Jean Baudrillard

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// En faisant du ménage dans de vieilles notes/fichiers/etc…

// Une partie d’une ITW de Mark Fisher de 2015.

“[…] There is this frenzied activity of promotion and of self-promotion— and Baudrillard was really a prophet of this— which I think is a final and decadent stage of capitalism and so I titled a chapter in Capitalist Realism, “All that’s solid melts into PR.”

I really liked that title…

Of course it’s a play on Marx and Engels but this seems to me what’s happening with the social media obsession and it’s something Baudrillard would have anticipated. If you listen to the radio or watch TV now, it seems they are endlessly promoting Twitter feeds rather than the other way around. Wasn’t the point of the social media feed to promote the radio or TV show? It’s sheer promotion for its own sake now and everything gets sucked into this vortex without any possible end. I use the word “frenzied” because it’s producing this constant sense of overwhelming urgency that there is no time to settle on anything— “there’s no time to read this book properly, there’s no time for me to listen to this record. Maybe I’ll be able to snatch a few fragments of it. What I want is a quick summary because I’m under pressure at all times from multiple platforms and even on those platforms my attention will be dispersed across multiple windows.” And this is not some strange or marginal condition for those straining themselves to the limit but becoming required of practically everybody. And the final deadly element is that this is not just some duty imposed on us by work or our employers but that this requirement has become libidinized as something we will enjoy. So I think along with Baudrillard, Burroughs is also a key prophet of the current moment. We are seeing addiction and compulsion— not the kind of lyrical addictions of heroin but precisely the Baudrillardian kind— addictions to the banal and the boring. I mean, is there anything more boring than being addicted to smartphones?!”

— http://www.highwaymagazine.info/mark-fisher-full-interview/

(The source article linked here is not “full”, but contains “redacted” words…)

L’aventure d’un photographe / The writing of light

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”Il rassemblait les photos dans un album : on y voyait des cendriers pleins de mégots, un lit défait, une tache d’humidité au mur. Il lui vint l’idée de composer un catalogue de tout ce qui existe dans le monde de réfractaire à la photographie, ce qui est laissé systématiquement hors du champs visuel non seulement des appareils photo, mais de l’humanité. Sur chaque sujet il passait des journées, épuisant des rouleaux entiers, à quelques heures d’intervalle, de façon à suivre les changements de la lumière et des ombres. Il se fixa un jour sur un coin de la chambre complètement vide, où il n’y avait rien d’autre que le tuyau du radiateur : il eut la tentation de continuer à photographier cet endroit et seulement celui-là jusqu’à la fin de ses jours.”

— Italo Calvino, L’aventure d’un photographe.

***

Pour faire entrer tout cela dans une photographie, il fallait acquérir une habileté technique extraordinaire, mais alors seulement Antonino pourrait s’arrêter de photographier. Toutes les possibilités ayant été épuisées, au moment où le cercle se refermait sur lui-même, Antonino comprit que photographier des photographies était la seule voie qui lui restait, et même la vrai voie qu’il avait obscurément cherchée jusqu’alors.

— Italo Calvino, L’aventure d’un photographe.

***

… Because once you’ve begun, there is no reason why you should stop. The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.   The minute you start saying something, ‘Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!’ you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.

— The Adventure of a Photographer by Italo Calvino, from Difficult Loves

Perhaps true, total photography, he thought, is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations.

***

In photography, we see nothing. Only the lens “sees” things. But the lens is hidden. It is not the Other 5 which catches the photographer’s eye, but rather what’s left of the Other when the photographer is absent (quand lui n’est pas la). We are never in the real presence of the object. Between reality and its image, there is an impossible exchange. At best, one finds a figurative correlation between reality and the image. “Pure” reality – if there can be such a thing – is a question without an answer. Photography also questions “pure reality.” It asks questions to the Other. But it does not expect an answer. Thus, in his short-story “The Adventure of a Photographer,”6 Italo Calvino writes: “To catch Bice in the street when she didn’t not know he was watching her, to keep her in the range of hidden lenses, to photograph her not only without letting himself be seen but without seeing her, to surprise her as if she was in the absence of his gaze, of any gaze…It was an invisible Bice that he wanted to possess, a Bice absolutely alone, a Bice whose presence presupposed the absence of him and everyone else.”7 Later, Calvino’s photographer only takes pictures of the studio walls by which she once stood. But Bice has completely disappeared. And the photographer too has disappeared. We always speak in terms of the disappearance of the object in photography. It once was; it no longer is. There is indeed a symbolic murder that is part of the photographic act. But it is not simply the murder of the object. On the other side of the lens, the subject too is made to disappear.

Jean Baudrillard – excerpt from Photography, Or The Writing Of Light
Translated, CTheory, 2000.

Jean Baudrillard, Amérique, 1986 – 2

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“Tout autour, les façades en verre fumé sont comme les visages : des surfaces dépolies. C’est comme s’il n’y avait personne à l’intérieur, comme s’il n’y avait personne derrière les visages. Et il n’y a réellement personne. Ainsi va la ville idéale.”

“L’argent est fluide, c’est comme la grâce, il n’est jamais votre. Venir le réclamer est une offense à la divinité. Avez-vous mérité cette faveur ? Qui êtes-vous, et qu’allez-vous en faire ? Vous êtes suspect de vouloir en faire usage, un usage infect forcément, alors que l’argent est si beau dans son état fluide et intemporel, tel qu’il est dans la banque, investi au lieu d’être dépensé. Honte à vous, et baisez la main qui vous le donne.
C’est vrai que la propriété de l’argent brûle, comme le pouvoir, et qu’il faut des gens pour en prendre le risque, ce dont nous devrions leur être éternellement reconnaissants. C’est pourquoi j’hésite à déposer de l’argent dans une banque, j’ai peur de ne jamais oser le reprendre.”

“Pourtant il y a une puissance poétique dans cette tautologie implacable, comme partout où il n’y a rien à comprendre.”

“Les déserts naturels m’affranchissent sur les déserts du signe. Ils m’apprennent à lire en même temps la surface et le mouvement, la géologie et l’immobilité. Ils créent une vision expurgée de tout le reste, les villes, les relations, les événements, les médias. Ils induisent une vision exaltante de la désertification des signes et des hommes. Ils constituent la frontière mentale où viennent échouer les entreprises de la civilisation. Ils sont hors de la sphère et de la circonférence des désirs. Il faut toujours en appeler aux déserts du trop de signification, du trop d’intention et de prétention de la culture. Ils sont notre opérateur mythique.”

“Ce qui saute aux yeux à Paris, c’est le XIX° siècle. Venu de Los Angeles, on atterrit dans le XIX° siècle. Chaque pays porte une prédestination historique, qui en marque presque définitivement les traits. Pour nous, c’est le modèle bourgeois de 89 et la décadence interminable de ce modèle qui dessine le profil de notre paysage.”

 

(Three years later I finished the little book…)

Extrait de Le Virtuel, in Mots de Passe, Jean Baudrillard

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Il y a aujourd’hui une véritable fascination pour le virtuel et toutes ses technologies. S’il est véritablement un mode de disparition, ce serait un choix – obscur, mais délibéré – de l’espèce elle-même : celui de se cloner corps et biens dans un autre univers, de disparaitre en tant qu’espèce humaine à proprement parler pour se perpétuer dans une espèce artificielle qui aurait des attributs beaucoup plus performants, beaucoup plus opérationnels. Est-ce l’enjeu ?

Je pense à cette fable borgésienne du peuple qui a été ostracisé, repoussé de l’aute côté du miroir, et qui n’est plus que le reflet de l’empereur qui l’a asservi. Tel serait le grand système du virtuel, et tout le reste ne serait plus que des espèces de clones, du rejet, de l’abjection. Mais dans la fable, ces peuples se mettent à ressembler de moins en moins à leur dominateur, et un jour, ils repassent de ce côté-ci du miroir. Alors, dit Borges, ils ne seront plus vaincus. Peut-on supposer une catastrophe de ce genre, et en même temps cette sorte de révolution à la puissance trois ? Pour ma part, je vois davantage une telle hypertrophie du virtuel qu’on en viendrait à une forme d’implosion. A quoi laisserait-elle la place ? Il est difficile de le dire parce que, au-delà du virtuel, je ne vois rien, sinon ce que Freud appelait le nirvana, un échange de substance moléculaire et rien de plus. Ne resterait qu’un système ondulatoire parfait, qui rejoindrait le corpusculaire dans un univers purement physique n’ayant plus rien de d’humain, de moral, ni évidemment de métaphysique. On serait revenu à un stade matériel, avec une circulation insensée des éléments…

Pour abandonner la science-fiction, on ne peut quand même que constater la singulière ironie qu’il y a dans le fait que ces technologies, que l’on réfère à l’inhumanité, à l’anéantissement, seront finalement peut-être ce qui nous tiendra quittes du monde de la valeur, du monde du jugement. Toute cette lourde culture morale, philosophique, que la pensée radicale moderne s’est métaphysiquement évertuée à liquider au terme d’un labeur éreintant, la technique l’expulse pragmatiquement et radicalement avec le virtuel. Au stade où nous en sommes, on ne sait si – point de vue optimiste – la technique arrivée à un point d’extrême sophistication nous libérera de la technique elle-même, ou bien si nous allons à la catastrophe. Encore que la catastrophe, au sens dramaturgique du terme, c’est à dire le dénouement, puisse avoir, selon les protagonistes, des formes malheureuses ou heureuses.

