Baudrillard's Bestiary

Baudrillard and Culture

Mike Gane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415063074
• eBook ISBN: 9781134923892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Mike Gane provides an introduction to Baudrillard's cultural theory: the conception of modernity and the complex process of simulation. He examines Baudrillard's literary essays: his confrontation with Calvino, Styron, Ballard and Borges. Gane offers a coherent account of Baudrillard's theory of cultural ambience, and the culture of consumer society. And it provides an introduction to Baudrillard's fiction theory, and the analysis of transpolitical figures. The book also includes an interesting and provocative comparison of Baudrillard's powerful essay against the modernist Pompidou Centre in Paris and Frederic Jameson's analysis of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. An interpretation of this encounter leads to the presentation of a very different Baudrillard from that which figures in contemporary debates on postmodernism.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The double infidelity

He must…take upon himself the weight of the double infidelity

Blanchot

Baudrillard’s work represents an attempt to establish a general theory of two fundamental social forms. In one sense it is an evident attempt to rewrite Durkheim’s two basic social formations (segmental, organized). But Baudrillard’s relation to Durkheim is certainly not direct, and, if Baudrillard is fundamentally Durkheimian, this is apparent only in displacement, repositioning, total revision. In a sense, however, to regard Baudrillard from this point of view is extremely enlightening. It could be said that what Baudrillard wants to do is to convert the main focus of analysis away from types of social solidarity to two basically opposed forms of culture. There are immediate difficulties in posing the problem in these terms however, and even Baudrillard struggles to maintain a consistent vocabulary. For, at his most consistent, primitive societies do not have cultures. Their societies are lived in the symbolic, and in symbolic exchange. Theirs is a society of ‘us’ and outsiders (others, gods, animals). Ours is a universal society of the human: it is the latter universe which strictly speaking is ‘culture’, and its other is the inhuman (1976:193). Baudrillard develops this distinction through increasingly radical forms.

It is not easy to describe or identify precisely Baudrillard’s point of departure or fundamental position in this project. It is facile to suggest that he simply supports the position of the primitive against culture. It is only slightly more sophisticated to argue that he is best interpreted as a Nietzschean surveying the disenchanted world with aristocratic disdain. Although it is probably still grossly inadequate as a description, it seems that his position is very close to that of a modern Hölderlin of whom Blanchot has written:

Today the poet no longer has to stand between gods and men as their intermediary. Rather he has to stand between the double infidelity; he must keep to the intersection of this double—this divine and human— reversal. This double and reciprocal movement opens a hiatus, a void which must henceforth constitute the essential relation of the two worlds. The poet, then, must resist the pull of the gods who disappear and draw him toward them in their disappearance. He must resist pure and simple subsistence on the earth which poets do not found. He must accomplish the double reversal, take upon himself the weight of the double infidelity and thus keep the two spheres distinct, by living the separation purely, by being the pure life of the separation. For this empty and pure space which distinguishes between the spheres is the sacred, the intimacy of the breach which is the sacred.

(Blanchot 1982:274)

This idea captures better than any other the tension of Baudrillard’s poetic practice (Hölderlin is cited, 1976:239).¹ What Baudrillard attempts, in an unsentimental manner, is to live in a world in which God has left either because He has died or because He has turned his back on it. Baudrillard keeps symbolic forms alive, and his infidelity is practised towards the present. Thus the pathos in Baudrillard is not as intense as in Hölderlin, since, at least at the crucial stage of Baudrillard’s development, he wanted to remain faithful to the idea of the symbolic order.

But what exactly is the symbolic order? Here Baudrillard’s ideas have developed. In 1976, he suggested:

the symbolic is neither a concept, nor an instance or a category, nor a ‘structure’, but an act of exchange and a social relation which puts an end to the real, which resolves the real, and in the same stroke the opposition between the real and the imaginary.

(1976:204)

(Later even the idea of social relation itself is identified as inappropriate and replaced with the notion of symbolic tie: an inexorable process of radicalization of the divergence between orders of symbolic ties and cultures of social relations.) In his earlier discussion the major concept which carried the weight of the critique of the sign was that of ambivalence. In one statement Baudrillard gave it the power to check the sign itself:

Only ambivalence (as rupture of value, of another side or beyond of sign value, and as the emergence of the symbolic) sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign.

(1972, 1981b:150)

This has to be understood, as Baudrillard noted, in the sense that the symbolic process, thus conceived, is a radical alternative to the ‘concept of the sign and to signification’ (1972:149). The sign is defined as the crystallization of the signifier and signified, and although this can be realized on the field of polyvalence (1972:150) it cannot tolerate ambivalence. The basic dilemma is well grasped by Baudrillard: how is it possible to talk of the symbolic except through a modality which renders it null (1972, 1981b:161)?

