Editorial: Until We No Longer Speak His Name

Dr. Gerry Coulter
(Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada)

 

What Freud missed was not seeing the curvature of life in death, he missed its vertigo and its excess, its reversal of the entire economy of life, making it, in the form of a final pulsion, into a belated equation of life. Freud stated life’s final economy under the sign of repetition and missed its paroxysm. Death is neither resolution nor involution, but a reversal and a symbolic challenge.1

 

 

Baudrillard’s grave – Cemetery Montparnasse, Paris (2007).

Photograph: William Pawlett

 

Existence isn’t everything. It is a very little thing.2

 

 

I. Introduction

            Among the most frequently occurring concepts in Baudrillard’s writing is “death”. The passing of Baudrillard3 has led me to reread and rethink his writing on the subject while overseeing this special issue and virtual memorial. This issue is itself part of the death which Baudrillard began before his biological death and that goes on after his life. “Life” in this view, as he explains in Symbolic Exchange and Death, “is impossible to distinguish from death”.4 Baudrillard rejected the Western scientific notion of death with its final irreversible, and objective character.5 In the West it is very difficult to “escape the State monopoly over death”, to choose to disconnect one self from the network (suicide) has been made into a subversion.6 “Science” he said: “makes death inhuman, irrational and senseless”.7

            It is not surprising that he chose to die at home among friends. For Baudrillard the goal of thinking about death was to see the “radical indeterminacy of life and death” the way in which cultures other than our own have viewed it. According to some of these views death cannot be understood as a form of “due payment” but rather as a “nuance of life” or as he preferred it: “life is a nuance of death”. Death in Baudrillard’s writing “is a rendez-vous, not an objective destiny”.8 There is death before death just as there is life after life.9 And so Baudrillard, like all of us, was dying from the moment of his birth and will not finally die until we no longer speak his name.

 

II. Baudrillard On Death

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us at our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema.10

           

            On death Baudrillard wrote that it “does not allow itself to be caught in the mirror of psychoanalysis” and “nothing corresponds to death except death”.11 “The object represents our death”12 and in our world of objects we have a “passion for accidents and death”.13 He wrote about the political economy of death,14 sex and death, and how in our prohibitive era, only death is pornographic.15 Cronenberg’s Crash was the exception that proved this rule for Baudrillard by the extraordinary manner in which it pointed to a correspondence between sex and death.16 Baudrillard noted that while death is “censured everywhere, death springs up everywhere”17  – reversibility would have it no other way.  Poetically, he used the story of death in Samarkand to remind us of our powerlessness in the face of that unavoidable meeting:

Consider the story of a soldier who meets Death at a crossing in the marketplace, and believes he saw him make a menacing gesture in his direction. He rushes to the king’s palace and asks the king for his best horse in order that he might flee during the night far from Death, as far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace and reproaches him for having frightened one of his best servants. But Death, astonished, replies: ‘I didn’t mean to frighten him. It was just that I was surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow in Samarkand’.18

 

            Death for Baudrillard could have “the effect of a prophetic disappearance” such as in the deaths of Barthes and Lacan.19 He wrote about the left and the right on death20 and how the power which priests tried to exert over death was in our history perhaps the birth of large scale social control.21 Among our responses to power he said we “dream of a violent death, unbearable to power”.22 In his concern about the perfect crime and our descent into digitality, cloning, and artificiality Baudrillard introduced the term “absolute death” to describe a kind of regression that takes us “toward a state of minimal differentiation among living beings, of a pure repetition of identical beings”.23 In a future world of clones, death (and sex) must die: “Death is under the threat of death”.24 But he did wonder if clones of the future might be able to purchase the “luxury of death” (once a vital function) – enjoying what would be for them a “cyberdeath”. Such beings could enjoy death if they were to “become mortal once again in simulation”.25