— Extrait de Le Virtuel, in Mots de Passe, Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard, Art

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My concern is not the misery of the world. I don’t want to be cynical, but we are not going to protect art. The more cultural protectionism we enact, the more waste we have, the more false successes, false promotions there are. It puts us in the marketing realm of culture…
To put it naively, the pretension of art shocks me. And it is hard to escape, it did not happen overnight. Art was turned into something pretentious with the will to transcend the world, to give an exceptional, sublime form to things. Art has become an argument for mental prowess.
The mental racket run by art and the discourse on art is considerable. I do not want anyone to make me say that art is finished, dead. That is not true. Art does not die because there is no more art, it dies because there is too much. The excess of reality disheartens me as does the excess of art when it imposes itself as reality.

— Jean Baudrillard, “The Conspiracy of Art”

 

But I do not put myself in a position of truth. Everyone makes his or her own choices. If what I say is worthless, just let it drop, that’s all.
The article was written a little hastily. I should not have started like that. I should have said that there is a hint of nullity in contemporary art. Is it null, or isn’t it? What is nullity? My article is perfectly contradictory. On the one hand, I use nullity as null or nothing, and on the other, I say: nullity is a tremendous singularity. That is a critique that could have been made.
My text reflects a mood, an obsession with something, something more. That we have moved from art as such to a sort of trans-aestheticization of banality… It comes from Duchamp, okay. I have nothing against Duchamp, it is a fantastic and dramatic turn.
But he did set in motion a process in which everyone is now implicated, including us. What I mean is that in daily life, we have this “readymadeness” or this trans-aestheticization of everything which means that there is no longer any illusion to speak of. This collapsing of banality into art and art into banality, or this respective game, complicit and all… Well, from complicity to conspiracy… We are all compromised. I am not denying it. I certainly have no nostalgia for old aesthetic values.

— Jean Baudrillard, “The Conspiracy of Art”

 

The only things I said about art that excited me were on Warhol, Pop Art and Hyperrealism. I think Andy Warhol was the only artist at a time when are was caught up in a very important transitional movement, the only artist who was able to situate himself at the forefront, before all the changes. Maybe it’s also just luck or destiny… Everything that characterizes his work—the advent of banality, the mechanized gestures and images, and especially his inconolatry—he turned all of that into an event of platitude. It’s him and nobody else! Later on, other simulated it, but he was the greatest simulator, with style to match! The exhibition of his works in Venice (Summer 1990) far surpassed and outclassed everything else in the Biennial.
Andy Warhol was a big moment in the 20th century because he was the only one who had a gift for dramatization. He still managed to bring out simulation as drama, a dramaturgy: something dramatic slipped between two phases, the passage into the image and the absolute equivalence of all images. His principle was to say, “I am a machine, I am nothing.” Since then, everyone has just repeated the same mantra, only pretentiously. He, however, thought it as something radical: “I am nothing and I can function.” “I am working on every level, artistic, commercial, advertising…” “I am operationality itself!”
He affirmed the world in its total evidence, the stars, the post-figurative world (it is neither figurative nor non-figurative, but mythical). His world was glamorous and everyone in it was glamorous! Warhol’s act could be considered a revisitation of art after Duchamp. According to our own coordinates and temporality, it is less a work of art than an anthropological event. That’s what interests me about him: the object. He is someone who, with utter cynicism and agnosticism, brought about a manipulation, a transfusion of the image into reality, into the absent referent of star-making banality.
Warhol remains for me a found of modernity. It is somewhat paradoxical, since modernity is usually considered more of a destruction; yet there is a certain jubilation, not at all suicidal or melancholy, because, ultimately, that’s the way he is: cool, and even more than cool, totally insouciant. It’s mechanical snobbism and I like that kind of provocation of aesthetic morals. Warhol freed us from aesthetics and art…

— Jean Baudrillard, “The Conspiracy of Art”

 

 

Jean Baudrillard, photographie

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« The degree of intensity of the image matches the degree of its denial of the real, its invention of another scene. To make an image of an object is to strip the object of all its dimensions one by one: weight, relief, smell, depth, time, continuity and, of course, meaning. This disembodiment is the price to be paid for that power of fascination which the image acquires, the price for its becoming a medium of pure objectality, becoming transparent to a subtler form of seduction. »

— Jean Baudrillard – Photographies