Transcription
[Music] New Horizons in a restless search for new opportunities and new ways of living, the mystery and the promise of distant horizons always have called men forward. The Industrial Revolution effectively freed man from being a beast of burden. The computer revolution will suddenly free him from dull, repetitive routine. The computer revolution, however, perhaps better compared with a Copernican or the Darwinian revolution.
[Music] Is it possible to lose contact with reality? To float away from the material world towards something else? What happens when real bodies can be replaced by holograms? When real food is replaced with perfect synthetics? When real pleasure is replaced with pleasure perfectly calibrated to your own tastes? What happens? Baudrillard writes, "On the other side of truth, not in what would be false, but in what is more true than the truth, more real than the real." But what if we haven't noticed that this strange new world has already arrived? Isn't the act of writing already a kind of virtual reality? Don't pixels already trick us into thinking the image on the screen is real? Don't artificial flavors already replace any authentic food? The earth with that conceit? Don't all of these things already merge in advertising? What is the combination of attacks, the pixel and an artificial flavor, if it's based on nothing?
These machines, which have been with us less than a millionth of a second in terms of the temporal span of man's history, have already given promise of deep and far-reaching change in our way of life and way of thinking. They literally accelerate into milliseconds of time our ability to perform logical arithmetic and control. There was a time, as in the Middle Ages, when only the superfluous, the excess of production, was exchanged. There was again a time when not only the superfluous, but all products, all industrial existence, had passed into commerce, when the whole of production depended upon exchange. And finally, there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of traffic, and could be alienated.
[Music] Jean Baudrillard was born in Reims, France, in 1929. Like many of his contemporaries, his work crossed disciplinary boundaries, but he's best known for attempting to describe and theorize this shift from a time in the Middle Ages when only the superfluous, the excess of production, was exchanged. The rest, he argues, then was real: real food, real shelter, real travel. There was not marketized, not turned abstract by a monetary value and exchanged. How have we got from here to a place where everything is defined not by its real value, but by abstract terms? In attempting to theorize this shift, Baudrillard becomes the most controversial, provocative, cynical, and mind-twisting thinker there might have ever been. He becomes the postmodern thinker par excellence. He wrote that people no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contact-o-therapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food.
As with most post-structuralists, Baudrillard was heavily influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure's evolutionary theory of language. Saussure argued that linguistic systems should be studied synchronically – that's how words relate to each other at any given moment – rather than diachronically, and that's studying the history of a word. Nietzsche had argued that if you wanted to understand the word "liberty," for example, you wouldn't be able to just by looking it up in a dictionary. You'd need to look at its history, how it's been fought for, and which parts have been sidelined or repressed. This is a diachronic reading of a word. Saussure argued that this was not enough to understand the word "liberty." You'd have to understand it in its context, as part of a network of other words in the moment: servitude, slavery, despotism, liberalism. Words were tied together in a system that gave them meaning. This is a synchronic reading of a word.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow. Climb aboard. You are about to take a journey out of this world, into the world of the future. Forget the world around you. Forget the people around you. You are entering Futurama, alone with your own thoughts.
[Music] Post-World War II France was undergoing a consumer revolution. Electricity, radio, television, washing machines were suddenly everywhere. Baudrillard wants to take Saussure's synchronic theory of language and apply it to this new world of consumer objects. His first book was *The System of Objects*, published in 1968. He thought that consumer society aimed to draw people in by producing systems of objects that all relate to one another. The branding and the idea of the complete modern home would mean that if you have the iron, you'd want the washing machine with the same logo. That if you wanted the blender, you'd want the orange peeler. He could see this logic being applied to the new ways products were being designed and styled. Modern and minimal design simplifies everything so that it goes together. The simple IKEA table goes with the lamp. The iPhone goes with the iPad. He wrote, "Few objects today are offered alone without a context of objects to speak for them, and the relation of the consumer to the object has consequently changed. The object is no longer referred to in relation to a specific utility, but as a collection of objects in their total meaning. Washing machine, refrigerator, dishwasher, and so on, have different meanings when grouped together than each one has alone as a piece of equipment. The display window, the advertisement, the manufacturer, and the brand name here buy an essential role in imposing a coherent and collective vision of an almost inseparable totality."
