Reviewing a German Academic Sociology Book on Baudrillard ...

Samuel Strehle, Zur Aktualit?t von Jean Baudrillard: Einleitung in sein Werk (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2012)

On the Contemporary Relevance of Jean Baudrillard: An Introduction to His Work

(On page 11, Strehle writes: ?Das Buch geht damit ?ber den Charakter einer blo?en Einf?hrung hinaus; es will nicht nur einf?hren, sondern auch weiterf?hren.? ?The book is not only an Introduction. It also wants to advance knowledge.?)

The VS Verlag is a social sciences book publisher that is part of ?Springer Fachmedien.? The book is part of a series called ?Aktuelle und Klassische Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaftler/innen?. ?Contemporary and Classic Social and Cultural Scientists?.

editor: Stephan Moebius.

Samuel Strehle is a sociologist and philosopher at the University of Konstanz.

No, Baudrillard does not have two 15-year old children.

In discussing Baudrillard?s ?life?, Strehle writes (page 22): ?Im Jahr 1995 heiratet er sein zweite Frau Marine in Paris, mit der er zwei Kinder bekommt.? ?In 1995, he marries his second wife Marine, with whom he has two children.?

NO. Baudrillard had two children with his first wife. His children are now about 50 years old, not about 15 years old, as they would be if Marine were their mother.

Please learn some French.

In writing about the May-June 1968 student-worker near-revolution in France, Strehle tells us that two important slogans of the student movement were: ?L?imagination prend le pouvoir? and ?Dessous les pav?s, c?est la plage.? He tries a little bit of French here, but he is wrong in both instances. The first slogan was ?L?imagination au pouvoir.? His fantastical rendition sounds like an attempted retranslation from English or German, like ?imagination takes power? or ?Die Phantasie an die Macht.? The second slogan was ?Sous le??s pav????s, la plage.? (?Under the paving stones, the beach?) ?Dessous? is the German word for women?s intimate underwear, and ?c?est la plage? would be: ?it?s the beach!?

Although he doesn?t say it explicitly, it is obvious that Strehle doesn?t read French. He refers throughout the entire book to German and English translations of Baudrillard?s works. Is it academically OK to publish a book about the works of a thinker or writer without reading those works in the original language in which the thinker wrote? One can debate about the answer to this question, but I strongly think that the answer is NO. By Cornell University standards, this wouldn?t be acceptable for a book by a professor. And in Comparative Literature, it certainly would not be acceptable. I could write a pretty good book about Fyodor Dostoyevsky, working from translations in the pitiful 4 languages that I know, but I would feel like a TOTAL IDIOT doing that, since I don?t know a word of Russian.

Strehle calls the ?Mouvement du 22 mars? at the University of Nanterre just outside Paris in 1968 ?Mouvement du 22-Mars?. Here he follows the typical and wrong practice by many Germans of sticking in hyphens in foreign-language phrases.

Strehle says on page 17 that Baudrillard participated in the founding of a Maoist organization in 1962 called ?Association populaire fran?ois-chinois?. I think this was called: ???Association populaire fran??ais-chinois.?

Strehle would like to rehabilitate Baudrillard for academic German sociology, and he is very enamored of Baudrillard?s second published book from 1970, which is a work on the sociology of consumerism. But he spells the name of the book wrong: Le soci?t? de consommation (page 18). The book is called La soci?t? de consommation.

No, the rebelling students in 1968 were not Surrealists.

Strehle calls the above-mentioned two slogans Surrealist (page 16). That is wrong. Basically they were slogans from the May-June 1968 student movement in Paris, nothing more or less. If one insists upon associating them with an artistic movement, it would the Situationists, who were influnced by Dada and Surrealism, and descended from the Lettrist Group, the Lettrist International, COBRA, and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB).

Baudrillard was very interested in literature.

There exists no published German translation of a major early work of Baudrillard?s: The Consumer Society (as mentioned, Strehle is especially interested in this book). So what does Strehle do? Does he quote passages from the French original version and translate them into German? (at least that would start to lay the groundwork for the publication of a German translation) NO. He quotes passages from the published ENGLISH translation and doesn?t translate them into German.

It is bizarrely ?schizophrenic? to complain at length that no German publisher ever took up the duty of translation of The Consumer Society, yet to be oneself someone who never made the effort to learn French.

He is implying that a German academic needs to know English but not French. Even if the subject of the book is a highly misunderstood yet highly important thinker who wrote in French? I think that this assumption is puzzling beyond words.

