Jean Baudrillard

Richard J. Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134026074
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most controversial theorists of our time, famous for his claim that the Gulf War never happened and for his provocative writing on terrorism, specifically 9/11. This new and fully updated second edition includes:

• an introduction to Baudrillard's key works and theories such as simulation and hyperreality
• coverage of Baudrillard's later work on the question of postmodernism
• a new chapter on Baudrillard and terrorism
• engagement with architecture and urbanism through the Utopie group
• a look at the most recent applications of Baudrillard's ideas.

Richard J. Lane offers a comprehensive introduction to this complex and fascinating theorist, also examining the impact that Baudrillard has had on literary studies, media and cultural studies, sociology, philosophy and postmodernism.

1
BEGINNINGS

FRENCH THOUGHT IN THE 1960s

In 1968 Jean Baudrillard published his first book with Éditions Gallimard, called Le Système des objets. The date of publication happens to be one of the most infamous years in recent French history, with students and workers rising up in political protest on a grand scale. Yet it is no surprise that Baudrillard’s book should coincide with such a date because he is a thinker and writer who emerges from, and forms part of, several significant strands in contemporary French culture and theory. This chapter will examine in some detail the complicated network of philosophical influences upon Baudrillard’s work, describing the background of the man who emerges from an intellectually and politically exciting (as well as demanding) period.

INFLUENCE OF HEGEL

Modern French philosophy, aside from the dominance of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, spent much of its intellectual energies on a re-reading of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel’s book The Phenomenology of Spirit had been translated into French by Jean Hyppolite between 1939 and 1941. Two massively influential books had followed: Hyppolite’s own commentary, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1946) and Alexandre Kojève’s lecture series at the Sorbonne (given 1933–1939), published as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (first published in 1947). John Heckman, the translator of the English edition of Hyppolite’s book, argues that:

although the postwar period is usually associated with the triumph of ‘existentialism’ in the persons of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the moment of existentialism’s triumph was also, in proper Hegelian form, the moment of its death. For the famous manifesto of the first number of Les temps modernes in October 1945, signaled a turn by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty away from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and towards Hegel and Marx.

(Hyppolite, 1974: xvi)

It could be argued that Hyppolite, with his translation and commentary, was one of the most influential teachers of Hegel; some of the most powerful poststructuralists (see p. 16) – Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault – studied under Hyppolite. So why was Hegel so important? This will prove crucial to our understanding of Baudrillard, especially as it could be argued that his countering of Marx parallels Bataille’s earlier countering of Hegel.

Without doubt, the main reason for the interest in Hegel was the fact that his philosophy, and especially the notion of the dialectic, had heavily influenced Marxism, which was one of the dominant political movements in postwar France.

DIALECTIC

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines dialectic as ‘a historical force, driving events onwards towards a progressive resolution of the contradictions that characterize each historical epoch’ (Blackburn, 1996: 104). The word ‘dialectic’ derives from Greek, and means ‘to converse’, leading through philosophy to logical argumentation, where two opposing arguments or positions are ‘solved’ by a third. This ‘third’ argument or position becomes a new starting point for a further logical argument, and so the dialectic continues, ever driving forwards. Marxism combines Hegelian dialectics (or Hegel’s dialectical insights into the formation of the human subject) with the insights of historical materialism. To put this another way, Hegel’s theories of social structures are linked with economics, to show how societies evolve through class struggle.

According to Marxism, the end result of the dialectic is not Hegel’s notion of Absolute Spirit (or philosophy), but societies’ attainment of communism.

MARXISM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 with the opening assertion that: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (1988: 79). Both men produced a number of key texts, but it was Marx’s Das Kapital (first of three volumes published 1867) that became the mainstay for the political movement called Marxism. Marxism theorizes that economics is the determining factor in class struggle, and that capitalism ultimately needs to be overthrown to liberate the working classes, who are maintained in a position of dependency to the industrialized state.

It needs to be stressed that with Hegel’s dialectic, politics and philosophy intersect. We can explore this in one of the most famous passages of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – the master/slave section. Here, Hegel is concerned with self-consciousness, and the fact that the human subject can be recognized as such only through another human subject. The problem arises when ‘primitive’ human beings demand recognition without return; the strong individual wants to be recognized as human, without realizing that such a recognition is universal (Taylor, 1989: 153). For example, we could have a person who demands that others recognize his basic human rights, but the person then fails to award the same human rights to those ‘others’! Hegel argues that at a primitive stage in their development this leads to a struggle between two human subjects that ends for one of them in death. But here the problems begin: if the struggle had not taken place, recognition would always have remained ‘outside’ the human subject, in the other human subject. But with the death of one of the combatants, there is no active recognition from that other subject, who no longer exists. What is the solution to this conundrum? It would appear to be the ‘giving in’ of one of the combatants in the struggle to death, so that instead of losing their life, they lose freedom and become a slave. The ‘master’ now has a subject who recognizes his or her superiority and therefore identity. Charles Taylor writes that: ‘The full relation of master and slave has to be understood with the aid of a third term, material reality’ (1989: 154). In other words, the master consumes his or her surroundings, the material goods that the slave produces through hard struggle. As Taylor says: ‘The master’s experience is of the lack of solid reality … of things; the slave is the one who experiences their independence and resistance as he works them’ (1989: 154). Ironically, this puts the slave in a potentially superior position, because the master is recognized by a human being who has no other recognition than through material things. This becomes an indirect and ‘empty’ recognition for the master, who wants to be recognized, crudely speaking, by someone of the same stature. The master has won and lost at the same time. The slave exists through and for the master, and thus has a kind of indirect recognition, but one that is also structured by the fear of death and the discipline of unending work (1989: 154).Taylor argues that:

The short, three-page … passage in which Hegel deals with this is one of the most important in the Phenomenology of Spirit, for the themes are not only essential to Hegel’s philosophy but have had a longer career in an altered form in Marxism. The underlying idea, that servitude prepares the ultimate liberation of the slaves, and indeed general liberation, is recognizably preserved in Marxism. But the Marxist notion of the role of work is also foreshadowed here.

(Taylor, 1989: 154–155)

The fear of death, for the slave, makes him or her aware of his or her situation, while the master becomes preoccupied with a passive consumption; the transformation of his material reality through work makes the slave aware that he or she can change his world, in comparison with the master’s passivity. These two tied together – the fear of death and world-transformation through work – initiate the true self-consciousness that will lead to the slave’s ultimate liberation. As Hegel argues, it is through work that the slave discovers a mind of his or her own, and that mind can be used to transform the slave’s world in the ways that he or she desires.

Hegel’s dialectic is a voracious thing: it is all-encompassing, all-consuming. The philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) argued that the magnificence of the dialectic was because it wasn’t something like a mill, into which we pour our intellectual problems to be solved by the operation of thesis, antithesis, synthesis (the individual ‘moments’ of the dialectic). Rather, our intellectual problems are made apparent to us through, or because of, the workings of the dialectic (another way of putting this is that the dialectic means we can think in the first place) (Heidegger, 1988: 112). Put this way, it has an uncanny knack of preceding and answering all intellectual movements and ideas. So with the master/slave narrative, the dialectic does not somehow end or finish with the above outcome. Instead, we move on to the next stage in human existence, where the dialectical process starts all over again (we could say: the dialectic never rests). This is where, for thinkers such as Bataille and Baudrillard, the bigger problems begin. How are we to think ‘outside’ the dialectic? If it is a process that never ends, you could say that there is no outside. How are we to counter such an imposing, all-consuming philosophical system? Perhaps the question might be: ‘If it is such a successful system, why might we want to counter it?’ A quick answer would suggest that thinkers such as Bataille and Baudrillard are suspicious of totalizing systems of thought – they argue that there are experiences in the world that cannot be subsumed by the dialectic, and somehow operate at its limits, working (potentially) to fracture the entire system, just as a small crack in a large bell can ultimately destroy the entire structure.

