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Baudrillard Seriously: The Joys of Misprision

2012; Duke University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/17432197-1571994

1751-7435

François Cusset,

Cinema and Media Studies

November 1996 in Primm, USA, straddling Interstate 15 on the California-Nevada border. Outside, cracked earth as far as the eye can see. Just a hilltop on the horizon, straight out of some Western. The air unrelentingly hot, with dried branches swirling around. Inside, the cheap, rather cluttered, decor of Whisky Pete's Casino, with its row of one-armed-bandits and solitary gamblers on the ground floor. On the floor above, in a ballroom somewhat past its best, an event is being held that is uncommon for this locale and imperceptible to its habitués. Three days of meetings on the theme of chance, bringing brokers and croupiers, Butoh dancers and I-Ching experts, Indian chiefs and experimental DJs, transsexual poets and catastrophe theorists, successively to the stage. Facing them in the stalls sit trendy New Yorkers and young, careworn Angelenos, whose fashion-victim attire contrasts with the stained-sweatshirt look of the gamblers on the floor below and who are prompted by the permissive laws of the gambling state to try everything that is prohibited on the East and West Coasts—smoking, drinking, drug taking, chatting one another up.“Chance: Three Days in the Desert” is an initiative of teacher and publisher Sylvère Lotringer and his partner, Chris Kraus. The unrivaled star of the show, for whom some of the audience have traveled thousands of miles, is none other than Jean Baudrillard. Affable and nonchalant, he moves along the aisles of Whisky Pete's with an air of indulgent surprise that is, of course, only half feigned. “Roll-up” in hand, he leafs through the most incongruous of magazines at the publications table—extreme piercing or alternative rock. A few extemporized dialogues take place with the other participants or with young North American fans, the rare French speakers among them acting as intermediaries. DJ Spooky, a Deleuzian rising star on the turntable scene, even approaches Jean B. (the “Chance” crowds use the English pronunciation) to ask whether the combinatory practices of the DJ belong to the universe of the simulacrum. He receives only a circumspect reply from the author, for whom the letters DJ have, as yet, no particularly precise meaning. On the evening of the “Chance Party,” Sylvère Lotringer manages to convince the “Sultan of Simulation” (as the Village Voice reporter will call him in his article), the “French theorist” personified, the enthusiastic casino-goer but recalcitrant guru, to don a crooner's gold lamé jacket and read extracts from his texts on stage, in the presence of a number of musicians and three languorous muses who have dubbed themselves, in best Baudrillard-speak, the “Suicide Motel Girls.” The spectators, perplexed, dance nonetheless. From time to time, they sing along, but mostly they hum. A ceremony of anomic city-dwellers, mentally rambling under the influence of psychotropic drugs or behind their video cameras. The next day around noon, in front of a few friends and the handful of journalists who made the journey, an extended conversation takes place between Baudrillard and Allucquère Rosanne (or “Sandy”) Stone, depressive ex-male turned postfeminist performance artist and professor of communication technologies at the University of Texas, a not so typical academic (except for the large, virile hands of the pedagogue) and the savviest theorist on the relations between bodily pleasures and new technologies.A misunderstanding on all levels, then. One of those structural misunderstandings that stretch the field of what is possible and, in the USA, both fuel the creation of concepts and feed the great inclusive cultural melting pot. A misunderstanding at Primm between a silver-tongued tourist, whom they are trying to present as a millenarian prophet, and young interlocutors, of whose ways he knows nothing, themselves shooting from the hip with grand terms like “metaphysics” and “the end of reality,” as though they were the keys of access to real life. A misunderstanding between campus leftists and trendy techno-libertarians, the latter celebrating and the former denouncing the magic of the commodity with the same Baudrillardian turns of phrase (and arguments). A misunderstanding—in this case, deliberate—between organizers purposely leaving it to chance to make the connections announced in their program and a half-cut audience, all of whom had developed a specific image of what an encounter between “the event” and “chance” might be (since they were promised an “event on chance”) before gradually forgetting why they had come. And, encompassing all the others, the supreme misunderstanding, the one that radically separates ground from first floor, intellectual elite from proletarian roughnecks, metaplayers from real players, weavers of references from single-arm waggers, as though they were two forever distinct strata. This is the ultimate misprision, unsuspected by the—oh so numerous—proponents of simulationism and Baudrillard studies, and it consists in the far greater proximity of the distinguished guest to the plebeians, yoked as they are to the apparatus (dispositif ) of total gaming (theoretical interest as much as spontaneous empathy), than to the weightless intelligentsia of a country that scorns such people; in a word, his “lesser distance”—to speak of something more of the order of fate than of some strategy of disappearance—from all the Americans who will never read him than from the very many