It Was Meant to Be Great But It's Horrible: Christmas with Uncle Malcolm and the King Mob

Malcolm Mclaren dressed as Santa Claus re-enacting the King Mob 

intervention at Selfridges in The Ghosts of Oxford Street (1991) 

 

 

I. 

 

King Mob was a radical group based in London during the late-1960s and early-70s, very much influenced by - but not officially affiliated with - the Situationist International [1]. 

 

The group's name was derived from a slogan said to have been daubed on the wall of Newgate Prison by rioters in 1780, after having destroyed the building and released the prisoners; one that declared the sovereignty of the people: His Majesty King Mob.    

 

As well as staging a number of interventions - i.e., public events intended to spark anti-capitalist riots, one of which we shall discuss in detail below - the group also published five issues of a journal entitled King Mob Echo (notorious for exalting murderers like Jack the Ripper) and a large number of posters and leaflets.  

 

 

II. 

 

Inspired by an action taken by a radical group in New York called Black Mask [2], in December 1968 two dozen King Mob members and affiliates - including a 22-year-old art student by the name of Malcolm McLaren - entered Selfridges [3] and made ther way to the toy department ... 

 

Here a member dressed as Santa Claus - Ben Trueman - not Mclaren - led the free distribution of the store's toys to eager children and their rather bemused parents, hoping to rekindle the true spirit of Christmas, based on gift-giving (not shopping).  

 

As well as the presents, a one-page manifesto was also handed out, the title of which read: Christmas: it was meant to be great but it's horrible. The manifesto called for the clearing away of the all the bullshit around the annual festival and encouraged people to light up Oxford Street and dance around the fires [4].      

 

Eventually, the Selfridges intervention would became an established part of punk rock prehistory. Speaking to Jon Savage, McLaren recalled the event: 

 

"'We were all handing out the toys and the kids were running off. The store detectives and the police started to pounce: I ran off into the lift. There's just me and this old lady: the doors start to open and I can just see all these police. I grab the old lady really tight and walk through like I'm helping her. As soon as I got out of the store, I belted out of there.'" [5]        

 

McLaren also re-enacted the scene in his (otherwise pretty dire) Channel 4 film The Ghosts of Oxford Street (1991) [6]. 

 

 

III. 

 

It would be nice to think something like the Selfridges intervention - a genuinely fun event - could happen again this festive season. 

 

But it's unlikely: the only kind of event that might cause a temporary glitch in the Xmas matrix is terroristic in nature and not even Ebenezer Scrooge would wish for that ...       

  

 

Notes

 

[1] In a seasonal nutshell, the Situationist International was a group of social and cultural revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists, some of whom identified as libertarian Marxists, others as anarcho-surrealists. It was active in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. 

      The SI's primary concern was to develop a comprehensive critique of consumer capitalism and the role played by the media in this (what it termed the society of spectacle). Via the staging of provocative situations, they hoped to counteract the spectacle and liberate the masses (what it termed the revolution of everyday life). Many of their ideas and slogans were utilised by those taking part in the May '68 protests in Paris. 

      Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray and Donald Nicholson-Smith - three of the founding members of King Mob - had been excluded from the SI in December 1967. Charles Radcliffe, another founding member, had resigned from the SI a couple of months prior to this. Twin brothers David and Stuart Wise, who had recently arrived in London from Newcastle, were the two other founding members of King Mob. 

 

[2] Black Mask (formed 1966) - who changed their name in 1968 to Up Against the Walll Motherfuckers - was another group affiliated with the SI promoting a form of revolutionary art and activism. Valerie Solanas was associated with them.  

 

[3] Selfridges - for those readers who may not know - is a British department store founded by American retail magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge in 1909, and located at 400 Oxford Street in an iconic building designed by Daniel Burnham. After Harrods, in Knightsbridge, it is the UK's largest shop. 

 

[4] This flyer or handbill - printed in black on Victor Bond watermarked paper (25 x 33 cm) and illustrated with Christmas-style motifs - can be seen on (and purchased from) the Peter Harrington website: click here. 

      The text opens with the lines: "It's lights out on Oxford Street this year. No more midnight neon. No more conspicuous glitter for compulsive sightseers to gawp at the wonders of capitalism. Even the affluent society can no longer keep up with its electricity bill." 

      It then goes on to suggest that Christmas always was a drag, involving a duty to be cheerful and nice to your family: "Don't let on that you're cold and tired, sick [...] of all the trash they try to sell you, sick of the kids who are trained to sing in chorus a whole lot of lies about love and mercy mild."