Perhaps the semi-conscious idea behind it is some kind of very strict binary opposition between ?science? and ?literature.? Strehle thinks that Baudrillard is a sociologist, a social scientist. So it?s not a study of Comparative Literature in the German academic system, where maybe you would need to know the original language. It?s science. German science. So the languages that a German scientist needs to know are German and English.

Yet it is undeniable that Baudrillard was very interested in novels and films. In other words, literature. His writings are permeated through and through with discussions of novels and films. So the binary opposition doesn?t hold up.

LISTEN UP: Either read the thinker in the original language or forget about it.

Baudrillard was not a philosopher of the end of history.

Strehle calls Baudrillard ?ein Philosoph des Endes der Geschichte?, ?a philosopher of the end of history.? NO. This is incorrect. Baudrillard published a book called ?L?illusion de la fin? (1992) ?THE ILLUSION OF THE END.? In this book, Baudrillard criticized theories of ?the end of history? which were at the time popular. More on this later.

Sociology versus Science Fiction.

Strehle writes: ?So legt der Fokus auf den soziologischen (gegen?ber zum Beispeil dem philosophischen oder ?sthetischen) Baudrillard nahe, sein Werk gerade nicht als ?Science Fiction? zu lesen, wie es aus anderer Perspektive wiederholt vorgeschlagen wurde.? ?The focus is on the sociological (as opposed to, for example, the philosophical or the aesthetic) Baudrillard, and especially to not read his work as ?Science Fiction?, as has often been proposed from other perspectives.?

(There is no ?aesthetic? Baudrillard. As Baudrillard said at the conference on ?Baudrillard and the Arts? at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe in 2004, he feels particularly weak on the subject of art, knows very little about art, and doesn?t have much to say about art.)

Strehle seems to be positing some kind of strict binary opposition between sociology and science fiction. Strehle?s agenda, as mentioned, is something like rehabilitating Baudrillard for academic German sociology. After laughing at Baudrillard or ignoring Baudrillard for 45 years, now some German academic sociologists want to bring him into their canon.

The only problem is that Baudrillard disliked academic sociology intensely. You don?t have to look very far in the literature on Baudrillard to see that many of his friends and admirers have interpreted him as being a critic of sociology as it exists. The highly valuable Cahiers de l?Herne volume on Baudrillard edited by Fran?ois L?Yvonnet has a section called ?Tombeaux pour la sociologie? ? ?Tombs for sociology?. Tombs, you know, as in ? dead and buried.

Or please read William Pawitt?s very interesting ?Two Appointments with Baudrillard?. Over the last several decades, most young intellectuals in the English-language part of the world who discovered Baudrillard were spurred on by reading him to become disillusioned with academic sociology as it is constituted.

Pawitt: ?After reading Baudrillard, contemporary sociology seemed hopelessly slow and plodding, excruciatingly tame and stubbornly na?ve in its empiricism. ?Accessing Baudrillard?s contribution to sociology is exceptionally problematic since his aim seems to have been to destroy it, or at least to observe its self-destruction.?

Perhaps it would make sense to see Baudrillard as the originator of a new kind of sociology, that one might call a pataphysical sociology (as his collaborator Jacques Donzelot called it), a quantum physics sociology, a literary sociology, a science fictional sociology ? whatever. It should be some kind of new direction in sociology that ?leaves? sociology, that goes very trans-disciplinary with fields like literary theory, chaos theory, Einsteinian relativity, non-Euclidean geometry, Batesonian ?savage ecology?, diversionist technologies, and the architecture of ?radical illusions?.

Baudrillard does not agree with the Situationist idea of ?the society of the spectacle?.

Strehle places a great deal of emphasis on a supposed similarity between the ideas of Baudrillard and the ideas of the Situationists, especially Guy Debord?s idea of ?the society of the spectacle.? (for example, on pages 39-41) It is true that Baudrillard said ?I was a Situationist at twenty?, but here he is describing a biographical episode.

In The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard wrote (I am allowed to quote the English translation since this is not a book): ?Virtuality is different from the spectacle, which still left room for a critical consciousness and demystification? We are no longer spectactors, but actors in the performance, and actors increasingly integrated into the course of that performance. Whereas we could face up to the unreality of the world as spectacle, we are defenceless before the extreme reality of this world, before this virtual perfection. We are, in fact, beyond all disalienation. This is the new form of terror, by comparison with which the horrors of alienation were very small beer.?