fewer who devour the “Readers” and other “Best of Baudrillard” collections unleashed by his publishing success on the other side of the Atlantic.Having an offbeat thinker, whom his young local readers saw as the high priest of the Age of the Simulacrum, pass for a postmodern crooner; organizing a wacky, joyfully intransitive encounter around the absent center of his impossible consecration; leaving the trend spotters unsatisfied with a single, inadequate gold lamé jacket (unless they conferred some higher meaning on this lack of meaning); and bringing together in this way polygraphic students and New Age thinkers not even on neutral territory but outside any territory, at an equal distance from the campuses, the bookshops, and the rare American cosmopolitan centers (those reassuring havens where our leading intellectual exports normally make their landings), a long way, even, from the ground floor of the casino with its jingling quarters, in a nonplace beyond the reach of the tactics of reterritorialization that domesticate texts and tame their authors—“Chance,” even in its eponymous uncertainty, brought together in 1996 some of the ingredients of the curious relationship uniting (or separating) Baudrillard and his American destiny: his destiny in that elusive “America” that his book of the same name seemed so badly to have characterized, as some of its citizens saw it, that, as soon as the English translation appeared, they made their opinion known by burning several copies on a campus green. To tell the story of their impossible encounter, we would have to be able to grasp, in their searing intensity, those singular moments (too intangible to satisfy the hurried empiricists of “intellectual history”) in which the texts of a single author and the workings of a great cultural machine come together; that point of contact between a “name,” jealous of his anonymity, and more inclined than his colleagues to risk opprobrium or put his faithful followers off the scent, and a hegemonic culture—the American—seeking to legitimate the last castoffs of its leisure industry and irradiate the innovations of the moment, which it is about to submit to market testing, with theoretical prestige. For in the United States the name Beau-Dr'll-Hard—the American pronunciation of which, apart from reminding us of the difficulty of transplanting “a culture which, like fine wines and French cuisine, does not cross the ocean well” (Baudrillard), suggests some charmer busy making a hole in a resistant wall—references a whole theory of entertainment under constant threat of losing itself in its object, a modality of being allegedly specific to advanced ludo-capitalism (and which we might characterize as the paradox of onto-tainment), and hence the entire palette of standardized worlds and subjective counterworlds: a simulationist doctrine in conceptual art and its appeals to a “fun” participation in Capital; neo-figurativism in painting with its odes to critical emotion; jargon-ridden parodies and fractal plots in the campus novel; the power of images and the virtualization of the world in TV series (like Wild Palms, produced by Oliver Stone and devised by soi-disant Baudrillardians); the substitution of a digital matrix for the real world in the new Hollywood science fiction (with the celebrated furtive appearance of a Baudrillard book in a scene in the first Matrix film, the directors vainly attempting to recruit their cult thinker as “theory consultant” for the next two); the circulation, from lecture theater to alternative gallery, of extracts from the master in the eminently portable Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series; and the many sparkling references to Jean B. and prepackaged allusions to his writings thrown out, in recent years, in the paratactic logic of epileptic cultures, by the stammering new media with their promises of temporary autonomy—from student websites to the pages of Wired magazine, from the essays of Hakim Bey to the forums of Internet surfers questing after meaning.All in all, then, the American Baudrillard is everywhere and nowhere. He is brandished by the dissident artists of the 1980s, on the pretext that the era of representation could be said to have extended into an “era of simulation,” whereas, for Baudrillard, this latter marks the definitive end of the former. His name is intoned by art historians and critics in an effort to theorize post-pop practices, even though he has never stopped saying that art, as a coherent field of practice, ended with Andy Warhol. He is quoted online or on the silver screen by the stagers of the great technological simulacrum or the pioneers of cyberpunk science fiction, even though Technology—which he has long boasted of giving a wide berth—was never conceived by him as a vast hall of machines hidden beneath the surface of the world. He is invoked more cautiously, but just as often, by the American “cultural” Marxists in the name of a—questionable—line of descent from the Frankfurt School, even though his analyses of Capital as “extermination of difference” or “infinite outbidding” all converge toward the hypothesis of an end to exteriority (or its illusion)—that very exteriority postulated by Fredric Jameson, Stanley Aronowitz, and the others to justify their critical activity. He is quoted word for word by everyone, even when his oracular tone might be said to be merely parodic or his epigraphs entirely apocryphal (like the epigraph to Simulacra and Simulation supposedly taken from Ecclesiastes and chorused by his readers as though the Bible had itself predicted postmodernity). And he is read, still, as the incarnation of that