, who died three years ago at the age of 77. Go here for Part I.]

So what of democracy, the great Enlightenment goal? Is there now only a democratic simulacrum? What is the demos, the "fantastic silent majority characteristic of our times" thinking and doing in its silent postmodernity?

The masses in "advanced" democracy

In Dostoevsky's brilliant chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor," Jesus comes back to earth during the Inquisition, and is arrested and interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor, "a man of almost ninety, tall and erect." Jesus says nothing throughout the moving and remarkable monologue of his adversary. The supposed Savior is condemned for lack of compassion:

[GRAND INQUISITOR:] Instead of seizing men's freedom, You gave them even more of it! Have You forgotten that peace, and even death, is more attractive to man than the freedom of choice that derives from the knowledge of good and evil... Instead of ridding men of their freedom, You increased their freedom, and You imposed everlasting torment on man's soul... Had you respected him less, You would have demanded less of him and that would have been more like love, for the burden You placed on him would not have been so heavy. Man is weak and despicable... We [the Church] have corrected your work.

Baudrillard meditates on the same material.

Choice is a strange imperative. Any philosophy which assigns man to the exercise of his will can only plunge him in despair. For if nothing is more flattering to consciousness than to know what it wants, on the contrary nothing is more seductive to the other consciousness (the unconscious?) than not to know what it wants, to be relieved of choice and diverted from its own objective will. It is much better to rely on some insignificant or powerful instance than to be dependent on one's own will or the necessity of choice. Beau Brummel had a servant for that purpose. Before a splendid landscape dotted with beautiful lakes, he turns toward his valet to ask him: "Which lake do I prefer?"

In the Sixties, and even now, the (New) Left called for "empowering people to make the decisions that affect their lives." But that assumes people know what they want, or at least want to find out. Baudrillard demurs:

Not only do people certainly not want to be told what they wish, but they certainly do not want to know it, and it is not even sure that they want to wish at all.

But while most commentators -- Chomsky, the Frankfurt School -- would see this as the surrender of the masses to the designs of Power (Dostoevsky: "Man is weak and despicable."), Baudrillard challenges us to see things another way.

Whom does this trap close on? The mass knows that it knows nothing, and it does not want to know. The mass knows that it can do nothing, and it does not want to achieve anything. It is violently reproached with this mark of stupidity and passivity. But not at all: the mass is very snobbish; it acts as Brummel did and delegates in a sovereign manner the faculty of choice to someone else by a sort of game of irresponsibility, or ironic challenge, of sovereign lack of will, of secret ruse.

The ruse of silence: the mass's way of resisting manipulation.

About the media you can sustain two opposing hypotheses: they are the strategy of power, which finds in them the means of mystifying the masses and of imposing its own truth. Or else they are the strategic territory of the ruse of the masses, who exercise in them their concrete power of the refusal of truth, of the denial of reality.

Understanding media...

...is crucial, for it is the media which cooks up reality stew and invites the masses to dinner.

We must think of the media as if they were...a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal. (55)

But the question of whether the masses eat or are eaten remains unsettled.

There is an over-circulation of ideas, of the most contradictory ideas, all in the same flux of ideas. What happens is that their specific impact is wiped out. I mean their negativity is wiped out. Mass media, and all that, are not vehicles for negativity. They carry a kind of neutralizing positivity.

Which means that even the negative is positive. It's true. Iran-Contra created the stardom of Ollie North. It was fascinating, and everyone was excused. Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas and we are all the better now for understanding sexual harassment, and the pundits taunted us "They can't both be telling the truth," and Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court. And then, OJ flees from the police in what becomes the most watched chase scene in TV history. Isn't actuality wonderful? Remember those fascinating L.A. riots? No matter how negative the event, just reporting it shows us that "The system works!"

What kind of person does this self-affirming recursiveness create? Democracy depends upon an informed public, but

Is information really information? Or on the contrary, will it produce a world of inertia? Will it produce, by its very proliferation, the inverse of what it wants to? Doesn't it lead to a world, a universe in reverse, of resistance, inertia, circulation, silence and such like... It is by information that one is supposed to bring consciousness to the world, to inform and to awaken the world, but it is this very information through its very media which produces the reverse effect.

It would seem that in this simulated postmodernity, the conditions of democracy are far from being met, and all of us are largely consigned to inconsequential states of obeying and resisting a bland hyperreality.

