Henceforth, everything was public, transparent, and hyperreal in the object world that was gaining in fascination and seductiveness as the years went by. Previously, in banal strategies, the subject believed itself to be more masterful and sovereign than the object.
A fatal strategy, by contrast, recognizes the supremacy of the object and therefore takes the side of the object and surrenders to its strategies, ruses and rules. In these works, Baudrillard seems to be taking his theory into the realm of metaphysics, but it is a specific type of metaphysics deeply inspired by the pataphysics developed by Alfred Jarry. For Jarry:. Definition: pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments Jarry Thus, in view of the growing supremacy of the object, Baudrillard wants us to abandon the subject and to side with the object.
Pataphysics aside, it seems that Baudrillard is trying to end the philosophy of subjectivity that has controlled French thought since Descartes by going over completely to the other side. Henceforth, for Baudrillard, people live in the era of the reign of the object. Thus, according to Baudrillard, the society of production was passing over to simulation and seduction; the panoptic and repressive power theorized by Foucault was turning into a cynical and seductive power of the media and information society; the liberation championed in the s had become a form of voluntary servitude; sovereignty had passed from the side of the subject to the object; and revolution and emancipation had turned into their opposites, trapping individuals in an order of simulation and virtuality.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, within the transformations of organized and hi-tech capitalism, modes of Enlightenment become domination, culture becomes culture industry, democracy becomes a form of mass manipulation, and science and technology form a crucial part of an apparatus of social domination. Baudrillard follows this concept of reversal and his paradoxical and nihilistic metaphysical vision into the s and s where his thought becomes ever more hermetic, fragmentary, and difficult.
During the decade, Baudrillard continued playing the role of academic and media superstar, traveling around the world lecturing and performing in intellectual events.
Retiring from the University of Nanterre in , Baudrillard subsequently functioned as an independent intellectual, dedicating himself to caustic reflections on our contemporary moment and philosophical ruminations that cultivate his distinct and always evolving theory. From June through May , he published reflections on events and phenomena of the day in the Paris newspaper Liberation , a series of writings collected in Screened Out [] and providing access to a laboratory for ideas later elaborated in his books.
During the s and until his death, Baudrillard continued to write short journal entries and by had published five volumes of his Cool Memories. These texts combine reflections on his travels and experiences with development of his often recycled ideas and perceptions.
These texts continue his excursions into the metaphysics of the object and defeat of the subject and ironical engagement with contemporary history and politics. While the books develop the quasi-metaphysical perspectives of the s, they also generate some new ideas and positions. They are often entertaining, although they can also be outrageous and scandalous. These writings can be read as a combination of cultivation of original theoretical perspectives along with continual commentary on current social conditions, accompanied by a running dialogue with Marxism, poststructuralist theory, and other forms of contemporary thought.
In The Transparency of Evil , Baudrillard described a situation in which previously separate domains of the economy, art, politics, and sexuality, collapsed into each other. He claims that art, for instance, has penetrated all spheres of existence, whereby the dreams of the artistic avant-garde for art to inform life has been realized. The result is a confused condition where there are no more criteria of value, of judgement, or of taste, and the function of the normative thus collapses in a morass of indifference and inertia.
In the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle, a transaesthetic object — just as everything also becomes trans-economic, trans-political, and trans-sexual. Driven toward virtualization in a high-tech society, all the imperfections of human life and the world are eliminated in virtual reality, but this is the elimination of reality itself, the Perfect Crime.
Baudrillard has entered a world of thought far from academic philosophy, one that puts in question traditional modes of thought and discourse. His search for new philosophical perspectives has won him a loyal global audience, but also criticism for his excessive irony, word play, and intellectual games.
Yet his work stands as a provocation to traditional and contemporary philosophy that challenges thinkers to address old philosophical problems such as truth and reality in new ways in the contemporary world.
Baudrillard continues this line of thought in his text Impossible Exchange He attacks philosophical attempts to capture reality, arguing for an incommensurability between concepts and their objects, systems of thought and the world. He identifies this dichotomy with the duality of good and evil in which the cultivation of the subject and its domination of the object is taken as the good within Western thought, while the sovereignty and side of the object is interwoven with the principle of evil.
In The Perfect Crime b , Baudrillard has declared that reality has been destroyed and henceforth that people live in a world of mere appearance. Most controversially, Baudrillard also identifies with the principle of evil defined as that which is opposed to and against the good.
There is an admittedly Manichean and Gnostic dimension to his thought, mixed with skepticism, cynicism and nihilism.
His thought is self-avowedly agonistic with the duel presented in tandem with his dualism, taking on and attacking rival theories and positions. Contradictions do not bother Baudrillard, for indeed he affirms them. It is thus tricky to argue with Baudrillard on strictly philosophical grounds and one needs to grasp his mode of writing, his notion of theory fictions see Section 5 , and to engage their saliency and effects. The current situation, he claims, is more fantastic than the most fanciful science fiction, or theoretical projections of a futurist society.
Thus, theory can only attempt to grasp the present on the run and try to anticipate the future. However, he has had a mixed record as a social and political analyst and forecaster. As a political analyst, he has often been superficial and off the mark. Shortly thereafter, rather significant events destroyed the wall that Baudrillard took as permanent and opened up a new historical era.
The Cold War stalemate was long taken by Baudrillard as establishing a frozen history in which no significant change could take place. For Baudrillard, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York also symbolized the frozen history and stasis between the two systems of capitalism and communism. On the whole, he sees history as the unfolding of expanding technological rationality turning into its opposite, as the system incorporates ever more elements, producing an improved technological order, which then becomes irrational through its excesses, its illusions, and its generating unforeseen consequences.
This mode of highly abstract analysis, however, occludes more specific historical determinants that would analyze how technological rationality is constructed and functioned and how and why it misfires. It also covers over the disorder and turmoil created by such things as the crises and restructuring of global capitalism, the rise of fundamentalism, ethnic conflict, and global terrorism which were unleashed in part as a response to a globalized rationalization of the market system and to the breakup of the bipolar world order.
Baudrillard does not help us to understand much about the event and does not even help us to grasp the role of the media in contemporary political spectacles. Reducing complex events like wars to categories like simulation or hyperreality illuminates the virtual and high-tech dimension to media events, but erases all their concrete determinants. And yet Baudrillardian postmodern categories help grasp some of the dynamics of the culture of living in media and computer worlds where people seem to enjoy immersing themselves in simulated events witness the fascination of the Gulf war in , the O.
Simpson trials during —6, the Clinton sex scandals, and various other media spectacles throughout the s, and the September 11 terror attacks in the early days of the third millennium. These myths, these strong ideas, are exhausted, he claims, and henceforth a postmodern era of banal eclecticism, inertial implosion, and eternal recycling of the same become defining features.
For Baudrillard by the end of the s with the collapse of communism, the era of the strong ideas, of a conflicted world of revolution and universal emancipation, is over. Communism, on his reading, collapsed of its own inertia, it self-destructed from within, it imploded, rather than perishing in ideological battle or military warfare. With the absorption of its dissidents into power, there is no longer a clash of strong ideas, of opposition and resistance, of critical transcendence.
With the embedding of the former communist regimes into the system of the capitalist world market and liberal democracy, the West no longer has an Other to battle against, there is no longer any creative or ideological tension, no longer any global alternative to the Western world. Baudrillard celebrated the coming of the new millennium with a recycling of some his old ideas on cloning, the end of history, and the disappearance of the real in a series of lectures collected as The Vital Illusion For Baudrillard , cloning is connected to the fantasy of immortality, to defeating the life-cycle.
Thus, it is no surprise that cryogenics — the freezing of dead human beings in the hope they might be regenerated in the future through medical advances — is a booming global industry. Likewise, in a digital era, he claims that history has come to an end and reality has been killed by virtualization, as the human species prepares itself for a virtual existence. Baudrillard complained that the contemporary era was one of weak events, that no major historical occurrences had happened, and that therefore life and thought were becoming increasingly boring.
He quickly responded with the Le Monde article, soon after translated and expanded into one of the more challenging and controversial books on the terror spectacle, The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers a.
The moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are directly proportional to the prodigious jubilation felt at having seen this global superpower destroyed. Each one brought us progressively closer to the single world order of today, which is now nearing its end, everywhere opposed, everywhere grappling with hostile forces. This is a war of fractal complexity, waged worldwide against rebellious singularities that, in the manner of antibodies, mount a resistance in every cell.
That the entire world without exception had dreamed of this event, that nobody could help but dream of the destruction of so powerful a Hegemon — this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West.
In the end, it was they who did it, but we who wished it. Terrorism is not a contemporary form of revolution against oppression and capitalism. No ideology, no struggle for an objective, not even Islamic fundamentalism, can explain it. One should not confuse the messenger with his message. Indeed, Baudrillard has also produced some provocative reflections on globalization. Deregulation ends up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to those of a fundamentalist society.
Many see globalization as a matrix of market economy, democracy, technology, migration and tourism, and the worldwide circulation of ideas and culture. Baudrillard, curiously, takes the position of those in the anti-globalization movement who condemn globalization as the opposite of democracy and human rights.
This position, however, fails to note the contradictions that globalization simultaneously produces homogenization and hybridization and difference, and that the anti-corporate globalization movement is fighting for social justice, democratization, and increased rights, factors that Baudrillard links with a dying universalization.
In a Nietzschean mode, he suggests that henceforth truth and reality are illusions, that illusions reign, and that therefore people should respect illusion and appearance and give up the illusory quest for truth and reality. Ideological apologists of globalization such as Thomas Friedman have been forced to acknowledge that globalization has its dark sides and produces conflict as well as networking, interrelations, and progress.
