The difference between the French obituaries of Jean Baudrillard, who died last week, and the Anglo-Saxon ones was really remarkable. The Anglo ones seemed to be written by people trapped in exactly the sort of spectral, consumerist cage that Baudrillard described in his work, people nevertheless unaware of how well he had understood their situation. And so we got, from Britain and America, pieces which began, over and over again, with the same two soundbites:
1. That Baudrillard had said the first Gulf War "did not take place".
2. That his ideas had inspired The Matrix (a film he hated and refused to have anything to do with, by the way).
The best obit was in
Libération, the paper for which he wrote many of his most famous articles. They gave him the cover and several pages inside, and told us that Baudrillard was "curiosity itself".
Whereas a newspaper like
Le Figaro told us, usefully and sensibly, that Baudrillard "contested the very notion of a New World Order, because it suggested the end of history and a conception of the universal in which the figure of the other is by definition retrograde, barbaric or archaic", and that his conception of postmodernity was of an era "marked by the erosion of grand explanations of the world and by the hegemony of a consumerist lifestyle", the Anglo press actually
exemplified those things, offering us no big ideas, a conception of Frenchmen as "the other", a few anecdotes about Keanu Reeves and Madonna, some soundbites that had grown "iconic" by repetition, some
hate mail, and some very peculiar and contradictory stuff about consumerism.
What to make of the very odd article in
The Scotsman entitled "Bookshop hype owes a debt to Gallic genius of the hyper-real"? This told us that "his ideas are probably a lot more sane than you might think" because the policy of Waterstone's Booksellers to charge publishers £1000 to have a book on display in the store and £10,000 to make it a featured display somehow vindicated "crazy" Baudrillard's idea about simulacra and the hyper-real? Some kind of claim that Baudrillard could be justified, after all, as a slightly unconventional marketing guru seemed to be in the offing.
This was confirmed by the
NPR report in which Mark Poster from the University of California at Irvine told public radio listeners that the French philosopher "was very interested in consumer behaviour", and recounted Baudrillard's own consumer preference: unlike Americans, he drank wine at lunch.
On the question of whether Baudrillard liked America, there was some confusion.
The Times told us that Baudrillard was both "a fierce critic of consumer culture" and "a tireless enthusiast for America". For
Reuters, though, Baudrillard's "America" was "a high-speed travelogue seeking to lay bare the "banality" of American culture" and his response to 9/11 "seemed to display a lack of sympathy for the victims". Several articles quoted his statement that America was the world's "last remaining primitive culture". For some reports, Baudrillard thought Disneyland was "a paradise", others reported that, for Baudrillard, "Disneyland is not a fantasy -- it presents an objective portrait of America. It tries to make you forget that the whole of America is already infantilized".
BBC Radio 3's
Nightwaves show found a British academic -- Andy Martin, reader in French Literature at Cambridge -- who had actually dined, once, one-to-one, with Baudrillard. He could remember just two things the guru said, one about Madonna and one about surfing. Madonna had just produced this book called "Sex" and, according to Martin, Baudrillard and Madonna were not only at the same level of American celebrity at the time, but rumoured by some to be dating. Baudrillard said of Madonna: "Her tragedy is that she can never get naked enough".
When Martin, a keen surfer, said he didn't like the way the word surfing was then being turned into a metaphor for other things, like taking a computer onto the internet, Baudrillard said "Everything that once was real has already become a metaphor".
While presenter Matthew Sweet wanted to end by calling Baudrillard "the greatest fool of his age", Martin preferred to end on a technical note. "He is a strong
anti-foundationalist. I think the term postmodernist is already dead. Does that help?"
It did indeed help, although the Figaro put it much more coherently for the layman when they said "For Baudrillard we have become a part of a universe where not only has all transcendent reference disappeared, but in which the definition of reality itself has become problematical, as evidenced by the predominance of virtual representations of the world over values which foreground the notions of sense and truth."
Considering how widely Baudrillard's soundbite about the first Gulf War not having happened was repeated, it's surprising how little people went into what Baudrillard had meant by that. Only
Libé went back to the original statement.
"War," said Baudrillard, "everywhere except in the New World Order, is born from an antagonistic and destructive relationship, a duel between two adversaries. But this war is asexual, surgical, "war processing". The enemy here is nothing but a target on a computer screen, just as a sexual partner is nothing more than a pseudonym in a sexy chatroom on the
Minitel Rose. If that's "sex", well, the Gulf War can pass for "war"."
Nobody pointed out -- so I'll do it here -- that George Bush Junior seems to share Baudrillard's disdain for the brevity and unreality of the first Gulf War, and his father's New World Order. Bush Jnr hates the "internets" and panty-waisted "virtuality" as much as Baudrillard did. So convinced was he that the first Gulf War didn't take place that he organized a second one. Far from being a "surgical strike" in "virtual reality", his has lots of real combat between real people on the ground, lots of torture, bloodshed and suffering. It's still taking place today.
