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Review: Reading BaudrillardAuthor(s): David BanashReviewed work(s):

The Vital Illusion by Jean Baudrillard ;Julia WitwerSimulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media by Elisabeth Kraus;Carolin AuerReading Simulacra: Fatal Theories for Postmodernity by M. W. Smith

Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 123-129Published by: SF-TH IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241145Accessed: 07/11/2008 22:51

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BOOKS IN REVIEW 123

BOOKS IN REVIEW

Reading Baudrillard. Jean Baudrillard. The Vital Illusion. Ed. Julia Witwer. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 102 pp. $18.95 hc.

Elisabeth Kraus and Carolin Auer, eds. Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 271 pp. $65.00 hc.

M.W. Smith. Reading Simulacra: Fatal Theories for Postmodermity. SUNY SERIES IN POSTMODERN CULTURE. New York: State U of New York P, 2001. 151 pp. $16.95 pbk.

The whole problem is one of abandoning critical thought, which is the very essence of our theoretical culture, but which belongs to a past history, a past life.-Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange (2001) 17

How should we read Jean Baudrillard? This is the real problem at the heart of two recent books that utilize the work of the French postmodernist: Elizabeth Kraus and Carolin Auer's anthology Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media and M.W. Smith's Reading Simulacra: Fatal Theories for Postmodernity. Both provide possible answers to this question as they mobilize Baudrillard's theories of simulation to analyze popular culture, postmodernism, and sf. It is perhaps Baudrillard himself, however, who provides the most challenging answer to the question of how he should be read. In one of his most recent works, The Vital Illusion, he abandons the traditional methods and vocabularies of theory. Indeed, his work now seems closer to what might best be understood as social science fiction. Approaching Baudrillard as social sf creates a number of problems for both theory and sf, however, and it is these problems that have kept critics from attempting a more radical re-invention of his work.

The post-structuralist vogue of the 1980s has largely disappeared, and it seems as if we are not quite living in a panic culture after all. Indeed, the more sober voices of less radical Marxists and cultural critics have had a great deal of success in co-opting the vocabularies of Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Baudrillard, assimilating them into any number of more practical approaches and concrete explorations of postmodern culture. Of all the post-structuralists, it is Baudrillard who has been most closely associated with the triangulation of postmodernism, popular culture, and sf, and it is also Baudrillard who is seen as the most provocative. He is often caricatured as little more than a sophomoric nihilist, celebrating his own celebrity status, grossly misreading culture, and generally trying to live up to the worst excesses and absurdities associated with the discourses of postmodernism. Nonetheless, critics still find that Baudrillard's work provides constructive approaches to the problems of our media, and his arguments continue to animate the work of critics from Marxists such as Douglas Kellner to cultural critics such as Lynn Spigel. In many respects, it is something like this more sober Baudrillard that we fimd in Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media.

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Edited by Elisabeth Kraus and Carolin Auer, Simulacrum America consists of seventeen essays originally presented as papers at the annual conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies in 1997. Though these essays cover topics from nineteenth-century literature to contemporary cinema, postmodern fiction and sf nonetheless remain at the heart of the collection, the former represented by a selection of five essays entitled "Simulacra in Literature: History and Human Identity" and the latter in a selection of five essays grouped under the title "Simulation in Science Fiction: Cyberspace, Cyborgs, and Cybernetic Discourse." With so many essays, the quality tends to be somewhat uneven. Still, as I hope to show, even the less accomplished essays say a great deal about the ways in which we read Baudrillard. The collection has an ambitious introduction, and Kraus and Auer are acutely aware of both the problems and possibilities associated with the work of Baudrillard. After offering a brief survey of Baudrillard's theory of simulation, they make the following observation:

