CF I wanted to do this interview with you because – after the shock I felt reading your article – it struck me that it needed to be put in perspective with regard to the more general development of your ideas. I have the impression from this piece that you are interested in art only to the extent that it confirms the behavioural and functional patterns that inspire your critique of Western culture.
It’s true that art is of peripheral interest to me. I have no real commitment to it. In fact, I would say that I regard it with the same unfavourable prejudices as I do culture in general. In this sense, art has no special privilege in relation to other value systems. People continue to think of art as some unhoped-for blessing. I contest this Edenic view of things. My viewpoint is anthropological. Seen from this position, art no longer seems to have a vital function. It suffers from the same extinction of values, the same loss of transcendence. Art is no exception to the phase of total implementation, of total visualisation, which the West has now reached. Hypervisibility is in fact a way of exterminating the gaze. I can consume such art visually, and even enjoy it, but it gives me neither illusion nor truth. We have questioned the object of painting and then the subject of painting, but it seems to me that no one has taken much interest in the third element: the beholder. His attention is increasingly solicited, but as a hostage. Is there really a way of looking at contemporary art other than the one brought to bear by the art world on itself?
CF Let’s talk about this art world. You are very hard on it. By talking about a supposed ‘art conspiracy’ you imply that those involved in this world are conspirators.
When I talk about an ‘art conspiracy’ I am using a metaphor, like that of the ‘perfect crime’. You cannot put a name to the instigators of the conspiracy, nor can you identify its victims. For this conspiracy has no originator and everyone is both victim and accomplice. It’s the same with the theatricality of politics: we are all both conned and complicit. There is a kind of incredulity, a noncommittal quality which means that everyone is playing a double game in a kind of infinite vicious circle. Now I think that this kind of circularity is in contradiction with the very form of art, which assumes a clear-cut distinction between the ‘creator’ and the ‘consumer’. Everything arising from this confusion, be it in the name of interactivity or total participation or interfaces – the whole caboodle – bores me.
CF From your article I certainly don’t get the impression that you see yourself as an accomplice. You seem to want to put yourself in the position of the outsider, of those who are being taken for a ride.
I like to hold up the figure of the Eastern European peasant, the Danube farmer who is ignorant but instinctive. I assert my right to indocility. Literally speaking, an indocile person is one who refuses to be educated, in other words, to get involved with the world of signs. I try to offer a diagnosis from an agnostic standpoint. I like to see things as a primitive would.
CF In other words, you’re acting naïve?
Yes, because as soon as you enter the system to attack it you also become a part of it. Today, there is no position above the melee from which one can judge severely but fairly. It is obvious in politics that those who blame politicians are also those who keep them going. The political caste is regenerated by its own prosecution. Even the harshest criticisms become part of the circuit.
CF You say that this critical neutrality is impossible to attain, but are you not in fact fostering the illusion that it is within the reach of the man in the street?
I do think that the masses, even though they too participate in the game and are kept in a position of voluntary servility, are utterly sceptical. In this sense, they do come close to a form of anticultural resistance.
CF That brings to mind another of your articles for Libération, ‘Islets and Elites’ (‘Les ilotes et les élites’), in which you criticise the elites and maintain that the purportedly blind masses are in fact perfectly lucid. That may be true for politics, but can it be said that the masses have a spontaneously clear vision of art? This is an area in which the general public is rather conformist.
In the political sphere, the opacity of the masses neutralises the domination exercised upon them. It may be that this opacity is not so great in the field of art and that the critical power of the masses is consequently lesser. No doubt there is still a certain appetite for culture. And if culture has taken over from politics, it has also done so in terms of complicity. However, the fact that the masses consume art does not mean that they adhere to the values they are taught. To put it simply, the masses have nothing to counter them with. We are seeing a kind of alignment, a general cultural mobilisation.
CF Pardon me for saying so, but don’t you think your critique of the elites tends to make common cause with a certain type of extremist right-wing demagogy?
The terms left and right mean nothing to me. It’s true that you can’t say the masses have been fooled, because, objectively, no one has been manipulated or exploited. It’s more a kind of integralism in that everybody ends up being integrated into the same circuit. If someone is being taken in, it is in the political and intellectual worlds. There, it is true, people are fooled by their own values. And it is the almost mythomaniac power exercised on them by those values that leads them to become an autonomous class and to insist that all those operating outside their world should come and play the game within it.
THE RESISTING MASSES
CF Aren’t you simply calling into question the whole democratic system itself?
The democratic regime is increasingly dysfunctional. It works on a statistical level: people vote, and so on, but the political scene is schizophrenic. The masses are completely external to this discourse about democracy. People don’t give a damn. Actual living participation is extremely weak.
CF Isn’t that what right-wing politicians are saying too?
They say that in an attempt to get mass opinion behind them: ‘You can trust us . . .’ But when it comes to convictions, the way they project themselves into their values, the masses are neither to the right nor to the left. You cannot isolate the masses because we are all a part of them. What interests me is the futility of all the attempts to mobilise the masses at a deeper level. Looking beyond superficial side-taking and snap judgements, the masses are impervious to politics as such, just as they resist the system of aesthetic and cultural normalisation. This increasingly vast public, which was first conquered politically, and which they are now trying to conquer and integrate culturally, is putting up a fight. It resists progress, its resists the Enlightenment, education, modernity, and so on.
CF You seem very happy about that.
I am. Inasmuch as there are no critical imperatives left, it seems that this offers the only possibility for opposition – for another conspiracy, an enigmatic, indecipherable one. All discourses are ambiguous, including my own. They are all caught up in a kind of shameful complicity with the system. Indeed, the system uses these ambiguous discourses to justify itself. Thus, the judges inquiring into political malpractice justify the political system because they are the only ones to take an interest in it. The system thrives on persecution. On the other side, that of the masses, there is something ignorant and intractable to politics, sociology or aesthetics. Everything is becoming realised. One day, society will be fully realised and we will all be outsiders. One day, everything will be culturalised: every object will be ‘an aesthetic object’ and no object will be aesthetic. As the system perfects itself, so it simultaneously integrates and excludes. In computing, for example, the more perfect the system, the greater the number of people it throws on the scrap heap. Europe is being built and will be built, and as this happens everything will enter into dissidence against this European voluntarism. Europe will come to exist as an entity, but England won’t be a part of it, nor will the regions. There is an ever-widening gap between the formal realisation of things, conducted by a caste of technicians, and their real implantation. Reality no longer follows the realisation willed at the top. There is a serious distortion. The triumphalist discourse lives on in a total utopia. It continues to believe in its own universality, when in fact its existence is only self-referential. But since society has all the resources it needs to sustain fictive events, the show could run and run.
CF You have just talked about public indifference, but in your article you went further. What you said was more or less: ‘Consumers are right because the bulk of contemporary art is trash.’ Can one really analyse in terms of ‘the bulk’? Surely, whatever true art there may be belongs to the ‘small fraction’ that you ignore.
I agree, but there’s nothing you can say about singularity. Look at all the books and articles about Bacon [in conjunction with the Pompidou Centre retrospective – Trans.]. All this commentary seems to me a form of dilution designed for the art world. What is the cultural function of this kind of object, in the strong sense of that word? Without going back to primitive cultures, there are no anthropological cultures in which an object exists outside a global circuit of either use or interpretation. You cannot propagate singularity through the channels of communication. Or rather, if you do, the circuit is so small that it becomes a kind of fetish. In classical societies, too, the circuit for the circulation of symbolic objects was limited. A single class monopolised the symbolic universe. It didn’t even set much store by it, in fact, but it made no attempt to involve everyone else. Nowadays, we want everybody to have access to this universe, but how is that going to change life? What new energy will it generate? What is the point? In the aesthetic world, the superstructure is so overwhelming that nobody has a direct, brutal relation with objects or events any more. It’s impossible to start afresh. All we do is share the value of things, not the form. The object itself, the secret form that makes it what it is, is rarely attained. What is form, after all? Something beyond value which I try to reach through a kind of void where the object or event have a chance of radiating with maximum intensity.
What I am taking issue with is aesthetics, that added value or cultural veneer behind which intrinsic value disappears. We can no longer pin down the object. All we have are the surrounding discourses or an accumulation of visions that end up forming an artificial aura. The phenomenon I observed in Le système des objets is now reproducing itself in the aesthetic system. In the economic sphere, there comes a moment when objects no longer exist in terms of their end function and exist only in relation to other objects, so that what is being consumed is a system of signs. It’s the same in aesthetics. Bacon is officially consumed as a sign, even if, individually, one can try to re-singularise him, to rediscover the secret of the exception that he represents. Nowadays, though, you really have to work hard to escape the effects of the educational system, not to be taken hostage by signs. To get back to the moment where form first appears – and, at the same time, where all the cladding disappears. The blind spot of singularity can only be approached in a singular manner. This is antithetical to the system of culture, which is a system of transit, of transition, of transparency. And culture is something that leaves me cold. Anything bad that can happen to culture is just fine by me.