In this period, Baudrillard was working in a Marxist framework that applied to objects, to values: use value and exchange value. The use value is tangible. It relates to a human need. It's how we need bread or housing as humans. We value something intrinsically based on that. Marx argued that capitalism instead prioritized the exchange value of an object: what it was worth on the market. In this way, a small diamond can be worth more than a house. This led to commodity fetishism. We fetishize diamonds because of their use value, but because of their exchange value. Baudrillard thought that any proper analysis of an object required a third metric: sign value. The sign value is derived from this Saussurean relationship between objects, represented by signs, images, signs, language, pixels, adverts, branding, and a web of related objects imbue an object with a different type of value than any period in the past.
As Baudrillard progresses, he argues that these relationships and objects, sign value, overtakes use and exchange value and begins to take on a life of its own. In the ideological genesis of needs, Baudrillard argues that consumer objects are valued in four ways: their use value – that's functional and economic value based on exchange; a symbolic value based on things like gift-giving and personal relationships; and a sign value. And where Marx thought that the exchange value led to us fetishizing objects, for Baudrillard, consumer items are further fetishized by their sign value. Diamonds are suffused with even more value by which celebrity is wearing them and the prestige of the brand. Perfumes aren't just about what they're worth on the market, but a part of a system of signs: signs, images linked to movie stars and glamour and sex. Champagne and fine wine become fetishized and collect value through who's been seen drinking it and where. Big tail fins on '50s American cars were actually counterproductive, but borrowed the idea of speed from the new and glamorous air travel that was taking off at the time. The value of the iPhone isn't just measured by its utility or how much it cost to manufacture. It's also derived from the space it shares with other related signs: the iPad, the iMac, Steve Jobs, the flashy advertising, the social capital of the celebrity with the AirPods. And there is the way in which we create meaning socially is directed by a number of things, including utility, how useful an item is, but also by aesthetics, by history, or by the power of capital. The powerful display their power through their styles, their tastes, their wealth, which in turn creates a prestige that's attached to those objects, hobbies, or trends. These different ways of valuing objects become mixed together, but increasingly throughout his life, Baudrillard argues that in our postmodern world, sign value begins to dominate. And all of this combines into what he ambiguously refers to as the code: an aggregate of value dominated by signs that orders and erects the world of political economy. It's a world based on a utilitarian logic of balance sheets, capital investment, sales figures, algorithms, all of which are the codified representation of, for example, in the iPod's case, the utility of listening to music, the aesthetic design, Steve Jobs' stage presence, the dullness of PCs at the time. All of this becomes abstracted into a code.
At this point, Baudrillard's work becomes increasingly radical. In 1973, he published *The Mirror of Production*, attacking Marxism and breaking from it spectacularly. However, in the mid-1940s, a different kind of tool was invented, a tool for extending certain of the powers of man's might. This tool is the electronic computer.
[Music] The end of labor, the end of production, the end of political economy, the end of the dialectic signifier-signified, which permitted the accumulation of knowledge and of meaning, the linear syntagma of cumulative discourse. The end simultaneously of the dialectic of exchange-value, use-value, the only one to make possible capital accumulation and social production. The end of the linear dimension of discourse, the end of the linear dimension of merchandise, the end of the classic era of the sign, the end of the era of production.
[Music] In this mature period, Baudrillard took Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase, "The medium is the message," as one of the defining axioms of postmodern life. What mattered in this new world was not what was real and material, but what was represented as signs. In short, television, and now the computer screen, has come to dominate social life. Sign production has replaced material production as the organizing principle of political economy. In a chapter of *Symbolic Exchange and Death* titled "The Orders of Simulacra," he outlines how this has happened historically. His story goes something like this: A simulacrum is a copy or representation of something – a pictogram, a letter, a sign, a gesture, a signifier. Baudrillard follows Foucault by arguing that signifiers have become slowly detached from their signified. Well, once language was a gift from God, where "tree" meant tree and "good" was what God said was good, we now live in a world where language is freed from any determinant. We realize it's socially constructed. We realize that it's humanly made and communally agreed upon, and so it is flexible. Images, paintings, poems, essays, conversations about a tree are simulacra of the tree, but their meaning comes not just from the tree, but from the person's worldview, their poetic flair, the hidden meaning of the story, the composition of the painting, your relationship with the person you're conversing with. The signifier "tree" can detach from the real tree.
