The Real: Collector’s Edition

In late 2019, I visited an art gallery in Edinburgh. The collection being shown was of Russian royalty, and featured Portrait of Empress Catherine II with Travelling Dress (1787), by Mikhail Shibanov. The facial recognition technology of my phone camera was triggered by Catherine II’s grey-eyed, soft visage, an occurrence that felt uncanny and a little amusing. This affect only grew when I learned from the text panel on the wall that the artist was a serf of Grigory Potemkin. Catherine’s lover and a prominent statesman, Potemkin is widely known through the phrase ‘Potemkin Village’, an assembled facade of a town he supposedly erected along the route that Catherine travelled during her 1787 visit to Crimea, in order to impress her. In the more exaggerated accounts, this was an elaborate, Wes Anderson-style project of a living set, requiring thousands of peasants being meticulously stage managed. Modern historians largely agree that these claims are ridiculously mythologised; however, this has not prevented the reserved, ‘factual’ account being far outstripped by the myth of Potemkin, a name synonymous with any kind of false construction.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French thinker who developed an idiosyncratic, occasionally funny but mostly terrifying style of writing, that conveyed his rapturously negative critiques of philosophy and society. His work is deliberately counter-intuitive, provocative, and highly inventive. He is interpreted by many critics, such as Douglas Kellner, as being a dangerous thinker who must be avoided lest his darkly hypnotic writings foreclose political solutions. One of his most influential books is Symbolic Exchange and Death (henceforth SED), published in 1976 and fully translated into English in 1993. SED is one of those texts that only really appears relevant long after its initial publication. The main argument of the book is that Western societies have lost access to the symbolic realm, which has been replaced by a semiotic order. Baudrillard was heavily influenced, as were many, by Ferdinand de Saussure, a key figure of structuralism. Saussure was most significant in his formulation of the linguistic sign. Briefly, a sign is  a meaning communicated by language that is not limited to the form of communication itself, and is made up of the signifier (the word), and the signified (the concept). That which is referred to by the sign, the referent, is the ‘real’ thing, external to thought. Drawing upon anthropological work by Marcel Mauss on gift exchange in ‘primitive’ societies, Baudrillard argues that such cultures had no mode of production, and indeed functioned primarily under the system of the symbolic, which is “a functional principle sovereignly outside and antagonistic to our economic ‘reality principle’”. In his account, symbolic exchange is a sort of uninterrupted cycle of reversing forces – the gift/counter-gift, exchange/sacrifice, and production/destruction. With capitalism, the symbolic is blocked, taken over and concealed by productivism and utilitarian calculation:

“Isn’t it a miracle that with plastics, man has invented an undegradable matter, thus interrupting the cycle through which corruption and death reverses each and every substance on the earth into another?”

He posits that these myriad exchange forms are replaced, in our societies, by the stimulus/response, to which we shall return later.

Baudrillard's theorisation of simulacra is his most famous. He contends that the key feature of our societies is that signs are free-floating, constantly shifting from one referent to the other – precisely because there is no longer any referent to which the sign could reliably refer. He lays out, in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), his famous four-stage theorising of the image:

“It is the reflection of a profound reality;

it masks and denatures a profound reality;

it masks the absence of a profound reality;

it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;

it is its own pure simulacrum.”

Such are the orders of simulation; no doubt only a sketch, and critics of his that contest the specifics of this genealogy miss the point of his work, and indeed seem only to engage with this specific part of it, as Mike and Nicholas Gane point out in their introduction to the revised edition of SED. In his book Baudrillard's Bestiary (1991), Mike Gane argues that this is an attempt to show that anyone proceeding with analysis of representation throughout history, cannot speak of the ‘real world’ without running into a great many problems. With every successive phase, what is ‘known’ as the ‘real’ is not just out of date, but ludicrously distorted. Central to this discussion is the invention of the reality principle itself, that has from its outset been tied to the specific development of economic and philosophical doctrines in the West. Such a development leads us to a state where simulacra dominate everything, resplendent in their “blind but brilliant ambience” that all aim at “political and mental hegemony, the phantasy of a closed mental substance”. With the increasing sophistication of technology and methods of depicting reality (most obviously, but not exclusively in visual media), there is a paradoxical result – the real implodes, and the simulation of this real takes precedence. With the disappearance of the original, the copy becomes free-floating, unrestrained, and universally exchanged according to a general equivalence. In our world, everything and everyone is so completely mediated by these simulations that it is useless to speak of ‘faithful’ or ‘distorted’ pictures of reality, precisely because reality has (always-already) become hyperreal. Modern societies were those of production, the circulation of commodities, and industrialism. In the West, that time has passed, according to Baudrillard. We have reached “The end of production”, and now are in an era of reproduction. The era of the generation of signs for the sake of signs, the endless proliferation of images and media.

