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Jean Baudrillard: The Precession of Simulacra
The shortcomings of Baudrillard’s mid-Eighties work have apparently been widely documented- the predilection for hyperbole, the reluctance to analyze systemically after making a bold claim, the seemingly warrantless concentration on specific societal phenomena to the exclusion of all sorts of others, etc. All of these make The Precession of Simulacra very frustrating to logically parse, but conveniently the question of whether or not any of the ideas within it can be said to be True in any sense falls way outside the boundaries of this thesis. Precession begins with an allusion to narrative, specifically a short story by Borges. He then outlines the difference between dissimulation and simulation (“feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only asked,; whereas simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’” [Baudrillard 5]). I guess he was in a scrappy mood at that point, because the first thing he does after defining those terms is assert the nonexistence of God through analysis of iconoclastic movements in Europe: Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination (Baudrillard 9). At this point we move into the real meat of the analysis, or at least the place where that SHOULD be. He puts forward his overarching theory on the successive phases of the image: -it is the reflection of a basic reality -it masks and perverts a basic reality -it masks the absence of a basic reality (italics his) -it bears no relation to any reality (Baudrillard 11). In the other post I’ll elaborate on what he goes on to talk about, which is an application of this framework to several historical and social phenomena; the general thesis develops a bit throughout, and takes on more nuance with regard to certain cases, but the above more or less summarizes it. Citation: Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983.
Jean-Francois Lyotard- The Postmodern Condition; Frederic Jameson- The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
These two texts continue the discourse initiated previously by the Frankfurt Schoolers regarding the relationship between art and commerce. Jameson feels more pertinent to what I'm doing than Lyotard, but they're both important and usually looked at together. I'll do Lyotard first.
On legitimation of knowledge, carried out by language games:
“What is needed if we are to understand social relations in this manner, on whatever scale we choose, is not only a theory of communication, but a theory of games which accepts agonistics as a founding principle” (Lyotard).
Linguistic games pop up over and over in the Invisibles- I'll cover the specific instances in the other post. What is important to draw out of this is that he's moving the post-structural idea of language governing the world from the subjective to the social. That is, Derrida's idea of language structuring reality has to do more with the individual's relationship to "the world", whereas this focuses on how language wholly governs every social action between two or more individuals. Language gives form to reality in a slightly different way here; he raises the example of the rector or university dean saying "The University is open," but it wouldn't be true if he hadn't said it, or if someone else said it, etc. This only works because other people buy in to the legitimacy of this linguistic interaction.
On grand narrative/historical metanarrative:
“The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation” (Lyotard).
I agree with this notion of postmodernism not ascribing to any grand narratives of societal progress or validation of the self or anything like that, but I wonder where the line is drawn between smaller narratives and grand narratives, and Lyotard isn't very clear. I guess this is covered on a micro level by the overarching story of the Invisibles being kind of lame, and the demands of individual issues or 3- or 4-issue arcs always taking precedence over the main narrative, to the point where the last issue itself is a complete departure from the rest of the story. On the other hand, the work "participates" in a larger narrative of British writers putting out extremely literate and creator-owned work through major American publishing houses, thus messing with the mechanics of the culture industry.
Which leads me to Jameson!
“One fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above [is] the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply ‘quote’ as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance” (Jameson).
Obviously as a literary superhero comic book the Invisibles is implicated in this erosion of the dichotomy between high and low culture. It also interrogates the concept in a lot of ways, and hopefully by the time I write the post on the other blog I'll have found and pulled some nice pages to support this.
“Our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation […] the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonising those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity […] Not only punctual and local counter-culture forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it” (Jameson).
I think this one speaks for itself. It feels intuitively true and it makes things both easier and harder for me; it's tough to reconcile the book's anti-capitalist attitudes with the reality of its ontological status as a late-cap art-commodity, but at the same time it's easy to just kick out of the question and say that because nothing can escape the system, nothing has a responsibility to try. Besides, I think the book has a pretty sophisticated attitude about capitalism, as I'll hopefully show on the other page.
Citations:
Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press, 1984. Frederic Jameson. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer- The Culture Industry as Mass Deception
Using this as a theoretical text, I'm forced to look at The Invisibles two ways: first as a work of art which is part and parcel of the Industry described by Adorno/Horkheimer, and second as a work which directly interrogates ideas put forward by A/H. I'm going to focus mostly on the first one here. The second gets covered on the other blog. Applicable parts include: " The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero's momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter's rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made cliches to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfill the purpose allotted them in the overall plan... The culture industry has led to the predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself- which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated together with the idea" (Adorno 1244).
They go on to say that the cliches have become so powerful that the repeated observer is left unable to experience works outside of them:
"Those who are so absorbed by the world of the movie–by its images, gestures, and words–that they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening" (Adorno 1244).
The Invisibles traffics heavily in cliches, which I get into a bit further on the companion post. Sometimes the effect is to undermine/subvert the cliche, and sometimes it isn't. But A/Hork seem to contend that things have come to a point where to use one of these tropes at all will wash out the message of your work, because it positions it so firmly inside the Culture Industry.
This essay seems to ignore a lot of stuff, making the classic Marxist mistake of defining identity solely in terms of status within the capital-exchange system. It also assumes that the producers of this stuff are way more centralized than they are today- sure, five or so firms still own all the major TV stations/record labels/etc., but those aren't the only channels for distribution anymore. I'm not sure how this theory would hold up under a more democratic model of production, but the thought raises a question: if, instead of just Pat Boone making Pat Boone records, five thousand dudes made Pat Boone records, do we as a culture gain or lose from this?
Citation:
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry as Mass Deception." in Rivkin and Ryan, ed. Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Inaugural Post
This blog will archive my annotations of all the theoretical texts I read in the course of my thesis work on Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Here is the companion post.
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