For Baudrillard, there are three orders of simulacra. The first, he writes, "our simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature." The painter sitting, painting a tree. The second, "our simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization by the machine and its whole system of production, a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion of an indefinite liberation of energy." We might simplify this to an architect looking at the tree and drawing a house to be built from it. But the third, "simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game, total operationality, hyper-reality, aim of total control." The global architecture corporation algorithmically processing timber locations, stock numbers, shipping details to work out the best utilization of the woods in the most efficient and profitable way. These are all different types of copies, and in each order of simulacra, we move steadily away from the real, from the touch, the smell, the use value of that single tree in the woods.
He writes, "The super-ideology of the sign and the general operationalization of the signifier everywhere sanctioned today by the new master disciplines of structural linguistics, semiology, information theory, and cybernetics has replaced good old political economy as the theoretical basis of the system." It's in this third order of simulacra that the world is controlled by code that breaks away from signifying anything real. He argues that we now live in a world of simulation. We are already in the matrix. In our world, the speed and tempo of modern living are increasing at an ever-accelerating rate. Without organization, without system, the result would be chaos. Our control over a bewildering environment has been facilitated by new techniques of handling vast amounts of data at incredible speeds. The tool which has made this possible is the high-speed digital computer, operating with electronic precision on great quantities of information. Even humans become superfluous to the self-management of systems like self-checkouts, deals determined algorithmically, security replaced with AI CCTV. For Baudrillard, the mid-'70s were an implosion of sign value and the beginning of the era of hyper-reality, of simulation, of code. The information age. In this era, there is no more mirror of being, appearances of the real in its concept, no more imaginary coextensivity. It is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks. Everything's organized by the code: algorithms dominating financial services, our news websites on Instagram, on radio schedules, computer models simulate war, economic models dictate policy, even DNA is altered genetically based on incomprehensibly large computer models. The hyperreal governs us more than the real. In the run-up to the 2008 crash, the real value of mortgages was hidden under layers of sign value, under deceitful insurance policies and financial ratings based on nothing. In the postmodern world, everything is a copy of a simulacrum of something real, to the point of the real real being forgotten. Images of pixel societies are based on polls. Everything implodes into everything else, and real life begins to disappear.
Baudrillard invites us to ask what the consequences of this are. What happens if we lose our grasp, our grip? If the real one was the desert? If we become unable, a medium, a success?
[Music] He says, "It's a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say, an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double." With fake news, it doesn't matter what's real. What matters is how it's said, who says it, the perspective, whether it will be provocative enough, whether it will entertain you. Rate that by crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth. The end of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referential. The referentials are the referential of the signifier to the signified, the painter to the tree. It all slowly slips away.
[Music] We live in a world where things like reality TV, Disneyland, and Facebook define our lives. Porn gadgets, Google Maps, computer games, fake grass, fake meat, synthetic clothing. We live in a postmodern carnival. Disneyland exists in order to hide that it's the real country. All of real America that is Disneyland. A bit like prisons are there to hide that it's the social in its entirety and it's banal, omnipresent, that is carceral. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.
In *Simulacra and Simulation*, Baudrillard points to the absurd paradox of reality TV. He discusses the first reality series, *An American Family*. In 2011, an article in The New York Times said that for the viewing public, the controversy surrounding *An American Family* doubled as a crash course in media literacy. The Louds, in claiming that the material had been edited to emphasize the negative, called attention to "nonfiction narratives" as fashioned. Some critics argued that the cameras' presence encouraged the subjects to perform. Some even said it invalidated the project. That line of reasoning, as Mr. Gilberto points out, would invalidate all documentaries. It also discounted the role of performance in everyday life and the potential function of the camera as a catalyst, not simply an observer. Baudrillard had already written in 1981 that "more interesting is the illusion of filming the lines as if TV wasn't there. The producers' triumph was to say they lived as if they were not there." An absurd, paradoxical formula. Contestants on reality TV are already hyperreal choices, averages, ideals chosen with expectations designed to provoke by their likeliness to entertain in the correct way. Big Brother contestants chosen by how well they'll fit into a hyperreal narrative. Contestants and stars pressured to act and talk how they think they should act and walk under the all-pervasive eye of the camera and the audience. Television has increasingly adopted this quality.