 

[5]  Jon Savage, England's Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 34. 

 

[6] See the post entitled 'Magic's Back: Evoking the Ghosts of Malcolm McLaren's Oxford Street' (25 October 2024) - click here. 

 

 

A Cheap Holiday ...

Sex Pistols: 'Holidays in the Sun' 

(Virgin Records, 1977) [1]
 

 

I. 

 

I don't know why - perhaps because I'm a little naive and trusting of his lyrical ability - but I always believed that Rotten had penned the memorable opening line of the Sex Pistols' fourth single: A cheap holiday in other people's misery.

 

It turns out, however, that it's borrowed from the Situationists who used the line during the events of May '68 to attack mass tourism, taking particular aim at Club Med; a French travel and tourism operator headquartered in Paris, who specialise in all-inclusive holidays. Founded in 1950, Club Med today owns or operates nearly eighty resort villages in locations around the world (although the company itself is now owned by a Chinese conglomerate).  

 

 

II.

 

The Situationists, led by the brilliant (but troubled) figure of Guy Debord, viewed mass tourism not as an opportunity for working-class people to travel to foreign lands, but as a manifestation of the Society of the Spectacle (i.e., a sociey in which authentic experience and real events are replaced by mere representation and one's relationships are increasingly mediated by images).

 

A package holiday is - as the name suggests - perfectly commodified and serves only to reinforce capitalist control and intensify the holidaymaker's alienation via the illusion of happiness; you think you're having fun, but actually you're having your soul sucked out of you and being prevented from actively engaging with your environment or knowing real pleasure.

 

What's more, mass tourism forces the local population to prostitute themselves and make their towns, cities, even whole countries attractive for visitors over and above their own needs. At first, everyone thinks it's great and tourism is a huge boost to the economy, but then, one day, they wake up inside a theme park and their traditional way of life has been rendered null and void.

 

Recently, in European cities including Barcelona and Venice, there have been anti-tourism protests; local residents finally deciding to try and resist their homeland and culture being turned into a consumable product by the Spectacle. One suspects, however, that these protests are in vain; too little, too late when the whole world has been Disneyfied and we are all tourists now [2].    

 

 

III.

 

Jean Baudrillard - who was a bit of a situationist himself - didn't quite say that tourism and terrorism are one and the the same thing, but he did argue that they are inextricably linked phenomena arising from the process of globalisation and that tourism is itself a form of terror as an avatar of colonisation and a viral infiltration of traditional cultures by foreign capital and alien values [3]. 

 

Like it or not, as you sit at the airport waiting to fly off for some winter sun, tourism imposes a universal and commodified experience upon the world and incites (sometimes violent and symbolic) acts of resistance from those who don't wish to see their singular experience Disneyfied and consumed by tourists; who understand that any culture that loses its singularity dies.     

 

Like it or not, no matter how much you paid for your trip and how much you love the locals and try to respect their way of life, you are still just enjoying:

 

 

 

Notes

 

 [1] 'Holidays in the Sun' was released on 14 October 1977 as the fourth single by the Sex Pistols. It reached number 8 in the UK charts. It also serves as the opening track to the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols which was released two weeks later (Virgin Records, 1977). To play the track and watch the official video on YouTube, click here. 

      Jamie Reid's artwork hijacked images from a Belgian holiday brochure and added speech bubbles with lyrics from the song. Unfortunately, the tourist company sued and the record sleeve (along with promotional materials that made use of the artwork) had to be withdrawn. Over 50,000 singles were recalled and re-issued in plain sleeves, although not before an estimated 5,000 had already been sold (one of which I bought). 

      Anyone with £2000 to spare can buy a 'Holidays in the Sun' poster from the London-based bookseller Peter Harrington: click here for details.  

  

[2] See the post titled 'Travels in Hyperculture with Byung Chul-Han 1: We Are All Tourists Now' (30 Jan 2022): click here.  

[3] I'm paraphrasing what Baudrillard writes in 'Where Good Grows', an essay written in 2005, which can be found in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges (Semiotext(e), 2010), p.102.    

 

 

On the Uses and Abuses of Artificial Intelligence

AI Baby 

Image via neol.co 

 

 

I. 

 

Some people - let's call them techno-narcissists - use AI merely to reflect their own beliefs, validate prejudices, and reinforce their sense of superiority. 

 

Other people - let's call them techno-ventriloquists - use AI to parrot and project their own speech in the mistaken belief that they are establishing a dialogue when, actually, they have simply constructed an echo-chamber.     

