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--></style><title>[iDC] Some thoughts on Jean
Baudrillard</title></head><body>
<div>Hi Trebor;</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Thanks for inviting me to write a response to Baudrillard's
passing: Truth is, I haven't thought much about him or his work for
years or my past love/hate relationship to his writing. I think I
stopped reading him after his coffee table
book <i>America </i>came out, which seemed so beside the
point of what was occurring in America as to be useless. He sure was a
provocateur on first encounter, but then it all seemed to slide into
cynicism too easily. His articulations of the simulacrum were
ultimately moralistic and it was his theory of it that made it
impossible to imagine much political or aesthetic agency (as opposed,
for instance, to the Deleuzian simulacrum which is all about
transformation and possibility). His arguments about the impossibility
of critique--since it is always complicit with what it is
critiquing--were complex arguments to be sure; but the ease with which
it all could be reduced to fit the if-you-can't-beat'em-join'em ethos
of the too hip for politics generation made his work stand for the
worst side of postmodernist thought: "If it's all a simulation
why bother to change it?" Baudrillard's "murder of the
real," similarly was too sad--no more mystery or "thought
from the outside." He seemed to turn Benjamin's utopian
"Jeitzeit" into the deadtime of the now: no crimes, no
resistance, no hope.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>My first encounter with Baudrillard's writing was in the
Reaganist 1980s and it seemed to explain a lot about what was
happening in the first world--how a Hollywood actor like Ronald Reagan
could be elected president, how Star Wars went from being merely the
title of a fascist movie to an actual weapons program--in ways that my
earnest political modernism just couldn't. But there was still the
Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua as a counter-image of resistance to
bolster my belief that the last vestiges of a 60s authentic
counter-culture that I had been weaned on could still succeed.
The illegal Iran-contra war put an end to that, and the American
people loved Reagan even more! It all made Baudrillard's "desert
of the real" seem even more accurate. Repressive tolerance gave
way to the consumer sublime: Baudrillard had really flipped it around,
the modernist futurism of pure immanence gave way to the depressing
eternal newness of corporate consumerism. A cynical and ironic stance
toward everything made more sense than my own mourning over the loss
of the authentic spirit of revolution. His complicated and elusive
writings were filled with the cynicism of post-68 leftwing
melancholia. Sadly, it was hard not to find myself thinking
Baudrillard was always depressingly right.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>At the same time, many were trying to figure out what a socially
engaged, activist media could be out there in the desert of the final
consolidation of corporate media in America, and Baudrillard's
work was of little help. But people resisted the swoon of his hopeless
admonitions. In the art world I remember the huge
"Anti-Baudrillard" Show in NY in the late 80s, Tim Rollins
held a Nuremberg-like rally against him at some conference at
NYU--crowds cheering Tim's evocation of Emersonian idealism as
Baudrillard slumped in his chair. There also was political and
cultural resistance everywhere: The tremendous experiments of an
emerging media activism belied the sense of impossibility that the
media could be used for developing active social and political
awareness locally and internationally: ACT-UP, public access TV (we
were running Sandinista-made TV on public access stations), low power
radio, neighborhood cinemas, anti-gentrification, the incredible work
the was coming out of the developing countries. And today there still
is--the endless IDC discussions of the political possibilities of
"Second Life" notwithstanding.!!</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Still when I think about it now, Baudrillard at his most
provocative articulated something about the ways media culture trains
us to accept everything, and embrace nothing that was right and seems
more right everyday. Who else could have imagined the last decade,
where the American people finally gave up their outrage at the Bush
coup and the lies, killing, and global destruction in their name? Both
Baudrillard and Ronald Reagan, that other great prophet of the 1980s,
certainly agreed on one thing when they exclaimed from the depths of
1984: "YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET!"</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>In solidarity, Jeffrey</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>Jeffrey Skoller</div>
<div>Film Studies Program,<br>
7408 Dwinelle Hall #2670,<br>
University of California Berkeley<br>
Berkeley CA 94720-2670<br>
(510)642-2600 office<br>
(510)642-8881 fax<br>
jasko@berkeley.edu</div>
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