He distanced himself conceptually from the Situationist idea of ?the spectacle.?

On page 48, Strehle introduces the concept of ?the consumer spectacle? (?Das Konsumspektakel?) and implies that Baudrillard believed in this. NO.

Sylv?re Lotringer lives in New York.

Writing about Baudrillard?s reception in France (pages 23 ? 24), Strehle complains that the French have produced so few books and commentary on Baudrillard. Then he mentions Sylv?re Lotringer as being a French ?Anh?nger ? [der] seine Gedanken weiterf?hr[t]? ? a French ?follower who continues [Baudrillard's thinking]. But you cannot say in a simple way that Lotringer is French. He lives in New York City, teaches at Columbia University, and is the editor primarily responsible for the dissemination of Baudrillard?s work in the USA.

R?gis Debray and Marc Aug? are important thinkers in their own right.

It is misleading to say that ??R???gis Debray and Marc Aug? are followers of Baudrillard who have carried on his work (as Strehle says on page 24, then again on page 118). Debray and Aug? are important thinkers in their own right.

The Consumer Society is more influenced by American sociologists like David Riesman, Daniel Boorstin, William H. Whyte and Vance Packard than by the Situationists.

In many ways, Alexis de Tocqueville?s diagnosis of mass conformity is at the basis of modern social analysis, especially that which flourished in the 1950s in works such as David Riesman?s (1950) critique of suburban middle-class value formation, William H. Whyte?s (1956) analysis of corporate bureaucratization and drone-like existence, and Vance Packard?s (1957), evaluation of advertising manipulation. Riesman appears in Baudrillard?s The System of Objects (French 1968 original edition: pages 142, 152, 156 and 170); The Consumer Society (French 1970 original edition: pages 45, 70, 78, 88, 92-3, 103, 156, 170-2, and 181); For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (French 1972 original edition: page 36); Symbolic Exchange and Death (French 1976 original edition: page 22-23); and The Illusion of the End (French 1992 original edition: page 105). Packard appears in The System of Objects (1968: 83, 145, 165, 174 and 185); and The Consumer Society (1970:71)]. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America; William H. Whyte, The Organization Man; David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character; and Vance Packard, The Hidden Pursuaders. See the excellent book on Baudrillard and the Media by William Merrin.

American commentators did not confuse Baudrillard with ?Frankfurt School? Critical Theory.

Strehle writes (page 27): ?Was die thematischen Schwerpunkte der Rezeption im englischsprachigen Raum betrifft, ist bemerkenswert, wie stark Baudrillard, hierzuland kaum denkbar, als (neo-) marxistischer Denker oder sogar also Vertreter der Kritischen Theorie verhandelt wird.? ? ?Regarding the thematic focus of the Baudrillard reception in the English-speaking world, it is remarkable how strongly Baudrillard ? in a way that would hardly be thinkable in our country ? is treated as a (neo-)Marxist thinker, or even as a representative of Critical Theory.?

He cites Charles Levin, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Mike Gane, Mark Poster, and Douglas Kellner and Steven Best as alleged examples of this.

German academic sociology was hostile to French thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Baudrillard for decades, protecting the German sociological tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory from infiltration. The appearance of Foucault?s books in German translation was delayed for decades by the German sociological ?establishment.? Just look at the German Wikipedia article on Foucault and see the years of appearance of the German translations of his books!

Just before Derrida died, there finally took place a sort of reconciliation between Habermas and Derrida.

American leftist intellectuals starting in the 1970s were interested in learning about the entire tradition of so-called ?Western Marxism? (or non-Leninist Marxism), which included both French and German thinkers (as well as thinkers from many other countries). From the ?third? (outside) perspective of America (and Canada, Australia and the UK), it was possible to see that French and German thinkers could be usefully brought into dialogue with each other, that there were commonalities, ?die k?nnten sich gut erg?nzen.? Obviously the Germans didn?t see this (and hence the resistance and hostility). And this is a negative point on their record, not a positive point.

And I don?t think that anyone thought that Baudrillard was a neo-Marxist thinker. Anyone who read The Mirror of Production knew that Baudrillard had significantly distanced himself from Marx. Of course, you could argue that Baudrillard is closer to Marx than he himself admitted, but that is a secondary point.

Zizek and Badiou are opponents and critics of ?French Poststructuralism?.

