Jean Baudrillard and Consumer Objects, by Alan N. Shapiro
The System of Objects
Baudrillard sets out in his first book to “classify a world of objects.” He wants to go beyond a strictly “technological” analysis of how ordinary objects are intended – by the companies that manufacture them – to operate and to be used. He will instead study the “directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects.” But as soon as he contemplates the “secondary meanings” of modern day objects, he discovers that these everyday life connotations – when considered as a whole – constitute a cultural system. More decisively, this consumer culture or System of Objects is founded upon a lack. Baudrillard distinguishes between the concrete contribution to social and individual existence that ordinary manufactured objects made in earlier times, and the abstract “semiotic” function that objects serve in contemporary Consumer Society. In traditional society, people maintain a moral, natural and poetically expressive relationship to their objects, which still have a strong physicality and singularity. It is the same “organic” intimacy that “binds [the person] to the organs of his body.” In the classic “bourgeois home,” each object must be in its proper place – at best garnished with trimmings. For modern man the “cybernetician,” the physicality and locality of objects is subordinated to their participation in the “perfect circulation of messages.” The intercommunication and relationality of sign-objects to each other takes precedence over the specificity of each. All objects enter into an equivalence through their common belonging to the “universal” System of Objects.
Pataphysics of the Object
The fictionalist mode of investigation performed by Baudrillard in his exercise of raw phenomenology might be called the pataphysics of the object. As defined by Alfred Jarry, pataphysics is the painstaking elaboration of imaginary scientific and technical solutions, expressed in a persuasive language that pays almost “pathological” attention to particulars. Facing a system of hyper-reality, the only effective counter-strategy is pataphysical – “in other words, a science fiction of the reversibility of the system against itself.” Baudrillard has always been a pataphysician. One of his earliest known texts that has been published is called “Pataphysics.” He wrote it when he was “about twenty.” Baudrillard co-taught a seminar (together with Jacques Donzelot) in the early 1980s at the University of Nanterre outside Paris calledPatasociology. In Fragments (2001), his illuminating book-length interview with François L’Yvonnet, Baudrillard asserts that pataphysics is the most appropriate response to the project of integral reality – or bringing the world to total “realization” and completion – currently being carried out by science, technology and media culture. The fatal strategy of pataphysics is “neither critical nor transcendent, but is rather the perfect tautology of this integral reality.” To add further interpretation, pataphysical praxis sets into play a quantum system that is non-local (yet relatively near) in the fully qualitative sense (beyond obvious physical non-locality in the classical Newtonian sense). This quantum system is accessible via an intellectually imaginative man-made dimension-traversing wormhole. It engineers into existence the impossible-possible “quantum vector” operator (of a fractal nature) that must be given time to operate, to develop its energy signature. It implements the “de-realization” (against integral reality) of the mutual remote control of two particles engaged in long-term reciprocity, a step forward in praxis-poesy for the quantum entanglement ideas first put forth by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935. In patasociology, the two entangled particles do not have to be subatomic.
Glass
In the first part of The System of Objects, Baudrillard mentions a certain material substance – out of which a plethora of contemporary objects is made – that catalyzes the transformation of the object from physical and vigorously singular to virtual and merely a signifier: Glass. A French advertising campaign of the sixties designates glass as the “material of the future” – and this same future is touted by businessmen, politicians and intellectuals alike as “transparent” and “value neutral.” Glass exists at a “zero level of matter” and embodies a “universal function in the modern environment.” It is “the material used and the ideal to be achieved, both ends and means.” But what glass actually effects is the opposite of what is promised and intended. The promotional discourse of the glass window claims that this aperture enables us to see more objects, thereby extending our horizons. What the windowpane really does is to introduce more objects – including nature and landscapes – into the systemic unity of our own self-contained environment. Although it appears to be an opening up to the outside or onto the world, the glass window in fact diminishes the world by bringing it into our closed-circuit atmosphere or system of ambient signs as a mere component. In an analogous way, media technologies assure through their transactions that all of reality gets “integrated as spectacle into the domestic universe.” In the high-tech era, the pictures imported into the subject’s ambient network are computer-generated, as the interface to her surroundings is upgraded from glass panes to monitor screens.
