imomus | The virtual world of consumer spectacle fails to describe its describer

The difference between the French obituaries of Jean Baudrillard, who died last week, and the Anglo-Saxon ones was really remarkable. The Anglo ones seemed to be written by people trapped in exactly the sort of spectral, consumerist cage that Baudrillard described in his work, people nevertheless unaware of how well he had understood their situation. And so we got, from Britain and America, pieces which began, over and over again, with the same two soundbites:

1. That Baudrillard had said the first Gulf War "did not take place".

2. That his ideas had inspired The Matrix (a film he hated and refused to have anything to do with, by the way).

The best obit was in Libération, the paper for which he wrote many of his most famous articles. They gave him the cover and several pages inside, and told us that Baudrillard was "curiosity itself".

Whereas a newspaper like Le Figaro told us, usefully and sensibly, that Baudrillard "contested the very notion of a New World Order, because it suggested the end of history and a conception of the universal in which the figure of the other is by definition retrograde, barbaric or archaic", and that his conception of postmodernity was of an era "marked by the erosion of grand explanations of the world and by the hegemony of a consumerist lifestyle", the Anglo press actually exemplified those things, offering us no big ideas, a conception of Frenchmen as "the other", a few anecdotes about Keanu Reeves and Madonna, some soundbites that had grown "iconic" by repetition, some hate mail, and some very peculiar and contradictory stuff about consumerism.

What to make of the very odd article in The Scotsman entitled "Bookshop hype owes a debt to Gallic genius of the hyper-real"? This told us that "his ideas are probably a lot more sane than you might think" because the policy of Waterstone's Booksellers to charge publishers £1000 to have a book on display in the store and £10,000 to make it a featured display somehow vindicated "crazy" Baudrillard's idea about simulacra and the hyper-real? Some kind of claim that Baudrillard could be justified, after all, as a slightly unconventional marketing guru seemed to be in the offing.

This was confirmed by the NPR report in which Mark Poster from the University of California at Irvine told public radio listeners that the French philosopher "was very interested in consumer behaviour", and recounted Baudrillard's own consumer preference: unlike Americans, he drank wine at lunch.

On the question of whether Baudrillard liked America, there was some confusion. The Times told us that Baudrillard was both "a fierce critic of consumer culture" and "a tireless enthusiast for America". For Reuters, though, Baudrillard's "America" was "a high-speed travelogue seeking to lay bare the "banality" of American culture" and his response to 9/11 "seemed to display a lack of sympathy for the victims". Several articles quoted his statement that America was the world's "last remaining primitive culture". For some reports, Baudrillard thought Disneyland was "a paradise", others reported that, for Baudrillard, "Disneyland is not a fantasy -- it presents an objective portrait of America. It tries to make you forget that the whole of America is already infantilized".

BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves show found a British academic -- Andy Martin, reader in French Literature at Cambridge -- who had actually dined, once, one-to-one, with Baudrillard. He could remember just two things the guru said, one about Madonna and one about surfing. Madonna had just produced this book called "Sex" and, according to Martin, Baudrillard and Madonna were not only at the same level of American celebrity at the time, but rumoured by some to be dating. Baudrillard said of Madonna: "Her tragedy is that she can never get naked enough".

When Martin, a keen surfer, said he didn't like the way the word surfing was then being turned into a metaphor for other things, like taking a computer onto the internet, Baudrillard said "Everything that once was real has already become a metaphor".

While presenter Matthew Sweet wanted to end by calling Baudrillard "the greatest fool of his age", Martin preferred to end on a technical note. "He is a strong anti-foundationalist. I think the term postmodernist is already dead. Does that help?"

It did indeed help, although the Figaro put it much more coherently for the layman when they said "For Baudrillard we have become a part of a universe where not only has all transcendent reference disappeared, but in which the definition of reality itself has become problematical, as evidenced by the predominance of virtual representations of the world over values which foreground the notions of sense and truth."

Considering how widely Baudrillard's soundbite about the first Gulf War not having happened was repeated, it's surprising how little people went into what Baudrillard had meant by that. Only Libé went back to the original statement.

"War," said Baudrillard, "everywhere except in the New World Order, is born from an antagonistic and destructive relationship, a duel between two adversaries. But this war is asexual, surgical, "war processing". The enemy here is nothing but a target on a computer screen, just as a sexual partner is nothing more than a pseudonym in a sexy chatroom on the Minitel Rose. If that's "sex", well, the Gulf War can pass for "war"."

Nobody pointed out -- so I'll do it here -- that George Bush Junior seems to share Baudrillard's disdain for the brevity and unreality of the first Gulf War, and his father's New World Order. Bush Jnr hates the "internets" and panty-waisted "virtuality" as much as Baudrillard did. So convinced was he that the first Gulf War didn't take place that he organized a second one. Far from being a "surgical strike" in "virtual reality", his has lots of real combat between real people on the ground, lots of torture, bloodshed and suffering. It's still taking place today.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

bikerbar.livejournal.com

To say Baudrillard famously said the Gulf War did not take place is or that his ideas inspired The Matrix is to belittle his theories and place in contemporary thought. Ultimately they didn't like Baudrillard because he could see they live in Disneyland. No one likes a mirror held up too closely ... oh wait is that Lacan's theory ,, uh

From:

whip-lash.livejournal.com

Ultimately they didn't like Baudrillard because he could see they live in Disneyland.

To paraphrase Momus, a conception of Americans as the Other. How then would we like him?

But the truth is, only philosophy majors (or minors like me) ever heard of him here. Most Americans can look at French philosophy and understand that most French philosophers need a bit more Disneyland. In Disneyland you can still tell Snow White apart from her evil stepmother, a skill lost to French culture.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

It's tempting to see Baudrillard as a man too caught up in the headlines and hype of his time -- virtual reality, simulation, the New World Order; a kind of phrase-maker who could be called upon to comment on news events as they happened. I think he was aware of this himself, and tried to stay a couple of steps ahead by pushing his pronouncements just a little further into paradox and provocation than most would have dared. But he was always ahead of the headlines, if not the poets of media. He really picks up themes from Borges, McLuhan and Ballard and applies them to the events of the last 30 years.

The fact that some of his insights can still shock and perplex shows that they aren't as self-evident as they might seem. For instance, yesterday I was surprised to find how resistant some are to the idea that the Muslim world is postmodern. Baudrillard called 9/11 "the ultimate event, the mother of all events" and said that, now, there was no longer any need for the media to virtualise events, as in the first Gulf war, since the war's participants had thoroughly internalised the rules of simulation. Whoever the current War of Terror is against, by that definition, is certainly playing by the rules of postmodernism.

From:

eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com

Crikey Momus! Are you some kind of postmodern fundamentalist? You must be, because for you to apply the name 'postmodern' to the Muslim world (and Muslims) is to implicitly say that you possess better conceptual equipment than the subjects you classify: subjects who hold an entirely different view of themselves and the world! This is as arrogant and hierarchical as Victorian anthropology. You must be closer to the truth than Muslims, I take it?

Poor benighted Muslims! We need to get some postmodern missionaries in among the devils, what!

I'm off to buy some flowers from Columbia Road. I look forward to reading your response when I return.

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags