Baudrillard and Theology

James Walters

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780567559722
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567009890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología

Jean Baudrillard was one of the foremost intellectual figures of the late twentieth century and his work is currently reaching a new prominence in the English-speaking world. Known as the "high priest of postmodernity", Baudrillard never directly addressed theological concerns. However, his provocative analysis of the changing nature of reality, subjectivity and agency is of increasing importance to contemporary theology. Furthermore, his mode of cultural analysis (which he himself describes as "mystical") provides fruitful possibilities for theological reasoning in the post-idealist world he describes.
James Walters provides the context of Baudrillard's writing and identifies key influences. He then sets out his core ideas, drawing in theological responses and relating them to theological concerns. Finally, he highlights some areas of his work of particular theological interest.

PART ONE

1

Signs, systems and ’68

Even signs must burn.¹

Baudrillard’s philosophical project originates in a systemic analysis of the powerful processes of consumer capitalism, showing how these processes distort the meaning and coherence on which the human self and human relationship depend. Over the half century that he writes, until his death in 2007, his work ranges widely and develops a very idiosyncratic style of both reasoning and writing. But his approach is grounded in this essential project which, while distinctive, also reflects the dominant philosophical and political currents of his day. A particular approach to language, visual culture and revolutionary politics shape his thinking through the 1960s and 1970s in ways that endure throughout his writing, even as it subsequently evolves in unconventional ways. This chapter seeks to place Baudrillard in the philosophical and political context of his time and trace his early break with traditional Marxism after the student riots of 1968.

Baudrillard’s context: Philosophical

The philosophical movements that dominated French thought in the second half of the twentieth century can be loosely grouped into two strands: those that begin from the standpoint of the thinking subject (existentialism and phenomenology) and those that emphasize the primacy of the objective systems within which humans operate (structuralism and situationalism). Baudrillard would more naturally be seen as belonging to the latter category and bears many of the features of ‘post-structuralism’, although he is a difficult thinker to categorize. His thinking is, in some ways, unique and he is consequently omitted from a great number of surveys of French thought of the period.² While his early analysis is certainly systemic, he is in fact influenced greatly by both existentialism in the form of Sartre (particularly his development of the Marxist concept of alienation within ordinary social relations)³ and also Husserl’s phenomenological approach of critiquing the character of everyday life and the objects that shape it.

Language

Nonetheless, it is fair to say that Baudrillard’s understanding of the world emerges out of the systemic approach known as structuralism that originated in the linguistic analysis of Ferdinand Saussure (1857–1913). The Cours de linguistic général was not written by Saussure, but based on notes taken by students from the lectures he gave at the University of Geneva in the early years of the twentieth century. It sets out the most comprehensive exploration ever attempted of what language is and how it works, which has become the basis of a far wider analysis of human systems of meaning. Saussure draws a distinction between language as a series of speech acts (parole) which make up the day-to-day processes of communication and language as the system of rules that govern speech (langue). This is the system that shapes and determines any given speech act. The language system is made up of signs. But, crucially for Saussure, these signs are not merely referents that point us towards non-verbal concepts (e.g. the sign ‘bicycle’ might simply be seen as referring to the concept of the two-wheeled pedal vehicle). Saussure rejects the view that language is simply a communication tool that refers us to some other more concrete realm of meaning. For Saussure, ideas and meaning are more closely bound up in the processes of language. Indeed, there are no ideas independent from language; ideas may only be understood in relation to language.⁴

Consequently, the Saussurean sign encompasses both word and idea. He understands a sign to be constituted of both a signifier (signifiant) and what is signified (signifié). Only taken together can they give meaning to the sign. With such an understanding of the sign as the basis of language, Saussure then goes on to elaborate how we should not view signs as meaningful in isolation (as if the word ‘bicycle’ contained all its meaning within this single signifier), but as part of a system of signs in which individual signs only find their meaning in relation to one another. The sign only communicates within the context of the overall system of signs. More specifically, Saussure contended that the meaning of the sign derives from its difference from other signs. Meaning is not found in the content of the linguistic sign, but in its structural relation within the system of differences.

What may seem to be a rather technical debate about the operation of language has in fact had profound impact on wide areas of philosophy. Indeed, Saussure came to view semiology as a general science of signs in which linguistics would be merely one branch. We shall come to see how these ideas underpin Baudrillard’s social critique. Saussure articulates the idea of human society’s dependency on a system of signs to generate meaning and coherence and Baudrillard takes the notion of the semiotic system and writes it large onto the consumer society that dominates our modes of exchange today. Yet others begin this approach and influence his own work in taking the structuralist method into the anthropological, psychological and social realms of human experience.

Anthropology

Foremost among these is Claude Lévi-Strauss who worked primarily in the area of anthropology. Lévi-Strauss used the Saussurean semiological approach to understand how the signifiers of primitive societies (their customs, rituals and art) relate to those societies’ beliefs about kinship relations, gods, purity and pollution and so on (signifieds). Lévi-Strauss rejected a typical functionalist view of these primitive practices as seeking to explain some mystery in the pre-scientific age or perpetuating the authority of a ruling elite. Just as Saussure rejected an instrumentalist view of language, Lévi-Strauss did not regard the ritual language of primitive societies as articulating pre-existing beliefs. Rather he sees the whole ritual system as a sign system through which the community generates meaning. ‘He does not see a society or culture as having certain ideas about kinship (or the gods, or animal totems) that are then implemented by practices corresponding to them, the practices being material images of the society’s “self-understanding”. Rather, both the ideas and the practices are specified by their shared formal structure, once again understood in terms of differences between elements in the system’.⁵

Mike Gane suggests that the televised conversations on art between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Charbonnier in 1959 had a strong impact on Baudrillard.⁶ In these dialogues, Lévi-Strauss explored how the art of primitive societies functioned as the sign system of the social group and how the move towards representational art in the Western tradition leads to the diminution of this role. His comparison of primitive and modern societies has a dual significance in its influence on Baudrillard. First, he elaborates strong contrasts between them. He compares the small-scale primitive ‘cold’ society to a clock, a system which minimizes disorder and entropy and tends towards stability. Modern civilized societies he compares to the steam engine.These ‘hot’ societies are prone to rapid change, disorder and entropy which require strong social hierarchy to control. In drawing these distinctions, Lévi-Strauss may be guilty of a sentimentalizing of primitive societies (a trait Baudrillard takes even further), but it should, second, be noted that in reading societies in this way he is also rejecting a normative distinction between them. Implicit is a very radical rejection of certain notions of human progress and our ability to talk about early societies as ‘primitive’ and modern societies as ‘advanced’. Unconscious sign systems continue to pervade our culture and he suggests that uncovering these hidden structures of social life remains the primary means of studying human thought and society. This is of enormous significance to Baudrillard who frequently blurs the lines between historical anthropology and contemporary sociology in his writing.

In this anthropological strand, Gane sees a strong Durkheimian paradigm in Baudrillard’s work, influenced by the work of Georges Bataille and Marcel Mauss (whose influence will be explored in later chapters). What makes Baudrillard’s work frequently strange and unconventional is his strategy of casting himself as the ‘primitive’ and lauding a seemingly barbaric, ritual society over the supposed rational consumer society of the present day. To Gane, this is Baudrillard’s ‘remarkable project’, to place himself as ‘a pre- or anti-rationalist, and to evolve a poetic theoretical analysis of the effects of the most advanced technical transformations in our culture’.⁷

Psychology

Another field in which Saussure’s theories were advanced and whose influence can be strongly identified in Baudrillard’s work is that of psychology. In the 1960s, structuralist thinkers in this area such as Jacques Lacan began to engage in semiological readings of Freud, reappraising the significance of the Unconscious after its rejection by the existentialists in their emphasis on conscious agency. Lacan suggested that the Unconscious could also be understood as a sign system, a kind of regulative language, made up of the drives and desires that shape conscious behaviour. Lacan labels this realm the Symbolic. He conceived of speech and action as the signified of the unconscious signifier, and, again, the meaning of any particular sign can only be discerned within the system of differences. Baudrillard states that his understanding of the Symbolic differs from Lacan’s ‘Imaginary’, giving it a particularly anti-capitalist slant.⁸ Nonetheless, he explores the power of the unconscious drives, and particularly the Death Drive, in Symbolic Exchange and Death and the notion of the Symbolic as a suppressed but overriding social agent remains a central theme of his work.