BATAILLE VS HEGEL

In relation to this reading of Hegel, we can turn to the essay ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, where Bataille tries to find a fracturing process. He argues that modern society is utilitarian, with two main strands of activity: the production and conservation of goods, and the reproduction and conservation of human life (Bataille, 1985: 116). Consumption must be conservative, not excessive, if it is to fit in with this ethos. However, Bataille recognizes two categories of consumption: the minimum consumption needed to continue the individual’s productive life and that of ‘unproductive expenditures’, of which we are given some examples: ‘luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity’. Bataille argues that all of these activities have ‘no end beyond themselves’ (1985: 118). A good example is Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, which Baudrillard translated in 1965. Cohen comments on ‘the play’s turbulent sequence of dance, pantomime, songs, and litanies, performing acrobats, heroic tableaux, and by its displays of heated revolutionary rhetoric disrupted by scenes of grotesque violence and sexual excess’ (Cohen, 1998: xiv). Its scenes of violence and excess are not arbitrary; rather they are linked to the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century anti-Enlightenment drive, replacing the highest values of knowledge and reason with eroticism. So what we have with expenditure and ‘unproductive activity’ is a notion that might be resistant to totalizing systems such as the dialectic because wasteful activity is difficult to bring back ‘within’ rigid systems of thought and behaviour. At the very least, expenditure brings us to the limits of the dialectic.

Bataille’s most famous example of the notion of expenditure is that of the Canadian north-west coast native process called the potlatch. The potlatch is a ceremony that usually takes place at transitional moments such as puberty, weddings and funerals. The fundamental process involves the giving of excessive gifts to the attendees, gifts that have considerable value. Bataille notes that:

Potlatch excludes all bargaining and, in general, is constituted by a considerable gift of riches, offered openly and with the goal of humiliating, defying and obligating a rival. The exchange value of the gift results from the fact that the donee, in order to efface the humiliation and respond to the challenge, must satisfy the obligation (incurred by him at the time of acceptance) to respond later with a more valuable gift, in other words to return with interest.

(1985: 121)

What interests Bataille is the fact that giving is not the only component in the potlatch; a more powerful act is that of the destruction of wealth, which reunites the potlatch ‘with religious sacrifice, since what is destroyed is theoretically offered to the mythical ancestors of the donees’ (1985: 121).

Clearly, this is not a system that reaches the ideal of non-exchange and thus anti-utilitarianism, or a kind of pure loss (which presumably would halt the dialectic in its tracks). Instead, it is one that operates at the limits of the utilitarian, crossing back and forth between the economic and the uneconomic, the rational and the spiritual, the productive and the unproductive. Thus Bataille notes how wealth is not ultimately lost by the potlatch, but actually inflated (it works like credit in this sense); but such inflation of wealth is as it were a side effect of the institution of potlatch, and it is not the result when physical destruction takes place because there is spiritual, not material, gain:

wealth appears as an acquisition to the extent that power is acquired by a rich man, but it is entirely directed toward loss in the sense that this power is characterized as power to lose. It is only through loss that glory and honor are linked to wealth.

(1985: 122)

Baudrillard recognizes Bataille as a key thinker who can go beyond the strictures of Hegel and Marx not in a simplistic sense of ‘opposing’ Hegel or Marx (because then as an ‘antithesis’ such opposition can be subsumed by the dialectic to reach a ‘higher’ position that has conserved the original values in the process) but in the more radical, creative sense of working at the limits of Hegelian and/or Marxist thought. Later, we will see how Baudrillard uses the notion of expenditure or waste (dépense) in his book The Consumer Society, and how the potlatch relates to the notion of ‘symbolic exchange’ (see Chapter 3).

INFLUENCE OF MAY 1968 AND VIETNAM

The interest in Bataille among French thinkers signalled a wider interest in anthropology. Behind Bataille’s notion of expenditure or waste we find a work of anthropology by Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) called The Gift. And with the move of French thought away from Sartre because of a reaction against authorized modes of political thought, we find the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–). In 1958, Lévi-Strauss had published a book that many would claim as deeply influential – the book was called Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology), a manifesto for a movement that would gain rapid strength.