Critics and theorists from a wide variety of disciplines, such as Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, and Larry McCaffery, agree with Baudrillard that science fiction has become the pre-eminent literary genre of the postmodern era, since it has long anticipated and fictionally explored the drastic transformations that technology, including the fields of information/simulation technology and bioengineering, have wrought on Western post-industrial society. Science fiction's wealth of futuristic themes and topoi including powerful icons of cyberspace, Artificial Intelligence, and border crossings of all kinds, as well as its simulations of limitless alternative utopian, dystopian, and heterotopian realities, gave important impulses to mainstream fiction and cultural analysts in general. In fact, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., argues in his essay "The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway," science fiction has ceased to be a genre of fiction per se, and become instead a mode of awareness about the world. (5)

In some sense, Kraus and Auer promise more than they deliver. While they cite Csicsery-Ronay's essay (SFS 18.3 [Nov. 1991]: 387-404), this introduction, and unhappily the collection as a whole, do little to develop the new understanding of sf or theory that Csicsery-Ronay suggests. Indeed, the real flaw of this collection is that Baudrillard's work is simply applied as a critical theory of the world, when it is precisely the distance implied by the critical operation that Baudrillard's work calls into question.

This is not to say that there are not some strong essays about post- modernism and sf in the book. Riidiger Kunow's essay, "Simulation as Sub- Text: Fiction Writing in the Face of Media Representations of American History," provides an excellent survey of both canonical and postmodern literary texts, demonstrating throughout that these historical fictions are less "reconstructions of the past than demonstrations of the power of that past in the present" (34). Alen Vitas offers a compelling reading of cyberpunk in his contribution, "Warp 9 to Hyperreality: Information Velocity and the End of the Space Age. " Working through cyberpunk classics and popular films such as Star Wars, Vitas argues that "Mediaspace now replaces outer space, and consequently, simulations of kinesis and information velocity now replace the

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earlier fascination with physical speed" (125). Herbert Shu-Shun Chan explores the metaphor of space in Neuromancer and Babylon 5, suggesting along with Vitas that we need to rethink the relationship of cyberpunk to the more traditional themes of space opera. In keeping with the cyberpunk focus, Elisabeth Kraus offers a detailed survey and analysis of Pat Cadigan's work, and Louis J. Kern offers an exploration of the nostalgia for fully human bodies that animates much cyborg fiction and film. For sf scholars, these essays constitute the real interest of this book. The rest of the collection covers an amazing amount of ground, but the contributions vary widely in subject matter and quality.

Nonetheless, almost all the essays at least gesture towards Baudrillard's theory of simulation, and many more take his theory of simulation as their basic critical position. For a collection that takes Baudrillard's theory of simulation as part of its very subject, there is surprisingly little nuanced reading of his work, and the collection as a whole seems to reflect a wider problem in our current reception of Baudrillard's work. In short, the basic move that animates most of these essays is to elucidate the premise of Baudrillard's theory of simulation, and then claim that this or that text functions in accord with it. For instance, Arno Heller's reading of Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) claims that "Gladney's confrontation with Mink can be interpreted as his coming to terms with an America that Jean Baudrillard has so persuasively depicted as a system of simulations in the endless stream of meaningless signs and images" (45). The conclusion is that somehow DeLillo offers a kind of proof for Baudrillard. There is no sense that DeLillo might help us somehow better understand, or better yet reinvent, Baudrillard, or vice-versa. Far more problematically, such applications of Baudrillardian theory treat his work as if it were an objective description of our world, an option that Baudrillard problematizes by putting his own work in the realm of hyperreal simulation itself. In short, despite the promise of the introduction, there is almost no attempt to reinvent Baudrillard here, as social sf or anything else, and this is the case with all the essays that use his work. Furthermore, Michael Stockinger's essay on DeLillo and Baudrillard goes on to claim that "the submergence of the reader in a narrative usually produces a more mind-baffling effect than the consumption of a theoretical essay. The skillful 'suspension of disbelief demands more imaginative, creative, and therefore illusionary potential on behalf of the writer as well as the reader" (62). Such a statement leaves one to wonder if this contributor has actually read Baudrillard. It is not, however, as if less-than-innovative approaches to Baudrillard or post-structuralism in general are hard to find. Indeed, what this collection reveals more than anything is our dire need to stop the "critical application" and instead reinvent our entire approach to Baudrillard.

