Jean-François Lyotard

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Jean-François Lyotard, photo by Bracha L.Ettinger, 1995 French philosopher,sociologist, and literary theorist

Born 10 August 1924Versailles, France

Died21 April 1998 (aged 73)(leukemia)Paris, France

Nationality French

Era 20th-century philosophyRegion Western PhilosophySchool Postmodernism

Institutions

Sorbonne, University ofParis VIII, University ofCalifornia, Irvine, EmoryUniversity, CollègeInternational dePhilosophie, University ofParis X, Yale

Notable ideas

The "postmodern condition"Collapse of the "grandnarrative"

Influenced by[show]Influenced[show]

Jean-François Lyotard (French: [ ʒɑ̃ f ʁɑ̃ swa lj ɔ ta ʁ ] ; 10 August1924 – 21 April 1998) was a French philosopher, sociologist,and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulationof postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of theimpact of postmodernity on the human condition. He was co-founder of the International College of Philosophy withJacques Derrida, François Châtelet, and Gilles Deleuze.

Biography[edit source | editbeta]

Jean François Lyotard was born in 1924 in Versailles, Franceto Jean-Pierre Lyotard, a sales representative, and MadeleineCavalli. He went to primary school at the Paris lycée Buffonand Louis-le-Grand. As a child, Lyotard had many aspirations:to be an artist, a historian, a Dominican monk, and a writer.[1] Lyotard describes the process of realizing he could notbecome a monk, an artist, an historian, or a writer as "fate"in his autobiography called Peregrinations.[2] Lyotard studiedphilosophy at the Sorbonne. His master's thesis, Indifference as anEthical Concept, analyzed forms of indifference and detachment inZen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and Epicureanism.[3] Aftergraduation, he held a research post at France's NationalCenter for Scientific Research .[4] In 1950, Lyotard took up aposition teaching philosophy in Constantine in French EastAlgeria. Lyotard earned a Ph.D in literature with hisdissertation, Discours, figure (published 1971).[5] He marriedtwice: in 1948 to Andrée May, with whom he had two children,Corinne and Laurence, and for a second time in 1993 to DoloresDjidzek, the mother of his son David (born in 1986).[6]

Political life[edit source | editbeta]

In 1954 Lyotard became a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, a Frenchpolitical organisation formed in 1948 around the inadequacy ofthe Trotskyist analysis to explain the new forms of dominationin the Soviet Union. His writings in this period mostlyconcern with ultra-left politics, with a focus on the Algeriansituation—which he witnessed first-hand while teachingphilosophy in Constantine.[7] He wrote optimistic essays ofhope and encouragement to the Algerians, which was reproducedin Political Writings.[8] Following disputes with CorneliusCastoriadis in 1964, Lyotard left Socialisme ou Barbarie for thenewly-formed splinter-group Pouvoir Ouvrier, before resigning fromPouvoir Ouvrier in turn in 1966.[9] Although Lyotard played anactive part in the May 1968 uprisings, he distanced himselffrom revolutionary Marxism with his 1974 book Libidinal Economy.[10] He distanced himself from Marxism because he felt thatMarxism had a rigid structuralist approach and they wereimposing 'systematization of desires' through strong emphasison industrial production as the ground culture.[11]

Academic career[edit source | editbeta]

In the 1950s Lyotard taught Lycée Constantine in Algeria. Inthe early 1970s Lyotard began teaching at the University ofParis VIII, Vincennes until 1987 when he became ProfessorEmeritus. During the next two decades he lectured outside ofFrance, notably as a Professor of Critical Theory at theUniversity of California, Irvine and as visiting professor atuniversities around the world including Johns HopkinsUniversity, University of California, Berkeley, YaleUniversity, Stony Brook University and the University ofCalifornia, San Diego in the U.S., the Université de Montréalin Quebec (Canada), and the University of São Paulo in Brazil.He was also a founding director and council member of theCollège International de Philosophie, Paris. Before his death,he split his time between Paris and Atlanta, where he taughtat Emory University as the Woodruff Professor of Philosophyand French.

Later life and death[edit source | editbeta]

Lyotard repeatedly returned to the notion of the Postmodern inessays gathered in English as The Postmodern Explained to Children,Toward the Postmodern, and Postmodern Fables. In 1998, whilepreparing for a conference on Postmodernism and Media Theory,he died unexpectedly from a case of leukemia that had advancedrapidly. His work-in-progress, Augustine's Confession, waspublished posthumously in the same year. He is buried in LePère Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Theory[edit source | editbeta]

Lyotard's work is characterised by a persistent opposition touniversals, meta-narratives, and generality. He is fiercelycritical of many of the 'universalist' claims of theEnlightenment, and several of his works serve to undermine thefundamental principles that generate these broad claims.

In his writings of the early 1970s, he rejects what he regardsas theological underpinnings of both Karl Marx and SigmundFreud: "In Freud, it is judaical, critical sombre (forgetfulof the political); in Marx it is catholic. Hegelian,reconciliatory (...) in the one and in the other the

relationship of the economic with meaning is blocked in thecategory of representation (...) Here a politics, there atherapeutics, in both cases a laical theology, on top of thearbitrariness and the roaming of forces".[12] Consequently herejected Adorno's negative dialectics which he regarded asseeking a "therapeutic resolution in the framework of areligion, here the religion of history".[13] In Lyotard's"libidinal economics" (the title of one of his books of thattime), he aimed at "discovering and describing differentsocial modes of investment of libidinal intensities".[14]

The collapse of the "Grand Narrative"[edit source | editbeta]

Most famously, in La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (ThePostmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979), he proposes whathe calls an extreme simplification of the "postmodern" as an'incredulity towards meta-narratives'.[15] These meta-narratives—sometimes 'grand narratives'—are grand, large-scale theoriesand philosophies of the world, such as the progress ofhistory, the knowability of everything by science, and thepossibility of absolute freedom. Lyotard argues that we haveceased to believe that narratives of this kind are adequate torepresent and contain us all. He points out that no one seemedto agree on what, if anything was real and everyone had theirown perspective and story.[16] We have become alert todifference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations,beliefs and desires, and for that reason postmodernity ischaracterised by an abundance of.[17] For this concept Lyotarddraws from the notion of 'language-games' found in the work ofWittgenstein. Lyotard notes that it is based on mapping ofsociety according to the concept of the language games.[18]

In Lyotard's works, the term 'language games', sometimes alsocalled 'phrase regimens', denotes the multiplicity ofcommunities of meaning, the innumerable and incommensurableseparate systems in which meanings are produced and rules fortheir circulation are created.