Our relationship to this system is an insoluble "double bind" -- exactly that of children in their relationship to the demands of the adult world. They are at the same time told to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free, and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive objects, inert, obedient, and conformist. The child resists on all levels, and to these contradictory demands he or she replies by a double strategy. When we ask the child to be object, he or she opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, the strategy of a subject. When we ask the child to be subject, he or she opposes just as obstinately and successfully a resistance as object; that is to say, exactly the opposite: infantilism, hyperconformity, total dependence, passivity, idiocy.

Does this seem an apt description of the electorate?

I don't know what people are looking for. They have been taught to look for things like happiness, but deep down that doesn't interest them, any more than producing or being produced.

The masses are playing dead...They are no longer involved in a process of subversion or revolution, but in some gigantic devolution from an unwanted liberty...

The drive to spectacle is a more powerful instinct than self-preservation.

And this suggests an explanation for a phenomenon perplexing now, and perplexing too, to an interviewer in 1989, who comments

President Reagan and his whole administration, his wife included, seem like an immense simulation: before he was a Hollywood B-grade actor, now he looks like a living cadaver. The astonishing thing is that no one really cares when he lies to the press or makes incredible gaffes. Even more, he's been involved in many suspicious or illegal activities, like the Iran-Contra scandal. But basically no one in the US seems really upset; in fact, it's as if the exposé itself, as a genre of critical or investigative reporting, had suddenly become dépassé in the eighties. Everyone knows or suspects the worst but finally remains indifferent. One might even say that the very visibility of Reagan and his suspect activities makes him invulnerable to criticism. Do you see here any confirmation of your own theories?

To which, Baudrillard replies,

Indeed. Reagan is a sort of fantastic specimen of the obscene transparence of power and politics, and of its insignificance at the same time. It's as if everyone has become aware of the indifference of power to its own decisions, which is nothing but the indifference of the people themselves to their own representation, and thus to the whole representative system. This is accompanied by a demand all the greater for the spectacle of politics, with its scandals, morality trials, mass-media and show-biz effects. There is no longer anything but the energy of spectacle and of the simulacrum....

Reagan provided one kind of spectacle, Obama provides another. There is in President Hope and Change a kind of "anti-Teflon effect," in which no matter what he does, he is seen by many as blameworthy. Why this curious transformation of public opinion from all-forgiving to merciless?

The conflicts have all the depth of a grade-B Hollywood movie:
Reagan -- old and pitiful; The Public -- magnanimous and tolerant.
Obama -- young and treacherous; The Public: fierce and righteous.
Always enough white hats to go round. Self-preservation -- and reality -- be damned!

True, there's a lot of theorizing there, in the disguise of "intellectual terrorism." But notions such as Baudrillard's are postmodern products, deep from the molten core.

Naturally, he denies it all:

I have nothing to do with postmodernism.

One should ask whether postmodernism, the postmodern, has a meaning. It doesn't as far as I am concerned. It's an expression, a word which people use but which explains nothing. It's not even a concept. It's nothing at all. It's because it's impossible to define what's going on now, grand theories are over and done with... That is, there is a sort of void, a vacuum. It's because there is nothing really to express this that an empty term has been chosen to designate what is really empty. So in a sense there is no such thing as postmodernism.

And yet Baudrillard, of all the commentators, gives the most arresting expression to this "non-existent" state. He describes a contemporary world which has burst the previous limits of Western society, a world in which all previous boundaries -- male/female, art/non-art, economics/politics, etc. -- have broken down, where religion becomes fashion, and revolution becomes style and colored shirts. What does a simulated hyperreality signify if not the "postmodern rupture"?

In fact, in Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard talks about the

second revolution of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances [in modernity's search for the hidden authentic]. Whoever lives by meaning dies by meaning.

A second revolution, equal to that of modernity? This is hardly nothing.

"Who lives by meaning dies by meaning." Thus Baudrillard dismisses the entire debate over the Enlightenment Project.

This intellectual, mental, metaphysical situation has through inertia managed to survive beyond its point of relevance. And it is probably from this that we get the stagnation and collapse of thought that we see today... We are dragging behind us a whole bundle of ill-digested rationalities, radicalities, that have no support, no enemies, and in which there is nothing at stake.

The old theories are irrelevant.

It is a question here of a completely new species of uncertainty, which results not from the lack of information but from information itself and even from an excess of information. It is information itself which produces uncertainty, and so this uncertainty, unlike the traditional uncertainty which could always be resolved, is irreparable.

I have the impression with postmodernism that there is an attempt to rediscover a certain pleasure in the irony of things, in the game of things. Right now one can tumble into total hopelessness -- all the definitions, everything, it's all been done. What can one do? What can one become? And postmodernity is the attempt -- perhaps it's desperate, I don't know -- to reach a point where one can live with what is left. It is more a survival among the remnants than anything else.)

The end of history

The seriousness of the postmodern rupture is attested to by Baudrillard's musings on "the end of history". In 1989, Francis Fukayama created an intellectual storm when he published an article with that title. His thesis was that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy -- at least in theory -- history, as we know it -- the struggle between opposing forces -- was over. I mention this teapot tempest in order to contrast it with Baudrillard's deeper, more mysterious probe.

Unlike Fukayama's triumphal announcement, Baudrillard's reasoning rings with affirmatory hopelessness.

A painful idea: that beyond a certain precise point in time, history was no longer real. Without being aware of it, the totality of the human race would have suddenly quit reality. All that would have happened since then would not have been at all real, but we would not be able to know it. Our task and our duty would now be to discover this point and, to the extent that we shall not stop there, we must persevere in the actual destruction.

History has been irreversibly destroyed by the virus of simulation. Although there is much "interest" in history today -- there is even a History Book of the Month Club -- a genuine return to an authentic relationship with history has become impossible.

And that is also part of the postmodern: restoration of a past culture, to bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that one has destroyed, all that one has destroyed in joy and which one is reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive.

It's true that everywhere today (and not just in the U.S.) there is a resurgence of history, or rather of the demand for historicity, linked no doubt to the weak registration rate of factual history (there are more and more events, and less and less history). We are caught in a sort of gigantic, historical backwards accounting, and endless retrospective bookkeeping. This historicity is speculative and maniacal, and linked to the indefinite stocking of information. We are setting up artificial memories which can take the place of natural intelligence.

But all this frenetic activity, all the research and data entry and hypertextual referencing do us little good in our attempt to connect.

We tend to forget that our reality, including the tragic events of the past, has been swallowed up by the media. That means that it is too late to verify events and to understand them historically, for what characterizes our era and our fin de siècle is precisely the disappearance of the instruments of this intelligibility. It was necessary to understand history while there was still history...

Now it's too late, we're in another world. It's evident in the television production of "Holocaust" or even in "Shoah." Those things will no longer be understood because notions as fundamental as responsibility, objective cause, the meaning (or non-sense) of history have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing. Effects of moral conscience or collective conscience are now entirely the effects of the media. We are now witnessing the therapeutic of obstinacy with which some try to resuscitate this conscience, and the little breath it still has left.

History has disappeared

in the ecstasy of information, the ecstasy of messages. We have disappeared in a sort of ecstasy of the media, of information circulating with acceleration across everything. And one is no longer able to put a stop to this process.

This, not Fukayama's superficial assessment, is the deeper meaning of "The End of History".

(Final installment next week.)

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

Also see "Marc Estrin: The Genius of Jean Baudrillard" by Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / June 29, 2010

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Marc Estrin : The Genius of Jean Baudrillard

THE GENIUS OF JEAN BAUDRILLARD

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / June 29, 2010

[This is the first of three parts.]

My last week's posting on The Rag Blog, Tea for Two, led to several inquiries concerning the philosopher and social critic Jean Baudrillard, who died three years ago at the age of 77.

I was a latecomer to Baudrillard. Years after academic critics had been industriously putting him down, I discovered him by accident in a catalogue called AMOK, Fourth Dispatch: A Sourcebook of the Extremes of Information in Print. Exotica, Mayhem, Neuropolitics, Scratch 'n Sniff, Sensory Deprivation, Sleaze, Tactics -- and, under "Control," Baudrillard.

In a page of Baudrillard listings, they printed a selection from Simulations about Disneyland being "presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real." The proverbial light bulb snapped on over my head: Reality! This contemporary craziness is not basically about Democrats and Republicans, hawks and doves, rich and poor, blacks and whites, women and men -- it's about different understandings of Reality! And about the various strategies of manipulating Reality.

This was a new thought for me, one that seemed hugely pregnant. I ran out and bought a copy of Simulations, figuring that Baudrillard might have the missing key to my key questions. He would explain things that seemed so weirdly inexplicable -- like how and why we've fallen into our postmodern insanity, and what we need to do about it.

