The
Death of Jean Baudrillard Did Not Take Place
G.
Christopher Williams1
(Staff
Writer, Popmatters.com)
Jean Baudrillard. New
York (1997)
While
it is a seemingly bleak and dismal prospect to be the man who may be best known
for declaring the “death of the real”, some solace derives from the fact that
Jean Baudrillard apparently was able to outlive “the real” by at least a few
years. The news of Baudrillard’s death reached me on the morning of 7 March as
such news often does in academia – through the grapevines that emerge when
prominent critics, scholars or literary artists die and the public at large
takes little notice. A philosophy professor at my university had passed on a
link to the New York Times obituary2
to a number of us. As always, I was a little saddened – both by Baudrillard’s
passing but also by the fact that his obituary came to my attention in this
obscure, word-of-mouth fashion while the whole country had been fascinated by
the death of Anna Nicole Smith just weeks before. Yet something seems quite
appropriate in the public’s absence of awareness of Baudrillard’s death in the
wake of all the press surrounding Smith’s death; Baudrillard’s own critique of
media centered on absence and especially the absence generated by the white
noise of mass media.
Baudrillard
began his scholarly life as a fairly traditional Marxist critic railing against
the prevailing consumer culture in such works as The System of Objects
(1968) and The Consumer Society (1970). But his later work, generally
cultural critique focusing on mass media and pop culture, was what would make
him notable – notorious, perhaps – within both academic and, to some extent, mainstream
culture. Books like America (1986) and The Illusion of the End
(1992) offered fascinating observations on the pop culture iconography that has
come to dominate late 20th century culture.
Simulacra
and Simulations (1981) most clearly defined Baudrillard’s concerns. There
he deployed the term “hyperreal” to describe how mass media consumers view
reality. Simulations of reality, he argued, have become “more real than the
real” to such consumers as they regard the significance of the sign (that which
represents a real thing – a form of simulation) more crucial to life than the
reality it formerly signified. In essence, Baudrillard suggests that the copies
of reality have overtaken reality and replaced them. Famously he described the
simulated world of Disney’s Magic Kingdom and how it disguises and parallels
the absence of the real in the equally simulated landscape of American culture:
Disneyland
is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in
its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is
presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when
in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real,
but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question
of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact
that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
Baudrillard’s
frequently maligned book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, (1992), is a
particular study of just such an effect of spectacle trumping direct experience
of the world. While critics (who seem to have never gotten past the title of
the text) curse Baudrillard’s inhumanity in claiming that a war never happened,
these literalists fail to see the more chilling metaphor that the book
suggests. While the media has often been acknowledged as having helped end the
Vietnam War by bringing its horrors into our living room, making “direct”
experience of the carnage a cause for political action, our interest in the
Gulf War and the Iraq war was directed toward the spectacle of tracers and
explosions lighting up the sky of Baghdad rather than the human lives lost.
Baudrillard argues the media strips human dignity from what an audience vicariously
experiences – we become fixated on the noise, not the signal.
Reductionist
readings of Baudrillard’s work, though, have had an effect on his intellectual
legacy. Likewise, his own rise to a degree of celebrity has had deleterious
effects on more “serious” scholars’ views of his work. While The Matrix would
make his words famous in the mouth of Morpheus (in the aforementioned quotes in
the epigraphs to this essay) and even feature an ironically hollowed-out copy
of Simulacra and Simulation in one of the film’s scenes (seemingly the
Wachowski brothers’ efforts to pay homage and acknowledge the theory that
informed some of their film’s ideas), this pop-culture media spectacle served
to diminish Baudrillard’s reputation by making his theory more pop – more
spectacle than substance. Baudrillard’s reply was to say: “the Matrix is the
kind of film the matrix would make about the matrix.3
As
I looked over the obituary notice in the New York Times, I cringed at
phrases like “once considered to be a postmodern guru”. Likewise, some oddly
dismissive phrasing emerged in Slate’s memorializing, which noted that
Baudrillard was “long a favorite of graduate students”.4
But such dismissals are appropriate to Baudrillard’s own vision of the way that
the media speaks of absence through simulation of ideas. When considering his
uniqueness, I have often found myself wondering if Baudrillard’s work isn’t
simply a kind of re-envisioning of previous media critics, most especially
Marshall McLuhan. Baudrillard’s simulations seem notably similar to McLuhan’s
own observations that in mass-media culture “the medium has become the
message”. Should Baudrillard himself should be dismissed as a simulation of
McLuhan?
It
might be amusing and ironic to dismiss Baudrillard as a cheap imitation, but it
would be inaccurate. While McLuhan seemed to revel in this transformation of
the signs of culture into the dominant of cultural experience, such evaluations
are much more opaque in Baudrillard. Again, I often find myself wondering if he
intended, as McLuhan seemed to, to desire us to revel and embrace the brave new
world order of simulation or if his stories and examples of the simulacra were
intended to be cautionary tales about the dangerous seduction of media images.
If
it remains hard to grasp what Baudrillard’s final conclusions were on the
hyperreal spaces he investigated, it may have been his intention to prevent us
from drawing such an evaluative conclusion. He may have held no agenda to drive
or deride the simulation. Instead, he merely observed a media phenomena, and
left the reader to discover its import. In that sense his value as a scholar
may be his ability to distance himself and simply present data for our
consideration. For me, though, what Baudrillard fundamentally did was – for
lack of a less obvious phrase – make pop matter. If this “real” of popular
culture has become the real of the everyday American, then mining the shiny and
salacious surfaces of American media becomes more fascinating and eerily
relevant. Baudrillard’s ambivalent tone is especially suited to the PopMatters
website; I am especially fond of the notion that the title PopMatters
does not necessarily dictate whether pop “mattering” is a positive or negative
thing. Instead, in studying media and its messages (real, hyperreal, or
otherwise), we must consider the validity and invalidity of, as Baudrillard put
it, “these ‘imaginary stations’ which feed reality.”
I
will miss the man who put the real to death and brought the hyperreal to life.
As much as I’d like to say there will never be another like him, I must stay
true to the nature of simulacra and suggest only that there will be another and
another and another and another and another… As he was well aware before his
death – his doubles already wander the networks.5
G.
Christopher Williams
is a staff writer at PopMatters. http://www.popmatters.com
©
C. Christopher Williams and Popmatters.com
Endnotes
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