Baudrillard's Endgame

—The Question of Radical Politics

 

 

Francis Russell

 

 

 

With each passing discussion of ‘the end’—whether the phrase is understood in terms of an ecological eschatology, global economic ruin, or religious apocalypse—it seems fitting to return to the work of French intellectual Jean Baudrillard, who was, in contemporary theoretical discourse at least, a thinker infamous for his attachment to such concerns. That is to say, over the course of his intellectual career, and across numerous texts published in several languages, Baudrillard can be seen to have reenacted the same theoretical gesture—despite revealing it each time in different guises—of orienting his analysis of postmodern consumer society towards a discussion of radical finitude and ‘the end’. Across his oeuvre, Baudrillard’s writing touched on manifold subjects, and yet, in each of his writings, his discussion moves towards questions of effacement, cessation, disappearance, and the end. 

 

As with many of his compatriots, tied to Baudrillard’s discussion of the postmodern as the terminus of metaphysics is a negotiation of the ‘problem of the symbolic’; the assertion that the subject’s experience of reality—and, therefore, the subject’s existential and conceptual possibilities—are inextricably linked to the systems that function to produce reality, be they linguistic, cultural, technological or otherwise. While numerous philosophers have taken up this concern, Baudrillard presents perhaps the most extreme articulation of the problem of the symbolic, insofar as, conventionally understood, he offers no possibility for divergence from or alterity to the symbolic, and, instead, locates the postmodern subject within a seemingly totalized symbolic space of simulation and hyper-reality. 

 

In later works—such as Impossible Exchange, The Spirit of Terrorism, and the posthumously published The Agony of Power —Baudrillard articulates his conception of the postmodern ‘symbolic’ by way of a discussion of a global hegemonic system that engulfs all other discourses, be they political, economic, technological, etc. On Baudrillard’s account, the global crises that we face in our current situation—in the form of impending ecological devastation, the increasing gulf between rich and poor nations, the persistence of violent dictatorships and totalitarian regimes the world over—can be adequately characterised only if approached in terms of the question of the overlapping problems of simulation and hegemony. For example, in his discussion of the World Trade Centre terrorist attacks of 2001, Baudrillard argues that the horrific nature of the attacks, and the western world’s response to these attacks—for example the suspension of civil liberties in the form of the ‘Patriot Act’ in the United States and the White Paper on immigration in the United Kingdom (Perera, ‘Camp?’)—bear witness not to a ‘clash of civilizations’ or a traditional antagonism between warring nations or ideologies, but instead to ‘triumphant globalization battling against itself’ (Baudrillard, Spirit, 11). Furthermore, the terminology traditionally employed for the analysis of hegemony and social conflict, such as the Marxist notion of ‘domination’ is, on Baudrillard’s account, ineffective for proper diagnosis of the malignancies of the postmodern age, as such terms are only useful insofar as they can posit a stable external reality that is not itself regulated by simulation, hegemony, and the logic of the symbolic. As Baudrillard puts it:

 

it could be said that hegemony brings domination to an end. We, emancipated workers, internalize the Global order and its operational setup of which we are the hostages far more than the slaves […] Contrary to domination, a hegemony of world power is no longer a dual, personal or real form of domination, but the domination of networks, of calculation and integral exchange. (Agony, 34)

 

However, Baudrillard is certainly not alone in terms of raising concerns about the rise of global hegemony and of posing the question of the symbolic. Rather, both of these problems—in one version or another —remain a primary concern for a host of influential contemporary continental philosophers such as Alain Badiou (Being; Metapolitics), Slavoj Žižek (Parallax), Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer; Community), Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (Empire), Simon Critchley (Infinitely; Ethics), and Jacques Rancière (Dis-agreement; Dissensus). Badiou in particular displays a clear indication of this theoretical imperative when he states that the philosophical question that must be posed apropos the demands facing politics within the age of a global capitalist system is, ‘what kind of politics is really heterogeneous to what capital demands?’ (‘Beyond’, 117).

 

Against the philosophical projects of such thinkers, for whom a commitment to the possibility of radical politics remains absolutely necessary, Baudrillard’s work not only appears to offer no account of a radical politics that could enable the subject to engage in counter-hegemonic activity, but also seemingly functions to subvert the very possibility of any conception of politics, radical or otherwise. For this reason, it would seem reasonable to critique Baudrillard’s theoretical work on the grounds that it is awash with the limitations and deficiencies that have become associated with a conventional depiction of ‘postmodern philosophy’—notwithstanding the inherent awkwardness of such a term. This is to say that, through privileging his own key concepts and his investigation into the postmodern, over any actual engagement with the real world—a world that is absolutely external to simulation, the symbolic, the text, etc.—the work of the ‘postmodern’ philosopher, such as Baudrillard, functions to efface real world issues by way of affirming the absolute ascendance of a totalised and hegemonic symbolic space. 

 

Such a view is put forward by prominent theorists such as Douglas Kellner and Catherine Belsey, who have argued that Baudrillard’s analysis of the postmodern becomes increasingly limited the more central his discussion of simulation and the hyper-real become. Kellner argues that, while motivated by an attempt to avoid some perceived limitations of traditional social and political theory, Baudrillard’s discussion of simulation and the hyper-real ultimately fails to produce an adequate ‘social theory of postmodernity’; instead, his work ‘terminates in a postmodern metaphysics’ (From Marxism, 153-4). Similarly, Belsey has argued that ‘Baudrillard’s thinking is characteristically binary, and in consequence less sophisticated than it might appear’ (Culture, 59). On Belsey’s account, Baudrillard’s discussion of simulation and the hyper-real merely inverts the traditional metaphysical privileging of truth over representation, in order to posit the absolute primacy of the symbolic. Evidence of this tendency is seemingly abundant in Simulations, where Baudrillard appears to posit the impossibility of conceiving of any notion of an external reality that can subsist independently of simulation, stating that within the postmodern ‘the very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction’ (146).

 

However, regarding this conventional understanding of Baudrillard’s discussion of simulation and the totality of global hegemony, there appears to be a question that remains open. Insofar as we speak to this gesture of declaring the ‘end’, should we take Baudrillard at his word, and, therefore, assume that this ‘end’ has already come? If not, what can be done, if anything, to defer—perhaps, indefinitely—the coming of this end? In other words, should we interpret Baudrillard’s discussion of the end—the end of the real, of politics, of the social—as an attempt at providing an ontological account of the postmodern, or as a crisis to be avoided? And if it were the latter, what would be the implications of this for our summation of Baudrillard’s work as a whole? While it might be impossible—and, most likely, fruitless—to look for a definite answer to these questions, Baudrillard himself provides some impetus for us to at least take them into consideration. In a posthumously published text entitled ‘Where Good Grows’, in which he again appears to make a case for the insurmountable problem of facing an increasingly totalised space of global hegemony, Baudrillard concludes by stating that ‘wherever this global confrontation will lead, nothing is yet decided and the suspense remains total’ (107). This description of our current situation as ‘suspenseful’, and this concomitant affirmation of the aleatory as opposed to the totalised and fatalistic sits at odds with the aforementioned conventional view of Baudrillard’s project. Indeed, such a paradoxical summation of the present surely implores a reexamination of Baudrillard’s oeuvre—particularly as it relates to the question of radical politics—and, furthermore, the grounds for opening up the question of Baudrillard’s penchant for the ‘endgame’. 

 

 

The Window and the Mirror

In his In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Baudrillard provides what is perhaps his most sustained critique of the political, and of traditional political and social theory. In this text, he outlines a trajectory of ‘the political’ by way of a brief account of the historical development of the concept in western thought, beginning with the emergence of the Renaissance period and ending with the concept’s eventual termination in the postmodern. He describes the Renaissance conception of politics as a ‘pure game of signs, a pure strategy which was not burdened with any social or historical truth’ (Shadow, 45). For at the heart of Renaissance politics—exemplified by the ruthlessness of a figure like Machiavelli—is a struggle for power and domination that, rather than looking externally to some notion of truth or external reality to orient its internal movements, looks instead only inwards, and thereby functions to perpetuate the struggle for power, for power’s own sake (Shadow, 46). Following this Renaissance mode of politics, Baudrillard argues, politics transformed itself during the Enlightenment period and over the course of the social upheavals of the eighteenth century, from the internalised movements of Renaissance politics to a dialectical process whereby the political articulates itself against the external reality of the social corpus, and thereby becomes invested in the possibility of representing the will of the people, and in the primacy of truthful representation. In this age, politics no longer

 

worked on signs alone, but on meaning; henceforth summoned to best signify the real it expressed, summoned to become transparent, to moralize itself and respond to the social ideal of good representation. (Ibid.) 

 

On Baudrillard’s account, just as the internal power struggle of the Renaissance gives way to the eighteenth-century ‘golden age of bourgeois representative systems’ (ibid.), so too has the Enlightenment mode of representational politics given way to the procession of simulation within postmodern consumer society. In the postmodern age, that is, rather than dialectically moving toward some final synthesis, or sublation, the movements between the political and the social—between political ideal and social will—terminates in the implosion of both terms. The consequence, for Baudrillard, is the ‘absolute hegemony of the social and the economic, and the compulsion, on the part of the political, to become the legislative, institutional, executive mirror of the social’ (Shadow, 46-47). Or as Baudrillard puts it elsewhere, ‘of the political sphere one can say that the idea of politics has disappeared but that the game of politics continues in secret indifference for its own sake’ (Transparency, 7).

 

 

gigantic black hole which inexorably inflects, bends and distorts all energy and light radiation approaching it: an implosive sphere, in which the curvature of spaces accelerates, in which all dimensions curve back on themselves and ‘involve’ to the point of annihilation, leaving in their stead only a sphere of potential engulfment. (Shadow, 40)

 

It seems then that, for Baudrillard, as a result of the mutation of the social into an indeterminate mass—a mass that can be apprehended or reflected neither by political institutions nor by traditional political and social theory—the social becomes reproducible only within the space of simulation, mediated by news media, opinion polls, sociology, political science, etc. Thus the circulation of news stories—comprising carefully selected segments of edited footage and presented to the viewing public within the codes and constraints of ‘news style’—does not provide the viewer with a reflection of reality, or the social ‘will’; nor does it simply provide the viewer with a spectacle to be passively consumed. Instead, Baudrillard claims, the viewer is given an injunction by the media to actively respond—to be ‘informed’—but in such a way as to ensure that the response is always already governed by way of the ‘code’ of media simulation (Simulations, 120-3). The code of media simulation, reliant on numerical data and statistical models for predicting outcomes and representing events, can present the viewer with what appears to be a greater sense of objectivity and neutrality than traditional forms of subjective expert opinion or lengthy discussion, due to the seemingly democratic nature of the code’s lucidity and verifiability. However, the consequences of the distribution of all events by way of media simulation appears, on Baudrillard’s account, to be the subordination of reality to the logic of the code; with the absolute exclusion of any sense of the singularity of events—any remainder that cannot be represented through the modes that structure the code of media simulation. Accordingly, rather than the interlaced networks of media functioning to reflect or express the political inclinations of the ‘public’, for Baudrillard it appears that the phenomenon of ‘public opinion’ is itself, and can only ever be, generated by way of the simulation of media networks. Therefore, Baudrillard argues, the media function to demarcate both consciously and unconsciously the parameters of discussion by way of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ binary of opinion polls, and in doing so they generate and project the phantasm of ‘public opinion’ onto the indeterminate mass. He states that it is the polls that ‘manipulate that which cannot be decided’ (Simulations, 127). Moreover, rather than merely accepting or affirming the media’s simulation of the social, the masses are simultaneously engaged with and beguiled by this media phantasm: ‘the people even enjoy day to day, like a home movie, the fluctuations of their own opinions in the daily opinion polls’ (Shadow, 60).

 

For a recent example we could turn to the coverage of the 2011 London riots, wherein the ‘media-event’ itself, generated through the code of media simulation, loses all sense of determinacy. The coverage appears to engender the event with manifold conflicting significations, whereby racism, post-GFC rage, and rapacious opportunism are all presented simultaneously as the ‘real’ motive behind the violence. Even the significance of the riots with regard to broader social issues and the question of responsibility becomes equally undecidable as a violent minority, the police, government, and the social media and networking technologies that allowed the rioters to elude police are all brought under suspicion within the networks of media simulation.

 

'London Riots', 2011 © BBC

 

Were the riots inevitable or avoidable, justified or disgraceful? For Baudrillard media simulation can only respond with the profusion of the undecidable. Therefore, rather than merely being an instance of the media serving the interests of a dominant group—or of simply ‘distorting the truth’—the function of such media simulation is to produce not an event, but, rather, a radically indeterminate series of interlaced signals—presented and ordered through the logic of media codes—that, on Baudrillard’s account, denies the postmodern subject access to the stable external reality that appears necessary for the development of some notion of counter-hegemonic and radical political action.

 

Baudrillard’s analysis of the postmodern and his critique of the political thus appear to speak to the impossibility of delimiting the ‘real’, a space in which the political, media, and the masses intersect in a way that is both determinant and transparent to the postmodern subject. Accordingly, for Baudrillard, these discourses or fields—if we can use these terms—merely efface one another through the act of simulation, producing a radically indeterminate space of hegemony that seemingly functions to preclude the real. It is for this reason that Baudrillard states that any attempt to conceive of a radical politics that is fundamentally counter-hegemonic will ultimately be recuperated (Transparency, 11). Given that hegemony, on Baudrillard’s account, appears to manifest through the realisation and interconnection of a super-abundance of models of the real—wherein there can be no distinction made between emancipation and subjugation—any critical discourse that attempts to denounce hegemony is ultimately recuperated by the very force it attempts to oppose. To illustrate this point, we could take the work of contemporary graffiti artist Banksy, whose lauded installation/intervention graffito-works deal with traditional Marxist problematics, such as the evils of consumerism, worker alienation, the devaluation of life, the domination of nature by capital, and so on. With an eye for provocative imagery, and a dramatic sense of pathos, Banksy’s works have been internationally lauded for their engagement with a contemporary feeling of post-industrial disenchantment and, furthermore, for their elevation of graffiti from a form of juvenile angst to a mode of critique and anti-establishment protest.

 

Banksy’s Little Diver (see note 1). Image from MelbourneStreetArt.com

 

So resonant has Banksy’s work proven to be that his art and personality alike have become objects of mass proliferation throughout the interlaced networks of the art world, international tourist sectors, and news media. Indeed, such is the level of celebration that, over a comparatively short period of time—and despite his counter-hegemonic intent—Banksy’s name and iconic graffiti have obtained a status not dissimilar to multinational brands like Saatchi & Saatchi or Reebok.¹ Given the aforementioned objection raised concerning the possibility of critical discourse, it would appear therefore that Baudrillard’s question for those who champion the critical projects of figures like Banksy—and those who work in a more ‘traditional’ or discursive vein—would involve fundamentally questioning the capacity for critical discourse to avoid being co-opted. Further, a question could be raised regarding a certain catharsis of critique—as is experienced when one comes across a particularly acerbic and witty piece of graffiti, or visits a gallery, or when one reads a cultural studies journal—that functions to inhibit rather than promote the political engagement of the subject. While notable theorists such as Simon Critchley have referred to laughter and the comedic as possible modes of critique, insofar as they provide moments of solidarity and resistance (Critchley, Ethics, 235), the problem of critique’s cathartic element cannot be ignored. When we laugh at one of Banksy’s spray-painted lampoons of symbols of authority or mainstream values, it is perhaps precisely this feeling of solidarity or resistance that allows the viewer a release from the very pressure of feeling the demand of responsibility.²  Accordingly, the critical projects that underpinned the programs of the Enlightenment and modernity appear to be precluded on Baudrillard’s account, insofar as

 

critical intelligence no longer measures up to the collapse of reality and to the passage into total reality […] The curse of critical discourse is to reconcile itself secretly with those it criticizes by denouncing them (Agony, 39).

 

However, just as Baudrillard appears to preclude the very possibility of a critical discourse standing in opposition to the hegemonic, the following parenthetical clarification is provided, in which Baudrillard states that he is ‘well aware that what I am saying here belongs to this discourse’ (ibid.). How should such a statement be interpreted? Does this proclamation attest to the critique of Baudrillard’s work as a kind of postmodern metaphysics, whereby the concepts of simulation and the hyper-real are deemed to be so ontologically fundamental to the ‘postmodern’ that even their creator is doomed, incapable of resisting their domination? Does this statement, annexed onto what appears to be Baudrillard’s preclusion of the possibility of critique, display an inability to think beyond his early concepts? I would argue that, given the ambiguity of this admission, care must be taken to avoid merely interpreting this statement as a lapse of sorts, or using it as an excuse to dismiss Baudrillard’s work as being muddleheaded and ‘metaphysical’. Such care must be taken as these kinds of objections appear to avoid, rather than resolve, the fundamental tension that runs throughout Baudrillard’s work: the double gesture of precluding the possibility of counter-hegemonic critique and, simultaneously, of performing just such a critique. In other words, whilst Baudrillard will maintain the impossibility of philosophical thought apprehending the political—even negatively, as this would again merely be a case of philosophy simulating the political—he engages, time and time again, with the question of the end of the political and the profusion of simulation by way of such critique. Such an engagement with the tradition of critical inquiry—inextricably linked to a rich tradition of philosophical intervention into the world—appears to undermine Baudrillard’s own theoretical endeavour to articulate the indeterminate nature of the postmodern.

 

 

Baudrillard’s metaphysics derives from his social analysis and notion of the end of modernity, the disappearance of the social, the political, meaning, reality and so forth, in our new and original social situation. Baudrillard’s postmodernism thus provides the impetus and ground for a new metaphysics. Hence, strictly speaking, Baudrillard does not in the final analysis provide a social theory of postmodernity—that is to say, an adequate account of historical stages or ruptures in history and society in the transition from modernity to postmodernity, accompanied by a systemic analysis of the contemporary era. Rather, his work terminates in a postmodern metaphysics which ignores the critique of metaphysics carried out earlier by Derrida and other poststructuralists. (From Marxism, 153-4)

 

However, pace Kellner and the many similar critiques (e.g. Belsey’s) of Baudrilard in much of the secondary literature, there exists perhaps the possibility of returning to Baudrillard’s work by way of a reading that locates a critical import within his discussion of ‘simulation’ and the ‘hyper-real’ whilst simultaneously presenting the possibility of opening up a counter-hegemonic or radical conception of the political. Againsy Kellner’s and Belsey’s readings of Baudrillard—which look to interpret the apparent conflict between the declarative and the performative levels of Baudrillard’s texts as an over-attachment to his notions of simulation and the hyper-real—Baudrillard’s discussion of the political could be read in such a way as to reveal a performative textual strategy that seeks to subvert the very problem of simulation and to re-engage a form of critique that could itself be regarded as potentially counter-hegemonic. Such a reading can only be considered, however, if, in our readings of Baudrillard’s work, we suspend the decision to commit simulation and the hyper-real to a postmodern metaphysical system, and strive instead to affirm the paradox as central, rather than detrimental, to Baudrillard’s project.

 

 

Real Value

Conventionally speaking, Baudrillard’s notions of simulation and the hyper-real signal the problem of the disappearance of what would function as the truth of the real and the reality of truth. This truth, which we would look towards as a guarantee of the objectivity and externality of the real, has conventionally been understood as the aggregate of empirically verifiable propositions that philosophy and the natural sciences can posit regarding existence. Rather than rejecting the presence of such an aggregate, Baudrillard’s discussion of simulation and the hyper-real could, perhaps, be seen to raise the question of the value of the hegemonic and dominant discourse that surrounds discussion of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ within the postmodern. For example, in The Perfect Crime Baudrillard states that within the postmodern

 

we labour under the illusion that it is the real we lack the most, but actually, reality is at its height. By our technical exploits, we have reached such a degree of reality and objectivity that we might even speak of an excess of reality, which leaves us far more anxious and disconcerted than the lack of it. That [i.e. an absence of reality] we could at least make up for with utopianism and imagination, whereas there is neither compensation for—nor any alternative to—the excess of reality. (65)

 

This ‘excess of reality’, which develops by way of technological simulation—be it in the form of scientific speculation, media representation, statistical modeling, etc.—functions to efface the concepts of the social, the political, and the real; and it is this excess that threatens the possibility of counter-hegemonic resistance. In this sense, rather than functioning as an ontological-structure within a ‘metaphysical imaginary’, Baudrillard’s notion of simulation can be taken as a means for critiquing a dominant and hegemonic tendency that functions to obstruct the very posing of the question of the real—and, by extension, the political. Arguably, it is for this reason that Baudrillard seems so unequivocal in his rejection of the conventional analysis and discussion of the political—particularly as enacted within the discourses of social theory or Marxism. Echoing the remarks of Belsey and Kellner, sociologist Anthony King’s attempt to critique Baudrillard’s critical project for being ‘an example of postmodern sociology, rather than a sociology of postmodernism’ (‘Critique’, 48) is indicative of this fundamental blind spot with regards to what is most radical about Baudrillard’s project. For to charge Baudrillard’s work with being either a form of metaphysics, or for failing to produce a rigorous social theory of the postmodern, is to presuppose dogmatically that Baudrillard’s primary task as a thinker is to provide a model of reality.³ Instead, Baudrillard argues that ‘if we want to resist hegemony and escape it using the means we once used against domination (revolt, critical thought, negative thought, etc.), there is no hope’ (Agony, 117). Accordingly, rather than discuss the problem of reality or of the political by way of a traditional engagement with such concepts as though they could clearly indicate an external reality—and here we must recall that Baudrillard sees such models of the real as functioning only to simulate reality—Baudrillard adopts an ironic and performative strategy in an attempt to avoid simulating any objective reality, while simultaneously affirming a sense of alterity or divergence by engaging paradoxical structures. It would appear then that, rather than attempting to undermine all conceptions of the political, Baudrillard is perhaps engaged in a critique that attempts to open up the question of the very value of political process. On this account, rather than reading Baudrillard as hypostatising the postmodern, the notion of the postmodern can itself become a means of articulating an insidiously dominant set of power relations which act to exclude any recognition or practice of a form of politics that sits outside of the code of simulation—be it in the form of media analysis and representation, or opinion polling, etc.

 

Such a commitment to the counter-hegemonic cannot be adequately expressed through the mere privileging of alterity and radical difference over previous terms—and by way of the subordination of both the metaphysical notions of objective reality and the postmodern ascendance of culture. Instead, a commitment to the counter-hegemonic would require a confrontation with the fundamental limit inherent in all models of ‘reality’ and all symbolic structures, because, while such models are unavoidable, it is only when they are given a universalised or foundational status that they begin to conjure away the possibility for the emergence of resistance and interpretation. To be sure, there is the sense in which Baudrillard’s project can be read as an attempt to resist the ontological and representational tendencies of modern philosophy, and to critique the latter’s misrecognition of ‘reality’ as a self-identical object, passively waiting to be discovered by philosophy, science, and the media, in all its ideality. But beyond this level of critique, Baudrillard’s work affirms a certain notion of the poetic, insofar as poetic praxis can be taken as a divergence from ‘the real’—as closed off, or static—which, furthermore, allows for the possibility of alterity and transformation. Thus he writes:

 

The irruption of radical uncertainty into all fields and the end of the comforting universe of determinacy is not at all a negative fate, so long as uncertainty itself becomes the new rule of the game. So long as we do not seek to correct that uncertainty by injecting new values, new certainties, but have it circulate as the basic rule. It is the same here as with the will: you can resolve the problem of the will only by a (poetic) transference into the play of otherness, without ever claiming to resolve the question of its ends and its object. It is on the continuity and reciprocal exchange of the Nothing, of illusion, of absence, of non-value, that the continuity of Something is founded. (Impossible, 10)

 

This is not to say that, for Baudrillard, some form of absolute relativism, or the humanist privileging of ‘unique’ and ‘individual’ subjective positions, is more significant for the discussion of political reality than the work conventionally carried out by scientists or journalists. Rather, the affirmation of the aleatory and the poetic, of chance and imagination—each being unencumbered by its relationship to the ‘truth’ of the real—expresses, arguably, the absolute need for the possibility of critiquing the doxa that manifests itself in ‘common-sense’ and ‘obvious’ discussions of reality. This is not to say that there can be no discussion of empirical facts, or that the disciplines of natural science, journalism, and politics, must be made subordinate to Baudrillard’s brand of anti-philosophy. Rather, Baudrillard’s critique points to the way in which such disciplines function to self-legitimate the hegemony of simulation. Baudrillard’s discussion raises the concern, moreover, that our conception of politics has become restricted to the capacity for the simulation of the social will, and the use of this ‘will’ to justify a political process that, in its inability to gesture towards anything but its own process, looks increasingly totalised and ‘postmodern’. This is to say that, for Baudrillard, there always exists the imperative to consider the possibility of an otherwise to the dominant discourses that surround contemporary conceptions of politics. Accordingly, for thought, philosophy, or politics, to be truly radical or counter-hegemonic, it must continually engender a commitment to forestalling ‘the end’, by way of the affirmation of the poetic and, therefore, the illusionary level of the real.

 

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In his second volume of experimental works, Cool Memories II, Baudrillard, referencing the work of the famous comic Groucho Marx, draws attention to what he refers to as Groucho’s Paradox : ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’ (83). This exhortation of refusal, predicated on the paradox, strikes at the heart of Baudrillard’s performative and anti-foundationalist, counter-hegemonic strategy. One could say, with Groucho’s remark in mind, that Baudrillard will not accept any reality that is seen to be identical with, and reflected in, the simulations of philosophy, science, the media, and the political. Against the metaphysical primacy of truth that underpins the hegemony of the postmodern, Baudrillard insists that ‘the value of thought lies not so much in its inevitable convergences with truth as in the immeasurable divergences which separate it from truth.’ (Perfect Crime, 95) With the increasingly grim assessment of global warming’s effects in mind, Baudrillard’s privileging of imagination and of the possibility of a thought that can diverge from the simulated profusion of truth has become increasingly relevant. Indeed, there is a sense in which the super-abundance of the real, the sheer scale of the intrusion of models of reality into our experience of what theorists like Baudrillard have referred to as the ‘postmodern’, has not functioned to compel subjects to act and to establish a radical conception of politics that is adequately equipped for the task at hand. Rather, it seems that—whether a hyper-real excursion into the cancer-riddled vital organs of a heavy smoker, or, the increasingly accurate statistical modeling of the erosion of the polar ice caps due to the affects of global warming—this incursion of the real via simulation effaces the fields of the social and the political. It is for these reasons that Baudrillard’s work must, if it is to have any relevance whatsoever, be interpreted in such a way as to acknowledge his fundamental commitment to critique and to divergence that operates throughout the use of his concepts of simulation and the hyper-real, and the complex performative strategy that operates within his work.