diffuse entity called “theory,” though he has so often delighted in pointing out its tendency to “disappear by becoming its own object” and is even presented as the core of this new corpus of French theory invented in the USA at the dawn of the Reagan era, as though he had never invited us to “forget Foucault,” to beware of the “appalling changeability of desire” in Deleuze, or to gibe at the jouissance of capital in Jean-François Lyotard.However, Baudrillard's sallies on the intransitiveness of theory, its unpredictable chameleonism or its historical end, when the real and its representation finally become one-and-the-same, ultimately put him much more in tune with that willfully unidentified (flying) object of theory, as developed by American literary scholars over the past thirty years, slippery indeterminate object that it is, than Foucault's genealogies, Deleuze's theoretical practices, or even the famous Derridean deconstruction. If, in the United States, this referent-less theory looks like anything at all, it probably looks like what Baudrillard says of it in The Ecstasy of Communication or The Perfect Crime. And while he persists in eluding American discursive capture, leaving New York's artists orphaned of their master-thinker in 1987, disappointing the Marxists with his “postmodern” temptations, or finding it hard to supply the manufacturers of academic concepts with tools didactic enough to be operational, this very style of throwing his followers off the scent puts him, in a way, at the heart of the theoretical enigma. A structural discrepancy in tone, register, and even the very unfolding of his work (the author amusing himself by being always one text ahead of his improbable epigones) prevents most of his American readers from grasping the writerly irony and paradoxical thinking that form the very substance of his journey. Unfamiliar with literary play and condemned by their institutional framework to “take something from a writer,” they prefer to substitute a corpus of notions, a strict doctrine, and a taxonomy of “isms”—these things all being presented as strictly “Baudrillardian.” As though the only way to carve out a place for Baudrillard in the New World and get a handle on a thinking that has always been resistant to commentary and reappropriation had been to take him seriously, thus running contrary to his own approach. You would, indeed, have to take him fearfully seriously to wring from his work the numerous academic products to which it has already given rise in the Anglo-Saxon world: exegeses, anthologies, glossaries, and introductions and the synthesizing monographs devoted to him by those certified experts in Baudrillardism, the like of which are unknown in France, from Douglas Kellner at the University of California, Los Angeles, to Mark Poster over at Irvine—both of them, significantly, on the West Coast, a place all the more Baudrillardian than New England for having severed its ties the more cleanly with those fetishes of the Old World that are history, the fine arts, and argumentative logic itself.A glance at the introduction produced by Poster for a selection of Baudrillard texts—despite the accurate perspectives it outlines—is sufficient to show that to catch the author in the net of this spirit of seriousness (esprit de sérieux), with its attendant battery of references, is to run the risk of failing totally to grasp his inimitable spirit. In the few short pages of that introduction, we see him driven, from his very first texts onward, by a genuine telos—his aim: to “make intelligible…the proliferation of communications through the media” (Poster 1988: 1). He is the heir to the Adornian-Benjaminian project of critical elucidation of the cultural industries; a structuralist analyst of the internal play of the code in the consumer society (even if he is criticized for “never adequately defin[ing]” the concept of “code” [Poster 1988: 4]); the theorist carrying forward the Marxist projects of Henri Lefebvre or the early Tel Quel group into the field of social semiology, an atypical Habermasian or a “fatalistic” postmodernist, successor in the field of commercial signs to the projects of Derrida or the Nouvelle Critique on the “self-referentiality of language,” and by turns prime target and conceptual recourse of the great feminist academics. And, to close the loop, though his passage “from leftism to fatalism” is duly noted, his Cool Memories series is, in the end, equated with Adorno's Minima Moralia, even if the exegete's enthusiasm is tempered by his humanistic, rationalistic regret concerning Baudrillard's moral inconsistency and lack of deliberative rigor. Though this esprit de sérieux enabled Baudrillard to be lionized in the USA, it nonetheless prevented the great majority of his emulators from following him, after September 11, 2001, down the path of “death live” and “suicidal capitalism” into the arcana of a new series of paradoxes, on the occasion of which, against the right-thinking consensus, he managed to reconnect with the pugnacious tone and some of the political paradigms of his earliest work. To Americans, that particular Baudrillard, hooted out of a lecture hall at New York University in November 2001, is something decidedly less funny. That is to say, he is something less serious than the prophet of the Hyperreal and “terminal Virtuality” that his local users have made of him—users who ultimately prefer a concept not to overflow its bounds, who would rather it did not stand out like a sore thumb.This article is a translation by Chris Turner of François Cusset, “Baudrillard Seriously, Les joies du quiproquo” © L'Herne, 2004, www.lherne.com.