On Leaving and Being Left – a Tribute to Jean Baudrillard

8/10/2019 On Leaving and Being Left a Tribute to Jean Baudrillard

1/6

Volume 4, Number 3 (October, 2007).

Special Issue: Remembering Baudrillard

On Leaving and Being LeftA Tribute to Jean Baudrillard

Stephen H. Jones

(Goldsmiths College, University of London, England)

One view of Jean Baudrillard as a condescending intellectual who saw us (the mere mortals) as

no longer able to differentiate between actual events and media orchestrated illusions makes

defending him a disheartening endeavour. In my experience, attempts to do so frequently face an

accusation that is thought to render reading him unnecessary and unhelpful. Most commonly ittakes the form of some variation upon the following: Where does Baudrillard leave us? If we

must, supposedly, be at all times cognizant of the absence of distinction between truth and

falsity, how might we craft a moral position? If politics has been supplanted by mererepresentations of itself, how can we even begin to think about political change?

In light of his recent passing the first of these questions seems to have acquired a new relevanceand a different meaning: Where does Baudrillard leave us? With what message, what lesson, if

any? How should one take into the future this writer who, unlike the generation of thinkers of

which he was a part, seemed to closely tie his thoughts to the events (or non-events) of theday? Does the fact that he spoke of contemporary art, of Rushdie and Khomeini, of the Gulf

War, of Sarajevo, mean that he cannot be taken beyond the times he wrote about?

For me these questions now have an immediacy and pertinence because, as simple as it often was

to write off his assertionsbeing, as they were, so often made apparently in the face of directevidence to the contrary1he nonetheless seemed, with remarkable frequency, to put a finger on

what was, paradoxically, most elusive and most obvious at the same time. His writing attemptedto speak of what was tacitly operative on a wide scale but was nonetheless unnameable. His

opinion was, therefore, both invigorating and infuriatingimpossible to ignore, yet intensely

difficult to thread into any systematic analysis. His insights were, and remain, almost impossibleto quantify. As such, the notion that his thought might not be able to inform any event upon

which he has not explicitly commentedthat there might not be a central effort to his writing

suggests, to me at least, that what needs to be spoken of might in the future remain silent.

Can we then define what this central effort was? Many of Baudrillards critics bemoaned his

reservations about the Enlightenment goal of ever-increasing knowledge, and in consequenceattributed to him scepticism of an open society, and even hatred of democracy. These kinds ofinferences even lead to occasional efforts to try and draw connections between him and fascist

authoritarianism.2Thought, it frequently appeared to his opponents, was something Baudrillard

held in contempt. His aim was thus, it was often claimed, little more than to express his owndisaffection, normally directed toward whatever was at the time generally regarded to be worth

fighting for: rights, happiness, peace.
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn1http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn1http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn2http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn2http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn2http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn2http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn1


2/6

But to anyone who has read Baudrillard carefully it is obvious that, whilst a deeply-held

reservation about what he called the totalization of knowledge is very much present in his

writing, that presence never once lead him to cease fighting against whatever he saw as a threatto openness and egalitarian principles. His only difference, perhaps, was that he only reluctantly

limited himself to a particular national, and hence electoral, context. In fact, what appeared to

impel Baudrillards writing was the recognition of a contradiction: thevery technologicalmechanisms looked upon to open up society through increased understanding andcommunication seemed to be closing it. It was, he thought, the erasure of uncertainty that was,

and today is, egalitarianisms opponent. This led him to question the purity of media, but also,

more generally, the self-evident beneficence of technological progress. He would, for this reason,surely have approved of John Grays words, which go some way to summarising his perspective:

Today, faith in political action is practically dead, and it is technology that expresses the dreamof the transformed world. Few people any longer look forward to a world in which hunger and

poverty are eradicated by a better distribution of the wealth that already exists. Instead,

governments look to science to create ever more wealth. Intensive agriculture and genetically

modified crops will feed the hungry; economic growth will reduce and eventually removepoverty. Though it is often politicians who espouse these policies most vociferously, the clear

implication of such technical fixes is that we might as well forget about political change. Ratherthan struggling against arbitrary power, we should wait for the benign effects of growingprosperity.3

These words, however, although broadly consistent with Baudrillards position, do notadequately encompass it. His concern was not just that technologys promise to inoculate all

against misfortune, misery and poverty might be a false dawn, butthat the active nurturing of

this consensus, its protection and maintenance, could result in the most violent action right nowin the present. According to Baudrillard, in fact, the potential for violence threatened to increase

rather than decrease as the likelihood of realizing this utopia dwindled. We continue to protect

the goal of a life lived without misfortune, he averred, not through brash self-confidence, but

fearfully; each challenge, each voice differing from the consensuseven if it is only symbolicand without military musclebecoming an insufferable threat to the dimly held hope that it

might yet, even in the face of impossible odds, be possible to expunge lifes calamities. Better to

do that than to face the presents challenges; better to do that than to feel obliged to others, tofeel the need to question oneself for the sake of others. In this scenario hope dwindles but fear

persistslike a man who has ceased to believe in God but who still fastidiously observes every

religious ritual for fear of being condemned to Hell.