Strehle claims that Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou are French poststructuralists (page 32). You don?t have to read very deeply into the works of Badiou and of the Leninist-Stalinist Zizek to see that the opposite is the case. They are constantly criticizing what they call ?French Poststructuralism.?

Baudrillard was not in conceptual agreement with Georges Bataille about symbolic exchange.

Similar to his emphasis on Guy Debord and the spectacle, Strehle makes a big thing out of the alleged importance of Georges Bataille?s concept of symbolic exchange for Baudrillard (pages 42-44). ?Again similar to the case of Debord, what is much more important to get clear about is that Baudrillard disagreed with Bataille and separated himself conceptually from the ideas which Bataille expressed in La part maudite (The Accursed Share).

This is most clear in a small essay that Baudrillard published in La Quinzaine litt?raire in 1976, and which was translated into English by David James Miller in the volume Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins (eds., Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, St. Martin?s Press, 1991). It is called ?When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy.?

Baudrillard writes: ?Bataille founds his general economy on a ?solar economy? without a reciprocal exchange, on the unilateral gift that the sun makes of its energy: a cosmogony of expenditure, which he then deploys in a religious and political anthropology. But Bataille has misread [Marcel] Mauss: the unilateral gift does not exist. This is not the law of the universe. He who has so well explored the human sacrifice of the Aztecs should have known as they did that the sun gives nothing? The root of sacrifice and of general economy is never pure and simple expenditure ? or whatever drive [pulsion] of excess that supposedly comes to us from nature ? but is an incessant process of challenge [d?fi]. Bataille has ?naturalized? Mauss.?

See Ren??Girard, Violence and the Sacred.

Our society is BOTH totalitarian and open to democratic challenge and change.

On page 46, Strehle makes an allegedly important distinction between thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, on the one side, who thought that contemporary society is ?totalitarian?, and thinkers like Marcuse in An Essay on Liberation (1969), on the other side, who saw change happening everywhere, for example in the May 1968 revolt. Then he tries to convince us that Baudrillard is more like Marcuse than like Adorno and Horkheimer.

In the late 1960s, Marcuse stopped saying what he said in One-Dimensional Man (1964) ? that everything is one-dimensional ? and instead declared the revolution of the outsiders, the dropouts. (see also page 70) Is that still news?

Is our society totalitarian or democratic? Yes, that?s a debate that?s been going on for many decades among critical sociologists. But why stay forever within a logic of EITHER / OR, either A or B? What about both? What about A AND B? Can?t two ?seemingly contradictory? observations about contemporary society both be true?

Baudrillard was very interested in cars.

On page 35, Strehle claims that Baudrillard was not interested in cars. ?F?r Autos indes interessiert Baudrillard sich nur am Rande,? he writes.

In The System of Objects, for example, there is an entire section about cars. (pages 65 ? 69 of the English translation)

Here?s my commentary on it:

The ?Car of the Past and Present? is a cozy pod that is nowhere in spacetime, a leased annex of the shopping malls and prodigious factory outlets to which one would otherwise have no access, and a logistical prosthesis for the ?disabled? pedestrian-becoming-cyborg. It is the site of speed, engineering and command mythologies, disappearance through endless motion, blending of body and technology, sensuous arousal and carnal fantasy, climate control and vibrating music, accident and crash, formal freedom and death, prestige and cultural citizenship. The automobile is a ?privileged center of daily waste? where huge sums of money are expended. The contradictory demands made on the individual by society are exemplified in the tension between advertising?s limitless exaltation of personal consumption and public service announcements for safety, sobriety, or driver moderation which are ?desperate calls to collective responsibility.? Baudrillard states that this appeal to another kind of civic duty or morality cannot take hold because the consumer is already fulfilling his social responsibility in his activities as a consumer, even if this set of obligations commonly circulates under the name of ?freedom.?

The English word for the German word ?die Messe? or the French word ?la messe? is mass, not mess.

On page 51, Strehle makes a big deal about claiming that the English translator of The Consumer Society made a mistake in the last sentence of the book. No, he did not make a mistake. Baudrillard wrote: ?Nous attendrons les irruptions brutales et les desagr?gations soudaines qui, de fa?ons ausssi impr?visible, mais certaine, qu?en mai 1968, viendront briser cette messe blanche.?