But the broader relevance to Baudrillard of this structuralist Freudian approach is perhaps found in its concern with the relation of the individual to broader reality. The very purpose of psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition is to allow the ego sufficient control over the unconscious that it can relate to reality in a stable way. But Baudrillard comes to the point of suggesting that the complexity and potency of the sign system has now made reality entirely ungraspable. This notion seems already present in Lacan’s definition of the Real as the perpetually elusive limit of language. For Lacan, psychoanalysis must serve to destroy the illusions of stability in the ego and the objective reality that the ego perceives, subordinating both to the realm of the Symbolic. Here he would seem to prefigure a central theme that Baudrillard would develop – that of death of the human subject in the age of the Hyperreal.

However, of the Freudian structuralists, it is perhaps Julia Kristeva whose work had the greatest impact on Baudrillard in her developing of the two modes of language: semiotic and symbolic.⁹ In her analysis of literature, Kristeva suggests that the former is the rule-governed system of language that occurs within the finite field. This interacts with what she calls the dialogical or symbolic, a kind of language involving the ‘transfinite’ and drawing heavily on unconscious drives and the chaotic world of bodily functions. In psychological terms the semiotic is the realm in which the self is generated but is also the source of its destabilization. The symbolic is the source of the social in which the individual finds stability. In her literary analysis, Kristeva sees ambivalence in language as arising from the confluence of these two modes, an insight which influences Baudrillard’s own notion of ambivalence. Kristeva’s understanding of the transfinite and symbolic in poetry may lie behind his embracing of this style in his later work, a theme explored in Chapter 9.

Social critique

While his incorporation of these anthropological and psychological perspectives makes his work distinctive, it is, however, his application of the structuralist semiotic approach to the social critique of the Left that dominates Baudrillard’s early work. Two other thinkers have a decisive influence on this approach, both of whom he met in the early 1960s while doing editorial work for the French publishing house Seuil. The first of these is Roland Barthes who led the way in using the Saussurean semiological method to reconceive the traditional Marxist themes of alienation and class struggle. Barthes developed a distinctive understanding of the way in which signs signified, not simply in isolation, but within the system of signs, to perpetuate political ideology. This he called ‘myth’ and, in his 1957 work, Mythologies, he shows how everyday objects are drawn into the normalization (or naturalization) of unquestioned political ideas. A key example is the signification of clothes within the fashion system, an area which Baudrillard also explores in his early work. But it is not merely clothes that signified in this mythological way. Barthes contended that ‘Everything in everyday life is dependent on the representations which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between man and the world . . . bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order’.¹⁰ Another example he cites is the way in which the traditional opulent wedding functions as a major class ritual which is held up as an ideal to all sections of society. The mythology of this kind of wedding, however, perpetuates the traditions of the ruling elite and provokes decadent commercial expenditure. Barthes’ approach is reflected in both Baudrillard’s Marxist analysis of the system of consumer products in The System of Objects (1968) and the sociology of consumerism in The Consumer Society (1970).

Similar work was carried out by the second influence on Baudrillard in this area: Henri Lefebvre. Closer to the humanism of the Frankfurt School than the rigid structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, Lefebvre did much to popularize Marx’s early writing, the central theme of which he saw as the liberation of the human self. For Lefebvre, the key issue was that of alienation. ‘Today we are only just beginning to glimpse the complexity of the questions the theory of alienation poses’, he argued in his Preface to the Second Edition of the Critique of Everyday Life.¹¹ We must look beyond the macro-economic questions of capital and labour towards the substance (and objects) of the mundane, since ‘it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which make the human – and every human being – a whole takes its shape and its form. In it are expressed and fulfilled those relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Overcoming the real
• Part One
• Part Two
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright