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
