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THE AGE OF HYPER-REALITY JEAN BAUDRILLARD & POLITICS TODAY Over the past five years or so, a steady flow of translations of texts by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard have appeared in English, particularly in "radical" arts magazines, which have seemed incomplete without such a translation as figurehead. However there have been few attempts to come to terms with the content of his writings and the trajectory, validity and implications of his political theses. (1) As Henri Lefebvre's teaching assistant at Nanterre in the late-50s, Baudrillard was involved in the attempt to develop a "critique of everyday life" more responsive to contemporary developments (such as "leisure") than traditional Marxism. According to one account (2), other participants included Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Whatever the circumstances of the disputes over authorship of ideas developed in this area, there was an overlapping emphasis on questions of urbanism, leisure and tourism and on the importance of utilising the critique of the nature of the commodity. The others named were much more prominent in the period leading up to and during the May-June 1968 events, when the critique of everyday life seemed to have burst onto the streets. Nowadays, Cohn-Bendit is deeply involved in the area around Die Grunen (on the rebound from his love-affair with the Revolution), and Debord and Vaneigem have lapsed into near-silence, occasionally asserting their own uncompromising radicality (3). On the one side, immersion in the "practical"; on the other, little contact with the world today: an unfulfilled councillist project simply remains on the agenda, a missed appointment with History. By contrast, Baudrillard (although involved in a journal called Utopie), comes to prominence only with the attempt to understand the reflux of that movement. As he says "That imponderable situation, unanalysable in its breadth, but new and radical, has not ended, nor have the ravages caused by the deconstruction of certain fundamental concepts." (4) Le Systeme des Objets (published in 1968) investigated "how objects are perceived, to what needs other than functional they respond, what mental structures become confused with functional structures and contradict them, and what cultural, infracultural or transcultural system is the base for their perceived everydayness?" (5) The System of Objects was that where technological "improvement" removed all trace of human symbolic relations from objects leaving a system of connotation without finality, haunted by the robot and the gadget - respectively the final victory and failure of the totally functional. However, consumption was not represented as just a clogged-up outpipe of the production system. "To become a consumption object, an object must become a sign" and consumption is the "activity of systematic manipulation of signs" (6), a "resigned" and limitness project, adopted in the absence of any other. Unlike the desiring subject in other models then being proposed, here "objects/signs in their ideality equate with one another and can multiply to infinity: they must do so to supplement an absent reality at each moment. It's finally because consumption is based on lack that it's irrepressible" (7). Contemporary "individuality" (as consumer) is induced by advertising, which constantly refers to "essence" and "nature", appearing as "the most democratic product", constantly solicitous of our needs and desires, even while recalling "the infantile situation of parental gratification". (8) La Societe de Consummation and the articles collected in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1970 & 1972 respectively) are more explicitly aligned with a radical project. It is striking how much of the subject-matter and treatment of the later books were already present: - Already socialists' assumptions regarding the "real" material base were being put into in question (9). It is likened to the Ego constituted in the Lacanian Mirror Stage: an imaginary order of terms like production, labour and value through which society will recognise itself. So terms like "use value", accepted by Marx as a relatively unproblematic finality of the production system, were to be seen only as the alibi of political economy. - Drawing on revisionist anthropologists of "primitive" societies, like Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres, Baudrillard introduced the notion of symbolic exchange, firstly to show that "surplus value" is meaningless in relation to exchange in "primitive" societies, and secondly as a privileged term to be counterposed to the entire history of "the political economy of the sign". - This concept of Symbolic Exchange is used to highlight the naivete in attempts to turn mass media to "socialist" ends: "it is not as vehicles of content, but in their form and very operation that media induce a social relation". This operation is that of "speech without response", without reciprocity. Against (or beyond) Orwell, it is said of TV that "There is no need to imagine it as a State periscope spying on everyone's private life - the situation as it stands is more efficient than that: it is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other" (10). - Already too, suspicion of talk of "essences", discovered even in Pop Art (and assumptions about which sank so many Alternativist projects), was leading to reticence about the transcendence of alienation which socialism would supposedly realise. The Mirror of Production (1973) concentrates on the effect of these criticisms on the radical project: "A radical questioning of the concept of production begins at the level of needs and products. But this critique attains its full scope in its extension to that other commodity, labour power. It is the concept of production, then, which is submitted to a radical critique." (p23) This can appear to be Baudrillard's most conservative and radical book: conservative in its utilization of Marxian terminological reference points; radical in that their relevance and limitations are submitted to close scrutiny, finding in them a political discourse based on uncritically accepted referents seen in the Mirror of Production. Contradictions emerging within a system do not imply any possibility for a break with that system: no revolt can be expected from any group of workers as long as they accept that identity imposed upon them; only "subversion" plays with the excess over pure function. But curiously, this greater "realism" about the overwhelming nature of the code, criticising the likes of Marcuse for optimism and over-simplification, ends with the then-obligatory recognition of women, blacks, gays and youth as the carriers of a genuine revolt against the code. The incorporation of these seemingly "subversive" demands now seems to have been relatively successful, through the creation of newly segmented markets within which "identity" can be represented and purchased. L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort (1976) carries out a more detailed examination of "the symbolic", the only positive term emerging from the previous books. This attempt is made partly by utilising Freud: "The Freud of the Death Drive must be set against the whole of the previous edifice of psychoanalysis, and even against the Freudian version of the Death Drive." (11) The Death Drive is placed in conjunction with Marx's observation that Capitalism is founded on the domination of Dead Labour over Lived Labour: "(The) possibility of quantitative equivalence... of wage and labour power assumes the worker's death, and that between commodities assumes the symbolic extermination of objects. Death always makes possible calculation of equivalence and regulation by indifference. This isn't violent and physical death, it's the ... respective neutralisation of life and death in survival, or deferred death" (12). This book also returns to the question/response digitality of the system (which had been mentioned in La Societe de Consummation) as the basis of the participation elicited by the system. Public Opinion Polls, etc. are an enormous simulation of public space, and the ever-increasing reliance upon them indicates the hyper-reality of the system: people are asked not to form opinions, but to reproduce those already framed. The constant appeals to "the social" and "the community" by agencies and political groups are merely evocation of presence-through-absence. Hyper-reality also appears in the economy, with the constant reference to crisis hiding the loss of any objective standard, whether Gold or Dollar. (This last example related to the post-1971 end of the Dollar Standard and 1970s inflation, but also mentioned the EuroBond market, all the more relevant today, when currency dealing is seen as an extremely profitable area with no finality or discernable Surplus Value creation.) Although the "order of production" and its supposed contradictions were no longer privileged, there remained reliance on the "subversion of the code" by subgroups who practise "refusal" and reject representation within the ruling code. With the dissipation of such activity, what remains? "...I believed in a possible subversion of the code of the media and in the possibility of an alternate speech and a radical reciprocity of symbolic exchange. Today all that has changed." (13) From In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978) onward, symbolic exchange is joined in Baudrillard's analyses by a new positive term, the mass, a term to be regarded as positive in its absolute negation of any meaning. The "mass" always rejected any asceticism: for example, in religion it preferred "the immanence of ritual... to the transcendence of the Idea". "For the masses, the Kingdom of God has always been already here on Earth, in the pagan immanence of images." (14) If power in modern societies has been instituted through the replacement of the reciprocity of symbolic exchange by the speech without response of functional objects, their acceptance without overt subversion by the mass is rotated into a tactical refusal of meaning. Baudrillard had always been suspicious of theories of "alienation", with their privileging of supposed transcendental values: now he was happy to negate all such assumptions, saying of the masses that "They are given meanings: they want spectacle." (15) and that "the desire for a show... is a spontaneous, total resistance to the ultimatum of historical and political reason." Alienation "has probably never been anything but a philosopher's ideal perspective for the use of hypothetical masses. It has probably never expressed anything but the alienation of the philosopher himself - in other words, he who thinks himself other." (16). Leftists have explained the near-constant tiny numbers on demonstrations etc. by mumbling about alienation and false consciousness, which amounts to a slander against almost everyone. Baudrillard removes the accusation, suggesting that the "mass strategy" is far in advance of that of the Leftists, who are incapable of moving beyond outmoded positions based on the age of production. With the loss of a positive carrier of subversion, he seems to draw attention to the hyper-reality of his own position as, in a strange prose-style based on incessant use of astronomical analogy (Black Holes, Red Shifts, etc.), he develops and exaggerates the idea of apathy as a form of resistance practised by the "mass" to all meanings which politicals of all descriptions would impose on them. The "mass" becomes the only term which can describe those who reject meaning and participation: a Black Hole into which politicos shine light but which absorbs it all and emits none. The mass strategy in response to those who try to impose meaning is presented as switching between hyper-conformity and demand for subjectivity. This is likened to the strategy of a child in relation to the parent's demands: childish behavior when told to "Act your age!" and wanting to be treated as an individual subject when treated like