The Car of the Past and Present
The “Car of the Past and Present” is a cozy pod that is nowhere in spacetime, a leased annex of the shopping malls and prodigious factory outlets to which one would otherwise have no access, and a logistical prosthesis for the “disabled” pedestrian-becoming-cyborg. It is the site of speed, engineering and command mythologies, disappearance through endless motion, blending of body and technology, sensuous arousal and carnal fantasy, climate control and vibrating music, accident and crash, formal freedom and death, prestige and cultural citizenship. The automobile is a “privileged center of daily waste” where huge sums of money are expended. The contradictory demands made on the individual by society are exemplified in the tension between advertising’s limitless exaltation of personal consumption and public service announcements for safety, sobriety, or driver moderation which are “desperate calls to collective responsibility.” Baudrillard states that this appeal to another kind of civic duty or morality cannot take hold because the consumer is already fulfilling his social responsibility in his activities as a consumer, even if this set of obligations commonly circulates under the name of “freedom.”
Advertising
From the backs of breakfast cereal boxes to giant billboards atop Times Square, from cornea-scanning personalized hologram ad posters as in Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report (2002) to flash graphic animated banners on the World Wide Web, from erotic come-ons on TV to skywritten white letters above the beach that disperse in the blue ether, Advertising is simply the air we breathe in Western society. It is a permanent society-wide conversation about consumer objects and commodities. Yet advertising is also an object in itself that we consume. The dominant culture’s procedure of infinitely generating “simulated differences” – all derived from the same model or operational code – is eminently consummated through advertising. In our relation to advertising, we are consuming an order of “sameness” that is concealed beneath the arrays and recombinations of marginally distinct differences. Publicity for a specific product is rarely successful – but this is not advertising’s true purpose. Its real and general function is the promotion of the entire system. Although “we may be getting better and better at resisting advertising in the imperative,” writes Baudrillard in The System of Objects, “we are at the same time becoming ever more susceptible to advertising in the indicative. Without ‘believing’ in the product, therefore, we believe in the advertising that tries to get us to believe in it.” Each product ad refers not only to the individual product that it is “informing” us about – it also refers to itself, endorsing the wonder of advertising per se. Through the spectacular celebration or “radical visibility” of a single object or brand, it is the totality of spectacle objects and a universe made complete by objects and brands that is promoted. In speaking of one object, advertising virtually glorifies all spectacle objects, including other media images and semiotic signs. Marshall McLuhan insightfully pointed out that the medium is the message. Consumers are “retribalized” in McLuhan’s sense – at the level of the medium itself and the code. Each consumer-semiotician is called upon to decode each message in compliance with “the code in which it was coded.” Content, declared objectives, and references to the so-called “real world” are not where the action is at. These modalities are merely pretexts for enacting the fundamental process of abstraction.
Addicted to Abstraction
The individual consumer as constituted subjectivity receives perpetual doses of real-time protection, reward and titillation from advertising as an integral system. All consumerism is infused with a hyper-visible eroticism. An “invisible agency” exists somewhere that has taken upon itself the task of informing me of my desires, then generously offering me a non-stop stream of images to satisfy them. The visual culture of stylized images is obscene, pornographic and medicating at every level – from hard-core porno to “music television” (interviewing the candidates for my next date), from swimsuit magazines to commonplace TV commercials. Just as alcohol, drugs, gambling, cigarettes, or even ice cream provide addictive escapism, so does a permanent flow of images of sexy actresses and models in skimpy clothing furnish relief from the difficulties of workaday ennui or emotional-existential pain. The attraction of “minimal otherness” of the ubiquitous pornographic image is always a projecting identification with the object of prestigious idleness in which I seek refuge. “Consciousness here is shaped not by a real relationship but by an imaginary one.” Sexual fantasies are liberated in order to remove me from my own physicality and embodiment. They are survival mechanisms for the lonely which lead in the long run to numbness of body parts or inability to take pleasure in more everyday sensual contacts with one’s surroundings. The classical Freudian notion of an essential unconscious is itself mobilized and projected by the psychoanalytic subculture and the advertising agencies onto the system of operationally erotic fantasies and symbols. The constituted individual invests in his personal bank account of “psychic or libidinal capital” that goes by the name of his very own unconscious or “reservoir of desire.”
Woman as Serial Object
Women who must measure themselves in relation to media culture’s models of feminine beauty are also compelled into a realm of abstraction and addiction. They are pressured to conform to socially prescribed standards of female looks and performance in order to attain popularity, success, or positioning as the object of desire. This brings on obsessive dependency on expensive clothes, cosmetics, staying thin and “young,” or plastic surgery. Moreover, women are encouraged to experience this coercive process of “managed narcissism” as an act of individual freedom. The Brigitte Bardot hairdo, as Baudrillard makes clear in The System of Objects, is presented as a model of loveliness and incomparability in that each young woman “who follows the fashion remains unique in her own eyes.” The consumer thinks only of Bardot herself – “sublime archetype and fountainhead of uniqueness” – and never considers the thousands of other consumers who have bought into the same product or cultural sign (the same hairstyle) as a reference. The spectacle object – celebrity, consumer gadget, media property – enters the panoply of fetishes among which we shop in our efforts to find an identity niche and dubiously distinguish ourselves from others. The model serves as lightning rod for ambivalent collective projections, allowing each individual to feel unique at the very moment when all consumers of that same niche are imitating the same elevated pattern.
I’d Rather Dance
The “critical theory” viewpoint of the above two paragraphs is also entirely wrong. Baudrillard is completely wrong. Every issue has two sides to it. The opposite side would be the viewpoint of Tantra, of polysexuality. I amMadame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, a man, said this). I am Brigitte Bardot (is Baudrillard, a man, close to saying this?). The virtual reality of erotic images and story-fantasies enables me to experience sexuality from every side, every which way but Sundae, precisely in order to gain in understanding of my singular embodied sexuality in this real physical body which is the synthesis of all these virtual-projecting experiences. It’s not self-medicating, it’s a controlled practice of dance. The non-stop creativity of the virtual-real polysexual dance is the way out of repetition and addiction.
It’s True Because I Say So
From Playboy or FHM Magazine to radiant toothpaste smiles, images engineered to please execute the controlling socio-psychological functions of gratification and the desensitizing of wounds. Media culture images in general signify the excess of wealth that we as citizens of the West have the prerogative of partaking in. Advertising is constantly bestowing free gifts on us – the unending discounts, sales, gimmicks, contests, sweepstakes, drawings, raffles, lottos and giveaways – to buttress the prestige of abundance. All goods are presented as a personal service being offered to you. They entice you to want to be a part of this society. Through advertising, the political-technological order as a whole incorporates you as consumer-citizen. The Prime Directive is on display: “Society adapts itself totally to you and your desires, so integrate yourself totally into society.” The Industrial Revolution took place for your benefit. Modernist Science and Economics have brought good things to life for You. America Fights Wars For Your Safety (AFWFYS). Furthermore, advertising is too smart to be simply false. Beyond the epistemology of true and false, it practices the tautological reasoning of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Advertising is master of the art of rendering things true by saying that they are.
Models and Series
The concept of Models and Series put forth by Baudrillard in the fourth part ofThe System of Objects is effectively the first appearance in his work of his well-known hypothesis of simulation (or of one major component of simulation). As ideal oppositional terms, the model object is a luxury or high-status “original” article available only to the upper economic layers of society; a serially produced and distributed object is an industrially replicated copy of the prototype model. But in the real social field, neither model nor series exists as a discrete entity. Although “the status of the modern object is dominated by the model/series distinction,” it is more and more difficult to find objects in contemporary culture which can be classified as pure model or pure series objects. There is rather a protracted continuum between the hypothetical immaculate extremes of the model’s uniqueness and the series’ reproducibility. There is an extended differentiation in small transitional steps from one terminal pole to the other. Cultural objects possess qualities of both model and series, with the serial properties operating across a given media product array through a formal play of differences. The alleged “authenticity” of the model disseminates droplets of charisma exuded from its lingering aura onto each newly generated item in the interminable substitutions of the series. These two elements of the cultural code coexist in a mutually generative, interdependent, and ceaselessly recycling relationship to each other. Model and series are a redundant two-way assemblage where each term is summoned to rescue the other at urgent moments through reversibility. They comprise “a perpetual dynamic which is in fact the very ideology of our society,” writes Baudrillard. This recombinant simulation is a “system of differences which is, properly speaking, the cultural system itself.” There is a special alluring fascination belonging to the code of eternally rearranged set elements and multiplying redistribution of mini-references to the comforting real.
War of the Reals
By emphasizing the fictionalist aspect of any act of creativity – that facet of the expression which, to a greater or lesser degree, maintains a cognizance of the difference between reality and its representation – a privilege is granted to science fiction as a paradigm for grasping our contemporary situation. In Baudrillard’s SF of critical and fatal theory (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.), two distinct “reals” are at war. There is the generation by models of a self-referential hyper-reality, or state of affairs where the “map precedes the territory.” This is the real of simulation. “An immense process of simulation is spreading out to all areas of everyday life, in the image of the ‘simulation models’ of the operational and cybernetic sciences.” But this real is only the world as the impresarios of simulation would like us to preceive it. “Present-day simulators try to make the real coincide with their simulation models.” A more subtle analysis reveals the third term of fiction of which Baudrillard will become a staunch proponent. This is the real of seduction. Among the objects of media culture and technology, there exists opportunities for metamorphosis, reversibility, challenge, artifice and symbolic exchange. Just as technologies of the screen and the network have dispersed control, surveillance and micro-power relations to every instant of our daily lives, so fiction – or the gap between a thing and its identity – reappears in scattered shards of lucid intelligence, popping into and out of existence. The authors of these diffused fictions are objects — and they write in tropes of irony, parody and viral defiance.