 

In Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit, Baudrillard is asked if his ‘diagnosis’ of the postmodern must necessarily posit the condemnation of all possible political change, and how such a ‘diagnosis’ could ‘allow us to escape from the world of those who believe in nothing and seem fated to ruminate on that nothing?’ (7). Baudrillard responds by reaffirming that the ‘excess of visibility’ produced by the ever increasing networks of simulation appears to efface the possibility of singular and irreducible ‘events’ and of historical progress in the traditional sense (Perfect Crime, 8). However, in what could perhaps be considered a moment of uncharacteristic directness, Baudrillard remarks that ‘to point this out isn’t to believe in nothing any more, as you put it, but to register this curving back of history and try to thwart its lethal effects’ (ibid.). Against his reputation as a kind of postmodern prophet of post-millennial nihilism, and, moreover, against his numerous declarations against such an idea, perhaps Baudrillard does in fact share an affinity with a certain task of philosophy, insofar as his work appears to have struggled for opening up a space for thought, politics, and an irreducible real.

 

 

Notes

1. For an example of this we can turn to the outrage that was expressed by the public of Melbourne when, in 2008, ‘vandals’ destroyed a ‘priceless’ Banksy stencil-piece. The piece, which had been protected by a large sheet of plastic, which had been installed by the owners of the building that the piece adorned, was destroyed when ‘vandals struck’ by pouring silver paint behind the plastic protector effacing the artwork beneath (Houghton,‘Painter’). This new work, which was deemed destructive and of little value, particularly when compared to the $470,000 estimate attributed to the original stencil (ibid.), could not be defended, not by the authorities nor by the public, as not only had a valuable work of art been destroyed, but the work that had replaced the Banksy original was merely a black scrawl across a silver expanse, one that stated ironically ‘Banksy woz ere’. What this incident displays is the extent to which Banksy’s work appears to be robbed of its capacity to ‘interrupt’ the spatial manifestations of capital due to its recuperation within the very value-structure that it looked to displace. Furthermore, the ‘public outcry’ that met the reported act of vandalism begs the difficult question of whether works like Banksy’s can function in an anti-hegemonic way once they have been effectively canonised. #back

 

2. And here Banksy can’t take all the credit, as, while mastering the comedic arts certainly involves perfecting one’s timing—and Banksy certainly has a habit of turning up in the right place at the right time—the vast majority of his better lines were written by prominent alternative comic Simon Munnery. As for what might be called a feeling of ‘canned’ solidarity, Žižek raises a similar concern in his explication of the Lacanian notion of the ‘big-Other’. Žižek states that, within Lacanian theory, the subject will at times displace beliefs and knowledge onto the big-Other so that it does not have to engage with them directly (How to Read, 27). To illustrate this point Žižek provides the example of he use of canned laughter in television sitcom soundtracks, stating that when watching a program ‘even if I do not laugh, but simply stare at the screen, tired after a hard day’s work, I nonetheless feel relieved after the show, as if the soundtrack has done the laughing for me’ (How to Read, 23). Returning to Banksy’s work, could we not say that a similar displacement functions in the viewer’s relation to purportedly ‘anti-hegemonic’ work? That is to say, even if we do not attempt to resist hegemony, but simply stare at the graffiti, on our way home after a hard day’s work, we nonetheless feel the sense of solidarity that Critchley describes. #back

 

3. This reading of Baudrillard as a fundamentally metaphysical thinker, whose project, especially since his works of the 1980s, is to provide an ontological account of the postmodern, continues to hold a prominent place for many contemporary commentaries on Baudrillard’s writing. For example, Craig Anderson writes that Baudrillard’s account of postmodern simulation ultimately privileges an ‘arrogant’ and acute vision of Western capitalist countries, and, as a result, serves to ‘ignore those suffering from the economic affairs of ‘reality’, of the world’ (‘Modes’). Again, what remains unnoticed by critiques such as Anderson’s is the extent to which a certain metaphysical commitment hinders the possibility of locating within Baudrillard’s work any project that is irreducible to the traditional ontological projects of philosophy or the critical projects of ‘post-philosophy’—i.e. Marxism. #back

 

 

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Žižek, Slavov. The Parallax View. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009.

 

 

Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy

ISSN 2200-8616

 

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