Jean Baudrillard, dead at 77

It took surprisingly long for this to hit the New York Times, but I've just learned that Jean Baudrillard died on Tuesday at the age of 77. Baudrillard is pretty much the only serious French theorist I can name whose reputation survived a brief moment at the forefront of American pop culture. Eight years after the scholar -- always something of a drunken brat -- flirted with total obscurity by daring to suggest that "the Gulf War did not take place," his key concepts of hyperreality and simulation were transplanted into The Matrix cleverly managed his moment under the spotlight of the simulacrum, dismissing the . BaudrillardWachowski's as having "misunderstood" his work. To some extent, that's probably true, but this in itself was vintage Baudrillard: it's not just that the guy was a born negater, it's that negation was his only move. It was a character flaw that became a dialectical imperative.

The best thing about reading Baudrillard, I think, is stumbling across the odd passage where he's obviously straining to resist the lure of hyperreality. I haven't finished the book yet, but a couple of months ago I picked up The Conspiracy of Art, a collection of essays and interviews with Baudrillard edited by Sylvere Lotringer. Reading the transcriptions of his interviews, it's clear that he had a fondness, maybe even a passion, for contemporary film. It may have been partly a guilty pleasure, partly academic interest, but he's not by any means entirely dismissive. Here's a passage from within, re: The Matrix:

After the release of the first episode, the staff of the Wachowski brothers got in touch with me, hoping to get me involved with the following ones. But this was out of the questions [laughter] ... Other films have already dealt with the growing blurring between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's masterpiece. The Matrix's chief value is that it pushes all these elements to a paroxysm. Yet it does it more crudely and in a far less complex way. Either the characters are in The Matrix, and belong to the digitized universe, or they are radically outside it–in Zion, the resistor's city. it would be interesting to show what happens at the point where these two worlds meet. The most embarrassing part of the film is that it confuses the new problem raised by simulation with its arch-classical, Platonic treatment. That is a serious flaw.

Baudrillard's inability to completely dismiss popular culture is all over America, his diary of a coast-to-coast drive published in 1986. He never stops being critical, but no man could write so lovingly (even if semi-ironically) if his sole intention was to scold. Here he he's talking about a Southern California suburb:

The only element of culture, the only mobile element: the car. No cultural centre, no centre of entertainment. A primitive society: the same motor identification, the same collective phantasy of an unfolding ritual–breakfast, movie, religious service, love and death–the whole of life as a drive-in. Truly magnificent.

I've spent the last hour going through Baudrillard's many obituaries, and this quote seems to manage the best sum-up. It comes from the Times Online:

Opposition, Baudrillard came to assert, could only now be realised in the form of singularities that could in principle never be absorbed into western cultures. Ultimately, his writing became unclassifiable, a kind of singularity itself. His own project, nihilism and hermetic language were unique, lending themselves neither to codification nor to being organised into a coherent doctrine.