Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 45, November 2002
The Defence of Extreme Realities
_Jean
Baudrillard: The Defense of the
Real_ London and New Delhi: Sage
Publications and Thousand Oaks, 1999 ISBN
0-7619-5833-9 vii + 181 pp. As Rex Butler says in this
knowledgeable, clever, scholarly, stimulating, and somewhat
opaque book, Jean
Baudrillard is an
extreme thinker about extreme times -- and times have been
never more extreme than now. America is a society in which
the old De Toqueville ideal of individual citizens concerned
enough to form small groups and, from the ground up, make
their opinions known and represented in public office, has
given way to a country whose opinions are doubled by the
media itself, which, at the end of a Presidential Debate,
immediately pronounces one candidate the winner in the name
of 'the American people' without asking them. The media,
meant to inform the public (which indeed it does), also
doubles it in a way that causes it to drop out, as if all
voting eventually were to take place over the _Larry King
Live Show_. Such doubling (which
simultaneously mirrors and replaces an object by its double)
is also a well known condition of television and film. In
_Big Brother_ life is doubled so that a group of selected
individuals live 'totally ordinary' and totally controlled
lives in a contained, television environment, with the
television audience voting them out of their 'house' one by
one until, finally, a single winner (the last survivor)
rakes in the cash. _The
Truman Show_ is
entirely about resistance to such perfect, architectural,
simulated worlds whose forms of containment give rise to
inchoate anxiety on the part of Truman, who knows no other
reality but is sufficiently disturbed by his sense of an
unreal limit shrouding his daily, happy banalities that he
spends all of his time planning trips to 'faraway places',
and who, after being touched by a woman who steps out of her
controlled part, plots and eventuates his
'escape'. Increasingly reality
erupts only in the form of incipient birth memories (which
are, as Decker says cynically in _Blade Runner_, 'implants')
and terror. Even if every one of us knows and cannot help
but know the realities of work, leisure, circulation,
language, food, kisses, and even cinema with the security of
the obvious -- even if the thought that the real has
'dropped out' is incoherent, since the things that are
(ontology) are a function of language games which are mostly
'business as usual' for most of us, most of the time -- our
immense detachment from things is made clear when they blast
us in the face and we find ourselves with no language to
give representation to the trauma except from the media.
'It's like a movie', so many said upon watching the pictures
of the World Trade Towers collapse. There are no more potent
symbols of modernity imploding on itself than an airplane
rushing headlong into a skyscraper. Victim and terrorist
alike inhabit the same world of images and symbols, movies
and spectacles. When it happens, this system of signs (as
Baudrillard would call it) generates an internal language
for its interpretation, and without that language of 'it's
like a movie', the 'airborne toxic event' of September 11th
(I adopt a phrase from Don DeLillo) has no language for its
description. These points are ample
reason to revisit Baudrillard, extreme thinker of extreme
times now, even if now he is more infuriating than ever. The
source of this infuriation is not only Baudrillard's willed
myopia for normality -- and by 'normality' I mean the daily
contact absolutely everybody has with 'the real' at all
times, when working, eating, at leisure, communicating in
language, even watching television, they know things,
understand things, speak things, communicate things -- it is
also the way his concepts are datable to poststructuralist
intellectual regimes which are brilliant but also, facile. I
refer to attempts to read representations as forming systems
of signs, to read those systems of signs as economies
characterized by forms of circulation, and furthermore to
understand those forms of circulation as characterized by
structures of reversal, whereby signs cannot achieve their
goals, set forth their opposites, and then commute into
them, as if uncertain whether they are particle or wave. For
all of his zany brilliance in reading the details of late
modern life, Baudrillard is an abstract thinker, and Butler
takes him seriously at the right level of abstraction. If
there is a move which Butler never points out, and which is
central to the brilliance, and problematic character of
Baudrillard, it is the presumption that concrete details
prove astonishing abstractions at the level of systems which
are, it is always assumed, somewhere in place. Baudrillard
writes so well as an apocalyptic journalist of social detail
(about America, for example, as if it were an artifact of
another planet which turns out to be the future of Paris),
that it is easy to think of him that way, which is to say,
to avoid, the constant move from detail to
abstraction. Butler organizes his book,
which is a monograph study of Baudrillard's thought, to
bring out Baudrillard's three most central concepts:
simulation, seduction, and doubling. (Baudrillard the
thinker on film and media is given somewhat short shrift. It
is Baudrillard the philosophical economist who is central in
this book, which is not a bad thing, considering how much
Baudrillard the thinker about media has been discussed in
the literature). Each of these concepts is presented in a
synoptic and scholarly way. Butler has immense knowledge of
Baudrillard's work and shows the generation of his central
concepts from the early writings to the later ones, noting
changes and inflections. Butler also illustrates these
highly abstract discussions (sometimes one feels one had
better already understand Baudrillard's abstractions to
understand Butler's) by reciting Baudrillard's examples (of
simulation, seduction, and doubling). Some of these
recitations are very helpful, and overall one learns a lot
from the book. The chapter on simulation
is about the double relationship simulation has to reality.