There is not sufficient space here to raise the much-contested term postmodernism. I mention it only because it is often used, as cudgel or looking-glass, to address Baudrillardian thought. Let us leave such a debate to one side and take a look at a short essay by Baudrillard titled Modernity (1987). He begins by stating that what we call modernity is not a theory or analytic concept; “There are only traits of modernity...only a logic of modernity and an ideology”.

Several points key to understanding his thought are to be found here – first, what we call modernity is often viewed as spawning huge networks of technological apparatuses and scientism, and that these things are in themselves modern phenomena. He disagrees; “Modernity is not technologic and scientific revolution, it is the play and the implication of the latter in the spectacle of private and social life...Neither science nor technology are themselves ‘modern’, but the effects of science and technology are.”

What modernity is not, then, is the exaltation of the individual whose rights stem from the supposedly linear development of liberty given to us by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. As modernity becomes universal and hegemonic, through its technical standardisation of forms of exchange and culture, what appears is not change as such, but the dance of change on a static sociality. The subjects of modernity are endlessly recycled, “threatened everywhere by the homogenization of social life...lost in a system of ‘personalisation’”. The second feature of modernity to be found in his account also appears in SED – that modernity does away with tradition is to misperceive what tradition is. Modernity, in fact, “arises in implication with tradition in a subtle cultural play, in a debate where the two are hand in glove, in a process of amalgamation and adaptation”. If one detects hints of the dialectic here, Baudrillard is quick to dispel this inclination, arguing in SED that there is no contradiction to be found:

“Tradition is no longer the pre-eminence of the old over the new: it is unaware of either – modernity itself invents them both at once, at a single stroke, it is always and at the same time ‘neo-’ and ‘rétro-’, modern and anachronistic.”

Let us take so-called ‘free time’ as an example – it has been known for some time by critical theory that work and leisure are no longer differentiated in any meaningful sense. Baudrillard extends the thesis of post-WWII Marxists, that both work and non-work time resemble each other ever more closely. In a world of implosion, where everything collapses into everything else all at once, dialectical opposition and conflict does not produce anything outside that which is not already in service to the reproduction of the code. Baudrillard’s sociology, if it can be confined to such a discipline, is one where functions such as work or leisure are valued not for their content, but for their signification as such. Labour is no longer limited just to the confined spaces of industrialism, and “explodes and scatters over every aspect of society”, which can be perceived everywhere today. Self-checkout terminals, omnipresent interactive media, and neoliberal self-care ideology, all reveal the labour of leisure time, nakedly displaying the total investment of social space with the logic of a system that argues it only really exists in exploitative assembly lines and concrete institutions.

As the distinctions between hitherto separate spheres of life break down, we reach “The end of production”, and we enter an era of reproduction, which is not to say that nothing is produced, but everything that is serves only to mechanically repeat social functions that have done away with their imaginary differences. It  is  a strange thesis, but one that reaches its apotheosis in the world of digitality he could only anticipate incompletely. Factories, he writes, “must disappear as such, and labour must lose its specificity in order that capital can ensure the extensive metamorphosis of its form throughout society as a whole”. Random and combinatory, testing is everywhere – the medium (the method of communication, if you like) constantly selects and tests you “by a circular operation of experimental modifications and incessant interference”, not so that the real views on a subject can be grasped, but so that these views can be approximated according to existing models. “Everywhere the same ‘scenario’ of ‘trials and errors’...the scenario of the spectrum of choices on offer or the multiple choice (‘test your personality’).”

Leisure today is overwhelmingly determined by streaming services, aggregation mechanisms of all recorded media that can be accessed. That some art remains outside the pull of streaming is surely a historical contingency not to last much longer. Just  as the artifacts of all cultures are interred in great archives and endlessly explained, so too is all cultural enjoyment to be indexed according to the general equivalence of hyperrealism. Streaming ‘services’, which present visual art as just one more set of tasks to be organised, sorted, and evaluated, demonstrate clearly the way samples of taste or opinion are generated. Your selections are ‘personalised’ and ‘tailored specifically to you’ – you have ‘flexibility’, and everything is ‘on demand’. Even advertising today is wholly barefaced – an increasing share of advertising sells you experience freed of its intrusions – which expresses perfectly the consummate layering of ironism over everything; “Reality is no longer stranger than fiction: it captures every dream before it can take on the dream effect”. While his writings are often reduced derisively to fiction, his smirking pessimism and keen eye for critique make Baudrillard an engaging, important writer, that unlike many others, can get a laugh out of you as well.

Works Consulted:

Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Phillip Beitchman. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Baudrillard, J. (1987) ‘Modernity’. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. Vol.11, No.3.

Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Baudrillard, J. (2017) Symbolic Exchange and Death. Revised Edition. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage.

Gane, M. (1991) Baudrillard’s Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture. London: Routledge.

Hawkes, T. (1977) Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

Kellner, D. (1989) Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Mauss, M. (2011) The Gift. Translated by W.D. Halls. London: Routledge.

Tom Beed is a writer, actor, and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. He has a degree in International Relations and Politics from Oxford Brookes University.