The Controversy Around Baudrillard
Baudrillard is highly controversial as a thinker. Over the course of time, his work has had as many detractors as it has had defenders and enthusiasts. Some of Baudrillard’s critics absurdly even accused him of celebrating the postmodern media-cultural condition of simulacra and semiotic signs becoming increasingly autonomous and detached from the “referents” of which they were supposed to be the representations. The popularized misreading of Baudrillard is that he diagnoses techno-culture as an Empire of Signs which has forfeited its connection to the real and has spun itself off aimlessly into a never-never land of meaningless funhouse simulations. Having thus been caricatured, Baudrillard is condemned as the pope of the takeover of reality by semiotic signs, or the solipsistic denier of the existence of an externally objective real. Baudrillard would be the David Bowie of philosophy, the king of the carnivalesque, the avant-garde prophet of cultural pessimism.
The single most overriding reason that explains the animosity towards Baudrillard’s work is that he very often made statements along the lines of: Everything is virtual. Everything is simulation. Reality has disappeared (albeit through too much reality or as the culmination of the Western cultural and scientific concept of “reality” intensified into hyperreality). There is no distinction anymore between reality and its representation, and the vanishing of the gap between them is the state of simulation. These kinds of statements by Baudrillard infuriated many of his commentators.
His detractors say: It cannot be that everything is simulation! Look at this table – it is real! If Baudrillard crosses the street without looking, he is going to get hit by a truck! The same as you and me! Indulging for a moment in wrongheaded wishful thinking, one can entertain the thought that maybe it would have been better for his reputation if Baudrillard had said something like: There is a definite tendency for things to become more and more virtual. There is a strong trend for the percentage of what is real to decrease and the portion of what is virtual to increase. These would have been “respectable” and accurate empirical statements and good “predictions.”
As someone who believes in the importance of Baudrillard’s work, one is tempted by the thought: if only he had expressed his key concepts more empirically and in a less absolutist way, then he would not have been so harshly and often attacked! There would have been more appreciation for the value of his insights! But wait – this is not correct at all! To wish for that would amount to making Baudrillard into an idiot. He was not an idiot, and it is in fact very valuable to think instead about WHY did he say that “everything is simulation”? Why does he say this? What is the significance of him saying that everything is virtual? Rather than shy away from what appears to be an extreme and even ridiculous claim, I embrace the declaration and explain why it is important.
Baudrillard continuously said that “everything is simulation (or virtual)” rather than saying that “there is more and more simulation (or virtuality)” because the diagnosis of simulation, simulacra, virtuality, and hyperreality in contemporary culture is not the main concern of his work. The main concern of his work is to open a new knowledge field of reflection on and investigation into the possibilities of the challenge to the simulacrum.
He is primarily interested in how the condition of hyperreality can be contested and changed. Baudrillard thought that the “epistemological” statement that “everything is simulation” is a prerequisite to getting to the vitally important questions of conceptualizing where exactly there could be challenges to the system of virtuality in its mainstream manifestations. Baudrillard believes that it is only by acknowledging the simulacrum, facing it head on, that one can then begin to theorize about social change. Those who insist upon defending the good old-fashioned “natural reality” (or what is left of reality) against the virtual or the posthuman circumstances cannot get to this point of challenging the system. They cannot reach the plateau from where they can see the new vistas of resistance.
The overwhelmingly dominant position of leftist intellectuals (for example: Marxists, humanists, and even some celebrated Deleuzian “post-humanists” like Rosi Braidotti) is that the challenge to virtuality comes from the identity or growing consciousness of certain identified groups of human subjects who are oppressed by what is conceived of as the latest phase in the cognitive mapping of the stages of capitalism.
Yes – Everything is Simulation!
Looked at in one way, Baudrillard’s claim about the whole world being/becoming a simulation is obviously false. Looked at in another way, the hypothesis makes sense and is valid. From the standpoint of empirical sociology or a scientific methodology that evaluates statements measured against how things “really are” in the world, such pronouncements are incorrect. The human body still exists. There are still trees. A certain fact took place. The neo-Marxist or Frankfurt School “critical theory of society” believes that its object of inquiry – for example, ideology or “enlightenment as mass deception” – is mendacious or counterfeit. Those who have been duped by false consciousness or media manipulation or some set of cult beliefs are still susceptible to being brought back to “the real” or to “the truth.” Critical theory is suspicious of the principle of the simulacrum, whose assertion would seem to imply that the participants are hopelessly lost in the chimerical flourishes and imaginary phantasmagoria of perceptual appearances and discursive effects.
But evaluated in another way, as science fiction theory, Baudrillard is working with an “ideal type” (a term of Max Weber) of a scenario of a future society in whose direction we have been headed for a long time, and towards which we are surely headed even more.
I will further argue that, after having asserted the prerequisite or first principle that “everything is simulation” (an alternative to the first principle of natural science that the mission of the scientist is to investigate “the true nature of reality”), Baudrillard went on to name and conceptualize a whole series of new locations and possibilities for challenges to the simulacrum. I seek to enumerate those sites of contestation. In the absence of lending oneself to acceptance of that first principle, it would not be possible to see beyond the horizon of received ideas to this new field of research and exploration. I will additionally argue that many visual and textual science fiction narratives bring into visibility and into focus these arenas of challenge to the simulacrum. In the genre of science fiction stories, of course, it is allowed to posit a “fictional” scenario in which “everything is simulation.” Both empirical social science and the Marxist view that what we are living in can be named as “capitalism” of course do not allow this.
My argument is that certain ideas can be elicited from Baudrillard that contribute to a “science fiction theory” which identifies what we are living in not as “capitalism” but rather as a science fiction world. Then it will be a question of how that “science fiction world” can be contested, reversed, or transformed. I call this object of inquiry the trapdoor, escape hatch, or secret way out of simulation and hyperreality.
If only Baudrillard would just call what he is doing fiction and practice it as fiction! Why must he insist on bringing science fiction into cultural theory? He has the audacity to try something new and which was different? N. Katherine Hayles (in what she wrote about Baudrillard in the prestigious academic journal Science Fiction Studies in an essay entitled “The Borders of Madness.”) would like Baudrillard to openly acknowledge that his texts are fictional. SF should be a warning and is not a serious mode of thinking. Baudrillard, according to Hayles, fails to describe empirically the implosion into simulation but rather enacts that event himself. Hayles regards this as dangerous. She compares it to a powerful drug. Baudrillard represents, for her, apocalyptic madness. What she does not see is that his theory is opening the “doors of perception” to the ways to resist and change the simulacrum.