What is meant here is ?la messe? in the sense of a religious service, a Gottesdienst, or the liturgy of the Eucharist. The English word for that is ?mass?, not ?mess? as Strehle believes, and the English translator of The Consumer Society had it right. And it is acceptable to capitalize it.

On page 62, Strehle quotes from the English translation of The Mirror of Production: ?The concept of history must itself be regarded as historical, turn back upon itself.? No, these last four words are not English. But it sounds like a good title for a song.

The English translation of For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign uses sexist language.

I learned from Strehle?s book that there also exists no German translation of two other important early Baudrillard books: The Mirror of Production and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Once again, Strehle apparently cannot read French, so he gives us citations from the English translations. But Charles Levin?s English translation of the book F.A.C.O.T.P.E.O.T.S. contains sexist language which Strehle reprints (page 56): ?What constitutes the object as value in symbolic exchange is that one separates himself from it in order to give it, to throw it at the feet of the other, under the gaze of the other (ob-jicere); one divests himself as if of a part of himself.?

This sexist language, with Baudrillard?s use of the French ?on se ??, does not exist in the original.

French-to-English translations in cultural studies tend to Gallicize English, and this is a bad tendency.

By bombarding his German readers with passages from published English translations of Baudrillard?s books, Strehle indiscriminately contributes to the dissemination of a certain form of bad English ? the gallicization of English usage in cultural studies texts. There are exceptions to this. Chris Turner and James Benedict are excellent Baudrillard French-to-English translators. But the passage from For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign which Strehle reprints on page 59 is an example of this problem: ?There is no articulation between these three forms (which describe general political economy) and symbolic exchange.? What the heck does ?articulation? mean here? Nobody knows. It has a meaning in French, but to use this word in English is abstruse, obstruse, obtuse, and everything in between.

I?ll bet that 99% of your readers don?t know what ?Metaphysics? means.

Please don?t just use the word ?metaphysics? without explaining to your readers what the heck it means. Into his German text Strehle dumps this citation from the English translation of The Mirror of Production: ?The mirror of production in which all Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken.?

So would this be metaphysics in the sense that Heidegger and Derrida used the term? Or is there some special Baudrillardian meaning of metaphysics? Or is the definition according to some Philosophical Dictionary?

Looking at cybernetics only negatively is truly a missed opportunity.

It is truly a missed opportunity to look at cybernetics only negatively, as Strehle does on page 64. What about N. Katherine Hayles? great history of ?the ?three orders? of cybernetics, How We Became Posthuman? (1999)?What about Gregory Bateson and cybernetic epistemology? What about Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela? What about the Artificial Life movement?

In his great essay on media theory, ?Requiem for the Media?, Baudrillard is not saying that the imbalance of power between senders and receivers is not reversible.

Strehle writes on page 67: ?Das Machtgef?lle zwischen Sendern und Empf?ngern ist nicht umkehrbar, wie Baudrillard in ?Requiem f?r die Medien?, einer Kritik an Hans-Magnus Enzensbergers ?Baukasten f?r eine Theorie der Medien? (1970), nachzuweisen versucht.?

?Baudrillard is not saying that the imbalance of power between senders and receivers is not reversible. He is saying that, in order to reverse it, the media ? the form, the format, the trope, the pattern ? has to be changed. And not the ?use? or ?participation?.

Baudrillard did not only have a negative view of television.

Strehle has only a negative view of television, and attributes this pure negativity to Baudrillard. In fact, he begins his book on page 9 with a long diatribe against television. He continues in the same vein on page 69, telling us that ?the revolution will not be televised.? Isn?t this purely negative attitude towards television among academics involved with ?media theory? kind of old and stale by now? What about great TV shows with ?literary qualities? like Star Trek, The X-Files,?Lost, The Prisoner, Mad Men, 24, CSI, NCIS, The Wire, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, etc., etc. ? And some great German TV shows too, like the Sunday evening ?Krimis.? Are you ?theory? guys going to ignore these shows forever? I guess so.

But Baudrillard did not ignore them forever. In the conversation that I had with him in Karlsruhe in 2004, he accepted my argument that, if a film can be great, then a TV show can be great too.

The topic of Baudrillard and psychoanalysis is only of very limited interest.

