PB Recently, Le Monde published an article on the progress of digital technologies, entitled ‘The boundaries between the virtual and reality are increasingly blurred’. Wouldn’t someone who’d read you overhastily be inclined to take that for a Baudrillard title?
It’s amusing to start there because in fact I’ve never said that – at least not in those terms. The idea that reality no longer exists is, as I see it, a hypothesis. And it’s to be understood in that sense only. But it’s useless to try to re-establish any kind of truth since we are, by definition, in a world where it no longer exists . . .
PB Thirty years ago, in your first books, you often used the notion of ‘sign’, which has subsequently almost become a cliché.
A total cliché. And I’ve had absurdities of the ‘Signs-are-all-there-is!’ type lumped on me. Later, more or less the same thing happened to me with ‘simulation’: American artists hardened up the hypothesis to the point where it became set in stone. After that, it’s impossible to pull these things back. But, again, let’s leave it there. That’s just how it goes.
PB In Cool Memories, a melancholy series of fragments, mid-way between essay and diary, you slipped in this personal admission, which is a sort of clarification: ‘The immateriality of signs is alien to me, as it is to a race of peasants with whom I share an obsessional morality, a sluggishness, a stupid, ancestral belief in the real. In reality, I am one of them.’
My parents were in fact of peasant origin. They came from the Ardennes and settled in Reims. From that peasant background, I’ve retained something of a barbarian bias against culture. Contrary to appearances, I’m not greatly at ease manipulating sign systems. All the themes I’ve latched on to over the years – the immateriality of signs, simulation, seduction – weren’t part of my calling. Even on the subject of death, I have very little imagination. But there is this something impenetrable deep down in me, this drive that leads me to be fascinated by things that will always be beyond my grasp. At that point, I try to make utopias of them – or objects of analysis.
PB It was in that sense that you were fascinated, if not indeed bowled over, by America?
Yes, of course. It’s clearly not a world I could live in. Apart from the desert, where I feel affinities because there isn’t any antinomy there between the primal environment and the sense of nothingness, of emptiness. I went back to California last spring. There wasn’t the same feeling of illumination and astonishment as when I first discovered the place – that quasi-physical metabolic effect that led me to steep myself in America. But whether through the natural spectacle of the imposing landscapes, the technology or the culture, I re-discovered my phantasmagorias there. Perhaps because I’ve never lost my childlike curiosity and I’ve never been blasé, I always find the air-conditioned, hushed automatism of American cars tremendous – or those headlights full on in the daylight on the eight-lane highways running along the coast. My book America was that – a phantasmagoria. And American readers didn’t understand that or rejected it. Because, precisely, we’re not coming from the same place on this.
PB Conversely, and you’ve said this again and again, you’ve no time for condescending or contemptuous judgements of America.
I don’t in any way criticise what we might call political verdicts on America. But when people talk to me about French cultural exceptionalism, that really gets my goat. I can’t stand the kind of caricature of culture that takes itself for culture. Having put ourselves on the same footing as the Americans, we stress an artificial differentness in order to compensate. I’m the first to agree with the idea that we shouldn’t accept globalisation. But it’s stupid to confuse globalisation with America. America is as much a victim of globalisation as any other country. No one benefits from that vertiginous operation. The only way of resisting the global is through singularity. Playing up the theme of French cultural exceptionalism is just an attempt to rehabilitate oneself in a desperate effort to salvage something. At a pinch, if I had to choose, I’d choose America’s prodigious lack of culture over our moribund post-cultural state. When I’m abroad – and not just in the USA – I can tell you I’m a little bit ashamed of French smugness, of our vanity and bluster. [The telephone rings. A weekly magazine is conducting a survey on the theme ‘What does it mean to be left-wing today?’ and asks Jean Baudrillard his opinion. He refuses to respond.] Do you realise what they’ve come to? Happily they don’t call me much now and I’m better at getting out of it. After all, I’m not going to waste my energy explaining that these kinds of questions just don’t arise any more and the problem has disappeared.
PB Still in Cool Memories, you said this in 1987 and it’s amusing to cite it now: ‘I was born in 1929 just after Black Thursday under the sign of Leo and Crisis . . . Born at the time of the first great crisis of modernity, I hope to live long enough to witness its catastrophic turn at the end of the century.’1
I’m still hoping, though sadly it’s only a faint hope [laughter]. In fact, I confess to having cut some corners here with a small dating error. The 1929 Crash took place in October, whereas I was born in the July. Since passing seventy recently, I’ve devised a more striking chronology for myself: 1929 is the economic crisis; 1939 the Second World War; 1949 the height of the Cold War; 1959 for me was the Algerian War; with 1969, we’re still in the aftermath of 68 and there’s the moonwalk; with 1979, I’m still looking for a key event; 1989 is the fall of the Berlin Wall; and in 1999 I create this little decades-based mythology to excuse myself for being seventy . . .
PB You like to have fun with this kind of schema. Here’s another one: ‘Pataphysician at twenty – situationist at thirty – utopian at forty – transversal at fifty – viral and metaleptic at sixty – my complete history.’2 And at seventy?
You’ve got me there: I haven’t given it any thought. Perhaps I’ll add it in the fourth volume of Cool Memories which I’m preparing for the year 2000 and which will be the last.3 I had set myself this objective: twenty years between 1980 and 2000 and four volumes. That’s not an entirely definite plan but more a conviction that there’s a moment for writing those kinds of books and you shouldn’t go on beyond it.
PB For the time being then, you’re staying ‘viral and metaleptic’. Which means what, precisely?
Metaleptic means mistaking the effect for the cause, reversing or disrupting the rational course of events. Viral is a bit the same: there’s no longer any causality, all the connections are blurred. This corresponds somewhat to the idea I formed of a radical thinking that’s no longer critical and rational but destabilises judgement and writing. Am I really viral and metaleptic? Let’s say that, where I’m concerned, there’s a desire, a dream and almost a systematic strategy of turning things about or of infinitely prolonging sequences of events to the point of – at least, virtual – catastrophe.
PB I can remark, in passing, that you’re coherent on that score, since you once said: ‘Radicality is an end-of-career privilege’.4
And you can only say it when you’ve reached a certain age. Generally, people think the opposite, that radicalism is a privilege of youth or the illusion of youth. In fact, radicalism means going to the root of things, casting reality into doubt or stripping it down. I’m not talking about the accumulation of experience: radicalism isn’t knowing more and more about the real but going beyond it. And one acquires that state of mind only quite late on.
PB In the late 1980s you suggested getting up a petition to have the next decade cancelled and for us to go directly from 1989 to 2000. ‘After all, the fin de siècle has already arrived, complete with its necro-cultural pathos, its endless commemorations and mummifications. Is there any good reason why we should have to languish for another decade in this hellish atmosphere?’5 So you’ve been bored a lot these last ten years?
Not at all. For me, individually, they’ve been remarkable years. It was my view that we were destined to be bored collectively. Everything was settled. And there hasn’t in fact been any major event changing things, we’ve just played everything out to its end. The de-realising of the world through virtual reality or cloning – all these things were in place long ago. It wasn’t anything to go into raptures about. For more than ten years, then, I’ve been striving to get beyond the 2000 marker and to think beyond it. I’d no desire whatever to play the cat’s paw role again and even less did I want to launch into fin-de-siècle lament – that kind of wearisome repentance we’re seeing now. As allegory, the only interesting novelty is the ‘millennium bug’. First because it’s been turned into an event that no one can declare to be either real or unreal; second, because we seem fascinated by this ‘total accident’, as my friend Paul Virilio would call it; and lastly because, if we can’t manage to set the computers back to zero, that’ll mean metaphorically that we can’t re-set ourselves to a starting point for embarking on the twenty-first century. And it’s paradoxical that it’s technology itself, theoretically the dimension in which we should ‘move beyond’, that’s blocking and ensnaring us. I see a kind of collective mental bug in all this.
PB Your writings don’t belong to mainstream sociology and they’re still not accepted by philosophers. Moreover, in the university system you’ve always been more or less on the fringes.
As far as the university system’s concerned – particularly at Nanterre – that was deliberate. I managed to be there at a time when you could play on this lack of a clear label. For various reasons, I suffered the consequences of that, but, all in all, I’ve come out of it well. There isn’t any sort of romanticism in this: it simply happens that what I wanted to write would have barely had any sense if I’d been trying to insinuate myself into the institutional system. I’d have been disqualified. So I claim a certain coherence between theoretical content and behaviour. Moreover, one shouldn’t be naïve and surprised by the negative reactions of the corporation of sociologists or philosophers. But it’s curious to note that this enabled me almost to enjoy a kind of additional prestige abroad. There have been around twenty books on my work in the English-speaking countries but none in France (apart from the papers of a conference organised by friends at Grenoble). Why the freeze-out in this country? Sometimes I prefer to think it’s an organised conspiracy!
PB Talking of conspiracies, you’ve been vilified recently for writing an article called ‘The Art Conspiracy’, in which you ponder the avowed ‘nullity’ of a certain sort of contemporary art.
The sense of paradox and irony isn’t widely shared. To think that all you have to do is show a bit of humour to find yourself called a fascist hoaxer! Without any intention deliberately to provoke, I’d wanted for some time to talk about the pretentious nullity of part of the contemporary art world. During a Venice Biennale, I’d been struck by the auto-da-fé aspect of certain ‘performances’, that preference for playing the cult of waste or the mutilation of the body. And that ablation demanded an equal lobotomy of aesthetic judgement on the part of the spectator. That’s why I talked about an ‘art conspiracy’: managing, on the one hand, to suppress all artistic originality and, on the other, paralysing the spectator, who, for fear of appearing idiotic, has to accept it with tolerance or, rather, mental servitude. It wasn’t what the artists were choosing to do that annoyed me, but that general servility. I couldn’t bear to see such a collusive mechanism in operation. You have to think I’ve touched a sore spot here, but I really wasn’t expecting such violent reactions: either disgusting conflations of the ‘opposing contemporary art is supporting Le Pen’ kind or more subtle allegations insinuating that this was a defence of traditional against contemporary art. Why am I denied the right to detect aesthetic spin in the same way as there might be political or media spin? There’s a tactic of deception or deterrence within art which has become a way of ruling minds. I’m very sorry but I find it hard to accept. But don’t worry, my intervention has changed nothing.
PB By its very title, your new book Impossible Exchange makes reference to Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), which had been a watershed in your development, and the internal critique of the system.
Yes, it was more detailed in its composition and I situated myself more on the inside. What can I say? I’d gone along with the movement; I’d made the ‘Long March’ through semiology and Marxism. That’s all finished now. But I did, in fact, want to set up Impossible Exchange to echo Symbolic Exchange and Death, as it were, by attempting to get back to the same panoramic position, though a more radical one. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, there was still, if not hope, then at least nostalgia – for primitive societies in particular. The horizon of the lost object has disappeared, even if one can’t dispense with it totally and if discourse tends, rather, to revive it.
PB In Impossible Exchange, you devote many pages to machines, artificial intelligence and the clash between Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue at chess. And you conclude: ‘So we have to revise our judgement of this “alienating” technology which our critical philosophy spends its whole time denouncing.’6 In short, let’s let the machines win on the terrain where they’re inevitably going to win out and let’s accentuate what distinguishes us from them: pleasure, exhilaration with life, irony.
The whole ending of Impossible Exchange revolves around this turnabout I’ve termed ‘poetic transference of situation’. I set myself against critical judgement and move to a stance that’s ironic, paradoxical or paroxystic (describe it how you will). Having hypothesised that the system or the code has won – let’s give it its victory, if need be – I try to ask myself what remains for thought beyond that. What is irreducible to artificial intelligence, which, as superstition unfortunately has it, can allegedly absorb everything? At a certain level, it’s better, I think, not to resist the virtual, so that we can move on quickly to something else. That’s where I’m not entirely on the same wavelength as Virilio. He opposes that critically and almost morally, arguing that we should decelerate and recover a lost time and space. I have my doubts about that or, rather, I take a different gamble. But I admit that I don’t have any idea where it may lead me.
PB At the beginning, the leitmotif of Impossible Exchange is the sudden emergence everywhere of uncertainty.
All systems of verification – all value systems, even – are in question today. I think we can exploit this situation of uncertainty, in which contradictory facts are simultaneously true. We have to know how to manage the coexistence of innumerable antinomic truths today. I don’t take a stance in the absurd or in non-meaning, and I’m not at all despairing, but I try to find a certain level of play, though I don’t write derisively and I do ponder the problem of destiny: beyond all the irresolvable conflicts over truths and values, is there a possibility of finding a sequence of forms? Art has been one of the fields in which another kind of liberty has existed than the simple freedom to choose between various determinate options. If I had an object to defend, that would be it, which connects with what I’ve tried to say about illusion or about bringing forms and appearances into play.
PB One of the themes that attracts you is cloning – or the fantasy of immortality exemplified by the image of Walt Disney in his liquid nitrogen coffin.
The media talk about that every day one way or another, but I don’t think that they’ve really spotted what’s going on in all that. For example, we talk about cloning only in biological terms. Now, it seems to me it’s already been preceded by a mental cloning: the school, information and mass culture systems enable individuals to be turned out who are all carbon copies of each other. Genetic cloning is just an endorsement of this mental cloning.
PB But to what extent can you, Jean Baudrillard, be said to escape this mental cloning and massification?
I make some efforts to do that, without claiming to be entirely successful. And I play my part on the bad side too – I’m not an archangel wandering around in another world. Everything I’ve written, I’ve tried to conceive in terms of this world, not in relation to a history of ideas or to philosophy. But believe me, I’m aware of my contradictions and that they could make quite a long list!
PB You write: ‘Sex had liberated itself from reproduction; today reproduction is liberating itself from sex.’7 And you note too that, after wreaking its violence on others, the human species seems to be turning that violence back on itself with biotechnology. But you refer to the work of the ethics committees as ‘pseudo-moral speculation’.
Don’t go imagining I’m not a bit terrified too. But I say that we can’t just be content with ethics committees that reduce the business to conventional morality. From the standpoint they adopt, the problem is insoluble and they can only paper over the cracks. Taking my inspiration from an extraordinary expression of Canetti’s – ‘passing out of history’ – I prefer to ponder a scenario of passing out of the species. Canetti shows that beyond a certain point in history, you get to a stage where it becomes impossible to distinguish between the true and the false. Until you can find another point back beyond that, you can only press on with the destruction. And what Canetti discerned in modern history has spread, it seems to me, into all fields – and even into aesthetics, where we can no longer distinguish the beautiful from the ugly. Through all the genetic manipulation, engineering or transmutation of the species we’ve reached a point of no return where we can no longer determine what’s human or non-human. By separating ourselves from animality, consigned to an inferior level, we’d drawn lines and created a zone of privileges on which we could base a definition of the human. We’re currently sacrificing that dimension. Is the species taking an interesting gamble here or a dangerous one? I shan’t allow myself any critical judgement on that. I was lucky enough to visit the Lascaux caves (not the replica) and when I came back I reread a text by Georges Bataille. He was wondering why the Lascaux people didn’t depict human beings and merely left drawings of animals. Bataille’s explanation was that, as they were in the process of detaching themselves from animality yet were still incapable at that point of endowing themselves with superior status, the human didn’t exist as such. Thousands of years after Lascaux, perhaps we’re seeing a similar process in which the species is detaching itself from what we believed to be human. From the human standpoint, that clearly seems disastrous. But, ultimately, we don’t know and I don’t think there’s any morality we can set against the immoral, technical desire for immortality.
PB Speaking of catastrophes, of Princess Diana, the pope or the World Cup, you say ‘the immediate and universal emotional contagion which seizes the masses . . . isn’t a matter of voyeurism, or letting off steam.’8 And you add that the immorality of our societies created by excess of information automatically prompts the desire for a ‘fateful’ event. Let’s take the example of Diana, to whom you’ve even devoted a song that was recently broadcast on France-Inter.
Yes, ‘La Complainte de Diana [The Ballad of Diana] . . .’ In a very few words – and in music – the message was: ‘that’s just what we were all waiting for!’ We all colluded in this immoral event, an event that was grandiose because of its immorality. Of course there’s no reason to be mindlessly gleeful about it. But there was something about it that was propitious and untamed, unjustifiable and unpredictable, something that exceeded the categories of understanding and judgement. Don’t see this as a form of cynicism but simply as an attempt to take what we might call an ‘omega’ viewpoint, making it possible to free up a certain way of thinking. Similarly, with all the doping and corruption scandals, I think we have to try to see not how these are useful in a metaphorical way, but how there’s a process going on which, like a purgative, absorbs the principle of evil.
PB For some years now you’ve been very much interested in photography. You’ve even had exhibitions and produced albums of your photos. Are you going on with that?
Yes. At the beginning, it was a hobby, a diversion from writing: I took photos because I enjoyed it, without talking about it. And then it sucked me in. I can see that theory sometimes reaches certain limits and crossing over to another medium can aid the transition to other forms. Images enable you to go beyond discourse. But this isn’t in any way a professional activity and I don’t at all aspire to situate myself in relation to a history of the photographic art. It just happens that I play the game of photography with seriousness and application. That’s my way of respecting a form of professional ethics.
Translated by Chris Turner
NOTES
1. Baudrillard, J. (1990), Cool Memories, London: Verso, p. 144.
2. Baudrillard, J. (1996), Cool Memories II, Cambridge: Polity, p. 131.
3. In the event, Baudrillard published a fifth volume in the series. [Trans.] See Baudrillard, J. (2006), Cool Memories V: 2000–2004, Cambridge: Polity. [Editors]
4. Baudrillard, J. (1996), Cool Memories II, Cambridge: Polity, p. 63. [Editors]
5. Baudrillard, J. (1993), The Transparency of Evil, London: Verso, p. 93.
6. Baudrillard, J. (2001), Impossible Exchange, London: Verso, p. 120.
7. Baudrillard, J. (2001), Impossible Exchange, London: Verso, p. 30.
8. Cf. Baudrillard, J. (2005), The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact, London: Berg, p. 134: ‘the pathetic contagion that sweeps through crowds on some particular occasion (the death of Diana, the World Cup) has no other cause. It isn’t a question of voyeurism or letting off steam.’ [Editors]
© Pierre Boncenne and Le Monde. Original publication: ‘Viral et métaleptique’, Le Monde de l’éducation, 274, October 1999, pp. 14–20.