Baudrillard and the Millennium (Postmodern Encounters) - Softcover

Horrocks, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840460911 ISBN 13: 9781840460919

Publisher: Icon,Totem Books, 1999

Synopsis

‘In a sense, we do not believe in the Year 2000’, says French thinker Jean Baudrillard. Still more disturbing is his claim that the millennium might not take place. Baudrillard’s analysis of ‘Y2K’ reveals a repentant culture intent on storing, mourning and laundering its past, and a world from which even the possibility of the ‘end of history’ has vanished. Yet behind this bleak vision of integrated reality, Baudrillard identifies enigmatic possibilities and perhaps a final ironic twist.

‘Baudrillard and the Millennium’ confronts the strategies of this major cultural analyst’s encounter with the greatest non-event of the postmodern age, and accounts for the critical censure of Baudrillard’s enterprise. Key topics, such as natural catastrophes, the body, ‘victim culture’, identity and Internet viruses, are discussed in reference to the development of Jean Baudrillard’s millenarian thought from the 1980s to the threshold of the Year 2000 – from simulation to disappearance.

About this title

About the Author:

Christopher Horrocks is Senior Lecturer in Art History at Kingston University in Surrey. His publications include ‘Introducing Baudrillard’ and ‘Introducing Foucault’, both published by Icon/Totem. He lives in Tulse Hill, in the south of London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

After the Millennium: Baudrillard’s Endgame

In the last passages of Baudrillard’s article, ‘The End of the Millennium or The Countdown’, the enigma of the millennium is revealed, but any solution is held in suspense.

Jean Baudrillard’s millennium can be seen as ‘regulating and ordering the radical becoming, the radical illusion, of the world and its appearance’, and ‘reducing any internal singularity – of events, beings or things – to the common denominator of reality’. However, we must also consider his millennium as a mirror in which every simulated object, every simulated identity, hides a defeated enemy that waits to burst out and shatter simulated reality.

‘So, everywhere, objects, children, the dead, images, women, everything which serves to provide a passive reflection in a world based on identity, is ready to go on to the counter-offensive. Already they resemble us less and less ... I’ll not be your mirror!’

Thus Baudrillard sees a situation in which singularities emerge even when, and because, the system has become universal. These are joined by the extreme phenomena on this side of the mirror: the virulence of financial crashes, AIDS, computer viruses, deregulation and disinformation. Once discovered by science or anthropology, objects such as primitive societies, viruses or atoms are not content simply to remain themselves: they infiltrate the system. In this way, Baudrillard suggests, rationalist, scientific and technological subjects such as medicine, for example, must be pitied, as they are disarmed in advance by illnesses in which microbes are already interactive and capable of adapting to medication, in the way that insects adapt to insecticides.

At another level, Baudrillard sees a form of hope in the rise of ‘world stupidity’, as it must surely lead to a violent reaction of some sort, unless such acceleration simply ushers in ever more banal acts. While our world’s experts imagine solutions to achieve social provision, galloping exclusion ensues. In the same form, educational progress is outstripped by mental retardation.

One solution, Baudrillard suggests, lies in looking at worlds other than our own that have not undergone ‘development’ or, thankfully, that have failed at it. The future lies with such adolescent, confused societies that have not bought into the historical categories of humanism and reason.

In the concluding passages of ‘The End of the Millennium’, Baudrillard presents pataphysical aspects in which everything around us passes beyond its own limits and beyond the laws of physics and metaphysics. This stage, Baudrillard reiterates, is an ironic one. This propels us beyond even Heidegger’s view of technology as the culmination of metaphysics, and allows us to consider science, media and technology ironically.

This ironic destiny is such because it reverses our assumption that technology controls, manipulates and alienates the masses. A more subtle approach to the millennium is to consider how the media, for example, is manipulated by the masses through its indifference to meaning, or how the social allows political power to think it has them where it wants them, when in fact it is power that is vulnerable to destabilisation.

The essence of Baudrillard’s argument is this. The subject, such as science, technology or political power, may imagine that it controls its object, such as nature, the masses and the world. Yet this scenario (which gives rise to models of oppression or alienation) may be reversible. The object may be playing with the subject, natural phenomena with science, the masses with the media, and so on. This is the objective irony of our era. Baudrillard gives an example ...

‘Through the most subtle procedures we deploy to pin it down, isn’t the scientific object toying with us, presenting itself as an object and mocking our objective pretension to analyse it? Scientists are not far from admitting such a thing today, and this irony of the object is the very form of a radical illusoriness of the world, an illusoriness which is no longer physical (of the senses) or metaphysical (mental or philosophical), but pataphysical, to use the term Jarry applied to the ‘science’ of imaginary solutions.’

Ruse, irony, illusion, denial, reversibility, duplicity and radicality are not only conditions of our humanistic subjectivity, but conditions of the world. If we think beyond the conventional wisdom that the modern world of technologies, images and events signals alienation, expropriation, loss of will and history as a failed adventure, then we could detect a kind of ‘showing-through’ of the illusion of the world in the techniques we use to transform it. This is our millennial irony. Technology, in its apparent hyperreality, its high-definition and its supposed victory, might in fact be the ruse played on us by the object, in order to hide it and allow it to continue. Like Nietzsche’s veil, technology hides the radical illusion and maintains the secret: the world playfully allows us to act out our dreams of control. This is the answer that lies at the ‘end’ of the millennium, but one we are not permitted to discover.

We must choose between the first and second hypothesis, between the ‘perfect crime’ of simulation’s murder of reality and the objective irony of the world’s disappearance behind technology – two irreconcilable yet ‘true’ perspectives. In Baudrillard’s encounter with the millennium, these two versions of the world must be considered at once. ‘There is nothing that allows us to decide between them.’ The millennium’s catastrophe is perhaps our century’s greatest trick.

About this edition

• Publisher: Icon,Totem Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1840460911
• ISBN 13: 9781840460919
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80