<nettime> Jean Baudrillard in London

[John Armitage <john.armitage@unn.ac.uk>]

Meet the David Bowie of philosophy Jean Baudrillard is a consummate
self-inventor, radical thinker - and takes a fine photograph, too. He
talks to Steven Poole

Tuesday March 14, 2000
The Guardian 

Jean Baudrillard's lecture in London last Friday did not take place. But
don't be alarmed: the aim of thought, after all, is not truth or reality. 
Thinking is the art of making things disappear. Let's try, then, to make
this impish, septuagenarian matre ` penser disappear too.

Picture, if you will, Baudrillard in the chemistry lecture theatre of
University College, London. Gazing down from a side wall is a vast chart
of the periodic table, whose elements huddle together for comfort, anxious
at the appearance in their midst of this unpredictable catalyst. 
Baudrillard looks wonderfully like a hyperreal cafe Frenchman: short,
rotund, in a crumpled suit, with tufts of golden-grey hair poking out from
his temples.  But that appearance is a mask.

To an audience of alternately amused and blankly bamboozled architecture
students, Baudrillard delivers an hour of sizzlingly dense, rococo
argumentation in his warm but near-impenetrable Gallic tones. He explains
his love of taking photographs, and mercilessly dissects the poverty of
modern art. He laments the loss of magic, the fact that in an age of
technical explanation, the universe has now "fallen" into a banal reality. 
The universe is given to us ready-made, like Duchamp's urinal. And art has
no answer to this; it can only rehearse the disaster. "To turn an object
into art," Baudrillard smiles, "you just have to make it useless." But the
idea of uselessness is itself useless. Today, we merely enjoy the idea of
art, not art itself.

Why? Baudrillard calls it "image-feedback". The image masks itself with an
idea of itself. It constantly transforms itself into a message, and thus
prevents us from seeing. Meaning, the omnipresent, choking smog of the
post-industrial era gets in the way. This is true of all visual media. 
"It is the TV that looks at us," he insists, "from a blind spot, from
nothing."  Our gaze is turned back from this dead zone and blinds us.

And yet there is hope. Perhaps a certain sort of image could "break the
screen". And perhaps photography is the weapon for this violent
liberation.  Because photography, if it avoids being assimilated to a
message, can be unintelligible: the opposite of thinking. The potential
for "something that is neither true nor real, but is beautiful". That is
Baudrillard's plea, his challenge.

Across the road after the lecture we congregate in the bar, drinking beer
while Baudrillard's own photos are projected in triptych on the walls. 
The images are inscrutable. An empty red armchair faces out at the viewer,
enacting the disappearance of a human body, whose shape remains, in
Baudrillard's own beautiful phrase, "like a smile". Close-ups of brick
walls or alleys radiating in ecstasies of brown and blue; a lone bicycle
gazing out over a golden river; a philosopher's still-life of book, pens,
ashtray and coffee bowl; keys on a cafe table; splotches of red and black
paint on a wall, almost humanoid. These stories of charged absence
continue to glow on the walls as the bar empties and the chatter fades.

The next morning I meet Baudrillard at his hotel in South Kensington. 
"Oh, the grand homme himself!" chirps the receptionist, after I repeat the
magic code of his name. Downstairs in the bar, Baudrillard drinks black
coffee and smokes a cigarette he has rolled in advance; he delivers a
rolling monologue in an English-French hybrid. It's early, but the twinkle
in his eyes bespeaks pure joy in thought. "Ouf, it's a game!" he says, as
if astonished that anyone could think otherwise of thinking.

But sometimes even champions need a break. That's why Baudrillard took up
photography, as a way of escaping writing and thinking. "I began to
photograph without any ambitions," he says, "not to be exhibited. It was
just surprise encounters with objects, with situations, with lights." He
had tried to take portraits of people, but "it's a disease of mine before
human beings," he confesses. "I cannot take them as subjects. With objects
it's an elective affinity, as far as they are traces of the living human
world." 


His photographs, he hopes, are without "meaning". For Baudrillard adores
unintelligibility. There is not enough of it around. "Gone is the
innocence of nonsense," he said wistfully in his lecture. But he tries his
best:  "It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us
in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more
fabulous."

That is why we love Baudrillard: because he can do this. But that is not
to say he is a mere conjurer of nonsense. Baudrillard foresaw the allure
of virtual reality long before William Gibson; he was in the vanguard of
Marxian critiques of modern consumerism; before it became fashionable, he
wrote a scintillating analysis of man's sentimental exploitation of
animals.  Baudrillard got there first, many times. And now his
self-imposed task is "this art of taking reality as fiction, taking
fiction as a hyperreality".  To shock us into realising that thought and
the world need not be as they are.

That is why we love him; it is also why he enrages a certain stodgy,
anti-imaginative Anglo-American sensibility. Baudrillard is most infamous
in non-philosophical circles for having said that the Gulf war did not
take place. The theory is that these days, the "model" precedes the event
and exhausts it totally in advance. The Gulf war was played out as
simulation before any tanks began rolling, and then it was played out
again as simulation through videogame-style missile-runs on TV. Behind
this orgiastic virtuality, the "real" event was nowhere to be seen.

Baudrillard's pioneering analysis is now common - so thoroughly
domesticated as to figure in such books as Michael Ignatieff's recent
Virtual War. A few years ago, Baudrillard also claimed that the year 2000
would not happen.  So?  Did it? "No," Baudrillard insists gleefully.
"Because we were already in the 21st century long before we came to this
dead point. We abused the scenario of the millennium long before it
happened. Now, we stay in the 20th century.  We have not really passed
over. We don't live in a rational time..."

But what, pray, is a "rational time"? The most high-profile charge
levelled against Baudrillard's game of thinking came a few years ago from
Alan Sokal's and Jean Bricmont's book, Intellectual Impostures, which
named Baudrillard among a phalanx of French "postmodernist" thinkers who
regularly abuse scientific concepts. It caused a huge storm in France, and
an ejaculation of happy sneering over here, fortifying the complacent
impression of those who had never bothered to read any French philosophy
that it was all a load of rubbish.

Up until now, Baudrillard has not dignified the attack with a public
reply.  I ask him about it, and he sighs simply: "It's a misunderstanding
of metaphor." It is further, in his view, based on an outmoded idea of the
scientific process. Nowadays, Baudrillard argues, we know that hypotheses
are never verified - "they give way to other hypotheses. And thought has
always been like that... I was surprised that no scientist ever answered
to Sokal himself as a scientist." And then he adds, with a devious grin: 
"In a way it was a compliment."

To be accused of imposture, after all, is not necessarily a bad thing. 
"There is a good use of imposture," he points out slyly. "It is the art
never to take a definite posture. The ability to metamorphose posture." 
Indeed, Baudrillard's own career has been an exercise in balletic shifts
of pose. In 1991 he summed up his intellectual journey: he had been a
pataphysician at 20 (the term is Dadaist: a scientist of imaginary
solutions), then "situationist at 30, utopian at 40, transversal at 50,
viral and metaleptic [having seizures about seizures] at 60. That's my
history." 

Now Baudrillard is 70: so what is it this time, monsieur? He laughs: "I
ought never to have said that. Well, let's see, at 70, I would say that I
am... beyond the end. It was my fateful strategy to go beyond the concept,
so as to see what happens beyond."

So where next for the perpetually self-reinventing man, the David Bowie of
philosophy? Becoming digital? Well, Baudrillard rather likes the idea of
the internet voraciously sucking up the world, because that would "leave
thought alone in its radicality", although he doesn't use the net himself.
"I cannot see a text, a modulation of thinking, on a screen - on a screen
I can only see an image..." Yet nor does he prophesy cyber-doom. "I did
this critique of technology, but I would not do that any more. I am not
nostalgic. I would not oppose liberty and human rights to this technical
world."

For now, Baudrillard has another book due out in France - the final volume
of his delightful journals, Cool Memories. And then? "After that, maybe I
become an artist." I wish him luck. "Ouf, on verra! " he chuckles, and
with that, Jean Baud-rillard puffs on his cigarette and wanders back
upstairs, leaving only the traces in my notebook behind.


______________________________________________
"The military is the message."
 
John Armitage
Principal Lecturer in Politics & Media Studies
Division of Government & Politics
University of Northumbria at Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 8ST
UK
Tel: 0191 227 4971
Fax: 0191 227 4654
E-mail: (w) john.armitage@unn.ac.uk
E-mail: (h) j.armitage@technologica.demon.co.uk
Read: Machinic Modulations:new cultural theory & technopolitics
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/archive/r-archive/ang-con.html


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net