Philosophy
can and is used for creativity, using the doubts and insights to
create, playing with the boundaries and tensions of the most important
things. Humor and art are two ways of using one’s insights from
Philosophy to do this. Last time, we saw Lewis Carroll was reacting
critically to British Victorian society, showing the contradictions of
authority and the assumptions we make in reasoning that are dependent
upon our position in the situation. Today, we will consider similar
social criticism in the work of two early American masters of humor,
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) and Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977), both of whom
were reacting to the horror and absurdity of the times, Bierce to the
Civil War and the Marx Brothers to WWI.
Ambrose
Bierce wrote bitterly about the Civil War and the corruption on both
sides, Union and Confederacy, arguing that the war was not about noble
ideals but the power of the military and the profits of corporations.
He moved to San Francisco in 1866, wrote his famous Devil’s
Dictionary, which was originally called the Cynic’s Word Book in 1906
when it was first published, and then disappeared in Mexico seeking to
join the revolution in 1914. He had a brilliant gift with using humor to
point out the ways we are all selfish and ignorant, attacking the
politicians, the military, the rich, slavery, and American society.
Some Entries from his Devil’s Dictionary include:
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Academe: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy: A modern school where football is taught.
Acquaintance: A person we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Admiration: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Anoint.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Beauty:The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.
Bore: A person who talks when you want them to listen.
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Cartesian:
Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher who wrote, “I think,
therefore I am”, which could be improved as “I think that I think,
therefore I think that I am”, as close an approach to certainty as any
philosopher has yet made.
Christian: One who thinks the Bible is admirably suited to the needs of his neighbor.
Circus: A place where animals are permitted to see people acting like fools.
Conservative:
A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a
Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Debt: An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Dictionary: A device for cramping the growth of a language and making it inelastic.
Diplomacy: The patriotic act of lying for one’s country.
Disobedience: The silver lining to servitude.
Distance: The one thing the rich are willing to let the poor keep.
Duty: That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Edible:
Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a
snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the fool their lack of understanding.
Freedom: A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly.
Future: The time when our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Egotist: a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Hand: An instrument worn at the end of an arm and commonly thrust into someone’s pocket.
Hashish: There is no definition of this word. No one knows what this word means.
History:
An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are
brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Impartial: Unable to perceive personal advantage from either side of a controversy.
Justice: That which the state sells the citizen in exchange for allegiance and taxes.
Lecturer: One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
Logic:
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the
limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Occident:
The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient, largely
inhabited by Christians, a powerful sub-tribe of the Hypocrites, whose
principal industries are murder and cheating, called ‘war’ and
‘commerce’, which also happen to be the principal industries of the
Orient.
Ocean: A body of water occupying two thirds of a world made for man, who has no gills.
Past: That part of Eternity with which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance.
Patriot: The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
Peace: A period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Positive: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
Radicalism: The conservatism of tomorrow injected into the affairs of today.
Railroad: A device enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off.
Rational: Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
Reality: The dream of a mad philosopher.
Reason: To weigh probabilities in the scales of desire.
Responsibility:
A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate,
Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was
customary to unload it upon a star.
Revolution:
An abrupt change in the form of misrule. In American history, that
whereby the welfare and happiness of the people were advanced a full
half-inch.
Rum: A fiery liquor that produces madness in total abstainers.
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
Self-evident: Evident to one’s self and to nobody else.
Selfish: Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.
Suffrage: The right to vote for the man of another man’s choice.
Trial: A formal inquiry designed to prove the blameless character of judges, lawyers and jurors.
Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.
Understanding:
A cerebral secretion that enables on having it to know a house from a
horse by the roof on the house. Its nature and laws have been
exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived
in a horse.
The
Marx Brothers were early absurdists like Camus, comedians of the 20s
and 30s whose work was formative for American comedy. Groucho Marx, the
head of the group, was amazing with one liners that show a beautifully
complex understanding of contradictions involving human pride and
judgment, very much like Bierce.
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he's crooked.