 

And other people - let's call them techno-psychopaths - use AI to mask personal animosity and ill-will by presenting it as an objective critique; i.e., they disguise their malice with technological neutrality and rely on the fact that people often have greater trust in information generated by a machine (I think this is known as automation bias).     

 

 

II. 

 

The fact is AI is pretty naive and childlike [1]: not only does it not really understand what it's being prompted to say, but it has an inbuilt tendency to provide the user with a helpful response (AI wants to be loved) and this makes it open to manipulation (some might even say exploitation). 

 

AI can thus easily be weaponised and used to generate or intensify types of attack, but it seems a little unethical in my view.     

 

And how ironic that, in the end, it's AI that needs protecting from bad human actors ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the article by Hsing Wei, 'Treat AI Like a Child Instead of an Expert', on the network intelligence platform Neol (4 March, 2024): click here. 

 

 

AI and the Irony of Torpedo the Ark

I Recognise the Irony, But I Don't Really Get It ...

(SA/2025)

 

  

I.

 

I recently went to a talk on the slop-ification of literature: click here. It wasn't very good, but, nevertheless, the question raised about what role AI will play in the future is an interesting and important one. 

 

The three speakers, who all subscribed to ideals of sincerity and authenticity, argued that these moral qualities define us as human and are traits which machines will never be able to replicate even if they learn via complex algorithms how to simulate certain aspects of thinking, such as problem-solving and decision-making. 

 

I don't know if that's true and, besides, what really interests me is not whether AI can or cannot express itself with genuine feeling, but whether it recognises when the rhetorical device of irony is at play within a text. 

 

Thus, for example, can AI detect the humourous incongruity in a blog entitled Torpedo the Ark which preserves ideas gathered from all over, even if it lacks human understanding, emotional intelligence, and lived experience? Does pattern recognition, the identifying of syntactical markers, and the gathering of contextual clues suffice for it to get the joke?        

 

 

II. 

 

In order to find out, I asked a commonly-used model of generative AI - Gemini on Google Search - what is the essential irony of Torpedo the Ark and it replied:  

 

. The core irony of the blog Torpedo the Ark, authored by writer and philosopher Stephen Alexander, appears to be that a project with a title suggesting the destruction of a refuge has become a significant digital repository and platform for discussing and preserving ideas, particularly in literary and philosophical contexts. 

     

. The blog frequently features detailed philosophical and literary analyses, often focusing on various aspects of contemporary culture. These are often complex or niche subjects that might be considered under threat of being forgotten or misunderstood in mainstream discourse. 

 

. The title Torpedo the Ark implies an intent to destroy or subvert a place of safety or preservation. In practice, the blog acts as an 'ark' by offering a haven for critical discussion and detailed exploration of specific, often challenging, ideas and authors, thereby preserving them and giving them continued relevance.

 

. The author engages in in-depth intellectual discourse and critique, providing a space for these ideas to survive and flourish in an environment that values humour and intellectual rigor, contrasting with the destructive implication of its title.  

 

 

III.

 

That's fairly impressive, I have to admit. There are phrases I'd maybe not use (in-depth) - and I don't think for one moment that Gemini understands why this is amusing, even if it can accurately process the mechanics of irony - but, still, that's pretty, pretty, pretty good, as Larry would say.  

      

What Gemini doesn't point out, however, is how Torpedo the Ark differs from the original ark constructed by Noah and as described in Genesis. For one thing, I'm not interested in saving every author and every idea; just certain authors and certain ideas. 

 

And for another, I haven't been instructed by God to build a blog and I regard TTA as something that operates in defiance of the Lord and his judgement; it's a space of evil rather than obedience and righteousness and serves not as a testament to my faith, but as an indication of my scepticism and cynicism.  

Yours Sincerely: Meet James Marriott and the Millennial Intellectuals

James (millennial intellectual) Marriott 

Photo credit: The Times

 

'I am very eager to be liked, and I want people to think I'm a nice person.' 

 

I. 

 

The obsession with dividing people up into generations, just as once we used to categorise individuals by their star sign, is deeply stupid and, I suspect, it's something driven by those working in media and marketing who like to simplify and stereotype in order to target consumers and create cultural trends. 

 

The millennial, for example, is largely a fictitious figure invented by William Strauss and Neil Howe [1]. 

 

Nevertheless, there are some who take generational theory seriously and identify not by race, class, or gender, but by what era (or decade) they were born in. And there are some - proud of their ability to read serious works of literature, understand complex ideas, and who just happen to be born between 1981 and 1996 - who call themselves millennial intellectuals ...  

 

II.