The Saussurean notion of the referent (the real object) is also given sharp treatment:

this perceptual content…is shifted to the level of the sign by the signified, the content of thought. Between the two, one is supposed to glide in a kind of frictionless space from the perceptual to the conceptual, in accordance with the old recipes of philosophical idealism and the abstract associationism that was already stale in the 19th century.

(1972, 1981b:153)

In fact, perhaps the whole of Baudrillard’s project can be located around this attack on the illusion of the referent.

By 1976 a number of significant developments in Baudrillard’s position had occurred, which make it much less difficult to understand the main lines of theoretical critique. After all it is extremely difficult to grasp just what the nature of ambivalence as a characteristic of society can possibly mean. By 1976 the full importance of Saussure’s analyses of anagrams had become widespread in the writing of Starobinski and the Tel Quel group, especially Julia Kristeva. This enabled Baudrillard to broaden his theory and to move away from a dependence on the notion of ambivalence.

Baudrillard’s argument for an anti-materialist theory of language begins with a critique of materialism as a simple inversion of idealism, which renders idealism a service. So it would be wrong to conclude that Baudrillard wants to present an idealist theory; his critique could well render materialism a service. In the theory of the sign as adopted in psychoanalysis there is, he argues, always in fact a yielding of the sign to a positive analogy of the thing signified: for example, the unconscious appears as language disorder. And

it is the blind, transversal surreality of the libido which comes to burst the reality principle and transparency principle of language. This is how, under the best circumstances, poetry is interpreted as transgression.

(1981c:79–80)

What occurs is often a form of metaphor or condensation. In the theatre of cruelty (Artaud) there is a liberation of a force but only in the form of metaphor: the repressed is released as content. Even Lyotard’s notion of the rhythmic harmonization of the thing and the word through the intervention of the body is only another version of this materialism (1981c:80–1).

The only way out of this dilemma, says Baudrillard, is to conceptualize the poetic as placing the relative positions of words and things into question by volatizing them: it should aim at the destruction of signification, the extermination (in a sense to be defined) of language, as discourse and as materiality. Thus Baudrillard introduces some important new terms: extermination, annihilation, poetic resolution.² The symbolic process (or, as he calls it, the symbolic operation) does not appeal to a material base, or a referent, or a hidden unconscious. It operates like anti-matter, without being ideal. This is similar to Saussure’s notion of poetic cancellation: the poetic rhythm of vowel and counter-vowel conceived as a cancellation not as an accumulation. In the end there is no remainder. Baudrillard cites Kristeva’s analysis of Greek poetry which concludes that these poems do not express the world, they are the world (1976:339), and that

In that other place, where the logical laws of language are shaken off, the subject is dissolved and in the place of the sign, it is the collision of signifiers annihilating each other that takes over. It is an operation of generalised negativity which has nothing to do with the negativity that constitutes judgement (Aufhebung) or with the negativity internal to judgement (0–1 logic)—it is a negativity that annihilates (Buddhism— sunyavada). A zero-logical subject, a non-subject that comes to assume this thought that annihilates itself.

(Kristeva, cited in Baudrillard 1981c:81)

But Baudrillard is not only a poet, or only a theorist of the sign. His first major work was a study of the new culture of consumer capitalism, in which he identified a new ambience in the world of objects. This work, The Object System (1968), was the beginning of a number of sociological investigations into the cultures of modern western capitalist societies. It is the rigour, even the obsession, with which he persisted in these reflections which mark his work. The driving theme of this project was the remarkable inversion of all previous expectations, especially for Marxists, in the emergence of affluent consumer societies. The radical analysis of these societies had to begin, he insisted, with the fact that it was through consumer affluence that social integration in a class-divided society was now being achieved. It was not predominantly through the physical power of the state or of work, but rather through the seductive power of an ambient culture that the society’s discipline was maintained. The main enemy, for the left, had changed, and it was essential, Baudrillard maintained, to reconstruct social theory to take account of it. This led to a full-scale theoretical investigation in a work called The Consumer Society (1970), combining semiological with sociological and psychoanalytic styles of analysis. But, after a period of critical self-reflection following the defeat of May ’68, his analysis broke out of its Marxist confinement and greatly radicalized both the conception of non-utilitarian cultures based on the organizing principle of symbolic exchange and the critique of capitalist cultures also based on it. This deepening was thus two-fold: it elaborated new ways of thinking about symbolic exchange in the anagram, in the poetic, in the significance of rituals of birth and death; and it reconstructed its critique of modern societies as it located new forms of resistance within the affluence, the fatal strategies of the silent majorities. The unity of Baudrillard’s project is thus remarkable—from an analysis of ambience, of a change in the dominant form of power into the object, his work moves to an analysis of changing forms of resistance to it in the consuming masses: a mode of resistance that takes the very form of the subject as an object (passive, silent, hyper-conformist). In a final twist of the spiral of his work, he broadens out the analysis of these forms of resistance into the world of objects in general: things themselves have silent strategies, and appear to offer to human action a vision of inhuman subversion.³

