Introducing Baudrillard E-Book

Chris Horrocks

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 100

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Illustrated guide to the controversial sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who died in 2007. Did the Gulf War take place? Is it possible to fake a bank robbery? Was sexual liberation a disaster? Jean Baudrillard has been hailed as one of France's most subtle and powerful theorists. But his provocative style and assaults on sociology, feminism and Marxism have exposed him to accusations of promoting a dangerous new orthodoxy - of being the 'pimp' of postmodernism. Introducing Baudrillard cuts beneath the controversy of this misunderstood intellectual to present his radical claims that reality has been replaced by a simulated world of images and events ranging from TV news to Disneyland. It provides a clear account of Baudrillard's work on obesity, pornography and terrorism and traces his development from critic of mass consumption to prophet of the apocalypse. Chris Horrocks' text and Zoran Jevtic?s artwork invite us to decide whether Baudrillard was a cure for the vertigo of contemporary culture - or one of its symptoms

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-984-4

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Jean Baudrillard – Con? Icon? Iconoclast?

Background… Algeria, Existentialism, Marxism

Revolution in Everyday Life

Mass Consumption

Structuralism

1968 Situationism

Situationist Graffiti

Repressive Participation

Affluent Society

Sign Network

The Critic as Consumer

Defining the Ambient Consumer

Applying Semiology

Semiology of Fashion

Classifying Consumers

Sign Function of Objects

The Field of Connotation

Crazy Consumers?

Regressing with Consumer Objects

The Fun System

Logic of the Consumer Object

Symbolic Exchange

The 1970s – Baudrillard Unmasks the Sign

Commodity and Sign

The Innocence of Use Value

The Mask of “Use Value”

Does Ideology Reflect Reality?

The Reply of Structural Linguistics

Is the “Sun” Real?

Déconstruction… against “Presence”

… and Différence

Baudrillard’s Culture

Simulations

Mass Reproduction… and Non-Auratic Culture

Lowest Common Culture

The Frankfurt School vs. Mass Culture

The Techno Culture…

… or Cyberblitz

Fashion Alibis

And Gadgets?

Banking on Galleries

What is a “True” Work of Art?

The Genealogy of Art’s Disappearance

The Beaubourg Effect

1973 – Baudrillard Destroys Marxism

And Psychoanalysis? And Nature?

“The Accursed Share”

The Myths of “Primitivism”

The Slave and Wage Worker

Lacant’s Mirror

Baudrillard – A Ladies’ Man?

Foucault’s Idea of Power

Male vs. Female

The Disaster of Liberation

Against Feminism

Seduction vs. Production

The End of Phallocracy?

Games of Seduction

Appearances vs. Reality

Sentimental Cannibalism

Baudrillard and Simulation

1. Symbolic Order in cultures of scarcity…

2. First Order of Simulacra

Examples of the Counterfeit

3. Second Order of Simulacra

4. Third Order of Simulacra

The Real – Simulation’s Alibi?

Disneyland or Baudrillard?

Watergate

The Bomb that Destroyed Reality

The Panic Crash

No Nukes

The Reality Gulf

Baudrillard and the Media

The Medium is the Model

Advertising – A Dead Language

Television

Reality Served Cold

The Silent Majority – Baudrillard and the Masses

TV and Class

Anti-Sociology

What has happened to society?

The Neutral Mass

The Silent Majority

Implosion

A World of Residues?

So where is politics today?

Baudrillard’s Fatal Decision

Fatal Extremes

Ecstasy

More Ecstasy …

The Obscene

Trans-Everything

Bio-Terminology: Hypertelia

Metastasis

Anomaly

Terrorism

Baudrillard and Nietzsche’s Superman?

Baudrillard on Tour…

USA

“The Desert of the Real”

Baudrillard Accused!

Baudrillard at The End of the World

What are we left with?

Postmodern Guru?

“The End” as Parody

Forget Baudrillard?

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Biographies

Index

Jean Baudrillard – Con? Icon? Iconoclast?