This becomes more crucial in Au juste: Conversations (Just Gaming)(1979) and Le Différend (The Differend) (1983), which develop apostmodern theory of justice. It might appear that theatomisation of human beings implied by the notion of themicronarrative and the language game suggests a collapse of

ethics. It has often been thought that universality is acondition for something to be a properly ethical statement:'thou shalt not steal' is an ethical statement in a way that'thou shalt not steal from Margaret' is not. The latter is tooparticular to be an ethical statement (what's so special aboutMargaret?); it is only ethical if it rests on a universalstatement ('thou shalt not steal from anyone'). But universalsare impermissible in a world that has lost faith inmetanarratives, and so it would seem that ethics isimpossible. Justice and injustice can only be terms withinlanguage games, and the universality of ethics is out of thewindow. Lyotard argues that notions of justice and injusticedo in fact remain in postmodernism. The new definition ofinjustice is indeed to use the language rules from one 'phraseregimen' and apply them to another. Ethical behaviour is aboutremaining alert precisely to the threat of this injustice,about paying attention to things in their particularity andnot enclosing them within abstract conceptuality. One mustbear witness to the 'differend.'

"I would like to call a differend the case where the plaintiffis divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reasona victim. If the addressor, the addressee, and the sense ofthe testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as ifthere were no damages. A case of differend between two partiestakes place when the regulation of the conflict that opposesthem is done in the idiom of one of the parties while thewrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom."[19]

The sublime[edit source | editbeta]

Lyotard was a frequent writer on aesthetic matters. He was,despite his reputation as a postmodernist, a great promoter ofmodernist art. Lyotard saw 'postmodernism' as a latenttendency within thought throughout time and not a narrowly-limited historical period. He favoured the startling andperplexing works of the high modernist avant-garde. In them hefound a demonstration of the limits of our conceptuality, avaluable lesson for anyone too imbued with Enlightenmentconfidence. Lyotard has written extensively also on fewcontemporary artists of his choice: Valerio Adami, DanielBuren, Marcel Duchamp, Bracha Ettinger and Barnett Newman, aswell as on Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky.

He developed these themes in particular by discussing thesublime. The "sublime" is a term in aesthetics whose fortunesrevived under postmodernism after a century or more ofneglect. It refers to the experience of pleasurable anxietythat we experience when confronting wild and threateningsights like, for example, a massive craggy mountain, blackagainst the sky, looming terrifyingly in our vision.

Lyotard found particularly interesting the explanation of thesublime offered by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment(sometimes Critique of the Power of Judgment). In this book Kantexplains this mixture of anxiety and pleasure in the followingterms: there are two kinds of 'sublime' experience. In the'mathematically' sublime, an object strikes the mind in such away that we find ourselves unable to take it in as a whole.More precisely, we experience a clash between our reason(which tells us that all objects are finite) and theimagination (the aspect of the mind that organises what wesee, and which sees an object incalculably larger thanourselves, and feels infinite). In the 'dynamically' sublime,the mind recoils at an object so immeasurably more powerfulthan we, whose weight, force, scale could crush us without theremotest hope of our being able to resist it. (Kant stressesthat if we are in actual danger, our feeling of anxiety is verydifferent from that of a sublime feeling. The sublime is anaesthetic experience, not a practical feeling of personaldanger.) This explains the feeling of anxiety.

What is deeply unsettling about the mathematically sublime isthat the mental faculties that present visual perceptions tothe mind are inadequate to the concept corresponding to it; inother words, what we are able to make ourselves see cannotfully match up to what we know is there. We know it's amountain but we cannot take the whole thing into ourperception. Our sensibility is incapable of coping with suchsights, but our reason can assert the finitude of thepresentation[citation needed]. With the dynamically sublime, our senseof physical danger should prompt an awareness that we are notjust physical material beings, but moral and (in Kant's terms)noumenal beings as well. The body may be dwarfed by its powerbut our reason need not be. This explains, in both cases, whythe sublime is an experience of pleasure as well as pain.

Lyotard is fascinated by this admission, from one of thephilosophical architects of the Enlightenment, that the mindcannot always organise the world rationally. Some objects aresimply incapable of being brought neatly under concepts. ForLyotard, in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, but drawing on hisargument in The Differend, this is a good thing. Suchgeneralities as 'concepts' fail to pay proper attention to theparticularity of things. What happens in the sublime is acrisis where we realise the inadequacy of the imagination andreason to each other. What we are witnessing, says Lyotard, isactually the differend; the straining of the mind at the edgesof itself and at the edges of its conceptuality.

Criticism[edit source | editbeta]

Manfred Frank argues that Lyotard ignores that the underlyingconditions for consensus is also a condition for thesuccessful communication of his own thought.[20] He criticizesLyotard for playing into the hands of the irrational forcesthat often give rise to injustice and differends by puttingforward a false argument against rational consensus.[21]

Influences[edit source | editbeta]

This section requiresexpansion. (June 2008)

The collective tribute to Lyotard following his death wasorganized by the Collège International de Philosophie, andchaired by Dolores Lyotard and Jean-Claude Milner, theCollege's director at that time. The proceedings werepublished by PUF in 2001 under the general title Jean-FrançoisLyotard, l'exercice du différend.[22]

Lyotard's work continue to be important in politics,philosophy, sociology, literature, art, and cultural studies.[23]

To mark the tenth anniversary of Lyotard's death, Aninternational symposium about Jean-François Lyotard organizedby the Collège International de Philosophie (under thedirection of Dolores Lyotard, Jean-Claude Milner and GeraldSfez) was held in Paris on 25–27 January 2007. 

Lyotard: The PostmodernCondition

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, viewed by some asthe "bible" of the postmodernism movement, Jean FrançoisLyotard analyzes how the legitimation of knowledge has changedin the computerized societies of the twentieth century. TheReport was commissioned by the Conseil des Universités of theQuebec government in order to frame the discussion ofincorporating computers into higher education. The postmoderncondition is the fundamentally different outlook on knowledgethat has arisen after the Enlightenment, and particularlysince World War II in Western post-industrial, information-based society. In the Report, Lyotard makes a variety ofclaims and recommendations about how knowledge, particularlycomputerized knowledge, in the postmodern condition must belegitimated and made accessible in a just society.

Lyotard believes that cybernetics (computers,telecommunication systems and the various associateddisciplines of language and information processing) has cometo dominate society and economics since World War II. Hebelieves that the status of knowledge has changed profoundlyin this period. The major question that interests him is howknowledge gets legitimated in cybernetic society, and thenature of the legitimation itself. Lyotard maintains thatwhatever principle society uses to legitimate knowledge mustalso be the principle that it uses to legitimate decision-making in society, and consequently government, laws,education, and many other basic elements of society.Legitimation in the Enlightment was tied to what Lyotard callsmeta-narratives, or grand narratives. Meta-narratives aretotal philosophies of history, which make ethical andpolitical prescriptions for society, and generally regulatedecision-making and the adjudication of what is consideredtruth. Meta-narratives roughly equate to the everyday notionof what principles a society is founded on. They form thebasis of the social boand. The meta-narratives of theEnlightenment were about grand quests. The progressiveliberation of humanity through science is a meta-narrative.The quest for a universally valid philosophy for humanity isan example of a meta-narrative. The problem is that when meta-

narratives are concretely formulated and implemented, theyseem to go disastrously awry. Marxism is the classic case of ameta-narrative based on principles of emancipation andegalitarianism which, when implemented, becomes perverted tototalitarianism under Stalin in the Soviet Union.