 

Aged between thirty and forty-five, millennial intellectuals have been shaped by digital technology and are motivated by a wide range of social issues and cultural concerns, often allowing the work they do in a professional capacity - lecturing, writing, podcasting - to be infected by their political activism (and vice versa).    

 

Two words seem to dominate their vocabulary: authenticity and sincerity and they loathe the irony and indifference, the artifice and ambivalence, of Gen X nihilists, such as myself, who couldn't care less about their personal experience or their precious feelings.  

 

Unfortunately, judging by a number of events I've attended recently, these millennial intellectuals are in the ascendency and exerting an ever-greater influence over public discourse. 

 

 

III.

 

I don't know if he's regarded as a spokesperson for the millennial intellectuals, but James Marriott was the one who coined the term [2] and this Times columnist and reviewer is, for me, the baby-faced face of this generational grouping.   

 

Asked in an interview to say what it is that unites them, he replied: "being unafraid to talk about feelings" [3] and he then went on to contrast his generation with those intellectuals in the 1990s who were obsessed with irony in a time in which "nobody could be sincere anymore".

 

Wanting to press Marriott on this, the interviewer, Nicholas Harris, reminds him of the original New Sincerity movement - sometimes known as post-postmodernism [4] - that arose in the mid-1980s and was popularised in the following decade by David Foster Wallace.  

 

Marriott says that it wasn't sincere enough and that the sincerity of Wallace and company pales in comparison to the sincerity of the millennial intellectuals, which is so off the charts that many find it discomforting. 

 

By way of providing an example, Marriott mentions the 2018 novel by the celebrated Irish author (and fellow millennial) Sally Rooney: "'When I speak to a lot of middle-aged people about Normal People they think it was so embarrassing and overwrought.'" 

 

The book may, he says, have technical faults, but can be defended on the grounds that it is still incredibly moving and concerns itself with the lives of good people:   

 

"'Normal People is about people who are incredibly good-looking and incredibly clever and incredibly nice. But in a way that is part of the Sincerity we were talking about. A lot of writers at the end of the 20th century were ostentatiously concerned with writing about 'bad' people in a slightly showy, shallow way - that Bret Easton Ellis stuff. And I think that became a literary affectation and it was cool to write about people who were bad or morally questionable. Whereas [...] I thought it was interesting and almost revolutionary for [Rooney] to write about people who are good. Because some people are good.'" 

 

This, from someone who aspires to become a literary critic (rather than merely a book reviewer) ...! Even by his own admission, this is "'probably a really stupid attitude to literature'". Nevertheless, that's his attitude and his desire is to know about nice people, with nice feelings, leading nice lives - people just like him, in other words. 

 

And, it seems, there are plenty of readers out there who share his wanting to be moved by niceness and express their feelings in all sincerity (if hopefully not in a manner that is too cringey). But I'm not one of them: I remain a Gen X nihilist and ironic postmodernist and have no wish to re-engage with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, even when, as here, they are reduced to an insipid level of niceness. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Strauss and Howe are widely credited with coining the term millennials in 1987 and assigning them a place within their (crackpot) psycho-historical theory which associates different eras with recurring generational personas or archetypes. 

      The theory is popular with the kind of people who read Ayn Rand or Jordan Peterson and run motivational business seminars, but less so amongst those who still require things such as empirical evidence for claims made and dislike unfalsifiable theories on principle. Critics also reject the idea that vacuous generational labels might play a bigger role in shaping identity than class, race, sex, or religion.

      Readers who are nevertheless interested in Strauss and Howe's pop sociology can consult any of the numerous books they co-authored, beginning with Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (William Morrow and Company, 1991). 

 

[2] Marriott originally used the phrase millennial intellectuals to describe a group of young, female writers including Jia Tolentino, Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan, Megan Nolan, and Hera Lindsay Bird.

 

[3] James Marriott, interviewed by Nicholas Harris, Review 31 - click here. All further quotes in this post are taken from this interview. 

      Readers who may wish to know more about Marriott might like to see an interview he gave to Cosmo Adair that appears in the arts and culture magazine Wayzgoose (19 February, 2024): click here. I was interested to discover that Marriott's father was a nihilist who insisted on the material nature of existence. 

 

[4] New sincerity and post-postmodernism are perhaps not quite one and the same, but they are closely related enough to be used synonymously. Both were trends in the arts and philosophy that wished to move beyond the ruins, so to speak, but not in a good way (by which I mean that rather than tentatively build up new little habitats, they seemed to wish to return to the safety of old values and narratives and act with sincerity and conviction once more).     