This is Baudrillard's complaint that historical films are a little too good, without the psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches of the films of the era they're meant to depict. In the same way, Vietnam itself, he provocatively claims, perhaps never happened. It's retrofitted through films like *Apocalypse Now*. Our view of it has nothing to do with the realities on the ground. He writes, "The war as entrenchment, as technological and psychedelic fantasy, the war as a succession of special effects, the war became film even before being filmed." What was so spectacular about HBO's *Chernobyl*? That the depiction was more real than the event itself? Costumes, props, special effects, and the perfect angle. The Geiger counter mapped onto the score, already over-determined by signs, by Soviet storytelling and the twisting of facts at the time. Now it's a product: rule, this time's history, times politics, times entertainment. When in 20 years' time we think of Chernobyl, well, we think of the real event, or images conjured up by TV studios.
Baudrillard's point is that if we make meaning socially, and words and sentences and paragraphs are defined synchronically, then all of these media and their sign values drive our lives more than anything real and concrete. More than Times Square, the Union March, or the church on a needle up high. You can look through the eye and you see, yes, you're seeing it all as the present unfolds. What the picture be? Home you're a late after day. Imagine, if you can, an electronic brain operating at millions of the second speed. I say brain because the new electronic central office will almost think for itself. It will not only carry out instructions you dial into it, it will also remember instructions you provided earlier.
In another wise cynical, pessimistic, and dystopian interpretation of our postmodern world, Baudrillard does theorize one way out. He calls it symbolic exchange. After his break with Marxism, he argued that Marx was stuck in and was a mirror of bourgeois society. Marx's fundamental fault was placing production at the center of his analysis, continuing to emphasize work routines, utilitarian reasoning, dialectical history. Baudrillard argued that a truly revolutionary society would have to break from all of this, to escape from the overbearing, subjectifying pressure to be utilitarian, to consume and produce based around what is commanded of us. We must look to a way of thinking that's outside of all of this. He points out that pre-modern societies revolved around religion, myths, the culture of the tribe, not production, and that these ways of organizing life were based on things like gift exchange, ritual sacrifice. These may seem outdated to us now, but maybe what underpinned them was something primal, something truly human. In this way, Baudrillard was almost as well as a technological determinist, a romantic and a kind of neo-Luddite. He argues that within all of us, there's an urge to escape from the law of value that commands us to act in a certain way. He says this has similarities with Freud's death drive, and it's the drive to waste energy, to dance, to do good when it's not commanded of us, but when we feel like it. Festivals are like sacrificial rituals. Parties should be whims of the moment. We should be fickle. We should jump from hobby to hobby. But I, who influenced Baudrillard, look to the sun as a matter to for an object that simply expels energy, asking for nothing in return. Baudrillard argues that gift-giving works in a similar way: giving when the giver wants, when he sees something that he thinks the other person should like, not thinking rationally about, "Well, if I give this person something now, he'll give me something in the future." He argues that a society that has this kind of motivation as its basis would be the only one where the individual was sovereign, had control over himself, free from oppression. He also looks to the aristocracy as a model of this: when you become rich, you simply expel energy, drink when you feel like it, self-destruct when you feel the need of it, make art one minute and take another hobby the next. You do without asking anything in return. The idea behind this is that human beings are not just utilitarian creatures, but excessive ones with creative desires and irreconcilable urges and drives. We should embrace this rather than run from it.
So, Baudrillard's theory of history can be divided into three periods: a symbolic pre-modern society, a productive modern society, and a hyperreal postmodern society. Notoriously pessimistic, but who inspiringly innovative, Baudrillard is a difficult but thought-provoking thinker. He describes the world in a way that no one else has, and while much of what he says might be considered eccentric or hyperbolic, his prescience writing decades ago is hard to deny. He's also had a powerful effect on our cultural landscape, inspiring films, music, television programs, and novels. As humans, we are both attached and detached from the material world around us. The extent to which we continue to float away into something new, and the extent to which it can be a positive rather than a negative experience, is yet to be seen. Baudrillard knew, though, that technology wouldn't just feed our old desires, but would create new ones. He said, "It's always the same. Once you are liberated, you're forced to ask who you are."
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