As the Marxist critic Douglas Kellner said,“The whole Baudrillard affair is rapidly mutating into a new idolatry of a new master thinker, and is in danger of giving rise to a new orthodoxy”.

His theoretical position has radically altered over this time…Jean BaudriIlard’s enormous output on mass consumption, media and society stretches from the political turbulence of 1960s France to the global vertigo of the 1990s.…from early Marxist critiques of modern consumer culture and society, through a succession of skirmishes with psychoanalysis, sociology, semiology and Marxism itself, to his rejection of theory and its replacement with an extreme “fatal” vision of the world.

Baudrillard is a contradictory character. The “real” Baudrillard was elusive- almost secretive. In seminars he seemed passive and uncertain. Yet the “virtual” Baudrillard is ferociously uncompromising — and his virulent style is met with equal force by critics who accuse him of intolerance, banality, generalization and facetiousness.

It’s not just his style they find irksome.Baudrillard disturbs the theoretical foundations of academia, and intellectuals are wary of his popularity with the media. Academia questions his status as a “serious” intellectual.

So who was Jean Baudrillard — and what did he do to upset people?I don’t think of myself as a philosopher … perhaps a moralist, but certainly not a sociologist.Although he taught sociology up till the mid 1980s, it’s misleading to call him a sociologist — much of his work is intent on destroying the discipline.It’s safe to call Baudrillard a “critical theorist” for his Marxist period and “fatal theorist” later on when his writing style sends theory beyond its limits.I’m an aeronautical missionary.

Fasten your seatbelts …

Background… Algeria, Existentialism, Marxism

I was born in Rheims, France in 1929, just after the “first great crisis of modernity” — the Wall Street Crash.His grandparents were peasants and his parents civil servants.

The young Jean studied hard at the Lycée, then taught German before taking up sociology. He went to university late, as an assistant at Nanterre, Paris. In 1966, he completed his thesis in sociology.

His interest in politics came with the left’s opposition to the Algerian War and his association with Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre’s (1905-80) journal Les Temps Modernes in 1962-63, for which he wrote literary reviews.

Modern society produces inauthentic relations between its members.Only lived and experienced existence provides a philosophical platform to overcome this — not appeals to human essences.

But did Baudrillard adopt my existentialist philosophy?No, he sided with Henri Lefebvre, the Marxist sociologist.

Sartre’s novels are quite simply boring. His philosophy turns human anguish into a mystery overcome by a superhuman moment.That’s inhuman. Anguish is everyday fear and misery. We must reverse this slide into contempt for man and not condemn his triviality.

Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life (1958) examined social structures beyond the workplace but with an emphasis on Marx’s concept of alienation.

Baudrillard did follow Sartre’s creation of the “intellectual” as independent from political parties, “free” to build a dialogue with Marxism.

Revolution in Everyday Life

Capitalism represses the free development and exercise of physical and mental faculties.The assembly-line worker is reduced to a mere fragment of man. Inner potential appears in alienated forms. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life.

In the modern world, everyday life has ceased to be a “subject” rich in subjectivity; it has become an “object” of social organization.We live in a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.

Henri called for a revolution via everyday life. Even festivals would play a part.

Mass Consumption

In the 1960s, Baudrillard and his contemporaries saw a new France emerging: modernization, technological development, monopoly capitalism and a developing information society of mass consumption.

But could traditional Marxism account for or incorporate these upheavals? Was capitalism extending itself beyond the workplace or was this a radical departure?

Identify contradictions between classes in relations of production by economic analysis of the commodity?No, Marx’s theories of the mode of production have stalled. Consumption — not production — is the basis of the social order.

Baudrillard’s first major project was to provide a critical account for the emergence and effect of mass consumption.

Structuralism

But what methodology could he use?Fashionable Structuralism — a method which emphasizes “deep” permanent structures of languages and cultures, which contends that the “subject” is not derived from existence but from language.

I am against structuralism — a system intent on classifying culture is repressive.No… I see a structural system at work in consumption — and structuralism could be used to expose its dynamics.What’s the noise?

From May to June 1968, theoretical crisis was eclipsed by social revolt.

Mon Dieu!

