By Alfredo Dillon
Translated by Guy Simpson
On Tuesday, 6th March 2007, Jean Baudrillard died at his house in Paris. An intellectual who moved fluidly between sociology, philosophy and media analysis, he defied classification; Baudrillard simply liked to call himself a "thinker". He is considered to be one of the foremost representatives of postmodernism and post-structuralism, although he himself resisted any such pigeon-holing. "I have tried to evade definition," he acknowledged in an interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. A consistant nihilistic agnosticism, though, remained discernible.
His analysis of media culture reveals a fierce but subtle critic. Baudrillard believed that a virtual
world created by the media induces in our consciousness a feeling of hyperreality. The hyperreal experience, a product of the interaction between real, social and symbolic worlds, is a simulacrum that ends up replacing authentic experience. In one of his articles, Baudrillard cited Borges' composition "On Rigour in Science". In it, the Argentinian writer imagines an empire in which the art of cartography has been so consummately developed, that the map of the empire matches perfectly the territory it describes in extension and detail. It was the French philosopher's contention that we live within the map, not the territory. Not only that, but one is indistinguishable from the other. Herein lies the "perfect crime" that forms the title of one of his books: nothing less than the murder of reality itself. All that we are left with is the simulacrum. The precepts have been turned on their head. "The hyperrealism of the simulation is found expressed everywhere, due to reality's extraordinary resemblance to itself," he wrote in Simulacra and simulation (1981). "In the postmodern world, there is no reality, no history," he says. "Only a simulacrum of reality, and the denial of history." The media broadcast a daily quota of news about a present that is completely dissociated from the past. Some see a connection between Baudrillard's ideas and the film Matrix, in which the world that everybody believes to be real turns out to be a construct sustained by a powerful simulator. For the philosopher, the media are that simulator.
It is in this context that Baudrillard asserted that the Gulf War never happened, at least not for the vast majority of people whose only experience of it was what they saw on television. The conflict between the United States and Saddam Hussein, Baudrillard argued, only ever existed on a symbolic plane. The enemy was not defeated and the victors did not win. Thus Clausewitz's comment that "war is politics carried out by other means" became for Baudrillard, the "perpetuation of the political void by other means".
By contrast, the destruction of the Twin Towers represented for the French thinker, an "absolute event". The first event, pure and simple, that lifted the "event strike" (an expression borrowed from Macedonio Fernández), which for Baudrillard characterized the 1990s. "Reality and fiction are inextricably linked and the fascination with the attack is first and foremost bound up with the image," he wrote in The spirit of terrorism (2002). "The image consumes the event, in the sense that it swallows it up and regurgitates it in the form of a consumable product. Certainly, the impact was of a magnitude unknown until our times, but only as an event-image." He concludes wondering: "What happens to the real event, if all we see everywhere is image, fiction, virtuality?"
Baudrillard maintains that on 11th September 2001, the World Trade Center became the stage on which globalization engaged in battle with itself. The Towers, then, "collapsed under their own weight", as a consequence of a breakdown that goes far beyond both Islam and the USA, on which two the conflict was deliberately focussed in order to give the illusion of a visible confrontation." 11/9 constitutes a "symbolic" reaction to the constant expansion of a worldview based solely on commercial exchange. "There has been a concerted effort to relegate Islam to a question of ideologies, but it has nothing to do with that. Islam is the strongest counterpart to the integrative system of Western values. What is essential is that globalization and singularity be respected. The Western system of humanist values is simply an illusion. That's why we are just as much victims as the rest", said Baudrillard, countering the thesis of the clash of civilizations. A postmodernist outsider
Jean Baudrillard was born in Reims, in the north-east of France, in 1929, to a family of farmworkers. "My parents lived outside the cultural sphere and my emancipation was thanks to books," he once admitted. He declared himself "allergic to Culture with a capital C." He studied German at La Sorbonne, then taught the language while making translations of Marx, Hölderlin and Bertolt Brecht. In 1966 he completed his doctoral thesis, The system of objects, under the tutelage of Henri Lefebvre. He protested against the French war in Algeria and took part in the May revolts of 1968 before "transpoliticizing" himself, as he put it, and devoting himself to writing.
He began his intellectual career in the Marxist arena, while drifting gradually towards postmodernism, disenchanted with the former's "grand tales", as referred to by François Lyotard. In this second stage, Baudrillard's work addresses itself more towards present day topics. Although many regard him as the "highest authority on postmodernism", Baudrillard rejected the very concept of "postmodernism". "It's an expression that explains nothing; everything that needed saying on the matter was said before the term was created," he asserted.
The Marxists broke with him when he decreed "the death of the masses"; and shortly afterwards, he wrote Forget Foucault (1977), which was enough to put him at odds with the French intelligentsia en masse. A detractor, also, of Fukuyama, the place Baudrillard chose for himself was that of outsider: "I seek a singular point of view and transport myself to that end to an island of indifference, inactive, unoccupied; an internal exile that can involve a certain degree of boredom", he said in 2004.
In addition to virtual reality, the consumerist society and the media culture, Baudrillard took an interest in moral reflection. As he saw it, the line separating what we choose to call "good" and "evil" is generally blurred. "An excess of good produces evil, and vice versa," he asserted. "Metaphysics treats evil as an accidental by-product; but this axiom, which is the sole source of the Manichaean vision that sets Good and Evil at each other's throats, is an illusion. Good and evil are unable to diminish each other: they are irreducibly codependent," he theorized in The spirit of terrorism.
To the provocative, controversial, unclassifiable Baudrillard, to engage in thinking was exciting, a risk. A phrase of his, reproduced in Le Monde, alludes to this stance: "Intellectual cowardice has become a veritable Olympic discipline in our time." Baudrillard, the thinker, was always a brave thinker in this real, or hyperreal, world. |