On pages 85 to 90 comes a discussion by Strehle about Baudrillard and psychoanalysis. This is mainly based on the section towards the end of Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) where Baudrillard discusses Freud and the ?death drive? (Thanatos), then Freud and jokes. Then comes (by Strehle) a somewhat ritualistic comparison between Baudrillard and Lacan, saying that Baudrillard was similar to Lacan. In his career considered as a whole, Baudrillard showed very little interest in psychoanalysis and psychology. So I think that emphasizing paradigmatic social theory ?resemblances? between Baudrillard and Lacan is a very abstract kind of exercise, a sort of social theory imperialist attitude towards psychology that belittles the importance of psychology.

The topic of Baudrillard and psychoanalysis, or of Baudrillard and psychology, is only of very limited interest. Baudrillard knew very little about psychoanalysis or the history of psychoanalysis (especially the history of all the psychological thinkers and practitioners who came after Freud). It was simply fashionable and de rigeuer in the 1960s and 1970s for French social theorists to say something about psychoanalysis. ?He felt compelled to comment about psychoanalysis in 1976 in Symbolic Exchange and Death.

As a sociologist, Strehle is then happy to report that Baudrillard believed that the unconscious is societal and not individual (pages 85 to 90). ?Es gibt kein anderes Unbewusstes als das gesellschaftliche? (?There is no other unconscious than the societal one?), Strehle writes. I don?t think that Baudrillard believed that (or he believed that before 1977 and not after 1977). And, if he did, so what? Sociology and psychology are both important. There is a social dimension to the unconscious, and there is an individual dimension to the unconscious.

However, ??es gibt kein anderes Unbewusstes als das gesellschaftliche? (?there is no other unconscious than the societal one?) sounds really cool as exaggerated hyperbole.

Two years after publishing Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Baudrillard published ?In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities ? or the End of the Social? (1978). Here Baudrillard says that the object of inquiry in which sociologists believe ? THE SOCIAL ? doesn?t exist. I think that it is in 1977 (at the time of the student uprising in Bologna and Rome, which was very important for him) that Baudrillard really comes into his own as a great and original thinker. Between these two books. Between being an academic university sociologist who still made a lot of academic references, and striking out on his own as a thinker against ?referentiality?, observing the disappearance of ?the social? and the appearance of a radically unmasterable field of uncertainty, complexity and paradox.?The ordinary macro world has a lot of quantum properties, Baudrillard as a truly original social thinker came to see.

Classical sociologists still base their ?scientific sociology? on a 19th-century scientific paradigm (that of Auguste Comte) which assumes a world of docile objects waiting to be ?objectively? investigated, a classical worldview that assumes the existence of a social world and social problems rationally ordered by the sovereign thinking subject of social science who is in control. A ?Baudrillardian sociology? (the best that we can really do is call it a ?sociology in honour of Jean Baudrillard?, because we know that he would cringe at the idea of a ?Baudrillardian sociology?) is also scientific ? it would be based on the 20th-century sciences of quantum physics, special/general relativity, chaos/complexity theory, G?delian incompleteness, Riemannian geometry, cybernetic epistemology, holistic biology and some others. It would consider much stranger and wily objects in an unmasterable social field governed by relations of radical uncertainty and paradox. The World thinks me; the Inhuman thinks me. Everything is relativistic, enigmatic, and aleatory. Social reality is nearly a total chaos. Countries, nationalities, immigration, religions, hybrid languages, identities, gender, sexuality: it is almost beyond our comprehension, laden with strange effects.

The post-1977 seminal thinker of radical wily objects Jean Baudrillard is foreshadowed in his 1968 (first) book The System of Objects.

The topic of Baudrillard and art is also of only very limited interest.

A similar thing to what I said about the subject of ?Baudrillard and psychoanalysis? can be said about the subject of ?Baudrillard and art.? [my view is that it would be better to focus on the subjects of "Baudrillard and Science Fictional Thinking / Quantum Thinking", "Baudrillard and Diversionary Technologies", and "Baudrillard and New Radical Sociology".]

The 2004 conference/symposium at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, which Strehle tells us on page 26 was so great was, in truth, in some significant ways, not very successful as a symposium about art.

On the positive side, there were many valuable, high-quality lectures. But these were either on the subject of 9/11 and terrorism, or on the subject of Baudrillard?s photography (or perhaps a theory of technology). They weren?t on the subject of Baudrillard and art.

During the panel discussion, Baudrillard himself said that the concept of ?Baudrillard and Art? for the symposium was ill-conceived. And no one else on the panel was able to say anything coherent about ?Baudrillard and Art? either.

Try to live a little closer to death.