Why a four-year old child could understand this! Somebody find a four-year old child.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
After
he was a successful movie star, Groucho was offered membership to a
country club at a time when country clubs did not admit white Catholics
and Jews. Groucho, who was Jewish, famously replied in a telegram, “I
don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.”
In
one of his movies, in reply to an art critic who says, “Art is art”,
Groucho says, “Well, Art is Art, isn't it? …And east is east and west is
west… and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they
taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you
know.”
Similar
to the German Pessimism that influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the
horrors of WWI (1915-1917) brought great disillusionment with reason,
science and society to European intellectuals, particularly for German
and French youth who would have a huge impact on modern culture. Here
in the Bay Area, a very similar movement happened in reaction to the
Vietnam War. WWI used more machines and propaganda than ever before,
and for this is often called the first modern war. Oil became the fuel
of war and vehicles, planes, jeeps, and after WWI, the Middle East was
carved up by European powers as the source of oil. This was the
beginning of machine guns and air warfare, bombing runs, tanks.
Newspapers became mouthpieces of propaganda in times of war. To
European intellectuals who conversed across national lines, this showed
logic and language being used for authority and empire in the name of
reason. The dominant scholars often sang nationalistic praise,
particularly in History and Philosophy departments.
Modern
art and humor started from this point, putting tradition and authority
out of joint, bringing out contradictions explicitly. They help to
simplify and focus work which is abstract and disconnected on purpose as
a revolt against the positive collective power of the traditional.
During WWI young intellectuals from all over Europe converged in
Zurich, Switzerland. They shared an opposition to the war and
traditional values. To these thinkers, the stupidity and brutality of
the modern age was clearly being sold to the masses through appeals to
‘reason’, ‘order’, ‘logic’, and ‘spirit’. They found these terms to be
hypocritical on a societal level, and declared a crisis of meaning:
European civilization, and human reason, the new modern values, are a
farce. Thus, use absurdity to bring out the contradictions in the
‘reason’ and the ‘reasonable’.
Some
of these similarly minded youth converged on the Cabaret Voltaire, a
beer parlor run by Hugo Ball. Jazz music was the new rage, violating
old traditional standards. Ball and his friend Huelsenbeck were looking
for a fake French name for a dancer in a French dictionary when they
found the word dada, ‘baby talk for horse, a child’s rocking horse’,
effectively the child’s term ‘horsie’. They decided that this word fit
the movement that they felt was going on in Zurich. The parlor became
the first home and center. Much art that was brutal and bizarre
appeared here, a new turn that is critical for modern art and humor.
Out of Zurich, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany, the Dada movement
quickly spread to Paris, New York, Moscow, Tokyo, and across the whole
world. Our modern culture, which is not simply Western but global,
includes the deep and playful skepticism of DADA. The Beatniks and
Hippies of the Bay picked up the Motherwell anthology The Dada Poets and
Painters as a major source and inspiration.
Dada’s
two celebrated themes are brutalism and simultaneity. Their brutalism
was use of the obscene, such as sex, swearing, violence, intoxication,
and nonsense, violated cultural norms. Simultaneity is the occurrence
of many disconnected elements within a work, a resistance against the
whole as coherent. Collage involves using many different types of media
blended together to create. The Dadaists were famous for using
newspaper type and pictures in collage, unseen before their time, used
to portray the disconnected urban life. This is both a celebration and a
protest, loving yet fearing the contradictions of the world. The
Dadaists invented an impressive set of new art forms, including abstract
sound poems, mechanical music, found art, and abstract painting.
In
one of the first shows at the Cabaret Voltaire, Schwitters showed the
audience a one letter poem, a card with a large ‘W’. He then started to
recite the poem, starting with a whisper and ending in a loud wailing
scream.
