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Jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange

2018; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jhistrhetoric.21.2.0213

2687-8011

David Hoffman,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

I imagine myself to be almost exactly the sort of person for whom Brian Gogan wrote his meticulously structured book about Jean Baudrillard, a prolific French writer who is best known for his work on simulacra and simulation. I am not a Baudrillard scholar. Like many academics who went through college and graduate school in the 1980s and 1990s, I encountered Baudrillard alongside many other French thinkers who were lumped together under the banner of “postmodernism,” a descriptor that most of them, including Baudrillard, rejected. Although my interests took me in other directions once I got there, the intellectual fascination that I had with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and, to a lesser extent, Jean Baudrillard was one of the forces that drew me to graduate studies in communication. I read Baudrillard in excerpted form in a variety of classes and occasionally checked in on other works over the years, such as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. (Baudrillard’s claim in this book was not that bombs didn’t drop or that people didn’t die, but rather that the war was a simulation of a war because the outcome was never in doubt. It was a made-for-TV show.) I recognized Baudrillard as the foremost theorist of the undeniable obsession of American culture with simulacra that is played out at Disney World and Las Vegas, Renaissance fairs and colonial Williamsburg, in Blade Runner and The Matrix, and on the holodeck of the USS Enterprise. But I had little concept of the depth and breadth of Baudrillard’s work or how it connected with the rhetorical tradition. Gogan’s book has given me some sense of both. Gogan’s greatest achievement in Jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange is to excavate a theoretical structure useful to rhetoricians from the oeuvre of a writer who produced social and linguistic theory, culture critique, political commentary, and even collections of aphorisms.Gogan provides a concise articulation of the rhetorical theory that he attributes to Baudrillard: “Baudrillard’s rhetorical theory stretches the concept of invention so that invention is positioned as the relationship between, on the one hand, the art of appearance and, on the other hand, the art of disappearance” (32). Gogan equates the movement between appearance and disappearance, which Baudrillard calls symbolic exchange, with the goal of rhetoric. “… the goal, or telos, of Baudrillard’s rhetorical theory is a movement that he names symbolic exchange” (100). He spends two-thirds of the book culling material about the “art of appearance” and the “art of disappearance” and “symbolic exchange” from Baudrillard’s oeuvre to give substance to “the rhetoric of symbolic exchange.”Gogan grounds Baudrillard’s art of appearance in his writings about the process of simulation. Gogan opposes Baurillard’s conception of simulation to representation because they imply different ontological structures. As Gogan understands representation, any “representation” will have less ontological primacy than the “reality” that it represents. In contrast, the simulacra produced by the process of simulation are no less real than the entities they simulate. Indeed, the appearance of even a single simulacrum as an entity that is on the same ontological level as any other destroys the ontological hierarchy implied by representation. For instance, in Blade Runner, when replicants are revealed to be as human as any human being (if not “more human than human”), the ontological primacy of humanity, grounded in some “reality” outside the process of simulation, disappears. Baudrillard contends that all things are simulacra.The art of disappearance is coextensive with the art of appearance and the two are in constant tension. Disappearance, as Gogan reads Baudrillard’s use of the term, is not laden with meaning. It is not a death. It is even not a meaningful absence. It is not like realizing that there are no birds at your feeder in the backyard when there have been birds there every other day of the year. That would be a meaningful absence. It is more like thinking one sees a bird on the lawn, but then realizing that it is just a leaf. The bird has disappeared and has left behind no meaning. The appearance of a simulacrum frequently hides the disappearance of something else. When the simulacrum becomes fully “real,” what disappears is reality itself. “[The] simulacrum is not that which hides the truth, but that which hides the absence of truth,” Gogan quotes Baudrillard as saying (66). Appearance and disappearance are completely reversible. Anything can be made to disappear through the process of simulation. Replicants threaten to cause the disappearance of humanity in Blade Runner in much the same way that “fake news” threatens to cause the disappearance of news. In both cases the predecessors survive: biological humans continue to exist in the world of Bade Runner and anchors continue to read “the news” in the present day, but the meaningfulness of the distinctions between replicant and human, and between real and fake news, is on the verge of disappearance. An imperfect counterfeit devalues the currency. A perfect counterfeit destroys it.Gogan works harder than might be necessary to show that Baudrillard’s writing contains rhetorical theory, but the extensive discussion of Plato’s Sophist that he launches to prove this claim will probably help rhetoricians who have more familiarity with the premodern than the postmodern part of the rhetorical tradition. In the Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger contends that the sophist is a maker of likenesses distinguishable from the philosopher because the likenesses the sophist produces are phantasma—fantasy-likeness that distort reality. The philosopher, on the other hand, produces likenesses that represent reality in its true proportions. Gogan argues that Baudrillard, like many ancient sophists and contemporary rhetoricians, rejects the notion that there is any “divine yardstick” with which one can measure the real in order to distinguish phantasma from true likenesses. All that phantasma can be compared to are other phantasma. Baudrillard more frequently uses the word simulacra than phantasma or the etymologically-related “fantasy’” but the ontology of simulacra is basically the same as that of phantasma. Rhetoricians unfamiliar with Baudrillard may also be aided by Gogan’s chapter 10, which puts Baudrillard into conversation with Kenneth Burke.Some of the best parts of Gogan’s book are at the beginning and end. Chapter 2 is a biographical sketch that takes the approach of presenting seven snapshots of moments in the unusual career of a provocative theorist who achieved his doctorate only a year before an early retirement from his position of junior lecturer at the Univerdité de Nanterre in Paris in 1987, where he had been on faculty since 1966. From 1987 until his death in 2007, he devoted himself to writing full time. Among the moments Gogan collects are the blistering attack Baudrillard launched on Michel Foucault in 1976 that won him notoriety; his lecture delivered on stage with a band playing “Twin Peaks-style music” behind him at the Bonaventure Hotel in 1986; and an exhibition of his photography in 1999. If the biographical sketch is one of the more entertaining sections of the book, the critical review of literature presented in the Appendix is one of the most useful to rhetorical scholars seeking to get a foothold in Baudrillard’s vast output of work.What rhetoricians get from Jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange, then, is a vision of rhetoric as an art that brings about appearances and disappearances in an ontologically flat world populated with simulacra. What we do not get is much discussion of the mechanisms that bring these appearances and disappearances about, or much rhetorical criticism that makes use of the theory that Gogan has excavated from Baudrillard’s writing. There is one extended example of how such a theory might be applied, an analysis of Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010). This book tells of the life, and afterlife, of Henrietta Lacks, who was an African American woman who died of cancer in 1951. Her cancer cells were cultured and have continued to reproduce ever since and have become one of the most important cell lines in medical research, generally referred to as the HeLa cell line. Gogan works to draw out analogies between the proliferation of HeLa cells and simulacra, and discusses the disappearance and reappearance of Henrietta herself.Overall, as good at Gogan is at distilling Baudrillard’s work into a plausible rhetorical theory, one has to go back to Baudrillard himself for an abundance of the sort of provocative analyses that created his reputation. It is my hope that Gogan’s book will encourage more rhetoricians to read Baudrillard and ask themselves what the man who explained Disney World and claimed that the Gulf War did not happen would say about such contemporary phantasma as bitcoin, Donald Trump, fake news, and “fake” Chinese cities made to look like scale version of Paris, London, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.