            If we pity the clones perhaps it is because “it is the paradox of our society is that we can no longer die in it because we are already dead, (hyper-protected)”.26 The modern metropolis was for Baudrillard a culture of death.27 Further, in the “cybernetic functionality of the urban environment is death” – we find it “scattered among all the virtual productive [and protective] forms”.28 Our true necropolises, he wrote are; “computer banks and foyers, blank spaces”.29 In his assessment of 9/11 Baudrillard discussed the impossible exchange with death and the challenge to the system represented by the “symbolic gift of death”.30

            For Baudrillard, “rather than death, we should speak today of extermination, about the absence of destiny, slow, endemic, extermination”.31 In our world of hyper-security and the fear of terrorism we attempt to dissuade death at the “price of continual mortification”.32 In our time the technical extreme unction of science and medicine take charge of us, replacing all other sacraments.33 Elsewhere he wrote that death, which “runs beneath the surface of all exchanges”34 is itself the sacrament.35 Funeral homes only pick up where the medicalization of death leaves off with their “absurd connotation of naturalness for the dead”.36 Death is made shameful and obscene.37 We attempt, he said, to ward off the ambivalence of death by seeing life as a value.38

            So for Baudrillard, death is a far more innocent player39 than we take it to be and it lies buried under the “contrary myth of security”.40 Death for Baudrillard is a risk in every symbolic pact,41 it is “an event that has always, already taken place”.42 He addressed the concept of the “death drive” in at least seven books43 and also made mention of a “death impulse”.44 He thought death to be from a place beyond the “unconscious” and said that it must be “wrested from psychoanalysis and turned against it”.45 Psychoanalysis, for Baudrillard, is one of the fields in our culture that operationalizes everything as part of a greater societal functioning of simplification – the shelving of complexity – and the simplification of our mental functions. And so in our easy and operational environments the “mirror has been turned into a phase, pleasure into a principle and death into a drive”.46 As such, the exclusion of death “is at the core of the rationality of our culture”.47 For assessing our culture of simulation, death, as it turns out, was one of Baudrillard’s favourite metaphors.48 In its hypocritical position towards the crumbling of Yugoslavia Baudrillard said that the West had taken the dead man’s place.49 Where else would one expect to find a civilization pursuing both advanced technological wars and a policy of “zero deaths”.50

 

III. Remembering Baudrillard

            This memorial issue contains more than eighty articles, obituaries, and other memory traces of Baudrillard (including a graffiti mural). The first section contains three papers given in honour of Baudrillard at the annual meetings of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2006). Here Joseph Tanke remembered fondly Baudrillard’s ability to complicate moral and political understandings. Leslie Curtis recalls Baudrillard’s many strategic challenges – especially his unforgettable challenge to the arts. My remembrances for the IAPL were of Baudrillard as a writer.

            The remaining remembrances of Baudrillard are organized under two main headings: “Remembrances from the Academy” and “Remembrances from Elsewhere”. Among the academics most of the usual (and a few unusual) suspects are present. John Armitage remembers Baudrillard’s deep challenge to Sociology. Jon Baldwin remembers fifty-eight aphorisms on death by Baudrillard and others which are “structured by death”. Simon Blackburn writes of Baudrillard’s gift for assaying our contemporary mediated realities. According to Blackburn, “even if engagement with the world is the cure, the respite it gives may be short-lived. No sooner has the real moment gone than the work of memory begins, once more selecting, massaging, suppressing and spinning.

            Rex Butler notes that Baudrillard eventually arrived at the concept of simulation by “pushing to the limit the ideas of a language of objects and the untethering of consumption from need”. Reality in this view becomes an effect of its representation. His passing, notes Butler – paraphrasing Baudrillard – makes the world seem more enigmatic. Alan Cholodenko dipped into his memory chest and retrieved “the Future-Fall rap” which he performed for a conference in Australia in 1984 at which Baudrillard made an appearance. He offers it here as a memorial to Jean. The ending of the third stanza seems so fitting today as we think not about the meaning or destiny of Baudrillard (see Butler) but his “effect”. “No subject, no object – no future, no past – no text, no context – presence’s absence at last”.

