Baudrillard Live

Selected Interviews

Mike Gane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134912414
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Jean Baudrillard arouses strong opinions. In this collection of his most important interviews the reader gains a unique and accessible overview of Baudrillard's key ideas. The collection includes many interviews that appear in English for the first time as well as a fascinating interview and encounter between the editor and Baudrillard in Paris.

Part I

A VIRTUAL STATE OF RUPTURE…

1
I DON’T BELONG TO THE CLUB, TO THE SERAGLIO

Interview with Mike Gane and Monique Arnaud

MA Can you tell us about your youth? What your parents did for a living?Who were your first intellectual influences?

My grandparents were peasants. My parents became civil servants. A traditional family development which meant that they left the countryside and settled in a town. I was the first member of the tribe, so to speak, to do some studying, that was the point of rupture, when I broke away and got started. Apart from that I don’t have much to say. I was not brought up in an intellectual milieu—there was nothing around me—my parents were what they were, not even petit bourgeois, or perhaps very lowly petit bourgeois. It was not a cultural environment. So I had compensated for this by working extremely hard at the Lycée. That’s when an enormous amount of primitive accumulation took place. It was a period in my life when I worked really hard at acquiring an enormous amount. After that was the rupture with my parents. This break-up played an important part in my life, because breaking away from my parents established a mode of rupture which then by a process of transposition influenced other things. I have always been in a virtual state of rupture: with the university, even with the political world where I was able to get involved but always only at a distance. So there’s a kind of prototype in my childhood, adolescence, etc. I didn’t get into the Ecole Normale Supérieure. I took the agrégation but I didn’t succeed. So I didn’t become ‘ agréé’ either. I got into the university in the 1960s but by an indirect route. In short, as far as the normal stages of a career are concerned, I’ve always missed them, including the fact that I was never a professor. I say this without any recrimination, because that is how I wanted it. It was a little game of mine to say that I wanted a degree of freedom. It was also how people sometimes thought at the time, people of my generation. You lived off anything and the energy came from rupture. Whereas today, it is completely different. That is why I was out of phase with the university: even with the students there was a great feeling of complicity about everything, about seduction and all that, which lasted ten to fifteen years, that completely changed and the university became a foreign and tiresome environment; I couldn’t at all function in such a world. Nevertheless, I was very lucky that I was able to live at Nanterre in the sixties and seventies, some of the best years. Once these were over, we mourned. We didn’t do that well either, we became melancholic. That was that. But afterwards things became dead; they had become funereal, even Nanterre. So I left. I should have left before. But I wasn’t such a success carrying it out, and it was even unlikely that I would redeploy myself. I don’t think you find too many cases of successful redeployment at that time and among people of that generation. So it’s true today…because those who were there at the time, our mentors, well, they were not really mentors, they were fathers that have since died. It’s the whole spirit of an era which has disappeared. I don’t want to be nostalgic about all this. On the contrary, looking back, I rather think I was very lucky to have been there at that time in that milieu at Nanterre, in Paris. So I have no complaints. That said, it has all gone.

MG Your articles in Les Temps Modernes and Utopie were Marxist. How did you become a Marxist, under what influences?

I am not quite sure whether they were really Marxist. I haven’t read them for a long time. In Utopie they certainly weren’t. The articles I wrote for Les Temps Modernes were literary articles. The influence was less political, more Sartrean. That was the dominating influence of the age. But as far as the first stage of my involvement was concerned, I was much closer to a kind of anarchism and things like that. Then there was the Algerian War which had a vital part to play, a kind of Marxist-type politicization. With regard to thought and analysis, yes, there was a Marxist analysis in my work but very much mediated by many other things. I set about doing some theoretical work. From the start there was semiology and psychoanalysis and things of that sort, all of which went well together.

Then Marxism was already a thing of the past. We were already in something like a post-Marxist age. So I find it difficult to say whether I was really a Marxist. But Marx’s analysis was certainly influential on my work. From the beginning, the analysis of it in terms of production was accompanied by analysis in anthropological terms of consumption of the gift and expenditure ( dépense), so then the analysis of production was left behind. As far as political economy is concerned, I only came to it in order to deconstruct it. In fact from the beginning I subscribed to Marxism but almost immediately began to question it and became ambivalent about it, distancing myself from it more and more as I went along. It’s true that Sartre had a great influence, and then came another influence, in the 1960s, that of Barthes. I discovered Barthes and worked with him, and found it straight away more interesting. I’m not saying that he was more important, but more fascinating. Barthes offered a more virgin territory. From that point everything changed.

MG There appears to be a strong influence of German romanticism on your first books, that is, the influence of Kleist and Hölderlin. Up to what point has the German romantic movement been the basis of your thought?