It remains to be seen, of course, how the current Terror War and intensified global conflicts will be resolved. Baudrillard has never been as influential in France as in the English-speaking world and elsewhere — a point made in many French obituaries upon his death. Baudrillard is perhaps most important as part of the postmodern turn against modern society and its academic disciplines. His work cuts across the disciplines and promotes cross-disciplinary thought.
He challenges standard wisdom and puts in question received dogma and methods. While his early work on the consumer society, the political economy of the sign, simulation and simulacra, and the implosion of phenomena previously separated can be deployed within critical philosophy and social theory, much of his posts work quite self-consciously goes beyond the classical tradition and in most interviews of the past decade Baudrillard distances himself from critical philosophy and social theory, claiming that the energy of critique has dissipated.
Baudrillard thus emerges in retrospect as a transdisciplinary theorist of the end of modernity who produces sign-posts to the new era of postmodernity and is an important, albeit hardly trustworthy, guide to the new era. It is not an accident that Baudrillard is an aficionado of science fiction, who has himself influenced a large number of contemporary science fiction writers and filmmakers of the contemporary era, including The Matrix where his work is cited.
He obviously wants to have it both ways with social theorists thinking that he provides salient perspectives on contemporary social realities, that Baudrillard reveals what is really happening, that he tells it like it is. Likewise, he sometimes encourages cultural metaphysicians to read his work as serious reflections on the realities of our time, while winking a pataphysical aside at those skeptical of such undertakings.
With regard to reproduction, it is clear that labour power, or the worker, is also reproduced. Reproduction, therefore, includes what would have been both sides of the equation in the era of industrialism. Now, the origin of things is not an original thing, or being, but formulae, coded signals, and numbers. The difference between the real and its representation is erased, and the age of simulacra emerges.
In its extreme form, therefore, even death can be integrated into the system: or rather, the principle of reversibility implies that death does not really happen. In short the claim that power has a content becomes a pretence. Generalised simulation thus accompanies the death of all essentialisms.
Socially speaking, Baudrillard notes that the era of the code begins to penetrate the whole of the social fabric. Baudrillard thus shows how the system is potentially a closed system which risks imploding. Hyperreality effaces the difference between the real and the imaginary. The question to be answered is that of how a political intervention which does not get recuperated by the system is possible. In both cases, he argues that it is necessary to give primacy to the object over the subject, fatal theory determined by the object over banal, critical theory determined by the subject.
Ecstasy, fascination, risk and vertigo before the object which seduces, takes precedence over the sober reflexivity of banal theory. Seduction, then, is fatal in the sense that the subject is dominated by the unpredictable object — the object of fascination. The masses who, due to their lack of reflexivity and conformity, were the despair of revolutionary intellectuals now become the model to be followed. For they have always given precedence to ecstasy and fascination, and thus to the object; the masses thus converge towards the potential extremities of the system.
Baudrillard was accused of denying material facts, in relation to the first Gulf War, and in justifying terrorism in the second article. Of course, Baudrillard was in both instances misunderstood, if one spent time unpicking the crux of the arguments. But perhaps this is no longer the point. These works constituted, in light of real developments in technology, particularly digitalisation and cybernetics, a genuine engagement with history, unlike the ironical and nihilist position Baudrillard has adopted over recent years.
There is, then, the fatal strategy of the object, an object that outplays the subject; the strategy of seduction, which poses itself as a foil to the society of the spectacle; the strategy of pataphysics from Alfred Jarry as a science of imaginary solutions which, in the contemporary world, would entirely supersede metaphysics see Baudrillard Pataphysics is the only way theory can outfox a virtual reality of simulation, where radical and under normal circumstances unanticipated reversals occur with increasing frequency.
As such, the world would become the height of predictability, not the reverse. Chance would have no role to play here. In short, it is precisely because the world social and cultural reality is not as Baudrillard says it is that crises of theory, crises of predictive science can occur.
A world of pure appearances would be easy to manage. The truth, though, is that such a media world does not exist — even in imagination even in pataphysics. Gane, Mike, ed.
Ames Hodges, New York: Semiotext e. Mark Poster, Cambridge: Polity Press. Selected Interviews, ed. John J. John, Baddeley: Routledge. Through objects one is able to control time. The following quote will expand on this:. Objects allow us to apply the work of morning to ourselves right now, in everyday life, and this in turn allows us to live- to live regressive no doubt, but at least to live. A person who collects is dead, but he literally survives himself through his collection, which duplicates him infinitely beyond death, by integrating death itself into the series, into the cycle.
Our worlds passion for objects results in envy. The article then points towards the castration complex, and how we attempt to solve it through others jelousy of our objects. This entry was posted on June 29, at am and is filed under Uncategorized. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.
You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Pages Why?
0コメント