            My obituary remembers Baudrillard as a joyful thinker and writer who feared the state capable of ending terrorism far more than terrorism itself. I offer some memories of losing a friend and the one person who spoke to me most directly in his writing. I remember Baudrillard as a good person in whom evil will remain indebted for a very long time. For me, the passing of Baudrillard is the passing of one of the signs of our times. Marcello Faletra gathers up many of the concepts which lead to memories of Baudrillard’s incredible singularity in contemporary thought. Gary Genosko recalls Baudrillard’s contributions to semiotic and structural studies. Chris Horrocks remembers Baudrillard the “outlaw theorist” and one instance when Baudrillard repudiated an event from within the event. Stephen Jones recalls an important lesson from the writing of Baudrillard – that “thought should… always leave the grasp of that which confines it”.

            Douglas Kellner’s contribution remembers Baudrillard as a poststructuralist thinker who consistently avoided fads. For Kellner Baudrillard was one of contemporary philosophy’s most radical thinkers in that he undermined vital categories “of Western philosophy and contemporary theory”. Many came to appreciate the notion of theory [as] fiction in a very personal manner through Baudrillard’s writing. Rex Butler notes how Baudrillard’s appearance at a conference in Australia “irrevocably changed the terms of intellectual debate” in that country. Kellner’s obituary reminds us also of the enormous impact Baudrillard (like many others of his generation such as Lyotard), changed how people around the world speak of theory. Contemporary theory for example has rapidly split into two groups: those who include Baudrillard and French theory more broadly [theory as a challenge to the real], against those who now inhabit the Jurassic parklands of objective theory. Kellner reminds us that Baudrillard shows us [as Lotringer once put it] that “theory may even be a way out of theory”.51 C. J. Lee recalls how Baudrillard changed the intellectual landscape for his generation. Daniel Miller represents those who did not like the later Baudrillard but appeals to us to not forget the early works. William Nericcio remembers Baudrillard as part of a French influenza that influenced an entire generation in the humanities in America. Geert Lovink and McKenzie Wark discuss the future of theory after Baudrillard. They see Baudrillard as having moved theory closer to poetry and for turning anecdotes into theory. Lovink hopes theory can, after Baudrillard, open spaces of possibilities. Wark hopes for a Baudrillard affect “where theory is a way of thinking mixed series, flows of news, of tools, of gestures, of events, of moods”. Christopher Norris, like Wark, wonders about Baudrillard and the future of pedagogy asking how contemporary educational practices might seek ways to resist the “code”.

            Benjamin Noys recalls Baudrillard as not merely an author of theory fictions, but ones that should be placed under the heading “Horror theory fiction”.  Robin Parmer has nothing to say to Baudrillard’s disappearance – and he says it with elegance acknowledging that his silence is indebted to Baudrillard. William Pawlett reminds us, optimistically, that by “submitting to all hypotheses, even Baudrillard’s provocations and speculations, the world generates a radical uncertainty and remains ultimately elusive”. Paul Taylor’s memory of Baudrillard takes him into a criticism of academe during our times of “disciplinary and methodological petty-mindedness”. If Baudrillard’s significance is missed by many in the academy today Taylor points to those upon whom the blame falls. Scott Stephens reflects on Baudrillard’s “cool” way of thinking and wonders if the form that ethics must take in our time is nihilism? Thinking for Baudrillard was “elevated to an ethical imperative” writes Stephens, pointing to the “catastrophic role of thought” Baudrillard favored. Emily Theriault ends the section of reflections from the academy by capturing so much of what Baudrillard meant to a generation of critically engaging undergraduates and graduate students.