It is when speaking of this sense of almost pathological fearfulness that Baudrillard managed to

communicate what present-day political debate cannot easily countenance. He considered

political life to have been worn down not (or not only) because of its being subsumed by thefacile world of stage-driven media representation, but because where it once referred to change,

antagonism and reconciliation, it now refers to protection, securitization, and maintenancein

short, little more than an administrative task divorced from ethics. And this shift was, for him,made all the more pronounced by most politicians seeming need to mobilize the vernacular of

history, progress and change in the face of their own constraint. Every adjustment is given a

veneer of historical significance in order to mask a profound inertia (the recent change in British
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn3http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn3http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn3http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn3


3/6

Prime Minister, for instance, was inaugurated with the proclamation let the work of change

begin, despite the outgoing individual and his replacement being almost identical in ideological

terms); each event, every movement on the world stage, must, to use one Baudrillards turns ofphrase, examine itself and ask: am I profound enough, spectacular enough, significant enough to

make it historically?4And in this situation historyand the history of political change in

particularis cheapened, like a currency that has been overproduced and thereby devalued to thepoint of ceasing to be money.

Yet for Baudrillard this wearing down of politics was sinister for more reasons than its ability tomake parliamentary debate stagnant. His foremost concern was that it suggested a reversal of

political norms. His problem was that non-political security-based manoeuvres might be able

to proceed without being judged as wars are judged, as power is judged, because they cease to be

wars based upon power: they are merely, to use Carl Schmitts term, police operations. Afearfully maintained utopia which is nonetheless viewed, consensually, as the only acceptable

option opens a dangerous door: to the spilling of blood to save blood; to the creation of disorder

and destruction in order to maintain order and avoid destruction. When the maintenance of order

is the motive, and the aim is impossible, (non-)political strategy becomes merely a form ofprophylaxis or deterrence that can be directed at anything. This is how one should, I think, read

Baudrillards comments on the war on terror:

This strategy of deterrence is directed not only at the future, but also at past eventsfor

example, at that of 11 September, where it attempts, by war in Afghanistan and Iraq, to erase the

humiliation. This is why the war is at bottom a delusion, a virtual event, a non-event. Bereft ofany objective or finality of its own it merely takes the form of an incantation, an exorcism. This

is also why it is interminable, for there will never be any end to conjuring away such an event. It

is said to be preventive, but it is in fact retrospective, its aim being to defuse the terrorist event of11 September, the shadow of which hovers over the whole strategy of planetary control.5

One can certainly see from these words why Baudrillard amassed in his lifetime such a sizeablecollection of vociferous enemies. His reluctance to temper, qualify or elaborate upon his position

leaves it sounding sweepingly judgemental. Alone, without context, his fragmentary declarations

can come across as little more than anti-American, anti-Western diatribes. But he was not againstAmerica per se, merely against any power setting out the terms against which morality and

immorality are judged. His concern was the structural asymmetry that existed between non-

violent protective violence and symbolic destructive violence. And in order to oppose this he

tried to forcibly reinsert the element he saw as left out of the picturein this case the symbolicechoes that refuse to be controlled. His point above is not that America is a deluded Moloch, but

rather that a process of disavowal is at work. After all, can we truthfully sayeven given all that

could be written about the usefulness of the interventions in Iraq and (more justifiably)

Afghanistanthat there is nothing in this military situation that relates to the media-driven needto be publicly seen to be doing something?

It is therefore a grave mistake conclude from Baudrillards work as many of his critics havedone that his perspective, cunning as it may have been, was not concerned with morality, that

he was unmoved by the dead of terrorist attacks or of non-wars. Quite the opposite, in fact:

Baudrillards concern was that in the situation he described significant elements were left out of
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn4http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn4http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn4http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn5http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn5http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn5http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn5http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn4


4/6

the moral equation. In a situation in which political processes proceed like administrative tasks,

the dead become mere collateral damage a discounted by-product that is no longer part of the

minimal utopia to which the global world clings. He thus had some affinity with the followingwords of Schmitt:

Everyone belongs to humanity Humanity thus becomes an asymmetrical counter-concept. Ifhe discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being human to a disturber or

destroyer, then the negatively valued person becomes an unperson, and his life is no longer of the

highest value: it becomes worthless and must be destroyed.6

Pace the opinions of his critics, Baudrillards opinion was not uncaring, he merely refused to

accept this closing off of ethics: he denied the possibility of total consensus in order to questionany particular persons ability to speak for all; he refusedto remain satisfied by the morally self-

gratifying idea that all could be catered for without having to consider how ones way of living

affects others; he rejected the moral confidence that comes with blind certitudeand

consequently he did his best to disrupt that certitude. William Merrins words, written about

Baudrillards essay The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, can be extended to cover much of hisoeuvre: Baudrillards essays, far from being nihilistic, form a genuine, impassioned and

sustained polemic, infused with anger, indignation, scepticism and wit that suggest a moreimmediate and coherent moral position than that usually attributed to his work.7