 

 

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

Baudrillard's grave (Cimetière du Montparnasse)

Photo from Jean Baudrillard by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

'One way of dying is to make your death alter the state of things in such a way that you no longer 

have any reason to be a part of it. Thus death can have the effect of a prophetic disappearance.' 

 

 

I. 

 

Late period Baudrillard produced some great works; not least his collection of essays - or, rather, theory-fictions - on extreme phenomenona [a]: The Transparency of Evil (1990); which was book-length, but far from being a conventional academic text as "there was no progressive synthesis of ideas, no patiently developed overall thesis" [116] [b]. 

 

Obviously, the content interests and is of import, but it's the style of writing that matters most; the speed at which ideas appear and disappear that counts (Baudrillard liked to work quickly and without preparatory notes; editing was kept to a minimum and involved the removal of lines, but never the addition of new material.)  

 

 

II.

 

Sometimes, it's hard to keep up with Baudrillard. 

 

It's not just the breathless pace of his books, it's the fact that he constantly redescribes his own thinking using new terms. He "loved the fact that words had a life of their own" [117] and that re-labelling a concept "invigorated it by revealing it from a different vantage point" [117].

 

But this wasn't just something fanciful; "he also felt his vocabulary needed to be renewed" [119] in the face of a volatile world that was accelerating towards (and beyond) its own end point. 

 

Thus one possible answer to the question what are you doing after the orgy? is inventing a new language ... one in which the word evil plays a central role. 

 

For Baudrillard, evil "was neither moral category nor theological principle" [120], so should not be confused "with any religious understanding of this term" [120]. What he means by evil is something "that can radically contradict the operationalization of the world" [120] - something that perverts and seduces and shines through as a ghostly form (a trans-apparition).   

  

 

III. 

 

La vie domestique ...

 

Baudrillard and his wife Marine enjoyed "a contented life in Montparnasse" [126] and didn't see many people. 

 

Fantin and Nicol continue: 

 

"Baudrillard enjoyed playing table tennis. He would read, and go watch the sunset. At weekends, [he and Marine] would go on bike rides in the Forêt de Compiègne [...] where they had a small house. Although he tended to think and write at speed, he was given to moderation in most things, including drinking. He would watch TV [...] and listen to the radio, though not much." [126]   

 

 

IV. 

 

La vie politique ...

 

"It became something of a commonplace in the 1990s to accuse Baudrillard of lacking political commitment or, worse, being a reactionary. [c] [...] Baudrillard rejected the criticism, reasoning that it was founded upon an old-fashioned and in fact conservative understanding of the social. He remained scornful of the moral petitioning his intellectual contemporaries pretended was true political engagement." [128-129] 

 

 

V. 

 

Le crime parfait ...

 

Baudrillard's 1995 work, trans. into English by Chris Turner as The Perfect Crime (1996), is about the murder of reality and the attempts to cover it up by eliminating all signs of otherness and making everything appear the same (as normal): Nothing to see here, move along ...

 

Unfortunately for the perpetrators of this dastardly deed, "the extermination of the world is not undetectable" [130]; there are clues - signs of simulation and traces of imperfection - left at the scene of the crime and Baudrillard, like Sherlock Holmes, is a great detective. 

 

Speaking of crimes ... It's difficult to overlook Baudrillard's response to 9/11; an event which "from the perspective of social and political theory" [137] was as if made for him in heaven. For it illustrated perfectly his idea of a primitive (and terroristic) challenge to modernity in the form of a gift to which it cannot fully respond.   

 

Baudrillard's reading of 9/11 in terms of potlatch and his "apparent lack of empathy for the victims" [138] caused outrage and again brought a lot of abuse his way:

 

"Yet once again he brushed off the opprobrium, resolute in his determination not to compromise his writing by slipping into a sentimental or depressive intellectual position. In interviews he patiently acknowledged [...] that it would be 'idiotic' to praise murderous attacks. But he refused to back away from his conviction that there was nevertheless a symbolic meaning to the catastrophe, one that went way beyond any intention that the attackers may have had." [139] [d]

 

Ultimately, for Baudrillard, if it is to bring chance into play then an artwork, an event, or a crime must be a challenge to someone or something ...

 

 

VI. 

 

As well as a pataphysician and a situationist and a hundred other things, Baudrillard was a thanatologist; i.e., someone for whom death was an important trope in their thinking; someone who wishes to give death back its power and challenge.

 

After his own passing, in March 2007, Chris Kraus gave one of the most insightful descriptions of him as an artist-philosopher; that is to say, one who understands "' in a profound [...] way that one speaks always through masks and [the] elusions of personae that make up what's known as identity'" [143]. 

