Unravelling the revolutionary thinking of Jean Baudrillard

By FRANCES GRANT

The sleek DVD player with its winking digital display and promise of beautiful images is so sexy. Your telly's too old for the technology, but you want it anyway.

You love the way the new washing machine takes a load off your mind - but why do you sometimes get the feeling the consumer items in your home are more real than you?

When you go down to the mall, you're struck by how much bigger it seems inside than out. You nearly always get lost in its spaces, which replicate themselves in every direction.

Nor is the retail therapy as satisfying as it should be. Did you buy those gizmos and that designer suit, or did they buy you?

Back home, you flip on the telly to watch the news: there's a war on somewhere, but the images of the battle look like a computer game. You surf through endless channels and finally settle on a reality show, but the "real people and events" seem pre-programmed.

Hopping on the internet for a chat, you decide to change your identity - no one else is who they say they are. Perhaps you need a holiday. Why not go to Disneyland for a nice, safe fantasy? Nothing else seems real anyway. The world has stopped making sense.

Vraiment, mes amis! With its mass consumerism, mass media, computer networks, cyberspace, instantaneous electronic flow of capital and global package tourism, the world is no longer real.

Just ask French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, the man who made the earliest models of a post-modern world and has been playing with them ever since.

Baudrillard has come to New Zealand as a guest of the University of Auckland. He will give a public lecture at the Auckland Town Hall on Wednesday, open an exhibition of his photographs and take part in a two-day conference.

The 71-year-old philosopher, whose working titles are professor of sociology and professor of history, prefers to be called a "theoretician." From the topic of his lecture, "The Global, the Universal and Singular," it sounds as though he intends to cover just about everything.

Baudrillard is well-known for his sizzlingly dense lecture style, which can leave an audience both buzzing and bamboozled. His writing, too, has been described as just as much performance art as analysis.

Here is a typical Baudrillardian mission statement: "It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous."

When he needs a break from the fabulousness of thinking and writing, Baudrillard takes photographs. He hopes his photographs - images of objects charged with enigma and the absence of their human users or creators - are "without meaning." His comments on art are equally nihilistic: "To turn an object into art, you just have to make it useless."

Meaning may now be a mirage, but a philosopher still has to make a point. As a radical thinker, Baudrillard is, of course, a master of the controversial statement.

Outside philosophical circles, he is most famous for his book of essays, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Other provocative assertions in his work include: that Watergate was not a real scandal; that the function of Disneyland is to conceal the fact that the rest of America is no longer real; history has ended and is now running backwards.

Inside philosophical and intellectual circles, he is hot property. He is also a popular target of a mostly Anglo resistance movement, which discounts French philosophy as so much Gallic flair and nonsense.

The radical's own roots lie in Reims, where he was born in 1929. He taught at the University of Paris X, Nanterre, between 1966 and 1987, and is now a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

The starkly modern Nanterre campus was a hotbed of French student protest in 1968, when Baudrillard published his first book.

The System of Objects, which contains key ideas of his later work, is an analysis of how technology has replaced older, symbolic orders of meaning (such as religion) and how consumer objects are created to satisfy human fantasy and desire rather than need.



He then set about re-examining Marxism, using the tools of structuralism, a school of French philosophy that looks at how meaning is generated by codes and signs.

In a society driven by mass consumption, excess and waste, Baudrillard argues that objects have become a system of signs that generate their own messages far removed from their original use and exchange values. Confused? Well, you didn't buy that designer suit because you needed clothing. You bought it to put you a cut above your workmates; you bought the message generated by fashion.

This rethinking of Marx, in terms of mass consumption rather than production, led to Baudrillard's most influential post-modern ideas.

The world of mass consumerism, media and images has lost sight of the originals that give things and events authenticity and meaning. The real thing no longer exists, there are only copies and, more dangerously, simulations created by models or abstract codes.

Baudrillard calls this state of affairs "hyper-reality." And one of the foremost carriers of the hyper-real is television, which seems to bring us closer to events but reduces these events to its own code of empty spectacle.

In his travel book America, Baudrillard locates the most hyper-real corner of the world in California, with its sprawling, decentralised city of Los Angeles, its techno-fantasy factories of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and theme parks.

Years after his invention of the hyper-real, Baudrillard is looking like a prophet. Along has come the internet, computer-simulated realities, the mapping of the human genome and the danger of our reduction to the code of our creation. And then there was the hyper-real event par excellence, the Gulf War.

When Baudrillard asks if this took place, it isn't a denial. The Gulf War was played out on television as videogame-style missile strikes; through talking heads of experts and journalists' reports. Behind the images, the real event was nowhere to be seen.

The question he asks is not whether the media misrepresented the event, but whether the media constructed it in advance.

Get your head around this way of thinking and it's not so shocking to learn that in his latest book, The Vital Illusion, Baudrillard reckons the year 2000 didn't happen either. History has become stuck in a feedback loop of replays, reconstructions and simulations of what might be.

So how seriously should we take the man whom Guardian journalist Steven Poole has dubbed the "David Bowie of philosophy?"

His detractors have accused him of being a critical terrorist, a nihilist or a cult figure for intellectual fashion victims. One of the most serious charges against him (made in the book Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont) is that he is one of a group of French post-modernist thinkers who abuse scientific concepts.

None of this has fazed Baudrillard. In The Vital Illusion , for example, he hoes into issues of human cloning with his usual gusto.

And there's no denying the influence of his ideas on students and theorists of art, film, media and communications, information technology, sociology, history and geography.

But what does the man himself think about the seriousness of his art of thinking? "Ouf, it's a game," he told Poole. A fabulous game. A game that may not really be taking place.

* Jean Baudrillard will give a public lecture, The Global, the Universal and the Singular, at the Auckland Town Hall at 8 pm, Wednesday.