Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 43, November 2002
Kenneth Rufo
Obscenity with a View
Baudrillard's _Revenge of the Crystal_ and Film Studies
Jean
Baudrillard _Revenge of the Crystal:
Selected Writings on the Modern Object and its Destiny,
1968-1983_ London: Pluto
Press,
1999 ISBN:
0-7453-1443-0 198 pp. Jean Baudrillard stands
amidst a strange scene in contemporary thinking: largely
ignored or lamented by 'serious' intellectuals, yet embraced
by those yearning for the cutting edge of the
philosophically hip. While independent and European
filmmakers produce documentaries about Jacques Derrida and
Pierre Bourdieu, Hollywood powerhouses instead see in
Baudrillard's thought the kernel for multi-billion dollar
cinematic epics. From the real to the reel, Baudrillard has
experienced a rather wide dissemination. But who is this bizarre
figure? Dubbed a prophet, a priest, and a nihilist,
Baudrillard seems paradoxically out of place and dead on
target in describing the contemporary social and political
scene. His thesis, in a nutshell: reality has left the
building. Maybe we had it once, or more accurately, maybe we
knew how to appreciate it. But with the ascendancy of modern
technology, the apotheosis of the object and objectivity,
and the media saturation of the West, we have (literally)
'realized' everything, and in so doing we have giddily paved
over reality in the process. Today's reality is instead the
reality of the object, that
technological/scientific/theoretical conceit that defines us
as subjects, from clothes and computers to clones and
Keynesian economics. So what can we say of the
role of film and cinema in Baudrillard's thought? The
question is actually quite difficult to resolve. Baudrillard
has been quite clear about his distaste for television, has
lamented the nature of contemporary radio, and has
complained about the dissolution of theatre into repetition
and simulation. The temptation thus exists, and perhaps not
incorrectly, to see film as another emblematic product of a
hyperreal malaise. But really engaging Baudrillard's work
means more than mere dismissal, and any assessment of film
requires that one not reject the entirety of the medium
simply because of the many bad apples still floating around
in the celluloid barrel. Instead, I believe that any
assessment of cinema using Baudrillard requires an
historical investigation of the scene of the object and the
disappearance of the real. It is here that Pluto Classic's
recent publication of Baudrillard's _Revenge of the Crystal_
can play a pivotal role. The selections that
comprise the book will not interest everyone, even if they
should. Enough negativity exists towards Baudrillard as a
thinker or scholar that academics seem especially reticent
to invoke his name as anything other than a parenthetical
specter. Those in the middle of the divide (Steven Best and
Douglas Kellner seem apt examples) often frown at
Baudrillard's more recent meanderings, even as they laud his
initial post-Marxist reformations. For those who find that
such a middle ground provides good grazing, _Revenge of the
Crystal_ has much to offer, even if that offering
problematizes any clean break between Marxist Baudrillard
and his more nefarious twin (McGehee and Siegel's _Suture_,
anyone?). Included in the book are five excerpts, chapters
from texts published between 1968 and 1983, which chart
(loosely) the role and nature of the object as a semiotic
device: its role in structuring social identity; its impact
on theorizing the Marxist problematics of production and
consumption; its role in the formulation of sex and desire;
its relationship with mass media culture; and its
transformative influence on the social and political scenes.
These essays, while not indicative of Baudrillard's more
recent work, and despite their age, remain particularly
robust with insight. The selections provide some indications
as to the evolution of Baudrillard's thought, both within
and beyond the chosen period of time, and are thus quite
useful for those looking for an entry point into his
work. Those interested in
philosophy and/or sociology in general will no doubt find
these five essays intriguing, but for the purposes of this
review, in the specific context of film and philosophy, the
combination of these essays with an introductory interview
(conducted by Guy Bellavance), provides the real book bang
for the buck. In the interview, Baudrillard discusses many
of the motivations that animate his thought in general, and
the issues that provoked his 1983 _Fatal
Strategies_ in
particular, with a heavy emphasis on the current state of
art, theatre, and aesthetics. Particularly close attention
should be paid to the discussion of obscenity, and the scene
of representation, which has, I believe, the most to tell us
about Baudrillard's potential utility for film criticism. I
will spend the remainder of the review discussing these
terms in an attempt to hint at their potential value for
thinking film. As both the book's last
chapter and opening interview make clear, Baudrillard has
'realized' that the frightening proliferation of the object
has led to a sort of mass implosion. The cultural, the
social, the political, the industrial, the aesthetic --
these spheres, once able to be distinguished conceptually,
have bled into each other; a sort of sociological
cross-pollination. No conceptual sphere can lay claim to
producing a meaning or inventing a value not already
implicated and imbricated by its objective relations. This
somewhat catastrophic notion is much more complex than it
first appears. Rather than simply pronouncing a particular
film (say Wenders's _Until the End of the World_) as
necessarily laden with political implications -- something
film criticism has done largely since the advent of film --
Baudrillard's implosion means that such a pronouncement is,
today, ultimately meaningless. Films still have meanings,
lots and lots of meanings. They contain social messages,
political directives, cultural mappings, ad nauseam. The
point is that today everything, film and not film, art and
not art, has those meanings, which is, for Baudrillard,
tantamount to saying that there is no such thing as a
political or cultural meaning per se. (For a recent and
poignant illustration, think _Collateral Damage_ meets 9/11,
the common reaction that the World Trade Center collapse
'looks like a movie', and the strange heroism of Dr Mark
Heath who ran into the thick fog left after the Towers
collapse, video camera firmly in hand, to offer medical
assistance.) Every meaning, every event, has been realized
in excess, and in so doing, dissolved itself of any reality.
