[Marcus Marulus]

4. Into the 1990s: From Immanent Reversal to Impossible Exchange

In the 1980s, Baudrillard posited an "immanent reversal," a flip-flop or reversed direction of meaning and effects, in which things turn into their opposite. Thus, according to Baudrillard, the society of production was passing over to simulation and seduction; the panoptic and repressive power theorized by Foucault was turning into a cynical and seductive power of the media and information society; the liberation championed in the 1960s had become a form of voluntary servitude; sovereignty had passed from the side of the subject to the object; and revolution and emancipation had turned into their opposites, trapping individuals in an order of simulation and virtuality. Baudrillard's concept of "immanent reversal" thus provides a perverse form of Horkheimer and Adorno's “dialectic of Enlightenment” (1972 [1947]), where everything becomes its opposite. For Adorno and Horkheimer, within the transformations of organized and hi-tech capitalism, modes of Enlightenment become domination, culture becomes culture industry, democracy becomes a form of mass manipulation, and science and technology form a crucial part of an apparatus of social domination.
Baudrillard follows this concept of reversal and his paradoxical and nihilistic metaphysical vision into the 1990s where his thought becomes ever more hermetic, fragmentary, and difficult. During the decade, Baudrillard continued playing the role of academic and media superstar, travelling around the world lecturing and performing in intellectual events. Some of his experiences are captured in his collections of aphorisms, Cool Memories (1990), Cool Memories II (1996a), Fragments. Cool Memories III, 1990-1995 (1997 [1995]), and Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000 (2003 [2000]). These texts combine reflections on his travels and experiences with development of his (often recycled) ideas and perceptions. Baudrillard's fragmentary diaries often provide revealing insights into his personal life and psychology, as well as capturing experiences and scenes that generate or embody some of his ideas. While often repetitive, his “cool memory” booklets provide direct access to the man and his ideas, as well as validating him as a global intellectual superstar who travels around the earth and whose every diary notation is worthy of publication and attention.
Retiring from the University of Nanterre in 1987, Baudrillard subsequently functioned as an independent intellectual, dedicating himself to caustic reflections on our contemporary moment and philosophical ruminations that cultivate his distinct and always evolving theory. From June 1987 through May 1997, he published reflections on events and phenomena of the day in the Paris newspaper Liberation, a series of writings collected in Screened Out (2002 [2000]) and providing access to a laboratory for ideas later elaborated in his books.
Baudrillard's retirement from a sociology faculty seems to have liberated his philosophical impulses and in addition to his diary collections and occasional forays into engagement of issues of the day, Baudrillard has turned out a series of increasingly philosophical and densely theoretical texts. During the 1990s, Baudrillard's works include The Transparency of Evil (1993 [1990]), The Gulf War did not take place (1995 [1991], The Illusion of the End (1994b [1992]), The Perfect Crime (1996b [1995]), and Impossible Exchange (2001 [1999]. These texts continue his excursions into the metaphysics of the object and defeat of the subject and ironical engagement with contemporary history and politics. Bringing together reflections that develop his ideas and/or comment on contemporary events, these texts continue to postulate a break within history in the space of a postmodern coupure, though Baudrillard himself usually distances himself from other versions of postmodern theory.[7]
The post-1990 texts continue the fragmentary style and use of short essays, aphorisms, stories, and aperçus that Baudrillard began deploying in the 1980s and often repeat some of the same ideas and stories. While the books develop the quasi-metaphysical perspectives of the 1980s, they also generate some new ideas and positions. They are often entertaining, although they can also be outrageous and scandalous. These writings can be read as a combination of cultivation of original theoretical perspectives along with continual commentary on current social conditions, accompanied by a running dialogue with Marxism, poststructuralist theory, and other forms of contemporary thought. Yet after his fierce and focused polemics of the 1970s against competing models of thought, Baudrillard's dialogue with theory now consists mostly of occasional asides and recycling of previous ideas, a retro-theory that perhaps ironically illustrates Baudrillard's theses about the decline of theory and politics in the contemporary moment.
In The Transparency of Evil (1993), Baudrillard described a situation in which previously separate domains of the economy, art, politics, and sexuality, collapsed into each other. He claims that art, for instance, has penetrated all spheres of existence, whereby the dreams of the artistic avant-garde for art to inform life has been realized. Yet, in Baudrillard's vision, with the realization of art in everyday life, art itself as a separate and transcendent phenomenon has disappeared.
Baudrillard calls this situation "transaesthetics" which he relates to similar phenomena of "transpolitics," "transsexuality," and "transeconomics," in which everything becomes political, sexual, and economic, so that these domains, like art, lose their specificity, their boundaries, and their distinctness. The result is a confused condition where there are no more criteria of value, of judgement, or of taste, and the function of the normative thus collapses in a morass of indifference and inertia. And so, although Baudrillard sees art proliferating everywhere, and writes in The Transparency of Evil that "talk about Art is increasing even more rapidly" (p. 14), the power of art — of art as adventure, art as negation of reality, art as redeeming illusion, art as another dimension and so on — has disappeared. Art is everywhere but there "are no more fundamental rules" to differentiate art from other objects and "no more criteria of judgement or of pleasure" (p. 14). For Baudrillard, contemporary individuals are indifferent toward taste and manifest only distaste: "tastes are determinate no longer" (p. 72).
And yet as a proliferation of images, of form, of line, of color, of design, art is more fundamental then ever to the contemporary social order: "our society has given rise to a general aestheticization: all forms of culture — not excluding anti-cultural ones — are promoted and all models of representation and anti-representation are taken on board" (p. 16). Thus Baudrillard concludes that: "It is often said that the West's great undertaking is the commercialization of the whole world, the hitching of the fate of everything to the fate of the commodity. That great undertaking will turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world — its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation into images, its semiological organization" (p. 16).
In the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle, a transaesthetic object — just as everything also becomes trans-economic, trans-political, and trans-sexual. This "materialization of aesthetics" is accompanied by a desperate attempt to simulate art, to replicate and mix previous artistic forms and styles, and to produce ever more images and artistic objects. But this "dizzying eclecticism" of forms and pleasures produces a situation in which art is no longer art in classical or modernist senses but is merely image, artifact, object, simulation, or commodity (Baudrillard is aware of increasingly exorbitant prices for art works, but takes this as evidence that art has become something else in the orbital hyperspace of value, an ecstasy of skyrocketing values in "a kind of space opera" [p. 19]).
Examples of the paradoxical and ironic style of Baudrillard's philosophical musings abound in The Perfect Crime (1996b). Baudrillard claims that the negation of a transcendent reality in the current media and technological society is a “perfect crime” that involves the “destruction of the real.” In a world of appearance, image, and illusion, Baudrillard suggests, reality disappears although its traces continue to nourish an illusion of the real. Driven toward virtualization in a high-tech society, all the imperfections of human life and the world are eliminated in virtual reality, but this is the elimination of reality itself, the Perfect Crime. This “post-critical” and “catastrophic” state of affairs render our previous conceptual world irrelevant, Baudrillard suggests, urging criticism to turn ironic and transform the demise of the real into an art form.
Baudrillard has entered a world of thought far from academic philosophy, one that puts in question traditional modes of thought and discourse. His search for new philosophical perspectives has won him a loyal global audience, but also criticism for his excessive irony, word play, and intellectual games. Yet his work stands as a provocation to traditional and contemporary philosophy that challenges thinkers to address old philosophical problems such as truth and reality in new ways in the contemporary world.
Baudrillard continues this line of thought in his 1999 text Impossible Exchange (2001). In three parts containing a series of short essays, Baudrillard first develops his concept of an “impossible exchange” between concepts and the world, theory and reality, and subject and object. He attacks philosophical attempts to capture reality, arguing for an incommensurability between concepts and their objects, systems of thought and the world. For Baudrillard, the latter always elude capture by the former, thus philosophy is an “impossible exchange” in which it is impossible to grasp the truth of the world, to attain certainty, to establish a foundation for philosophy, and/or produce a defensible philosophical system.
In retrospect, Baudrillard's philosophical play with the subject/object distinction, his abandonment of the subject, and going over to the side of the object is a key aspect of his thought. He identifies this dichotomy with the duality of good and evil in which the cultivation of the subject and its domination of the object is taken as the good within Western thought, while the sovereignty and side of the object is interwoven with the principle of evil. Baudrillard's thought is radically dualistic and he takes the side of the pole within a series of dichotomies of Western thought that has generally been derided as inferior, such as siding with appearance against reality, illusion over truth, evil over good, and woman over man. In The Perfect Crime (1996b), Baudrillard has declared that reality has been destroyed and henceforth that people live in a world of mere appearance. In this universe, certainty and truth are impossible and Baudrillard takes the side of illusion, arguing in Impossible Exchange (2001) that: “Illusion is the fundamental rule” (p. 6).
Baudrillard also argues that the world is without meaning and that affirming meaninglessness is liberating: “If we could accept this meaninglessness of the world, then we could play with forms, appearances and our impulses, without worrying about their ultimate destination… As Cioran says, we are not failures until we believe life has a meaning – and from that point on we are failures, because it hasn’t” (2001: 128). Most controversially, Baudrillard also identifies with the principle of evil defined as that which is opposed to and against the good. There is an admittedly Manichean and Gnostic dimension to Baudrillard's thought, as well as deep cynicism and nihilism.[8] Deconstruction, however, takes apart the subject/object dichotomy indicating the impossibly of taking the side of subject or object, or of good and evil as both are interconnected with each other and there can be no pure object without subject and vice versa, an argument Adorno has made.[9] Baudrillard's thought is intrinsically dualistic and not dialectical. His thought is self-avowedly agonistic with the duel presented in tandem with his dualism, taking on and attacking rival theories and positions. Contradictions do not bother Baudrillard, for indeed he affirms them. It is thus tricky to argue with Baudrillard on strictly philosophical grounds and one needs to grasp his mode of writing, his notion of theory fictions (see Section 5), and to engage their saliency and effects.