170
Book
ReviewAnti-System,
Anti-TotalityFragments: conversations with François L'Yvonnet. Jean Baudrillard,
2004. London: Routledge; ISBN 0-4153-0548-9, 119 pp., £13.99
SAGE Publications, Inc.2004DOI: 10.1177/09675507040120020503
HelenBulbeck
From
the mid-1960s through to the present day, Jean Baudrillard has touched on
just about everything to do with contemporary social theory and philosophy.
He looks for meaning everywhere, bringing his perverse wit to bear on an array
of subjects. Amongst contempor- ary culture and thought that he has already
made his trademark (vir- tual reality, television, capitalism) he has addressed
the more unusual and specific topics such as Holocaust revisionism, children's
rights, Aids, geneticism, BSE, the Gulf War and the Rushdie fatwa. His work
today cuts across many genres, so that there is something for everyone. However,
it is only during the last decade or so that Bau- drillard's work has appeared
in English translation; the timing could not have been better given the virtual
take that now colours our society. Fragments is an excellent starting point
for anyone who is trying to get to grips with Baudrillard for the first time.
Fragments presents a set of intriguing interviews with Baudrillard, whose
work today occupies centre stage in the analysis of consumer- ism, terrorism,
and contemporary culture. In these discussions with François L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard
reveals for the first time in detail the thinkers who have been the dominant
influences on his work dur- ing his career. Instead of examining his work
as a project of intellec- tual accumulation, he challenges all the major interpretations
of his work by suggesting he has always adopted an anti-system, anti- totality
strategy. Even globalization is accompanied in his view by a Western culture
that itself is no longer a well-founded, confident universalism. The system
of Western culture is subject to radical uncertainty and chaos. Such fractalization
can be opposed, in Baudrillard's view, by letting the thesis and the antithesis
live, and by not trying to move to a goal in the synthesis. In his fractured
take on the world, Baudrillard discusses his life's work in relationship to
his contemporaries — Bataille, Barthes, Lyotard and Deleuze, to name
a few — and explores his position as an outsider in the field of French
philosophy. Since the world has
171
long
stood on its philosophic head (Hegel/Marx), we can find comfort in being `Other'.
The presence of an `other' in autobiographical and biographical texts means
that they are always written with at least a double perspective in mind: the
author's and the other's. It is within the area of this double perspective
where individuals cross social boundaries. Baudrillard has a gift for picking
the smallest nuance of reality and exploring it as a means towards whatever
is lar- ger, as he tests and defines boundaries through their deconstruction,
but he returns again and again to moments of fading and finality. He speaks
of the ends of things. And, in true Hegelian fashion, since we are at the
end of languages, styles, meanings, subjects and objects, we are at the beginning
of them as well. It is in this dialectical balance between the fading and
the emerging that the defiant, artistic act of self-creation intervenes, thus
creating a `negative' synthesis or space: `The fragment is indeed closely
related to the fracture. Something happens in the crack of things, in the
breach, and hence in their appearance' (p. 34). In Fragments, Baudrillard's
use of the textual convention of dialogue does not merely raise technical
or methodological issues, because it has also moral consequences — it
invites judgement as our sense of the social and moral is underpinned by what
we read. Dialogue is used as an oblique, non-committal way of expressing a
point of view, whilst at the same time, allowing disassociation from it and,
as often as not, subverting it by proceeding to express the opposite point
of view. The dialogic nature of Fragments enables the writer to `expose',
so that readers can search for meaning them- selves. The investigation of
truth by discussion, whereby a process of question and answer gradually eliminates
error and moves towards truth is reflected in Hegel's pattern of reality,
where history is seen as an inevitable dialectic, as Baudrillard acknowledges,
but he takes it one step further: `We're in a culture in which everything
is going better and better and. At the same time, from bad to worse — simultaneously in two directions at once, like time's double arrow' (p. 60).
He projects a vision of a world that was created by God `who per- haps wasn't
quite up to the job' (p. 60); a high-tech society where people are caught
up in a play of images, aphorisms, adverts, simula- cra, where people have
less and less of a relationship to an external reality, to such an extent
that the very concepts of the social, political, or even reality no longer
have any meaning. Fragments reads as an attempt to think through the implications
of this new situation — this antithesis — and, if possible, find
a way out — a synthesis: `Whatever the dysfunctions, the pollution,
the corruption, there's always the
172
intention
to find the ideal, technical version of things, an absolute reparation for
this world, which is such a mess' (p. 61). Of course, Baudrillard does not
find a way out. In his postmodern mediascape, Baudrillard collapses the distinctions
between reality and the word, images and objects, language and the world,
the signifier and the signified, so that the universe is inflected with no
stable struc- tures in which to anchor theories or policies: `They are networked
fragments. It's no longer possible today to establish some form of continuity,
wholeness or totalization, because it will be immediately obliterated by the
system itself. You have to set against it something that apparently plays
by the same rules, but stands opposed to it formally' (p. 26). On this point,
this translation of D'un Fragment l'autre presupposes that he is right, that
we are in something like a postmodern condition, that we have left modernity
behind and are in a qualitatively new society where the old categories and
old distinctions no longer hold. For a man who says that he has obliterated
his own footsteps, Fragments holds together very well. It just needs an index.