This excess is the core of what Baudrillard terms
'obscenity', literally the 'against-scene' that makes
unthinkable the conditions necessary for meaning to arise.
Baudrillard notes, foreshadowing his most famous work: 'Many
things are obscene because they have too much meaning,
because they occupy too much space. They thus attain an
exorbitant representation of the truth, that is to say the
apogee of simulation' (187). I have started from the
negative (is there any other way?) of obscenity, that which
works against the scene of representation, against the
possibility of seduction and aesthetics. The scene will have
to wait. Instead, we must first consider a truly profound
implication of this implosion, one that will no doubt seem
abhorrent to some academics and critics: that there is no
longer a distinction between theory as an object and the
object of critique; the same implosion is at work between
theory and criticism as between all other spheres of value
and meaning. As such, theory and criticism impact each other
rather profoundly, with a sort of radical reflexivity, and
one must remain open to the possibility that the object of
film provides as much critical inspiration as does a
critical-theoretical oeuvre, Baudrillard included. He
writes: 'We are all actors, all spectators, there is no more
scene, the scene is everywhere, there is no more rule,
everyone acts out their own drama, improvises their own
phantasms' (192). What phantasms do we hold to as critics?
What dramas do we enact without intention, without even the
prospect of a seduction? Can we even begin to think what it
would be like, not to rethink a film through a
psychoanalytic lens, but rather to rethink psychoanalysis
through a film? Is it possible that criticism functions, all
too often, as the recursive play of the object, a sort of
revenge upon the subject? Perhaps. But perhaps, and
here is the aporia within Baudrillard's thought, such a
seduction is necessary if meaning is to be rescued from
itself: 'For something to have meaning, there must be a
scene; and for a scene to exist, there must be illusion, a
minimum of illusion, of imaginary movement, of challenge to
the real, one which transports you, seduces you, revolts
you' (194). The scene of representation, which remains an
ill-defined horizon within Baudrillard's thought, comes
about outside of the realm of thinking and of calculation
that the modern investment of meaning requires. The real --
that hard kernel upon which models and meanings and objects
ultimately flounder, where the imaginary no longer animates
and establishes the objective relations between the distal
and the subjective -- survives precisely because meaning (or
rather its functional impossibility) cannot be foreclosed.
This is the scene of representation that makes film theory
thinkable even as it forces a massive revision; cinema can
no longer be seen as the symbolic manifestation of material
realities/ideals, but rather as the potential of seduction.
The scene of the film thus understood, 'is about the
possibility of creating a space where things have the
capacity to transform themselves, to perform in a different
way, and not in terms of their objective purpose . . . the
scene is about the arbitrary' (29). Here then, are the stakes:
on one hand, the meaning of a cinematic object (which is to
say, its lack of meaning, its hyperreality), and on the
other hand, the seduction by the cinematic object (which is
to say a void of meaning not paved over by a theoretical
imaginary). One senses, despite all desire to the contrary,
a sort of Heideggerian letting-be at work in Baudrillard, or
at least in my reading of his _Revenge of the Crystal_
(though one would need some hermeneutic gymnastics to read
Baudrillard's discussion of causality on pages 27-29 without
at least a trace of Heidegger). Debates over intellectual
lineage notwithstanding, the hope that Baudrillard offers
for film studies resides in that challenge of rethinking the
cinematic object's relationship to the critic and the theory
that animates critique, in clearing a space for seduction.
The hope: to oppose the scene of representation to the
implosion that marks obscenity: 'through the false can
appear all the power of the true -- such is the sublime form
of illusion and seduction -- then through the true itself
can also appear all the power of the false; and this is the
form of obscenity' (185). Perhaps this somewhat
Romantic notion of a scene, of a seduction, of a meaning
once lost, reflects nothing more than a profound nostalgia
and a willful misunderstanding of human history. Perhaps.
The work that emerges after 1983, and thus beyond the scope
of the writings collected in this text, seems both more
openly nostalgic and less hopeful that any escape from this
mass obscenity is thinkable. Then again, no one seduces the
scene back into existence by looking for it, any more than
one finds truth by looking for it (28), and one cannot help
wondering if the nihilism so often assigned to Baudrillard
is not in fact playing into some secret game of
reversibility, a ruse, a revenge of the object on the
subject or vice versa. In the end, only the Object knows for
sure. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Kenneth Rufo, 'Obscenity
with a View: Baudrillard's _Revenge of the Crystal_ and Film
Studies', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 43, November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n43rufo>.
and receive the journal articles via email as they are published. here
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615)
PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England
Contact: editor@film-philosophy.com
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
