How Jean Baudrillard Turned Philosophy into Performance Art
Few philosophers score a book-to-film treatment, and fewer still become blockbusters. Jean Baudrillard—the scholar whose idea of simulation both inspired and appeared in The Matrix (1999)—is the rare exception. In one scene, Neo hides illegal software in a hollowed-out copy of Simulacra & Simulation (1981). Handing it over, the buyer warns him: “This never happened. You don’t exist.” A more explicit reference was cut from an early draft of the script—a line that cast Baudrillard as a kind of prophet or god: “As in Baudrillard’s vision, your whole life has been spent inside the map, not the territory.”
Of course, with popularization comes oversimplification. Baudrillard thought The Matrix made “an embarrassing error” in its caricatured contrast between the simulated and the real, and he turned down an offer to serve as “theoretical consultant” on the sequels. The art world’s adaptations, he thought, were even worse—or so Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol argue in their slim new biography of the Frenchman.
It’s easy to see why artists both love and hate him. On one hand, he spent his career insisting that reality itself is generated from models—especially images—and that “the map precedes the territory.” The simulacrum, for him, is a copy so many degrees removed from the original that the referent ceases to matter. We often come to understand or even construct the real on the terms of its simulation—which we tend to encounter first, or at least find more seductive. “Sexuality has been superseded by pornography,” he wrote, “knowledge by information.” Images, in his world, rule.
And yet, in his view, art has long been “staging its own disappearance,” becoming indistinguishable from commerce and thus incapable of critical distance. He made that case memorably in 1987, at a sold-out lecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where thousands clamored for tickets. Some art lovers in the audience felt betrayed as he declared their irrelevance.
By then, Baudrillard was a star in the New York art world, serving on Artforum’s editorial board and writing catalog essays for Barbara Kruger, Sophie Calle, and Mary Boone. Sylvère Lotringer of Semiotext(e), his English-language publisher, had explicitly marketed him to artists and curators who shared his feeling that it was impossible to produce anything truly new amid the late-capitalist glut of images. As Baudrillard once memorably put it, “What are you doing after the orgy?”—that is, what could still be enticing or new now that everything is available and permissible, now that everything has already been done?
The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl dubbed the fall of 1986 “the season of simulationism” as the Simulationist (or Neo-Geo) movement took off in honor of Baudrillard, with Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, and Jeff Koons at the helm. But as with The Matrix, Baudrillard disavowed their use of his ideas. These artists employed the aesthetics of media and commodification with irony, echoing his claim in The Consumer Society (1970) that “there is no escape… the only solution is to adopt a distanced and amused position and, if possible, to become a sign.” Critique under capitalism, where even criticism is commodified, was a contradiction. But Baudrillard wasn’t saying “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” He wanted to take the logic of a system—art, politics, criticism—as far as it could go until it collapsed. You can see why Andy Warhol was his favorite artist.
That instinct—to push a concept to the point of implosion—defined his intellectual temperament. He seldom spoke in the future tense or imagined what would happen after a given system blew up. Trained not in philosophy but in German and sociology, he was brought up to describe the world as it is, not how it might be—an ironic origin story for a man best known for deconstructing the real. He grew up during the French occupation and studied German in the postwar years, when the language and culture were largely unpopular. This meant he encountered the Frankfurt School’s critiques of mass culture as they appeared, long before they were widely read elsewhere, and their influence on his work is unmistakable. By 1966, he defended his dissertation before a star-studded panel of Roland Barthes, Henri Lefebvre, and Pierre Bourdieu, just as global fascination with French theory was about to explode. Quickly, he became a celebrity.
Two decades later, in response to that infamous Whitney lecture, detractors staged a protest show at White Columns titled “Resistance (Anti-Baudrillard),” with forty artists participating. Some objected less to Baudrillard himself than to the notion that “nothing is real,” fearing it bred political apathy. Coy as ever, Baudrillard sided with the Anti-Baudrillardians—since they were arguing against something he never actually said. His point about simulation, often misconstrued, was not that things like America or advertising were unreal. Rather, he thought that understanding them as if they were fictional might bring us closer to the truth. “Disneyland,” he wrote, “is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real”—a model for what America believes itself to be, both aspiration and distraction.
Politically, he was less of an activist and more of a provocateur. He publicly called Nixon’s environmentalism a diversion from the horrors of Vietnam, but was also lukewarm toward the student protests of May ’68, which took place while he was a Parisian professor. He later described those protests—and even 9/11—as being more significant as symbols than as events. Those statements, along with the titles of provocative texts like The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), have been criticized, not because they were uninteresting, but because they were insensitive. Baudrillard’s temperament was indeed detached—which is arguably synonymous with insensitive. His wife—born Martine, though he renamed “Marine”—said his irony was as much his personality as it was an intellectual position.
Jean Baudrillard, as this new biography is titled, is brief. This is in part because the man revealed little about his life. At a 2005 talk at Tilton Gallery, he said he was simply “the simulacrum of myself.” What makes the book so fun to read is that you can see him living out his own pronouncements with his signature wry humor, making his abstract ideas into concrete behaviors, not unlike a performance artist. Quite literally, the book makes his ideas come alive. In his writing, he rarely used endnotes and sometimes fabricated quotations, attributing them to Nietzsche or Marx. Chris Kraus once called him “a conceptual artist, a performative philosopher,” and his biographers agree: “Few thinkers’ lives and works form such a seamless whole.”
And yet Baudrillard was often skeptical of conceptual art, though went softer on photography. He loved Sophie Calle, writing about her in Fatal Strategies (1983), for the way her work is both seductive and vacuous, always teasing the viewer toward a meaning that dissolves. Calle had been his student, but left school at seventeen; Baudrillard is rumored to have forged her diploma to “pacify her father.”
Baudrillard’s own photographs, now exhibited by the Los Angeles gallery Château Shatto, are often artful, surprisingly earnest images of America: empty deserts, televisions left on in vacant rooms. He had an enduring fascination with the United States and devoted an entire book, America (1986), to it, writing, ever quotably, that Americans “have no identity… but they do have wonderful teeth.”
For Baudrillard, photography had the capacity to make the world more banal and more enchanting at the same time. What he loved about pictures was their “silence.” Using oblique angles, strange crops, or reflections, he believed fine art photography could preserve mystery—remain seductive—whereas straightforward documentary images risked becoming “obscene,” leaving nothing to the imagination. In other words, photographs can make the world smaller or they can make it stranger. In writing, he often sounded fatalistic, yet his art held a glimmer of hope: he wanted his pictures, like those he showed at the 1993 Venice Biennale, to resist the simulacra by making reality unfamiliar, creating new models rather than replicating old ones.
One of his final essays, “War Porn” (2006), considered the photographs from Abu Ghraib: horrifying, sadistic, unmistakably obscene. He had spent his career defending seduction over obscenity, but here he couldn’t deny the latter’s power. These images, he admitted, disrupted rather than reinforced the system by exposing the real. Even in a world where everything seems available and visible, he realized, we can still, on occasion, be shocked.
Baudrillard died the following year, in 2007. And yet even though “Baudrillard may no longer be around to analyze our world,” as a recent conference slogan quipped, “he has already done so.” This new biography allows us not only to speculate on what he would say about our times, but to also ask: What Would Baudrillard Do?
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