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ISSN: 1705-6411

Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2005)

A Gift for the Real

Nicholas Ruiz III
(Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities, Florida State University).

L’effacement de Dieu nous a laissés face à la réalité. 

Qu’en sera-t-il de l’effacement de la réalité?1      
 

I. Introduction

            What is at stake for theory in the photographs of Jean Baudrillard is whether his visual project corroborates or denies his literary project, the latter narrative circulating around the notion that the postmodern milieu is hyperreal, and that is to say, more virtual than real, a supplantation of the real by an engulfing aesthetic culture, and a sign-full simulation (e.g. the consumer society, with its myths and structures; the political and economic system of consumer objects; the manic logic of global capital; the screening out of reality through the filter of mass media; the violence of the global, etc.)  Do his photographs function, as alibis for all of us, in what can only be a holocaust of the real by “la société de consommation”? Can photographs dispute or confirm a literary extermination of reality?  In 1993, Baudrillard replies simply, to queries regarding the relationship between writing and photography in an interview with Zurbrugg: “For me, there was no connection between the two.”2 Such an exclusivity of interests can only be ideal.

          Most recently, Baudrillard makes clear that the image is undergoing an ultimate violence, which is to say that the "new" and synthesized image, the image ex nihilo, borne of computation and numeric calculation, is an immediate production – a virtual reality.3 The pervasiveness of this reality, this version of the real, portends an apt reply to the question of the real, that is, a reply in offering, with the challenge of a gift – a gift for the real.  This is the “miracle of the photograph”, because reality must die while history should live, or so we are implored through what Baudrillard aptly calls the total screen.  The total screen in turn is governed by another virtuality – the metaphysics of Capital.4  An upgraded replacement religion where the newest work, events, even wars, are instantly outsourceable and mediated to other locales, where “as in particular kinds of stocks and shares, you cannot calculate both the real value and the rate of devaluation”5 – there is no longer a point at which we can locate our position, if ever there was.  

The gift of the photograph exists as our insurrection to the eternal-return, and the real in turn can only fold, if only for an instant, and this gives us time, so that we might recollect our position.  In postmodernity, of course the challenge continuously reframes and reformulates itself, quarantining new “lines of flight” by an ever-increasing speed and magnitude of image flows, and the “automatic tide of images” virtualizes a visual flow that knows only change, “and in that flow the image no longer even has the time to become an image”.6  As a gift for the real, a photograph, or a theory, can assert a location of disobedience, a space where, however fleeting, the world and its “triumphant epiphany of meaning is supplanted by the silent apophany of the object and its appearances”.7   

            Baudrillard’s literary project purveys that to maintain oneself as a singularity amidst the burgeoning and global homogenization of culture by a regime of globalizing mediated bodies (individual and organizational), one’s theory, even one’s religion (especially so, and a special case) must function to anticipate the next moment on the trajectory of progress, so as to avoid being annihilated by it.  We should note at the outset that Baudrillard anticipates an apocalypse, not necessarily an end of time, but a confrontation, that will inescapably be good and evil: 

…we do not have a choice between Good and Evil, since they are merely the transfusion or transfiguration of each other, in the literal sense in which each takes on the figure or form of the other according to a curvature of the moral universe identical to the curvature of a non-Euclidean space.8

            An amoral apocalypse is what Baudrillard envisions in that the networking of the world will efface the plurality of the many, perhaps what some refer to as the “multitude”, while simultaneously reproducing the simulacrum of “the people” ad infinitum.  This end is specifically not a judgment day because we already indict and judge daily, and have thus used our credit for such a future day.  Or as Debray has recently reminded us, Eurocentric culture (and increasingly so, world culture), which has always been a pious culture, despite aspirations of plurality and difference, might “be compared to a moviegoer who had paid for his ticket and is still awaiting the beginning of the film”.9  For millennia, “history has been projecting a coming attraction” but, I think, just now do we protest faith as it stands, that is, as a “disappointment overcome”, and the Church that is the “efficient administration of a mortifying setback”.10 

So, technology has supplanted the measure of all things whereas previously religiosity was the measure of our milieu. This change allowed for Nietzsche, who murdered God, we who murder the real, and the simulacrum replacing the latter two through the media, and this is possible because no bodies were found when God and the real were murdered and as the adage states – no body, no crime.  Or as Baudrillard might say, it was a “perfect crime”.   