Strehle?s entire long discussion about Symbolic Exchange and Death in Chapter 4 (we are halfway through the book and still talking about a Baudrillard book that was published in 1976 ? 36 years ago) doesn?t really get to the heart of the matter of what the book is saying.

Basically what Baudrillard is trying to say in that book is that, in our society, we are all very much afraid of death and we push death to the margins ? hospitals, funeral homes, cemeteries, etc. ? and don?t want to think about it. We should try instead to live a little closer to death.

The first appearance of the ?simulation? theory was in The System of Objects.

Strehle says that the first appearance of Baudrillard?s simulation theory was in The Consumer Society and The Mirror of Production (page 95).

I don?t think so. Here?s my commentary about that:

The concept of Models and Series put forth by Baudrillard in the fourth part of The System of Objects is effectively the first appearance in his work of his well-known hypothesis of simulation (or of one major component of simulation). As ideal oppositional terms, the model object is a luxury or high-status ?original? article available only to the upper economic layers of society; a serially produced and distributed object is an industrially replicated copy of the prototype model. But in the real social field, neither model nor series exists as a discrete entity. Although ?the status of the modern object is dominated by the model/series distinction,? it is more and more difficult to find objects in contemporary culture which can be classified as pure model or pure series objects. There is rather a protracted continuum between the hypothetical immaculate extremes of the model?s uniqueness and the series? reproducibility. There is an extended differentiation in small transitional steps from one terminal pole to the other. Cultural objects possess qualities of both model and series, with the serial properties operating across a given media product array through a formal play of differences. The alleged ?authenticity? of the model disseminates droplets of charisma exuded from its lingering aura onto each newly generated item in the interminable substitutions of the series. These two elements of the cultural code coexist in a mutually generative, interdependent, and ceaselessly recycling relationship to each other. Model and series are a redundant two-way assemblage where each term is summoned to rescue the other at urgent moments through reversibility. They comprise ?a perpetual dynamic which is in fact the very ideology of our society,? writes Baudrillard. This recombinant simulation is a ?system of differences which is, properly speaking, the cultural system itself.? There is a special alluring fascination belonging to the code of eternally rearranged set elements and multiplying redistribution of mini-references to the comforting real.

Baudrillard: ?The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.? On pages 107 -108, Samuel Strehle discusses the controversy surrounding Baudrillard and the film The Matrix. The character Neo played by Keanu Reeves has a hollowed-out copy of Baudrillard?s Simulations and Simulacra in his apartment. In Baudrillard?s interview with Le nouvel observateur about The Matrix, he makes two points which, for me, stand out, and which I don?t think that Strehle mentions.

The first point is that Baudrillard says: ?The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.? This means that we are already living in the matrix (of virtuality), and this matrix has produced a film called The Matrix (which misleads us by cleverly projecting the ?disastrous? event of the matrix into the future when it is really the case that we are already living in the disaster of the matrix and have been doing so for quite some time). It is crucial to understand that Baudrillard?s diagnosis about virtuality is that we have already descended into virtuality with the media technologies that we already have. It is not a prognostication or warning about some possible ?future catastrophe.? Simulation, hyper-reality, virtuality ? it has all already taken place. And not as a ?real? or ?literal? catastrophe, but as a ?virtual? catastrophe.

The second point is that Baudrillard mentions that there are other films which are more ?in tune? with his ideas than The Matrix. He mentions:?The Truman Show (1998), Minority Report (2002), and Mulholland Drive (2001).

The ?Canetti Point? is not the end of history; it is the disappearance of history, and of the concepts for thinking about history, and of any ?philosophy of history?.

At the beginning of his chapter 6 (page 123), Strehle interprets Baudrillard?s writings about what Baudrillard calls ?the Canetti Point? (for example, in ?The Year 2000 Has Already Happened?) as being about ?the end of history?.

Baudrillard: ?I once again take up Canetti?s proposition: ?A painful idea: that beyond a certain precise point in time, history was no longer real. Without being aware of it, the totality of the human race would have suddenly quit reality. All that would have happened since then would not have been at all real, but we would not be able to know it. Our task and our duty would now be to discover this point and, to the extent that we shall not stop there, we must persevere in the actual destruction.? (The Human Province)

I am using the translation version of ?The Year 2000 Has Already Happened?, and the passage from Elias Canetti, that appeared in the book Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America (eds., Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, St. Martin?s Press, 1987). Translated by Nai-fei Ding and Kuan-Hsing Chen.