            Baudrillard’s death also brought forth a few rather vicious pieces the kind of which followed Derrida’s death in much greater number. The two most offensive to Jean’s friends and survivors which appear here are Robert Fulford’s obituary in Canada’s National Post and Carlin Romano’s “Death of a Clown” which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some will be angry with me for reprinting these contemptible memories but they too are ways of remembering Baudrillard (who would most likely enjoy these more than the fond memories and leave us with a comment about how his virulence seems to have passed on to these authors!) In any event I see it as an important part of my mission not to protect readers of this journal from challenges. As Bourdieu told us – academic life is a contact sport. Baudrillard could take a hit with the best of them and like all great players of any game was subject to numerous cheap shots from lesser opponents.

            Scott McLemee’s obituary sends a good deal of challenge back in Fulford’s direction. Richard Prouty also takes Fulford and those like him to task for attacking Baudrillard because of the way he exposed the most cherished illusions of intellectuals. Joseph Tanke addresses the Romano’s “hyperbolic pronouncements” rather well. Richard Pope challenges both Fulford and Romano. As for Romano – it appears he shares a set of commonsense blinders with the American right-wing – these blinders serve as a form of intellectual protection from the brightness of provocative contemporary philosophical ideas. In the end it appears that Romano didn’t really hate Baudrillard, simply the fact that no one reads Henri Troyat anymore. I quite agree with Romano that Troyat is an interesting read and I’ll also keep working to see that Romano is wrong about the most provocative assertion uttered in any of Baudrillard’s obituaries – that “no one will read Baudrillard in fifty years”. One hopes it is a fate that has not already befallen Troyat. It seems that Romano’s prediction is off to a bad start if we go by Technorati’s counting which has Baudrillard among the top ten subjects in hyperspace these days. Baudrillard’s double is rather busy as it turns out!

Posts per day about “Baudrillard (90 day period ending July 22, 2007)52

 

            One of the remarkable aspects about our call for memories of Baudrillard is that so many “non-experts” responded. This tells us something good about the reach of IJBS (which currently takes about 16,000 total hits per month on its articles and reviews), and it says something interesting about Baudrillard. He did not write merely for an academic audience and it would have done his memory a great disservice to publish a special issue of memories to him which was confined only to academics. I have heard that two such “academics-only” publications are being prepared for 2008. Pity.

            Among the memories from beyond the academy, Victoria Alexander has sifted through Baudrillard’s oeuvre with an eye on his deployment of the concept “world”. Alexander traces for us some of the contours of Baudrillard’s world as the concept appears in over 20 of his books and wonders if it will survive his passing. She sees the time following his death as a time of great urgency and begins her essay with a very poignant question: “Does the passing of Baudrillard also mark the end of the ‘world’?” The question remains unresolved but in forcing us to peer over the enormity of its abyss Alexander leads us to ponder the very future of our species.

            After silence we have the image – and here we have an image sprayed onto a wall in Germany (Jean Baudrillard: R.I.P.) by the Zonenkinder

Collective of street artists. My short writing which accompanies it points to Baudrillard’s appreciation for the diverse significances of graffiti.

            Obituaries have been collected from the major mass media, materials posted on Internet blogs, and remembrances we received from students concerning the impact he had on their life. These diverse writings together form a poignant reminder of the reach of Baudrillard into the lives of those who do not earn their daily bread as scholars. I am very pleased to have these here as they are a significant slice of the Global conversation taking placed concerning Baudrillard’s work of which IJBS is now a significant voice.

 

            Michael Agger quite rightly remembers Baudrillard’s America as “Baudrillard 101”. The Antigram website recalls – Baudrillard’s courageous gesture against the New York City art scene of the 1980s. The Apocryphist website reminds us that it takes a simulacrum to know one in a piece of apocryphal wit. Julian Baggini discusses differences between the French and Anglo-American philosophical style and tells us that for many in the English world Baudrillard simply had too much style. The BBC obituary kept its distance from Baudrillard focusing attention of his writing on the Gulf War and 9/11 without missing the point of either (as many mass media sites did). Kim Clune predicts that Baudrillard will remain important to future generations and offers a poignant thought on paradise and Disneyland.