Though not precisely an attempt to reinvent Baudrillard, M.W. Smith's Reading Simulacra: Fatal Theories for Postmodernity provides a far more interesting and useful approach to his work. In its first four chapters, Reading Simulacra offers a broad survey of postmodern theory through an investigation of Baudrillard's major positions, using these to bring together a number of

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thinkers, including Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, and most importantly Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Smith proposes a "bi-focal" approach to reading Baudrillard, arguing that to take him at his word and admit that we live in a world of total simulation is to abandon all hope of a critical or active engagement with the world. To rescue us from this bind, Smith proposes that we attend closely to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. According to Smith:

The difference in subjective and objective strategies notwithstanding, Deleuze and Guattari might yet find a place in the hyperreal topography of Baudrillard. The distinguishing factor setting them apart is that the latter sees this societal leveling of images (simulation) as producing an undimensional subjectivity that is fatal, whereas the former looks toward simulation's "mutational aptitude" and the potential for "becoming" that it allows. (8)

Though Smith never dwells on this, what is clear is that theory, be it Baudrillard's concept of simulation or Deleuze and Guattari's of becoming, is never a matter of mimetic texts that somehow faithfully represent the world in any realistic sense. Indeed, for Smith such an approach guarantees a fatal exchange that would trap us in the worst kind of Baudrillardian nightmare. Though Smith doesn't propose sf as one of the perspectives through which he is reading Baudrillard, he does put it on the same plane. Again, working through the bind in Baudrillard's theory of simulation, and looking for a way out, Smith offers the following analogy:

In other words, is it possible to "will," in a Nietzschian spirit, beyond these fatal strategies in life-affirming ways (Baudrillard's apprehension, Kroker's invitation)? Or is humanity moving ever faster to the cyber-call of William Gibson's Neuromancer; toward a state of symbiosis with the machine, which issues in the end of lived experiences for human beings and the entry into a simulated, virtual or cybernetic world of existence? (18)

Though he doesn't call attention to the fact, what is most striking here is that both cyberpunk fiction and Baudrillard's theory offer descriptions of the world that are equally plausible, equally worth thinking about. Insofar as we read cyberpunk as social sf, should we not also read Baudrillard and other theorists as in some way part of the same fantastic discourse? Smith certainly doesn't explore this possibility, but his book does suggest the plausibility of such reading strategies. Rather than turning to sf or the fantastic to find new strategies of reading, however, Smith turns to Nietzsche, Arthur Kroker, and the history of philosophy:

[W]e "will to will" as a condition of existence in the nihilistic cycle of consuming the signs of consumption provided by a recombinant culture: "Nietzsche's 'pessimism' (which is really the method of 'perspectival' understanding) becomes an entirely realistic strategy for exploring postmodern experience. And this event, the interpretation of advanced capitalist society under the sign of nihilism, is the basic condition for human emancipation as well as for the recovery of the tragic sense of critical theory." (Kroker, qtd 62-63)

While Smith thus offers an affirmative reading of post-structuralist and postmodern theory, it is not a particularly original or daring reinvention.

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Nonetheless, his book serves as an excellent overview of Baudrillard's writing, and would be especially useful to students new to such work. Though not surprising, his attempt to synthesize Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari is suggestive, and for those new to Deleuze and Guattari, Smith also provides an excellent and usable introduction to their notoriously idiosyncratic and difficult concepts.

