Title: Baudrillard and the Millennium
Author/Artist: Christopher Horrocks
Publisher: Icon Books
Media: Book
Reviewer: Paul Taylor
These are confusing times. Jean Baudrillard, the postmodernist theorist, brings to mind gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson's slogan,
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."It's not easy to make sense of Baudrillard's books, or even, in this case, of a book about him. Horrocks has a difficult job, distilling the pronouncements of Baudrillard on the subject of that most evanescent of items, the millennium. So I have tried to avoid a curmudgeonly response, though I may not have succeeded.
Perhaps I nurse a grievance: as a musician, I am disconcerted, in more than one sense, by the guru's claim that,
"we can neither go back to real events or pre-stereo music." (p.11)So it may be that Baudrillard hit the mark when he said:
"Well-ordered resentment always begins at home." (p.60)First let's dispose of a few minor points on the science front, bearing in mind their possible larger significance in the Science Wars.
To begin with, in one description of the millennial state of things, we find this odd remark:
"Once discovered by science or anthropology, objects such as primitive societies, viruses or atoms are not content simply to remain themselves: they infiltrate the system." (p.61)This seems to imply that viruses didn't get up to much before they were discovered by scientists. Am I being unfair to pick on this statement? Surely Horrocks doesn't really mean that? Well, this kind of utterance will not surprise the connoisseur of postmodernist texticules. The notorious Bruno Latour is the prime example of this, as recounted by Alan Sokal:
"Latour discusses what he interprets as the discovery in 1976, by French scientists working on the mummy of the pharoah Ramses II, that his death (circa 1213 BC) was due to tuberculosis. Latour asks 'How could he pass away due to a bacillus discovered by Koch in 1882?'... He goes so far as to assert that 'Before Koch, the bacillus has no real existence'." (Intellectual Impostures, p.88, note 123)Another sign that all is not well is when Horrocks says,
"history has slowed down, like light near a dense astral body." (p.10)If only Coles' book in the same series had come out first, he could have learned that,
"One of the consequences of Maxwell's theory is that the speed of light (in vacuum) appears as a universal constant (usually given the symbol 'c')... all observers have to measure the same value of c, whatever their state of motion." (op. cit., p.10)At the end of Horrocks' book is a selection of Key Ideas, where we find another unfortunate sentence:
"strange attractors and dark matter are terms enlisted to connote the irresistible gravitational pull of the universe towards forces lying at its periphery." (p.47)A more garbled account of gravity would be hard to find, yet this is typical of the cavalier approach to science that Sokal so damningly anatomized. Try this:
"strange attractors and dark matter are terms enlisted to promote the resistible gravitational pull of the university towards farces lying at its periphery."Of course there is the customary attempt to dodge the issues, as in this passage:
"Baudrillard employs the metaphors of fractal science..."So here we have the master "employing chaos theory", a product of rationalistic science, in order to characterize millennial culture in a special mode of his own devising, such that he is beyond any claim that he is wrong about the world, yet is presumably telling us how things are, without, of course, sullying his theories with reality.[he may be using the concepts of fractal science metaphorically, but that is not the same thing, since mathematics is not made out of metaphors]
"...to suggest that culture too is infinitely divisible, proliferates cancerously, leads randomly and exponentially from the particular to the general, and from stability to instability. These fluctuations lead to effects that Baudrillard, employing chaos theory, calls 'strange attractors'. This is quite beyond rationalist claims to verifiability, truth and reality." (p.6)
Throughout the book, I had the lingering worry that I was missing the point. So I invite readers to contemplate another sample, and reach their own conclusions about a more attractive matter: sex.
"Even desire becomes problematic, now that the radical otherness between male and female gives way to millennial cloning of sex with no purpose, where sexual functions will no longer be needed for reproduction... Sexual exchange now involves locking on to each other in new machinic rituals of switching, merging or commutation, rather than gazing seductively and fatally." (p.53)Sex can be a bleak business, to be sure, but I must report better luck than Horrocks'. He also seems to be talking as if sex-without-reproduction is a new thing (see Ehrlich for a biological angle).
This suspicion that a kind of amnesiac fuss is being made about contemporary experiences recurred throughout my reading, as in this claim:
"Computer crashes or slips of the hand on a computer mouse give the files we were compiling a value they should not have, when they are erased or inadvertently lost." (p.33)Can he really think that spilling an inkwell over a ledger was a non-event for the Dickensian clerk? Then there is this:
"The technoculture itself... has led to extreme and fatal proliferations in phenomena such as computer viruses or financial crashes beyond the controlling will of the rationalist, progressive institutions that instigated them..." (p.76)The Wall Street Crash was in 1929. This remarkable capitalist achievement was brought to us without digital technology.
Presumably he believes things are radically worse now, as he unquizzically cites Baudrillard's bizarre claim that computers,
"have equipped themselves with a number of functional gremlins, electronic viruses and other negative side-effects which protect them from perfection and spare them, in their turn, from pushing to their limits." (p.49)This touching faith in the advent of artificial intelligence is, some would say, "a bit previous". It is part of a Punch and Judy wrangle between a sub-Hegelian belief in technology as the agent of history, and an animist notion of nature. This is expressed in Horrocks' summary of Baudrillard's argument:
"The subject, such as science, technology or political power, may imagine that it controls its object, such as nature, the masses and the world. Yet this scenario (which gives rise to models [sic] of oppression or alienation) may be reversible. The object may be playing with the subject, natural phenomena with science, the masses with the media, and so on." (p.63)Who am I to scoff, with my memories of inkwells and Wall Street? Is it Baudrillard's or Horrocks' fault if I can't keep up with the dizzying spin of their incantations? I should forget Marx, Einstein and Chomsky and get wise, like Horrocks, just by going to the flicks:
"As Terry Gilliam's film Twelve Monkeys showed us, linear time is now reversible." (p.40)Is this popcorn past its sell-by date or what?