            Patricia Cohen wrote a very thoughtful obituary for the New York Times but in the end it suffers from the same handicap as most of the mainstream media obituaries – the writer really did not know Baudrillard’s work very well and does not purport to understand it. The Times of London avoided this problem by having an obituary by Mike Gane on file (written about two years before Baudrillard’s death). One wonders how many other living thinkers already lay dead and eulogized in the private files of the Times. It is a kind of modelling approach to obituaries that I really don’t think Baudrillard would be very comfortable with! Still, Gane’s obituary (matched only by Chris Horrocks for the Independent), was exceptional among the English news obituaries for its knowledge of Baudrillard and his work.

            Tyler Cowan strikes a sad note when he expresses what so many feel – that the death of Baudrillard represents the loss of a font of many great books. For those who knew Jean only through his writing this is a point that cannot be underestimated. The obituary on the Dead Author website takes this a point further noting that for most people Baudrillard existed only as a mediated simulacrum or in the simulations of his books. As in the case of Derrida, the best mainstream obituary for Baudrillard appeared in the Economist. It is witty yet speaks to the absence Baudrillard photographed then left to us. Tim Footman reminds us that Baudrillard made us feel so hyperreal and ends with a note on George Bush and the simulated turkey he took to the troops in Iraq – a non-edible (plastic) oil product. The Global Game website survey’s Baudrillard’s relationship with the game of football (soccer). Douglas Groothius’s obituary speaks to the power of Baudrillard’s discourse beyond the walls of academe where, despite difficulties in understanding his writing, readers were encouraged to press on by the very quality of his writing. Owen Hatherley observes that Baudrillard’s was never a part of promotional culture – even in his writing on architecture as Baudrillard’s was more interested in autopsy than diagnosis.

            David Hopkins addresses the panic stricken ways we respond to a world proliferating in simulacra. From the Immodest Proposals website a simulation concerning counterfeit Baudrillard’s. The Immomus website contrasts some French and English obituaries for Baudrillard. The K-Punk website obituary reminds us that reality took its leave before Baudrillard. This is another of several obituaries that recognize the autopsy approach in Baudrillard’s writing. The Last Vehicle website discussed the appropriateness of invoking the Matrix in remembering Baudrillard. This thoughtful piece also wonders about what we are trying to bury in making an archive of his obituaries.

            David Lomax says good bye to Baudrillard from an architectural perspective. Karina Longworth says that negation was a character flaw which for Baudrillard turned into an imperative. Yet she recognizes that Baudrillard’s intention was not to scold. The Love The Book site sides with Baudrillard’s most unpopular claims about America. Robert Mackey remembers Baudrillard with a very ironic story about treating psychologically injured Gulf War veterans using gaming technology. The Masticator obituary leads those who look upon American culture as powerful to recall how Baudrillard pointed out that it is actually quite hollow – no culture but wonderful teeth! J. Clive Matthews takes the opportunity provided  by Baudrillard’s death to speculate about the spread of anti-intellectualism in popular obituaries. Stephen Poole of the Guardian wonders if Baudrillard has really entered into transfinity.

            Sam Prestridge relies on Baudrillard for an assessment of the hyperreal American president. The Richard is Retired website ponders the end of Baudrillard in the context of our constantly shifting reality. Timothy Ruggerio recalls that Baudrillard’s line of thinking was developed to fight “the annihilating and homogenizing effects of our culture and to sustain a role for serious thinking”. Stefan Steinberg’s obituary for the World Socialist recounts Baudrillard from a left wing perspective which labours under a God-like conception of Marx. Baudrillard is cast  by Steinberg as one of the current degenerates – not unlike the way in which the NAZI’s once cast modern artists. In any event, Steinberg writes an obituary from a perspective that is rapidly evaporating and this, along with its rather nostalgic quality, makes it a very interesting read. Ironically this is where it intersects with Baudrillard as the academic Marxist position has all too often been dedicated to protecting students from critically reading Marx from anything other than an ideological position devoted to Marxism. Baudrillard might have found such a memory rather quaint yet somehow touching. G. Christopher Williams points out that Baudrillard outlived the real. The ever illusive Charles H. de Selby provides an interesting example of postmodern generation – with Baudrillard no less! If not automatic writing we certainly can call it machine text – (see for yourself).

