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COMMENTARY
March 10, 2007
Jean Baudrillard
The death this week in Paris of Jean Baudrillard, the “postmodern philosopher”, “cultural theorist” (please don’t yawn yet), mischievous political commentator, and talented photographer, is a loss all round. The reader will guess I am not generally well-disposed to fashionable French intellectuals, but Baudrillard I could enjoy on the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” principle. For he despised Michel Foucault.“Postmodernism” is, to me, the philosophical age that follows the loss of sanity, when reason finishes preying on itself. Which is not to say it is without poetry, or that the French thinkers who have been its intellectual stars have not provided glimmerings of truths. Verily, I think one of them, Jean-Luc Marion, in his theological construction of a “God without being”, may have provided a profound insight into the Creation as “pure gift”; an insight that might begin to redeem a great deal of apparently nihilistic 20th-century thought. Baudrillard struck me as the anti-postmodern postmodernist, and paradoxically as the most earnest of them, running with a notion from our Canadian thinker, Marshall McLuhan, about the illusory nature of all media presentations. This is the notion that the media do not report anything, but rather enact themselves, creating an alternative, theatrical reality to the fact of God and the facts of life. The photograph was to Baudrillard “the perfect crime”, providing a durable illusion of things no longer there. He famously argued that the first Gulf War was an “imaginary event”, in the sense that nothing was changed by it. He called the attack on the World Trade Centre a collective fantasy -- not denying that people were killed, but rather saying it was a drama we had mysteriously willed upon ourselves. More deeply, in his book, The Illusion of the End, he subverted all variations on the “end of history”, by suggesting that the whole modern obsession with progress has created an illusion of an end point to which we are progressing. But: “Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history?” He dismissed all economists, for their common illusion that an economy exists to provide consumers with necessary goods. Instead, consumers use the products they buy to create a symbolical, sumptuous and sacrificial order. Baudrillard was a peasant. He came from a peasant background. He made me think of another peasant Frenchman, the 19th-century painter Jean-François Millet, with his distrust of any emotions above the peasant's level, and his peasant love of the hard and self-apparent. Baudrillard wrote in a sophisticated urbane language, Millet adapted complex painting techniques of the pre-Impressionist Romantics -- to present simple, quite unromantic things. This contrast, between the urbane and the peasantish, was brought home to me recently when reading old Greek plays. Compare, for instance, the fate of Iphigenia in the late tragedian, Euripides, and the early tragedian, Aeschylus. She is the daughter of Agamemnon, who must be sacrificed to the goddess Artemis, if the Greek fleet is to sail successfully against Troy. For Euripides, there is this romantic story of a doe that is substituted by the goddess at the sacrifice, while the human girl is whisked away whole. Iphigenia, and her Trojan counterpart Polyxena in another play, are heroic women, who go bravely to the mound declaring, "Here is my neck!" -- the one to save the Greek fleet, the other, later, to die a princess and not a slave. Their very fanciful "declarations of nobility" mark Euripides as sophisticated and urbane. Now turn back to the Agamemnon, by Aeschylus. In that, Iphigenia is wimpering to her father about the horrible fate that awaits her. She has to be bound, and carried to the altar. The men wrap a gag around her pretty face, for fear she will utter some dangerous curse against the Argives. And no doe is substituted. Aeschylus makes Iphigenia more terribly real, in reducing her TO an animal. On the Greek (and peasant) theory that emotions are communicated "like darts" through the eyes, we learn that while bound and gagged and dragged to her execution, Iphigenia is still "darting" with her eyes, shooting pathos into every heart that watches. But this is real pathos, not an eroticised sentimentality: for she is really going to be butchered. Baudrillard tried, as McLuhan tried, to show the way our media and intelligentsia falsely "elevate" our lives, from the real to the fanciful, creating illusory and inconsequential dramatic events to replace the small, hard, apparent things, and casting everything as a morality play between the noble and the ignoble. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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