an infant. Opposition becomes just an effect. In this sense of rejecting all imposed meaning in favour of an eternal polyvalency, Baudrillard accepts the label of "nihilist": "If being nihilist is to be obsessed with the mode of disappearance and no longer with the mode of production, then I am a nihilist... Theoretical violence, not truth, is the sole expedient remaining to us. But this is a utopia. For it would be admirable to be a nihilist, if radicality still existed." (17) The evaporation of meaning and the system's own nihilism, which swamps everything in indifference leave all activities deadened, without echo. A recent collection of essays on French politics over the past 10 years, concentrating particularly on the 1981-86 Socialist Government, La Gauche Divine (1985) allows us to see what practical application may be derived from his outlook. That these articles were originally newspaper commentaries inevitably emphasises the pop-sociology and the novelty of the glorification of the avoidance of meaning. Baudrillard rightly emphasises that the Socialist Party's victory was far from their traditional expectations: no popular movement brought the Left to power, merely an electoral simulation. "Seeing their having gained power as deserved recompense and the logical outcome of historical development, they failed to see that they occupied a space left empty by the reflux of historic and political passions" (18) Their fundamental misunderstanding about the basis of their power haunted their whole experience of Government. He asks how ex-Premier Laurent Fabius could be so confused about "the perverse mechanisms of popular indifference, deploring apathy and resistance, the absence of collective myth, etc... in spite of the fact that he is in power precisely thanks to this indifference." (19) The ghost of gauchisme haunts this, in the stress still laid on mass movements, but with an insistence that no such movement is now possible - only simulation remains. And the politicians' major error seems to be their unawareness of this fact and their naive continued stress on political virtue. Baudrillard's insistence on this error and on the "bad side" in politics leave his articles reading like a latter-day rewrite of The Prince. Baudrillard states that "...I do not have relations with the intelligentsia. I am not totally integrated in its networks, cliques and hothouses" (20). Seen from here this seems a surprising statement, in the light of his journalism. The extent to which he is indeed outside the intelligentsia is that he rejects the role of carrier of positivity traditional to French intellectuals, rejecting it as historically outmoded as much as anything else: "...It's not enough to ask (the intellectual) to be a critical consciense or moral guardian of his time - that required an appropriate passion: for Gide it was sincerity; for Sartre, lucidity; for the Situationists and others, radicality. After that, it's over: no more politico-intellectual virtue. After that, there's irony, the fascination of a world dominated by chance processes, by microscopic sequences of events - transhistory, as dangerous as a minefield to cross."(21) Whatever the extent to which this does describe a situation and the crisis perceived by that class, only one role seems to remain: that of intellectual pundit commenting on the mode of disappearance, and much of Baudrillard's recent writing seems designed to fill that role. It would be pleasant to reject Baudrillard's writings as a candyfloss construction invented by someone dragging himself "between the television set and the writing desk". It would be a particular relief if some real movements could be held up to show it as redundant. Baudrillard's writings can be utilised to show how erroneous is the current pragmatic radicalism which seeks to take refuge in the halls of representation, to defend "our" "gains" during a period of reflux. A politics based on opposition to representation itself has no place there. As for Baudrillard's own outlook, though, despite displayed more stamina than others in trying to understand recent developments without recourse to mere insistence that things are really the way they'd like them to be, and despite devoting much breath to inflating the immense and perverse figure of the mass, he still founders before the same problem, the dissipation of any real movement. A.D. 5/11/86 NOTES: 1 The obvious exceptions to this are the introductions to the two Telos translations (The Mirror of Production and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign) and the articles in Seduced and Abandoned: The Baudrillard Scene (Stonemoss Press). 2 L'Estetico il Politico by Mirella Bandini. 3 In the filmscript In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni Debord revels in a role as master-strategist, boasting of having avoiding recuperation into the role of radical media pundit. 4 La Gauche Divine p87 5 Le Systeme des Objets, p9 6 Le Systeme des Objets, p276-277 7 Le Systeme des Objets, p283 8 Le Systeme des Objets, p240 9 "A spectre haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity." (Preface to The Mirror of Production). 10 This and previous quotation from For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign p169, p172. 11 L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort p.8. 12 L'Echange Symbolique p.67-68 13 The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media in New Literary History, Spring 1985. 14 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities pp7-8. 15 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities p.10 16 This and previous quotation from The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media. 17 From Sur le Nihilisme, cited in Paul Foss's Despero ergo Sum in Seduced and Abandoned. 18 La Gauche Divine p87 19 La Gauche Divine aux Prises avec L'Indiff-rence in Lib-ration, 28/2/86. 20 In the interview with Maria Shevtsova Intellectuals Commitment and Political Power in Thesis 11 no.10/11. 21 La Gauche Divine p86 From Here & Now 4 1987 - No copyright