However, the gravest error to draw from Baudrillards life and work is that he held thought incontempt. This conclusion can only be reached by the baseless inference that because he denied

his opponents claims to be offering reasoned arguments and therefore rectitude of

judgementhe was an idealist who did not need to bother connecting the thoughts he thought to

the world he lived in. His arguments simply rebut the implication that proceeds: I am rationaltherefore I am right. I encountered Baudrillards work as a disaffected undergraduate, frustrated

at university lifes apparent inability to provide any education that related to more serious andsearching questions than how to organize the world more effectively and expediently. To this,Baudrillards writing seemed like a release: he seemed to me a man who placed thought, not

away from life, but against the defectiveness of life; he seemed to write like a man who saw

economics, politics and technology becoming incorporated into one unchallengeable integratedsystem, and whofor moral reasonsceaselessly refused to let thought go the same way. His

effort was, to use Rimbauds expression, to enact a logical revolt (the ambiguity of this

expression perhaps aptly conveying the way in which Baudrillard, on the one hand, saw revolt as

a logical part of global society, and, on the other, was himself revolting against that societyslogic). For mefar from being left out in the cold by Baudrillardit was Baudrillard who

seemed to be fighting against the prospect of being (either intellectually, materially or politically)

left aside.

This is not to say he was without flaws. His flaws, in fact, are part of the reason why I do not

read him as much as I once did (although, as I mentioned, I have never been able to dispense

with him entirely). His hyperbole, his curt, declarative style, whilst invigorating and challenging,can leave him open to attack. If one is to try to utilize his arguments in order to win over

intellectual opponents, it is sometimes necessary to try to adapt his thought into something more

thoroughgoing. For instance, Baudrillard called both Gulf wars non-events because (in the first
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn6http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn6http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn6http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn7http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn7http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn7http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn7http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_edn6


5/6

case) there was no desire to remove Saddam, and (in the second) there was. This can easily lead

to the counter that the West is, from a Baudrillardian perspective, frozen into inaction, never able

to do anything correctly. One needs, therefore, to emphasize the expediency that governed bothwars, and make judgements accordingly. One needs to expand the point further than Baudrillard

did, both in this case and typically.

But finally, upon the occasion of Baudrillards leaving us, we are left with, more than anything

else, his passion as a writer, which continually reminds all who read him that the reason for

engaging in intellectual activity is not just to suggest alterations and improve the functioning ofsociety as it stands, but to challenge what it stands upon. He is, for me, a writer to begin with, to

take intoas Pierre Bourdieu put itthe combat sport that is intellectual life. He is the initial

spark, the provocation. Mischievous, ironic, cuttingthe hallmarks of Baudrillards writing

remind us that the role of reflective thought is never to be constrained by the laws andconsensuses of the time; his lesson is that, ultimately, thought should and will always leave the

grasp of what confines it.

Stephen JonesEndnotes

1In one of his essays, he even admitted that this was the case: See Jean Baudrillard. The GulfWar Did Not Take Place. Sydney: Power, 1995:28. The same has been said about many of his

declarations. For example his suggestion that today the child is no longer a child is, for

instance, contrary to many peoples sensibilities. See Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil.New York: Verso, 1993:169-170:

Whereas adults make children believe that they, the adults, are adults, children for their part letadults believe that they, the children, are children. Of these two strategies the second is the

subtler, for while adults believe that they are adults, children do not believe that they are

children. They arechildren, but they do not believe it. ...The feminine principle also partakes ofthis lascivious irony, as when women let men believe that they are men, while they themselves,

secretly, do not believe that they are women (any more than children believe that they are

children). One who lets others believe is always superior to the one who believes, or makesothers believe. The idea of the sexual and political liberation of women was a trap precisely in

that it made women believe that they were women. Consequently, the idea of femininity

triumphed: the rights of women, the status of women, the idea of women -- all these carried the

day, along with the belief in womens own sexual nature. Once women were thus liberated,once they want to be women, the superior irony of the community of women is perforce lost. No

one is immune from this kind of misadventure. Think how men, by taking themselves for men,

have fallen into voluntary servitude.

2Richard Wolin. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from

Nietzsche to Postmodernism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004.
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref1http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref1http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref2http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref2http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref2http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref1


6/6

3John Gray.Heresies. London: Granta, 2004:50-51.

4Jean Baudrillard. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Sydney: Power, 1995:31-32.

5Jean Baudrillard. The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact. Oxford: Berg, 2005:118-119.

6Carl Schmitt. The Legal World Revolution, in Telos, 72, summer 1987. Cited in: Tracy B.

Strong. Foreword, in Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1996: ix-xxii.

7William Merrin. Uncritical Criticism? Norris, Baudrillard and the Gulf War, in Mike Gane(Editor),Jean Baudrillard. (Volume II). London: Sage, 2000:389.
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref3http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref3http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref4http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref4http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref5http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref5http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref6http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref6http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref7http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref7http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref7http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref6http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref5http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref4http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article17-jones.html#_ednref3

On Leaving and Being Left – a Tribute to Jean Baudrillard

Documents

Transcript of On Leaving and Being Left – a Tribute to Jean Baudrillard