Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard has been referred to as "the high priest of postmodernism." Baudrillard's key
ideas include two that are often used in discussing postmodernism in the arts: "simulation" and "the hyperreal." The
hyperreal is "more real than real": something fake and artificial comes to be more definitive
of the real than reality itself.
Examples include high fashion (which is more beautiful than beauty), the
news ("sound bites" determine outcomes of political contests), and
Disneyland (see below). A "simulation" is a
copy or imitation that substitutes for reality. Again, the TV speech of a political candidate, something staged
entirely to be seen on TV, is a good example.
A cynical person might say that the wedding now exists (for many people)
in order for videos and photos to be made—having a "beautiful
wedding" means that it looks good in the photos and videos! Baudrillard often writes in an exaggerated
or hyperbolic style (following his philosophical forefather Friedrich
Nietzsche), so that it is hard to know whether he is serious or
tongue-in-cheek. (Perhaps it does not
matter!)
Quotations Part 1: From "The Precession of
Simulacra," in Art After Modernism:
Rethinking Representation, Ed. Brian Wallis (New Museum 1984),
253-281.
Precession of simulacra: the map precedes the territory. "It is the real, and not the map, whose
vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of
the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself." (p. 253)
These would be the successive phases of the image:
—it is the
reflection of a basic reality
—it masks
and perverts a basic reality
—it masks
the absence of a basic reality
—it bears
no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance—the
representation is of the order of sacrament.
In the second, it is an evil appearance—of the order of
malefice. In the third, it plays at
being an appearance—it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all,
but of simulation. (p. 256)
When the real no
longer is what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin
and signs of reality: of secondhand truth, objectivity, and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of lived
experience, a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance
have disappeared. And there is a
panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel
to the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the
phase that concerns us—a strategy of the real, neo-real, and hyperreal, whose
universal double is a strategy of deterrence. (p. 257)
Disneyland is a perfect model of the entangled orders of
simulation. To begin with it is a play
of illusions and phantasms: Pirates,
the Frontier, Future World, etc. This
imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much
more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious reveling in
real America, in its delights and drawbacks.
You park outside, queue up inside, and
are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only
phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in
that sufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there specifically to
maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot—a
veritable concentration camp—is total….Disneyland is there to conceal the fact
that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which
is Disneyland…Disneyland is presented as
imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all
of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the
order of the hyperreal and simulation. (pp. 262-2)
Go and organize a fake holdup. Be sure to check that your weapons are
harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger
(otherwise you risk committing an offense).
Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest
commotion possible—in brief, stay close to the "truth," so as to test
the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't
succeed:
the web of artificial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real
elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will
faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phony ransom over to
you)—in brief, you will unwittingly find
yourself immediately in the real, one of whose
functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce
everything to some reality—that's exactly how the established order is, well
before institutions and justice come into play….Thus
all holdups, hijacks, and the like are now as it were simulation holdups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the
decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of
presentation and possible consequences.
In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to
their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their "real" goal at all.
(p. 267)
Quotations Part 2 From The Illusion of the End (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1994), Translated by Chris Turner, "Pataphysics
of the Year 2000"
Right at the very heart of news, history
threatens to disappear. At the heart of hi-fi, music threatens to
disappear. At the heart of
experimentation, the object of science threatens to disappear. At the heart
of pornography, sexuality threatens to disappear. Everywhere we find the same
stereophonic effect, the same effect of absolute proximity to the real, the
same effect of simulation.
By definition, this vanishing point, this
point short of which history existed and music existed, cannot be
pinned down. Where must stereo
perfection end? The boundaries are
constantly being pushed back because it is technical obsession which redraws
them. Where must news reporting
end? One
can only counter this fascination with 'real time'—the equivalent of high
fidelity—with a moral objection, and there is not much point in that. (p. 6)
Baudrillard has also written about our society's fascination
with immediate images of violence and disaster (soccer game riots, the Gulf
War, the Waco shoot-out, etc.). He says
that in such cases, the spectacle is hyperreal--the depiction of violence sets
the standard for the reality. Even horrific
disasters like Chernobyl or the Challenger explosion are, in Baudrillard's
view, "mere holograms or simulacra."
At times, however, Baudrillard adopts a less cynical
position and envisions the masses' options for ironic and antagonistic
resistance to the ongoing mediated spectacle of violence. He speaks for instance about "an original
strategy" of "subtle revenge" and a "refusal of
will."
(Jean Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the
Media," in Selected Writings (Stanford,1988), Ed. Mark Poster, pp.
207-219.)
This means that sometimes, Baudrillard downplays the
ideological functions of the television industry and questions its control over
the audience. Instead he emphasizes the
audience's mass self-seduction:
"The group connected to the video is also only its own
terminal. It records itself, self-regulates
itself and self-manages itself electronically.
Self-ignition, self-seduction.
The group is eroticized and seduced through the immediate command that
it receives from itself, self-management will thus soon be the universal work
of each one, of each group, of each terminal.
Self-seduction will become the norm of every electrified particle in
networks or systems. (Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond
(Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1989), p. 148)
Questions for JB from CF: The question is, if this is the opposite of "Big
Brother is Watching," what kind of value is there in a world in which we
are all self-seducing and plugged into our own terminals? Is this a
meaningful, liberated, democratic, creative, and valuable world? Or is it its own nightmare inversion of Big
Brother? (Notice how different this
picture is from McLuhan's optimistic idea of a happily united world in the new
"global village.")