The second half of Reading Simulacra offers applied readings of the usual postmodern suspects: Kathy Acker, Oliver Stone, and O.J. Simpson, as well as Baudrillard's America (1988) and the novelist Clarence Major's My Amputations (1986). These chapters vary widely in scope and quality when compared to the solid theoretical discussions earlier in the book. Smith offers a detailed and compelling reading of Acker's two best known and most accessible novels, Blood and Guts in High School (1984) and Don Quixote (1986). He offers the typical Baudrillardian reading of Acker's work: "the fatal motions of postmodemity in 'humanity' and 'sexuality' are possessed and tattooed with patriarchial images" (86). However, he goes on to offer simultaneously "a Deleuzian strategy for reading her works [that] offers a schizophrenic line of flight through desire and language to escape the coding of our molar selves in contemporary culture" (87). This strategy is particularly fitting with Acker's novels, and Smith manages to engage in just the kind of affirmative bi-focal reading that his introduction promised.

Fatal Theories ends quite oddly, however. After building all the apparatus for affirmative readings of the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari might help us renegotiate Baudrillard's world of simulation, Smith offers a final reading of the O.J. Simpson trial and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994). Smith offers his analysis of Stone's film as a critique of a world that actually produced the O.J1 trial, and in the end the trial and the film merge together. However, there is no sense that Stone or the trial could offer us moments of Deleuzian becoming. Instead, Smith says on the final page of his book that "what viewers take away at the conclusion of this movie [Natural Born Killers] is the 'Evil Demon of Images' that Jean Baudrillard refers to in a book by the same title" (128). So much for a new and affirmative approach to Baudrillard and postmodernism. Instead, it seems that Smith says what we knew all along: Acker's work is so obsessed with stereotypes and extremes that it offers amazing possibilities for becoming and critique, while newstainment television and Oliver Stone are so reactive and heavy-handed that even Deleuze wouldn't be able to figure them out.

Whatever their merits or flaws, both these books dealing with Baudrillard's theory of simulation reveal that Baudrillard is still his own best and most inventive reader. True to form, Baudrillard's Vital Illusion offers nothing new. Indeed, his latest work might be best understood as readings or applications of his earlier books, simply offering us simulations of his earlier work on the critique of value, the nature of images, technologies of communication, and the problems of postmodernism. In The Vital Illusion, he presents three essays: "The Final Solution: Cloning Beyond the Human and Inhuman," "The Millennium, or the Suspense of the Year 2000," and "The Murder of the Real."

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As the editors tell us, each was originally presented as part of the Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine, in 1999.

In his other recent book, Impossible Exchange (2001), Jean Baudrillard states that for postmodernism, "The whole problem is one of abandoning critical thought, which is the very essence of our theoretical culture, but which belongs to a past history, a past life" (London: Verso, 2001, 17). It is just this problem that Baudrillard has devoted his energies to, and we might well interpret his career over the past decade, or at least since the publication of America, as a movement further and further away from the limits and languages of criticism. Baudrillard seems to be more successful in his attempts to do this than almost anyone else, as his detractors constantly remind anyone who is willing to listen. For Marxists such as Terry Eagleton, Baudrillard's denunciation of critical theory is nothing less than selling out to the worst kinds of designer capitalism. And while such critics as Douglas Kellner and M.W. Smith try to find new ways to read Baudrillard that will rescue his theory of simulation for the purposes of critique, Baudrillard himself seems to flee from such capture more with each new work. Indeed, it is difficult to read Baudrillard as a theorist anymore, and The Vital Illusion confirms that Baudrillard is no longer interested in working through traditional critical vocabularies.