Shopping Window
The shopping window (la vitrine) fosters our incessant daily adaptation to the logic of fashion. The space of well-dressed mannequins behind the glass is neither indoors nor outdoors, neither department store nor street, neither private nor public. The orchestrated spectacle of opulent newness gestures teasingly at the passerby to come in and purchase. Behind the transparency is the “opaque stature and distance of the commodity” or the “frustration and dance of hesitation of shopping.” It is not so much a visual connection between the individual and the contemplated object as a “generalized communication among all individuals” through their shared recognition “in the same objects of the same system of signs and hierarchical code of values.” It is the same permanent loyalty and integration test that is going on at every advertising and media moment – on television and on the Internet, on billboards and on neon signs. The test will be refused in subway corridors, in the streets, and in the graffiti writing on the wall.
Disneyland
Jean Baudrillard loves America and loves Disneyland: “No vision of America makes sense without this reversal of our [high-culture European] values: it is Disneyland that is authentic here! The cinema and the TV are America’s reality! The freeways, the Safeways [supermarket chain], the skylines, speed, and deserts – these are America, not the galleries, churches, and culture.”
Disneyworld Company
Yet in the section “Hyperreal and Imaginary” in the well-known essay “The Precession of Simulacra” in the book Simulacra and Simulations, and in the article “Disneyworld Company” – which appeared in the Parisian newspaperLibération on March 4, 1996 (English translation by François Debrix available at CTHEORY.NET), Baudrillard seems to be taking a critical stance towards Disneyland and Disney World. Although this is undeniably true, my argument is that he is additionally proposing a way of transforming Disneyland into something better, a fatal strategy or radical illusion that Shapiro Technologies (which I have sometimes jokingly called the Baudrillard Company) would practice if Walt Disney Parks and Resorts hired us as consultants. I will explore this fatal strategies argument by considering Baudrillard’s concept of the fourth dimension that he presents in “Disneyworld Company.”
The Real is the Fake
On the critical side, Baudrillard famously writes: “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which isDisneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false; it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.”Furthermore, with the Walt Disney World Resort southwest of Orlando, FL – which clones many aspects of the original Disneyland in Anaheim, CA – the Disney enterprise has become a “vast ‘reality show’ where reality itself becomes a spectacle, where the real becomes a theme park.”The “Pirates of the Caribbean” attraction opened at Disneyland in 1967. It features animatronic characters created by the Disney robotics team. “Pirates of the Caribbean” at the Magic Kingdom in Florida opened in 1973. As an entrance building, the fort-like “Caribbean Plaza” substitutes for the Disneyland version’s New Orleans mansion. “Pirates of the Caribbean” at Tokyo Disneyland opened in 1983. It is almost an exact duplicate of the Disneyland “original.” “Pirates of the Caribbean” at Disneyland Paris (25 km east of Paris) opened in 1992. The sequence of scenes is altered, and there are new animatronic models. In the spectral universe of virtuality, we are no longer in the society of the spectacle but in a generalized metastatic and viral mode.
The Fourth Dimension
Long passage on the fourth dimension that concludes “Disneyworld Company” by Jean Baudrillard: Disney “also seeks to erase time by synchronizing all the periods, all the cultures… No present, no past, no future, but an immediate synchronism of all the places and all the periods in a single atemporal virtuality. Lapse or collapse of time: that’s properly speaking what the fourth dimension is about… Gladiator movies will be watched as if they were authentic Roman movies, dating back to the era of the Roman empire, as real documentaries on Ancient Rome… Disney realizes de facto such an atemporal utopia by producing all the events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, and by inexorably mixing all the sequences as they would or will appear to a different civilization than ours. But it is already ours. It is more and more difficult for us to imagine the real, History, the depth of time, or three-dimensional space, just as before it was difficult, from our real world perspective, to imagine a virtual universe or the fourth dimension.”