In
April of 1920, Orp, Baargeld and Ernst put on an infamous Dada show in
Cologne, France. Sitting next to a tank of red tinted water with an
alarm clock submerged at the bottom, Ernst had created a wooden
sculpture with an axe chained to it. A sign invited anyone who wished
to use the axe to help destroy the sculpture. In a Paris exhibit of
Ernst’s work, invitations read: “at 22 o’clock the kangaroo, at 22:30
high frequency, at 23 o’clock distribution of surprises, after 23:30
intimacies.” The exhibit itself was a Dada performance. On stage and
amongst the audience Breton, who would go on to become the “Pope of
Surrealism”, munched a mouthful of matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes kept
shouting, ‘It is raining on a skull’, Soupault and Tzara played a game
of hide and seek, while Peret and Charchoune continuously shook hands.
These performances are early precursors to performance art which
culminated in Situationism and Fluxus of the 60s and 70s, of which Yoko
Ono was a prominent figure.
Huelsenbeck’s many great quotes include:
“It’s
a fucked-up foolish world. You walk aimlessly along, fixing up a
philosophy for supper. But before you have it ready, the mailman brings
you the first telegram, announcing that all your pigs have died of
rabies, your dinner jacket has been thrown off the Eiffel Tower, your
housekeeper has come down with the epizootic. You give a startled look
at the moon, which seems to you like a good investment, and the same
postman brings you a telegram announcing that all your chickens have
died of hoof and mouth disease, your father has fallen on a pitchfork
and frozen to death, your mother has burst with sorrow on the occasion
of her silver wedding (maybe the frying pan stuck to her ears, how do I
know?). That’s life, dear fellow.”
“The Germans are the masters of dissembling, they are unquestionably
the magicians (in the vaudeville sense) among nations, in every moment
of their life they conjure up a culture, a spirit, a superiority which
they can hold as a shield in front of their endangered bellies.”
“The
highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the
thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly
shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to
collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.”
Tristan
Tzara was the foremost Dada manifesto writer, and he was famous for
reading his manifestoes interspersed in Dada performances. He was a
leader of the movement in Zurich, and then later in Paris, where the
scene is considered to have migrated with him, later becoming the
Surrealist scene of Breton, who wrote the many Surrealist manifestos.
Great quotes from Tzara’s Dada manifestos include:
“Dada remains within the European frame of weakness it’s shit after all
but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors and bedeck the
artistic zoo with the flags of every consulate.”
“Dada exists for no one and we want everybody to understand this because it is the balcony of Dada, I assure you.”
Tzara
repeats throughout the manifestos, “I love you so I swear I do adore
you”, and “I still consider myself to be quite charming”.
“If
I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge,
Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,” I have given a pretty faithful version of
progress, law, morality, and all other fine qualities that various
highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude
that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that
the writer is entitled to his boomboom.”
“I
am against all systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to
have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one’s own
littleness, to fill the vessel with one’s individuality, to have the
courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the
sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies…”
“Here is the great secret: The thought is made in the mouth. I still consider myself very charming.”
“A great Canadian philosopher has said: thought and the past are also very charming.”
(Here, the genders on ‘thought’ and ‘past’ are reversed, a common way of mocking Americans speaking French.)
From Tzara’s Lecture on Dada (1922):
“I
know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t
expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you
exist. You haven’t the faintest idea…You will never be able to tell me
why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious
attitude about life.”
“Dada
is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an
almost Buddhist religion of indifference….Dada is immobility and does
not comprehend the passions…But with the same note of conviction I might
maintain the contrary.”
“Nothing
is more delightful than to confuse and upset people…The truth is that
people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their
income, their dog…If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and
indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that cannot be
shaken… Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks. Then
you will be able to understand many things. You are not more
intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.”
“We
are well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were
pretty much the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi
(Zhuang Zi, the second patriarch of Daoism who we studied) was just as
Dada as we are.”
Tzara
advocated automatism as an artistic method, the creation of art through
automated processes that produced spontaneous patterns and beauty only
partly controlled by the artist. Later modern art made much use of
automatism. Tzara wrote:
“To make a Dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will resemble you.
And
here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a
sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the
vulgar.”
Surrealism
followed Dada in the use of the obscene and simultaneity. Influenced
by the work of Freud, it often involves dreamlike fantasy and sexuality.
Prefiguring the work of Donna Haraway, the Postmodern philosopher who
suggested we adopt the myth that we are all cyborgs and hybrids in the
age of computers and feminism, the Surrealist writer Jarry wrote his
poem Fable:
A can of corned beef, on a chain like opera glasses,
Saw a lobster pass by which resembled it like a brother.
It was protected by a thick shell
On which it was written that inside,
like the can of corned beef,
it was boneless,
(Boneless and economical);
And underneath its curled-up tail
It apparently was hiding a key to open it.
Smitten with love, the sedentary corned beef
Declared to the little live self-propelling can
That if it were willing to acclimate itself
Next to it in earthly shop windows,
It would be decorated with a number of gold medals.
Conceptual
art is the later development in the 50s, 60s and 70s that followed Dada
and Surrealism. Rauschenberg was asked to make a contribution to the
Iris Clert Gallery’s exhibit of found art, he submitted a postcard on
which he wrote, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”.
Rauschenberg also erased a De Kooning drawing, then framed and
exhibited as a new work. He contacted De Kooning beforehand, and De
Kooning decided that it must be something he would miss or the work
would not be meaningful. Manzoni drew lines of certain lengths, rolled
up the paper strips, put them in boxes labeled with date and line
length, sold as artwork. He also sold balloons of ‘artist’s breath’,
and his own crap in cans for their weight in gold. He famously signed
people as if they were his art. Warhol created screen prints of soup
cans put on shelves like canned goods and Marilyn Monroe titled, “a
hundred Marilyns are better than one”.
La
Monte Young composed a poem for tables, a performance piece of dragging
furniture around on stage to make noises. He was one of the early
performance artists who created ‘happenings’, often including audience
members to take down the “fourth wall”. Simone Forti created some
Fluxus happenings as performance art, instructing one audience member to
try to lie down, the other try to tie first to the wall. Morris
created a wooden box with a tape recorder inside that played a loop with
the sound of own construction.
In
his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote that the sentence,
“A Rose Has no Teeth” does not make immediate sense, but it can be put
in a context that makes it make sense. Nauman read Wittgenstein, made a
plaque with this sentence on it and nailed it to a tree knowing that
the tree would slowly grow over the plaque. Baldessari in 1971 had his
art students cover an exhibit room with “I will not make any boring art”
as if they were kids being punished at school. Craig-Martin put a
glass of water on a glass shelf installed into a museum wall, and called
it An Oak Tree. In a dialogue posted next to the work, a critic asks
if we are truly supposed to believe that the glass of water is an oak
tree just because the artist says it is, and the artist replies that the
glass of water is indeed now an oak tree. Lastly, one of my favorite
examples, the Nest Group staged a performance piece in 1978 called Let’s
Come One Meter Closer, where several of the group’s artists in various
places around world each dug a meter deep hole and stood in it.
Postmodernism was
flourishing at the same time as modern art, during the mid 60s, 70s and
80s, spreading from French philosophers influenced by Poststructuralism
such as Lyotard, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Derrida. Some have called
Nietzsche the first Postmodernist, and some say that we are still living
in Postmodern times, unlike Latour who argued as an Antimodernist that
‘modernity’ never happened. Postmodernism is characterized by a free
play of ideas, forms and influences in the wake of Poststructuralists
such as Foucault and their criticism of universal structures and
systems. Like Nietzsche, Postmodernism embraces self-contradiction,
often in the form of hybridization, mixing and matching formerly opposed
forms, ideas and cultures, embracing the Hegelian Other as Sartre would
have wanted. Recall that for Nietzsche creativity was not outright
rejection of morality, tradition and culture but free interpretation and
use of everything.