Baudrillard begins his first essay with the following caveat: "The question concerning cloning is the question of immortality. We all want immortality. It is our ultimate fantasy, a fantasy that is also at work in all of our modern sciences and technologies-at work, for example, in the deep freeze of cryonic suspension and in cloning in all its manifestations" (3). Making such pronouncements, Baudrillard's most recent work feels like sf, or at least as if he were something like a character himself in a postmodern novel or film, perhaps someone like Dr. Brian O'Blivion in David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982). However, Baudrillard's own attitude towards sf is complex. In Simulacra and Simulation (1994), he argues that "the good old imaginary of science fiction is dead ... [and] something else is in the process of emerging (not only in fiction but in theory as well)" (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1994, 121). Yet the essays in The Vital Illusion seem to work on some of the most traditional sf models, taking recent technological advances such as cloning and imagining how they may in fact affect us in the very near future. Indeed, Baudrillard goes on to write about the technology of cloning, projecting the technology into a perfect future that it has yet to achieve: "from this moment on it is possible to ask if we are still dealing with human beings. Is a species that succeeds in synthesizing its own immortality, and that seeks to transform itself into pure information, still particularly a human species?" (16). That anyone has yet to succeed in synthesizing immortality is, for Baudrillard, of no real concern. As in much sf, Baudrillard does an amazing job of identifying those technological and social issues bound up with our anxieties, and he plays out the worst-case scenario in a kind of dystopian vision.

Baudrillard is certainly not the only critic to chafe at the limits and logical binds of theoretical language. Indeed, in one of the more interesting efforts to

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engage postmodern discourse as something other than a discourse of critical theory, Steven Shaviro's Doom Patrols (1997) attempts to operate in accord with its subtitle A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. For Shaviro, Doom Patrols "is a theoretical fiction about postmodernism. A theoretical fiction, because I treat discursive ideas and arguments in a way analogous to how a novelist treats characters and events" (New York: Serpent's Tail, 1997, i). While Shaviro's explanation sounds radical, his work stays much closer to traditional models and languages of criticism than his introduction promises. Baudrillard, without the benefit of being quite so self-conscious about it, seems to go beyond even the pretense of an analogy to fiction, instead simply writing work that really is fiction. What strikes one most about Baudrillard's recent work is that he has almost entirely abandoned the technical vocabularies of criticism, even when he engages traditional theoretical problems.

Over ten years ago, SFS devoted an entire issue to sf and postmodernism (18.3 [Nov. 1991]: 305-464). In his contribution, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., was particularly concerned with Baudrillard's critique of sf, noting that "once the referent becomes a readout of the sign, and existence a readout of control models, theory's condition of possibility has been absorbed in the operational program" (391). Here we see Baudrillard's objection to the objective posture of most criticism, but the same critique applies to sf itself: "What Baudrillard considers the traditional charms of science fiction-projection, extrapolation, excessive 'pantography'-become impossible, because space no longer offers a scene for overcoming fundamental differences" (391). Just as theory can no longer stand back from the world it purports to describe, sf no longer has the literal or metaphoric space to imagine a future. In short, "SF disappears into its own presence" (392). Ten years later, however, it seems that these positions are themselves the social sf of Baudrillard's work. In essence, like any good sf writer, Baudrillard asks us to imagine a world. In his new essay "The Murder of the Real," this is "a world where everything that exists only as idea, dream, fantasy, utopia will be eradicated, because it will be immediately realized, operationalized ... a perfect world, expurgated of every illusion" (66-67).

To read Baudrillard's work as social sf is to rethink the space in which he works. Indeed, isn't it precisely Baudrillard's theory of simulation that is itself the most traditional sf aspect of his work? For Baudrillard, sf and theory have no room to move, for both are now simply part of a dead critical discourse. Yet although Baudrillard gives a convincing account of some aspects of our postmodern world, few readers are ultimately persuaded to accept the totality of his claims, especially his most radical idea that we adopt the fatal strategy of the object. The problem is that we either apply Baudrillard as a critical theorist or dismiss him as a lunatic nihilist, while he still seems to be attempting to redefme himself as an sf author. Could Baudrillard become more useful and relevant if we reinvent him through the perspectives of sf, and could sf criticism be in part transformed through Baudrillard? This seems to be the promise of his most recent work, and the challenge that he has given to contemporary critics who go on to apply his work. -David Banash, University of Iowa