Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol (Part Three)

Reworked front cover image to Jean Baudrillard 

by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol 

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

 

I.

 

Baudrillard liked objects. And he liked gift giving. And, perhaps surprisingly, he liked that desert of the real that is the United States; the place where the future is always present. And in the mid-late '70s his fascination with America flourished. 

 

Fantin and Nicol note: "Baudrillard loved the United States, especially the empty apparently transient communities he visited while working in San Diego." [69] 

 

They continue: "As a 'primal scene', the United States was often a touchstone for Baudrillard's interpretation of contemporary reality, providing ready examples of what he was diagnosing." [70] 

 

He even wrote one of the great books on America: Amérique (1986) [a]; a kind of conceptual (and cinematic) travel guide to a hyperreal land where "things unfold as pure fiction [and] the question of being real or unreal was not relevant anymore" [103] [b]. 

 

It was an earlier work, however  - Oublier Foucault (1977) - which really put the cat among the Parisian pigeons ...

 

Forget Foucault essentially sealed Baudrillard's fate; "the book reinforced the impression of Baudrillard as outsider-within, and had profound and lasting implications for his career" [73]. 

 

Why? Because respected intellectuals, including Foucault himself, now regarded him as a snake in the grass. Deleuze and Guattari even described publication of the essay as "a shameful and irresponsible act" [73] and he was excommunicated from philosophical circles:

 

"Ten years after Forget Foucalt, in the late 1980s, Baudrillard confessed he still felt 'quarantined' as a result of the influence of Foucault allies in the university system and media." [73]

 

The irony is, the essay isn't actually as critically dismissive as the provocative title might suggest. Nevertheless, it was a challenge laid down to Foucault and "the intellectual establishment as a whole" [74]. Baudrillard was essentially exposing (and diverting) the logic of Foucault's system of thought; seducing it, as he would later say [c].       

 

 

II.  

 

One of the criticisms of Simulacra and Simulation is similar to a criticism often made of Torpedo the Ark: namely, that it is little more than "a collection or recollection of material (essays, articles, notes, lectures)" [82] previously written and that such self-recycling can make the project "seem like one vast, never-ending conversation or monologue" [82].    

 

That might, at some level, be true. But it also reflects the consistency of my preoccupations and beautiful obsessions. 

 

 

III.

 

Published in the same year as De la séduction, came another of Baudrillard's key texts: Les stratégies fatales (1983) [d] ...

 

Fatal strategies are strategies that "push the logic of a system as far as it could go, to force it to reckon with its own contradictions, or to implode" [90]. According to Baudrillard, objects are fond of such strategies in their battle with know-it-all subjects.

 

It was another book loved by the art crowd, particularly in the United States (so good on them). Though, perhaps predictably, Baudrillard would soon piss them off by declaring contemporary art was "staging its own disappearance by becoming a commodity" [94] and that those who regarded themselves as Simulationists had completely misunderstood his work. 

 

"Many New York artists who had acknowedged Baudrillard's influence considered this rejection a betrayal [...]" [94]. That's unfortunate, but Baudrillard didn't want a legion of loyal followers and wasn't trying to produce a manifesto of some kind.   

 

 

IV. 

 

1987: Baudrillard quits academia and his writing becomes post-theoretical; the five books in the Cool Memories series (written between 1980 and 2004 and published between 1987 and 2005) are "fragmentary, aphoristic, more poetic" [99] in style.  

 

For Baudrillard, writing in such a way was intended as an effront to the canonical form of the well-argued and formerly structured essay: "Each Cool Memories volume can be skimmed, or started on any page" [107] and each "is filled with often dissociated lines, notes, poetical snippets, dream narratives, desires, fantasies, speculations, bits of political commentary, passages of travel writing" [108].   

 

The secret of the world, like the devil, is, Baudrillard suggests, always in the detail ... 

 

 

V. 

 

It is during the 1980s that Baudrillard also began to take photography seriously; "an activity he practised enthusiastically and with considerable talent" [100], as demonstrated by the fact that his pictures are still exhibited all over the world [e]. 

 

Photography "complemented his theory, offering him another way to reflect - and reflect on - the society he explored in his books" [101]. 

 

As someone who also likes to take snaps - albeit on my i-Phone and not on a camera which makes them digital images rather than photographs in a true sense - I understand Baudrillard's passion for taking pictures and I would suggest that Torpedo the Ark be understood as an attempt to "capture the world through fragments and snapshots, rather than fully fledged logical analyses" [101]. 

 

Whether these fragments and snapshots also "provide enticing views" [101] into my own biography and personality is debatable (although, if so, let's hope these views are restricted and one retains a certain degree of mystery).   

 

 

VI.

 

Like all the best photos, Baudrillard's are "distinctive for what they do not include" [111]. He was "uninterested in capturing individuals, animals, events or dramatic or violent scenes - anything that would provide an 'aura' of personal feeling" [111]. 

 

Baudrillard wanted to allow objects to present themselves as objects in all their strangeness and for the world to think us.   

 

All his images are "defamiliarized because of the choice of perspective - an object often appears through a close-up or as a fragment of a wider view - or the peculiar effects of the light on colour" [111]. They are rarely titled. 

 

Of course, as Fantin and Nicol remind us, Baudrillard's relationship to the image is somewhat paradoxical and conflicted; he was torn "between an absolute captivation by images and an impulse to condemn the very idea of the image" [111] as something demonic; as something "at the heart of the problem of simulation in contemporary society" [112], contaminating the real and making the world ever more obscene. 