            As for the Real, as the Saussurean referent and relevant operon of our species – it has become untethered from the sign and rescinds itself daily, while the sign is free to float on the wings of capital, akin to electronic currencies in twenty-four hour electronic exchange, like new mathematical constants, that ebb and flow with the electric pulse of the culture industry.11  But perhaps even this electric current of the sign is uncertain.  It is true in fact that little ever lasts, signs not precluded.  We hold the unique position, perhaps, of embodying cultural paroxysm, as the world becomes a total screen.12  Further, we have probably upgraded the veracity of signification, to such an extent that we can now be said to dwell elsewhere, because we have reified the sign to death.  It may very well be that we have lost the sign to what Baudrillard has recently called an automatic and total reality, la Réalité Intégrale, perhaps where in one digital upgrade, the sign and its profiling device, configured via the constellation of the spectacle, alienation, distance, transcendence, and abstraction, have been wiped clean, overwritten by a virtual horizon.13  Nevertheless, through the lens of the camera, does Baudrillard catalogue and preserve “secret of the real” via the elicitation of the silent apophany of the object in an image, or does the mechanical reproduction of the neuronally-presaged, retinally-received, and then macromolecularly-recorded image simply contribute to the phenomenon he has called “murder of the real”, by furthering the already exponential proliferation of images that make up the Barthesian myth of Western simulacrum?14
 

II. Nostalgia

            Critical theory attempts to dispense with the bones of nostalgia, yet critics have attempted to insert their fingers into the seductive apparition of a “fracture” in the Baudrillardian construct by charging him with the “crime” of nostalgia.  Anne-Marie Willis writes:

Another way I would offer of understanding Baudrillard’s turn to photography is as the latest manifestation of his nostalgia.  His writing is shot through with nostalgia.  Earlier on, it is nostalgia for pre-modern systems of exchange, reciprocity and the gift manifested in his taking up of the work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille.15

History is only nostalgic if we deem it so, via our own method of psychological reverse-transcription.  Willis would have us believe that all counts of memory, recollection, observation and remembrance, even language itself are nostalgic.

Nostalgia is also pervasive in the rhythms and structures of his incantations – the repeated ‘no longer’, the constant evocation of ‘today’ which always implies a yesterday, which was otherwise.  But now it is nostalgia for an imaging technology based upon a principle of referentiality (even if only at the level of its optical operations), a principle no longer operative in the digital technologies that are swallowing up traditional photography, in which there are no longer first or final instances, and the image simply becomes information, amongst data fields in constant flux.16

Nostalgia need not always be a dirty word.  Certainly, it can be, and religiosity is a constant reminder of a metaphysically nostalgic mode of thinking that casts an apocalyptic shadow upon the future, while lamenting a metaphysical past that idealizes the way we never were.  What has been described as a nostalgia for the Real in Baudrillardian discourse, is more aptly understood as a passionately unemotional cataloging; an evolutionary body of observations, that situates where humanity has previously been, and as such, a theory of modernity (or postmodernity) that countenances the theoretical currency and hence relevance of cultural phenomena and their industriously aesthetic progeny today. 