German romanticism? No, no. There was Hölderlin, that’s all, and to me he wasn’t a German romantic. No. It was something much more specific, dazzling in its own way. I know German romanticism very well, I have read a lot of it, but it wasn’t for me. In my view Hölderlin wasn’t romantic at all. He was mythical. He was rather in the line of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and writers like that. So it is not German romanticism, this is not what inspired me, it is too subjective, too romantic, too sentimental, so let’s not get things mixed up. It’s true that I was well into German culture. So I know German culture quite well. I did German, in fact, to read all those texts. So there must be some way in which I’ve been influenced by it, but I can’t tell. In fact I’ve often been told that my work has an affinity with German thinking. On the other hand, I don’t owe my intellectual formation to German philosophy. The texts I’ve read in German I’ve already mentioned: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and many other works, of course, but they are not philosophical works. In addition I didn’t read them systematically as I would have done if I had been to the Ecole Normale. There I would have acquired a solid philosophical culture, soemthing I have never had. I have a good familiarity with it but no training in it in the proper sense. This also means that I have never been a real philosopher and when these days I find people desperately trying to get back to philosophy to resuscitate it, and rediscover Kant, I can’t quite understand it. The whole thing leaves me rather cold…. These are cultural peripheries, they are there, but I don’t…. If I started anywhere it was with poetical things, Rimbaud, Artaud, etc., Nietzsche, Bataille. It was things like that, they were classical things, not very original, but they were not philosophy. In fact, I’ve always had a great deal of mistrust for philosophers, so I’ve developed a kind of allergy which makes me dislike the stereotyped language used in philosophy. Even its most beautiful texts fail to impress me. I’ve read Heidegger also but very quickly. I can’t say much more about what’s influenced me. Of course, there are other things as well…but German romanticism no more than…. Well, German romanticism is much superior to French romanticism, for sure, but it has never had a great impact.

MG Many people think of you as the high priest of postmodernism. What do you think of this?

This reference to priesthood is out of place, I think. The first thing to say is that before one can talk about anyone being a high priest, 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, as Lyotard says. 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. If you interpret it this way, it is obvious that I do not represent this emptiness. I am quite happy to be—I don’t know what—of a kind of void, to analyse the disappearance of a number of things, to analyse simulation which is also a form of void and where things get dislocated. But this is a form of void which is intense, intensive, and not the emptiness which is simply just what comes out of the residual, say, at the end of a culture, a sort of bricolage which consists of the vestiges of that culture. I have nothing to do with that kind of thing, but it would explain why there has been this collage, because postmodernism is made up of montage, collage, etc….but that collage seems to me completely incorrect (abusif). It doesn’t have anything to do with me, and I am not the only one in this situation….

Everything that has been said about postmodernism was said even before the term existed. Lyotard has obviously done a lot to make the term popular, but he didn’t erect it into a doctrine either. There is perhaps a conjunctural postmodernist practice, which is to define that void, what is in my view the non-structure of an epoch. So what to do? To want to disassociate oneself from it, to say that I am not a postmodernist, is still to say too much because it is a contradictory opinion and therefore defensive, and I don’t want to go along that road either…. So I have nothing to say about this because I say, and I know this from experience, even if I prove that I am not a postmodernist, it won’t change anything. People will put that label on you. Once they have done that it sticks. There are ways of getting rid of a problem. People just label it and in my opinion this is not really a process of…how shall I say…it’s not really a fraud…let’s not exaggerate, but there is something that is not very clear in all this. There are perhaps areas in which the term ‘postmodernism’ may mean something to the extent that people claim to belong to this, perhaps in architecture. But as soon as it is clear that the term adds nothing new it is best to let go of it. But it’ll be around for a while. It has been around for a long time already. In any case, postmodernism would seem to mean that one was ‘modernist’ and that after modernism there was still something. Thus one is still caught in a linear meaning of things. There is linearity which is after all postmodern. For me postmodernism would be something of a regression, a retroversion of history. There is, rather, a return towards the past. There is no beyond in the sense of the future but rather a curvature towards… which is worse in that sense. I can no longer recognize myself in this because my wager has been one of anticipation even if it meant making a leap, going forward beyond the year 2000; what I had proposed was erasing the 1990s and going straight on to the year 2000, to play the game on the other side through excess rather than lack. Postmodernism seems to me to do with being resigned, or even largely to do with regression. This possibility of tinkering about with these forms, through a kind of juxtaposition in complete promiscuity of everything in sight. I don’t recognize myself in all this…. So there you are. I won’t change anything but I shall have said it.

MAWhat are your thoughts on photography and film?

These are two different questions. I have only really been doing photography for four or five years. I am fascinated by it, it’s something very intense. It’s the form of the object, the form of the appearance of the object, more so than in the cinema, which is more realist. I like photography as something completely empty, ‘ irreal’, as something that preserves the idea of a silent apparition. This fascinated me a lot. The photo and travel, because at one time they went together, the fragment, the notebook and the diary; all these functioned together as one whole, a machine with differential axles. But photography now, I don’t know, I don’t pursue it any longer as an activity, because what is done today is so beautiful, so perfect, so well done, that photography raises itself to the status of art, technically and otherwise. Once again, I can’t do photos like that.