Lyotard claims that we have now lost the ability to believe inmeta-narratives, that the legitimating function that grandquests once played in society has lost all credibility. Thequestion then becomes, what now forms the basis oflegitimation in society if there is no overarching meta-narrative? For Lyotard, the answer lies in the philosophy ofWittgenstein, which analyzes the way sub-groups in societyregulate their behavior through rules of linguistic conduct.If we have rejected grand narratives, then what we have fallenback on are little narratives. Little narratives areWittgenstein's "language games", limited contexts in whichthere are clear, if not clearly defined, rules forunderstanding and behavior. We no longer give credence tototal philosophical contexts like Marxism which ostensiblywould prescribe behavior in all aspects of life, rather, wehave lots of smaller contexts which we act within. We areemployees, we are students. These roles legitimate knowledgeand courses of action in their limited contexts. Byfragmenting life into a thousand localized roles, each withtheir particular contexts for judging actions and knowledge,we avoid the need for meta-narratives. This is the nature ofthe modern social bond. Our effectiveness is judged in thecontext of how well we perform in each of these many limitedroles. We may be a good employee but a poor driver, etc.

Therefore, what legitimates knowledge in the postmoderncondition is how well it performs, or enables a person toperform, in particular roles. This criterion forms the basisof Lyotard's "performativity" legitimation of knowledge andaction. In a cybernetic society, knowledge is legitimated byhow performative it is, if it effective minimizes the variousrequired inputs for the task and maximizes the desiredoutputs. This is an intuitively compelling notion of ourcurrent society. Knowledge and decision-making is for the mostpart no longer based on abstract principles, but on howeffective it is at achieving desired outcomes.

This is a troubling state of affairs for Lyotard, becauseperformativity pays no heed to any kind of ethics. For thelegitimating principle of society to ignore the question ofethics is to verge on the equation of "might makes right."Lyotard is fundamentally pluralistic in his inclinations, anddetests any kind of philosophy which leads to uniformity ofopinion, enforced or otherwise. Science in the service ofperformativity is particularly troubling to him, as he sees itleading inevitably to rule by terror, whether this is thegreat terror of a totalitarian state, or the little terror ofuniversity reasearch programs being discontinued because theyare not sufficiently commercially competitive. Lyotard seeks aform of legitimation that will work in a manner akin toperformativity, without recourse to a meta-narrative, but alsowithout the tendency toward a uniform totalization of opinion.He is at pains in particular to combat the continued Marxisttradition of Jürgen Habermas, and his advocacy of a consensuscommunity. As a pluralist, Lyotard does not believe thatstriving in one way or another to bring every member ofcommunity into consensus is healthy. Just as the strength ofscience rests to a large extent in the continued striving ofindividuals to competitively voice new views, Lyotard believesthat a just system of legitimation must emphasize diversityand the fertile search for new answers to old questions.

"Paralogy" is the legitimating principle that Lyotard putsforward as an answer to these problems. Lyotard develops theconcept by first reviewing a variety of non-traditionalscientific areas which have proved fruitful in recent years,including chaos theory, fractal mathematics, and quantummechanics. The key feature of these areas of research whichLyotard believes provides their special strength is that,unlike the incremental and theory-bound work of most areas ofthe sciences, they actively and imaginatively seek outinstabilities and anomalies in current theories. This searchfor anomalies and paradoxes echoes the type of move thatLyotard previously identified as compelling in language gamesgenerally, and he seizes on the concept to form the basis ofhis legitimation grail. Since the most effective(performative) strategy for achieving advances in bothscientifically based and narratively based fields of researchis the search for imaginative new insights into existing

theories by noting anomalies and paradoxes, he coins aneologistic term: paralogy. Paralogy here does not have thedictionary meaning of "false reasoning", but captures theelements of this individualistic search for new meaning in oldlanguage games. Lyotard identifies an important technicalrequirement for this new legitimation strategy to beeffective, namely that the major data banks of informationcurrently hoarded must be freely available in order to createa level playing field for research-oriented language games.This move is in the best interest of the system as a whole,since through intellectual inventions realized by a widevariety of individuals, the performativity of the systemimproves overall. Paralogy is not mere innovation for its ownsake, but a creative and productive resistance to totalizingmetanarratives. [Readings, 1991: 73-74] The approach offersjustice in the sense that the rights of the individual arerespected. Paralogy completes Lyotard's project, forming thebasis of a legitimating principle that will respect both hisdesire for justice and his need for the unknown.

Lyotard believes that current trends in society are movingtoward paralogy as a legitimizing principle. He allies thetrend toward temporary contracts rather than permanentinstitutions with paralogy, although he acknowledges that thisevidence is equivocal. He does not specifically say whetherparalogy will completely overthrow performativity, or simplyact in concert with it. This is one of the most problematicareas of his project. The component of the paralogy conceptwhich may initially appears most utopian to our current way ofthinking is the idea that data banks can be made freelyavailable to everyone in society. If anything, corporationsare inclined to zealously guard access to their databases andprovide access to them only through expensive fees. Lyotarddescribes in great detail the importance of information inworld competition for power and economic dominance. He makesan intellectual case for open access to information by a looseappeal to perfect information competitions in game theory, butoffers no clear mechanism for moving toward free access todata in society.

I maintain that there is new evidence for paralogy as anactual emerging principle of legitimation in society. The

currents of society have clearly continued to flow in thecybernetic directions that Lyotard focuses on. The emergingconcept of our society as an "attention economy" has much incommon with the theme of paralogy. [Lanham, 1993] Briefly, theconcept is that information alone is no longer of much value;we are awash in information, oceans of it, to the point thatit is hardly a scarce commodity, as it once was. What isscarce is our time, specifically the limited amount of timethat we have to pay attention to new information.

When considered in this light, something like paralogy looksincreasingly likely. The Internet is a vast ocean of sharedinformation. What becomes significant is the clearidentification of what in this ocean is worthy of attention.This is where paralogy comes in. Lyotard's paralogy can betaken to mean exactly this notion of identifying the worthynew concepts that emerge from the sea of research. Thisinversion of the rules of the economic game has definiteramifications for higher education's research activities.Quite apart from the ramifications of this point, Lyotard'swork makes many specific recommendations that have bearing onthe question of the Internet as a medium for scholarlycommunication. These points must be explored to gain a fullsense of how Lyotard's Report addresses the central concernsof my project.

Fredric JamesonFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search

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Fredric Jameson

Born April 14, 1934 (age 79)Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Era 20th- / 21st-centuryphilosophy

Region Western PhilosophySchool Western MarxismMain interests

Postmodernism ·Modernism · science

fiction · Utopia ·history · narrative ·Cultural studies ·dialectics · structuralism

Notable ideas

cognitive mapping ·national allegory ·political unconscious

Influenced by[show]Influenced[show]

Fredric Jameson (born 14 April 1934) is an American literarycritic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known forhis analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once describedpostmodernism as the spatialization of culture under thepressure of organized capitalism. Jameson's best-known booksinclude Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The PoliticalUnconscious, and Marxism and Form.