I'm a good reader. Six hundred page book? No problem. Simulations is 4x6 -- large print, big margins, 150 pages. Almost a pamphlet. I'll read it in an evening. It's now 13 years later, and I'm still nibbling away at it. Not that it's so difficult. But the thinking of this "intellectual terrorist," "the Darth Vader of postmodernism," is so audacious that I can't read any more than a page at a time -- if that.

The last movement of Schoenberg's Second Quartet sets a poem by Stefan George which begins with the line, "Ich fühle Luft von anderen Planeten" -- I feel the air of other planets. That's how I feel when reading Baudrillard. Adding Baudrillard to any academic debate on postmodernism is like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie where two people are arguing, and Harpo comes in with a scissors and snips off their ties.

Although he himself denies being "serious," I think it pays to try to think with him, and to take his unseriousness seriously for where it may lead.

I'm going to quote him a lot. There's no sense paraphrasing a writer who, in a section on the energy of postmodern collapse, can write

We ...dream of harnessing this energy, but this is sheer madness. We might as well harness the energy of automobile accidents, or of dogs that have been run over...

Late, early, and middle Baudrillard

You may know that there is "early," "middle," and "late" Beethoven -- Beethoven the enthusiastic, energetic young kid ready to kick the pants off any other classical composer; Beethoven the walking tragedy, Europe's greatest composer going DEAF! -- inventing romantic music to express the deepest passions of his mighty heart; and finally, "late" Beethoven -- the stone deaf old man, a decade out of touch with any worldly sound, inventing music that had never been heard before, and would never be heard again. Well, Baudrillard underwent a similar conversion to the weird.


Late

For our purposes here, I am going to concentrate almost entirely on the language and concepts of middle Baudrillard. Late Baudrillard flies so high and crazy that it's difficult to connect with without a thorough grounding in what preceded it, and even then makes for a major challenge. His thought revolves around the notions of "seduction" and "fatal theory" in which objects take control of the universe, surpassing all attempts to conceptualize or control them.

This "obscene" (out of the scene, nothing hidden) "ecstasy of objects" creates a catastrophe for us, the exhausted subjects, and we arrive at apathy and stupefaction. Our only hope is to imitate the strategies and ruses of objects.

Baudrillard sees other social critics as proceeding by "banal strategies," thinking themselves more clever than objects, and heading for inevitable defeat from objects' greater cynicism and shrewdness.

That much said about late Baudrillard, I leave you to try to read his mysterious words, and to study the insidious plotting of your refrigerators and vases.


Early

Early Baudrillard is more understandable, and extremely interesting. Although he was never fully accepted into the starry, hierarchical skies of European academia, Baudrillard began his intellectual career with some extremely significant extensions of Marxism to contemporary reality, taking into account the emergence of mass culture and the technologies of mass reproduction.

Early on, Baudrillard was still a classical, highly imaginary, Marxist, assuming, with Marx, that economics was the major determining factor of human life and civilization. His insight, however, was that production was no longer as important a force as consumption, and that consumerism -- "a collective hysteria that takes the form of manic appropriation of an endless series of objects" -- made the behavior of consumers more important than the behavior of producers, the major actors on Marx's stage. The desire for objects had easily evolved into the desire for desire itself, and a positive feedback loop was well into driving a situation unimagined by the Marxian theory of mutually antagonistic forces.

But this extension of Marxism evolved into a devastating critique of Marx, and an attack on classical Marxism as a mirror of bourgeois society, a perpetuation of the idea of humanity as homo economicus, an excusing, legitimizing understanding of the current state of affairs.

In typical, flamboyant form, Baudrillard parodied the famous opening of the Communist Manifesto:

A spectre haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity. The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production.

Baudrillard accuses Marx of being in collusion with capitalism (!) in the Marxian analysis of the insidious power of its forms. He was looking for a more radical position, one which looks at the world through another lens -- the optic of "symbolic exchange." In symbolic exchange, Baudrillard posits an alternative organizing principle of modern society, harkening back to the practices of more "primitive" ones.

In escaping the logic of production and adopting the pervasive ambiance of advertising, this new condition creates a state of affairs in which the product is no longer as important as the set of meanings arbitrarily grafted on to it. The pervasive power of advanced capitalism has created an entirely new structure of meaning. The free play of signs and codes gives consumers an illusory sense of freedom and self-determination which entirely escapes their eyes and understanding.

