Why This Is Hell

XLVII: Jean Baudrillard, The Uncollected Baudrillard (2001)

I'm really glad I read this, because I was due to write a short intro to him (as an sf writer) and, whilst I could locate him in relation to Barthes (taking popular culture seriously, the development of semiotics) and Derrida (the break with western metaphysics), I knew the rupture of May 1968 was significant in some way.

May 1968 began as a revolt over the sacking of a cinema manager in Paris, and should have been a signal for everyone on the left to rise against the old fogeys, but the unions and the communists never supported the students. It all went pear-shaped. Jean-Luc Godard went off and formed the Dziga-Vertov group and made even more radical films than before. Jacques Derrida, on the other hand, hardly mentions Marx until Specters of Marx and seems to avoid it. Lyotard, meanwhile, gets accused of being a neo-con.

Baudrillard I wasn't sure about. He was clearly against advertising, and by extension capitalism, but it never leapt out as being Marxist. In a sense he's taking the Godard route - he doesn't forgive the Communists for betraying the uprising, and ends up being more radical than them. Communism - sliding into socialism - is just nostalgic. Digging around, I realised that he was at Université de Paris-X Nanterre, where much of the early action took place. He was part of the evenements

So to the book here - a selection of previously untranslated or uncollected reviews, articles, interviews and poems, dating from the early 1960s to the 1980s. The world is dominated by capitalism, which is the "limitless rule of exchange value" - what things cost and how much money you can make from the buying and selling of commodities. Socialism, on the other hand, is all about the use value, what things are for. In many ways it posits a return to an earlier state of being. A sort of eldritch force enters into the signifiers in the form of advertising, in part naturalising the process and weakening rejections of the force of capitalism.

we are thus is a state beyond, after, outside the western metaphysical tradition (footnotes to Plato) based on the dualisms of being/non-being, presence/absence and true/false. "Western rationality has always been based, as regards discourse, upon the criteria of truth and falsehood." Things are faked, but in such a way that truth no longer has any meaning - this is the world where we vote according to opinion polls or worry about the fear of crime. In the late 1970s, Baudrillard will note the obvious fakey of Disneyland acting as a distraction from the rest of the world being faked, and the insistence on the scandal of Watergate actually disguising the deeper scandals of the mass media.

Here we have counter-intuitive statements that sound convincing because they are counter intuitive - he writes that "repression [in liberated societies] is here much more profoundly accomplished than in puritanical repression", which seems to me ends up reversing (or is it the corollary?) Foucault's attack on the repressive hypothesis (baldly summarising: it's not true the Victorians were prudish about sex, in fact they wouldn't bloody shut up about it - any society that needs to cover up table legs for fear of being turned on has a few kinks to it [and this is MF's argument, not mine]). Baudrillard also suugests that humanity drops out of history - echoes of the Fukuyama end of history argument. Of course, the 9/11 atrocity marks a resumption of history, but this collection is too early to note that. He is already noting that terrorist and hostage become interchangeable in the late chapters.

What he repeatedly insists, in differing ways, is that his view of the world isn't science fiction, in fact it goes further than sf or theory. This is perhaps a familiar denial (see Atwood, James, Winterson etc) - he isn't writing sf because it doesn't contain squids in space. But there is a sense to his writings that they describe an alternate world; the mediated world, the world as novel.

One section I'd like to go back to is one which contains two articles on utopia, dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s. "Utopia passes between every thing and its model" he writes in one piece - and it strikes me here he ends up describing the working of advertising. Is this outopia rather than eutopia then? "Utopia is the non-place." The former, I suspect. "Utopia is the smile of the Cheshire cat." It disappears after the cat, and appears before. There is something more going on here, that I can't quite pin down yet, in part becuase of the overwhelmingness of the prose.