Strehle (page 123): ?Der ?Canetti-Punkt? ist sein Sinnbild f?r den Eintritt in ein Zeitalter nach der Geschichte, in das Posthistoire.? ?The Canetti Point is his [Baudrillard?s] emblem for the entry into an age after history, into posthistory.?

On pages 133 ? 138, Strehle tries to assimilate Baudrillard?s writings about the disappearance of history to an idea of ?posthistory.? This would make Baudrillard compatible with the ideas about ?posthistory? of the German sociologists Arnold Gehlen and Hendrik de Man, and the French philosophers Antoine-Augustin Cournot, Bertrand de Jouvenel and C?lestin Bougl?.

I don?t think so. I don?t think that Baudrillard ever uses the term ?posthistory.??He is talking about a kind of destabilization of spacetime that makes it impossible to use the same concepts that one used before the ?Canetti Point.? Not only has history disappeared, but the idea of history along with it. There is no more time in the classical sense. There is no more ?Zeitalter?, no more ?age?. The point at which ?the real? disappeared can no longer be identified. It is a total breakdown of any model of causes and effects. Maybe ?history? was always a simulation model.

On page 137, Strehle claims that Baudrillard uses the term ?posthistoire? on page 105 of the German translation (published by the Passagen Verlag in Vienna) of The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact. This is not true. Page 105 of the German translation corresponds to page 103 of the French original of Le Pacte de lucidit? ou l?intelligence du mal, published by Galil?e in Paris. It?s part of the essay ?Le Virtuel et l??v?nementiel?. On this page and the page before it, Baudrillard speaks of the ?derealisation of history?, ?the production of the event as sign? by ?the system of information?, ?the production of the non-event?, ?le vide de l?information?. Probably Strehle latched on to these two sentences: ?L?emprise des mod?les suscite une culture de la diff?rence qui met fin ? toute continuit? historique. Au lieu de se d?rouler au fil d?une histoire, les choses se mettent ??se succ?der dans le vide.? ?The ascendancy of models gives rise to a culture of difference that puts an end to any historical continuity. Instead of unfolding as part of a history, things have begun to succeed each other in the void.? (translated by Chris Turner) This is not about ?post-history?. It is part of an analysis of ?fake events?, a term that Baudrillard uses in English in the French original.

Strehle (page 123): ?[Baudrillard setzt] diese Analysen in einen allgemeineren geschichtsphilosophischen Rahmen.? ?[Baudrillard places] these analyses in a more general ?philosophy of history? context.?

No. History and the ?philosophy of history? are the very things that Baudrillard places into question, has abandoned, and will no longer have any truck with.

If history is over, then so are the ideas about history that are associated with it.

This is much more about going beyond the ?event horizon? that Einsteinian general relativity speaks about than it is about the ?philosophy of history?. To call Baudrillard?s ideas about ?the disappearance of history? and ?the Canetti Point? a ?philosophy of history? or a theory of ?posthistory? is to recuperate, co-opt, and assimilate his ideas into the very paradigm of thinking that he was done with, to try to domesticate them or render them harmless.

When Strehle gets to the point of discussing Baudrillard?s 1978 essay on ?? the End of the Social? (pages 129 ? 132), he attempts the same kind of cooptation. He calls Baudrillard?s ideas a theory of ?the postsocial?, and tries to bring them into harmony with the idea of ?the postsocial? of the sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina.

I skip over the discussion of ?the postmodern? (pages 138 ? 142), the Gulf War of 1991 (pages 142 ? 144), the World Trade Center (pages 144 ? 148), and more discussion of Baudrillard?s ?theses of the end of history? (page 149). I am still 34 pages from the end of the book. It?s kind of like in The Great Escape - Gesprengte Ketten in German ? (a 1963 American film about an escape by Allied prisoners of war from a German POW camp during World War II, starring Steve McQueen) when the ?Harry? tunnel that the prisoners have dug comes up 20 feet short of the cover of the trees of the woods, but they have to ?go out? that night anyway, and 76 prisoners escape.

As the German-Jewish politician and TV personality Michel Friedman says at the end of each episode of his political talk show: ?Meine Damen und Herren, die Zeit, sie ist um!? (?Ladies and gentlemen, time is up!?)

Source: http://www.alan-shapiro.com/reviewling-a-german-academic-sociology-book-on-baudrillard/

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