The virtual world of consumer spectacle fails to describe its describer

[imomus]

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.

Comments

[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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The way to think of it is this. There are different calendars in the world, all describing the same contemporary moment. For the West this moment is described as 2007 years after the birth of Jesus Christ, for the Japanese it's Heisei 19, for Muslims it's Hijrah year 1428. None of these dates is "objective". But when we interact with other cultures, we must be aware of what they call the date, just as they must be aware of what we call it.

It's the same with cultural descriptions. Let's say an Islamist calls the current time "the age of jihad", and a Westerner calls it "postmodernism". Our interactions make it inevitable that we see acts in both conceptual contexts. 9/11 is both a postmodern "spectacle" and an act of jihad. Neither of these is "the" description, but both apply.

I am going out now to buy some halal kofta.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to add that there's no need for anyone to "evangelize" amongst Muslims on behalf of the postmodern West. Globalisation (and the little co-incidence that our plastic societies require the oil sitting under Muslim nations) brings America to you, even if you don't go to America. If Mohammed doesn't go to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed!

[(Anonymous)]

What Muslims don't understand is that if Allah didn't want Americans to come to the Middle East to dig up oil he would've placed all the oil under North America. Or he wouldn't have made Americans and cars in the first place.

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

There are different calendars in the world, all describing the same contemporary moment. For the West this moment is described as 2007 years after the birth of Jesus Christ, for the Japanese it's Heisei 19, for Muslims it's Hijrah year 1428. None of these dates is "objective". But when we interact with other cultures, we must be aware of what they call the date, just as they must be aware of what we call it.

This is inarguable, but it’s not to the point. What’s at issue is deeper even than cultural description. Postmodernism contains accounts of the world and human beings – and what we can know about them – that are the antithesis of Islam’s cosmology, anthropology, and perceived certainty. The Muslim’s world and worldview is described and expounded in the Qu’ran, not Simulacra and Simulation: he doesn’t see it as a ‘conceptual context’, but as the truth. You and he are very different, and I can't say who’s right, but do I think that you perhaps need to be a little more careful. However much you wish to say Islam is postmodern, it will remain Islamic; your worldview is postmodern, and Muslims happen to inhabit that world; that doesn’t make them postmodern. I mean, how would you react to a Muslim saying your world is Islamic; created, ruled, and with certain eschaton?

Remember, he thinks it is.

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

I mean, how would you react to a Muslim saying your world is Islamic; created, ruled, and with certain eschaton?

I cannot speak for momus, but living here in the belly of the beast I can tell you with utter certainty and no reserve that we are defined by Islam. That people are forced to take their shoes off at airports, forced to concede to "random" screenings, forced to pay taxes into an illegal and unjust war to benefit war profiteers... every breath the news issues, every headline in mainstream media, every goan and sigh this country has issued since 9/11 derives from the very essence of Islam. To say that we are not obsessed with Islam (or Arabs to put a finer point on it) is to be blind to the last half decade at the least. We may not pray to Allah, but we pay homage with every liberty sacrificed on that altar and every time hearing "the war on terror" grates just a little bit less.

And to say that the Arab world isn't influenced by us is just as blind. They watch our television drama fercrissakes. We don't even watch that!

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

I know there is mutual influence, of course there is. But the point at issue is a radical, yawning difference in the very fundaments of world view and self-identity: therefore, a yawning difference in any definition we may attempt to apply, if we wish to apply one properly.

Nonetheless, I wonder about the extent to which your character, interests, and goals etc. are 'defined' by taking your shoes off and paying taxes. And why don't you try switching the television off so that you are no longer exposed to the headlines? You might find that you remain the same person.

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

Well, to be entirely fair, I haven't turned a tv on in half a decade or more so turning it of might be a bit of a challenge. I'm sure I can find a tv around this town somewhere though.

Fatuity aside, while I may not personally define myself by the fact that I live in what is becoming a prison state, the fact remains that I do live here and that doing so must necessarily affect my person. I wouldn't be hardly so bitter and cynical, nor quite so opposed to the government, nor quite so politically outspoken were not for the perpetual infringements on my civil liberties and moral ideology.

Whether I watch tv or no, read the newspapers or no, play sudoku or no, the fact of the matter is that I am systematically singled out for "special" "random" "security" screening every time I take a flight. Just because I don't have antipathy towards muslims nor arabs nor allow such prejudices to cloud my actions, that does not mean the mindset of the nation does not impinge on my life and affect the ways in which I might define myself. I am simply not permitted to be someone who cares about equality, justice, and the founding principals of this nation without also being either outraged or hypocritical.

Without even resorting to Freud and identification, the fact of the matter is that muslims are indeed postmodern. One cannot speak of "Islam" but must speak of "Islams". 90% of Arabs are Muslim, but only 20% of Muslims are Arabic. While Americans conflate "Islam" to mean "Arab", the two are quite distinct and non-arabic Islams are quite different from the religious fundamentalism Americans are now familiar with, and they are no less "Islamic" for being so. (Does anyone remember Louis Farrakhan?) Even within the Arab world, there is a wide range from Pakistanis to Saudis. How Muslim Pakistanis practice their religion, what they take as being the word handed down from Allah, is entirely different from what the Saudis believe. (Imagine what would happen if some Saudi official rather than the nazim of Karachi were to have walked onto Begum Nawazish Ali's show "without knowing" the begum was in drag.) And that's not even to get into issues of Sunni and Shiite and Kurd.

Postmodernity is a theory. It doesn't matter whether someone believes in it. It is either true, or it is not. Whether a westerner or an arab subscribes to the theory is immaterial. All these different peoples have very different notions of what it is to be Islamic, but none of them is any more "right" than the others. This very plurality is the definition of postmodernism. Furthermore none of these Islams exist within a vacuum but rather must define themselves both with and against other Islams just as they must define themselves both with and against the West(s).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Postmodernism contains accounts of what the world is and human beings are – and what we can know about them – that are the antithesis of Islam’s cosmology, anthropology, and perceived certainty

Exactly! The antithesis! Now, thesis and antithesis bounce off each other to form... synthesis! But even before they do that, all semantics require (what are perceived as) binary opposites to define themselves. And this is why there is an introjected postmodern West in every Muslim.

Of course, when it began, postmodernism defined itself against the thesis of modernism. But I believe that has changed. What was once the description of certain elite artforms and ideas has become a very broad description of a cultural epoch. And really, it doesn't matter whether you use the term "postmodern" or not, what matters is that you see how "what the West is like now" has shaped "what the Islamic world is like now".

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The short version is, think dialectically. Don't think in terms of fixed identities that are somehow not produced by contexts and relationships.

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Well, "what the West is like now has shaped what the Islamic world is like now" is certainly progress from "Islam is postmodern". And I won't argue.

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

And I appreciate the importance of contexts and relationships, but you mustn't dismiss the importance of what a Muslim essentially - yes, essentially, damn you! - believes. It ain't a postmodern view...

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

But even before they do that, all semantics require (what are perceived as) binary opposites to define themselves. And this is why there is an introjected postmodern West in every Muslim.

At the risk of dragging this on to the point of tedium, I really can't accept this gem of theory just like that. In what senses to you, for instance, contain Islam? And do you contain everything that you are not? How?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I do contain Islam, since I went through a process of education about the religion in 1993 at the Central London mosque and married a Muslim woman the following year.

But in a wider sense, I'd say that in the current cultural period, Islam has become the West's designated other, and vice versa. In other words, it's a defining other, an introjected other. Not all others are "the designated other" and have this power to define. And it's a fairly recent shift. The previous "designated other", within my lifetime, was Soviet communism.

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

OK, you have experience of Islam and Muslims, but most in the West have nothing so substantial - and since they have only a superficial understanding of Islam, how can it even begin to define them?

And to speak of Islam becoming the West's 'designated other' and vice versa: we're getting into the same difficult waters as we did yesterday. It's fine sounding to speak of the West and Islam as two Leviathans with human attributes, but if we actually applied this theory to an individual - one of those billions of individuals - things aren't so cut and dried. In what ways have muslim changed since 2001? Do they treat their families and friends differently? Do their jobs differently? Practice Islam differently? Eat, shit and boink differently?

And you and I? How have we redefined ourselves since the end of the Cold War?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I would say we frame our self-images differently, a bit like this thread, which gets squeezed ever more tightly against the boundaries. Imagine the text within the box being "you" and the way the box is changing and shrinking being "history" or "context". And the righthand edge being, for instance, "the designated other".

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

I must confess to not being much convinced by your model: as far as I can see, the text remains essentially the same!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Okay, try this. Is this two Muslim men plotting a suicide pact or a valuable Western vase about to go on sale at Christie's?

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

I can't see what's inside the vase. Wouldn't be Islam would it?

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Funny, I guess that's how fundamentalist Muslims see the West: as a vase they need to smash for the Islam it has inside.

[(Anonymous)]

Both! "Going, going.." BOOM!

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Ha!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"With-
out
cont-
raries
there
is no
pro-
gression."

Willi-
am
Blake

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Are Islam and postmodernism contraries then? Which way do you want it?

Anyhow, Blake was constructing a theodicy whereby good and evil as divine energies synthesize in the 'final end' of humanity; in a progression towards blessedness; you can't really use his contceptual frame for your purposes.