            We cannot fully comprehend the nature of cultural boundaries, or the differing cultures of respective locales, here in America, Europe, or any other location, if we have not comprehended what each culture has been, or what ideas each culture may have purveyed.  To be fair however, there is some appearance of what Willis refers to in the thought of Baudrillard; he says in a dialogue with architect Jean Nouvel, the following about nostalgia:

We’re looking for the lost object, whether we’re referring to meaning or language. We use language, but it’s always at the same time, a form of nostalgia, a lost object.  Language in use is basically a form of anticipation, since we’re already in something else…We have to be in these two orders of reality: we have to confront what we’ve lost and anticipate what’s ahead of us; that’s our brand of fatality.17

            Looking for something that is lost does not necessarily imply a negative connotation for research or nostalgia, and Baudrillard conveys that we are in no position to negotiate otherwise.  In essence, in order for theory to anticipate, it must be grounded somewhere: 

In this sense we can never clarify things, we can never say, ‘Okay, that’s behind us’ or ‘Okay, that’s ahead of us’.  But it’s hard to understand because the idea of modernity, is for all that, the idea of a continuous dimension where it’s clear that the past and the future coexist… We ourselves may no longer be in that world – if we ever were! – for it may be no more than a kind of apparition.  This seems to be true for any kind of form.  Form is always already lost, then always already seen as something beyond itself.  It’s the essence of radicality… It involves being radical in loss, and radical in anticipation – any object can be grasped in this way.  My comments need to be contrasted with the idea that something could be ‘real’ and that we could consider it as having a meaning, a context, a subject, an object.  We know that things are no longer like that…18
 

Our brand of fatality then is an ontological location where the photograph may exist as that which brings us "closest to a universe without images", and that is to say, the photograph is a gift that is not a function of a totalizing equation or pattern of the real, unlike the rhetoric of cinema, or the persuasion of art.19
 

III. The Photograph

            The Real eludes us, and yet we are surrounded by the effects of its inversement proportionnel – in the form of objects, ideas, and speculations – a culture.  The decoding of culture is a deaestheticization, like a singular strategy of engagement, whereas the culture industry may be said to hyperaestheticize the cultural space, via brands, labels, advertisements and a commodious rationale. The non-aesthetic photograph (if such an image can exist) functions in opposition to the culture industry in Baudrillard’s theoretical technique.20  In opposition to the euphoric effect and mass anesthesia of the great mass “push-off” into consommation – the well-theorized narcotic behavior of the consumer society21 – Baudrillard’s photographs offer us what is left of the Real, even if that something, is essentially nothing:  “Photographs are what bring us closest to flies, to their compound eyes and jerky flight”.22  The exceptional radicality of the photograph, as in the exceptional radicality of theory, finds its location apart from the excess debris of representative scaffolding, and via this chance – “the world should burst forth as insoluble self-evidence.” 

            Though representation is automatically narrative and stylistic, theorists having already noted that the very word itself connotes a re-presenting, and that is to say, a secondary putting forth of an event-object that had already been “present” – perhaps we can do more than add to the simulacrum, even if “the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – (but rather), is the truth which conceals that there is none”.23  Perhaps certain writings, certain images, even certain event-objects, for example, the day of September 11, 2001 –  in some way capture what is left of the Real.  It should be stated that violence, and above all, the violence of the image and spectacle, has always served to rally the masses from the complacence of whatever era they occupied, for better or for worse.24

            Photographs might serve as a sort of apparatus of capture, what is captured in Baudrillard’s case being “the secret life of objects”, but one might question whether it is possible for the photographic image to capture the “life” of that which is inanimate.  What life can an object be said to possess, in the absence of at least one subject’s gaze?  Fictionalization of an object, that is, by giving it a secret life of its own, would seem to only further the material of simulation.  And if it isn’t the “life” of an object that Baudrillard captures with a photographic prosthesis, that mechanical lens, what then?  In considering a relationship between theory and image in Baudrillard’s discourse, and in considering the two as gifts that challenge the real, I find myself thinking of Barthes’ ideas regarding myth, and of course photographs, and Baudrillard’s too, and their thoughts might serve well in this matter, as a likely foundation for the task of our inquiry.  Further, it is apparent that Baudrillard was especially aware of Barthes’ work in many respects, to the extent that one can assume that Barthes’ thought has long been a continuing influence on Baudrillard’s own thought.  Baudrillard says:

