Jean Baudrillard and the Place of the Intellectual1
J. Clive Matthews
(Agoravox website, London, UK)
It’s ironic, really,
that Baudrillard is most likely destined to be remembered more for his
commentary on 9/11 and The War Against Terror than his contributions to
academia. It all fits rather neatly into his object value system – the symbolic
value placed on his work by a world (unsurprisingly) uninterested in the
niceties of postmodernist poststructural semiotics is, it would seem, that of
criticism of America. Even though his perceived criticism of the US actually existed largely only in the minds of a misunderstanding readership.
The BBC’s item
reporting his death yesterday notes that “He gained notoriety for his 1991 book
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place and again a decade later for describing
the 9/11 attacks as a ‘dark fantasy’.” The New York Times, meanwhile,
feels that it has to introduce him as, effectively, the guy who inspired The
Matrix.
Now I do not doubt for
a second that this sort of thing has to go on, and has gone on for decades to
explain to an unfamiliar public just why some recently-deceased academic is
somehow more interesting/important than any number of other anonymous,
tweed-jacketed research types, surrounded by musty books in deserted libraries.
But I’m pretty certain that Pierre Bourdieu was not so glibly summed up
when he died five years ago.
Possibly it’s just my
own misplaced perception, but I had a similar thought when Conrad Russell died a couple of years back,
and was introduced in the Guardian’s obituary not as probably the most
influential historian of the post-war period for the massive impact of his
revisionist work on the English Civil War, but as “the great-grandson of Lord
John Russell and son of Bertrand Russell”. Please note also that in Russell’s
Wikipedia page, the section on his (relatively short) political career is
considerably longer than that on his infinitely more important career as an
historian.
There was a similar
dumbing down when Edward Said died,
added to by the convenience of his death occurring in the early months of the
Iraq war, a conflict in which his theories of western perceptions of the Middle
East were all too relevant. In other words, it seems to be an increasing trend
in the last few years to either dumb down the contributions of intellectuals to
an easy to understand sound-byte, or to focus on just one small, often faintly
controversial aspect of their lives.
At the risk of being in
very poor taste in predicting obituaries for the a few of the increasingly
small number of other surviving important European intellectuals (at least,
some of those who spring immediately to mind), Hobsbawm (like Christopher Hill
before him) was doomed to have a sensationalist obit from the moment he joined
the communist party. Likewise, Umberto Eco’s contributions to semiotics were
always going to take second place in any overviews of his career ever since he
penned The Name of the Rose. Jurgen Habermas has
been critical of the Iraq war, and supportive of the idea of an EU constitution
(not necessarily the one currently on the table, though) – will his easier to
understand forays into politics overtake his more complex theoretical works in
the obituaries?
Of course, obituaries
hardly matter with such people, as their work will live on long after the short
summaries of their lives are sent off for recycling. Indeed, half the time I
wouldn’t be surprised if most people’s reactions on hearing they have died
(assuming they’ve ever heard of them) would be along the lines of “oh, I didn’t
realize he was still alive”. And there is, of course, also no way that you’re
ever going to get a full-page “idiot’s guide to poststructural semiotics” in
tribute to a leading intellectual – partially because few journalists would be
capable of knocking one out, but mostly because 99 per cent of the population
are not in the slightest bit interested.
But even so, I can’t
help feeling that in recent years there has been a renewed shift towards the
kind of hostile anti-intellectualism
which, in Britain at least, we always used to keep under the surface – even if
largely by trying to pretend that our
intellectuals didn’t really exist. And that’s even before you take
in the hard to shake feeling
that there simply aren’t that many great thinkers around these days.2
© J. Clive Matthews and
Agoravox.com
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