The Hour of the Charlatans
On the afternoon of Jean Baudrillard’s lecture, I arrived at the Institute of Contemporary Arts half an hour early to look around its bookstore, which, though tiny, I’ve always considered a model of its kind. But a surprise was in store for me, because since my last visit the little place had undergone a classificatory revolution. The old-fashioned sections of earlier days—literature, philosophy, art, film, criticism—had been replaced with postmodern ones like cultural theory, class and gender, race and culture, and a shelf labeled “The Sexual Subject,” which gave me a brief moment of hope but turned out to have nothing to do with eroticism, only philological patristics and linguistic machismo.
Poetry, the novel, and theater had been eradicated; a few screenplays were the only creative form on display. Occupying a place of honor was a book by Deleuze and Guattari titled Nomadology and another book, apparently extremely important, by a group of psychoanalysts, jurists, and sociologists on the deconstruction of justice. Not a single one of the titles most prominently displayed (like Rethinking Feminist Identification, The Material Queer, Ideology and Cultural Identity, and The Lesbian Idol) appealed to me, so I left without buying anything, something that rarely happens to me in a bookstore.
I had come to hear Baudrillard speak because the French sociologist and philosopher, one of the heroes of postmodernism, bears much responsibility for what is happening these days in our cultural life (if that term still has a reason to exist alongside phenomenons like the one under way at the London ICA bookstore). And also because I wanted to see him face-to-face, after so many years. In the late sixties both of us attended the third-cycle courses given at the Sorbonne by Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, and we both lent a helping hand to Algeria’s FLN through the aid networks created in France by the philosopher Francis Jeanson. At that time, everyone already knew that Baudrillard had a brilliant intellectual career ahead of him.
He was extremely intelligent and expressed himself with admirable eloquence. Back then, he seemed very serious, and it wouldn’t have offended him to be described as a modern humanist. I remember hearing him, in a St. Michel bistro, savagely and amusingly tear apart Foucault’s thesis on the nonexistence of man in The Order of Things, which had just appeared. He had excellent literary taste, and he was one of the first in France to note the genius of Italo Calvino, in a splendid essay on Calvino that Sartre published in Les Temps Modernes. Later, at the end of the sixties, he wrote two dense, stimulating, long-winded, and sophisticated books that would cement his reputation, The System of Objects and The Consumer Society. From that point on, and as his influence spread around the world, setting down particularly strong roots in Anglo-Saxon countries—proof: the packed auditorium at the ICA and the hundreds of people outside who couldn’t get tickets—his talent, following what seems to be the fated course of the best French thinkers of our day, has become more and more focused on an ambitious undertaking: the demolition of what is, and its replacement with a verbose unreality.
His lecture—which he began by citing Jurassic Park—more than confirmed this for me. The compatriots who preceded him in this labor of attack and demolition were more cautious. According to Foucault, man doesn’t exist, but at least his inexistence has presence, occupying reality with its versatile void. Barthes believed that real substance could be found only in style, the inflection that each animate life is capable of imprinting on the river of words in which the self appears and disappears like a will-o’-the-wisp. For Derrida, real life is the life of texts, a universe of self-sufficient forms that modify and refer back to one another without ever coming close to addressing inessential human experience, that remote and pallid shadow of the word.
Baudrillard’s sleight of hand is even more categorical. True reality doesn’t exist anymore; it has been replaced by virtual reality, the product of advertising and the media. What used to be called “information” actually does the complete opposite of informing us about what is happening around us. It supplants and nullifies the real world of deeds and objective actions: they are cloned versions of what we see on television, selected and prepared by media professionals (or conjurers), and they substitute for what was once known as historical reality, the objective knowledge of what is going on in the world.
Real-world events can no longer be objective. Their truth and ontological consistency are undermined from the start by the corrosive process of their projection as the manipulated and falsified images of virtual reality; these are the only images admissible and comprehensible to a humanity tamed by the media fantasy world we are born into and in which we live and die (no more and no less than Spielberg’s dinosaurs). Besides abolishing history, television “news” also vanquishes time, since it eliminates all critical perspective on what is happening: the broadcasts occur at the same time as the events they are supposedly reporting on, and these events last no longer than the fleeting instant in which they are enunciated, then disappear, swept away by others which in turn are annihilated by new ones. This vertiginous denaturalization of the actual world has resulted, purely and simply, in its evaporation and in its replacement by the truth of media-created fiction, the only true reality of our age: the age—says Baudrillard—of “simulacra.”
That we live in an era of large-scale representations of reality that make it difficult to understand the real world seems to me an unassailable truth. But isn’t it clear that nothing, not even media mumbo jumbo, has muddied our understanding of what is really going on in the world more than certain intellectual theories, which, like the wise men from one of Borges’s lovely fantasies, pretend to embed speculative play and the dreams of fiction in real life?
In the essay he wrote proving that the Gulf War “did not take place”—since all that business involving Saddam Hussein, Kuwait, and the allied forces was no more than television playacting—Baudrillard stated: “What is scandalous, in our day, is not attacks on moral values, but on the principle of reality.” I wholly agree. At the same time, this seems to me an involuntary and harsh self-criticism from someone who, for many years now, has invested his dialectic shrewdness and the persuasive power of his intelligence in proving to us that audiovisual technology and the communications revolution have abolished the human ability to tell the difference between truth and lies or history and fiction, and have made us, bipeds of flesh and blood strayed into the media labyrinth of our time, mere ghostly automatons, pieces of machinery stripped of freedom and knowledge and condemned to expire without ever having lived.
At the end of the lecture, I didn’t go up to say hello or to remind him of the bygone days of our youth, when ideas and books excited us and he still believed we existed.