In his books, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972/1981), The Mirror of Production (1975), and Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Baudrillard attempts to work out all the contradictions between commodity exchange and symbolic exchange, and their implications for the future.

But his final break with Marxism came with his new understanding of the evolution of Reality in Western culture. Here we come to a main feeding station for digesting postmodernity -- the one I find most interesting, stimulating, and profitable: middle Baudrillard, and his notions of hyperreality and simulation.


Middle

In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard posits a definitive rupture between modern societies oriented around production and consumption, and postmodern ones "in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing principles of a new social order where simulation rules." In Simulations, he develops these ideas.

I don't think Baudrillard would like my seizing and concentrating on this stage of his work: he has gone beyond it.

"I so wish I could cast off this yoke of simulacras and simulations which, incidentally, I have never treated as the last word of history, and with which I am truly fed up. I've heard these tunes too many times." "I stopped working on simulation. I felt I was going totally nuts."

And even his readers go totally nuts. Middle Baudrillard is not logical. He rarely defines his key terms, and when he does, he will offer widely ranging anecdotal descriptions rather than definitions. So you never really know what he's talking about. The good side of this is that he stimulates the creative imagination like no other writer -- you have to fill in your own blanks.

Jean Baudrillard at his home in Paris. Photo by Eric Feferberg / Guardian, U.K.

Simulations

Let me review from last week a key section in Simulations which give a reader something to hang on to. Baudrillard, you may remember, characterizes four stages in the changing function of signs. It is worth repeating.

1. The sign is "a reflection of a basic reality" -- as is common in scientific or referential language.
2. The sign "masks and perverts a basic reality" -- as when ideology stems from false consciousness which prevents people from seeing their true alienation or exploitation. The Frankfurt School writers have plenty to say about this.
3. The sign "masks the absence of a basic reality" -- as when iconoclasts fear of images of deity because they may lead people to suspect the absence of deity.
4. The sign "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever": it is its own pure simulacrum.

Here Baudrillard is thinking of the incessant contemporary production of images with no attempt to ground them in reality. Do you drive a Lexus, an Acura, an Elanta, an XL300? What does that mean??? (p11)

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks a decisive turning point. The era of simulation begins. (12)

We look around us today. How can we account for "the interchangeability of previously contradictory or dialectically opposed terms," the interchangeability

of the beautiful and the ugly in fashion; of the right and the left in politics; of the true and false in every media message; of the useful and the useless at the level of objects; and of nature and culture at every level of meaning?

It's easy -- because

all the great humanist criteria of value, all the values of a civilization of moral, aesthetic, and practical judgment, vanish in our system of images and signs. Everything becomes undecidable.

The age of simulation ...begins with a liquidation of all referentials -- worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalence,... substituting signs of the real for the real itself....(4)

On the first page of Simulations, Baudrillard cites a tale by Borges in which "the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory." (1) But these days, it is no longer a question of maps and territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them. If there is any distinction at all, it is that it is the territory whose shards are slowly rotting across the map, and not vice versa.

So all we have now is the map, the sign, a most "ductile" environment. This is the age of simulation -- the generation by models of a "real" without origin or reality. Hyperreality. "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory." (2)

If you think it's easy to tell real from fake, Baudrillard challenges you to try staging a fake holdup.

Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger....Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible -- in brief, stay close to the "truth," so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of artificial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phony ransom over to you)...(39)

And here, Baudrillard elucidates the dynamic nature of the interaction of reality and simulation:

-- In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality -- that's exactly how the established order is... (39)

If reality is to seek in simulation the same order of reality, then the destiny of reality is inevitably to become simulation. This dynamic would explain the "collective hysteria" of production and overproduction, consumption and overconsumption in Western culture.

What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. (44)

It also explains the itch for fascism that we see demonstrated in the public desire for a president to "act presidential." It doesn't matter what he does: the mere assertion of power satisfies "a collective demand for signs of power -- a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power." (45)

It further explains the movement to "end welfare as we know it," and get single mothers working, even if they cannot afford to take care of their children, and even if government solutions (short of abandonment) are bound to cost more than welfare. "There is a demand for work exactly proportional to the loss of stake in the work process." (47)

How to cope with this unholy coupling of reality and sign? The answer seems to be to assume nothing about the reality of any reality. Everything is true. All realities are exchangeable and equivalent. Baudrillard gives the example of a hot topic at the time he was writing: urban bombings (presented as leftist) terrorizing Germany and Italy, but equally applicable to many "terrorist" and false-flag attacks today.

Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with the logic of facts... (31)

Baudrillard next treats us to some extended examples of living "in a logic of simulation."


Disneyland

I have already referred to the much-quoted section on Disneyland, (23-26), the "perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation." (23)

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is not a question of a false representation of reality, but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. (25)

Baudrillard identifies Disneyland in this regard as a third-order simulation -- the kind which "masks the absence of a basic reality." He also opines that "the Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false; it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real." (25)

By denying the truth or falsity of Disneyland, he is underlining that it is not that Disneyland is a fake representation of America, but that there no longer is any real America. His prison reference would suffer the same logic: it is not that America is "really" a total prison from which we are distracted by literal prisons. In terms of meaning, there is no is here -- any more than there is one particular terrorist bomber -- no matter who actually did the bombing.

Can you grasp the radical, all-embracing nature of these assertions?

Baudrillard is often accused of being decadent and apolitical -- of being neutral and non-judgmental concerning these phenomena. But his section on Watergate shows that it is possible to combine these counter-intuitive views with a hard-headed understanding of power and a passionate denunciation of predatory capitalism.


Watergate is not a scandal

It is not important who did what. "Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal -- in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication." (27)

Before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none. Watergate is not a scandal: this is what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a...moral panic as we approach the primal...scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality -- this is what is scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it -- it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather it is "enlightened" thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capital exploits us, etc." -- as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. (28-29)

Hence Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries, a simulation of scandal to regenerative ends. (30)

It was not a trap designed or set by anyone, but an inevitable consequence of unanchored reality desperately clinging to its unanchored self. Just as with the terrorist bombing, anyone can do the actual work. If the Left wants to expose Watergate as a scandal of the Right, all well and good.

The work of the Right is done very well, and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here [Deep Throat]. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left.....Such collusions admirably knit together...The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the 'vicious' curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilised from right to left, a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own surface.... (30, 34-5)

The Gulf War will not take place

Baudrillard became more infamous than ever when -- before the '91 war -- he made the above statement. After the war, when taunted with the incorrectness of his position, he simply commented, "The Gulf War did not take place." Rather than try to understand this paradoxical statement, most critics simply threw up their hands and cried, "He's a bigger asshole than I thought."

But isn't it clear that just as Disneyland is not fake, just as Watergate was not a scandal, the Gulf War was not a war, but a misdirecting sleight-of-hand to make us think that all isn't war? If this was an ideological war to oust Saddam, why was Saddam left still in power, though the west "won"? If this was a fierce contest against a hugely threatening army, why were there so few American casualties? Some on the left have refused to call it a war, but rather, "a massacre." Some have analyzed it as a taxpayer-supported demo -- PR for the benefit of U.S. arms merchants. In any case, there is a lot of truth in Baudrillard's seemingly outrageous statements. His analysis of simulated war, however, goes deeper:

Behind the armed violence, the murderous antagonism between adversaries -- which seems a matter of life and death, and which is played as such (otherwise you could never send out people to get smashed up in this kind of trouble), behind this simulacrum of a struggle to death and of ruthless global stakes, the two adversaries are fundamentally as one against that other, unnamed, never mentioned thing, whose objective outcome in war, with equal complicity between the two adversaries, is total liquidation. It is tribal, communal, pre-capitalist structures, every form of exchange, language and symbolic organization which must be abolished. Their murder is the object of war -- and in its immense spectacular contrivance of death, war is only the medium of this process of terrorist rationalization by the social -- the murder through which sociality can be founded, no matter what allegiance, communist or capitalist. The total complicity or division of labor between two adversaries...for the very purpose of remolding and domesticating social relations. (68-69)

No wonder there are no "victories" in war, at least not those of stated objectives. If the actual objective is to repress any other emerging reality, then it's good -- and understandable -- that Saddam was left in power, that the drug war is "unsuccessful," that Russia was (and is) being destroyed and humiliated in its recycled role as ally.

What no longer exists is the adversity of adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes, the ideological seriousness of war. (70)

Instead, there is a secret alliance of all the components of the what-is. All is simulated, necessary and equal in the Political Economy of Signs. Such thinking explains a lot.

To be continued next week.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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