8. Jean Baudrillard
| Quote: | Jean Baudrillard's sociological work challenges and provokes all current theories. With derision, but also with extreme precision, he unknots the constituted social descriptions with quiet confidence and a sense of humor.
---Le Monde (1984b, p. 95, italics added) |
The sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard is well-known for his reflections on the problems of reality, appearance, and illusion. In this chapter we want to draw attention to a less-noted aspect of Baudrillard's work, namely his frequent use of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology.
In some cases, Baudrillard's invocation of scientific concepts is clearly metaphorical. For example, he wrote about the Gulf War as follows:
| Baudrillard wrote: | | What is most extraordinary is that the two hypotheses, the apocalypse of real time and pure war along with the triumph of the virtual over the real, are realised at the same time, in the same space-time, each in implacable pursuit of the other. It is a sign that the space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity, and that the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean. (Baudrillard 1995, p. 50, italics in the original) |
There seems to be a tradition of using technical mathematical notions out of context. With Lacan, it was tori and imaginary numbers; with Kristeva, infinite sets; and here we have non-Euclidean spaces.[[189]] But what could this metaphor mean? Indeed, what would a Euclidean space of war look like? Let us note in passing that the concept of "hyperspace with multiple refractivity" hyperespace à réfraction multiple does not exist in either mathematics or physics; it is a Baudrillardian invention.
| Footnote189 wrote: | | What is a non-Euclidean space? In Euclidean plane geometry -- the geometry studied in high school -- for each straight line L and each point p not on L, there exists one and only one straight line parallel to L (i.e., not intersecting L) that passes through p. By contrast, in non-Euclidean geometries, there can be either an infinite number of parallel lines or else none at all. These geometries go back to the works of Bolyai, Lobachevskii, and Riemann in the nineteenth century, and they were applied by Einstein in his general theory of relativity (1915). For a good introduction to non-Euclidean geometries (but without their military applications), see Greenberg (1980) or Davis (1993). |
Baudrillard's writings are full of similar metaphors drawn from mathematics and physics, for example:
| Baudrillard wrote: | In the Euclidean space of history, the shortest path between two points is the straight line, the line of Progress and Democracy. But this is only true of the linear space of the Enlightenment.[[190]] In our non-Euclidean fin de siécle space, a baleful curvature unfailingly deflects all trajectories. This is doubtless linked to the sphericity of time (visible on the horizon of the end of the century, just as the earth's sphericity is visible on the horizon at the end of the day) or the subtle distortion of the gravitational field....
By this retroversion of history to infinity, this hyperbolic curvature, the century itself is escaping its end. (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 10-11)
It is to this perhaps that we owe this 'fun physics' effect: the impression that events, collective or individual, have been bundled into a memory hole. This blackout is due, no doubt, to this movement of reversal, this parabolic curvature of historical space. (Baudrillard 1994, p. 20) |
| Footnote 190 wrote: | | See our discussion (p. 143-45 above) concerning abuses of the word "linear". |
But not all of Baudrillard's physics is metaphorical. In his more philosophical texts, Baudrillard apparently takes physics -- or his version of it -- literally, as in his essay "The fatal, or, reversible imminence", devoted to the theme of chance:
| Baudrillard wrote: | This reversibility of causal order -- the reversion of cause on effect, the precession and triumph of effect over cause -- is fundamental....
This is what science catches a glimpse of when, not happy with calling into question the determinist principle of causality (the first revolution), it intuits -- beyond even the uncertainty principle, which still functions like hyper-rationality -- that chance is the floating of all laws. This is already quite extraordinary. But what science senses now, at the physical and biological limits of its exercise, is that there is not only this floating, this uncertainty, but a possible reversibility of physical laws. That would be the absolute enigma, not some ultra-formula or meta-equation of the universe (which the theory of relativity was), but the idea that any law can be reversed (not only particles into anti-particles, matter into anti-matter, but the laws themselves). The hypothesis of this reversibility has always been affirmed by the great metaphysical systems. It is the fundamental rule of the game of appearance, of the metamorphosis of appearances, against the irreversible order of time, of law and meaning. But it's fascinating to see science arrive at the same hypotheses, contrary to its own logic and evolution. (Baudrillard 1990, pp. 162-163, italics in the original) |
It is difficult to know what Baudrillard means by "reversing" a law of physics. In physics one can speak of the laws' reversibility, as a shorthand for their "invariance with respect to time inversion".[[191]] But this property is already well-known in Newtonian mechanics, which is as causal and deterministic as a theory can be; it has nothing to do with uncertainty and is in no way at the "physical and biological limits" of science. (Quite the opposite: it is the non-reversibility of the laws of the "weak interactions", discovered in 1964, that is new and at present imperfectly understood.) In any case, the reversibility of the laws has nothing to do with an alleged "reversibility of causal order". Finally, Baudrillard's scientific confusions (or fantasies) have led him to make unwarranted philosophical claims: he puts forward no argument whatsoever to support his idea that science arrives at hypotheses "contrary to its own logic".
| Footnote 191 wrote: | | To illustrate this concept, consider a collection of billiard balls moving on a table according to Newton's laws (without friction and with elastic collisions), and make a film of this motion. Now run this film backwards: the reversed motion will also obey the laws of Newtonian mechanics. This fact is summarized by saying that the laws of Newtonian mechanics are invariant with respect to time inversion. In fact, all the known laws of physics, except those of the "weak interactions" between subatomic particles, satisfy this property of invariance. |
This train of thought is taken up once again in his essay entitled "Exponential instability, exponential stability":
| Baudrillard wrote: | The whole problem of speaking about the end (particularly the end of history) is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending. This paradox is produced by the fact that in a non-linear, non-Euclidean space of history the end cannot be located. The end is, in fact, only conceivable in a logical order of causality and continuity. Now, it is events themselves which, by their artificial production, their programmed occurrence or the anticipation of their effects -- not to mention their transfiguration in the media -- are suppressing the cause-effect relation and hence all historical continuity.
This distortion of causes and effects, this mysterious autonomy of effects, this cause-effect reversibility, engendering a disorder or chaotic order (precisely our current situation: a reversibility of reality [le réel] and information, which gives rise to disorder in the realm of events and an extravagance of media effects), puts one in mind, to some extent, of Chaos Theory and the disproportion between the beating of a butterfly's wings and the hurricane this unleashes on the other side of the world. It also calls to mind Jacques Benveniste's paradoxical hypothesis of the memory of water....
Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes. (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 110-111) |
First of all, chaos theory in no way reverses the relationship between cause and effect. (Even in human affairs, we seriously doubt that an action in the present could affect an event in the past!) Moreover, chaos theory has nothing to do with Benveniste's hypothesis on the memory of water.[[192]] And finally, the last sentence, though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view.
| Footnote 192 wrote: | | The experiments of Benveniste's group on the biological effects of highly diluted solutions, which seemed to provide a scientific basis for homeopathy, were rapidly discredited after being hastily published in the scientific journal Nature (Davenas et al. 1988). See Maddox et al. (1988); and, for a more detailed discussion, see Broch (1992). More recently, Baudrillard has opined that the memory of water is "the ultimate stage of the transfiguration of the world into pure information" and that "this virtualization of effects is wholly in line with the most recent science." (Baudrillard 1997, p.94) |
The text continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense:
| Baudrillard wrote: | We shall not reach the destination, even if that destination is the Last Judgment, since we are henceforth separated from it by a variable refraction hyperspace. The retroversion of history could very well be interpreted as a turbulence of this kind, due to the hastening of events which reverses and swallows up their course. This is one of the versions of Chaos Theory -- that of exponential instability and its uncontrollable effects. It accounts very well for the 'end' of history, interrupted in its linear or dialectical movement by that catastrophic singularity...
But the exponential instability version is not the only one. The other is that of exponential stability. This latter defines a state in which, no matter where you start out, you always end up at the same point. The initial conditions, the original singularities do not matter: everything tends towards the Zero point -- itself also a strange attractor.[[193]]...
Though incompatible, the two hypotheses -- exponential instability and stability -- are in fact simultaneously valid. Moreover, our system, in its normal -- normally catastrophic -- course combines them very well. It combines in effect an inflation, a galloping acceleration, a dizzying whirl of mobility, an eccentricity of events and an excess of meaning and information with an exponential tendency towards total entropy. Our systems are thus doubly chaotic: they operate both by exponential stability and instability.
It would seem then that there will be no end because we are already in an excess of ends: the transfinite....
Our complex, metastatic, viral systems, condemned to the exponential dimension alone (be it that of exponential stability or instability), to eccentricity and indefinite fractal scissiparity, can no longer come to an end. Condemned to an intense metabolism, to an intense internal metastasis, they become exhausted within themselves and no longer have any destination, any end, any otherness, any fatality. They are condemned, precisely, to the epidemic, to the endless excrescences of the fractal and not to the reversibility and perfect resolution of the fateful [fatal]. We know only the signs of catastrophe now; we no longer know the signs of destiny. (And besides, has any concern been shown in Chaos Theory for the equally extraordinary, contrary phenomenon of hyposensitivity to initial conditions, of the inverse exponentiality of effects in relation to causes -- the potential hurricanes which end in the beating of a butterfly's wings?) (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 111-114, italics in the original) |
| Footnote 193 wrote: | | Not at all! When zero is an attractor, it is what one calls a "fixed point"; these attractors (as well as others known as "limit-cycles") have been known since the nineteenth century, and the expression "strange attractor" was introduced specifically to refer to attractors of a different sort. See, for example, Ruelle (1991). |
The last paragraph is Baudrillardian par excellence. One would be hard pressed not to notice the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology[[194]] -- inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning.
| Footnote 194 wrote: | | Examples of the latter are variable refraction hyperspace and fractal scissiparity. |
These texts are, however, atypical of Baudrillard's oeuvre, because they allude (albeit in a confused fashion) to more-or- less well-defined scientific ideas. More often one comes across sentences like these:
| Baudrillard wrote: | | There is no better model of the way in which the computer screen and the mental screen of our brain are interwoven than Moebius's topology, with its peculiar contiguity of near and far, inside and outside, object and subject within the same spiral. It is in accordance with this same model that information and communication are constantly turning round upon themselves in an incestuous circumvolution, a superficial conflation of subject and object, within and without, question and answer, event and image, and so on. The form is inevitably that of a twisted ring reminiscent of the mathematical symbol for infinity. (Baudrillard 1993, p. 56) |
As Gross and Levitt remark, "this is as pompous as it is meaningless."[[195]]
| Footnote 195 wrote: | | Gross and Levitt (1994, p. 80). |
In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant.[[196]] Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.[[197]]
| Footnote 196 wrote: | | For other examples, see the references to chaos theory (Baudrillard 1990, pp. 154-155), to the Big Bang (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 115-116), and to quantum mechanics (Baudrillard 1996, pp. 14, 53-55). This last book is permeated with scientific and pseudo-scientific allusions. |
| Footnote 197 wrote: | | For a more detailed critique of Baudrillard's ideas, see Norris (1992). |
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. All the ones in the book fit that, certainly, and they fit more than that too. These “intellectuals” use smart-sounding terms and concepts, sometimes from fields other than their own, to make assertions in their own fields. And yet, they have 