Jameson is currently William A. Lane Professor in The Programin Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.[1] In2012, the MLA gave Jameson their sixth Award for LifetimeScholarly Achievement.[2]

Life and works[edit source | editbeta]

Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating fromHaverford College in 1954, where his professors included WayneBooth,[3] he briefly traveled to Europe, studying at Aix-en-Provence, Munich and Berlin, where he learned of newdevelopments in continental philosophy, including the rise ofstructuralism. He returned to America the following year topursue a doctoral degree at Yale University, where he studiedunder Erich Auerbach.

Early works[edit source | editbeta]

Erich Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence onJameson's thought. This was already apparent in the latter'sdoctoral dissertation, which would be published in 1961 asSartre: the Origins of a Style. Auerbach's concerns were rooted in theGerman philological tradition; his works on the history ofstyle analyzed literary form within social history. Jamesonwould follow in these steps, examining the articulation of

poetry, history, philology, and philosophy in the works ofJean-Paul Sartre.

Jameson's work focused on the relation between the style ofSartre's writings and the political and ethical positions ofhis existentialist philosophy. The occasional Marxian aspectsof Sartre's work were glossed over in this book; Jameson wouldreturn to them in the following decade.[4]

Jameson's dissertation, though it drew on a long tradition ofEuropean cultural analysis, differed markedly from theprevailing trends of Anglo-American academia (which wereempiricism and logical positivism in philosophy andlinguistics, and New Critical formalism in literarycriticism). It nevertheless earned Jameson a position atHarvard University, where he taught during the first half ofthe 1960s.

Research into Marxism[edit source | editbeta]

His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense study of Marxistliterary theory. Even though Karl Marx was becoming animportant influence in American social science, partly throughthe influence of the many European intellectuals who hadsought refuge from the Second World War in the U.S., such asTheodor Adorno, the literary and critical work of the WesternMarxists were still largely unknown in American academia inthe late 1950s and early 1960s.[5]

Jameson's shift toward Marxism was also driven by hisincreasing political connection with the New Left and pacifistmovements, as well as by the Cuban Revolution, which Jamesontook as a sign that "Marxism was alive and well as acollective movement and a culturally productive force".[6] Hisresearch focused on critical theory: thinkers of, andinfluenced by, the Frankfurt School such as Kenneth Burke,György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Sartre, who viewedcultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory.This position represented a break with more orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which held a narrow view of historical materialism.In some ways Jameson has been concerned, along with otherMarxist cultural critics such as Terry Eagleton, to articulate

Marxism's relevance in respect to current philosophical andliterary trends. In 1969, Jameson co-founded the MarxistLiterary Group with a number of his graduate students at theUniversity of California, San Diego.[7]

While the Orthodox Marxist view of ideology held that thecultural "superstructure" was completely determined by theeconomic "base", the Western Marxists critically analyzedculture as a historical and social phenomenon alongsideeconomic production and distribution or political powerrelationships. They held that culture must be studied usingthe Hegelian concept of immanent critique: the theory thatadequate description and criticism of a philosophical orcultural text must be carried out in the same terms that textitself employs, in order to develop its internalinconsistencies in a manner that allows intellectualadvancement. Marx highlighted immanent critique in his earlywritings, derived from Hegel's development of a new form ofdialectic thinking that would, as Jameson comments, 'pullitself up by its bootstraps.'

Narrative and history[edit source | editbeta]

History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson'sinterpretation of both the reading (consumption) and writing(production) of literary texts. Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with thepublication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,the opening slogan of which is "always historicize" (1981). ThePolitical Unconscious takes as its object not the literary textitself, but rather the interpretive frameworks by which theyare now constructed. It emerges as a manifesto for newactivity concerning literary narrative.

The book's argument emphasizes history as the 'ultimatehorizon' of literary and cultural analysis. It borrowednotions from the structuralist tradition and from RaymondWilliams's work in cultural studies, and joined them to alargely Marxist view of labor (whether blue-collar orintellectual) as the focal point of analysis. Jameson'sreadings exploited both the explicit formal and thematicchoices of the writer and the unconscious framework guidingthese. Artistic choices that were ordinarily viewed in purely

aesthetic terms were recast in terms of historical literarypractices and norms, in an attempt to develop a systematicinventory of the constraints they imposed on the artist as anindividual creative subject. To further this metacommentary,he described the ideologeme, or "the smallest intelligible unitof the essentially antagonistic collective discourses ofsocial classes."[8] (The term "ideologeme" was first used byValentin Voloshinov [9] and then was popularised by JuliaKristeva. Kristeva defined it as "the intersection of a giventextual arrangement...with the utterances... that it eitherassimilates into its own space or to which it refers in thespace of exterior texts...". [10])

Jameson's establishment of history as the only pertinentfactor in this analysis, which derived the categoriesgoverning artistic production from their historical framework,was paired with a bold theoretical claim. Jameson's bookclaimed to establish Marxian literary criticism, centered inthe notion of an artistic mode of production, as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework forunderstanding literature.[11] According to Vincent B. Leitch,the publication of The Political Unconscious "rendered Jameson theleading Marxist literary critic in America."[12] The groundworklaid out in this book would serve as a basis for another ofJameson's best-known works.

The critique of postmodernism[edit source | editbeta]

"Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" wasinitially published in the journal New Left Review in 1984,during Jameson's tenure as Professor of Literature and Historyof Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.This controversial article, which would later be expanded to afull-sized book in 1991, was part of a series of analyses ofpostmodernism from the dialectical point of view Jameson haddeveloped in his earlier work on narrative. Jameson hereviewed the postmodern "skepticism towards metanarratives" as a"mode of experience" stemming from the conditions ofintellectual labor imposed by the late capitalist mode ofproduction.

Postmodernists claimed that the complex differentiationbetween "spheres" or fields of life (such as the political,

the social, the cultural, the commercial, etc.) and betweendistinct classes and roles within each field, had beenovercome by the crisis of foundationalism and the consequentrelativization of truth-claims. Jameson argued, against this,that these phenomena had or could have been understoodsuccessfully within a modernist framework; postmodern failureto achieve this understanding implied an abrupt break in thedialectical refinement of thought.

In his view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into anundifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization ofthe cultural sphere, which had retained at least partialautonomy during the prior modernist era, by a newly organizedcorporate capitalism. Following Adorno and Horkheimer'sanalysis of the culture industry, Jameson discussed thisphenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film,narrative and visual arts, as well as in his strictlyphilosophical work. Two of Jameson's best-known claims fromPostmodernism are that postmodernity is characterized bypastiche and a crisis in historicity. Jameson argued thatparody (which requires a moral judgment or comparison withsocietal norms) was replaced by pastiche (collage and otherforms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding).Relatedly, Jameson argued that the postmodern era suffers froma crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be anyorganic relationship between the American history we learnfrom schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current,multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapersand of our own everyday life" (22).

Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempted to view it ashistorically grounded; he therefore explicitly rejected anymoralistic opposition to postmodernity as a culturalphenomenon, and continued to insist upon a Hegelian immanentcritique that would "think the cultural evolution of latecapitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress alltogether".[13] His failure to dismiss postmodernism from theonset, however, was perceived by many as an implicitendorsement of postmodern views. From another angle, criticssuch as Linda Hutcheon have argued that postmodern artistsshow greater historical sophistication, by analyzing the

discursive means by which historical narratives areconstructed, than Jameson's account would allow.[14]

Recent work[edit source | editbeta]

Jameson's later writings include Archaeologies of the Future, a studyof utopia and science fiction, launched at Monash Universityin Melbourne, Australia, in December 2005, and The ModernistPapers (2007), a collection of essays on modernism.Postmodernism, A Singular Modernity (2002), and Archaeologies of the Futureform part of an ongoing project entitled The Poetics of Social Forms,which attempts, in Sara Danius's words, to "provide a generalhistory of aesthetic forms, at the same time seeking to showhow this history can be read in tandem with a history ofsocial and economic formations".[15] Jameson currently intendsto supplement the already published volumes of The Poetics of SocialForms with a study of allegory entitled Overtones: The Harmonics ofAllegory.[16]

Most recently, he has published three related studies ofdialectical theory: Valences of the Dialectic (2009), which includesJameson's critical responses to Slavoj Ž i ž ek , Gilles Deleuze,and other contemporary theorists; The Hegel Variations (2010), acommentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; and RepresentingCapital: A Reading of Volume One (2011), an analysis of Marx's DasKapital.

An overview of Jameson's work, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, by IanBuchanan, was published in 2007.

Holberg International Memorial Prize[edit source | editbeta]

In 2008, Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg InternationalMemorial Prize in recognition of his career-long research "onthe relation between social formations and cultural forms".[17]

The prize, which was worth NOK 4.6 million (approximately$648,000), was presented to Jameson by Tora Aasland, NorwegianMinister of Education and Research, in Bergen, Norway on 26November 2008.[18]

Influence in China[edit source | editbeta]

The first edition cover of Jameson's Postmodernism and CulturalTheories, tr. Tang Xiaobing (1987, Shaanxi Normal UniversityPress).

Jameson has had an enormous influence, perhaps greater thanthat of any other single figure of any nationality, on thetheorization of the postmodern in China. In mid-1985, shortlyafter the beginning of the cultural fever (early 1985 to JuneFourth, 1989)—a period in Chinese intellectual historycharacterized in part by intense interest in Western criticaltheory, literary theory, and related disciplines[19]—Jamesonintroduced the idea of postmodernism to China in lectures atPeking University and the newly founded Shenzhen University.[20]

[21] These were minor events amid the larger cultural ferment,yet ended up being quietly seminal: Jameson's ideas aspresented at Peking University had a major impact on somegifted young students, including Zhang Yiwu and Zhang Xudong,budding scholars whose work would come to play an importantrole in the analysis of postmodernity in China.[22]

Notwithstanding the impact of these lectures on a few futureintellectuals, 1987 was the date of Jameson's truly enormouscontribution to postmodern studies in China: a book entitledPostmodernism and Cultural Theories (Chinese: 后后后后后后后后后后; pinyin:Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn), translated into Chinese by TangXiaobing. Although the Chinese intelligentsia's engagementwith postmodernism would not begin in earnest until thenineties, Postmodernism and Cultural Theories was to become akeystone text in that engagement; as scholar Wang Ning writes,its influence on Chinese thinkers would be impossible tooverestimate.[21] Its popularity may be partially due to thefacts that it was not written in a scholarly style and that,because of Jameson's specific critical approach, it waspossible to use the text to support either praise or criticismof the Chinese manifestation of postmodernity.[21] In WangChaohua's interpretation of events, Jameson's work was mostlyused to support praise, in what amounted to a fundamentalmisreading of Jameson:

The caustic edge of Jameson's theory, which had describedpostmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism," wasabandoned for a contented or even enthusiastic endorsement ofmass culture, which [a certain group of Chinese critics] saw

as a new space of popular freedom. According to these critics,intellectuals, who conceived of themselves as the bearers ofmodernity, were reacting with shock and anxiety at their lossof control with the arrival of postmodern consumer society,uttering cries of "quixotic hysteria," panic-stricken by therealization of what they had once called for during theeighties.[20]

The Jameson- and specifically Postmodernism and Cultural Theories-fueled debate over postmodernism was at its most intense from1994 to 1997, carried on by Chinese intellectuals both insideand outside the mainland; particularly important contributionscame from Zhao Yiheng in London, Xu Ben in the U.S., and ZhangXudong, also in the U.S., who had gone on to study underJameson as a doctoral student at Duke.[20]

FREDRIC JAMESON, in his magisterial work, Postmodernism, or, theCultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), has offered us a particularlyinfluential analysis of our current postmodern condition. LikeJean Baudrillard, whose concept of the simulacrum he adopts,Jameson is highly critical of our current historicalsituation; indeed, he paints a rather dystopic picture of thepresent, which he associates, in particular, with a loss ofour connection to history. What we are left with is afascination with the present. According to Jameson,postmodernity has transformed the historical past into aseries of emptied-out stylizations (what Jameson termspastiche) that can then be commodified and consumed. (See thenext module on pastiche.) The result is the threatened victoryof capitalist thinking over all other forms of thought.

Jameson contrasts this postmodern situation with themodernist situation that has been superceded. Whereasmodernism still believed in "some residual zones of 'nature'or 'being,' of the old, the older, the archaic" and stillbelieved that one could "do something to that nature and workat transforming that 'referent'" (ix), postmodernism has losta sense of any distinction between the Real and Culture. ForJameson, postmodernity amounts to "an immense dilation of[culture's] sphere (the sphere of commodities), an immense andhistorically original acculturation of the Real" (x). Whereas"modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critiqueof the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself,"

postmodernism "is the consumption of sheer commodification asa process" (x). That apparent victory of commodification overall spheres of life marks postmodernity's reliance on the"cultural logic of late capitalism." (See Marx: Modules:Jameson: Late Capitalism.)

Following from this economic base for thinking aboutpostmodernity, Jameson proceeds to pinpoint a number ofsymptoms that he associates with the postmodern condition:

1) the weakening of historicity. Jameson sees our"historical deafness" (xi) as one of the symptoms of our age,which includes "a series of spasmodic and intermittent, butdesperate, attempts at recuperation (x). Postmodern theoryitself Jameson sees as a desperate attempt to make sense ofthe age but in a way that refuses the traditional forms ofunderstanding (narrative, history, the reality obscured byideology). For postmodernists, there is no outside of ideologyor textuality; indeed, postmodern theory questions any claimto "truth" outside of culture; Jameson sees this situation asitself a symptom of the age, which in turn plays right intothe hands of capitalism: "postmodernism is not the culturaldominant of a wholly new social order..., but only the reflexand the concomitant of yet another systemic modification ofcapitalism itself" (xii). Jameson calls instead for the returnof history; hence, his mantra: "always historicize!" Jamesonpinpoints a weakening of history "both in our relationship topublic History and in the new forms of our privatetemporality, whose 'schizophrenic' structure (following Lacan)will determine new types of syntax or syntagmaticrelationships in the more temporal arts" (Postmodernism 6 ). AsJameson explains, the schizophrenic suffers from a "breakdownof the signifying chain" in his/her use of language until "theschizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure materialsignifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelatedpresents in time" (Postmodernism 27 ). Our loss of historicity,according to Jameson, most resembles such a schizophrenicposition.