I’m for everything that is opposed to culture…in the sense of aestheticization, and I am opposed to such aestheticization because it inevitably involves a loss: the loss of the object, of this secret that works of art and creative effort might reveal and which is something more than aesthetics.  The secret can’t be aesthetically unveiled.  It’s the kind of ‘punctum’ Barthes spoke of in reference to photography – its secret, something inexplicable and non-transmissible, and something that is in no way interactive.25
 

Superfluous to the veracity of the object, cultural aesthetics narrate all objects a priori, and for Baudrillard, most scandalously and in the manner of a ruse, art objects narrate –  and it is this imposed narration from without, that Baudrillard’s images seek to impede:

It’s something that’s there and not there at the same time.  Within culture this thing is completely dissipated, volatilized.  Culture involves the total legibility of everything in it, and what’s more, it comes into being at the very moment Duchamp transposed a very simple object, the urinal, into an art object.  He transposed its banality to create an event within the aesthetic universe and deaestheticize it.  He forced banality upon it – he broke into the home of aesthetics – and stopped it cold.  Paradoxically he made possible the generalized aestheticization that typifies the modern era… And in the end, when this aesthetic of the secret disappeared, we had culture.26

            So then, we must question the aesthetic that culture imposes upon us, and in the face of that realm which is the milieu that we inhabit.  Barthes’ conception of “a new punctum” is an idea of the photograph that affords Baudrillard the space to question that aesthetic, and perhaps liberate the object from it’s virtual location – thus disclosing, rather than purporting, the secret of the real.  Barthes wrote: “This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (that-has-been), its pure representation”27 The punctum, or the photograph, serves to represent that thing that has been.  It lacerates the fluid of time, yet cannot stop it, cannot even slow it down.  Semiologically, the photograph signifies both death and continuity.  Barthes writes:

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.  This is the way in which our time assumes Death: with the denying alibi of the distractedly ‘alive’, of which the Photographer is in a sense the professional.28

The frantically “alive” event-object, (e.g., the meta-advertisement, the ubiquitous, deific ultra-sign) is the cultural aestheticization to which Baudrillard refers, that was present in Barthes; a manufactured vital force that is imparted to the object via culture, the rhetoric of its virtual location. This is the rhetorical content most images exist to produce.  Barthes continues:

For Photography must have some historical relation with what Edgar Morin calls the ‘crisis of death’ beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century; for my part I should prefer that instead of constantly relocating the advent of Photography in its social and economic context, we should also inquire as to the anthropological place of Death and of the new image.  For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.  Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.  Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.29

            This idea Barthes conveys of l’effacement de mort amid the anesthesia of culture is not only the disappearance of the death of the life that has passed, a conspicuous end of Death, by that instance represented in a photograph as proof that the same instance can still occur.  It is also, in some regard the death of the real, and a true morbidity for Barthes because of the virtual immortality the punctum portends to continuously bequeath as a new immortal and virtual progeny, and perhaps the death of belief and its photographic rebirth as the noemic unit of meaning in our Western European societies.  Today, we:

…consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs; (we) are therefore more liberal, less fanatical, but also more false (less authentic) – something we translate, in ordinary consciousness, by the avowal of an impression of nauseated boredom, as if the universalized image were producing a world that is without difference (indifferent), from which can rise, here and there, only the cry of anarchisms, marginalisms, and individualisms: let us abolish the images, let us save immediate Desire (desire without mediation).30

Does Baudrillard save the “immediate Desire” of the object – and ourselves – in his photographs, immediate desire being that inclination or want for something that we cannot seem to define – that which exists apart from any panoptic and culturally mediated aesthetic?  Insomuch as the dream of the photograph is to pass us briefly, without an objective, we can say that Baudrillard’s images pass us by as exceptions, in a world too clearly ordered by the rule of the representation.31
 

IV. A Duel with the Real

            In Baudrillard’s photo entitled Soho (1987) we observe a towering structure, a building, at least eight stories high, perhaps taller, though the image does not include the entire building, much like our natural or biological perception does not include all that can be seen, and does not perfectly include all that is there.