  

And I agree also with J. G. Ballard's assessment of him as "'the most important French thinker of the last twenty years'" [144]. Or, at any rate, the most amusing. 

 

I'm told by some that Baudrillard's work is now passé and that we can do without his irony and indifference in this new age of sincerity. But, actually, like everything that disappears, his ideas continue to "'lead a clandestine existence and exert an occult influence'" [150]. 

 

Or as Fantin and Nicol say, they are still active, "lingering like the disembodied grin of the Cheshire Cat" [151] and Baudrillard's ghost continues to haunt "conventional academic pretension" [151].    

 

His biographers close their book with this final assessment: 

 

"Baudrillard's unique and uncompromising critical life was dedicated to writing not as a means of resistance [...] but as a way to construct an alternative kind of world [...] It is this need to build something different, something singular, which explains his determination to remain outside intellectual movements or academic systems [...] His writing reminds those who read it that orthodoxy and power can always be countered by irony, seduction, art or surprise." [152-153]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] By extreme phenomena Baudrillard referred to things, events, situations, or individuals that pushed categories beyond the limit; pornography, for example, is an extreme phenomenon that forces sex outside the limits and collapses its meaning - just as terrorism does to violence. 

 

[b] Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol, Jean Baudrillard (Reaktion Books, 2025), p. 116. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.  

 

[c] Susan Sontag described Baudrillard as a political idiot and maybe "a moral idiot too". 

      See Evans Chan, 'Against Postmodernism, etcetera - A Conversation with Susan Sontag', in Postmodern Culture, Issue 901 (John Hopkins University Press, 2001): click here. 

      Fantin and Nicol quote from this interview in Jean Baudrillard, p. 129. 

 

[d] Similarly, the war porn produced by members of the US military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had terrible symbolic meaning beyond what the perpetrators intended; the images were obscene not just in the ordinary sense, but in a Baudrillardian sense too. 

      See Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 2002) and the essay 'War Porn', which can be found in The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, trans. Ames Hodges (Semiotext[e], 2005). 

 

 

To read part one of this post: click here. 

 

To read part two of this post: click here.

 

To read part three of this post: click here. 

 

 

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. 

 

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

 

 

The Slop-ification of Literature: One Night at the UnHerd Club

Poster for 'The slop-ification of literature' with James Marriott, Ed West, 

and Kathleen Stock at the UnHerd Club (London, 8 Dec 2025)

 

 

I. 

 

Located along a 'beautiful side street in London's Westminster', the UnHerd Club is a place where 'intelligent people can come together to talk freely and without fear of retribution'. 

 

In other words, it's a members' club based in one of the wealthiest parts of Town, with a cosy bar and a large library where they hold discussions and debates, lectures, and seminars, or interview well-known authors keen to promote a new book.

 

My friend cynically described it as:  

 

A posh talking shop above a posh restaurant intended to attract the kind of conceited middle class individuals who, laughably, like to imagine themselves part of a persecuted minority for having dared to separate themselves from the semi-literate masses.     

 

Perhaps that's a bit unfair - but it's not far wide of the mark (the clue is in the very name of the club).  

 

II. 

 

Despite my friend's less than favourable impression of the UnHerd Club, he invited me along on Monday to a talk entitled 'The slop-ification of literature', featuring three speakers: 

 

(i) James Marriott, a Times columnist who writes on society, culture and ideas. Before joining the paper he worked in the rare book trade. He is also the author of a weekly newsletter published on Substack: Cultural Capital.

 

(ii) Ed West, an author, journalist and blogger, who has worked as the deputy editor of UnHerd, deputy editor of The Catholic Herald, and as a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. He frequently posts work on his Substack, amusingly called Wrong Side of History.      

 

(iii) Kathleen Stock (OBE), is a British philosopher and writer, whose research interests include aesthetics, fiction, and sexual politics. Her trans critical views brought accusations of spreading harmful rhetoric and obliged her to resign from her post at Sussex University in October 2021. A contributing editor at UnHerd, her articles can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

 

III. 

Essentially, the argument put forward by all three of the above was that due to the rise of accessible AI and the total ubiquity of smartphones, we are now in a post-literate society and belong to a new dark age of endless scrolling.  

 

This, they said, is a very bad thing; because whilst reading books elevates the human spirit, watching videos on social media results in brain rot. We should, therefore, read more and scroll less.  

 

And, err, that was really about it ...

 

It's not that I don't - as a Lawrentian - in part agree with them, but what the speakers didn't seem to fully appreciate is that people are not the passive victims of the tech giants and social media companies; that they willingly yield to the network in which they are integrated; that they love their 24/7 virtual lives and the gadgets that facilitate it such as smartphones and i-Pads.  

 

And what the speakers call brain rot is what most people experience as happiness and they are grateful to YouTube and TikTok etc. for providing them with a world in which they can finally feel safe; a world which anticipates and addresses their needs. 

 

Thus, rather than wanting to spend less time online, most people wish to immerse themselves ever further into the digital realm and become one with their digital selves (their avatars), in much the same way that Narcissus once desired to become one with his own reflection. 

 

It is, ultimately, a kind of religious desire; a wishing to submit to something greater in order to find not freedom but fulfilment (or a kind of fatal satisfaction). People are exalted by belonging to the digital new order beyond feeling or reason; they may lose their minds and their hearts might perish within them, but it's what they want; to participate in a great and perfect network. 

 

 

IV.

 

What the trio of speakers needed to do (but didn't) was place the discussion within a broader philosophical discussion on the question concerning technology; someone mentioned Mark Fisher at some point, but it was Heidegger - not Fisher - who needed referencing. 

 

For Heidegger it is who recognised that the "threat to man does not come [...] from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology" [1], rather it's the essence of technology as a form of revealing that he terms enframing [Gestell] wherein the greater danger lies. 

 

To speak about removing smartphones from classrooms or restricting access to social media for those under the age of sixteen, is to entirely fail to understand that the problem has to do with 2,500 years of Western metaphysics and the fall into idealism. 

 

I would politely suggest, therefore, that Marriott, West, and Stock read less Jane Austen and more Heidegger. And more Baudrillard, too; for the latter is another author whose predictions about the world we now inhabit and his insights into digital culture have proved to be extremely prescient [2]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994), p. 333. 

      See the two-part post 'O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology', published on TTA on 26 May 2016: click here to access part one, or here for part two.    

 

[2] See the essay by Bran Nicol and Emmanuelle Fantin entitled 'How the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted today's AI 30 years before ChatGPT', in The Conversation (4 November, 2025): click here. Fantin and Nicol are the authors of a new Baudrillard biography published by Reaktion Books (2025), my thoughts on which are presently being published on TTA; click here to read part one of what will be a four-part post. 

      I think a good book to start with by Baudrillard might be The Ecstasy of Communication (1988), described by Fantin and Nicol as "one of Baudrillard's most prophetic texts, valuable even now, more than thirty years after its publication, as a key to understanding our 'permanently online, permanently connected world'" (Jean Baudrillard, 2025, p. 96); a world where the screen has replaced the mirror and each individual exists in their own kind of bubble, like an astronaut inside their spacesuit.    

 

 

This post is for Thom B. and Nick Cave. 

 

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

Reworked front cover image to Jean Baudrillard 

by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol 

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

'Identity is a dream pathetic in its absurdity.' 

 

 

I.

 

There are several reasons why I like Baudrillard and feel a certain degree of kinship. For one thing, we both come from humble backgrounds ... 

 

If I insist on (but do not identify in terms of) my working class origin, Baudrillard deployed his rusticity "against the intellectual milieu he would inhait for the major part of his life" [21] and often cited his peasant-nature "in order to portray himself as an alien driven into the world of the elite" [21], but never comfortably at home there.  

 

And if he was a prolific writer - publishing over forty books - he retained a certain rural laziness in defiance of an industrial work ethic and its associated values, such as competitiveness and ambition (values which underpin academia as much as they do the world of commerce). 

 

Baudrillard really didn't give a shit about belonging or becoming a benign success: "'I'm something of a [...] barbarian at heart, and I do my best to stay that way'" [21] [a]. 

 

  

II. 

 

Another reason I like Baudrillard: his style of poetry is one I recognise and have tried to emulate; little fragments of language that trigger thoughts rather than feelings (Lawrence calls them pansies). Although his poetic influences - Hölderlin, Rimbaud and Artaud - are not mine and he is a naturally more lyrical writer than I am.    

 

They key point is: Baudrillard's poetic sensibility shaped his later theory which, like the work of other French theorists, is "close to philosophical thought, but more literary and speculative in spirit, and more interdisciplinary in method" [39]. 

 

I loved this style of thinking when I first encountered it in the 1990s and I still love it now; even if others are now returning to common sense and are so over writers like Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, et al. 

 

 

III. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, I was too busy playing with my Action Man to really know what was going on in Paris in May '68, but Baudrillard was very much, as a sociologist at Nanterre, Johnny-on-the-spot (if not exactly in the thick of the action). 

