The Antidote to the Global Lies in the Singular: An Interview with Jean Baudrillard

339 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2011 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 7, ISSUE 3 PP 339–344 CULTURAL POLITICS DOI: 10.2752/175174311X13069348235132 The Antidote to the Global Lies in the Singular: An Interview with Jean Baudrillard Jean-François Paillard Jean-François Paillard: How does one become a major French intellectual? Jean Baudrillard: My career’s been an atypical one. With grandparents who were peasant farmers in the Ardennes and parents who had moved to the town and become white-collar workers, I’m a member of that generation in which the sons of the middle classes were able to get into higher education without much difficulty. But I gave up on the idea of a pres­ tigious teaching career early on. I was a secondary school teacher for a long time, but all I ever had to my name was the CAPES.1 I didn’t go to the École normale supérieure, which was the obligatory route into university teaching at the time. I didn’t do a state doctorate either and I never reached the rank of university professor, despite twenty years spent teaching sociology at the University of Nanterre on the invitation of Henri Lefebvre. Moreover, my first theoretical work came late in life: I was already thirty-nine when The System of Objects CULTURAL POLITICS 340 JEAN-FRANÇOIS PAILLARD was published in 1968. For a long time I was, admittedly, concerned more with political action than writing… J-F.P: That first work made something of a radical critique of the consumer society… J.B.: More an analysis of the consumer object than a critique of the system overall. That would come a few years later with The Consumer Society, published in 1970.2 The initial idea was to show how objects were both part of a social practice and a mythology, the act of pur­ chase being something both deeply material and highly symbolic. In fact, there was a kind of misunderstanding from the beginning. My book dealt almost exclusively with the manufactured object. It explored its simultaneously physical and metaphysical dimensions. Coming at these two facets of the object was a way of beginning a dialogue with Marxism and psychoanalysis, which between them occupied most of the intellectual horizon at the time. Yet what people immediately took from this analysis was the famous critique of the consumer society… J-F.P: And not without reason. As early as The System of Objects,3 you write: “In the current order, objects are not intended to be possessed but simply to be bought.” You try to lay down “the rights and duties of the consumer.” You speak of the “Father Christmas logic” of advertising… J.B.: For thirty years now, as soon as a country has achieved a level of mass consumption, it has seized on The System of Objects and The Consumer Society and translated them into its own language. So these two works have never been out of print. For me, all the same, the books are part of a previous life and my work has gone in another direction … The concept of “consumer society,” like that of the “society of the spectacle” which Guy Debord coined in 1967, has passed entirely into people’s lives. They’ve been popularized to such a degree that they’re really hackneyed now. You even find them in political discourse, which shows how far things have gone… J-F.P.: You went on then to attack the sacrosanct “art object,” which you saw simply as a commodity like any other… J.B.: In the mid 1970s, the state created the Beaubourg Gallery (Centre Pompidou) and it became the mecca of “culture for all.” This was the “Beaubourg Effect.”4 At the same time we saw an unprecedented, almost industrial development of artistic works produced specifically for galleries, which came in the end to take themselves as their own subject. With one accord, artists set about borrowing the most banal of objects from reality and lumping them together – sometimes under cover of “performances” – in installations that were of the order of scrap heaps, mere...