 

Nevertheless, perhaps it is the solitary photograph in all its stillness and silence wherein the saving power lies [f]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Translated into English by Chris Turner as America and published by Verso Books in 1988.

 

[b] Fantin and Nicol spend quite a bit of time discussing Baudrillard's America; see pp. 101-106. 

 

[c] For Baudrillard, seduction is an ironic and playful counterforce to production; where the latter brings things forth and gives them a value, the former is a process of diverting from that value and from identity. 

      See Baudrillard's brilliant text, De la séduction (1979); translated into English as Seduction by Brian Singer (St. Martin's Press, 1990). 

      With this book, Baudrillard finally becomes who he is; "casting off the established mode of academic writing" [77]. Feminist critiques of the concept - which Fantin and Nicol discuss and, ultimately, agree with, saying that seduction cannot be cleansed of misogyny - are, I think, misunderstandings.    

 

[d] The English version was published as Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchmann and W. G. J. Niesluchowski (Semiotext[e] / Pluto Press, 1990). 

 

[e] Baudrillard first took up photography, the authors of this biography inform us, "when the hosts of a conference in Japan [...] presented him with a miniature camera as a gift" [110]. Despite his success with the camera, Baudrillard never thought of himself as a photographer, but always just a "'maker of images' that were intended to make the world more unintelligible" [110].

      See Jean Baudrillard, Photographies (1985-1998), Christa Steinl and Peter Weibel (Hatje Kantz, 1999).  

 

[f] This is important: photographs must be seen individually in order to counter the Spectacle. When displayed as a collection of images in a gallery, they are "absorbed into the art sysem" [115] and have an aesthetic meaning imposed upon them. The role of the photographer - as an artist - is also brought to the fore and that's another problem.  

 

 

Part one of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Pansies: Brief Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Excremental Aesthetic

Georgia O'Keeffe: Detail from  

Black Pansy and Forget-Me-Nots (1926)

brooklynmuseum.org

'The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness. Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with the blue of the morning the black of corrosive humus. Else the scent would be just sickly sweet.'

- D. H. Lawrence

Pansies were one of Lawrence's favourite flowers and I can understand why; they're lovely little things, that turn their faces to the sun and backs to the wind.

And their name, of course, is the anglicised version of the French term pensées, meaning thoughts; particularly gay little thoughts, that bloom and fade without care or system.

An excellent name then, as Lawrence realised, for a collection of poems that fill the page "like so many separate creatures, each with a small head and a tail of its own, trotting its own little way".

But thoughts, like flowers, only stay fresh, if they keep their roots "in good moist humus and the dung that roots love". This is true also of objects made by hand, such as a Greek vase:

"If you can smell the dung of earthly sensual life from the potter who made [it], you can still see the vase as a dark, pansily-winking pansy, very much alive. But if you can only see an 'urn' or a 'still unravished bride of quietness', you are just assisting at the beautiful funeral [...] of all pansies."

Alas, many modern people want cut and dried forms of beauty. But a pansy that has been carefully plucked and pressed, which has no faint scent of shit and can no longer make you sneeze, is but a corpse-blossom.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Draft Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix 4, pp. 657-58. The opening quotation below the image is from Appendix 6, 'Introduction to Pansies', pp. 663-64.

In using the title Pansies for his 1929 collection of verse, Lawrence was, of course, displaying his own Romantic roots as a poet; Wordsworth references them in his work, for example, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published work was an unfinished piece entitled Pansie, a Fragment (1864). 

Schlegel's Hedgehog

German poet, literary critic and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, was, like other romantics, a big fan of the fragment.

In an oft-cited section of his Athenäums-fragmente (1798), he asserts that, if it is to be distinctive in form and purpose like a tiny work of art, then the fragment "has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog" [206].

Further, it must maintain itself in prickly opposition even to those fragments in close vicinity to which it might otherwise seem in some kind of relation, thereby reflecting Schlegel's view that the world is made up of isolated objects within a chaotic universality of infinite possibilities and perspectives.  

As someone who is also passionate about fragmentary writing - more due to my background in modernism and postmodernism, rather than romanticism - I feel obliged to say something about this; particularly as I feel there's something fundamentally false about Schlegel's view.

Firstly, whilst hedgehogs might lead relatively solitary lives and can, of course, roll into a tight spiky ball for defensive purposes, they are no more isolated from the surrounding world than any other creature; if they were, they'd die. So, if nothing else, the above Igel analogy doesn't hold water as far as any self-respecting naturalist would be concerned.

Secondly, whilst I concede that objects are always at some level withdrawn and don't exist purely in terms of their external relations, for me the beauty of the fragment is that it (potentially) contains all things within it on the one hand, whilst being forever open ended on the other. Indeed, I would say the perfect fragment always inconclusively concludes in an elliptic manner with a set of three dots and that they only really sparkle, like stars in a constellation, by becoming part of a new (intertextual) practice of some kind. 

Ultimately, the fragment is that which allows language to discover its own ephemeral destiny. They appear, but before we can hardly even begin to make sense of them they shoot lines of flight towards the horizon of their own disappearance, showing a beautiful indifference towards their own origin, their own end, or their own Schlegelian self-perfection as an enclosed work of art.

Each thing - be it fragment or hedgehog - streams in what D. H. Lawrence terms an intertwining flux of relations and the business of art is reveal and expand these relations, not isolate itself from the circumambient universe. The only way we might discover some kind of salvation (or belonging) is to accomplish a pure (or quick) relationship between ourselves and other objects of all description and for me it's fragmented or aphoristic writing which, as a literary genre, best facilitates this. 

Note: I am grateful to Thomas Bonneville for encouraging me to read Schlegel and write this post.