STRUCTURALISM

Structuralism is an intellectual movement that paid particular attention to the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who made a number of key assertions in a lecture series delivered at the University of Geneva, published posthumously as the Cours de linguistique générale (1916; published in English 1983). Saussure argued that the sign was composed of a signifier (‘sound-image’) and signified (‘concept’). His key point, however, was that signs do not stand in for things, or objects in the world, and that the connection between a sign, such as ‘cat’, and the object in the world, such as a furry domestic animal, is arbitrary. What this means is that the sign functions, or works, for us because it is part of a system of signs. The system generates or ‘makes’ meaning, and it does this through difference. In other words, the sign ‘cat’ has a meaning because in the system we call ‘language’ it is different from the sign ‘dog’. Note that we do not have to discuss furry domestic animals to think about the generation of meaning here. Structuralists are interested in the way that sign-systems work. There are many sign-systems to explore, from advertising to culinary systems (different cultural approaches to food). However, structuralists usually go beyond the ‘semiotic’ level of signs themselves to think about the way such systems function in the world, in relation to other issues such as ideology or philosophy. Also, the structuralist approach can be taken to mean a general interest in systems, or a way of perceiving cultural artefacts, events and theories as systems. For example, the early works of the famous French theorist Michel Foucault (1926–1984) were widely regarded as structuralist, although he strenuously denied this.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM

If Saussure had identified some radical ways of thinking about language and signs (e.g. meaning is ‘arbitrary’), it was the poststructuralist thinkers Derrida, Foucault and Lacan who examined the impact or effect of this radicality upon the world. Derrida examined the philosophical attitudes to writing and issued his infamous statement that ‘there is nothing outside the text’; Foucault examined the histories of madness, incarceration and sexuality to show the links between power and knowledge; and Lacan re-read Sigmund Freud (the inventor of psychoanalysis), theorizing the ‘mirror stage’ and the importance of the symbolic. Followers of these and other continental theorists are loosely termed ‘poststructuralist’; their ideas came to the fore in the 1980s with the rise of ‘theory’ in university humanities departments.

In a cartoon sketch by Maurice Henry published in La Quinzaine Littéraire in 1967, we see four central structuralist thinkers: Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes (1915–1980). The last two were the men who would be considered structuralist through and through; the first two were heavily influenced by structuralist theories, and are known as poststructuralists because of this influence and the fact that they then went beyond it. Foucault, in his early work, claimed affinities that he would later deny, and Lacan, the psychoanalytical thinker, used structuralism to produce his seminar series published as Écrits. Didier Eribon notes that, since the beginning of the 1960s in France:

every issue of every intellectual review not dedicated entirely to it had contained at least some mention of structuralism: structuralism and Marxism, structuralism against Marxism, structuralism and existentialism, structuralism against existentialism. Some promoted it; some opposed it; some were determined to come up with a synthesis. Everybody, in every area of intellectual life, took a position. Rarely had culture bubbled and seethed with more intensity.

(1991: 160)

One of the key issues that culture ‘bubbled and seethed’ about was that of the ‘system’. Lacan had argued that the unconscious was structured like a language, and it would generally be agreed within structuralist circles that the human subject is born into systems of meaning. This is a reversal of what is known as the liberal humanist position, where the human subject has ‘essential’ qualities and ‘genius’ that can generate significant meanings or works of art that project such essentiality. Another way of thinking about this position is in relation to biographical criticism, which often argues that all the ‘meaning’ in a series of novels or paintings, for example, can be traced back to the person who constructed them. The structuralist position would argue that human beings are already part of systems of thought that enable them to construct various works and so on. If the system precedes the subject, then the liberal humanist genius or more general conception of ‘man’ ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• WHY BAUDRILLARD?
• KEY IDEAS
• 1 Beginnings: French thought in the 1960s
• 2 The technological system of objects
• 3 Narratives of primitivism: the ‘last real book’
• 4 Reworking Marxism
• 5 Simulation and the hyperreal
• 6 Terrorism: from hostages to 9/11
• 7 America and postmodernism
• 8 Writing strategies: postmodern performance
• AFTER BAUDRILLARD
• FURTHER READING
• Works cited