FORM IS A GAME
CF Speaking to Geneviève Breerette in Le Monde, you said that you didn’t claim to be articulating a truth discourse, that no one was obliged to think the way you do. What did you mean?
That I don’t want to make my statements about art into a matter of doctrine. My cards are on the table, it’s up to other people to play and invent their own rules as I invent mine. In other words, what I say has no value in itself. It all depends on the response. The art object is presented as a fetish, a definitive object. I totally refuse that form of categorical and irrevocable presentation. I am not looking for conciliation or compromise, but for otherness, as in a duel. We are back with the question of form. Form never speaks the truth about the world; it is a game, a projection.
CF What made your article so hard to take was that you are well known for your interest in images. You also exhibit your own photographs. Some people felt they were being betrayed from within the same side. What are you trying to do with your photos?
Of course, with my photos, even if I take them for myself, the fact of exhibiting them is immediately ambiguous. For me it’s an unresolved problem. But I really do take a direct pleasure in making them, quite aside from questions of photographic culture or objective or subjective expression. At a given moment, I capture the light, a colour, distinct from the rest of the world. I myself am only an absence. Capturing one’s absence from the world and letting things appear. I am not interested to know if my photographs are considered beautiful or not. The goal is not aesthetic. It’s more a kind of anthropological device that sets up a relation with objects (I never photograph people), a view onto a fragment of the world that allows alterity to come out of its context. It may become aesthetic because the viewer can always see in those terms and want to interpret. Indeed, it’s almost inevitable, because once these photographs are in the gallery circuit they become cultural objects. But when I photograph I use a language as a form, not as a truth. It is this secret operation that I think is crucial. There are a thousand ways of expressing the same idea, but if you fail to find the ideal conflation of form and idea you’ve got nothing. This relation between form and language, this seduction or ‘punctum’ as Barthes called it, is becoming harder and harder to find.2 But only form can cancel value. They are mutually exclusive. Criticism today is unable to articulate itself from a position of alterity. Only form is capable of opposing the exchange of values. Form is inconceivable without the idea of metamorphosis. Metamorphosis allows you to move from one form to another without bringing in value. It cannot be made to yield meaning, be it ideological or aesthetic. We enter a world of illusion: form refers to other forms but there is no circulation of meaning. That is what happens in poetry, for example: the words resonate together, creating a pure event. In the meantime, they have captured a fragment of the world, even if they don’t offer any identifiable referent from which one might draw some practical lesson.
THE PROPER USE OF THE VOID
I have lost all belief in the subversive power of words. However, I have an unshakable faith in this irreversible operation of form. Ideas or concepts are all reversible. Good can always be inverted into evil, true into false, and so on. But in the materiality of language, each fragment exhausts its energy and all that’s left is a form of intensity. This is something more radical, more primitive than aesthetics. In the 1970s, Caillois wrote an article describing Picasso as the great liquidator of aesthetic values.3 He argued that after Picasso all we could expect was a circulation of objects, of fetishes, independent of the circulation of functional objects. Certainly, you could say that the aesthetic world is one of fetishisation. In the economic sphere, money absolutely has to circulate, otherwise there will be no value. The same law governs aesthetic objects: more and more are needed so that an aesthetic universe can exist. Objects now have only this superstitious function which brings about a de facto disappearance of form through excess formalism, that is to say, by excessive use of all forms. Form has no worse enemy than the total availability of forms.
CF You seem nostalgic for a more primitive state which, in reality, probably never existed.
Of course, and that is why I am not a conservative. I don’t want to regress to a real object. That would be to cultivate right-wing nostalgia. I know that object does not exist, no more than truth does, but I maintain the desire for it through a way of looking which is a kind of absolute, a divine judgement, and which reveals the insignificance of all other objects. This nostalgia is fundamental. It is lacking in all kinds of contemporary art. It is a kind of mental strategy which ensures that one makes proper use of nothingness, of the void.
Translated by C. Penwarden
NOTES
1. A Spanish version of this interview exists: ‘Entrevista con Jean Baudrillard’, LAPIZ: Revista Internacional de Arte, XVI: 128–9, February 1997, pp. 52–7. [Editors]
2. Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang. [Editors]
3. Caillois, R. (1975), ‘Picasso, le liquidateur’, Le Monde, 28 November, n.p.[Editors]
© Original publication: ‘La commedia dell’arte/The comedy of art’, Art Press, 216, September 1996, pp. 43–8.