Ouspensky Was a Neuroscientist
Based on new breakthrough mathematics and mathematical physics (see the work of Irish mathematician Alexis Clancy), it may be possible to develop Star Trek Technologies of Disappearance like time travel, teleportation, and Artificial Life characters, and sell them to Disney. Every child wakes up his first day at Disney World looking forward to meeting his favorite Disney characters “in the flesh.” Instead of conversing with a human actor wearing a costume, advances in Spoken Dialogue Technology will enable intelligent encounters with the otherness of A-Life Stuart Littles and A-Life Ratatouilles. We shall take seriously the reflections on time, space and motion made by the Russian mathematician and philosopher P.D. Ouspensky in his book Tertium Organum: The Fourth Dimension as the Esoteric Nature of Reality. “It would be best to assume that we know nothing,” writes Ouspensky, “and make this our point of departure.” Space is an instrument of the mind (like time-duration for Proust), and “it might be possible for there to be beings living in a world such that they would conceive a space of four dimensions.”
Utopia Out of Time
Recalling Edwin Abbott’s novel Flatland, Irish Ouspensky scholar Mary Fox champions the possibility of a “multiplicity of dimensions” and considers “the fourth dimension in relation to utopianism.” To remain utopian, the fourth dimension must be aspirational only and not be realized, which would turn it into something dystopian. According to Fox, Ouspensky would like us to begin to view the world, in conscious awareness, not from over here, but from over there. Not to time travel into the future, but to be present in such a way as defies our current understanding of time.
Quantum Entanglement
All the orders of simulacra are entangled, as in the quantum entanglement that is the basis of the already achieved teleportation of photons, atoms, and molecules. At the 2004 Baudrillard conference at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, I talked in my lecture about Baudrillard’s system of objects in relation to quantum entanglement. Baudrillard was present, and mine was the talk at the conference that interested him the most, I was told by …
I Was Taking a Trip Out to L.A.
As Baudrillard writes in Simulacra and Simulations: “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: Pirates, the Frontier, FutureWorld, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks.”If you transform Disneyland, you transform America. Transform America into the primitive society of the future. “The objective profile of America, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form.” In the book America, Los Angeles and America are something much more than simulation and the hyperreal. They are something very positive, a reversibility that emerges when simulation is taken to its extreme pure form. Thus Disneyland would also have something very positive about it, the radical illusion that one can make within/without the Möbius topology of Disneyland. “Moreover,” writes Baudrillard, “Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these ‘imaginary stations’ which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation – a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions.”
Why do we have no vision?
Our view of the present is occluded by the prevailing dichotomy between real and imaginary. In mainstream techno-culture, this impediment to vision is the standard opposition between the scientific real and the “fancy” of science fiction. But our culture is a specific formation like any other that an “ethnologist” might try to study (but never does). To study our own culture, we would need something much more radical than anthropology. In his major work, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard started to develop this much more radical discipline. We must understand our culture, beyond “reality” and “fiction,” in terms of the symbolic. “The symbolic is not a concept, an instance, a category, or a structure. It is an act of exchange and a social relationship that puts an end to the real. It ‘resolves the real,’ and in the same stroke the opposition between the real and the imaginary.” (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, my translation) That real that we hold so dear, and is so central to our perceptions, is nothing but a reality-effect or reality-principle. “It is only the structural effect of the disjunction between two terms.” (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, my translation) Each term in a metaphysical binary opposition (Derrida) excludes its counterpart, and is defined only negatively by its “not being” the other term. One term in the opposition is always only the chimera of the other term. The female is excluded by the male, and is the male’s imaginary. In an endless loop or vicious circle of simulation, the male is an effect of its effect. The reality-principle is that the real, in its dichotomous relation to the “fanciful,” is none other than a reality-effect, the imaginary of the imaginary.
Salami on Rye
The symbolic is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The symbolic is what is going to change the world. The symbolic is that which puts an end to the hyperreal code of disjunction and divided terms. It has no other definition. “In the symbolic operation, the two terms lose their reality-principle.” (Symbolic Exchange and Death) There is the inauguration of something to which I have given a name in all of my work. I call it: THE NEW REAL. There are many synonyms of symbolic exchange. There is seduction, otherness, alterity,exotism, artifice, and the radical illusion. There is challenge, sacrifice, metamorphosis, and the duel relationship. There is ambivalence, reversibility, the counter-gift, and the play of appearances. There is the intricate thread, duality within uncertainty, and the act of initiation. All of this takes place. And it takes place behind the backs of the Establishment — and just when the Establishment believes that it has planned everything down to a tee and knows what is going on.