Second Thoughts

“The illusion of desire has been lost in the ambient pornography, and contemporary art has lost the desire for illusion...After the orgies and the liberation of all desires, we have moved into the transsexual, the transparency of sex, with signs and images erasing all its secrets and ambiguities.”

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard is best known for his theory of the “simulacram”, which is based in the idea that contemporary society has its roots in images and illusions which give the appearance of freedom, but which are actually a deceitful web of bondage. Bondage like slavery, not bondage like sex. But I'm getting there.

One common example to demonstrate his idea is the United States dollar bill: when dollar bills were first printed, each was meant to represent a piece of of silver or gold in the U.S. treasury’s vaults. As time went on, however, dollar bills came to be an end in themselves. Dollar bills have value since we believe that they have value; they are, in effect, a simulacrum of their original existence. So, Baudrillard theorizes, is the rest of contemporary society. We have learned to see the world in packaged, “hyperreal” images. The media has become more convincing than reality; in turn those media images are how we view the world.

In his usual impenetrable, aphoristic manner, Baudrillard recently answered a few questions in a Times interview based on his reaction to the riots in Paris. He evades most of the questions and pronounces that all our values simulated, from the War in Iraq to the riots in Paris, from the choice of buying one car or another to whether there any more real intellectuals.

JB: When Jacques Chirac says, "No!" to Bush about the Iraq war, it's a delusion. It's to insist on the French as an exception, but there is no French exception.

NYT: Hardly. France chose not to send soldiers to Iraq, which has real meaning for countless individual soldiers, for their families and for the state.

JB: Ah, yes. We are "against" the war because it is not our war. But in Algeria, it was the same. America didn't send soldiers when we fought the Algerian war. France and America are on the same side. There is only one side.

NYT: Isn't that kind of simplistic reasoning why people get so tired of French intellectuals?

There are no more French intellectuals. What you call French intellectuals have been destroyed by the media. They talk on television, they talk to the press and they are no longer talking among themselves.

Baudrillard is championing Deconstruction, the theory that what we call the “real world” is really an oppressive social construct based on illusions which we have mutually agreed to stitch together and call reality. It is similar to Marxism in that society is an oppressive structure which traps us, which pressures us to think a certain way (or agree on the simulated reality), but it is not limited to economic systems (or leftist politics); it is post-Marxism, “cultural Marxism.” Deconstructionists, if they are hardcore enough, must deconstruct leftist politics and claim to be apolitical. They must also, in the end, deconstruct deconstructionism, as Baudrillard does faithfully at the end of the interview:

NYT: Some here feel that the study of the humanities at our universities has been damaged by the incursion of deconstruction and other French theories.
JB: That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.

Nobody needs French theory, so this whole conversation is supposed to eat itself like a snake swallowing its tail. Maybe it does. But Baudrillard also made it into the New Yorker the same week, and he had some things to say in a recent public reading, covered by a “Talk of the Town.” which I found much more interesting.

He covers two things: sex and art. Both, he says, have lost their importance because they, too, have joined with reality in becoming, simply, an image. Sex has lost its ambiguities because it has become overwhelmed with pornography (images of sex), and contemporary art has moved away from the traditional idea of art as “form.” What that means is that art as a “painting”, or art as a “sculpture” is not longer viable. Until the 20th century, these were ways that we accepted art to be made. A painting was a canvas with paint, a sculpture was some kind of three-dimensional object.

The modernists examined this idea by creating works which explored the inherent qualities of the form. Modernist paintings, for example, sought to be flat (since a canvas is flat), meaning the canvas ought not to be a “window” into another world with three dimensions, like in a painting of a landscape, for example; it ought to instead exemplify the flatness of the canvas. So Jackson Pollock made impenetrable canvases that forced you to see a surface.

But back to sex. The implication is that pornography (in the largest definition, including, probably, sexualized advertising and such) has overwhelmed our conception of sex. “In the United States...sex is everywhere except in sexuality,” another French lit critic, Roland Barthes, writes.

That’s a really compelling idea, since if there is any possibility of escape from the simulacrum of a simulated reality, it is sex with another person (or, though it isn’t as racy, a transcendant experience with a piece of art). It's too visceral to be denied its intense reality. But Baudrillard believes that both of these things have been overrun by simulated images just like the rest of reality--he paints a pretty bleak picture. Since contemporary art is concerned with aesthetics but not form, it is no longer differentiated from the rest of the simulation, which is only aesthetic. Separating the two is the point.

“As art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, with the banality of reality...it’s a total confusion between art and reality.” The separation of art’s aesthetics from its forms is a great idea--form is what used to save art from being a negative simulation, but that is no longer the case. We no longer believe in the ontological separation of art from reality: it is not something on a higher plane which hands us our morals and spirituality.

Iris Murdoch, the British novelist, critic, professor of philosophy at Oxford, and die-hard Platonist, writes this of art: “Art today is in a turmoil partly because we are all unprecedentedly self-conscious about the images and symbols which make our lives supportable. We know too much psychology. Technological changes which used to be slow and invisible are now fast and perceptible. Religion is not what it was.” Murdoch spent a significant part of her career as an essayist searching for a way to create a defensible moral philosophy out of art: her essays had titles like “The Novelist as Metaphysician” and “Salvation by Words.”

I agree with her on both counts, that Art today is in turmoil, and also that trying to find a defensible moral philosophy in it is a worthwhile quest. How does one extract morality from art? If it has become too self-conscious and collapsed into reality, to where do we otherwise look? Religion certainly is not what it was--postmodernism has not been kind to traditional religion. But the thicket that is literary theory is somehow an attractive replacement: even as postmodernism is highly suspicious of what it calls “metanarratives,” it becomes one--it is as all-encompassing and satisfying as a religious beginning-to-end-of-time way of seeing the world. It is a window by which to explain and examine everything.