Now that the orgy is over

Bryan Appleyard

THE TRANSPARENCY OF EVIL by Jean Baudrillard, translated by James Benedict, Verso, £34.95, £11.95, pp. 174 Jean Baudrillard is the kind of French thinker who can reduce the English to tears of rage. Like Jacques Attali's private jet or the Pompidou Centre, such thinkers are taken to represent a peculiarly Gallic kind of self-indulgence, a profligate cultivation of self-serving unreality that is, at heart, appallingly unserious. Brass tacks are unknown to these people and a spade is the one thing they will never call a spade.

Much of this prejudice is fair enough. The panjandrums of the postwar French intellectual life have a poor record. Sartre, for all his mystifications and sporadic genius, ended his days as the pawn of Mao- ism, one of the great evil systems of our day. Foucault, in the midst of his bewilder- ing density, seems often to be wrong for the simplest reasons. Barthes can be thrilling and elegant, but there always is an icy, dandyish insubstantiality about his relationships with his material and so on. The general impression is of a tradition that is more concerned with playing the role of intellectual rather than with saying anything. There is no postwar French Wittgenstein.

Appearances, however, are deceptive. Disregard the posturing and the hothouse of purely Parisian concerns and it becomes clear that there is a common, serious theme. Broadly this can be said to be the theme of the modern. Perhaps because of the German occupation, the French are more sensitive than the British to the idea that the 20th century modern does repre- sent an important discontinuity, a funda- mental transformation that demanded a Complete revaluation of Western thought.

Baudrillard comes late to this project and, consequently, is able to bring to it a novel degree of wisdom. The modern for him was an orgy of liberations — of poli- tics, sex, production, destruction, women, children, the unconscious and art. But this Is over: Now everything has been liberated, the chips are down, and we find ourselves faced collec- tively with the big question: WHAT DO WE DO NOW THE ORGY IS OVER?

This is a very good question, since to ask it at all evidently calls into doubt the virtue of the preceding liberations. If they led us nowhere, what was the point? The problem is that liberation overthrows values; judgment becomes impossible, indeed politically unacceptable, and all we are left with are systems, structures. Value as a concept has been dispersed through these systems, enfeebled into what Baudrillard calls 'an epidemic of value' that makes all real valuation impossible.

This is a soundly pessimistic view of what has come to be known as `the postmodern condition'. The form of its statement here immediately marks out Baudrillard as a kind of visionary moralist. He is not revel- ling in this undifferentiated sea of systems, rather he sees it as a defeat:

The glorious march of modernity has not led to the transformation of all values, as we once dreamed it would, but instead to a dis- persal and involution of value whose upshot for us is total confusion.

From this perspective the essays in this book launch, often opaquely, frequently ingeniously, into a suitably fragmentary anatomy of this confusion. At its best this produces a superb and revealing consisten- cy. Of the cult of jogging, for example, Baudrillard says that the pleasure it pro- vides is `not of pure physical exertion, but of dematerialisation, of an endless func- tioning'. And of the modern art market he writes that it resembles

nothing so much as floating and uncontrol- lable capital in the financial market: it is pure speculation, movement for movement's sake, with no apparent purpose other than to defy the law of value.

Such quality and accuracy of insight indi- cate both the power of Baudrillard's initial position and the value of the French tradi- tion of the grand philosophical analyst

Novels, Poems, Papers

Pastures of the novel, to this bony goat Eating poem after poem, Appear to be smooth and soft, a flat Stage on which distant drama Is at times as gripping As papers to the addict.

On the plains where battles are fought Our skirmishes don't hit the news, And how can we equal 'Body in boot Husband in court'? (Found poem, So brief, a death inset.) Why climb to find out?

Alan Dixon

moving freely through the culture. The French may often suffer from an excess of ambition, but at least they do not have to endure our narrow-minded specialisms.

But if this fragmentary book can be said to have a single centre, then it lies in Baudrillard's debate about evil. This surfaces many times in the essays, but I think most clearly in his discussion of the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence on Salman Rushdie. By negating all Western virtues — of progress, rationality, political ethics, democracy — Khomeini allied him- self with evil. The power of such an alliance lay in the fact that, in its pathetic postmodern condition, the West was helpless. 'We can,' Baudrillard writes, `no longer speak of Evil.' Instead, we simply chat about the rights of man, `a discourse which is pious, weak, useless and hypocriti- cal'. Baudrillard's evil can only be confront- ed with evil. But if, like all values, the word has been enfeebled and dispersed through our structures and systems, then we have no weapon. There is a forbidding, Nietzschean flavour to this. Baudrillard scorns the lan- guage of rights — right to sex, right to live, right to work — and demands instead a right

to accidents, to crime, to error, to Evil, to the worst as well as to the best — which, far more than your right to happiness, makes you a human being worthy of the name.

The point is that certain divisions are absolute — 'There is no solution to For- eignness. It is eternal . .' The world is not going to be resolved into a bland, undiffer- entiated community of tolerance. The whole modern project of introducing alien cultures into the West, of unifying and homogenising art and life was misconceived. It leaves us helpless, lost in our systems. Even our politics and history have vanished. The constant evocations of and ghoulish fascination with Hiroshima and Auschwitz are nothing more than symptoms of our inability to find real, `strong' history today. This is the best of the book. The worst happens when Baudrillard — or possibly his translator — slumps into dreadful obfuscations and pointless, word-spinning elaborations. There are some sentences here which, after careful study, I can only conclude are completely meaningless or simply grotesquely inefficient at conveying any kind of sense.

But, on the whole, Baudrillard deserves the benefit of the doubt. He is serious and, if his grosser generalisations frequently seem more wrong than right, then he can be forgiven. They are always, at least, chal- lenging, even if only because of their syn- tax. And, in any case, the man has a sound awareness of the dangers of the trade of the panjandrum:

Theory can be no more than this: a trap set in the hope that reality will be naive enough to fall into it.