2) a breakdown of the distinction between "high" and "low"culture. As Jameson puts it, the various forms ofpostmodernism "have, in fact, been fascinated precisely bythis whole 'degraded' landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV

series and Reader's Digest culture, of advertising and motels,of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-calledparaliterature, with its airport paperback categories of thegothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murdermystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materialsthey no long simply 'quote,' as a Joyce or a Mahler might havedone, but incorporate into their very substance" (Postmodernism3).

3) "a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation bothin contemporary 'theory' and in a whole new culture of theimage or the simulacrum" (Postmodernism 6 ). This depthlessnessis, of course, supported by point # 5. The depthlessnessmanifests itself through literal flatness (two dimensionalscreens, flat skyscrapers full of reflecting windows) andqualitative superficiality. In theory, it manifests itselfthrough the postmodern rejection of the belief that one canever fully move beyond the surface appearances of ideology or"false consciousness" to some deeper truth; we are leftinstead with "multiple surfaces" (Postmodernism 12 ). One resultis "that our daily life, our psychic experience, our culturallanguages, are today dominated by categories of space ratherthan by categories of time, as in the preceding period of highmodernism" (Postmodernism 16 ).

4) "the waning of affect" (Postmodernism 10 ) and "a wholenew type of emotional ground tone—what I will call'intensities'—which can best be grasped by a return to oldertheories of the sublime" (Postmodernism 6 ). The generaldepthlessness and affectlessness of postmodern culture iscountered by outrageous claims for extreme moments of intenseemotion, which Jameson aligns with schizophrenia and a cultureof (drug) addiction. With the loss of historicity, the presentis experienced by the schizophrenic subject "with heightenedintensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect" (Postmodernism28), which can be "described in the negative terms of anxietyand loss of reality, but which one could just as well imaginein the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory orhallucinogenic intensity" (Postmodernism 28-29 ).

5) a whole new technology (computers, digital culture,etc.), though Jameson insists on seeing such technology as"itself a figure for a whole new economic world system"

(Postmodernism 6 ). Such technologies are more concerned withreproduction rather than with the industrial production of

material goods.

Jean Baudrillard

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Jean Baudrillard (French: [ ʒɑ̃ bod ʁ ija ʁ ] ;[2] 27 July 1929 – 6March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher, culturaltheorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work isfrequently associated with postmodernism and specificallypost-structuralism.

Life[edit source | editbeta]

Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on July27, 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents werepeasants and his parents were civil servants. During his highschool studies at the Reims Lycée, he came into contact withpataphysics (via the philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet),which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard'slater thought.[3] He became the first of his family to attenduniversity when he moved to Paris to attend SorbonneUniversity.[4] There he studied German language and literature,which led him to begin teaching the subject at severaldifferent lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960until 1966.[3] While teaching, Baudrillard began to publishreviews of literature and translated the works of such authorsas Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.[5]

During his time as a teacher of German language andliterature, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology,eventually completing his doctoral thesis Le Système des objets (TheSystem of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri

Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently,he began teaching sociology at the Université de Paris-XNanterre, a university campus just outside of Paris whichwould become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.[6]

During this time, Baudrillard worked closely with PhilosopherHumphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a"visionary".[7] At Nanterre he took up a position as MaîtreAssistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences(Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor aftercompleting his accreditation, L'Autre par lui-même (The Other byHimself).

In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to theUSA (Aspen), and in 1973, the first of several trips to Japan(Kyoto). He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, whichled to his becoming a photographer.[8]

In 1986 he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche etd'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IXDauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teachingcareer. During this time he had begun to move away fromsociology as a discipline (particularly in its "classical"form), and, after ceasing to teach full-time, he rarelyidentified himself with any particular discipline, although heremained linked to the academic world. During the 1980s and1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his lastyears he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,[9]

being published often in the French- and English-speakingpopular press. He nonetheless continued supporting theInstitut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the CentreNational de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at theCollège de Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at the EuropeanGraduate School in Saas-Fee[10] and collaborated at the Canadiantheory, culture and technology review Ctheory, where he wasabundantly cited. He also participated in the InternationalJournal of Baudrillard Studies from its inception in 2004until his death.[11] In 1999–2000, his photographs wereexhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie inParis.[12] In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference onhis work, "Baudrillard and the Arts", at the Center for Artand Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.[13]

Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic, best known forhis analyses of the modes of mediation and technologicalcommunication. His writing—though mostly concerned with theway technological progress affects social change—coversdiverse subjects—including consumerism, gender relations, thesocial understanding of history, journalistic commentariesabout AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War,and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

His published work emerged as part of a generation of Frenchthinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard,Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan who allshared an interest in semiotics, and he is often seen as apart of the poststructuralist philosophical school.[14] Incommon with many poststructuralists, his argumentsconsistently draw upon the notion that signification andmeaning are both only understandable in terms of howparticular words or "signs" interrelate. Baudrillard thought,as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought aboutthrough systems of signs working together. Following on fromthe structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillardargued that meaning (value) is created through difference—through what something is not (so "dog" means "dog" because itis not-"cat", not-"goat", not-"tree", etc.). In fact, heviewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects,images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web ofmeaning; one object's meaning is only understandable throughits relation to the meaning of other objects; in other words,one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity.

From this starting point Baudrillard constructed broadtheories of human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His pictures of society portray societiesalways searching for a sense of meaning—or a "total"understanding of the world—that remains consistently elusive.In contrast to poststructuralists such as Foucault, for whomthe formations of knowledge emerge only as the result ofrelations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in whichthe excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge leadalmost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard'sview, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood

according to what it signifies (and because the process ofsignification immediately involves a web of other signs fromwhich it is distinguished) this never produces the desiredresults. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the originalLatin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He thereforeargued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding ofthe minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people areseduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a"simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of hisneologisms, a state of "hyperreality". This is not to say thatthe world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and morecomprehensively societies begin to bring reality together intoone supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure andunstable it looks and the more fearful societies become.[15]

Reality, in this sense, "dies out".[16]

Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs andof meaning in late 20th century "global" society had caused(quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this worldneither liberal nor Marxist utopias are any longer believedin. We live, he argued, not in a "global village", to useMarshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is evermore easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the"global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signsand commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic actssuch as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work thesymbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through theanthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille) isseen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification.Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the otherhand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, likegifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch. Baudrillard,particularly in his later work, saw the "global" society aswithout this "symbolic" element, and therefore symbolically(if not militarily) defenseless against acts such as theRushdie Fatwa[17] or, indeed, the September 11, 2001, terroristattacks against the United States and its militaryestablishment.

The object value system[edit source | editbeta]

In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of thePolitical Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society, Baudrillard's

main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects areconsumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard'spolitical outlook was loosely associated with Marxism (andsituationism), but in these books he differed from Marx in onesignificant way. For Baudrillard, it was consumption, ratherthan production, which was the main drive in capitalistsociety.

Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx'sconcept of "use-value". Baudrillard thought that both Marx'sand Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuineneeds relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply—despite the fact that Marx did not use the term 'genuine' inrelation to needs or use-values. Baudrillard argued, drawingfrom Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather thaninnate. He stressed that all purchases, because they alwayssignify something socially, have their fetishistic side. Objectsalways, drawing from Roland Barthes, "say something" abouttheir users. And this was, for him, why consumption was andremains more important than production: because the"ideological genesis of needs"[18] precedes the production ofgoods to meet those needs.

He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtainingvalue. The four value-making processes are as follows:[19]

1. The first is the functional value of an object; itsinstrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes; and arefrigerator cools.

2. The second is the exchange value of an object; itseconomic value. One pen may be worth three pencils; andone refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by threemonths of work.

3. The third is the symbolic value of an object; a value thata subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject. Apen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift ora commencement speaker's gift; or a diamond may be asymbol of publicly declared marital love.

4. The last is the sign value of an object; its value withina system of objects. A particular pen may, while having noadded functional benefit, signify prestige relative toanother pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all,

but may suggest particular social values, such as tasteor class.

Baudrillard's earlier books were attempts to argue that thefirst two of these values are not simply associated, but aredisrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later,Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally (The Mirror of Production andSymbolic Exchange and Death). But the focus on the differencebetween sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) andsymbolic value (which relates to Maussian gift exchange)remained in his work up until his death. Indeed it came toplay a more and more important role, particularly in hiswritings on world events.

Simulacra and Simulation[edit source | editbeta]

Main article: Simulacra and Simulation

As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved fromeconomically based theory to the consideration of mediationand mass communications. Although retaining his interest inSaussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (asinfluenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss), Baudrillard turnedhis attention to the work of Marshall McLuhan, developingideas about how the nature of social relations is determinedby the forms of communication that a society employs. In sodoing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's andRoland Barthes' formal semiology to consider the implicationsof a historically understood (and thus formless) version ofstructural semiology. The concept of Simulacra [20][21] alsoinvolves a negation of the concept of reality as we usuallyunderstand it. Baudrillard argues that today there is no suchthing as reality.

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of thesimulacrum: All is composed of references with no referents, ahyperreality. Progressing historically from the Renaissance,in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of thecounterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for areal referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness,etc.) that does not exist, in other words, in the spirit ofpretense, in dissimulating others that a person or a thingdoes not really "have it"—to the industrial revolution, in

which the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series,which can be propagated on an endless production line; andfinally to current times, in which the dominant simulacrum isthe model, which by its nature already stands for endlessreproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

Some examples Baudrillard brings up of the simulacrum of themodel are: 1) the development of nuclear weapons as deterrents—useful only in the hyperreal sense, a reference with no realreferent, since they are always meant to be reproducible butare never intended to be used—2) the (former) Twin Towers ofthe World Trade Center, which replaced a New York ofconstantly competing, distinct heights with a singular modelof the ultimate New York building: already doubled, alreadyreproduced, itself a reproduction, a singular model for allconceivable development, and 3) a menage-a-trois withidentical twins where the fantasy comprises having perfectionreproduced in front of your eyes, though the reality behindthis reproduction is nil and impossible to comprehendotherwise, since the twins are still just people. The very actof perceiving these, Baudrillard insists, is in the tactilesense, since we already assume the reproducibility ofeverything, since it is not the reality of these simulationsthat we imagine (in fact, we no longer "imagine" in the samesense as before; both the imagined and the real are equallyhyperreal, equally both reproducible and already reproductionsthemselves), but the reproducibility thereof. We do notimagine them reproduced for us, since the original image isitself a reproduction—rather, we perceive the model, thesimulation.

The end of history and meaning[edit source | editbeta]

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's mostcommon themes was historicity, or, more specifically, howpresent day societies utilise the notions of progress andmodernity in their political choices. He argued, much like thepolitical theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or"vanished" with the spread of globalization; but, unlikeFukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not beunderstood as the culmination of history's progress, but asthe collapse of the very idea of historical progress. ForBaudrillard, the end of the Cold War was not caused by one

ideology's victory over the other, but the disappearance ofthe utopian visions that both the political Right and Leftshared. Giving further evidence of his opposition towardMarxist visions of global communism and liberal visions ofglobal civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends theyhoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as his book TheIllusion of the End argued, he thought the idea of an end itself wasnothing more than a misguided dream:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are nolonger any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values.Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbinsof history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who inventedthem have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history,this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It hasbecome its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.[22]

Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electroniccommunication and global information networks the collapse ofthis façade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable.Employing a quasi-scientific vocabulary that attracted the ireof the physicist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speedsociety moved at had destabilized the linearity of history:"we have the particle accelerator that has smashed thereferential orbit of things once and for all."[23]

In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity withthe postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, whofamously argued that in the late Twentieth Century there wasno longer any room for "metanarratives". (The triumph of acoming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, inaddition to simply lamenting this collapse of history,Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analysehow the idea of forward progress was being employed in spiteof the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued thatalthough genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history,wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had beendeemed redundant, universality was still a notion utilised inworld politics as an excuse for actions. Universal valueswhich, according to him, no one any longer believed universalwere and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwiseunjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even

though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed inorder to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he wouldhave put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment,universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forwardprogress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed asa forward escape."[24]

Political commentary[edit source | editbeta]

On the Gulf War[edit source | editbeta]

Part of Baudrillard's public profile, as both an academic anda political commentator, comes from his 1991 book, titled forits provocative main thesis, "The Gulf War Did Not TakePlace". His argument described the first Gulf War as theinverse of the Clausewitzian formula: it was not "thecontinuation of politics by other means", but "thecontinuation of the absence of politics by other means".Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the AlliedForces, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form ofsacrifice to preserve his power (p. 72, 2004 edition). TheAllied Forces fighting the Iraqi military forces were merelydropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving tothemselves that there was an enemy to fight (p. 61). So, too,were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in realtime, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion thatthe US coalition and the Iraqi government were actuallyfighting, but, such was not the case. Saddam Hussein did notuse his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force). His politico-military power was not weakened, since he suppressed internaluprisings after the war. Overall, little had changedpolitically in Iraq, Saddam remained undefeated, and the"victors" were not victorious. Therefore, there was no war;the Gulf War did not occur.

Much of the repute that Baudrillard found as a result of thebook—originally a series of articles in the British newspaperThe Guardian and the French newspaper Libération in three parts:During the American military and rhetorical buildup as "TheGulf War Will not take Place"; during military action as "TheGulf War is not Taking Place", and after action was over, "TheGulf War Did Not Take Place"—was based on his critique thatthe Gulf War was not ineffectual, as Baudrillard portrayed it:

People died, the political map was altered, and SaddamHussein's regime was harmed. Some critics accuse Baudrillardof instant revisionism; a denial of the physical action of theconflict (part of his denial of reality, in general).Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism,encompassing cynical scepticism, and Berkelian idealism.Sympathetic commentators (such as William Merrin, in his bookBaudrillard and the Media) have argued that Baudrillard was moreconcerned with the West's technological and politicaldominance and the globalization of its commercial interests,and what it means for the present possibility of war. Merrinhas asserted that Baudrillard did not deny that somethinghappened, but merely questioned that that something was a war;rather it was "an atrocity masquerading as a war". Merrin'sbook viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant andbased upon misreading; Baudrillard's own position was morenuanced. In Baudrillard's own words (pp. 71–72):

Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more with him; hegases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres,the whole of Islam makes peace with him ... Even ... the 100,000 dead will onlyhave been the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood moneypaid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence, in order to conserve hispower. What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who donot want to have been excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove thiswar was indeed a war and not a shameful and pointless hoax ...