Chapter 2
From literary criticism to fiction-theory

One can never be sure of saving one’s soul by writing

Calvino

Baudrillard’s intellectual formation was decisively marked by literature, and it is no accident nor is it incidental that Baudrillard’s first essays were literary in the traditional sense, and his first period was dominated by work of translation from German into French. However, the critical phase passed, and in the 1970s Baudrillard began to use literature more as a theoretical resource (and aesthetic criticism disappeared). In this chapter this transition is examined through close scrutiny of Baudrillard’s changing techniques of reading fiction: first of a set of novels around 1962, second of J.G.Ballard’s Crash, and last of Borges’ story The Lottery in Babylon’.

ITALO CALVINO

Among Baudrillard’s first publications was a set of critical reviews for Les Temps Modernes of recently published fiction by Calvino, Uwe Johnson, and William Styron. These reviews are interesting and relevant here, for they allow us a glimpse of Baudrillard’s style and analytical orientations before he became an academic sociologist. These reviews, although relatively brief, reveal a writer with considerable grasp of literary and psychoanalytic theory, and an emerging maturity of social criticism dominated by a refusal both of simplistic solutions to the socialist project and of cynical rejections of the possibility of progressive engagement however charming or seductive their forms might be.

Among these pieces is a lucid and coherent review of three stories by Italo Calvino (recently taken by Salman Rushdie—Herbert Read Lecture—as paradigmatic of the human condition). The stories centre, in order, on a viscount (a story recalled by Baudrillard thirty years later, 1989e:66), a baron, and a knight, and are generally set in a period of the decline of chivalry. The story of the viscount is, according to Baudrillard, a kind of fantasie bouffe, a cruel baroque fantasy: in the war against the Turks a viscount is cut in two by a canonball. One part, on returning home, terrorizes the countryside splitting all the things and beings he finds in two. The other part is virtuous and repairs all the damage caused by the other. In the end, ‘Hoffmanesque’ says Baudrillard, the two halves fight a duel and are miraculously rejoined.

The Baron in the Trees is set in a larger scenario (the Napoleonic wars in Italy). A young nobleman is forced to eat snails against his will by his parents and decides to rebel and to take to living in the trees. A fine ‘Robinsonade’, says Baudrillard of this ‘arboreal solitude’, but a Robinsonade lived passionately. It is rich in the symbolism of exile. The final story is that of The Non-existent Knight, told by a nun of the adventures of Agiluf, the empty suit of armour, who is none the less a personality, this time not passionate but a ‘passive allegory of absence’, responding to a challenge to protect the honour of woman he has previously saved from rape. If the pleasure is more in the pure enjoyment of reading than in reflection on its meaning, said Baudrillard, here is a literature of pure charm: instead of Don Quixote here is pure abstraction. But the empty armour is obsessed with detail and perfection, as if practising a methodical ‘pharisaical’ ritual of a dying caste. He is the sign of a dying and lifeless world, but obsessed with verification of givens: he disinters bodies, verifies sauces, but is bored and morose. He strikes out at the derisory bats which are none the less, unlike him, vividly alive; he longs for a body of his own.

The stories are clear and seductive, but criticisms can be made on a number of levels. Agiluf poses some problems since there appears a fine irony in a knight in all his fine armour who cannot possess women as he has no body. Yet Calvino paradoxically makes him the object of a subtle erotization, and women come to idolize their hero. He thus appears exalted and romanticized. Yet the hero is an empty impotence, even coming to imply the political disenchantment of an abstracted void. What could be the significance of this for Calvino? asks Baudrillard. Another basic problem arises with the baron, since, as soon as real historical elements enter into the scene, for example, when the baron condescends to aid the revolutionary armies from the trees, the writing becomes, says Baudrillard, less convincing, and it appears that Calvino cannot engage with revolutionary historical truth (a style suitable...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2 FROM LITERARY CRITICISM TO FICTION-THEORY
• CHAPTER 3 MODERN AMBIENCE OF OBJECTS
• CHAPTER 4 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
• CHAPTER 5 THE RIGOURS OF CONSUMER SOCIETY
• CHAPTER 6 FROM PRODUCTION TO REPRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 7 MODERNITY, SIMULATION, AND THE HYPERREAL
• CHAPTER 8 FASHION, THE BODY, SEXUALITY, AND DEATH
• CHAPTER 9 ANAGRAMMATIC RESOLUTIONS
• CHAPTER 10 TRANSPOLITICAL OBJECTS
• CHAPTER 11 FROM THE BEAUBOURG TO THE BONAVENTURE HOTEL
• CHAPTER 12 CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY