Chris Horrocks

It is impossible to explain adequately the thinking of a radical post-modern like Jean Baudrillard in well under 80 pages so I suspect any reader of this 1999 text would get a glimmer of insight and have some thoughts triggered but not much more.

Baudrillard comes across here as obscure but also as someone who may be highly relevant to understanding not so much what was happening at the end of the twentieth century but what is happening now - two decades on. At times, he seems eerily show more prescient.

I tend to ignore the political tussles surrounding philosophers as outraged liberals and sceptical conservatives dig in and miss the point which is not to change the world (or fear change in the world) but to understand it better in order to survive. Survival is now the game for most of us.

Baudrillard might be regarded as part of a more general climate of opinion that would contribute later to the fashion for accelerationism which is a stance or posture more than it is a philosophy. Where he was important was in creating a reasonable scepticism about liberalism.

Liberalism is reaching peak hysteria as I write, denying or redrafting history, adopting an insidious totalitarianism in response to precisely the forces that Baudrillard identified as naturally arising from the contradictions and absurdities of modern technologies and systems.

Baudrillard has certainly not been alone in criticising rights ideology and other fossilisations of once-fertile enlightenment ideas but his critique has the virtue of positioning that ideology as intrinsically absurd, something waiting to eat itself up in its own lack of intrinsic sense.

And twenty years on, that is what is happening. Lots of 'educated' but not particularly intelligent youngsters and academics are fuelling mass hysteria little different from Byzantine iconoclasm which the rest of us are going to have to sit through and then pick up the pieces later.

Baudrillard may be right or wrong about history and society (I suspect he is a bit of both) but his thoughts are worth investigating not so much as explanation (I doubt if anything today can be explained easily) but as help towards Stoic survival amidst the mayhem.

If we think we know that what we are living through is absurd and that the absurdity, if not easily explained, can be tracked through the social systems and technologies that have developed a life of their own, we can perhaps be better at dodging the rocks thrown at us by history as it unfolds.

The book itself is probably not the guide we need. It lacks sufficient clarity, a failing of all contemporary academics when trying to communicate with us mere mortals, but it might trigger interest in thinking on these issues on one's own account and that is no bad thing.

Used in that way, it may be a help to those new to the 'field' (that of observing with detachment our social absurdity). If it gets just a few people to ask how the hell we have built an entire society on rights that do not exist outside the imagination, then some good will have been done. show less

Between 1965 and 1975, there was a series called 'The Bluffers Guide to ...' This provided short light-hearted introductions designed to get the middle classes through their dinner parties. Today we have the far more serious Oxford 'Very Short Introductions to ..." which started in 1995.

Inbetween came instant graphic guides to intellectuals and ideas - the 'Introducing ..." series published by Icon which was an expanded British version of an American series 'For Beginners' that went back to show more the 1970s. These dominated the instant knowledge market in the 1990s.

The point of the 'Introducing/For Beginners' series was that they purported to introduce difficult ideas by explaining them in pictorial terms. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. Introducing Baudrillard sadly does not.

This particular introduction was an attempt to pack twenty years of dense French intellectualism into 170 or so pages with perhaps a 100 or less words on a page with the pictures adding very little. 15,000-20,000 words is an article of 30 or 40 pages at most, an hour's read.

Half the book is taken up with Baudrillard's struggle to add something meaningful to the rapid decline of Marxist thought. Half the book is thus turgidly incomprehensible. This leaves only half available for when Baudrillard becomes potentially interesting.

Baudrillard likes simile and metaphors from cosmology and physics so the best and kindest way to describe what is happening to his thought is that he is being dragged into a philosophical black hole as Marxism implodes and then decides that it is the black hole itself that is interesting.

The result is a form of object-oriented nihilism that seems at times little more than a form of patrician intellectual despair at the masses who Marxism was supposed to liberate, a bit like Hitler's railing against the German people as the Russian shells burst overhead in his Berlin bunker.

Think of it like this. For decades, intellectuals sat on a pile of dung claiming that it was not dung but the world. It gives way and they are forced to accept that it is dung because they are now suffocating in it as they sink downwards.

As the world collapses around them and all the structures of meaning that they have created to explain that world prove meaningless, they drift, if not into cynical public intellectual careerism to enrich themselves, into assuming that the dung is the world and the world is dung.

Meanwhile the rest of the world outside the pile of dung continues to do what it always has done without benefit of clerics and intellectuals - live, struggle, survive, die, create personal and social meaning and generally exist regardless of theory.

From this perspective, one wonders why anyone would think the post-Marxist intellectual to be in the least interesting but Baudrillard, in his dead-end nihilistic way, still captures something worth considering - the elusive and increasingly absurd nature of social reality.

I would tend to ignore his negativity about the mass of the population (and its undoubted impotence at changing what matters to Baudrillard) and think instead of his analysis as often being correct but from which he draws the wrong conclusions.

The world he describes when he casts doubt on its reality is not the world of most of us most of the time, it is the evanescent and unstable world of elites (of which he is an unstable part). This is crumbling before our eyes while we duck and dive to deal with the consequences of the collapse.

There is a good example at the moment where the real world continues to trade along inflationary lines despite all the efforts of the central bank technocrats to control the process according to 'theory' while governments contribute to the chaos through wasteful potlach expenditures.

We have a war in the East whose actual operations work to one side's timetable (the attritional war economy-based long game of the Russians) while the public in the West sees a simulacrum made up of aspiration, agit-prop, hope and moral fervour much as Baudrillard might have pointed out.

Nothing Western elites hoped to achieve from February 2022 in terms of economic war has turned out the way that theory predicted. The Russian and Chinese counterparts do not have a theory in the same way - they just have a set of actions based on values and struggle.

Baudrillard's critique of society is actually a critique of Western society and of the utter failure of liberal democracy to be anything more than dysfunctional over the long term. We can merge Chomsky's Propaganda Model with Baudrillard's simulacrum here.

What we see is a massively complex and unruly system of social and political control that is, indeed, plunging into its own black hole. The 'masses' withdrawal into their own world is a rational response to the absurdity of a distant world that they see humming with self-importance far from them.

There is still a real world out there. It is still based on economics and competition for resources as well as on brute power and technology. The Marxism of simple faith rather than scholastic interpretation stands up, at least in part, surprising well.

Layered over this real world of markets and techno-innovation, of personal struggles and movements, of brute military force that can mostly not be deployed, of weather and crops, lies a magical world of intellectuals, managers, activists, politicians and technocrats that sucks this real world dry.

As the latter loses control over reality, the formally impotent masses enjoy themselves by treating their world as an elaborate game or as theatre with the fall-back position of taking to the streets as they are doing in France or may yet do on Trump's arrest.

The frustration of those intellectuals, managers and technocrats who still understand the link of everything to reality is compounded as careerism and the structures of power and media communications intensify the air of fantasy that allowed Baudrillard to speak of wars as illusions.

So, Baudrillard ends up both wrong and right. Wrong in that he did not have a correct description of all social reality. Right in that he had a correct description of the collapse of elites into their own black hole of illusion and ineptitude, out of control and taking the illusion for reality.

To answer a question posed by the book, Baudrillard is a symptom of what he writes about. Although this particular book is not useful in that respect, he should be read in order to diagnose the symptoms of the disease of Western civilisation from within.

If he is right (in this interpretation), the process of implosion will continue remorselessly. This will please political accelerationists but whether the implosion will even be noticed by most of suffering humanity is entirely another matter. They are living in another world entirely. show less

For me, did what it needed to do - gave me an idea of what Foucault was trying to say. I started working on one of his books and realized that I needed some sort of explanation ahead of time about where he was coming from. I agree strongly with a previous reviewer that the contempt the author shows towards Foucault, however, makes this a less-than-ideal introduction - as would one by someone showering him with praise. This thing is practically slanderous towards him personally with the show more implication that Foucault intentionally spread the HIV virus. Dude, if you're going to make that outlandish an insinuation, you'd damn well better be able to back it up. show less

This is a fun, if not entirely effective, approach to Baudrillard. The comic book style approach suits its subject in a way that I don't think it would for other thinkers and concepts within the "Introducing..." series. It's a shame that the text can't live up to the artistic vision and humor of the book. If you haven't read Baudrillard before, you're likely to be completely lost. If you've had a smattering of Baudrillard, you're going to be mostly lost. And if you've read the majority of show more Baudrillard, you know that getting to know him is hopeless anyway. Have fun with this book, but don't make it your first or last foray into the thinker that postmodernism loves to hate (and vice versa). show less