Jean Baudrillard (review)

A more nuanced discussion of Baudrillard's work is emerging in French cultural studies. Paul Hegarty demonstrates an impressive command over Baudrillard's theoretical vocabulary, and has less of a disciplinary barrow to push than some of his sociologist predecessors. He sees that Baudrillard's criticality lies not in opposition or resistance as typically understood, but in strategies of simulation and exacerbation. He thus accepts Baudrillard's défi, his challenge to theory — namely, to quote Baudrillard as translated by Hegarty, 'that if the world is paradoxical and uncertain, thought must also be this' (p. 8). Perhaps Hegarty's greatest contribution is to highlight, and explain, the enduring influence upon Baudrillard of Georges Bataille. For Baudrillard, it was Bataille who forced thought and literature into a kind of performative sovereignty, who forced criticality beyond mere critique, into that sacrificial space which postmodern culture has so nearly erased. Hegarty begins with a succinct account of Baudrillard's 'system of objects', and his 'gradual dismantling' of Marxism. By Chapter 3, having dispensed with Baudrillard's Marxist and sociological credentials, he goes on to outline his conceptual trajectory after the 1970s, from seduction and the symbolic through the figures of the fractal, Evil and illusion. He shows how this trajectory — emerging from the inscrutable theory of symbolic exchange and crystallizing with L'Échange impossible (2001) — assembles everything that defies valorization by spectacular capitalism. The decision to analyse Baudrillard's post-Marxist phase under the names of what is 'Other than Simulation' is a canny move. No doubt, this is to simplify a complicated theoretical position, but it allows Hegarty to account for Baudrillard's later work, including the slippery, refractive world of Simulation, without succumbing to its demands for hyperbole and eschatology.

Readers of Baudrillard will be relieved to find here an account of his œuvre that turns on the theory of simulation without reducing it to a rude, nihilistic metaphysics; one that acknowledges that, while reality is put in question by simulation, it is not ultimately what is at stake. Hegarty pursues the tension between simulation and 'symbolic exchange', rather than the more obvious — but more complicated — tension between simulation and 'the Real'. This approach does leave one major question unresolved, one that will doubtless prove to be a central problem of interpretation: how does simulation relate to history? If this constitutes a failure, it is at least an exemplary one. Baudrillard has proposed a raft of descriptive 'models' for the system's latest mutations (viral, virtual, orbital, and so forth). Can we take his non-committal remarks about a fourth, 'fractal' order of simulacra as a guide to a post-industrial, informationalized world? Hegarty is sceptical of Mike Gane's claim that this is a 'genuinely new stage' (see FS, lvi (2002), 276–77), preferring to consider it a 'variant' of the third; but the survey format of this book prevents a comprehensive answer. Baudrillard does tie together, in conversation with Hegarty (Chapter 6), some key terms of his recent work: the virtual, the inexchangeable and singularity. Throughout, Hegarty's astute emphasis on the pivotal concept of symbolic exchange allows us to place these terms within the overall development of Baudrillard's ideas.