To see a larger image, click on each image in this article.

Jean Baudrillard Soho (1987)

  Soho refers to a district in New York City that is south of Houston Street, and this district is known for its trendy restaurants and art galleries, though this was not always the case, and the looming, lower East side serves as a peripheral reminder of that historical economic disparity.  This gutted building in the Soho district, a building that has each window filled with bricks and mortar, so as to prevent entry or escape, is a challenge – and paradoxically a gift, as well as an exception to the rule of affluence we purvey. Such a building is post-developed; it has already been used and discarded, and we witness its quiescent state of death.  But it is not a death that the image serves to capture, and instead it serves to function beyond us, as an exception to our current state of affairs.  Motor vehicles are parked at the base of the building, but they serve only to remind us of our indifference to this discarded structure.

            Does the image portend a myth?  Barthes described a semiological system of myth, wherein ideological constructs are represented via a language-object, (e.g. a photograph), which itself communicates beyond what its mode of representation displays, in what Barthes called a metalanguage.32  This metalanguage is a second order semiological system, the first order system being the Saussurean sign complex, which consists of the associative complex of the sign and the signified.  In the case of Soho, the first order semiological system consists of the photograph, which itself is a sign for the signified, the building itself, and the referent to which the sign refers.  However, we can visibly discern that the image communicates far more than this, and this communication is its Barthesian myth, its metalanguage.  But a metalanguage can be aesthetic, as in contemporary art – or it can be literal.  What is the literal metalanguage of Soho? 

            Soho seems to communicate the cultural paroxysm about which Baudrillard theorizes; that moment before the end, when the end is visible and palpable, but not yet realized.  Will the building ever be redeveloped?  We do not know, but what we can be certain of is that its use-value has been spent, and it now remains to be seen whether a recycling is possible, or if the gutted structure harkens the progression of what culture has become for Baudrillard: anti-progress in disguise.  This metalanguage is at least, a shadow of the secret life of Soho.  It also speaks in the language of the exception, as a point of insurrection on the Cartesian coordinate system of a systemic culture. 

            In this respect, Soho challenges the principle of the observer, the mediated negotiation between a life and a terrain, and pits one against the smoothness of automatic living.  It is an encouragement, perhaps, a crack in the “everything” Cohen has written of, which allows the light to get in, thus illuminating a new line of flight from one’s current ontological location.33

 
Jean Baudrillard
Fronteira (1993)

            In the photograph entitled Fronteira (1993), we observe a broken statue of a Greco-Roman god or warrior, perhaps Alexander the Great, but instead of the propped-up, majestic pose that we are so accustomed to seeing these types of statues demonstrate, this model is cut down, broken, faded and spent.  The background of the photograph appears to be a wall of peeling blue paint, and it also, is worn and spent.  The metalanguage here is the same as in Soho – it communicates the end of something, perhaps the apocalypse of the real, or perhaps the afterbirth of the Pax Americana – the paroxysm of an anti-progressive culture. 

            As opposed to the self-conscious regime of contemporary art, wherein the image virtually begs to be noticed, pleads to be deconstructed precisely because it is such a pornographic construction, this image need not be deconstructed, because it already presents itself univocally. The acceptable (and exceptable) image does not illustrate the event, but rather is the event in itself.34  The secret of Fronteira is evidenced by the submission of the lens to the event, and this submission in turn delivers the image as it stands in defiance of the world, wherein the always real-time, cultural market profile, is quickly giving ground to the biomediated clone.     
 