The simulacrum replaces reality, but also creates it and
defers to it. Thus sociology (like presidential debates)
loses sight of real people by creating an artificial concept
called 'the masses' or 'the American public'. On the other
hand, this concept is continually pressured by genuinely
real persons and groups, and it is this pressure of 'the
real' which generates and continually informs the concepts.
The real functions as a 'limit' to the system of concepts,
which can never reach that limit because the concepts are
the creation of the system and expand in terms of it (there
is no 'outside' to the system). On the other hand, this
limit is constantly providing conceptual content for
sociology, or indeed for CNN news and Hollywood movies (how
could it not!). So stated, Baudrillard's theory of
simulations is less radical than one might have thought, and
far richer conceptually. Seduction is about
seduction by representation. A mode of representation (a
seducer's voice, an analyst's regard and speech, a country's
mythology) mirrors its object (a person, a group, another
system of representations) in such a way that the object
comes to achieve a capacity for self-reflection and
representation only in its light. Seduction implies
dependency, for the seduced knows itself and sees itself and
desires only through this structure of mirroring. (In this
respect, it would have been useful for Butler to compare
Baudrillard's concept to Lacan's.) Doubling is about the way
events double representations, or vice versa. September 11th
and its relationship to films of planes crashing into towers
is an example Butler would no doubt have used, had his book
not been published in 1999. Doubling interrupts simulation
since it injects reality (the genuine act of terror); or
conversely, it rejects reality by doubling it in the form of
television programs (_Big Brother_). These concepts, Butler
shows in some depth, have the tendency to turn into each
other. It is worth reading his book simply for the
excellence of that aspect of it. If there are three defects
with this book they are these: first and foremost it remains
too close to Baudrillard's own highly abstract language to
allow itself the space to make clear what that language
means. This is a common interpretive defect, and one found
it in the first generation of Heidegger interpreters,
Derrida interpreters, and Wittgenstein interpreters. You
have to simplify, criticize, move away from a thinker's
concepts to understand them, or rather, to communicate what
you understand. Second, the book fails to adequately place
Baudrillard in schemes of French thought, which would have
been one way to clarify his thought. Third, the book
registers but fails to explore or even motivate the crucial
question about Baudrillard: to what extent is the world like
his apocalyptic enjoyment of it? And how should such a
question even be properly formulated, either within or
outside his system of concepts? Finally, the following
question ought to be asked by someone, sometime, somewhere.
Why is Baudrillard so seductive? What resides behind the
seduction of the arts and humanities by certain kinds of
theory, such as his? What kind of need for enchantment is
evidenced in this seduction by representation? The question
about Baudrillard's place in contemporary culture needs to
be asked within the space of his own concepts, and outside
that space. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Daniel Herwitz, 'The
Defence of Extreme Realities', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no.
45, November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n45herwitz>. Read Butler's
Response: Rex Butler, 'It is Never a
Decision to Choose Between This and That: A Response to
Herwitz', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 46, November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n46butler>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
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