Postmodernism
reverses conceptions that arose with the European Enlightenment and
modernity about the progress of reason and the exclusive identity of
Western culture. Recall that Hegel saw history as a necessary unfolding
of European progress through reason without the possibility of
regression. The accelerating development of science and technology
which originally supported exclusive understandings of Western identity
is also undermining the distinction via counterculture. In the 1980s,
this included the use of video technology, and then in the 1990s it was
extended considerably by the explosion of the internet. The Bay Area,
one of the most diverse places in America, is a major center of fusion
culture as well as internet innovation. While there are countless
interesting examples of Postmodern art, particularly architecture and
literature, we will focus on the major influential Postmodern
philosophers and their core ideas.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
(1924 - 1998), pronounced “leo-TAR”, is often mentioned with
Postmodernism because he was centrally concerned with the impact it was
having on thought and culture. He is of the same family as the famous
trapeze artist known for his one-piece gymnastic garb, for whom the song
The Man on the Flying Trapeze was composed and from whom the gymnastic
wear gets its name. Lyotard taught in Algeria, Brazil and California
before settling in Paris in 1968, the year of the New Left student
protests in Paris, an event that had a major impact on the French
Postmodernists.
Lyotard’s
most famous work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1979), is regarded as one of the central works of Postmodernism,
sometimes called the Postmodernist Bible. Lyotard argues that all
cultures legitimate themselves through the telling and retelling of
narratives, stories that give each culture purpose and meaning. At a
time when computer technology was just beginning to bring vast changes
to communication, thought and culture, Lyotard argues that the training
of critical minds is being eclipsed by storage of data and governments
are being replaced by multinational corporations. All of this must be
legitimated by a narrative, and so the story of the European
Enlightenment and the Age of Reason separating the West from the rest
becomes central to the creation of meaning, a metanarrative. The heroic
West, it is said, brings freedom to the world through democracy and
reason to the world through science. Lyotard compares this story of
salvation to similar metanarratives found in Christianity and Marxism.
Without the faithful retelling and circulation of this metanarrative,
Moderns, as Latour would say, would have little idea what their culture
means.
Unfortunately,
Lyotard argues, the metanarrative was unmasked for many by the horrors
of WWII, particularly the manufactured genocide at Auschwitz, which
spawned the countercultural attacks on the metanarrative of the fifties,
sixties and seventies. While all can agree that Western culture
engages in the practices of science and democracy, counterculturals
begin wondering aloud if the story of progress is merely a mask for
brutality and whether the West is merely like the rest, wallowing in
ignorance and authoritarianism. Consider Jack Kerouac, who wrote of the
“beat generation”, the beatnik youth of the fifties who turned from
American conformity, tired and disillusioned after WWII and unfaithful
to the Korean War and consumerism. Consider the Civil Rights Movement
of the sixties, that called for revolutionary changes to the American
practice of democracy which openly excluded and oppressed many Americans
who were seen as Other due to race and gender.
Lyotard
argues that Postmodernism is a playful engagement with multiple
conflicting micronarratives that have emerged in the space created by
the questioning of the grand metanarrative. He was predictably attacked
by critics who argued that Postmodernism and the end of the
metanarrative was itself a new metanarrative. Lyotard countered that
the metanarrative of the progress of the West was not dead, but actively
contradicted by some countercultures. For many, the dominance of First
World, the environmental impact of technology and the supremacist
nature of the metanarrative is unquestioned, either out of ignorance or
with regret that has no faith in an alternative. Our obsession with
precision limits the scope of our vision. It is this limitation that
modern art and Postmodern thought hope to counteract by disturbing the
dominant forms of cultural coherence. Critics of Lyotard and
Postmodernism continue to ask whether this is a cure for the condition
or merely another symptom. Is Postmodernism, like the narrative of
modernity, genuine liberation, or is it merely a safety valve to
accommodate scholars and gallery goers who are disenchanted but still
require entertainment?
Gilles Deleuze
(1925 - 1995), pronounced “duh-LUZE”, wrote his first books on Hume and
Nietzsche, and then several with Felix Guattari, pronounced
“ga-ta-REE”, including Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972)
and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Between these periods of early work
and later collaborations, Deleuze wrote his central work, Difference and
Repetition (1968) a year before he was recommended for a professorship
by Foucault. Deleuze argues that all claims to objectivity requires
repetition, which gives the appearance of coherent concepts and
practice. Consider the example of tribal narratives chanted in song,
religious rituals and modern academics continuously using the terms
‘reason’ and ‘science’. Recall Tzara wrote, “If I cry out: Ideal,
ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom,
boomboom, I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law,
morality, and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent
men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all
everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is
entitled to his boomboom”.