As for the cinema, I am still very much in love with it, but it has reached a despairing state. I am not the only person who finds it in a hopeless state. I have seen three or four films in the last few months. I found them depressing. It is kitsch, it’s not cinema. Here, too, huge machines are set up which possess great technical refinement. This is a racket on images, on the imaginary of people. Cinema has become a spectacular demonstration of what one can do with the cinema, with pictures, etc. Everything is possible, it’s obvious, and everything is done any old how, there is no magic in it except, well, a mechanical magic. One has a feeling that it’s all been done before, there are only superb demonstrations; it’s performance, that is all. I don’t know, perhaps I have a Utopian idea of the cinema, but it used to be something different from what it is now. I have a feeling that the old cinema has completely disappeared. There is a kind of amnesia to do with the cinema. One doesn’t know what one has seen, what it’s worth, whether it is good or not, what one should think of it. People you know, you trust, have a different view from yours, a totally different conclusion about the film from ours. Everything has lost its credibility in this business. I feel this very sharply. There are things which disappear and do not affect me, but this loss of the cinema of my youth is something of a cruel loss to me, it is something that is really lost. At least photography remains, and one can practise it. It has a sort of autonomy which is able to escape the general production system. There is some hope here, even though photography these days is so hyped up. This is the paradox of the aesthetic. Something is shown to you, you judge it. It is perfect, it’s good, but then there’s something to criticize about it. There is everything in it, vision, technique and everything, but it doesn’t interest you. It leaves you completely cold. I won’t have anything to do with it. So everything seems to be crumbling. Cinema, as well as politics—all this deployment and display of things which, deep down, don’t mean anything to you. Photography does not leave me cold, but not the photography one finds in the de luxe market. There are naturally exceptions, but that is the general tendency. The field is monopolized by… I find this very demoralizing.

MG Let us turn to art itself. Your writings reveal a deep antipathy for European an since the Renaissance. Have you ever thought of writing an aesthetic?

No. Not at all. I am not against art, so you exaggerate a bit when you use the word ‘antipathy’. I am like everyone else. There are things about European art that I admire as much as anyone else. It’s not European art, it’s the concept of art, of the aesthetic, of the aestheticization of art that raised a problem. But this is a philosophical concept, and I am conscious of always having had, almost from birth, an allergy to culture with a big C, the ideology of the culture of art. This may have something very peasant-like, an old aversion to culture towards which my attitude has always been coloured by an unconditional anarchism. Cultural activities, cultural spectacles, the whole cultural environment, these are things that have always repelled me. So I have an anti-cultural bias and, since today culture is so identified with art, it’s true that I am a priori very seriously against all forms of art. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like them, that I don’t admire. I do, like other people. But I don’t recognize art as such as a practice, don’t write commentaries on art and those people who dare think themselves as artists! I cannot even think of myself as an intellectual. In any case as soon as I see three intellectuals together I run away, I can’t stand it. It’s the same as far as artists are concerned. However that might be, there is a pharisaism about art and culture. I can’t stand it. I try to reconcile myself to all this, but it doesn’t work. For me, I’ve always interpreted the aesthetic of art from the point of view of the object; that’s what I was obsessed with from the beginning. So I ask myself: what type of object? But from a point of view which is almost anthropological or metaphysical, because the viewpoint which is internal to aesthetics has never been acceptable to me. I’ve never adopted it. I find it extraordinarily affected, but that doesn’t stop me from being able to enjoy or judge things from an aesthetic point of view. But in principle the analysis assumes that one goes through these limits and this self-exaltation of art…. I can’t stand them at all. So I’ll not write an aesthetic, because that would be to privilege art as art, it would be to accept the very postulates of art, of a discipline and of the profession, something I can’t do, of course. I didn’t do it for politics. I didn’t do it for philosophy. I try to cut across all that. No, I don’t want to do for art what I haven’t done for other things.

As far as art is concerned, take music for example. This is something I don’t know much about. I am an autodidact, I have no musical culture. As for the fine arts, I have a culture; you get one for yourself but I remain completely the untutored amateur. I don’t belong to the club, to the seraglio. I would never want to be, no more than I wanted to be in a clique at the university, or in an intellectual club. There is, of course, a bit of affectation on my part as far as this goes, but I am as I am, I can’t be otherwise.

MG Nevetheless, is there an aesthetic theory that you find attractive?

What do you mean by that?

MGHegel’s, for instance?

Well, yes, Hegel is interesting to the extent that he questions the disappearance of art, etc. This is interesting. In my opinion he laid the foundation of all modern methods of analysing these things. But people have not drawn appropriately from what he did. This said, I tend to be interested in things as they are now, and people like Warhol interest me, but not as artists within the framework of a history of art, but as people outside it, people who are elsewhere and whose stake is no longer even aesthetic, and therefore who are more interesting, and who are a kind of more enigmatic object than those who fulfil a kind of prophecy within the framework of the Hegelian ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: A VIRTUAL STATE OF RUPTURE…
• PART II: BEYOND ALIENATION…
• PART III: I STOPPED LIVING…
• PART IV: RADICALISM HAS PASSED INTO EVENTS…
• PART V: WHEN REALITY MERGES WITH THE IDEA…
• AFTERWORD
• SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
• BIBLIOGRAPHY