On the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001[edit source |editbeta]

In contrast to the "non-event" of the Gulf War, in the essayThe Spirit of Terrorism[25] he characterised the terrorist attacks onthe World Trade Center in New York City as the "absoluteevent". Seeking to understand them as an (ab)reaction[clarification needed]

to the technological and political expansion of capitalistglobalization, rather than as a war of religiously based orcivilization-based warfare, he termed the absolute event andits consequences as follows (p. 11 in the 2002 version):

This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islamand America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order tocreate the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based uponforce. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points

past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sensethe sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is notthe embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battlingagainst itself.

Baudrillard thus placed the attacks—as accords with his theoryof society—in context as a symbolic reaction to the continuedexpansion of a world based solely upon commodity exchange.This stance was criticised on two counts. Richard Wolin (in TheSeduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard and SlavojŽ i ž ek of all but celebrating the terrorist attacks,essentially claiming that the United States of Americareceived what it deserved. Žižek, however, countered thataccusation to Wolin's analysis as a form of intellectualbarbarism in the journal Critical Inquiry, saying that Wolin failedto see the difference between fantasising about an event andstating that one is deserving of that event. Merrin (inBaudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's positionaffords the terrorists a type of moral superiority. In thejournal Economy and Society, Merrin further noted that Baudrillardgives the symbolic facets of society unfair privilege abovesemiotic concerns. Second, authors questioned whether theattacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry arguedthat Baudrillard believed that their destruction was forced bythe society that created them, alluding to the notion that theTowers were "brought down by their own weight". In Latour'sview, this was because Baudrillard conceived only of societyin terms of a symbolic and semiotic dualism.

Reception[edit source | editbeta]

Denis Dutton, founder of Philosophy & Literature's "Bad WritingContest"—which listed examples of the kind of willfullyobscurantist prose for which Baudrillard was frequentlycriticised—had the following to say:

Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge andcriticism from their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrillard'shyperprose demands only that you grunt wide-eyed or bewildered assent. Heyearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend off any serious analysis ofhis own writing, remaining free to leap from one bombastic assertion to thenext, no matter how brazen. Your place is simply to buy his books, adopt hisjargon, and drop his name wherever possible.[26]

However only one of the two major confrontational books onBaudrillard's thought—Christopher Norris's Uncritical Theory:Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (ISBN 0-87023-817-5)—seeksto reject his media theory and position on "the real" out ofhand. The other—Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism toPostmodernism and Beyond (ISBN 0-8047-1757-5)—seeks rather toanalyse Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism (a conceptwith which Baudrillard has had a continued, if uneasy andrarely explicit, relationship) and to present a Marxistcounter. Regarding the former, William Merrin (as discussedabove) has published more than one denunciation of Norris'sposition. The latter Baudrillard himself characterised asreductive (in Nicholas Zurbrugg's Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact).

Willam Merrin's work has presented a more sympathetic account,which attempts to "place Baudrillard in opposition tohimself". Thereby Merrin has argued that Baudrillard'sposition on semiotic analysis of meaning denies himself hisown position on symbolic exchange. Merrin thus alludes to thecommon criticism of Structuralist and Post-structuralist work(a criticism not dissimilar in either Baudrillard, Foucault orDeleuze) that emphasising interrelation as the basis forsubjectivity denies the human agency from which socialstructures necessarily arise. (Alain Badiou and Michel deCerteau have made this point generally, and Barry Sandywellhas argued as much in Baudrillard's specific case.)

Finally, Mark Poster, Baudrillard's editor and one of a numberof present day academics who argue for his contemporaryrelevance, has remarked (p. 8 of Poster's 2nd ed. of SelectedWritings):

Baudrillard's writing up to the mid-1980s is open to several criticisms. He failsto define key terms, such as the code; his writing style is hyperbolic anddeclarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it isappropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims.He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else insociety mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limitedbase. He ignores contradictory evidence such as the many benefits affordedby the new media ...

Nonetheless Poster is keen to refute the most extreme ofBaudrillard's critics, the likes of Alan Sokal and Norris who

see him as a purveyor of a form of reality-denyingirrationalism (ibid p. 7):

Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative insome actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I canassume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (towalk straight for X meters, carry out the action, and finally fulfill my goal byarriving at the point in question). What is in doubt is that this sort of thinkingenables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According toBaudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through themedia and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the masternarratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In animportant sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise theircivil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They arerather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code.

Wendy Chun, feminist technoscience academic of BrownUniversity, cites Baudrillard's The Ecstasy of Communication as"extreme". She notes how his conflation of information (andthus computation) with transparency resonates widely inpopular and scholarly circles, from fears of and propagandabetween national databases to examinations of "surveillancesociety." This conflation is remarkably at odds with theactual operations of computation: for computers to becometransparency machines, the fact that they compute-that theygenerate text and images rather than merely represent orreproduce what exists elsewhere-must be forgotten.[27]

In popular culture[edit source | editbeta]

Native American (Anishinaabe) writer Gerald Vizenor, whohas made extensive use of Baudrillard's concepts ofsimulation in his critical work,[28] features Baudrillardas a character in a "debwe heart dance" in his 1996 novelHotline Healers.[29]

The Matrix , a (1999) film by the Wachowski siblings, namesBaudrillard's thought, especially Simulacra and Simulation, asan influence. The book itself even appears in one scene,used by the protagonist Neo to hide money and diskscontaining information, presumably of a sensitive orillegal nature. While one critic went so far as to claimthat if "Baudrillard... has not yet embraced the film itmay be because he is thinking of suing for a screen

credit",[30] Baudrillard himself disclaimed any connectionbetween his work and The Matrix, calling it at best amisreading of his ideas.[31][32][33]

Carl Colpaert's film Delusion was inspired by Baudrillard'sbook America.

Some reviewers have noted that Charlie Kaufman's filmSynecdoche, New York seems inspired by Baudrillard's Simulacraand Simulation.[34][35][36]

Newcastle based band Maxïmo Park wrote a song aboutBaudrillard which featured as a b-side to "Karaoke Plays"from their 2007 album Our Earthly Pleasures.

Apollo 440 paid tribute to Baudrillard via direct quotes inlyrics and song titles

Baudrillard's Blender Symbolic Exchange and the 2008 U.S.Presidential Election.

Baudrillard is mentioned in Sarah Schulman's 1990 novel,People in Trouble, where she has a character say, "I think hemeant space-aged in the Baudrillard sense of the word, …"

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a video game, mentionsBaudrillard in its "Mission Briefing Files."