1968 Situationism

Who was responsible?Students known as the Enragés — maniacs — and some were taught by Baudrillard. But they drew inspiration from the Situationist International.

The Situationists were a group of radical writers and artists who demanded the overthrow of all bureaucratic regimes.

They combined subversive art and theory to encourage spontaneous action which would cast off the enforced passivity of consumer society. The revolution would be a festival or nothing — situations would act as passageways to a new kind of life. Situationists declared war against modern life. Culture was a corpse, politics a side-show, the media a limit on real communication.

Situationist Graffiti

Hey, I know you! I am head situationist Guy Ernest-Debord, who coined the phrase the “society of the spectacle”.Oh, hallo Debord — we both attended Henri’s lectures… Sorry, no time for chat!I have always been a bit of a situationist.

Capital accumulates until it becomes image. TV, football matches, art galleries, traffic… The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relationship among people, mediated by images.

Repressive Participation

Jean was not a member and was pessimistic about the effectiveness of an uprising which quickly turned into news footage.

The revolution failed. Some historians think it expired because the students went on summer holiday.

This May 1968 revolt was “hare-brained”. Students had thought that capitalist repression meant aggression, but in fact it encouragedparticipation.

Baudrillard called this new form of repression ambience — where society becomes controlled through its inclusion in the spectacle of consumption.

Baudrillard had contempt for the repressive code of consumption. It was not just a passive moment after goods were produced and sold but a new phase of capitalism… affluent society.

Affluent Society

Affluent society “mutates” the human species.We are no longer surrounded by people but by objects. This is the new consumer ambience — a new morality which systematically structures modern life, and where unique relations between an object, a place and function have disappeared.

This liberation of objects from life gives us an ambient experience of diffuseness and mobility — smoking, reading, entertaining, air tickets, credit cards, movies, gourmet shops, clothing are part of ambient connectedness.

Sign Network

Department stores and malls magically negate scarcity and synthesize all consumer activities — leisure, spectacle, consumption — offering a universalist model which invades all aspects of social life.

Store displays refer the consumer not to the objects’ function but to their collective meaning — a calculus or network of signs.

In the ambient order, the consumer object itself is less important than its value in the ambient harmony of consumer signs.

We are immersed in a modern world of signs which destroy tradition. Our experience of plastics, synthetics, pastel colours, lighting systems, replace earlier “living” materials like wood, stucco and cotton.

This systematization invades the domestic interior. Take colour. In the 19th century colours had no independent value from the particular objects they expressed – their symbolic meanings always arrived from their context.

In the early 20th century, colours became liberated and separated from forms. They had a life of their own. Anything could be red, or blue, or green.Later there is a backlash — and pastel harmonizes the ambient environment — colour disappears as such and we are left with tonal systems.

Because many objects have a functionalist logic, we become functional.Right dear?Multi-purpose products make multi-purpose people.

The Critic as Consumer

Our existence is lived by the rhythm of consumer goods. Objects are stripped of symbolism and expression. In this consumer world everything is “handy” – muscular effort is replaced with cybernetic, often remote, control.

What was Baudrillard’s own world of consumption like?

His pad in Paris was surrounded by restaurants, cinemas, small shops. Baudrillard usually wore brown, smoked Gauloises roll-ups (peasant background?). The apartment was unpretentious, with plain drapes over the furniture, black and white photos on the wall, a mirror over the fireplace, a TV, video recorder and CD. He had a second home in Languedoc and two children.

Defining the Ambient Consumer

Consumption diminishes the human species, but how can we challenge the satisfaction of someone who buys a pedal bin covered with flowers?So, what is a consumer?

No! We can’t cast off this apparent “conditioning” and limit our needs to “real” ones — it is impossible to know which are real needs and which are not.

Besides, consumers never feel mystified or alienated. We “play” with needs, substituting one object for another.

Individual choice is the ideology of the industrial system. Freedom of choice is imposed on the consumer.

Baudrillard’s conclusion is that individually needs are nothing. Needs have nothing to do with any correspondence between a consumer and an object. The system of needs is produced by the system of production.

Applying Semiology