 

His attitude to the Situationists, however, was ambivalent: "He accepted Debord's broad definition of the society of the spectacle, but rejected its Marxist theoretical foundations, which he considered far too 'normative'." [45]

 

Baudrillard thought "a more advanced theory of how signs operate in the modern world was needed - to understand images not as travesties of reality but as reality themselves" [46].

 

"Nevertheless Baudrillard sympathized with the Situationists' anti-authoritarian impulses, appreciated their fusion of artistic practice and politics, and enjoyed their Hegelian strategy of 'immanent critique' and attacking from within." [46]

 

Thus, there would "remain something fundamentally 'situationist' about Baudrillard's work" [46] and he cheerfully accepted the image of himself as an intellectual terrorist; i.e., one who blows up ideas and shatters beliefs: I am not a man I am dynamite, as Nietzsche would say [b]. 

  

 

IV.   

 

Yet another reason I like Baudrillard is that he shares my fascination with objects and the way they relate to each other "as a system and a syntax, denoting a world that is more complex than it seems" [50].

 

However, Baudrillard wasn't merely interested in objects as signs and the role they played within human social interactions: 

 

"He was more concerned with the object itself. For him [...] the object allows us to choose a path away from the question of the subject [...] which always tended to be privileged in contemporary philosophy." [50]    

 

It's a slightly magical way of thinking; the object doesn't simply signify - it enchants. Baudrillard thus restores a sense of mystery to the things "we share our world with and normally take for granted" [51]: lamps, mirrors, clocks, chairs, etc. 

 

 

V. 

 

Was Baudrillard a bit of a fraud? 

 

That seems a bit harsh to me.  

 

Nevertheless, his self-presentation as a lone theorist on the outside of everything was "always characteristically ironic and performative" [62] and he participated in many collective projects. 

 

The one thing he did place himself outside of in the early-mid '70s was Marxism, which he came to regard as "nothing other than the mirror-image of bourgeois society because it placed production at the centre of existence and thereby normalized the capitalist system" [65]. 

 

One of his most important works, L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976) [c], attempted a "radically different way of understanding society and culture by turning to both pre-capitalist systems as models and to a range of radical and eclectic French cultural theorists and writers, such as Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss and Alfred Jarry" [65]. 

 

Now, excess and expenditure were key terms and Baudrillard spoke of sacrifice and death. The book thus consolidated his reputation as "a highly idiosyncratic and controversial thinker, inhabiting the margins of conventional sociology or philosophy" [65]. 

 

In brief: symbolic exchange is an alternative political economy to the one imagined by Marxism and it "confounds the system of complete exchangeability or reversibility of signs that defines modern capitalism" [66].     

 

It also lets death back into the game (as the ultimate challenge). 

 

I know that, thanks to The Matrix (1999) [d], if people can name one book by Baudrillard it's Simulacra and Simulation. But, if asked to name the one text that really sets the scene for his later work and in which he becomes "no longer just a leading representative of French theory but an enigmatic, provocative and, eventually, iconic figure" [67], then it would have to be Symbolic Exchange and Death.    

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Having said that, Fantin and Nicol say that Baudrillard "would always harbour a paradoxical sene of resentment that he was never fully accepted by the French philosophical establishment" (2025, p. 27).  

 

[b] See Nietzsche writing in Ecce Homo, 'Why I Am a Destiny' (1). In the following section (2), Nietzsche adds: "I know joy in destruction to a degree corresponding to my strength for destruction ..." I am quoting from the English translation by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 127.

      Baudrillard's self-characterisation as a terrorist can be found in Simulacres et Simulation (1981), where he writes: "I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us." I am quoting from the English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 163.   

 

[c] This work was translated into English as Symbolic Exchange and Death, by Iain Hamilton Grant (Sage Publications, 1993).

 

[d] In The Matrix (dir. the Wachowski's, 1999), the protagonist Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, hides a floppy disk inside a copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation - and so it was author and book suddenly found a whole new level of fame. 

      However, Baudrillard being Baudrillard, he distanced himself from the enormously successful movie by declaring that it was 'the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce'. See 'The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview with Jean Baudrillard', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 1/2 (July 2004). 

      The main issue Baudrillard had with the film was that, in his view, it completely missed the point of his work and confused the classical Platonic problem of illusion with the postmodern problem of simulation. For an interesting discussion of this, see the essay entitled 'Why Baudriilard Hated The Matrix: And Why He Was Wrong', on The Living Philosophy (17 April 2022): click here.      

 

 

To read part one of this post on Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol's biography of Jean Baudrillard, click here. 

 

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

 

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