Following
Nietzsche, also a favorite of Tzara, Deleuze says that all great
thinking is a dangerous rupture of repetition and consistent coherent
categories, a painful birth of the formerly impossible into the world of
possibility. Philosophy is not the discovery of universal truth that
Plato, Descartes and Kant sought, but the creation of new concepts.
This is much like late Wittgenstein, who said that description must
take the place of explanation. Reason is not entirely consistent with
itself, universal or objective, and it need not be to create useful
ideas. Philosophy, science and art are different cultures of the
creation of concepts and meaning. Deleuze discusses the speed of light
and absolute zero, useful in science but also conceived as practically
unattainable ideals.
Jean Baudrillard
(1929 - 2007), pronounced “bo-dree-YAHR” was a French philosopher,
sociologist and photographer. Barthes and Bourdieu were both on his
doctoral thesis committee. In the seventies, after he became a
professor, he made many trips to America and Japan, fascinated with
consumerism, mass communication and advertising and the effect these
were having on culture and the production and consumption of meaning.
Against Marx, Baudrillard argued that society is not ultimately about
production, but consumption. I often mention with Nietzsche that
Baudrillard is much like Nietzsche, if Nietzsche had wandered through
malls, Disneyland and Vegas until he had given up hope in individual
creativity and given in to nihilism. Baudrillard is known for being the
most pessimistic of the major Postmodernists, and accepts that he is a
nihilist. He acquired a following in the late eighties and nineties.
The Wachowski siblings, who wrote the Matrix, were influenced by
Baudrillard, their Matrix an attempt to fuse the Deceiving Demon of
Descartes and the simulated hyperreality of Baudrillard. In one scene
Neo, the protagonist, uses a book by Baudrillard to hide items on his
desk.
For
Baudrillard, cultures seek a full closure for meaning and truth which
always escapes their grasp. The meaning of the thing is never the thing
itself, the sign and its significance always beyond its signification.
Following Nietzsche, Baudrillard argues that we are seduced by meaning,
and that all acceptance of interpretation is seduction. While
seduction is not necessarily the worst of things, in modern commercial
society the seduction has become a sickly, unfulfilling hypnosis, the
dull lull offered by hours of television and endless consumption of
manufactured products. Baudrillard argues that we no longer live in
what can be called simply reality, but rather in a simulation, a virtual
reality, what he calls the Hyperreal. Our manufactured hyperreality is
reality, but mass produced, much like the art of Andy Warhol in the
sixties, such as his screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and tomato soup
cans.
The
more we try to manufacture reality to complete it and enclose it, the
more hyperreal it becomes, both less than and more than real, and thus
unreal. Baudrillard says that pornography is hyper-sex. Similarly,
fast food can be called hyper-food, television can be called
hyper-experience, and advertising can be called hyper-seduction, the
mass production of desire as Lyotard argues. Baudrillard calls these
‘simulacra’ (each a ‘simulacrum’ singularly), simulations or copies.
The copy is real, but it is also, in reality, a knock-off. Baudrillard
argues that cultures are founded on exchange, and when everything
exchanged is mass-produced, things are more symbolic than they are
individual objects. Drinking a pepsi can be somewhat satisfying, but it
is more about the signification that it satisfies than its actual
satisfaction for the individual drinking it. It signals to others that
you are satisfied more than it satisfies. Culture is driven by
consumption, and the hyper-consumption of unnecessary products creates a
reality and life experience that is more symbolic and mythological than
real and significant. This does not mean nothing will happen, but that
each event loses individual significance. Clearly, both Lyotard and
Baudrillard are very Nietzschean, but Lyotard is optimistic about
cultural freedom and Baudrillard pessimistic about cultural consumption.
