I know it’s a sad statement when I discover an author because they have died, but this is the case with Jean Baudrillard, who passed away at the age of 77.
Timing aside, ideas and books do seem to fall into my lap at a time that is almost always relevant to my current interests. As I research the work of this man, I’ve been fascinated by the connection between his philosophy and how closely it relates to my own research topics (although he obviously got there first and is way smarter.)
What is intriguing is how much cross-disciplinary applicability there is between his work and those industries that are dominating the headlines in the high-tech world: virtual reality, web 2.0 and social networking. Alongside the ubiquitous optimism that comes with these fields are the revolutionary changes that are occurring in journalism, entertainment, and the academy.
His followers would find it ironic that I learned the most about him via Wikipedia, at least biographically. However, I felt that the description of his arguments and the following criticism was not so helpful. Indeed, the short bio on the BBC story managed in a few short sentences to capture the more interesting nuances of his philosophy, namely that:
He gained notoriety for his 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place and again a decade later for describing the 9/11 attacks as a “dark fantasy”.
Baudrillard focused his work on how our consciousness interacts with reality and fantasy, creating from them a copy world he called hyper-reality.
He said that mass media led to hyper-reality becoming a dominant force in today’s world - an argument taken to a provocative extreme in his statement that the 1991 Gulf War primarily took place on a symbolic level.
If this is an accurate portrayal (I should be writing this after I’ve read the man’s books but, what the hell, I’m probably proving his point by not), then his ideas are worth discussion.
There is little doubt that the controversy surrounding his statements that the first Gulf War did not exist and that 9/11 was the culmination of America’s dark fantasy gained him notoriety, but it seems clear that he was not denying the historical reality of those events.
It is their significance that he is interested in, and he seems to claim that the mythological significance that these events have in our society is a constructed one, and it is weaker than what used to pass for significance. The reason for this is because our society, so heavily saturated with the layered interlinking references of mass media and pop culture, that the images these sources evoke have lost their own original meaning without mass media and pop culture to prop that meaning up. How much meaning these elements originally had, according to Baudrillard, would be interesting to discern because the answer could potentially place him more in the camp of conservatives than in the camp of post-modernism. My guess, however, is that he would not have allowed that sort of inconsistency to survive in his work.
Hyperreality is probably the prevailing psychological phenomenon of our society and times and, boy, is it a gold mine. Coming back to my original reason for interest in his work, and some of the things I alluded to in my previous post, is that we are a culture comfortable with obsessed with our constructed realities and the mythology that comes with those fantasies because it’s the closest thing we have to meaning. How else do you survive, mentally and emotionally, in a Wal-Martian, flickering-fluorescent-lit landscape such as ours?
To use his example of 9/11 (this is not intended as a rant - it just happens to be a very convenient and potent case), if one reads the literature of those most galvanized by those attacks, it should come as no surprise that they immediately called for what has come to be known as the War on Terror.
Works like those of Tom Clancy were prophetic in a way that we may not understand until we at least acknowledge the possibility of 9/11 being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Politics aside, this would be a tremendous development in the study of both political science and history.
So, in 9/11 all of the building blocks were there to develop a leviathan political fantasy into a dynamic policy and war machine that continues to consume resources and divide the nation. This political fantasy is a narrative that asserts itself against those who deny its existence. Powerful stuff.
Daniel Rourke had some interesting things to say about all this just over a year ago.