            Most mainstream media obituaries were captivated by Baudrillard’s recent writing on 9/11 and his assessment of the virtual Gulf War produced as a television model in 1991. Two which do a decent job with these ideas are The Telegraph obituary; Shelley Walia’s obituary for The Hindu Magazine; and Elaine Woo’s for the Los Angeles Times. Overall the mainstream media obituaries were distant but not mean spirited as in the case of Derrida’s passing. This might have troubled Baudrillard a good deal. Baudrillard died one day before Captain America and the coincidence did not escape the notice of Stacy Hardy, Sam Leith, or the Raincoaster website. Overall Baudrillard’s death is understood as a significant loss in the blogs of hyperspace.

            There are also several non-English language obituaries included. In German we have Thomas Assheuer’s memories for Die Zeit Newspaper; in French Robert Maggiori’s obituary in Libération; Christian Delacampagne’s obituary for Le Monde and that of Les Humains Associés; Paul François Paoli’s tribute in Le Figaro; and the collection of tributes “L’hommage Américain à Baudrillard” by leading American artists, writers, and theorists collected by Les Nouvel Observateur: (Gary Indiana, Sylvere Lotringer, Douglas Kellner, Norman M. Klein, Mark Poster, Mackenzie Wark, Peter Halley, Paul D. Miller, Avital Ronell, Rosalind Kraus, Kathryn Bigelow, Jim Fletcher, Tim Griffin, Chris Kraus, Michael Silverblatt, Michael Tolkin, Lawrence D. Kritzman, and Eric Gans), In Italian we have memories from Marcello Faletra, Attilio Scarpellini, and Rene Capovin.

 

IV. Conclusion

It’s the book which reads me.

It’s the TV which watches you.

It’s the object which thinks us.

It’s the lens which focuses on us.

It’s the effect which causes us.

It’s language which speaks us.

It’s time which wastes us.

It’s money which earns us.

It’s death which lies in wait for us.53

 

            There is throughout Baudrillard’s oeuvre a joy in thought and an express  joy in writing. “Writing is closer to thinking than it is to speaking”54 for Baudrillard – it allows us to think beyond the end. In his writing on death Baudrillard did just that. One particular instance now stands as his final challenge to us. As “a reversal and a symbolic challenge” death then, for Baudrillard, must be enjoyed because “reversibility is the only source of enjoyment”.55 The writings of a writer are his life after life, a nuance of life – a rendezvous with many who are not yet born.

            Contemplating all of these memories alongside of  Baudrillard’s writing about death has led me, in the end, to a question which I asked in my IAPL memorial paper for Cyprus: What would your life be like if you had never read Baudrillard? This question, among other things, is part of keeping Baudrillard alive in death. He will live for as long a we continue to speak his name. Any replies IJBS receives to this question, as well as any other memories, will be posted to future updates of this archive.

October 1, 2007

 

Gerry Coulter is the founding editor of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. He writes a regular column for Euro Art (Online) Magazine http://www.euroartmagazine.com. Recent publications include: “One Among Several – The Traditional Gaze Seduced: Toward A More Complex Understanding of Eros in Modernism, appears in Kritikos: A Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text, and Image (July, 2007): http://intertheory.org/coulter2.htm. A review of Baudrillard’s books The Conspiracy of Art, and Utopia Deferred have recently appeared in the Canadian Review of  Sociology and Anthropology: http://www.csaa.ca/bookreview/reviews/2007reviews/200707/Baudrillard.htm

He has recently won Bishop’s Universities highest award for teaching – the William and Nancy Turner Prize

 

 

Endnotes