Jean Baudrillard
St. Clément (1987)

            Like Soho and Fronteira, St. Clément (1987) is a low point – an end of some kind. We observe a battered motor vehicle submerged in a pool of blue water.  This photograph emotes an eerie feeling that things are not as they once were, and we wonder if there is a nostalgia associated with this feeling.  The water appears to be swallowing this vehicle, and the vehicle almost seems to resist its inevitable descent, because it is not quite fully submerged and appears static – within a liminal phase, but progressing toward to its terminal point of being. 

            We might wonder about the occupants of this vehicle?  Are they still inside of it?  Is there a dead body that might float to the surface, shocking us at any moment, with the unanticipated horror of a mutilated corpse?  Thoughts like these are of a cinematic origin, and pass quickly like the cinema they represent.  Upon spending time with the image, one can see how St. Clement, and how most of Baudrillard’s images exist in defiance of the milieu within which they exist.  St. Clement is an utterance, of the most literal kind, that steps forward from our surrounding automatic flow of circulating images to become “the properly photographic image, which seeks stillness, silence and suspense” so that it can “gesture discreetly” to other exceptions – and possibly us.
 

Jean Baudrillard
Sainte Beuve (1987)

            The last photograph I wish to discuss is Sainte Beuve (1987), an image of Baudrillard’s blanket-covered chair at No 6 Rue Saint Beuve.  There is a conspicuously human absence that is present in this photograph in the impression left upon the red blanket covering the chair.  Sainte Beuve, more than the others, presents itself in way that Baudrillard might term a ruse.  The image wants to be seen, and insomuch as it can seduce us to observe it, we could call it art, but perhaps we will reserve our accusations for a more befitting conspirator.

I say this because it retains the illusion of orthodox transcendence, our dream of the “spiritual cooperative” or that “circle of affinity” wherein one’s presence and absence is equally and comfortably, known and unknown –  precisely the cohesion that now comes at the price of subordination: “The critique of the spirit of orthodoxy is an endless task, to be taken up every morning, so inclined are the divine powers to regiment bodies, and the secular powers to regiment minds.”35  I do not believe that Baudrillard here aimed for such a construction, but rather might have captured the illumination of a comfortable space of being.  Still the photograph can present itself as a ruse, and in that sense is counter to many of his other images.
 

V. Conclusion

            Baudrillard’s photographs, as a part of his oeuvre, seek to be the antithesis of the cultural artifacts that bombard us daily in the form of manufactured images that beckon our consent.  The photographs work to counter the effects of the disembodiment from the real that culturally industrious, aesthetic images represent in his critical theory. He writes:

To make an image of an object is to strip the object of all its dimensions one by one: weight, relief, smell, depth, time, continuity and, of course, meaning.  This disembodiment is the price to be paid for the power of fascination which the image acquires, the price for its becoming a medium of pure objectality, becoming transparent to a subtler form of seduction.  To add back all these dimensions one by one, relief, movement, emotion, ideas, meaning and desire – in order to produce something effectively more simulated – is, where images are concerned, utter nonsense.36 

It is precisely this nonsense of the contemporary image that Baudrillard’s work might gather to contest.  Not every occasion in Baudrillard’s oeuvre, as in Sainte Beuve, can fully pass the test of the real, to meet it in a duel, simply bearing a gift for the real in an image.  But then again, if this was the case, then what challenge could the real be said to present us with?  The gift for the real is an answer to its question, “Why are you here?” – to which another equally suitable reply might be “Why is there nothing, rather than something?”37

Nicholas Ruiz III is a teaching assistant and doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities at Florida State University.  His areas of interest include global capital, critical theory, and culture.  He holds a Master’s in Liberal Arts (University of North Carolina, 2003) and a Baccalaureate in Molecular and Microbiology (University of Central Florida, 1996). He is also the editor of Kritikos: http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~nr03

Endnotes